I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist. There's a fair bit I don't buy into, reincarnation and karma being the main ones. But the bits I do rate are the enlightenment idea in this story, non attachment as a route to being content, and meditation and mindfulness as something I think matters for general health, not just spiritual health. I've been to Palpung Temple in Brynmawr a few times. It's a proper Buddhist centre, not a tourist thing. If you're local or nearby, I'd genuinely recommend going. I've always believed your ability to explain something properly is a decent measure of how much you actually understand it. If you can't put it simply, you probably don't get it yourself yet. That's why I liked this video I came across of a Buddhist monk explaining nirvana, enlightenment, in one story. Five kids playing a wishing game. Wanted to pass it on. The Rules Five children are playing a game. Whoever comes up with the best wish wins. The First Four Kids The first kid says if he had a wish, he'd wish for the latest video game. The second kid says he'd go one better and wish for his own game shop. That way, every time something new comes out, he can just get it. The third kid thinks bigger again. He'd wish for a billion dollars. First he'd buy the game shop, then he'd buy the school. If he owns the school and pays the teachers, he can make sure he gets good grades even if he never does his homework. The fourth kid tops the lot of them. He wishes for three wishes. First wish, the game shop. Second wish, the billion dollars. Third wish, three more wishes. That way he never has to stop. Infinite wishes, forever. Try beating that, he says. The Fifth Kid The last kid wins the game. Not by out wishing the others. By seeing past the whole idea of wishing. His wish was this. He wished he was so content he never needed to wish for anything again. Why He Wins The first four kids are all playing the same game, just with bigger numbers. More stuff, more money, more power to get more stuff. Even infinite wishes is still wishing. It's still chasing.

I came across the idea of the invisible guest a while back. The theory goes that at any party, dinner, meeting, whatever, you walk in thinking you're the one under the microscope. Your clothes, your voice, whether you said something stupid five minutes ago that everyone's still thinking about. Meanwhile the person stood next to you is doing the exact same thing about themselves. Rent's due. Their mam's not well. They've got a difficult conversation waiting for them at home. They are not clocking your shoes. I can't stand this up with a film or a grandmother's wisdom passed down through generations, much as I'd like to. What I can tell you is that it lines up with something psychologists actually study, called the spotlight effect, the tendency to massively overestimate how much other people notice us. I've written about that before in this book. Same idea, different door in. Why this one lands differently Most of the advice about anxiety in social situations tells you to think positive, to remind yourself people like you, to breathe through it. This one doesn't ask you to feel better about yourself. It asks you to notice that everyone else is just as consumed with their own mess as you are with yours. That's not reassurance. That's just accurate. When I was deep in my two year depressive episode, I genuinely believed people were watching me, judging the fact I hadn't showered, judging that I was still in my mam's house at 40 odd. What I know now, and what I didn't have the capacity to see then, is that most people who walked past me on the street that day were thinking about their own overdraft or their kid's school report, not me. The maths of it If you're spending your energy worrying about what the room thinks of you, and the room is doing the exact same thing back at you, then nobody in that room is actually watching anyone. It's a room full of people performing for an audience that isn't looking. Once you see that, the pressure doesn't disappear completely, but it loosens.

I turn 50 in two months. I've got two daughters in their twenties, one at uni and one working a job that would once have been solid and secure, the kind of role that used to come with a pension and a future, but now offers barely any security at all. And I'm fed up watching people over 35 dish out advice to them like the world hasn't changed since we were that age. It has. Massively. And pretending otherwise isn't wisdom, it's laziness. Thing is, this isn't even new. There's an inscription on an ancient Egyptian tomb, thousands of years old, that reads something like "we live in a decadent age, young people no longer respect their parents." Seneca was saying the same thing two thousand years ago, moaning that the young men of his time had "grown soft and effeminate" and didn't work like his generation did. Every single generation looks at the one coming up behind it and decides they're the first ones to go soft. They're not. It's the oldest lie in the book, and people my age and older are repeating it word for word. You're All Lazy - The Work Ethic Myth Nobody's ever wanted to work. That's why it's called work and not fun. My generation didn't graft any harder than my daughters do, we just had it easier and won't admit it. My eldest is grinding through a job that used to mean stability and now comes with none, no real contract security, no guarantee she'll still have it next year. My youngest is at uni watching the goalposts move on what a degree is even meant to guarantee her by the time she's done. Neither of them is short on effort. What's short is the payoff. Telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps assumes there's a ladder there to climb. When your wage barely covers rent, there's nothing left over to save with, no matter how many hours you put in. You hear blokes down the pub talk about the earned pint, how it tastes sweeter after a hard day's graft, when you've built something and stood shoulder to shoulder with your mates. That only works if your labour actually means something. If you're cheap and replaceable, or your job could disappear in a restructure next quarter, the pint doesn't taste like anything.

Depression isn't loud. Not most of the time. It's a hum, low and persistent. A dull ache in the soul that makes everything feel heavier, slower, harder. Some days it's barely noticeable. Other days, it wraps around your chest and squeezes until even breathing feels like a chore. This chapter is about those days and what to do with them. There's a a strange little Canadian superhero called Puck. You don't know him unless you're into the deeper cuts of the Marvel Universe. He's not flashy. He's short, scrappy, scarred. Not the sort of character who usually gets the spotlight. But his story says something powerful about pain and about endurance. Puck, whose real name is Eugene Judd, lives in constant physical agony. Not metaphorically, literally. His body locked in a state of suffering after trapping a dark, magical entity inside himself to save others. Every day, he wakes up in pain. Every move, every breath, hurts. But he doesn't stop moving. What makes Puck remarkable isn't a shiny superpower. It's that he fights through pain, not by ignoring it, not by numbing it, but by focusing past it. It's a form of mental discipline that's deeply human. It says: Yes, this hurts. But it does not own me. Pain Doesn't Have to Be the Enemy Mental anguish isn't so different from chronic physical pain. It drains your energy, messes with your memory, robs you of joy. Depression lies. It tells you nothing will ever change. That your thoughts are truth. That the feeling you're in right now is permanent. Learning to focus past the pain means accepting its presence without letting it control you. You don't have to fight it directly. You don't have to pretend it's not there. But you can learn to move through it. This is not toxic positivity. This isn't "just think happy thoughts." This is about developing the mental muscle to stay standing even when you're carrying weight you didn't ask for. It's choosing to take the next breath. To stand up. To reply to that text. To take a shower. To show up for the things that matter. Not because you feel great. But because you're still here and that means there's still a choice.