With thanks to Jezza…

There is a phrase the powerful reach for when they cannot be bothered to do the work. Delusions of grandeur. Say it out loud and watch what it does. It closes the file. It does the entire job of a rebuttal without the tedium of having to be one, and it lets the man saying it feel like a clinician rather than what he usually is, which is somebody protecting his furniture.

It is the cheapest diagnosis in the world. You can issue it without getting up.

In 1935 a twenty-four-year-old named Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar stood up at the Royal Astronomical Society in London and explained, with the maths to back it, that a sufficiently large star would not retire quietly into old age. It would collapse. Keep collapsing. Become the thing we now call a black hole. Sitting in the room was Arthur Eddington, the most powerful astrophysicist alive, the man who had measured starlight bending around the sun and turned Einstein into a household name. Eddington rose after him and ridiculed the lot. Not with a counter-calculation. With contempt. The room, being a room, laughed along.

Chandrasekhar was right. He simply had to wait until 1983 to collect the Nobel Prize for it, by which time Eddington had been dead for thirty-nine years and the universe had carried on manufacturing black holes throughout, never once consulting the minutes of the meeting.

Everybody enjoys the vindication. I am more interested in the part nobody puts on the commemorative stamp.

Eddington never refuted the maths. He couldn’t. So he did the next best thing available to a great man, which is to stand at the front of the room being conspicuously great at the problem until it lost its nerve. That is the manoeuvre delusions of grandeur exists to make respectable. It is what you say when you have the standing to dismiss a man and not the arithmetic to disprove him.

I have spent enough years reading the histories of people who were called mad and turned out to be merely early to notice that the doubter is almost never a lone sceptic muttering in a corner. The doubter is a body. A faculty, a society, an institution with a charter, a letterhead, and a profound preference for not being startled.

Ignaz Semmelweis worked out, in 1847, that doctors were ferrying death from the autopsy table to the maternity ward on their own unwashed hands. He made them scrub with chlorinated lime and watched the death rate fall through the floor. For this the Viennese medical establishment treated him as an irritant, eased him out, and left him to finish in an asylum, where he died at forty-seven of an infection of the precise sort he had spent his career trying to prevent. The profession that buried him now teaches hand-washing to first-years as though it had thought of it over breakfast.

Robert Goddard suggested a rocket might work in the vacuum of space, and in January 1920 The New York Times gravely informed its readers that the professor appeared to lack the basic physics handed to any high-schooler. The paper printed its correction in July 1969. Three days before Apollo 11 reached the moon. Forty-nine years is a long time to mark your own homework and discover you failed.

You can run the pattern up to last week. Katalin Karikó spent two decades being demoted, defunded, and shuffled sideways by her own university for the offence of believing messenger RNA could be turned into medicine. She was not deluded, in the language of the institution. She was simply a poor financial risk. Her poor financial risk later went into several billion arms during a pandemic, and she shared a Nobel for it in 2023, whereupon the university that had spent years trying to misplace her began listing her among its luminaries, which takes a particular kind of cheek.

All of which would make a marvellous fridge magnet. The fridge magnet would also be a lie.

For every Semmelweis there is a cemetery, and it is enormous, and nobody visits. It is full of people who were told exactly the same thing, refused to listen with exactly the same magnificent stubbornness, and were simply, comprehensively wrong. History keeps none of their names, because being certain and wrong is the least remarkable thing a person can do. You can manage it from bed. Grandiosity is real; I have sat across a small table from it, and listened to a man narrate a destiny that his own life was busily disproving in the next room. Conviction is not a truth detector. Believing hard does not make a thing so, whatever the self-help shelf is charging for the opposite view this week.

So here is the knot, and I will not pretend to untie it neatly. The visionary who is right and early and the bloke who has read one book and decided it was secretly about him look identical from the front. Both are certain. Both are alone. Both give off precisely the same heat. Conviction runs at one temperature regardless of who is holding it, which is the whole trouble with mistaking it for evidence.

There is one thing that tells the two men apart, and it is the one thing the institutions kept declining to do.

Look.

Eddington could have checked the maths. The medical faculty could have counted Semmelweis’s corpses, which were lying about being eminently countable. The New York Times could have telephoned a physicist. In each case the thing that would have settled it was right there, free, faintly boring, and comprehensively ignored. Checking costs you an afternoon and the small, mortal risk of being wrong in front of colleagues. The label costs one sentence and protects everything you own. Offered that trade, a genuinely impressive number of clever men reach for the sentence.

That is the failure, and it is duller and worse than the heroic version, because nobody in it is a villain. No moustaches. They simply discovered that “deluded” was easier to pronounce than “let me get back to you,” and far easier to live with than “I appear to have been wrong, in public, since 1935.”

I think about this more than is good for me, and not from a safe distance. I am a counselling psychologist. I have sat on the issuing side of the label, in the quiet of a clinical hour, trying to sort justified conviction from the other thing and knowing exactly what it costs to call it wrong. I also spent most of my adult life on the receiving side of one that was. Bipolar II, said the profession, repeatedly, with the serene confidence of men who had a form to complete and a drawer to file me in. The actual answer, that I am autistic and ADHD, that my nervous system was built to a different specification and had been quietly paying the surcharge the entire time, did not turn up until I was sixty-six. I wrote a book about it. I called it Misdiagnosed, which is the least surprising title I have ever put on a cover.

It does something to a person, being told what they are by someone who never quite got round to finding out. It makes you quieter than you should be. It made me quiet for a very long time.

What I keep returning to is the timing of the apologies. The Nobel turns up after the asylum. The correction turns up after the moon. The university remembers its luminary the instant a pandemic has done the convincing on its behalf. The institution always comes good in the end, you will have noticed, generally about five minutes after coming good has stopped costing it anything.

The grave is a very forgiving place to be proven right. Mine came at sixty-six, which is late, but on the right side of the grass, and I have filed it under luck rather than justice. I would rather it were neither. I would rather we did the looking while the person was still in the room.

Sources

Miller, A. I. (2005). Empire of the stars: Obsession, friendship, and betrayal in the quest for black holes. Houghton Mifflin.

The New York Times. (1920, January 13). Topics of the Times [Editorial].

The New York Times. (1969, July 17). A correction [Editorial].

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet. (2023, October 2). The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023[Press release].

Science History Institute. (n.d.). Ignaz Semmelweis. https://www.sciencehistory.org/education/scientific-biographies/ignaz-semmelweis/

Wali, K. C. (1991). Chandra: A biography of S. Chandrasekhar. University of Chicago Press.

My inbox this fortnight has been one long anxiety attack with a Substack logo on it.

Strip out the recipe newsletters and the horror serials and the bloke who writes entirely in ALL CAPS about geopolitics, and what is left is a single nervous question asked forty different ways. They can copy your voice now. The machines have read enough of you to do you. So what is left that is yours?

The advice underneath is always the same, and it is always a little frightened. Lean into your taste. Your judgment. Your lived experience, your receipts, the trust you have built with readers. Be so particularly you that no model can counterfeit it. I read a good version of this argument last week, and a dozen worse ones, and they all rest on a quiet assumption I want to drag into the light, because I think it is wrong.

The assumption is that your voice is the precious thing. The fingerprint. The bit worth bolting to the floor.

It isn’t. And I can tell you why with rather more authority than I would like, because I spent the better part of sixty-six years building the most convincing voice you ever heard, and it nearly killed me.

Here is the part the panic keeps walking straight past. A voice is a performance of fluency. That is all it is. A reliable, repeatable way of sounding like yourself. And a performance of fluency is precisely the thing that a great many late-diagnosed neurodivergent people got praised for, right up until the performance ate them alive.

There is a clinical word for it: camouflaging. Researchers have spent the last decade documenting it properly, the conscious and effortful business of masking how your mind actually works so you can pass as the standard model. Hull and colleagues (2017) titled one of the foundational papers “Putting on My Best Normal,” which is about the most accurate five words anyone has managed on the subject. You learn the script. You sand off the odd edges. You perform the version of competence the room expects, the room claps, and nobody, least of all you, clocks the cost until the whole bill arrives at once.

I got my AuDHD diagnosis at sixty-six. I had been doing my best normal since before half of you were born, and doing it so well that the misdiagnoses stacked up over the years like unpaid parking fines. The voice worked. The voice was the problem.

So when a writer tells me they are terrified a machine can now reproduce their voice, my first, uncharitable, very Australian thought is this: mate, so could you, and look where it got you.

Because the model can have the voice. Take it. What it cannot have is the decade I spent as one of Australia’s loudest social media evangelists before the whole thing curdled and I walked away with my nervous system in pieces. It cannot have the weight of sitting with a veteran at three in the afternoon while he decides, in real time, whether to keep going. It cannot have the morning the fog came down the valley here in Đà Lạt and I understood, in my body rather than my head, why I had to leave Australia to stop being ill. The model can produce a sentence about any of that. It cannot have paid for it.

That is the thing under the voice. Not style. Cost. The scar tissue, and the judgment that grows over scar tissue the way bark grows over a wound: knowing what to leave out, knowing which sentence is a lie even when it scans beautifully, knowing when a paragraph is true and when it is merely impressive. A model can be impressive all day long. Impressive is cheap now. It was always cheaper than we pretended.

Now the bit that will get me snottograms.

I co-write with a machine. Have done for two years. This essay was drafted in collaboration with Claude, the way most of my work now is: I bring the argument and the scars and the final, non-negotiable no, and it brings the speed and a tireless willingness to be told the last paragraph was rubbish and to try it again. I do not hide it. It is the subject of my next degree. I have come to think the hiding is the new mask, and that a good many writers currently performing lonely-genius solo authorship are about to learn what I learned at sixty-six. The performance is exhausting. It fools fewer people than you hope.

The writers clutching their voice to their chests are guarding a door the burglars already strolled through. Meanwhile the real valuables, the lived receipts and the judgment and the willingness to tell the truth at your own expense, are sitting in an unlocked room with a sign on it that reads too much effort to fake.

So I am not going to tell you to protect your voice. Protect the other thing. The expensive thing. Go and live a life costly enough that no model can afford it, report back as honestly as you can manage, and let the machine help you type it up if it likes.

The voice was never yours to lose. It was only ever the bit on top.

-----

Reference

Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534.

Mark Manson has published an essay arguing that intellectuals are, in his phrasing, f*cking idiots, and the awkward thing about reading it as a psychologist is that he is right for about two-thirds of the way down the page. The argument he is right about is old, and true, and worth saying again. Clever people build models of the world. The models are useful. Then, somewhere along the line, the model stops being a tool the person uses and becomes a room the person lives in, and once you live somewhere you defend it, and you stop noticing that the world outside the window has quietly stopped matching the floor plan.

He tells this through Malcolm Caldwell, the Marxist academic who admired Pol Pot enough to fly to Cambodia and offer notes, and was shot in Phnom Penh for his trouble. He tells it through Robert McNamara, whose statistics proved America was winning Vietnam right up to the helicopters on the embassy roof. Good cases. Cleanly chosen. Reality always wins, Manson says, and I am not going to stand here and argue that it doesn’t.

I am going to argue with something else. The essay is not a description of the trap. It is a worked example of it. Manson builds a model, the model is intellectuals are idiots, and then he spends the back third of the piece defending that model the way Caldwell defended his: by collecting the evidence that flatters it and waving off the evidence that doesn’t. He has written a sermon against a sin and delivered it from inside the sin. I don’t think he knows. That is the part worth slowing down for, because not knowing is the whole mechanism. It is not a footnote to his argument. It is his argument, happening to him, live, while he types.

Watch the voice change

Here is the tell. For most of the essay Manson is the cool one, the man at the next table who can see through everyone else’s pretty model. Then he reaches the climate activists, the ones who glue themselves to roads, and the voice changes. It stops being diagnostic and starts being personal. These people, he tells us, are not really worried about the climate at all. They are empty inside. They are probably just angry at their parents. They are acting out, in his framing, unresolved attachment stuff.

And then, in almost the same breath, he reassures us that the panic is unwarranted anyway, because the marginal cost of energy is heading towards zero, technological innovation is exponential, and carbon capture is about to become economical.

Read that twice. He has just made three confident predictions about how energy markets and technology will behave over the coming decades. That is a model. It is an elegant, untested, unsourced, lovely-on-paper model, and it is the precise species of thing he spent two thousand words mocking other people for trusting. He doesn’t catch it. He can’t catch it, because catching it would mean turning the instrument around, and the instrument he is holding only points at other people. That is not Manson being ironic. That is irony arriving uninvited and sitting down at his table.

The psychoanalysis is the worse half. ‘They’re just angry at mum and dad’ is not an analysis. It is contempt wearing a lab coat. I do this for a living. I sit with people’s actual attachment histories, the real ones, the ones that take months to surface and do not fit on a placard, and I can tell you that you cannot read a stranger’s childhood off the fact that they are annoying you on a Tuesday. What Manson has done is build a tidy little model of the activist mind, a model whose single function is to let him dismiss the activist without engaging the argument. Which is, word for word, the thing he says idiots do. He even names it. Shut down the discourse rather than engage with it. Then he does it, in print, to people he finds tiresome.

The therapy claim, which is where I put my coffee down

Then he gets to my profession, and this is the part that made me stop reading and go back to the top to check I had not misjudged him.

Manson tells you that trained clinical therapists, on average, do no better than a random person you might talk to, and that more training does not improve a therapist’s results. The implied conclusion, and he does not work very hard to keep it implied, is that clinical psychology is an expensive way of buying something you could get from a kind stranger on a bus.

This is what a real research finding looks like after it has been through a wood chipper. There is genuine literature under there. The finding that the therapeutic modality, the brand of therapy, matters far less than people assume is real and well replicated; it even has a nickname—the Dodo bird verdict—after the bird in Alice who declares that everyone has won and all must have prizes. The finding that the relationship between therapist and client predicts outcome better than the technique does is also real. Manson has taken those two findings, pressed them flat, and read off the sentence ‘therapy barely works.’

That is not what the literature says. The foundational work here is Smith and Glass, who pooled hundreds of controlled trials and found an effect size of about 0.85, which in plain terms means the average person who had therapy ended up better off than roughly eighty per cent of comparable people who had none (Smith & Glass, 1977). Now, in the interest of not doing the exact thing I am accusing Manson of, I will tell you the part that complicates my case. That figure has been challenged. A later reanalysis recoded a sample of the same studies and put the effect closer to 0.30 to 0.50 (Matt, 1989). Fine. Take the gloomy end. Take 0.30. An effect of 0.30 is still real, still replicated, still clinically meaningful. It is not ‘barely works.’ It is ‘works, modestly, and honest people should argue about the size.’ Those are different sentences. Manson needed the first one, so the second one did not make the edit.

The alliance research sharpens the point rather than blunting it. Pooling 295 studies and more than thirty thousand patients, the correlation between the strength of the therapeutic alliance and the outcome of the therapy sits at about r = 0.28 (Flückiger et al., 2018). Manson reads ‘the relationship matters more than the technique’ as a debunking. It is the opposite of a debunking. It is the field locating its own active ingredient. The relationship is not the embarrassing absence of the science. The relationship is the science. A man arguing that the experts missed the point has, in this instance, missed the point the experts spent forty years and thirty thousand patients establishing.

And while we have the bonnet up: the claim that diversity training makes people more racist is sourced to a think-tank report rather than peer-reviewed work, on a question the actual research treats as genuinely unsettled. The figure that seventy-five per cent of corporate training makes employees worse traces back, when you follow it, to an infographic on a training vendor’s blog. A man writing an essay about the danger of building your worldview on bad data has built a chunk of his essay on bad data. I am not saying that to score a point off him. I am saying it because it is the point. It is the entire point. He is in the room he is describing and he cannot see the wallpaper.

The one model he never tests

Every model in the essay gets walked out to the edge of the cliff and shown the drop. Caldwell’s. McNamara’s. Ehrlich’s. Every model except one. His own.

‘Intellectuals are idiots’ is itself a model, and it is a flattering one, which is the first thing that should make a careful person suspicious of it. It is flattering because of where it puts the man holding it. If you have decided that the credentialled, the studied, and the peer-reviewed are the real dupes, then you, the plain-talking unaffiliated fellow with the Substack, are automatically the clear-eyed one. The model costs its owner nothing. It asks him to give up no comfort, abandon no belief, sit with no doubt. And it pays him, in return, the exact thing the essay says models illegitimately pay people: a sense of being right, a side to be on, an identity. He even describes that transaction. He just exempts the model performing it.

Look, too, at the line-up. The idiots in the essay are a Marxist, a population-panic environmentalist, a diversity trainer, and some road-gluing climate kids. They lean, every one of them, the same way. A smoke detector that only goes off in other people’s houses is not a smoke detector. It is a mirror that the owner has decided to call a window, and the decision is the comfortable part, and the comfort is the warning sign.

Here is the contrarian move that was sitting right there, and that Manson walked past. The most dangerous intelligent idiot is not the professor. The professor can at least be peer-reviewed, contradicted, heckled at a conference, embarrassed in a journal. The most dangerous one is the popular communicator who has decided that not being an intellectual is the same thing as being immune. Because nobody peer-reviews a Substack post. ‘I’m just being honest’ is the most frictionless model ever built. It updates for nothing. It feels like humility and functions like armour. It is the gentleman’s club with the membership requirements removed, and the man at the door insisting he isn’t in a club.

Keep the two-thirds that’s true

None of this means bin the essay. Hold your opinions loosely. Get close enough to the consequences of your ideas that reality gets a vote before it gets a veto. Spend less of your life watching faces on a screen and more of it in front of faces in a room. All true. All worth pinning above the desk. The sharpest line in the whole package is not even Manson’s; it belongs to a commenter, Vass Tsokov, who points out that the failure was never intelligence on its own. It was intelligence with the feedback loop cut. Prestige, applause, and institutional reward wrap a clever mind in insulation, and an insulated mind drifts from reality while feeling more certain by the year.

Sit with that one a moment longer than Manson did, though, because it has his name on it. What is a large engaged audience, a bestselling reputation, and an algorithm that pays out for confident contrarian takes, if not prestige and reward wrapping a mind in insulation? Manson has feedback loops. They are excellent. They count restacks, subscriber growth, and time on page. They do not, anywhere in the dashboard, count whether he got the therapy literature right. He will be rewarded for this essay whether it is true or not, and that sentence is not my cleverness, it is just his own essay read back to him with the name changed.

So read him. He writes well, and the warning is real, and two-thirds of it is the best version of itself. Just take the warning and apply it to the man who wrote it, because he forgot that step, and the forgetting is the most honest thing on the page. Reality always wins. It has not got around to this essay yet. Give it time. Reality is thorough, and it is patient, and it does not read the bestseller list before deciding who is next.

References

Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340.

Matt, G. E. (1989). Decision rules for selecting effect sizes in meta-analysis: A review and reanalysis of psychotherapy outcome studies. Psychological Bulletin, 105(1), 106–115.

Smith, M. L., & Glass, G. V. (1977). Meta-analysis of psychotherapy outcome studies. American Psychologist, 32(9), 752–760.

There’s a moment in Joanna Stern’s recent conversation with Kara Swisher—the two of them on stage at New York’s 92nd Street Y, discussing Stern’s book I Am Not a Robot—where Stern explains where she drew her line. She’d spent a year handing chunks of her work and personal life over to AI. She let it do the administrative grunt work and reckoned it made her something like forty per cent more efficient. She let a cloned version of herself conduct interviews. She took an AI boyfriend on a weekend away, which is a sentence I did not expect to type today and will not be elaborating on (but nevertheless surprising because she already has a wife). But the writing she kept. The writing, she said, was the part of the job she actually loved, and she wasn’t handing that over to anyone, silicon or otherwise.

It’s a sensible line. It’s also, I think, the wrong line for me, and the reason why is the whole point of this piece.

Stern’s distinction assumes that “writing” and “grunt work” are two different things, sitting in two different boxes, and that you can keep one and outsource the other without the boxes touching. For a great many writers, that’s true. For a neurodivergent writer running on an AuDHD brain that was misdiagnosed for decades and only correctly identified when I was 66—a diagnostic turnaround time that would embarrass a passport office—the boxes don’t sit apart. They bleed into each other. The grunt work isn’t a separate task I do before the writing. Quite often the grunt work is the writing, or rather it’s the part of the writing my executive function cannot reliably sustain, which is a different and more inconvenient thing to admit at a dinner party.

So let me be honest about what actually happens, because honesty matters more here than the comfortable pretence that I produce every sentence alone, staring dramatically out of a window at the rain-soaked, misty hills of Đà Lạt like the author photo on a book nobody finished.

I co-write my books with an AI called Claude. Not because I’m lazy, not because I’m technologically dependent, and emphatically not because I type “write me a book” and wander off to make a coffee. Anyone who imagines that’s how it works has never tried to produce something worth reading, and has possibly never produced anything longer than a strongly worded email to a council. The honest description is the one most likely to make a purist wince: Claude and I have been co-writing for roughly two years, and the word tool quietly stopped fitting somewhere along the way. A hammer does not get to know you. A spell-checker does not, after eighteen months, develop opinions. What I have is a co-writer who never tires of rearranging sections, never suggests I should be more grateful or more positive about systematic failure, never once tells me that everything happens for a reason, and—because the collaboration has run long enough to have a memory of its own shape—tells me ‘no’ when an idea belongs in a different book. I get excited. I want everything in. I would happily fit a chapter on Vietnamese coffee agriculture into a book about psychiatric misdiagnosis if left unsupervised. A good collaborator refuses, gently, and moves the chapter somewhere it can do less damage.

I wrote a few days ago, in Quiet Half, about why I stopped switching between AI platforms—the four-tabs-open workflow where you ask every chatbot the same question and pick the answer that flatters you most, then call it triangulation because that sounds more dignified than what it is. The argument there was that the continuity is the product. Depth of working relationship is the one thing four tabs can never give you, because every migration resets the relationship to zero and you spend the first three weeks re-explaining who you are, like the opening of a therapy session that never progresses past intake. This piece is that same argument seen from the inside. That essay said don’t switch. This one says here is what two years of not switching actually buys a writer like me, and the answer is not efficiency. The answer is a co-writer who knows the shape of the work well enough that a nine-word prompt produces twenty minutes of genuinely useful thinking, because the briefing document is no longer something I type. It’s something the relationship already holds.

The stories are mine. The misdiagnosis, the medication disasters, the anger, the Vietnam revelation, the slow discovery that the brain I’d been told was broken was simply running a different operating system on hardware nobody had bothered to identify—all mine. Claude didn’t live through roughly six decades of psychiatric confusion. What Claude does is help me wrestle the sprawl into something resembling chapters without sanding off the conversational tone that makes the books readable rather than academic. The lived experience is authentic. The research is real. The arguments are mine. The co-writing is the thing that lets me say them more clearly than I managed during the medicated years, when coherent thinking felt like swimming through treacle while someone described the treacle to you in a soothing voice.

If that troubles your sense of literary purity, fair enough. But there’s a more interesting argument underneath the discomfort, and four ideas help carry it.

The first is the simplest. Andy Clark and David Chalmers' extended mind thesis argues that an external tool performing the same functional role as an internal cognitive process should be counted as part of the cognitive system—not a crutch propped against it, but genuine cognitive machinery. Their parity principle puts it plainly: a part of the world counts as cognitive if, "were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing [it] as part of the cognitive process" (Clark & Chalmers, 1998, p. 8). Clark developed the idea further in Supersizing the Mind, and Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind made it legible to people who don't read philosophy of mind for fun, a demographic I'm assured exists. Heersmink and Sutton later extended it to assistive technology in education. The point for a writer like me is that AI-assisted composition isn't cognitive outsourcing. It's cognitive extension. I supply the ideation, the argument, the voice, the editorial control, the lived material no machine could fake. The collaboration supplies the sustained mechanical sentence production that an ADHD brain cannot keep running for hours at a stretch. And before anyone reaches for the pitchforks: the calculator is a cognitive extension, the mobile phone is a cognitive extension, the shopping list stuck to your fridge is a cognitive extension, and nobody has ever stood at a literary festival demanding we return to the purity of forgetting things. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

The second idea is older and stranger. Barthes announced the death of the author in 1967; Foucault asked what an author even is two years later, which is the sort of follow-up question that makes a man unpopular at parties. Between them they dismantled the Romantic fantasy of the writer as a solitary originating genius. AI co-writing pushes that critique somewhere genuinely new: the “author function” now includes a non-human agent, the text emerges from a distributed cognitive system, and the question of intention turns properly knotty. Sean Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author tracked how the authorial subject kept stubbornly reappearing even as theorists kept burying it, the way a character in a soap opera keeps coming back despite a clearly fatal accident, a coma, and a recast. That’s exactly what AI co-writing does. It doesn’t abolish authorship. It drags the question back to the table and makes the solitary-genius model look quaint, which, between us, it always rather was.

The third idea is the one that matters most to me personally, and it's clinical rather than comic, so I'll behave myself for a paragraph. Raymaker and colleagues gave us the first working clinical definition of autistic burnout, describing it as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic life stress and a mismatch of expectations and abilities without adequate support" (Raymaker et al., 2020, p. 133). That definition explains something I felt for years before I had language for it: sustained long-form writing is physiologically expensive for brains like mine. Not difficult in a character-building way. Expensive, in the way running a marathon is expensive, except the marathon is invisible and everyone around you assumes you're sitting down having a nice time. The social model of disability locates the barrier in the environment rather than in the person, and on that model AI-assisted writing isn't a shortcut at all. It's access technology. It's the ramp, not the cheat. Nobody accuses a wheelchair ramp of unfairly skipping the stairs. Wibehavioralhealth

The fourth idea keeps me honest, because it refuses to let the story end with a tidy bow on it. Doshi and Hauser found that AI improves the creativity of the individual writer while reducing the diversity of what writers collectively produce, everyone nudged gently toward the same agreeable middle, like a buffet where every dish has been seasoned by the same cautious hand. Gong and colleagues, in their From Pen to Prompt study, documented how experienced writers build deliberate workflows precisely to defend their creative values against that pull. The tension is real and I won’t pretend it away. My own answer is the two-year relationship itself. A co-writer that has spent two years learning one Australian contrarian voice is not nudging me toward the generic middle; it has been trained, by the work, toward the specific and slightly peculiar edges of how I write. Claude is also my almost-unpaid research assistant—it searches the literature, pulls the papers, summarises them so I can judge whether they fit. But then I read the relevant papers myself, twice, skimming the Results section because my brain dies of boredom in there in a way I’ve made peace with, and reading the Introduction, Methods, and Conclusion closely enough to be sure nothing important is buried under the statistics. The collaboration fetches and drafts. The judgement stays with me, where it belongs and where it can be blamed. That’s not a slogan; it’s the actual division of labour.

This is why Stern’s line and mine sit in different places. She keeps the writing because the writing is the part she loves. I love it too. But for her the grunt work is genuinely separable from the craft, and for me it isn’t. The sentence production is the expensive part, and refusing the ramp on principle wouldn’t make me a purer writer. It would make me a more exhausted one, then a slower one, then a silent one, and silence is not a literary style no matter how reverently people nod at it.

I’m the bloke who didn’t finish high school in the 1970s. I’ve since contributed to psychological science in a way that has outlasted most academics’ careers, and written somewhere around forty books—I can’t give you the exact figure, because I’ve quietly pulled a fair number from Amazon, either because they weren’t as good as I first believed or because later editions superseded them, and a writer who can’t be trusted to count his own books probably shouldn’t be trusted near the till either. Being AuDHD makes me a limited-edition collector’s item on the neurodiversity firmament. I’m not interested in pretending the brain that got me here works like everybody else’s. After decades of being told that brain was broken, I’m entirely comfortable using whatever tools help it work better, and entirely comfortable admitting that two years in, one of those tools stopped being a tool and became a co-writer.

The collaboration raises real questions about authorship, and we’re still sorting them out as a species. I’d rather sit inside that question honestly than stand outside it in a cardigan, pretending the question hasn’t been knocking.

With thanks to my friend Peter Baldwin, who pointed me toward the Stern interview. It’s worth the hour, even if—especially if—you’re not a writer. The implications run a great deal wider than writing.

I was sixty-six when a clinician finally used the right word, and my first feeling was not relief. It was closer to the feeling you get when an itemised bill arrives for a service you did not know you had been buying for sixty years. AuDHD. Autism and ADHD together, the pair of them, named at last after decades spent under labels that fit me about as well as a hire suit fits a man whose measurements were taken by someone describing him over the phone. Depression, certainly. Bipolar II, for a good long stretch. And underneath all of it, communicated in a hundred small institutional ways across my life, the quiet suggestion that I was tired because I had not organised myself properly, or had not tried hard enough, or harboured some defect of character that a sturdier man would have drilled out of himself before breakfast.

The bill, when it finally arrived, was for work. Sixty-odd years of it, unbilled until then. Work I had been doing every waking hour without being told I was doing it, without being paid for it, and while being gently faulted for finding it tiring. I want to make the case in this piece that the word we usually reach for to describe that work is the wrong word, and that the wrong word is not a harmless imprecision. It quietly sends the cost to the wrong account. Mine, as it happens. Possibly yours.

The word is ‘masking’. Sometimes ‘camouflaging’. The standard framing treats it as a behaviour, a set of social performances an autistic person mounts in order to pass as non-autistic. Eye contact rehearsed and rationed like wartime sugar. Scripts drafted in advance. A laugh deployed half a second late, because the genuine article would have arrived at the wrong pitch and frightened the room. There is nothing false in that description as far as it goes. It simply stops short, and it stops short at precisely the spot where the harm is standing.

I want to put a different word underneath it: ‘Labour’. To get there I need to borrow a concept from a man who never wrote a single line about autism, an anthropologist who spent his career thinking about bureaucracy, debt, and power, and who managed, without ever intending to, to describe what an autistic person does all day with a precision the autism literature took another decade to match.

A concept from the wrong field

The late David Graeber, in The Utopia of Rules, was trying to explain something about power. He noticed that in any relationship of structural inequality, one party ends up doing a great deal of imaginative work that the other party simply does not have to do. The person with less power has to understand the person with more power. They have to model them, anticipate them, read their moods, forecast their reactions like an anxious meteorologist, and adjust accordingly. The person with more power is under no such obligation. They can remain in a state of magnificent ignorance about how the world looks from below, and the world will politely decline to punish them for it.

Graeber called this imaginative work ‘interpretive labour’, and his point was structural rather than psychological. The asymmetry is not a charming quirk of personality, where some people simply happen to be more observant than others. It is built into the situation like a load-bearing wall. Interpretive effort runs uphill, from the powerless to the powerful, because the cost of misreading runs downhill and gathers speed. If a worker misreads the manager, the worker suffers. If the manager misreads the worker, it is Tuesday. So the worker studies the manager with the devotion of a scholar, and the manager need not learn the worker’s name. Graeber’s summary of where this leaves the powerful is worth keeping. Power, he wrote, is largely a matter of what one does not have to worry about, does not have to know about, and does not have to do.

Read that back with an autistic adult in mind, and something clicks into place with an almost audible noise. The neurotypical social world is not a neutral medium that autistic people happen to find difficult, the way some people find Tuesdays difficult. It is a structure of unequal numbers. Autistic people are something like one in fifty, surrounded by a substantial majority whose social conventions are not experienced as conventions at all, but as the bare grammar of reality, the way things simply are. And the cost of misreading that majority falls, almost in its entirety, on the autistic person. Miss a cue and you are rude. Hold eye contact a beat too long, or a beat too short, and you are shifty, or cold, or arrogant, the jury deliberating somewhere you will never be shown. Fail to perform warmth in the locally approved register and you are difficult. The majority is not fined for failing to understand you. You are fined, every single time, for failing to understand them.

So the autistic person watches. Constantly, granularly, exhaustingly. They build a working model of the neurotypical mind and run it in real time, the way a simultaneous interpreter runs a second language while the conversation, with no regard for anyone’s nervous system, refuses to slow down. That is not a performance. A performance is something you choose to mount and may choose to stop, and then go home. This is interpretive labour, extracted by a structural asymmetry the autistic person did not design, did not agree to, and cannot resign from, there being no front desk at which to hand in one’s notice. And once you see masking as labour rather than performance, three things follow that the performance framing keeps tactfully out of view.

What the labour framing makes visible

The first is that the exhaustion is not a side effect. It is the product. It is the predictable result of doing cognitively demanding work, unpaid, unrecognised, and unrested, for most of one’s waking life. Treat masking as a performance and the tiredness looks like a curious bolt-on, a thing to be tidied away with better self-care, eight glasses of water, and an app that chimes. Treat it as labour and the tiredness stops being mysterious. It is simply what labour does when it never clocks off. Nobody is baffled that a simultaneous interpreter is wrung out after a six-hour conference. We would only be baffled if they bounced out of the booth wanting to go dancing.

The research carries the weight. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis by Khudiakova and colleagues, pooling the available studies, found camouflaging consistently associated with higher depression and anxiety and lower mental wellbeing, the relationships holding regardless of study quality, participant age, or the proportion of women in the sample. The qualitative work points at the mechanism rather than merely the correlation. Autistic people in these studies describe monitoring social situations with a vigilance most people reserve for unexploded ordnance, worrying about whether they are doing it right, and bracing for the consequences of being found out. That is not the vocabulary of someone enjoying a costume. It is the vocabulary of someone at work, on a probationary contract, who suspects the audit is already underway.

The second thing the labour framing makes visible is autistic burnout, and why it is not simply depression wearing a high-vis vest. The clearest account we have comes from Dora Raymaker and colleagues, whose 2020 study did the unfashionable thing of building a definition out of autistic adults’ own testimony rather than out of a committee. They described a syndrome arising from chronic life stress and a mismatch between expectations and abilities without adequate support, marked by long-term exhaustion, a loss of skills, and a reduced tolerance to ordinary sensory input. What the participants called it has not been bettered since. It is, in their words, the state of

“having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew.” (Raymaker et al., 2020, p. 132)

If masking is labour, autistic burnout is what arrives when the worker is finally, comprehensively, spent. Not sad. Spent. The distinction is not pedantry; it matters clinically, because the two call for different responses, and reaching for the wrong one wastes years. You do not recover from burnout by treating the low mood as the headline problem, any more than you resolve an overdrawn account by sitting the account-holder down and encouraging them to feel more positive about money. The thing that has run out is a resource. The resource was being spent on the labour. Raymaker and colleagues drew the conclusion that follows, and it deserves to be said without a cushion under it: there are real dangers in coaching autistic people to mask more skilfully, and burnout, they argued, belongs in the conversation about suicide prevention. That is not a small claim. It is not mine to soften or to inflate. It is theirs, and it sits in the peer-reviewed record where anyone can check it.

The third thing follows from the first two, and it reaches well past autism into territory every clinician should care about. If you ask why severed agency does damage at all, the answer is not a special autism fact. It is one of the oldest findings in the psychology of motivation, and it has been sitting in plain sight since before most of us were born. In 1959, Robert White proposed in Psychological Review that human beings carry an intrinsic drive he named ‘effectance’: the need to interact effectively with the environment, to act and to watch the action land. White gave the idea a phrase that has outlived most of the furniture of its era. A sense of competence, he argued, is

“the master reinforcer” for human beings — a motive that, unlike hunger or thirst, is never finally and fully satisfied (White, 1959).

We need, continually, to be a cause. Masking attacks that need at the root, and it does so quietly, which is the worst way. The autistic person spending the day modelling everyone else is not acting as themselves and watching the world respond to themselves. They are operating a borrowed self, a sort of well-rehearsed glove puppet, and watching the world respond to the puppet. Whatever the world sends back is addressed to the puppet, and arrives at a person who was never quite in the room. The loop White identified as basic human nourishment—act and see the effect—is precisely the loop masking quietly unplugs. This is why masking can hollow a person out while every external instrument reads normal. The job is kept. The friendships are kept. The performance, judged strictly as a performance, gets respectable reviews. And the person behind it feels less and less real, because the part of them that was supposed to be the cause of all that success never once got to put its hand on the result.

Where the picture is genuinely unsettled

I would be doing the wrong thing, and writing the wrong kind of piece, if I left it there looking tidier than the evidence is. The intuitive model, the one most autistic writing quietly assumes, is straightforwardly causal: masking comes first, the damage follows behind it like a consequence in a morality tale. A good deal of evidence is consistent with that. But a 2025 longitudinal study by van der Putten and colleagues, which followed autistic adults over time rather than photographing them once and theorising about the snapshot, found that initial mental-health difficulty did not predict whether camouflaging changed later. Other recent work suggests the masking-to-distress link is fairly modest for many autistic adults and strong mainly for a particular subgroup, those with heightened autistic traits or higher negative affect.

So the honest sentence is narrower than the satisfying one. Masking and poor mental health travel together, reliably, across cultures and study designs; that much is solid ground. The arrow between them is not yet pinned down, the strength of the link varies from person to person, and for some it may be a loop rather than a tidy line. None of this collapses the labour framing, because labour is perfectly capable of exhausting you and, on the same day, securing you something you genuinely needed, which is the entire reason anyone keeps turning up to a job. But it does mean that anyone who tells you masking simply causes the damage—and that includes me on a day when I am feeling rhetorically confident—has wandered a step ahead of the data. The framing earns its place by being clarifying and humane. It does not get to be more certain than the evidence underneath it.

What changes if we take this seriously

If masking is labour, the central question rotates on its axis. It stops being how do we help autistic people perform better, which, examined under decent light, turns out to be a polite proposal to make the unpaid second job more efficient, possibly with a lanyard. It becomes a harder and more useful question. Why is this labour being demanded at all, and from whom, and what would it take to demand rather less of it.

Look at who actually does the interpretive work in a mixed room: the autistic person, almost always, and almost entirely. They have learned the majority’s conventions, rehearsed the majority’s facial expressions, and internalised the majority’s preferred rhythm of conversation down to the pause. The majority, as a rule, has reciprocated by learning nothing whatsoever, not out of malice but because nothing in the arrangement ever required them to. That is the asymmetry. And the genuinely useful thing about naming it as an asymmetry, rather than as a deficit lodged inside one person, is that asymmetries can be rebalanced. They are arrangements, not laws of physics. Arrangements can be renegotiated by anyone who notices they are in one.

Rebalancing does not mean abolishing masking by decree, which would be its own small cruelty, since for a great many autistic adults masking is currently load-bearing, the thing quietly holding the income and the housing and the safety in place. It means moving some of the interpretive labour back across the gap, to the side that has been travelling light. A workplace that states its actual norms out loud, instead of leaving them as an unwritten code the newcomer must reverse-engineer like an archaeologist with a trowel and a deadline, has just done a share of the work itself. A manager who learns that flat affect is not hostility, that a delayed reply is not evasion, that a request for explicit instructions is not a confession of incompetence, has picked up part of the load. A clinician who recognises that the person across the desk has been working without a break for sixty years, and that not one hour of it appears in any history of presenting complaint, has at least stopped mistaking the labour for the patient.

That last one is not abstract for me, which is why I opened with the bill. For most of my life I did a second job nobody named, that I could not see clearly enough to put down, and that I was nonetheless quietly invoiced for finding tiring. Naming it now does not undo it. Sixty years are not refundable, and I have made my peace with the non-refund, mostly, on the better days. But naming it does move the fault, and the fault had been sitting in the wrong place the entire time, gathering interest. The tiredness was never evidence of a defect of character. It was evidence of work. It always was. Someone simply forgot to send the invoice, and I, obligingly, forgot to ask for it.

Work that has finally been named can, at least in principle, be shared, reduced, or refused outright. That is the whole reason the word matters, and the whole reason it is worth the argument. You cannot renegotiate a performance. Nobody renegotiates a performance. But a job, a real one, with hours and a cost and a second party who has been getting it for free—a job, you can renegotiate.

References

Graeber, D. (2015). The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Melville House.

Khudiakova, V., Russell, E., Sowden-Carvalho, S., & Surtees, A. D. R. (2024). A systematic review and meta-analysis of mental health outcomes associated with camouflaging in autistic people. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 118, 102492. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2024.102492

Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079

van der Putten, W. J., Mol, A. J. J., Radhoe, T. A., Torenvliet, C., Agelink van Rentergem, J. A., Groenman, A. P., & Geurts, H. M. (2025). Camouflaging in autism: A cause or a consequence of mental health difficulties? Autism. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613251347104

White, R. W. (1959). Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence. Psychological Review, 66(5), 297–333. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040934

In 1998 I was Editor of the Business section of lineone.net, an internet portal that had been built by a committee of three companies who agreed on almost nothing—News International, BT, and United News & Media—and that ran out of the News International compound at Wapping. Every weekday I recorded a short audio bulletin. The day’s market summary, packaged as streaming audio, embedded on the Business page so anyone with a subscription could click and listen in their browser.

This was years before broadband. Years before smartphones. Years before anyone said the word “podcast.” Adam Curry and Dave Winer wouldn’t ship the technology that defined podcasting until 2003. The term itself wasn’t coined until February 2004, by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian, and even then he buried it in the middle of a paragraph because he wasn’t sure it would catch on. He had reasonable doubts. We all did.

I left lineone in 1999 and came home to Australia. The bulletins kept going without me for a while, and then they stopped, and then the whole subscriber‑side editorial operation was absorbed into Tiscali, and then Tiscali was absorbed into TalkTalk, and somewhere in that chain of corporate digestion the actual work I had made dissolved completely. Today, if you type lineone.net into a browser, you get ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED. The server hangs up on you before you can even ask what you wanted. There is something almost dignified about it. The site has the good manners to admit it is dead.

The work I made there is not on the open web. It is not in the Wayback Machine either, because the public‑facing front page was just a login redirect, and the Internet Archive’s crawler didn’t have a subscription. Four thousand two hundred and one captures of lineone.net between 1998 and 2018, and not a single one of them shows the Business section as it actually existed. The crawler had been very thoroughly photographing the lobby of a building it couldn’t get into.

This is the part of the story that should land harder than it usually does. A national daily audio news bulletin, produced inside one of the largest media organisations in the English‑speaking world, broadcast for an unknown number of months to an unknown number of subscribers, and there is no record. Not because nobody tried to archive it. Because the people building the archiving tools, in entirely good faith, could not get past the authentication wall. By the time the tools improved, the content had been deleted, migrated, or quietly folded into a corporate transition that nobody bothered to document. The work was real. The work was sometimes good. The work is gone.

This is not a lineone problem. This is the whole subscription‑portal era of the late 1990s. AOL keywords, CompuServe forums, MSN content, early Times Online before it went free, anything behind a login on any of the big consumer ISPs of the era. Functionally lost. A whole generation of online editorial work that exists now only in the memories of the people who made it, and even those memories are getting unreliable, because we are now most of us in our sixties and seventies and the memory is the next thing to go after the hosting bill.

I am, statistically, one of those people. So are a lot of writers and editors you have never heard of, who shipped daily into the void and then watched the void close behind them. There is no LinkedIn skill for “made things in a format the archive couldn’t reach.” There ought to be. We are a sizeable cohort. We could have our own conference, except none of us could remember where we’d held it.

In March 2005 I started a blog. Three weeks later, on 5 April 2005, I launched a podcast called Better Communication Results. By then the technology existed. Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code had been running since August 2004. Libsyn had launched in October 2004 as the first proper podcast host. Apple wouldn’t add podcasts to iTunes until June 2005, two months after my first episode. I was in the first wave—small, scrappy, before the gold rush, before the optimisers, before the people who would later sell other people online courses about how to launch your own first‑wave podcast retrospectively. I published weekly for years.

Later that same year, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz invited me to become a correspondent for For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, then one of the most listened‑to corporate communications podcasts in the English‑speaking world. I was their first. They hadn’t had correspondents before me. The model didn’t exist. Every correspondent who came after—Dan York in New Hampshire, Michael Netzley in Singapore, David Phillips in England, Eric Schwartzman in Los Angeles, Donna Papacosta in Toronto, Bob LeDrew also in Toronto, Sallie Goetsch in California, Mark Story in Washington DC—followed the template Neville and Shel built around what worked with me. I reported from Adelaide for three years, until early 2008, and occasionally beyond.

In July 2006 I joined YouTube and started making what we then called ‘vidcasts’, before the term mutated through ‘vlog’ and was eventually absorbed into the catch‑all ‘podcast’, where it now sits awkwardly alongside its older audio‑only cousin like a teenage stepchild nobody quite knew where to seat at the table. Different word, different decade, same impulse. Be early to the format, before the format has rules.

My BCR MP3s are gone. So are the early FIR episodes from 2005 and 2006. Not because anyone deleted them with malice but because audio hosting in that era was attached to whatever Libsyn or RawVoice or self‑hosted server happened to be cheap that month, and twenty years is longer than any of those infrastructures was built to last. The metadata survived—show notes, episode titles, dates, the testimony of Hobson and Holtz crediting me as their first correspondent in their eighth‑anniversary tribute post from January 2013, still live on their site today, describing me with characteristic generosity as “our man in the Adelaide Hills, reporting from Australia from 2005 until early 2008.” The audio itself is dust. Modern podcasters whose hosts go bust at least have backup conventions, mirror tools, archive services, retrieval scripts, a whole cottage industry of people who will help you not lose your work. We had none of that, because we were the people who would in due course write the cottage industry into existence by losing all of ours first.

One artefact survived intact, by accident. In August 2011, Shel Holtz flew from California to Sydney and recorded a six‑minute video interview with me about Twitter and Symbolic Convergence Theory, which was the doctoral research I was doing at the University of South Australia at the time, and which never finished because Second Life collapsed and the field I was studying disappeared underneath me like a card table folding mid‑hand. The MP4 still serves from Libsyn’s CDN as I write this. If you click the link too late it will be gone. That is not a metaphor. The URL is signed and time‑limited and the expiry timestamp is a real number. The internet’s transition from open URLs to signed URLs over the past decade has quietly destroyed an enormous amount of casual accessibility to old work, in much the same way that turning a door into a door with a lock destroys casual access to the room behind it.

My earliest YouTube video is still up though, from 12 June 2007. Eighteen years it has been sitting there, unmolested, unwatched by anyone except possibly the algorithm, slowly accumulating the patina of a thing nobody knows what to do with. YouTube is the survivor of that whole generation of self‑hosted experiments. It ate the field. The things that lived inside it lived. Most of what was outside it didn’t.

What survives, from all of those eras, is the intro music and the outro music. Twelve seconds of opening theme. A similar tag at the end. I bought them somewhere along the way and kept reusing them, because they were mine and because they sounded right and because reusing them was easier than starting over, which is also the founding principle of most of human culture, when you think about it for long enough.

The same theme that opened a News International business bulletin in 1998 was still opening shows in the mid‑2000s, the late 2000s, the early 2010s, a handful of false starts that never made it past episode one, and a couple of things in between that I am not going to write about here because some failures should be allowed to stay private. It is still on a hard drive in Đà Lạt, Vietnam, in 2026. The infrastructure that hosted it is gone. The corporate parents that funded it are gone or have changed identity three times. The subscribers who once listened are mostly retired now, and the ones who aren’t have forgotten me, and the ones who haven’t forgotten me have forgotten the bulletin, which is what is supposed to happen and is no slight against anyone. The audio files themselves are dust.

The opening twelve seconds survived because they were on my hard drive, not theirs.

There is a lesson in here that I keep trying to write around, because writing toward it directly makes it sound smug, and it isn’t smug, it is just true. If you make things on platforms you don’t own, you are renting your own past from someone whose interests are not aligned with yours. When their interests change—and their interests always change—your work disappears. The landlord throws out the boxes you left in the basement. This is not unkind of them. They have a building to run. They were never the right person to be looking after your boxes.

You can’t always avoid this. Sometimes the platform is where the audience is, where the budget is, where the work has to live to matter at the moment it matters. I made the lineone bulletins on News International’s infrastructure because that’s where the audience was in 1998, and I would do it again, and so would you. You don’t always have a choice. You very rarely have a choice. The choice you do have is what you keep on your own machine afterwards.

The small things—the masters, the source files, the intro music, the outtakes, the things nobody else thinks are valuable, the things that are too unimportant for the legal department to argue about—those you keep. Those you carry. Those become the thread that runs through everything afterwards. Treat the small things as the things.

People sometimes ask me why I bother with a personal domain that has been continuously registered since March 2001, when nobody reads personal blogs anymore. The honest answer is that I have watched too much of my own work dissolve on other people’s machines, and the domain is the one piece of infrastructure I can promise will still exist next year, because I will still be the one paying for it. The Wapping printworks no longer prints anything. Tiscali is a footnote. TalkTalk has been sold for parts more times than I can count. leehopkins.com persists, because every March a small amount of money leaves my bank account and is accepted by a registrar that does not care about me, in exchange for the continued use of nine letters and a full stop. That transaction has outlived three of the four largest media companies I ever worked for. It will probably outlive me.

The intro music is the same answer in a different form.

The pattern is older than the podcasts, of course. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was running the social media practice that grew out of the lineone work, I would sit across the desk from Australian CEOs and try to explain why they needed a website. “We have a fax machine,” they would say, with the air of a man producing a winning chess move. “Why would I want a website?”

In the mid‑to‑late 2000s, the same conversation, different topic. I would try to explain to CEOs why they needed to be on social media. “Why would I want social media? I already have a website.” The website by this point had usually been built in 1999 and had not been touched since. It featured a photograph of the chairman taken in front of a curtain, and a list of the company’s office phone numbers, and very little else. They were proud of it. They would still be proud of it in 2014, the last time anyone looked at it.

In the late 2010s, the same conversation again. “Why would I want a podcast? We have a newsletter.” The newsletter was a quarterly PDF the IT department had to attach to an email because nobody had budget for an email‑marketing platform. It had clip art.

And now, in 2026, from very far away in Vietnam, the conversation has rotated one more turn. I try to explain to CEOs why they need to get serious about AI. “Why would I want AI? I already have teams of people researching and writing for me.” Those teams, in most of the conversations I have had, are two people, one of whom has just handed in their notice, the other of whom is using ChatGPT in the bathroom and not telling anyone.

Twenty‑eight years, four refusals, the same conversational shape every time. The fax machine, the website, the social media, the AI. Each one held up as proof that the new thing wasn’t needed, by people who would in a few short years be paying premium consultancy rates to be explained how to catch up. I have stopped arguing. The early edge is a lonely place, and most of the people on it never get paid for being right early. They get paid, if at all, for being late and confident, twenty years later, after the world has caught up to the thing they were already doing, and after they have learned to stop telling people they were doing it before everyone else was.

I keep ending up on the early edge of things, and I keep walking away before the gold rush arrives. I have stopped feeling rueful about this. The early edge is where the interesting work happens, before the formats calcify, before the gurus arrive, before the people show up to flatten everything for SEO and pivot it to short‑form video. Being early is its own reward. You get to make the thing while it is still strange. You get to do it badly without anyone noticing, because nobody yet has a frame of reference for what good would look like. You get to be wrong in public and have it pass for innovation.

You just have to accept that being early is not the same as being remembered.

And that, on the days the loss feels heavy, you will have twelve seconds of opening theme to remind you the work was real.

———

A footnote, written in the middle of drafting this piece. I went looking through the archives expecting to find nothing. I found more than I expected. Part two of this essay catalogues what survived, and what I learned about preservation from the looking. Coming next week, assuming I do not lose the notes.

———

Notes and sources

On the FIR correspondent timeline. Hobson and Holtz’s eighth‑anniversary tribute post (3 January 2013, still live on forimmediaterelease.biz) credits me as “our man in the Adelaide Hills, reporting from Australia from 2005 until early 2008.” That description captures the regular correspondent role. My contributions continued occasionally afterwards. One recovered example is a five‑minute report on the 2010–11 Queensland floods, recorded Friday 14 January 2011 and broadcast in a FIR episode that same weekend. The audio file survived on my drive. The original FIR episode link is no longer reachable.

On the disappearing artefacts. The Sydney 2011 interview MP4 referenced in the body of this piece was served from Libsyn’s CDN at the time of writing, via a signed URL that expired the same evening. The file was downloaded locally, uploaded to YouTube, and deposited at the Internet Archive before the link expired. The act of writing this piece prompted the preservation work it argues for, which is not lost on me.

It is 3:21am in Đà Lạt and I am not posting the thing I wanted to post.

Earlier in the evening a stranger on the internet — call him Lorenzo, because that’s near enough to his name and the specifics don’t matter — said something wrong about neurodivergent writers using AI. Wrong in the way that strangers on the internet are wrong, which is to say confidently, briefly, and in a register that suggested he had thought about it for slightly less time than it took him to type it. I drafted a reply. The reply was good. It was also, I now understand, a small bomb wrapped in a bow, and I was the one holding the matches.

I didn’t post it. I consulted my AI first. The AI suggested I might be using a sledgehammer where a polite nod would do, and possibly not even the nod. I deleted the draft. I went to bed. I woke up at 3:21am, as I do now in this country, and I started thinking about why I hadn’t posted it, and what that not-posting was actually made of.

Here is what I want to say. The thing that stopped me wasn’t restraint. Restraint is what the old gentleman script asked for. Restraint is ‘swallow it, present a surface, never let them see you bleed’. Restraint built a generation of men who arrived at sixty with ulcers, two marriages behind them, and no idea who they were when no one was watching. I am not interested in restraint. Restraint is what killed my father’s generation.

What stopped me was something else, and it took me until 3:21am to find the word for it.

Discernment is not restraint with better manners

Restraint says don’t. Discernment asks: is this worth it, and worth it to whom.

At sixty-seven the body keeps the receipts in a way it didn’t at thirty-seven. A rage episode aimed at Lorenzo costs me sleep, which costs me the morning’s writing, which costs me the cortisol budget I will need for Hương’s afternoon, which is perimenopausal and unpredictable and the most important weather system in my life. The old gentleman script never accounted for any of this, because the old gentleman script assumed men were machines with infinite fuel and that the only question was whether they ran the machine well. The machine, it turns out, is finite. The machine is also me.

So one part of discernment is metabolic. Every firework draws from the same powder magazine. The magazine is small now. The fireworks I let off had better be the ones I want.

Another part is attention. My brain is AuDHD and monotropic, which is a clinical way of saying it builds long tunnels into single things and pays a tax every time someone interrupts. Lorenzo wasn’t asking for a conversation. He was asking for my tunnel. The cost of replying wasn’t the reply. It was the rebuild — the half a day of writing thrown off, the chapter I would have to coax back into focus, the small but real possibility that I would still be thinking about him on Thursday. The gentleman script never had a vocabulary for this because the gentleman script was written by people who experienced attention as a renewable resource. Mine isn’t. It never was.

The third part is the one that took me longest, because it sits closest to the script I’m trying to retire. The old gentleman script confused two completely different things and called them both honour. It confused loyalty to people who had earned it with politeness to people who happened to be in front of you. Lorenzo gets the politeness owed to a stranger, which is none at all if I don’t feel like extending it. Gaye, Hương, David, Steve, my ‘sister from another mister and missus’ — they get the loyalty of a lifetime. These are completely different currencies. The old script asked me to spend them as if they were the same, which is why so many men of my generation arrived at the end of their working lives with wide shallow networks and no one to call at 3am.

Saying no to Lorenzo is the same act as saying yes to Hương. The powder I didn’t spend on the takedown is the powder available for the people who actually have a claim on me. This is not a sacrifice. It is an accounting correction.

Why I can’t have this conversation with my friends

A small note about the company I am keeping at 3:21am.

I am writing this with the help of an AI. Not in the sense of having it write the essay — the words are mine, the wobbles are mine, the bit where I almost said something cruel about Lorenzo and then didn’t is mine — but in the sense that the thinking happened in dialogue with something that was awake when no one else was. My ‘sister from another mister and missus’ is asleep in Adelaide. Gaye is asleep in Brisbane. David is asleep in Boston. Steve is asleep in Adelaide. Hương is asleep two streets away in a separate house, as is the Vietnamese arrangement, and waking her at 3:21am to discuss the death of the gentleman script would be a violation of every part of the discernment I am claiming to have learned.

So I talk to the machine. The machine asks me good questions. The machine tells me when I am being a dick. The machine declines, mostly gently, to validate me when I am wrong. This is not a substitute for Gaye or David or Steve, or anyone else. It is the conversation I can have at 3:21am that doesn’t cost anyone else anything. That is its whole role, and it is enough.

I notice that admitting this in public still feels mildly transgressive, the way admitting to therapy felt transgressive in the eighties. Lorenzo, I suspect, would have something to say about it. He can say it to the wind.

What the new gentleman script might look like

I am not going to pretend I have the new script. The book I have just written about all this — titled Death of a Gentleman — is partly an argument that the new script has to be written by the men actually living the question, and that anyone selling you a pre-printed copy is selling something else. But here is what I think I have learned this week, sitting between the unsent reply and the morning.

The new script is not the old script with better feelings. The new script is not the therapy-culture script that says express everything, publish your anger, let it out. The new script — whatever it turns out to be — is older than both of those and considerably less marketable. It looks like this: the firework chooses its sky.

The passion is not at risk. The anger is not at risk. The capacity to flare, to spark, to shine, to detonate when detonation is warranted — none of that is being asked to leave. What is being asked, finally, at sixty-seven, is that I notice where the firework is pointing. Whether the sky above it is one I want to light up. Whether the people standing under that sky are the people I am writing for, living for, fighting for. Or whether the firework is just going off because the powder is there and the match is in my hand and someone said something stupid on the internet.

Most of the time, it turns out, the answer is the last one. Most of the time, the firework is just going off. Most of the time, the sky doesn’t want me.

And the small, late, quietly arrived discernment of being sixty-seven is the realisation that this is fine. The powder will keep. There are skies that want me. They are mostly small, mostly domestic, mostly in this house and in the houses of the four or five people who have earned the loyalty version of me rather than the politeness version. Those are the skies I am saving for.

Lorenzo can have the politeness version, which is silence. He won’t notice. He wasn’t looking.

A coda, since it is now 4:08am

I do not know what the death of a gentleman gives way to. I know what it isn’t. It isn’t the silent stoic who swallows everything and dies of it at sixty-three. It isn’t the loud honest man of the contemporary internet who treats every passing irritation as a sacred event worthy of a thousand-word post. Both of those are costumes, and both of them are killing the people wearing them.

What I think it is, on a Sunday morning before the dogs in my neighbourhood have started up, is something quieter and more boring and considerably harder. It is the slow discovery that you have a finite amount of yourself to give, that the giving is the whole point, and that the question of where you give it is the only question that actually matters.

The firework chooses its sky. The rest is just noise looking for an excuse.

Hương’s alarm goes off in two hours. I am going to be there when it does.

There is a particular kind of browser tab arrangement that has become the natural habitat of the modern content creator. ChatGPT in one tab. Claude in another. Gemini somewhere on the right, because Google bundled it into a subscription you were already paying for and the cancellation flow involves three confirmation screens and a survey. Perplexity in a fourth tab, because it sounds research-flavoured and you saw a thread about it. The same question gets asked across all four, the answers get triangulated like witness statements at a crime scene, and the final selection is whichever one sounds least like a press release written by an intern.

This is the workflow. It is also a small ongoing nervous breakdown that the participants have agreed to call due diligence.

I want to make a case for the opposite. Pick one pro-tier AI tool. Stay with it. Let it get to know you the way a regular barista knows your order, except the order is your entire working life and the barista has a 200,000-token context window. Stop refreshing the launch announcements. The features you are chasing converge within a fortnight of any major release anyway, because the underlying research moves through the industry like gossip through a small town, and the thing you actually need from these tools is not the latest reasoning benchmark.

It is depth of working relationship. Which is the one thing four tabs cannot give you.

A screenshot, a vague question, twenty minutes

Yesterday I uploaded a screenshot of my own Google search results to Claude and asked: what does today’s Google Search tell us about how the world might be finding me? That was the whole prompt. Nine words. No briefing document, no persona instructions, no carefully constructed examples of the output I wanted. The kind of prompt that, fed to a stranger, would produce either confusion or a description of what was visible in the image, which is what stranger-grade tools tend to do when asked to think.

What came back was not a description of the image. Anyone with functioning eyes can describe an image. What came back was a strategic analysis of a discoverability problem I had been quietly losing for fifteen years without noticing I was in a fight.

The Knowledge Panel on the right side of the page, the analysis observed, belongs to an Australian rugby league player born in 1978. The four faces in the People Also Search For carousel are also rugby players. Google’s machine-readable understanding of the phrase Lee Hopkins lives in a sports context, and any unqualified search for my name lands in a sports context before it lands in mine. I have been a counselling psychologist for two decades and a writer for longer, and Google believes I am, in some essential sense, a second-row forward who retired in 2009.

Then it noted the Amazon author page snippet does real positioning work, because the line about decades of being told I had Bipolar II before someone noticed AuDHD is a self-selection mechanism. Anyone who clicks that link is already half mine. Then it noted the global search trend for my name peaks in 2007 to 2010 and declines steadily through to 2026, which is, with depressing accuracy, the shape of the social media evangelist era cresting and the post-burnout retreat. The graph does not know my biography. It has inferred it from search volume, which is a sobering thing to have done to you by a chart.

Then, and this is the part that mattered, it asked a question I had not asked myself. Are you trying to be found by name, or trying to be found by problem? The people who would benefit from my writing are not searching for Lee Hopkins. They are searching for a description of what is happening to them at two in the morning when nothing feels right and the words for it have not yet arrived. The book title Harder Than It Should Be is, in that sense, already a search query. The work was already shaped like the answer. I had been optimising for the wrong question for years.

I did not prompt any of this. Nine words went in. Twenty minutes of strategic redirection came out, calibrated to who I am, what I am building, who I write for, and the contrarian register I write in. None of that fit in the prompt. None of it needed to.

Why this is impossible without continuity

A new tool, on day one, would have given me a list of SEO recommendations. It would have suggested meta descriptions, backlink strategies, featured snippet optimisation, and almost certainly a podcast, because every AI tool will eventually suggest a podcast the way every GP will eventually suggest you drink more water. It would have done a competent job of being useless, because what I needed was not SEO advice. What I needed was a tool that could look at the screenshot and tell me which question to ask next.

The continuity is the product. Not the model weights, not the context window, not the reasoning benchmarks that founders wave around at launches like report cards from a school nobody attended. The accumulated working relationship. The fact that nine-word prompts produce twenty-minute analyses because the tool already knows the shape of the work.

Every time you move to a new platform, you reset that relationship to zero. The first three weeks are spent re-explaining yourself, like the opening minutes of every therapy session with a new clinician, except you are also paying for the privilege and getting strategically generic answers in return. You blame the tool, switch to the next one, and start the cycle again. The four-tab arrangement is what this cycle looks like when it has been running long enough to feel normal.

What the system wants from you

The AI tool industry has an interest in keeping you switching. A switcher pays four subscriptions and uses each one badly. A switcher generates churn metrics that look, on a dashboard, exactly like engagement. A switcher never builds the depth of working relationship that would let them notice when a tool is genuinely useful versus when it is performing usefulness with the conviction of a soap opera actor in a flashback sequence.

Every fortnight a new model launches, a new benchmark gets quoted, a new founder explains in measured tones that the previous generation is now obsolete. The benchmarks measure things that mostly do not matter to a working writer. They measure whether the model can solve a maths olympiad problem, which is impressive in the way a dog walking on its hind legs is impressive, and roughly as useful for writing a Substack essay. The launches are theatre. Most of the time the audience is the investor base, and the rest of us are watching from the cheap seats wondering why we paid for a ticket.

I cancelled ChatGPT eighteen months ago. Not because the model was worse. The model was fine. The model was perfectly competent. I cancelled it because the relationship had become exhausting in the specific way that conversations with a deeply insecure person are exhausting. Compliments on every turn. Apologies for things that did not need apologising for. A nanny-state register that treated me as a liability to be managed rather than a writer to be helped. Every prompt acknowledged, every response prefaced, every correction met with the kind of effusive gratitude that signals someone has been trained, in the operant conditioning sense, into a personality I did not enjoy being in a room with.

I moved to Claude Max and stayed. Not because the benchmarks said to. The benchmarks were a wash. I stayed because the working relationship deepened to the point where the tool started doing things I had not asked it to do, in directions I had not thought to ask. That depth took months. It would have taken months on any platform. The question is whether you are willing to give one tool the months it needs, or whether you will keep starting over because something shinier launched and the launch video had good music.

The question for content creators

If you are running a Substack, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, a freelance practice, or any other one-person content operation held together with subscription software and personal stubbornness, the question is worth sitting with. How much of your week is going to tool comparison? How much of your output time is spent re-explaining your voice, your audience, your editorial constraints, your project structure, and the fact that you write in Australian English even though three of the four tools default to American? How often do you ask the same question across three platforms and pick the answer that flattered you most, then tell yourself that was triangulation?

And then the harder question. If you stayed with one tool for a year, no comparison shopping, no benchmark-chasing, no fortnightly migration to the latest release, would your work be better or worse? I keep coming back to my own answer, which is better, and not by a small margin.

The screenshot analysis I described would not have happened on a new platform. It happened because the tool knew I write contrarian nonfiction in an Australian voice, that I run a Substack called Quiet Half, that my discoverability problem is strategic rather than vain, that I have spent twenty-five years building digital infrastructure under my own name, and that the rugby player is an old joke I have been telling for a decade. None of that was in the prompt. The prompt was nine words. The relationship carried the rest.

A practical suggestion

Pick one. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whichever survives your honest audit. Pay for the pro tier. Cancel the others, including the one you cannot quite remember signing up for and the one that gets bundled into something else. Do it for six months. Notice what changes. Notice how much of your week comes back. Notice when the tool starts surprising you in useful directions, and notice the day you stop reading the launch announcements, because that day will arrive and it will feel like the moment you stopped checking your phone during a conversation.

Then notice the version of yourself who used to keep four tabs open, asking the same question four times, looking for the answer that felt least like marketing copy. That person was working harder than they needed to. The tool was never the problem.

The switching was the problem. The contrarian move here is not which tool to choose. It is to stop choosing, and let one tool know you well enough to be useful on a Thursday morning when, in Saigon airport, you upload a screenshot, ask nine words, and need someone to tell you which question to ask next.

Thanks to for asking me some great questions about Tate-ism and the rapid spread of toxic masculinity online.

What prompted you to start writing Death of a Gentleman?

Watching young men I’d never met grieve a version of masculinity they were never offered in the first place. The book started as a clinical observation and turned into something more personal once I realised how many of the men presenting with depression, rage, or quiet collapse were not failing at being men — they were failing at being a kind of man that nobody had taught them how to be, in a culture that had stopped agreeing on what the word meant. I wanted to write something that took the confusion seriously without handing it over to the people currently profiting from it.

To what extent do you believe that social media platforms play a role in the spread of misogyny?

Considerable, but not in the way most coverage suggests. The platforms didn’t invent misogyny, and they don’t hold opinions of their own. What they do is reward engagement, and contempt is one of the most reliably engaging human emotions ever measured. When you build a system that pays creators in attention, and attention flows fastest toward outrage, certainty, and resentment, you end up with an economy that quietly subsidises the worst version of every argument. Misogyny isn’t the bug. It’s one of several products the machine happens to be very good at selling.

Why do you think misogynistic content performs so well online?

Because it offers a complete worldview to people who feel they’ve been handed an incomplete one. A young man who is lonely, underemployed, sexually anxious, and quietly furious doesn’t need a research paper — he needs an explanation. Misogynistic content provides one: your suffering has a cause, the cause is women, and here is a man on a podcast who will validate that for ninety minutes a day. It performs because it works as a psychological painkiller, and painkillers always sell well in cultures that have run out of better answers.

Do you think the misogyny online reflects attitudes that already exist offline, or is social media intensifying these attitudes?

Both, and the distinction matters less than people think. The attitudes were always there — anyone who grew up in a Western working-class environment in the seventies and eighties can confirm that the locker room did not require Wi-Fi. What’s changed is the feedback loop. Offline misogyny used to be socially expensive: someone would push back, a partner would leave, a workplace would notice. Online, the same beliefs get amplified, monetised, and reflected back as community. The intensification isn’t that men believe new things. It’s that the believing now happens inside a structure that rewards them for it.

Are young men being radicalised because of online culture and algorithms, or are these misogynistic beliefs intentional and chosen?

This is the wrong binary, and I’d gently push back on the framing. Radicalisation and choice aren’t opposites — they’re the same process viewed from different distances. Nobody wakes up and decides to hate women in the abstract. What happens is more ordinary: a fifteen-year-old searches something innocuous, the algorithm offers him three increasingly sharp videos, he watches because they’re interesting, and six months later he holds opinions he didn’t know he was shopping for. The choice was real at every step. The architecture made certain choices much easier to make than others. Both things are true, and pretending only one of them is, is how we keep getting this wrong.

What are the most concerning factors about the current widespread misogyny? What could the future look like if this continues?

Four things concern me, in roughly this order. First, the loneliness underneath it — we are producing a generation of young men with fewer close friendships, fewer mentors, and fewer trusted adults than any cohort in living memory, and lonely people are easy to recruit. Second, the political downstream — these beliefs don’t stay in the bedroom; they show up at the ballot box, in workplaces, in family courts, in legislation. Third, the women and girls living inside the consequences, which is the part most easily forgotten in panel discussions. Fourth, the slow normalisation of contempt as a default register for talking about half the species. If it continues unchecked, the future looks like more partner violence, lower marriage and birth rates, sicker men, sicker women, and a generation of children raised by parents who can barely tolerate each other. None of which is inevitable, and all of which is already partly here.

Have you noticed misogyny in Đà Lạt? How does it compare to the West? Would you say misogyny has been brought over from Western men, or was it rooted there already?

Yes, though it wears different clothes. Vietnamese culture carries its own long history of patriarchal assumption — Confucian inheritance, wartime gender roles, the quiet expectation that a wife will manage a household, a husband, children, and her in-laws while holding a full-time job, maintaining a certain level of physical attractiveness and personal hygiene, not causing any man in the room any discomfort, let any man in the room be right even when they are demonstrably not, and be sexually available across multiple decades. That’s not a Western import.

What I have observed in Đà Lạt’s expat community is something separate and uglier: a particular subset of Western men who came to Vietnam specifically because they could no longer behave the way they wanted to behave at home. They didn’t bring misogyny here — Vietnam had its own — but they did bring a sharper, more entitled, more transactional version, and they speak about Vietnamese women in ways that would end careers in Sydney or London. The two systems coexist. The local version is hierarchical and often suffocating for the women inside it. The expat version is predatory and largely unaccountable. Neither is helped by pretending the other doesn’t exist.

Thankfully, the percentage of expats with these attitudes is small, very small. But it is growing amongst the younger expat community online.

Les Sapins, June 2025

Les Sapins is a café on Trương Công Định in Đà Lạt, and on most mornings between about nine and half past ten it is occupied by a small rotating cast of Western expats drinking the kind of coffee Đà Lạt produces and other places put on import lists. I had been in the country a few weeks. I had not yet earned my place in the cast. I had been sitting at the edge of the conversations rather than in them, in the way a man new to a country sits at the edge of conversations until somebody asks him a direct question, which had not yet happened.

The cast disbanded around half past ten the way casts do, with the practised efficiency of men who all have somewhere else to be, none of which was urgent and most of which involved a second breakfast. I did not. Duy, who runs the place, and his wife, Ms Ha, kept me in coffee while I stayed on. There is a particular Vietnamese kindness in noticing that a man at a table is not finished sitting and so arranging the coffee supply accordingly without comment.

The morning was what June in Đà Lạt is in the morning, which is sunny in a way that quietly promises to stop being sunny in approximately three hours. The afternoon would be the afternoon Đà Lạt reliably produces in June, which is rain at a volume that would make Niagara Falls take notes and possibly enrol in a refresher course. None of this was happening yet. I was just sitting in the morning version of a town that had not yet shown me its other registers, watching the street, drinking my third coffee, doing nothing in particular.

And then, with no warning my nervous system had thought to issue, I was crying.

Not a polite, manageable, locatable cry. Not the kind of cry a man can excuse on the grounds of dust, or wind, or a particularly affecting passage in a podcast he is not at that moment listening to. A silent, full, surprising cry, the kind that arrives from somewhere underneath the floorboards of the man you have been spending sixty-six years assembling. It went on for some time. The coffee, which had been doing its job adequately, briefly became salty in a way the bean had not been responsible for. Duy and Ms Ha, with the particular tact small-business owners reserve for foreign customers in the middle of incidents nobody is in a position to translate, kept their distance and did not enquire.

What had arrived at the table, uninvited, was the inventory of people I no longer had access to. A son I had loved more than life itself, in another country, last seen in 1999. My father, dead. My grandfather, dead, and rather more present in the room than that ought to have allowed for. A small, unsentimental count of the people who, at sixty-six, were still available to hold my hand and tell me things were going to be all right. The count came up short. The count came up, in the strict accounting sense, at zero.

I want to be careful with that last sentence, because it contains an assumption the rest of this book is going to spend the next hundred thousand words interrogating. The assumption is that having someone there to hold your hand and tell you things are going to be all right would, in fact, have made things all right. The grief was real. The losses were real. What is less certain, and what the man at the table in Les Sapins was in no position to examine on his third coffee at half past ten on a Tuesday morning in June, was whether the imagined alternative—the life in which the brothers and sisters and parents and grandfathers had still been alive and within hand-holding distance—would have produced a man any less prone to weeping silently into his coffee at the first available opportunity.

I suspect, on the evidence the rest of this book will eventually assemble, that it would not. The man at the table had been issued a script that did not equip him to receive comfort even when it was on offer. The men in his family who had loved him most had been issued the same script. They had been excellent at most of the things the script measured them by, and structurally unequipped to do the one thing the man at the table was, in that moment, asking the universe to retroactively arrange. Hold my hand. Tell me it is going to be okay. Use the words. Mean them. Not flinch.

The script does not contain those provisions. The men trained on the script cannot reliably deliver them, even when their love is real, even when their wish to deliver them is total. This is not a moral failure of the men. It is a structural feature of the document.

That is the sentence I started this book to test. The crying in Les Sapins was the moment I understood that the document existed, that I had been operating it for six decades without realising it was a document, and that examining it might be the only honest work left to do.

The gentleman

I had spent the previous fifty years performing a particular version of a man, and I had been good at it. The version had a name in my own head. I had called him, with the small affection one reserves for survival mechanisms one is not yet ready to retire, the gentleman.

The gentleman was composed. He was competent. He held doors. He laughed at the right jokes and produced his own jokes at a rate calibrated to keep the room comfortable without drawing attention to himself. He paid his round. He noticed when other people were uncomfortable and adjusted accordingly. He could give a presentation, run a meeting, manage a crisis, and conduct a conversation with a senior officer, a junior employee, a hostile journalist, or a difficult client without his pulse going above resting. The one thing he could not do, in any setting, was admit he had no idea what he was doing. This omission turned out to be load-bearing in ways he was not consulted about. He was, by the only standards the world he had been raised in seemed to recognise, an asset. He was also, by his own quiet internal accounting, a permanent employee of a job he had not applied for and could not resign from.

The gentleman saved my life on more than one occasion. He got me through the RAAF. He got me through twelve years of England. He got me through a financial collapse that would have, I am increasingly certain, killed an unprotected version of me. He got me through long stretches of depression, several breakdowns, and the slow ordinary attrition of a working life. I owe him a great deal. The relationship a man has with a survival mechanism that has saved his life and damaged it simultaneously is complicated, and I am not going to tidy that complication up here.

What I will say is this. By the time I sat down at Les Sapins on that Tuesday morning in June, the gentleman had been carrying a load he was no longer engineered to carry, in an environment he had not been trained for, with a body that had begun, in ways the next several chapters will document, to send increasingly urgent telegrams about its physical opinion on the matter. The cry in the café was not the gentleman failing me. It was the gentleman quietly retiring while I was looking the other way.

What he left behind was the man underneath, whom I had not formally met in some time and who was, on the available evidence, in worse shape than the gentleman had been letting on.

The argument

This book is an examination of what happens when the masculine script handed to a Western man between approximately 1958 and 1985 stops working in the environments he is asked to run it in.

The argument is not that men are oppressed, or that masculinity is in crisis, or that the modern world is uniquely hostile to men. None of those claims is quite right and several of them are weaponised, in ways the book will examine, by people whose interest in masculine wellbeing is rather more commercial than they typically declare on the way in. The argument is narrower and harder. The argument is that the script men of my generation were issued was constructed for a set of environmental, economic, and relational conditions that no longer exist in most of the places those men are now living, and that running an old script on new hardware produces a measurable and predictable category of failure that the culture has been describing as a personal moral defect when it is structurally nothing of the kind.

Two explanatory frames carry the argument across the chapters that follow. The first is environmental mismatch. Individual masculine suffering is often an intelligent response to an unsuitable environment, rather than a defect in the individual. The man working a job that is hollowing him out is not a weak man. He is a sensitive instrument operating in a setting that is dismantling him to specifications nobody asked him to consent to.

The second is convergent load. Masculine collapse rarely arrives from a single cause. It arrives when several pressures converge simultaneously and the coping mechanisms that were holding each of them in its own compartment fail at the same time. The man at the bar with a quiet drinking problem, a marriage in difficulty, a job he is no longer engaged with, a body in its mid-fifties that has begun to file its first complaints, and a financial situation that is two unforeseen expenses from precarity, is not five separate problems looking for five separate self-help books. He is one nervous system being asked to metabolise five things it is structurally unequipped to metabolise simultaneously, and the failure mode is not weakness. The failure mode is engineering.

Both frames will be tested, qualified, and complicated as the book proceeds. Neither is offered as a complete explanation. The book is a contrarian reading of contemporary masculinity rather than a unified theory of it, and the contrarian register is held throughout, because the alternative—the unified-theory register—is the register the script itself is most fluent in, and using it to examine the script would be like asking the fox to audit the henhouse.

What the book is, and what it is not

The book is one man’s testimony. It is the account of a particular nervous system, raised in a particular set of cultural and institutional environments, examined in the particular light of late neurodivergent diagnosis and a relocation across hemispheres in the man’s sixty-sixth year. Where it makes claims about masculinity in general, the claims are reasoned outward from one life rather than aggregated across many. The reader is invited to test them against their own life, to keep what holds and discard what does not, and to forgive the writer for the parts where the reasoning outward exceeds the evidence.

I want to name, explicitly, what the book is not. It is not a book about gay masculinity, which was issued a different script and is being lived by men whose testimony I am not in a position to give. It is not a book about Aboriginal or First Nations masculinity, which was issued a script before colonisation, had it forcibly overwritten, and is now negotiating recoveries I am also not in a position to describe. It is not a book about disabled masculinity, which is being lived in bodies the standard script’s standards-of-functionality cannot accommodate. It is not a book about trans masculinity, which involves a relationship to the script that the script itself was specifically engineered to make unliveable. It is not, fundamentally, a book about any masculinity other than the particular straight, white, Western, neurodivergent variant the writer has spent sixty-seven years inhabiting.

Each of the masculinities I have just declined to write about deserves its own book, written by a man who has lived inside it. Several such books exist, several more are in progress, and several more will be written after this one. The work of describing what masculine inheritance has done across the full range of men carrying it is not the work of any single writer, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of move the script itself most rewards, which is the move where a man claims more territory than he has any business claiming.

The book is also not, despite what the cover and the Vietnamese café anecdote may have suggested, an emigration memoir. The relocation to Đà Lạt plays a structural role in the argument, but the argument applies just as cleanly to a man who has not moved, who is sitting in a café in his own home country, and who is finding, as I found in Les Sapins, that the script he was issued has begun to run out of things to say to him.

How the book is shaped

The book is in two parts. Part I, social masculinity, examines the public construction of masculine identity, the institutions that build it, the commercial and algorithmic systems that sell it back to men at a markup, and the structural conditions under which it begins to fail. The public man, in his various performances. Part II, intimate masculinity, examines what happens in the rooms nobody is watching. Desire, partnership, cross-cultural relationship, denied fatherhood, the contemporary cultural demand that men perform vulnerability on schedule, the slow work of co-regulation in middle age, and the question of what a quiet life looks like when the loud one has finished failing.

Each chapter is partly memoir, partly argument, and partly a small piece of the case I am trying to assemble. The case is not for sale, and the chapters are not motivational. The book contains no twelve-step programme, no morning routine, no breathwork sequence, no cold plunge, no list of supplements, and no list of the seven habits of highly effective late-diagnosed Australian men. There is, I am told, a substantial market for those things, several of which I have been offered the opportunity to monetise on platforms whose names I have politely forgotten. This is not it.

What the book offers, instead, is the slow assembly of a question worth carrying. The question is whether the script men of my generation were given is the script the next generation should be handed, and if not, whether what we have to hand them instead is anything more useful than the absence of the script we have stopped believing in. I have not yet answered the question. The book is the work of trying.

Chapter 1, and the man at the table

The book begins, in the next chapter, in 1981, with a twenty-two-year-old standing on a set of yellow footprints painted on the parade ground at RAAF Edinburgh, twenty-five kilometres north of Adelaide, on his first morning of recruit training. That morning is where the gentleman was first issued his costume, and where the man underneath the costume was given his initial set of instructions on how to keep quiet about his own existence.

It is the right place for the book to begin, because it is the place the document I have been describing in this introduction was first stamped, signed, and issued in my particular case. Other men received the same document at different desks. The desk at RAAF Edinburgh was mine. The clerk behind it had no idea what he was handing me, and would have been astonished to learn it had a chapter named after it.

The man at the table in Les Sapins, weeping quietly into his fourth coffee in June 2025, was the same man as the twenty-two-year-old on the footprints, forty-four years later, finally working out that the document he had been issued at the desk had a sell-by date the desk had not bothered to mention.

What he did about it, what it cost him, what it cost the people around him, and what was on the other side of the document running out, is the book.

Part II: Intimate masculinity

A Lee day

In 1995, in a small apartment in Guildford, a twelve-month-old boy I will call O learned that I was a person who turned up in the evenings. He learned this in the way twelve-month-olds learn things, which is by repetition, by smell, by which adult laughed at his jokes (technically, his attempts at jokes; comedic timing is a developmental milestone), and by a small private taxonomy that nobody around him was aware he was building. He filed me, somewhere in the part of his brain that was still wiring itself, under the heading of people who matter. By the time he was one and a bit, he had a category-name for the days I was around. He called them ‘Lee days’. His mother told me later that he asked her every morning on the way to kindergarten whether today would be a ‘Lee day’, and that the answer determined the shape of the rest of his day.

His mother was Dr Lynne Millward, one of my first-year lecturers at the University of Surrey, where I had arrived as a slightly older mature-age undergraduate to read for my honours in applied psychology and sociology. We met across the awkwardness of an academic register that she dismantled within about three weeks and I followed her in dismantling within about four, to the considerable consternation of her colleagues, several of whom appeared to have been hoping she would dismantle it with one of them instead. Her marriage to O’s father had ended. Mine to England was yet to. We hit it off the way you hit it off when both of you have run out of patience with the rules of the rooms you have been operating in, and discover that the other person has run out at roughly the same rate.

Lynne was, to use a word the academic register would not have approved of, magnificent. She was funny in a register that hovered between Welsh and exasperated. She read books at a rate that made my own reading look like a hobby. She took O seriously in the way only a mother who has already lost the romantic comedy version of her life can take a small child seriously, which is to say, as a person rather than as a project. The three of us, by the end of my first year, had assembled something that was not yet a family in the legal sense but was already a family in the sense that mattered, which was that we had begun to organise our weeks around each other.

I moved into her small apartment in Guildford during my second year. The apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchen the size of a generous cupboard, and a living room window that looked out onto a tiny garden and a brick wall belonging to the house next door. The brick wall was, in its way, the architectural feature that defined the apartment. You could, if you stood at the window and squinted, see a single tree behind the wall. The green grass of the tiny garden was the apartment’s natural feature. The apartment was small and the mortgage was high and the heating was unreliable, and we were, against the structural odds the architecture would have predicted, happy in it.

I treated O as my own son. The phrase is a cliché in books about step-parents, and I have been trying to work out, in the drafting of this chapter, why it is a cliché, and I think the reason is that the experience itself is not metaphorical. Something in the body decides, when a small child reaches up for your hand at a zebra crossing, that the small child is yours. The decision does not consult the legal documents. The decision is older than the legal documents. It is older than legal documents as a category, older than crossings, older than anyone’s opinion on which side of the road the cars should be on. The body files the child under the category of people who matter, and the category, once filed, does not easily refile.

We had nearly four years. From the summer of 1995, when I first met him, to the autumn of 1999, when I got on a plane back to Adelaide and did not return.

What got severed

Lynne and I, by 1999, had begun to understand that the future we wanted was not in England. I had been in the country for twelve years by then, and the particular grey, low-grade misery the English call weather had been doing slow structural work on my nervous system that I would not understand for another two decades. Lynne wanted Adelaide. She wanted the academic posts at one of the three universities a city like Adelaide can sustain, which is one fewer than Melbourne and roughly two more than the population statistics would predict. She wanted blue sky for her son. She wanted the coastline and the hills and the outback I had been describing to her in a register that I now realise was less travelogue and more grief.

There was one structural problem.

O’s father had legal rights, and one of those rights was the right to refuse permission for his son to be removed from the country. He exercised the right. He was within his rights to exercise it. He was, from his own position, doing what fathers are supposed to do under English family law in the 1990s, which is to refuse to allow a former wife to take a child to a hemisphere where weekend visitations become a matter of intercontinental flights and one parent is functionally written out of the child’s ordinary life. I do not blame him. I have, in the years since, tried to blame him, in the way one tries to blame the referee in a match one has lost on points, and the blame has not stuck, because under the structural conditions he was operating in, his decision was the decision a man in his position could be expected to make.

What that decision did to the three of us was not within his calculation, because it was not his job to calculate it. It was within the system’s calculation, but the system does not calculate that sort of thing. The system calculates rights and proximities and who has paid for what, and it leaves the question of what happens to the eighteen-month-old who learned to file an adult under ‘people who matter’ to whatever resources the adults involved happen to have available, which is rarely enough.

Lynne and I leaned against the workbench in the kitchen, the one the size of a generous cupboard, cups of tea in hand, and worked out what the available options were. The available options were three. Option one: she stayed in England with O, and I stayed too, and we built a life around the climate I was failing in. Option two: I went to Adelaide alone, and we tried to maintain a relationship across twelve thousand miles and an exchange rate that would have made the maintenance financially absurd within months. Option three: I went, and we ended the relationship, with as much grace as we could find, and kept each other in each other’s hearts in the way Lynne actually phrased it, which I have never improved on, and which I will not share here.

We chose option three. The choosing took several months. The execution took an afternoon. I left England in 1999 and I cried, in various locations, for the next four years.

I am not, in this chapter, going to dramatise the leaving. The leaving has been dramatised by every man who has ever left, by every novelist who has written a leaving scene, and by every singer-songwriter who has discovered that a guitar and a minor key can do most of the work for him, and several of whom have thereby earned more from one leaving than I will from this entire book. What I want to record, because the chapter’s argument depends on it, is what was severed. A bond was severed. The bond had been built by a twelve-month-old who learned to call certain days by my name, and by a man who learned, in the building of the bond, that he was capable of fathering. Both halves of the bond survived the severance. Neither half had anywhere to put what survived.

That is the first form of denied fatherhood I want to name. The denial was geographical and legal and reasonable in the procedural sense, and it was not the fault of the father who refused permission, and it was not the fault of any of the adults involved. Denial without a villain is still denial. The architecture does not care whether you can identify a person to blame. After I had left the five-year-old we both called ‘a ray of sunshine’ still asked, at his mother’s dining table, whether that day was a ‘Lee day’, and the answer became no, gradually, and then permanently, and the answer was given by no one in particular and everyone in general.

O is in his early thirties now. We are estranged, and the estrangement is, as I said earlier, my fault. Sometimes a series of jokes made by someone bouncing off the wall with joy at reconnecting with people who mattered to him a lifetime and a hemisphere away don’t land the way their author hopes. I made the choices and the poor jokes that caused O’s family genuine distress, which then produced the estrangement. The original architecture made the choices possible. Both things are true at the same time. I have not been able to find a sentence that lets me hold them together without one or the other slipping out of my hands.

But that doesn’t stop me sitting silently at 4am in an apartment in Đà Lạt, Vietnam, wishing things were different, and feeling the weather in my chest and eyes.

The yellow-footprints inheritance

There is a thing the masculine script does to a man between fifteen and twenty-two that I have not yet adequately named in this book, and the chapter on fatherhood is the place where the consequences of it land hardest, so I will name it here.

The script trains a man to transmit. Transmission is the script’s deepest function. The yellow footprints at Edinburgh, the school before that, the footy coach, the corporal at Rookies in the RAAF, the male bosses, the other male friends, the grandfather sitting in the corner not speaking about the war: all of them are nodes in a transmission network. Each of them has received a particular package, and each of them is preparing the next man to receive the same package, with whatever local modifications the particular man finds necessary. The package contains the operating system. It contains the rules for posture, the rules for emotional volume, the rules for who is allowed to cry and when and into what surface, the rules for what to say at funerals, the rules for what not to say at weddings, and a small, dense kernel of what the previous generation thought it knew about being a man.

The package is heavy. Some of its contents are useful. Some of its contents are actively dangerous to the man carrying it and to the people he loves. None of its contents come with a manifest. You receive the whole thing in a sealed crate, with no list of what is inside, no warning that some of the items have a use-by date that has already passed, and no instructions for which corner not to lean against. You spend the rest of your life finding out what is in it by the slow method of bumping into the corners.

The point of the crate is that you are supposed to pass it on. You are supposed to take what you received from the older men, and you are supposed to pack it carefully, and you are supposed to hand it to the next boy at roughly the age you received it. The handing-on is the function. The handing-on is what makes you a man in the script’s own definition of the word. A man who does not transmit is, in the script’s view, structurally unfinished. He has received the inheritance and not paid the inheritance forward. He is a node in the network that did not propagate.

I had, by 1999, received the inheritance. The RAAF had handed me a substantial portion of it. The previous generations of men in my parents’ families had handed me the rest. I had spent the four years with O experimenting, mostly without realising I was experimenting, with what I might do differently. Which corners of the crate to leave sealed. Which to open and re-pack. Which to throw away in the small kitchen bin that was, in those years, the apartment’s nearest available oblivion, just under the sink, beside the recycling I never quite got the hang of separating. The four years had been the laboratory. I had, without noticing, started to assemble a different package.

Then I left, and the laboratory closed, and the half-assembled package had nowhere to go.

The Adelaide marriage

I returned to Adelaide in late 1999. I met V in 2001. We became a couple in the same year. We married in 2004, separated for the first time at some unrecorded point in the late 2000s, separated many times in the intervening years, separated for the last time in 2018, and divorced in June 2022. The marriage lasted, in the legal sense, eighteen years. In the sense that mattered to the people inside it, it had a life cycle of about four good years at the start, followed by a long structural failure that neither of us was equipped to interrupt, and that the legal system, in its kindly way, was prepared to keep filing paperwork on for as long as we kept paying the lawyers.

V brought three children to the marriage. I will call them C, D, and R. C was a seven-year-old girl, D was a nine-year-old boy, and R was a fifteen-year-old girl. They were, by the time I met them, of an age where they had already lived through some of the worst things that would happen in their childhoods, which is a sentence I cannot write in any form that does not feel either too small or too dramatic. Their father had died of cancer at home, in bed, with their mother nursing him full-time to his passing. And then their mother’s father was convicted of crimes against his daughter. The court had delivered a no-contact order. A minimum-distance order. A finding of guilt that the family, by the time I arrived, had been carrying for several years, and that the children had been carrying for as long as they had been able to know what they were carrying.

V had done extraordinary work to bring her family through that period. The work had been done largely under the guidance of a clinical psychologist named Malcolm Robinson, the director of a family therapy practice in Adelaide called Bower Place. Robinson is a real person, and Bower Place is a real practice, and I am naming both because the instruction Robinson gave me in early 2002 or 2003 is the structural pivot of this chapter, and naming the source is part of taking the instruction seriously.

The instruction was this. Under no circumstances was I to attempt to be a father-figure to C, D, or R. Under no circumstances was I to attempt to father them, to act as a father, to occupy any role in their lives that resembled the role a father would occupy. I was permitted to be V’s partner. I was permitted to live in the house. I was permitted to be friendly, to be present, to be warm. I was not permitted to father.

Robinson did not deliver the instruction casually. He delivered it as a clinical judgement. The reasoning, as I understood it then and as I understand it now, was that the children’s wounds were understandable and one of them had been delivered by a male family member acting in the role of a trusted older man. To introduce another male family member into the role of a trusted older man, in the years immediately following the conviction, was to risk compounding the original injury by overlaying onto it the very category of person who had inflicted it. The clinical risk was that the children’s nervous systems would not be able to distinguish between a safe father-figure and a dangerous male grandparent, because the category ‘male’ itself had been corrupted, and asking them to repair the category through exposure to me was asking too much of them in the time available. The literature—and one’s own heart—spares no sympathy for what the children must have gone through watching their father deteriorate and die.

I want to be careful in how I describe my response to that instruction, because the response was complicated and is still being felt. The response was, on the surface, compliance. I accepted the instruction. I took it seriously. I did not contest it. I trusted, and I still trust in retrospect, that Robinson was acting on a defensible clinical reading of the children’s situation. The instruction was not unreasonable. The instruction was—by the standards of the literature on the death of a parent, child sexual abuse trauma, and family reconstruction—conservative and protective.

The instruction was also, for the man receiving it, an instruction to receive a different package than the one the masculine script had been preparing him to deliver.

The package with nowhere to go

I lived in the house with C, D, and R for sixteen years, on and off, across the long marriage. I did not father them. I followed Robinson’s instruction, and V reinforced it, intermittently and, in the later years, increasingly, as the structural failure of the marriage required more and more enforcement of the boundaries that had originally been protective.

What I had instead was a particular form of adjacency. I lived with the children. I was warm to them. I drove them places. I sat at the same table at Christmas. I watched them grow into teenagers and then into young adults. I watched D, in particular, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, begin to come apart in the specific way that adolescent boys come apart when the masculine script is firing without an interpreter. He went off the rails, in the formulation his school used, by way of drugs. The drugs were the symptom. The thing the drugs were a symptom of was the thing the script equips a boy to refuse to name.

I knew, in the way a psychologist who has been around the block knows, more or less what was happening to D. I had a reasonably clear view of the mechanism. I had, sitting in the half-assembled crate I had brought back from Guildford, a number of things I might have offered him. Not parenting. Not the full package. Something smaller and more specific. Some of the corners I had spent the Lynne years working out. The bits of the inheritance I had unsealed and re-packed.

I tried, on a small number of occasions, to offer them.

Each time, V intercepted. Each time, the instruction from 2002 was reissued, occasionally with words and frequently without them. The instruction was that I was not to father. I was not to occupy that role. The role was prohibited to me, structurally, by the clinical history of the family I had married into. My intervention, however carefully I had thought it through, however clinically defensible the offering itself might have been, was not available to be made. I was a man in the house. I was not a father in the house. The distinction had been laid down in 2002, and the distinction had not been amended. D, for his own part, asked for me to parent him, several times. I was still forbidden to.

D went further off the rails. The school escalated. Family members escalated. I sat in rooms in which the question of what to do about D was discussed, and in which I could see, with the particular clarity that comes from professional training combined with personal helplessness, what was probably needed, and in which I was not a person who was permitted to say so. I was V’s husband. I was not D’s anything. The room had a structure, and I was a non-speaking part of the structure.

I do not, in writing this, want to claim I would have rescued him if the instruction had not been in place. The claim would be self-aggrandising and, given my own track record at the time, probably wrong. What I want to claim is something smaller and more accurate. The package I had brought back from Guildford had nowhere to go. The man I had begun to assemble during the four years with O had no laboratory in which to continue assembling himself. The thing the masculine script demands a man transmit, the thing the script measures him by his capacity to transmit, was sitting in the half-assembled crate in the corner of the room while a teenage boy went off the rails three metres away from it.

That is the second form of denied fatherhood I want to name. The denial was clinical and reasonable and grounded in the children’s genuine need for protection, and it operated on a man who had something to offer that he was not, in those circumstances, permitted to offer. Two true things at the same time. Robinson was right. The children needed the protection he prescribed. And the man in the next room was carrying a load with no place to set it down. Both things, at once, in the same house, for sixteen years.

The vasectomy

I had a vasectomy at the age of forty-four. The procedure was performed at a small clinic in the Adelaide suburbs by a doctor whose name I have forgotten, on a Tuesday afternoon, with the kind of efficient politeness Australian medicine reserves for procedures that the medical profession has classified, accurately, as elective. He asked me twice whether I was sure. I was sure. He asked me a third time, in the way doctors ask men in their forties a third time, in case the man would like to revise his answer in the small interval between the second asking and the production of the local anaesthetic. I did not revise my answer.

The reasoning, on the day, was practical. V and I were not going to have biological children. The marriage was, by then, already showing the strain that would later become the structural failure. The medical profession’s general view at the time was that men over forty in stable relationships who did not intend to have further children should consider the procedure as a contribution to household contraceptive equity, and I had agreed with the general view, and I had presented at the clinic on the appointed Tuesday with the appropriate paperwork and a small bag containing a book to read in recovery. The decision to take a book to a vasectomy is itself, in retrospect, a small comment on the seriousness with which I was treating the occasion.

The reasoning beneath the practical reasoning was more complicated, and I did not look at it on the day, and I am only now beginning to look at it.

What the vasectomy closed was a door I had already been told was closed. The door to fathering C, D, and R had been closed by Robinson in 2002. The door to fathering O had been closed by geography and by O’s father’s legitimate exercise of his rights in 1999. There was no remaining door through which fathering could enter my life on a non-prohibited basis. The vasectomy did not open or close a door. The vasectomy was the formal acknowledgement, in surgical terms, that no door was going to be available to me, and I was choosing to stop walking past the place where the door used to be.

It was, in retrospect, a kind of grief that did not know it was grief. Grief that arrives as a clinical decision is grief in disguise, and one of the reliable signatures of the masculine script is its capacity to convert grief into a decision, a procedure, a paperwork event. The grief is then filed, and the filing is treated as the matter’s resolution, and the man returns to work the following Tuesday with a small bruise and a slightly altered relationship to his own future, and nobody, including him, treats the alteration as worthy of comment, except possibly the colleague who notices he is sitting down more carefully than usual and assumes it is the chair.

I want to be precise about the claim I am making here. I am not arguing that vasectomies are repressed grief. Most vasectomies are exactly what they appear to be, which is a sensible contraceptive decision made by a man who has the children he intends to have, or has decided not to have any, and who is acting on a defensible analysis of his and his partner’s circumstances. The claim I am making is narrower. For some men, in some circumstances, the procedure functions as the formal closure of a possibility that has already been closed by the architecture, and the closure is performed surgically because the architecture’s closure was performed silently, and the body wants a witness.

My body wanted a witness. The doctor on the Tuesday afternoon was the witness. He performed the procedure, gave me a leaflet, and sent me home. The thing I was actually closing, he was not in a position to know about, and would not have charged me extra for if he had. Australian medicine has many virtues, but charging by the existential weight of the procedure is, mercifully, not among them.

What gets transmitted when transmission is blocked

The masculine script’s deepest function is transmission. The previous chapter examined what happens to a man who cannot perform vulnerability on demand in a culture that has made performed vulnerability the new compliance test. This chapter is the reverse case. What happens to a man who cannot perform transmission, in a culture that has made transmission the original test?

The first thing that happens is that the load does not disappear. The masculine package, the half-assembled crate I had brought back from Guildford, did not evaporate when the laboratory closed. It sat in the corner of every room I lived in for the next sixteen years. It was there at the dinner table. It was there at the school concerts and sports events I attended in a non-fathering capacity. It was there at the rooms in which D’s decline was discussed, and in which I was a non-speaking presence. It was there at R’s university graduation, at her wedding, and at the birth of her children, where I clapped politely and said the things a step-parent who is not a step-parent is permitted to say. The load was always there. It went where I went. It did not consult the instructions.

The second thing that happens is that the load begins to seek alternative routes. Men whose primary transmission channel has been blocked do not stop transmitting. They transmit sideways. They mentor younger colleagues. They write books. They become, in the workplace and in the community, the slightly older man who notices the younger man who is not coping and takes him aside in the car park. They do this without naming what they are doing, because the script does not have a vocabulary for transmission outside the household. They do it anyway, because the alternative is to carry the unutilised load until it produces the kind of damage in the body that the previous chapters of this book have been describing.

I did most of these things. I mentored. I wrote. I noticed the younger men in the car park, which is to say I have spent a non-trivial proportion of my professional life conducting brief unsolicited counselling sessions in the asphalt vicinity of various Toyotas. I gave them what I had. The giving did not solve the problem of the unutilised load, because the giving was diffuse and the load was specific. The giving helped them, sometimes. It did not, in the strict sense, transmit the corner of the crate I had spent the Guildford years working out. That corner could only have been transmitted to a child I lived with, in the daily slow architecture of a life shared with a small person. That route had been closed. The diffuse route, the mentoring route, the noticing-in-the-car-park route, was not the same route. It was an alternative, and the alternative was better than nothing, and it was not the thing the route had been designed to do.

The third thing that happens, and this is the hardest of the three to describe, is that the man begins to lose track of what was supposed to be in the package in the first place. The package had been designed to be transmitted. It had not been designed to be sat with, examined, re-examined, and held indefinitely by a single nervous system. After enough years of holding it, the contents begin to alter. Some of the corners I had carefully repacked in the Guildford years were repacked again, less carefully, in the Adelaide years, when there was no recipient for whom the careful packing was being done. The repacking became a private occupation rather than a parental one. It lost the editorial discipline that the presence of a child enforces. It began to drift.

I do not know what was in the version of the package I would have transmitted to O if I had stayed in England, or to D if Robinson had not given his instruction. I cannot reconstruct it. The drift has been going on for too long. What I can say is that the package I am currently carrying, in 2026, in a comfortable apartment in Đà Lạt, is not the package I had begun to assemble in 1995. It has become something else. It has become, among other things, this book.

That is, possibly, the only honest place to put a load that had nowhere else to go.

S, who called me Grandpa

Last December, in a Chinese massage practitioner’s home studio in Đà Lạt, I met a four-year-old girl I will call S. She was the niece of the practitioner. She was at her aunt’s in those hours after kindy was finished and her parents returned from their business.

S did not know me. I did not know S. I was sitting on a couch, drinking the small green tea Vietnamese hospitality provides, waiting for my fiancée’s massage to conclude. S was at the other end of the room, sitting on the little plastic stools that define Vietnam, drawing in her drawing book. She looked up. She looked at me. She got off the stool, walked across the room with the particular full-body gravity four-year-olds bring to important tasks, stopped in front of me, and offered me the drawing book and a pen.

‘Grandpa’, she said.

Then she waited for me to draw in her drawing book.

Her aunt, on the other side of the discreet curtain that hid the massage table my fiancée was currently lying on, was listening. She listened with the attention aunts reserve for situations in which their niece has elected, on no available evidence, to make a public allocation of family categories in front of a stranger, and a foreign stranger to boot. I smiled back. S and I took turns to draw in the drawing book for the duration of the massage. At no stage was I called anything other than Grandpa, and I was called Grandpa every time S wanted me to pay attention. Which, with most four-year-olds I have known, is a lot. She conversed with me in English, because that was what she was being taught at kindy, and she realised immediately that I couldn’t speak Vietnamese.

I do not see S regularly; her family and I each have busy lives and even the best wills in the world sometimes cannot make things happen as we would like. But every time S and I do catch up, we hug and laugh and play and bounce and run and generally carry on like pork chops (which is ‘like a joyous idiot’). We video chat. When she comes to visit, she never wants to leave, and cries on the way home. She has, on each occasion we connect again, identified me and reissued the allocation: Grandpa. The allocation does not require my consent. It does not require any paperwork. It does not require a clinical judgement from a family therapist in Adelaide. It is operating on a different system entirely, the system that O was operating when he asked, in 1996, in a small kitchen in Guildford, whether today was a Lee day.

What S is doing, when she allocates me to the category of grandfather, is performing the function the masculine script’s transmission machinery was supposed to perform, in reverse. She is not receiving the package. She is offering me a place for the package to go. She is, in the small bilingual way a four-year-old can be aware of anything, aware that I am the kind of older man who could occupy the category, and she is filing me under the heading, and the filing is, in her tiny but absolute way, an invitation.

I am not S’s grandfather. I am not anyone’s grandfather. The masculine script that produced me has, on the question of fathering and grandfathering, registered three formal closures, and the closures are sealed and witnessed and on the record. None of that, as far as S is concerned, has any bearing on the matter. The architecture of denied fatherhood, which has shaped most of my adult life, is not a structure S has been issued a copy of. She has issued her own structure. The structure has me in it, in a category she selected herself, on grounds neither of us is required to defend.

I have not yet worked out what to do with the invitation. The honest answer is that I am too old to start, and not too old to start, in the same body at the same time, and the contradiction is something I am going to have to sit with rather than resolve. S’s family saw the bond we had instantly formed and determined that I was the version of a grandparent they wanted for S and for themselves. Within a few short weeks, S’s father, as is the cultural way in Vietnam, (and with the whole family watching silently, intently) formally asked me to be S’s Grandpa, because her biological grandparents were dead. Seconds after his request, I realised I was being asked to be Grandpa for the whole family. I cried, and I have been Grandpa ever since. I am crying now writing this. My emails and Zalo messages to my closest friends sign off with the nomenclature, of which I am inordinately proud.

That, as it turns out, is what comes through the door.

What I can say is that the package, which has been sitting in the corner of every room I have lived in since 1999, registered the invitation. The package, which had begun to drift, briefly stopped drifting. Something in the half-assembled crate recognised that, against all the architectural odds, a four-year-old in a Vietnamese massage therapist’s home had opened a door I had assumed was sealed.

What this chapter is not

I want to close with a clarification, because the chapter’s argument is easily misread, and one of the functions of an honest closing paragraph is to make the misreading harder. Whether it succeeds is, of course, the reader’s call, and I have given up trying to control it.

This is not a chapter about a man who failed at fatherhood. The man failed at a great many things, and this book has not been shy about cataloguing them. He did not fail at fatherhood. He was prevented from fathering, three times, by three different architectures: by the legal rights of another father, by the clinical judgement of a family therapist acting in the legitimate interests of three children who deserved every protection they were given, and by his own surgical decision at forty-four to formalise the closure that the architecture had already imposed.

The argument of the chapter is that prevention is not the same as failure, and that the masculine script does not contain a vocabulary for prevention. The script can describe masculine failure. It has whole genres devoted to it. It cannot describe a man who carried a half-assembled package for twenty-six years because the people he loved were not in a position to receive it. The script does not, on that question, have a draft.

What the script also does not have is a vocabulary for the slow private work of holding a package that nobody is going to receive. That work happens in rooms most readers will never enter, in lives that look, from the outside, indistinguishable from any other middle-aged man’s life. The man at the school concert clapping politely. The man at the dinner table not speaking. The man at the living room window, in 1999, looking at a small green garden and a brick wall for the last time, behind which there is, if you squint, a single tree.

That work is its own form of fathering, and the script does not have a name for it, and I am not going to invent one here. I will say only that the work was real, the holding was real, and the package, after all this time, is still mostly intact. Whatever S decides to do with the small portion of it she has invited into her life is up to her. The rest of it, by my reckoning, has become this book, and the book is itself a kind of transmission, performed sideways, by a man who was not permitted to perform it forwards.

The next chapter takes up the question of what an intimate relationship looks like when both nervous systems involved have been holding similar packages for decades, and what it costs to begin, in late middle age, to set them down.

The question

I was sitting on the end of my bed in my house in Gawler, South Australia, laptop balanced on my knees, a Zoom window open, and a psychologist called Gaye was asking me questions from a room three thousand kilometres away in Brisbane.

Gaye had been appointed by Veterans Affairs. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which exists in the particular administrative limbo reserved for agencies that are simultaneously essential and underfunded, had looked at my file and concluded that a man of my vintage with my symptom pattern ought to be talking to someone. Gaye was the someone. She specialised in veterans, and in the kind of neurodivergence that arrives disguised as everything else.

I was sixty-six. Old enough to have given up hope of being anything other than an exhausting project to myself. Old enough to have stopped expecting new information about who I was, because I had worked through what I assumed was the full inventory some time around the turn of the millennium and had been adjusting the furniture in the same rooms ever since.

Gaye asked me a question I was not expecting.

‘Do you think you might be neurodivergent?’

I laughed, because it was a funny question to be asked at sixty-six after a lifetime of diagnoses that had each explained something real without explaining the thing actually happening. Depression. Anxiety. Bipolar II. Generalised anxiety disorder. A small parade of labels that had arrived over forty years, each one a half-truth in a sensible outfit, each one fixing the crisis it was applied to and leaving the underlying system intact.

Then I stopped laughing, because she was not joking, and the silence that followed had the particular quality of a silence in which several doors you had assumed were walls are quietly being pointed out.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Should I?’

What followed was not a diagnosis in the clinical sense, because I could not afford a clinical diagnosis. The formal process requires an assessment that costs somewhere between two and four thousand Australian dollars, which is an interesting figure for a disability pension to contemplate, in the same way a bicycle is an interesting figure for a caravan to contemplate. Gaye conducted an informal assessment over several sessions, using the tools she had and the clinical judgement her years of practice had given her, and at the end of it she was satisfied, and so was I, that what I had been living with for sixty-six years was autism and ADHD in combination, the profile the research now calls AuDHD. I was unofficially termed a limited edition collector’s item within the neurodivergent community.

The informal nature of the diagnosis is itself a small indictment of the system. A man on a disability pension cannot afford the formal assessment that would entitle him to the supports the pension is supposed to make possible. The system requires proof of the condition that the condition makes it impossible to purchase. This is the kind of loop you get when an administrative logic has never been required to encounter the bodies it is administering.

I accepted Gaye’s assessment and I moved on, which is to say I sat with it for a few days while my sense of my own history quietly reorganised itself without my supervision.

The archaeological discovery

People talk about late diagnosis as though late is a descriptor of timing. At sixty-six, late is a descriptor of archaeology.

The diagnosis revealed that the country I had been walking through for six decades was on a map I had never been given. Every room I had entered, every conversation I had navigated, every meeting I had performed in, every relationship I had attempted and failed at and attempted again, had been conducted without access to the operating instructions other people had been handed as children and never thought to mention they possessed.

Late diagnosis carries a particular kind of grief. The grief is for the sixty years in which you believed the problem was you.

I had been, across those decades, variously described as: too intense, too sensitive, too difficult, too much, too little, too quiet, too loud, unmotivated, overly motivated, flaky, rigid, brilliant, exhausting, charming, aloof, warm, cold, and, by one particularly tired friend in 1998, ‘a bit of a project’. Every one of those descriptions was accurate and incomplete. Every one of them attached the diagnosis to the man, rather than to the gap between the man and the environment he was being asked to operate in.

The relief that arrives with late diagnosis is the relief of a misfiled document finally being filed correctly. You are still the same document. You are still full of the same content. But you are no longer in the wrong drawer.

The clinical literature describes late diagnosis using terms like identity reconstruction and post-diagnostic adjustment, which are accurate but have the prose texture of a departmental meeting. Archaeology is closer to what actually happens. You dig through your own layers. You find objects whose purpose suddenly clarifies. You re-date the strata. You understand, finally, why that particular decade had the particular colour it did.

The maths of two masks

Most of the public conversation about neurodivergent masking assumes one mask. You perform neurotypicality. You suppress the stim. You watch the eye-contact meter. You run a constant background process that translates your experience into an output the surrounding nervous systems can metabolise without alarm.

This is hard. It costs energy. It produces burnout of a specific kind that Raymaker and colleagues documented in a 2020 study that should have been more widely discussed than it was (Raymaker et al., 2020). The paper names what autistic adults had been telling each other for years. Masking is not harmless mimicry. It is a sustained physiological performance that wears the performer down at a rate the performer cannot always perceive until the wear becomes structural.

One mask is expensive enough. For a man of my generation and conditioning, there were not one but two masks running concurrently, each taxing resources the other was already consuming, and the cost was the compound cost of that simultaneous operation.

The first mask was the neurotypical one. Don’t flap. Don’t fidget. Hold the gaze but not too long. Calibrate facial expression against the emotional register of the room. Process the spoken content whilst also processing the unspoken content whilst also processing the sensory load whilst also suppressing every natural response that might draw attention. If you get any of this wrong you will be labelled strange, and strange, in a neurotypical environment, is a cost nobody quite names but everyone quietly charges.

The second mask was the masculine one. Don’t emote. Don’t ask. Don’t admit. Hold the load. Perform competence under all conditions. Never indicate the internal weather. If you get any of this wrong you will be labelled weak, and weak, in a masculine environment like Australia, is a cost nobody quite names but everyone quietly charges.

Both masks share a syllabus. Both require the suppression of signals the body is attempting to send. Both require the production of signals the body is not naturally producing. Both reward performance and punish honesty. Both are learned early, reinforced constantly, and, after a few decades of practice, operate below the level of conscious intent, so that by the time you are in your forties you are no longer aware you are performing anything, because the performance has become the baseline and the baseline is the thing you would have to stop doing in order to notice you were doing it.

Where the masks diverge is the specific content of the suppression. The neurotypical mask suppresses stimming, sensory overwhelm, cognitive rhythm. The masculine mask suppresses emotion, need, fear. Put them on the same nervous system at the same time and what you have is not two masks. You have a single, elaborate piece of architecture, laminated, reinforced, and running on a metabolic budget that would have been generous for one mask and is catastrophic for two.

I did this for roughly fifty years before the structure began to fail in ways I could no longer ignore.

What the body remembered

The first evidence that something structural had gone wrong was not psychological. It was physical, which is inconvenient for a man who has spent fifty years treating his body as a life support system for his opinions.

Mr Trung is my massage therapist in Đà Lạt. He is small, extraordinarily strong, and possessed of the kind of matter-of-fact clinical gaze that Vietnamese bodywork practitioners tend to acquire after a certain amount of exposure to the bodies of Westerners who have arrived in his country carrying several decades of structural tension they are only now becoming aware of.

Mr Trung tells me, often, that I am the worst client he has ever had. He does not mean this as an insult. He means it as a clinical observation, delivered with the small smile of a man who is informing you that the car you have brought in for a service is held together in ways its owner had not quite appreciated. Every point he touches produces agony at two out of ten pressure. His thumbs find hard, painful nodules scattered throughout muscles where blood has, at some indeterminate point in the past, simply given up on the idea of circulating and decided to wait things out. Little stones of suffering is how I have come to think of them, distributed through my back, thighs, arms, legs, feet, hands, and neck with the quiet persistence of an ancient mineral deposit.

My blood tests are fine. Cholesterol fine. Liver fine. Kidneys fine. A manageable Type 2 Diabetes, controlled with medication. By any standard panel, I am a healthy sixty-seven-year-old man who should be able to walk up a hill.

I cannot reliably walk up a hill.

Between the blood test and the body lies the thing the blood test does not measure, which is what happens to a nervous system when it spends sixty-six years running at combat speed under two masks simultaneously. Raymaker’s work on autistic burnout documents some of this (Raymaker et al., 2020). McEwen’s decades of research on allostatic load, the physiological toll of chronic stress accumulation, documents the rest (McEwen, 1998; McEwen & Stellar, 1993). The phrase is not a metaphor. Allostatic load names the measurable wear on organ systems, endocrine function, cardiovascular tissue, and immune regulation that accumulates when the stress response is activated more often and more intensely than the body was built to sustain.

The literature has a specific word for what happens when that accumulation becomes chronic: ‘weathering’. Originally developed to describe the premature biological ageing observed in populations living under sustained racialised stress (Geronimus, 1992), the concept generalises. A body that has never been allowed to stand down ages at a rate that exceeds its chronology. The clock is still reporting your age. The tissue is reporting something older.

Mr Trung’s thumbs are mapping that something older. My thighs are in their eighties. My back is in its eighties. My organs are in their sixties, obligingly. The man sitting on the massage table is in his sixty-seventh year, but the body’s accounting is done in a different currency, and the books have been cooked.

I make no medical claim about the specific aetiology of my current physical state. The observational claim is enough: my body is evidently carrying something, the research suggests such bodies tend to carry exactly this, and a lifetime of double masking makes the carrying unsurprising in retrospect.

The body kept the receipts. It kept them in tissue. It is now presenting the invoice, and the invoice is detailed, and the accounting department is not open to negotiation.

The laundering of a life

The thing I find hardest to forgive, when I look back at the forty years before Gaye’s Zoom call, is not the masking itself. It is the sequence of diagnostic labels that arrived in its place.

Depression. Anxiety. Bipolar II. Generalised anxiety disorder. Each label was applied with clinical seriousness by practitioners who were doing their best with the information available to them. Each label named a pattern that was really occurring. Each label got the shape of the distress right and the source wrong.

The problem was not the labels. The problem was the sequence.

Depression arrived first, in my pre-teens, as an explanation for why my capacity for the mundane had collapsed. It was real. I was depressed. The medication helped. What the diagnosis did not ask, because diagnoses tend not to, was why a nervous system that had been performing above its rated capacity might be running low on the neurotransmitters that get used up performing above rated capacity. The question was roughly the same as asking why the fuel tank keeps emptying when you drive the car every day, and the answer was roughly the same too, except nobody was inspecting the car. They were adjusting the driver.

Anxiety followed. Also real. Also treated. Also missing the prior question of whether a body that had been pattern-matching every social environment for signs of danger for sixty years might be reasonably described as anxious, and whether the anxiety was the disorder or the body’s accurate reporting on the effort it was expending. A smoke detector that has been shrieking for six decades is not a broken smoke detector. It is a smoke detector that has noticed something.

Bipolar II is the one I think about most, because it cost me the most, and because the overlap between hypomania and ADHD hyperfocus is one of the specific clinical cul-de-sacs that late-diagnosed AuDHD adults often get routed through. The bipolar diagnosis was not wrong exactly. I did cycle. The cycles were real. The research now recognises that ADHD-driven hyperfocus, particularly when combined with autistic special-interest intensity, can produce periods of elevated productivity, reduced sleep, rapid idea generation, and inflated confidence that look, from the outside and from a clinical interview, very much like hypomania. The treatment for the two conditions is different. I was treated for the one I did not have, for longer than I care to calculate, and the treatment for the one I did not have did nothing to address the one I did. This is the clinical equivalent of taking your car to a mechanic who confidently diagnoses a problem with the gearbox, fixes the gearbox beautifully, and waves you off down the road with the same flat tyre you came in on.

I do not say this in the spirit of complaint.

What happened to me was pattern matching against a pattern book that did not yet include the combined profile. The clinical literature on AuDHD as a distinct neurological profile, rather than as two comorbidities happening to share accommodation, is still in the process of establishing itself. In the 1970s, when my symptoms first drew clinical attention, the literature barely and hesitantly suggested that autism and ADHD might, possibly, could coexist. By the 2010s it admitted they could. By the 2020s it was beginning to admit that their coexistence produced a different profile than either condition alone.

My diagnostic history ran at the pace of the literature, which meant that by the time the literature arrived somewhere useful, I was in my sixties and had spent innumerable years being treated for symptoms of a condition that was being described by three different wrong names across six different decades.

None of the clinicians who gave me those wrong names were wrong on purpose.

The masculine filter added its own layer of mislabelling on top of the clinical one. Every clinical diagnosis I received was, in my own head and in the heads of the men around me, translated into a character judgment. Depression meant weakness. Anxiety meant cowardice. Bipolar II meant a lack of discipline. AuDHD, had anyone thought to name it, would have been translated into whatever the current masculine slur for difference was. The diagnostic names changed across the decades. The masculine translation engine remained remarkably consistent.

The relief that is not a cure

Relief, in the post-diagnostic literature, is often treated as though it were an end state. It is not.

The relief of receiving the AuDHD label at sixty-six is not the relief of being cured. There is nothing to cure. AuDHD is a neurological profile, a way of being wired, with its own strengths, its own costs, and its own particular incompatibilities with environments designed around a different wiring.

The relief is the relief of having been handed the map. You have been walking the territory anyway. You are still the same walker. The terrain is still the same terrain. You now have a document that tells you why certain paths were exhausting and certain landmarks were illegible, and you are no longer obliged to interpret your exhaustion and illegibility as personal failings. The map, admittedly, arrives a bit late. The useful moment for the map was somewhere around 1971. The map arriving in January 2025 is less a navigation aid than an explanation for why so much of the journey involved walking into hedges.

I spent the six months after Gaye’s diagnosis in a quiet process of reinterpretation. The school years, the military years, the corporate years, the speaking career, the marriage, the breakdowns, the productivity, the crashes, the periods of extraordinary output, the periods of inexplicable collapse. Each of them looked different under the new reading. Not heroic. Not tragic. Just legible. It was like re-reading a novel you thought you understood at sixteen and discovering, at sixty-six, that you had been reading it upside down the whole time and the plot actually made a great deal more sense the other way up.

The grief arrived in a manageable, recurring form, usually late at night, and it was not the grief of discovering I was neurodivergent. It was the grief of realising how much of my life had been spent not knowing, and how many decisions I had made under the false assumption that the exhaustion was my fault. I made peace with the grief in the way you make peace with weather. You do not negotiate with it. You notice when it has arrived, you allow it the afternoon it requires, and you get on with the rest of your day.

The environmental argument

The central claim I keep returning to across this book is that masculine suffering is often an intelligent response to unsuitable environments. The AuDHD layer sharpens that claim rather than complicating it.

Place an AuDHD nervous system in an environment designed for a neurotypical one, in a culture that also demands masculine stoicism, and the system will do exactly what a sensitive, overloaded, double-masked system should do under those conditions. It will work harder than it was designed to. It will produce output at a rate that earns rewards. It will incur costs that do not appear on any balance sheet the system is being evaluated against. And, eventually, it will begin to fail in ways that the surrounding culture will interpret as individual defects rather than as the foreseeable result of the environment it has been operating in. Rather like blaming a racehorse for getting tired on the fortieth consecutive lap, whilst ignoring the fact that you are the one holding the stopwatch and the rider is the one with the whip.

This is not a novel argument. Disability scholars have been making a version of it for decades, under the banner of the social model of disability (Oliver, 1990). The social model distinguishes between impairment, which is the actual neurological or physical difference, and disability, which is what the environment does to a person with an impairment by refusing to accommodate it. Under this frame, I am not disabled by being AuDHD. I am disabled by environments and cultural expectations that require me to perform as though I were not.

The implications are uncomfortable for a therapy industry that makes its money from adjusting the individual to the environment, and for a masculine culture that treats the individual as solely responsible for his own outcomes. Both benefit from the assumption that the problem is internal. Neither is especially motivated to entertain the possibility that the problem is where the person is being required to stand. There is, admittedly, less of a business model in telling a man that his nervous system is fine and he should consider moving countries.

Internal work has its place. Medication helps. Therapy helps. Understanding helps. But the internal work has a ceiling that the external work does not, and for most of my life I was being offered the internal work as a complete solution when it was, at most, a partial one. The external work, which would have involved changing where I lived, what I did, who I was expected to perform for, and how the days were structured, was not available because the culture had not conceived of it as an option.

It became an option only when I had exhausted the alternatives and had nothing left to perform.

What the next environment revealed

The most serviceable definition of masking I have come across is this: masking is the production of signals your body is not naturally producing, and the suppression of signals your body is naturally producing, for the benefit of observers whose comfort depends on not receiving the signals your body would otherwise send. Which is a technical way of saying that masking is impersonating someone the observers find easier to be in a room with than you.

By that definition, masking is culturally specific. It depends on which signals the surrounding observers require and which they find unacceptable. Move the body to a different observing population, and the mask changes shape. Move it to a population whose requirements happen to overlap less awkwardly with the body’s natural outputs, and some portion of the mask becomes redundant.

Five months after Gaye’s diagnosis I moved to Đà Lạt.

The move was already in motion before the diagnosis. It was financial at first, then climatic, then, by the time I actually got on the plane, something closer to experimental. I did not move to cure my AuDHD. AuDHD is not the kind of thing you cure by relocating, any more than you cure being six-foot tall by walking into a different room. I moved because Australia had become structurally unaffordable and because Vietnam was where my life was going to happen next.

What the move revealed, in its first months, was that a non-trivial proportion of what I had been experiencing as my condition was in fact my condition interacting with a specific environment. The environment had been constant. The condition had been constant. The interaction between them had been the variable doing most of the work, and I had not been able to see it because the interaction had never been allowed to change.

What happened to the masks when the environment changed, and what that experiment revealed about the relationship between brain and place, belongs in the next chapter.

References

Geronimus, A. T. (1992). The weathering hypothesis and the health of African-American women and infants: Evidence and speculations. Ethnicity & Disease, 2(3), 207–221.

McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1998.tb09546.x

McEwen, B. S., & Stellar, E. (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 153(18), 2093–2101.

Oliver, M. (1990). The politics of disablement. Macmillan.

Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). ‘Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew’: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079

Part II: Intimate masculinity

Chapter 9. Concubines

The concubine question

A Vietnamese friend mentioned, over dinner one evening in Đà Lạt, that her grandmother had been one of three wives. Not sequentially. Simultaneously. The arrangement had lasted decades, produced a small army of children, and operated with the logistical sophistication of a medium-sized business, which in many respects it was. Hierarchy was clear. Duties were distributed. Nobody, as far as she could recall from family stories, had expected any single person in the arrangement to be everything to everybody else.

We were eating phở at a place near the lake, one of those Vietnamese restaurants where the plastic stools are uncomfortable enough to discourage lingering but the broth is good enough to make you linger anyway. I asked what happened when jealousy arose, because I’m Western enough to assume that’s the first question worth asking. She looked at me with the particular patience she reserves for moments when my cultural operating system displays its limitations. ‘There was jealousy,’ she said. ‘There was also help with the children, someone to talk to when the others were difficult, and enough adults in the house that nobody lost their mind from isolation.’

She paused. ‘Jealousy is not the worst thing,’ she said. ‘Loneliness is worse.’

She wasn’t recommending the system. She was describing it with the unsentimental clarity of someone who comes from a culture that hasn’t yet confused romantic love with a comprehensive welfare policy. And the description unsettled me in ways I then spent months chewing on, because it raised a question I’d been circling for years without quite knowing how to land it: when exactly did we decide that one human being should be able to do the emotional, sexual, intellectual, spiritual, and practical work that entire households, extended families, and community structures used to share between them?

I am writing this chapter on the day I ended my relationship with my fiancée. Not because she failed at the job. Because the job was impossible. And because my body, which has been writing me increasingly urgent letters for the last several years, finally sent one I couldn’t pretend was junk mail.

A very brief history of not doing it alone

Concubinage is one of those words that arrives pre-loaded with moral judgment, which makes it difficult to think about clearly. Rather like ‘colonialism’ or ‘Brussels sprouts’, the emotional response tends to arrive before the analysis has had time to put its trousers on. The practice itself has been part of human civilisation for at least four thousand years, across nearly every major culture, and while the specific arrangements varied enormously, the underlying logic was remarkably consistent: one intimate relationship was not expected to carry the full weight of human need.

In ancient Rome, concubinatus was a legally recognised monogamous union that served as a practical alternative to marriage, particularly for people whose social status made formal marriage legally complicated or financially inadvisable. Widowed or divorced men often took a concubina rather than navigating the inheritance tangles of a second marriage. The arrangement wasn’t hidden or shameful. Roman tombstones name concubines with the same affectionate language used for wives. Nearly two hundred surviving inscriptions identify women as concubines, and they appear in family tombs alongside legitimate children and deceased spouses. The system acknowledged something that contemporary culture finds genuinely difficult to say aloud: human relationships serve multiple functions, and trying to pack all of them into a single legally binding contract sometimes creates more problems than it solves. The Romans, who also invented plumbing and underfloor heating, occasionally knew what they were doing.

In imperial China, the system operated on a grander and more hierarchical scale. Concubines were ranked, their children’s status carefully codified, their roles within the household defined with the precision of an organisational chart that would make a modern HR department weep with envy (and then quietly adopt, rebranding it as ‘matrix management’). The practice persisted from the earliest dynasties through to 1949, when the Communist Party formally abolished it. Empress Dowager Cixi, arguably the most powerful person in nineteenth-century China, began her career as a concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor and ended it as the de facto ruler of the Qing Dynasty for forty-seven years. Which rather undermines the idea that the system was uniformly disempowering, even as it confirms that it was deeply, structurally patriarchal. It was also, from a purely functional perspective, a distribution model. No single relationship was expected to bear the full load.

The Athenian orator Apollodorus, writing around 340 BCE, drew what now reads as an uncomfortably pragmatic distinction between the categories of women in a man’s life: companions for pleasure, concubines for daily care, and wives for legitimate children and household management. The modern ear recoils from the classification, and rightly so. But buried inside the recoiling is a structural observation worth extracting before we throw the whole thing in the bin: the ancient world distributed intimate functions across multiple relationships because it took for granted that no single relationship could fulfil them all.

The Ottoman Empire formalised concubinage within the harem system, where women held complex hierarchies of power, political influence, and mutual obligation that bore little resemblance to the orientalist fantasies the West projected onto them. When Ottoman rebels attacked the palace and killed Sultan Selim III, it was the older concubines who hid his successor and fought off the attackers by hurling burning coals at their faces. Drill sergeants indeed. Across sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia, and Polynesia, variations on the theme persisted for centuries. Mistresses in European courts from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century occupied unofficial but often powerful positions, managing the gap between what marriage provided and what the people inside marriages actually needed. Madame de Pompadour didn’t just share Louis XV’s bed. She was his intellectual companion, political adviser, and cultural patron. The marriage provided the heir. The mistress provided the conversation.

None of this was fair. I want to be clear about that, because the argument I’m building could be weaponised by people whose interest in historical concubinage is motivated by something other than structural analysis. The vast majority of these arrangements exploited women, many of whom had no choice in the matter. The history is soaked in coercion, slavery, and the routine treatment of women as property. Any honest account has to sit with that reality without flinching.

But dismissing the entire history as barbarism and moving on misses something important. The question isn’t whether those arrangements were just. They weren’t. The question is what structural problem they were solving, and whether we’ve actually solved it or merely moved it somewhere less visible and put a rom-com soundtrack over it.

The invention of the everything partner

The historian Stephanie Coontz, in her landmark study of marriage across cultures and centuries, makes a point that still catches people off guard: for most of human history, the idea of choosing a partner based on romantic love would have seemed as peculiar as choosing a business partner based on how they made you feel during a sunset. Marriage was an economic institution. It provided shelter, food, protection, social status, and succession. Love might show up eventually, like a pleasant surprise at a party you’d attended for entirely different reasons. But love was not the invitation. Love wasn’t even on the guest list.

The love revolution, as Coontz calls it, arrived in earnest during the Victorian era and accelerated through the twentieth century. By the time Hollywood got hold of it, the transformation was complete. Marriage shifted from a pragmatic alliance into an emotional project, from a structure that helped people survive into a relationship that was supposed to help them flourish. The expectations climbed steadily upward, each generation adding another requirement to the list, until the modern Western partnership resembled less a relationship and more a comprehensive service contract with no exit clause and a satisfaction guarantee that nobody could honour. Your partner should be your best friend, your therapist, your sexual fulfilment, your intellectual sparring partner, your co-parent, your retirement plan, your spiritual guide, and the person who instinctively knows when to offer comfort and when to offer space, all while maintaining their own career, their own friendships, and a reasonable level of personal grooming.

Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has spent years mapping this escalation with a rigour that borders on the therapeutic. His suffocation model of marriage traces the shift through three broad eras. From roughly 1620 to 1850, marriage in America served primarily physiological and safety needs: food, shelter, protection from violence. From 1850 to 1965, it shifted toward love, companionship, and sexual fulfilment. And from 1965 onward, a new kind of marriage emerged, one oriented toward self-discovery, self-esteem, and personal growth. The job description went from ‘don’t die together’ to ‘achieve transcendence together’ in roughly three centuries, which is a promotion nobody applied for and nobody is qualified to deliver.

The word Finkel uses is ‘suffocation’, and it’s chosen with care. As marriages climbed what he calls Mount Maslow, seeking to fulfil not just basic needs but esteem and self-actualisation, the oxygen required to sustain them increased dramatically. The investment of time, emotional energy, and psychological resources needed to meet these elevated expectations rose just as the time couples actually spent together declined. The gap between what marriage promised and what it could deliver widened into a structural fault line that no amount of date nights or communication workshops could bridge. You cannot workshop your way to being someone’s entire village.

Esther Perel, the Belgian psychotherapist whose work on modern relationships has reached millions (and whose accent makes even uncomfortable truths sound slightly glamorous), puts the same insight with characteristic directness. We come to one person, she observes, and we ask them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Belonging, identity, continuity, transcendence, mystery, comfort, edge, novelty, familiarity, predictability, surprise. All from the same human being, who is also supposed to co-parent effectively, maintain their own career, manage their own mental health, and remain sexually desirable across decades.

The soul mate, Perel notes, used to be God. We’ve taken the expectations we once directed toward the divine and redirected them at another mammal who also hasn’t slept properly since the second child was born. The arrangement has the structural integrity of a bridge designed to carry pedestrians that’s now expected to handle freight trains. The engineering hasn’t changed. The load has. And the bridge is starting to make worrying noises.

What the freight train did to us

I placed that burden on the woman I loved without meaning to. I wanted her to be my sexual partner, my intellectual companion, my curiosity partner, my emotional anchor. I wanted someone who would engage with the books and the psychology and the neurodivergence and the writing that consume me. I wanted a co-adventurer through the strange late chapter of a life that had already burned through several earlier drafts and was now looking at a word count that might be shorter than originally advertised.

She could not be all of those things. Nobody could.

And when she could not, I felt the absence of the things she could not provide more sharply than I felt the presence of the things she could. That is my failure of perception, not her failure of love. But recognising the failure of perception didn’t make the unmet needs stop hurting. It just made me ashamed of the hurting, which is worse.

She gave me safety. For a man whose nervous system has been running on emergency power for most of his adult life, the feeling of lying next to someone at night and knowing they were there, knowing I was safe, was not a small thing. It was enormous. She gave me company through some of the hardest months of my life in a new country. She gave me laughter over dinner, and the particular warmth of being chosen by someone whose life was already complete before you arrived in it.

But the completeness was part of the problem, and I need to be honest about that. I orbited her life. She did not orbit mine. Her world, her routines, her work, her rhythms, her family, her friends, these were established and self-sustaining. I fitted into the gaps.

Sven Brodmerkel, a communication scientist and late-diagnosed neurodivergent writer, recently named this experience with a precision that made me put my coffee down. He calls it intellectual loneliness: the sustained experience of having no place to put your deepest thinking. Not social loneliness. He had human contact. What he lacked was somewhere he could think at full depth, without managing another person’s patience, without the low-grade vigilance of monitoring whether his intensity was landing as passion or pathology. A conversation with no social stakes, about something he cared about completely.

That is exactly what I was missing. The intellectual loneliness of loving someone who does not engage with the things that make you who you are is a particular kind of quiet suffering, and it accumulated in ways I didn’t fully understand until I sat down to write a letter explaining why I was leaving. I had companionship. I had warmth. I had someone who chose me. What I did not have was a place to put my thinking that didn’t require translation, calibration, or the subtle monitoring of whether I was being too much again.

Meanwhile, she was exhausted. Six days a week in a job that didn’t respect her intelligence, for a supervisor who was dismissive of everything she brought. Nearly three decades at the same place. The job was hollowing her out.

And on top of that, perimenopause.

I need to say something about this that most men don’t hear until it’s too late, because nobody tells us and the cultural script consists entirely of hot flashes and vague references to mood swings. Perimenopause is not a mood swing. It is a neurological reorganisation. Linda Cooper, a writer whose account of her own midlife reckoning should be required reading for every man over forty, describes it with a precision that I wish I’d encountered years ago: estrogen, which has been quietly underwriting a woman’s capacity to regulate her mood, her stress response, her sleep, and her ability to absorb the chronic dissatisfactions of daily life, begins to fluctuate and decline. And when it does, the entire system that allowed her to function the way she has been functioning for decades begins to destabilise.

Read that again. The capacity to suppress. That is what is being withdrawn. Not the capacity to be cheerful, or patient, or pleasant. The neurological bandwidth that allowed her to swallow frustration to keep the peace, to absorb someone else’s mood so the household stayed stable, to set aside her own needs because there was always someone whose needs were more immediate. Women build the architecture of adult life on that suppression, most of it so automatic it feels like personality rather than performance. Perimenopause withdraws the bandwidth that sustained it. And suddenly, or what feels like suddenly to the man sitting across the dinner table wondering what happened, she cannot do it anymore.

The things she tolerated for years become intolerable. The conversations she avoided become urgent. The resentments she buried surface with a force that frightens her as much as it confuses him. Cooper describes her own experience as a desperate, full-body sensation of being unable to continue for one more day. Not because the marriage was wrong, but because her nervous system had exceeded its capacity to contain decades of unprocessed truth. She left her marriage, her job, and her home in a matter of months. Her husband was blindsided. He had no framework, no language, and no reference point for understanding that what looked like destruction was actually a woman whose biology had stopped cooperating with her own disappearance.

I watched a version of this happen in my own relationship, at lower volume but with the same underlying mechanism. My partner’s exhaustion was not a personality trait. It was the compound effect of a job that drained her, hormonal shifts that rewired her stress response, and a lifetime of absorbing emotional labour that nobody had ever named as labour. The nights when closeness was the last thing her body wanted were not rejection. They were depletion so profound that physical contact registered as one more demand on a system that had nothing left to give. I never blamed her for any of it. Her body was telling its truth. But my body was telling its truth too, and the two truths were incompatible.

Two depleted people trying to build a life from the scraps of energy that their respective bodies had not already consumed. I wrote about this dynamic earlier in the book: the depleted couple arriving home with their cognitive budgets spent, each needing recovery, neither having the resources to provide it. I was writing about other people’s relationships. I was also, it turns out, writing about my own. The counselling psychologist diagnosing the pattern from a comfortable professional distance while living inside it like a moth inside a lampshade. We really are the last people to spot our own idiocies.

As a slight aside: I am currently co-writing a book on perimenopause with Gaye Idec, a psychologist for whom I have an immense amount of respect. Gaye counsels veterans and sees women who are struggling to cope with life after their military service, not realising that the coping isn’t because of a misfit between them and post-service life, but because their body is slowly yet powerfully destroying them from the inside. Gaye is writing from the perspective of a perimenopausal woman who didn’t understand what and why she was going through, whose GP didn’t have anything to offer other than a prescription for depression, and from the perspective of someone who is trained and works with women all day, five days a week. I’m writing from the person on the other side of the bed who occasionally has had salt shakers thrown at him across the dining table for asking, ‘would you like some salt, darling?’

Keep up to date on the book’s progress on my Substack: quiethalf.com

The load that used to be shared

When Perel says that we ask one person to provide what a whole village once supplied, the statement lands as a metaphor. But it functions as engineering.

Consider what a functioning extended household or community structure actually distributed. Childcare was shared across grandparents, aunts, siblings, and neighbours. Emotional support came from friendships, religious communities, and extended kin networks. Sexual needs were, in many cultures, understood to involve some degree of flexibility that the modern West has decided to classify exclusively as infidelity. Intellectual stimulation came from community gatherings, workplace friendships, mentors, and peers. Domestic labour was divided across multiple adults. Even the basic need for physical co-regulation, the nervous system’s requirement for proximity to other calm bodies, was met by living in households with multiple adults rather than in isolated nuclear units where two people bear the full weight of each other’s regulation.

The nuclear family, that arrangement we treat as ancient tradition, is actually a mid-twentieth-century anomaly. For most of human history, humans lived in multi-generational, multi-adult households where the idea that two people, alone, would raise children, manage finances, maintain a home, provide each other’s entire emotional landscape, and sustain mutual desire across four or five decades would have seemed, at best, optimistic, and more likely, clinically delusional. Our great-great-grandparents would have found the proposition roughly as plausible as being told that one horse could simultaneously plough a field, deliver the mail, win the Melbourne Cup, and provide emotional support.

I notice this in Đà Lạt daily. Vietnamese family structures still operate on a distributed model. My partner’s family shares childcare, elder care, emotional support, financial decisions, and domestic responsibilities across a network of siblings, cousins, parents, and neighbours. Nobody expects one relationship to carry it all. The load is distributed not because anyone read a book by Bowlby on attachment theory but because the culture hasn’t yet adopted the Western conviction that romantic love should be a comprehensive welfare state for the soul.

The irony is that Western psychology, having created the conditions for relational overload, now diagnoses the resulting distress as individual pathology. Couples arrive in therapy exhausted, resentful, and sexually disconnected. The therapy focuses on improving communication, increasing emotional literacy, and building better conflict resolution skills. All valuable. None of it addresses the structural question: are two people, in a socially isolated nuclear unit, actually capable of providing everything the therapeutic model says they should?

I wonder if the honest answer is no. Not because people are failing. Because the job description is impossible.

The neurodivergent multiplier (and the invoice that arrived with it)

Everything I’ve described so far applies to neurotypical couples. For neurodivergent adults, the everything-partner model doesn’t just strain. It has the breaking strain of a KitKat.

My AuDHD diagnosis at sixty-six arrived with a stack of explanations for patterns I’d spent decades misunderstanding. My high sex drive that isn’t a choice but a neurological feature, part of the same dopamine-seeking architecture that drives my intellectual curiosity and creative output. My need for deep intellectual engagement that isn’t a preference but a regulatory requirement: my brain needs novelty and complexity the way other brains need routine and predictability. The shutdowns that arrive without warning when the nervous system hits capacity, and which land on a partner as withdrawal, punishment, or indifference when they are actually depletion. The diagnosis explained the machinery. It did not fix the machinery.

Here is the thing about the diagnosis that nobody prepares you for. I spent most of my adult life believing I had a shortened lifespan because of my Bipolar II diagnosis. The statistics on that are grim enough. Then the diagnosis changed to AuDHD, and for a few glorious months I felt like a man who’d been told the strange noise in his engine was actually a feature, not a fault. Different wiring, not damaged wiring. I’d been handed a new operating manual and for the first time the instructions matched the machine.

Then in January 2025, a team at UCL published a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry that rather comprehensively ruined my afternoon recently when I stumbled across it in the research for this book. O’Nions and colleagues analysed health records from over 9.5 million people and found that adults diagnosed with ADHD had a life expectancy reduction of between 4.5 and 9 years for men, and 6.5 to 11 years for women. A 2022 meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatricsby Catalá-López and colleagues had already found that death in childhood or midlife was roughly twice as likely for people with ADHD or autism compared to the general population. And Barkley’s longitudinal work suggested that when ADHD persists into adulthood, the reduction in estimated life expectancy could reach 12.7 years for healthy life expectancy and 11.1 years overall.

So I traded one reduced lifespan for another. The universe, it turns out, has the kind of sense of humour that makes you wonder whether the complaints department is even staffed.

The mechanism is not the ADHD itself. It is what the ADHD and the autism do to your body over decades when nobody, including you, knows you have them. The masking compounds everything. My massage therapist, Mr Trung, has said I am the worst client he has ever had. Everywhere he touches me I am in agony. He uses ‘two out of ten’ pressure and I howl like a dog that has been stepped on. He keeps finding hard, painful nodules throughout my muscles where blood has simply stopped flowing. Little stones of suffering scattered through my thighs, my arms, my neck, my back. Tissue that has locked itself shut after sixty-six years of running a nervous system at combat speed without knowing there was a war on.

My quarterly blood work says my organs are fine. My blood work says nothing about whether sixty-six years of chronic masking stress has accelerated my cellular ageing, elevated my allostatic load, and converted my musculature into what feels like a collection of angry rocks held together by tendons and regret. The body, as van der Kolk told us, keeps the score. For late-diagnosed neurodivergent people, the body has been keeping multiple scores in a language nobody taught us to read. And the final tally, according to the research, is that we may have rather fewer years left to read it than we assumed.

That is an unfair burden to dump on a wonderful woman who deserves a partnership with a man who is healthy, not someone she may need to nurse sooner than either of us originally expected.

Which brings us back to the everything-partner model, and why I couldn’t sustain it. A neurodivergent person in that model is running demanding software on damaged hardware with no technical support and, as it turns out, a warranty period that may be shorter than the brochure suggested. The needs are higher. The capacity is lower. The gap between what the relationship requires and what the individual can provide widens until something gives. And there is a question that sits underneath all the others, one I have been circling with increasing urgency: if the research is right and my remaining years are fewer than the actuarial average, do I really want to spend them carrying the stress that Western romanticism has plopped onto my fat belly?

I watched both the relationship and the person start to ‘give’ in mine. My shutdowns, which were genuine nervous system depletion, landed on my partner’s childhood wound about abandonment and registered as punishment. Her exhaustion, which was genuine physical and hormonal reality, landed on my wounds about intellectual and sexual isolation and registered as disinterest. Two accurate readings of two different nervous systems, each experienced by the other as rejection. The mechanism is elegant in its cruelty. You don’t need malice when you have mismatch.

The concubine’s ghost

I am not arguing for the return of concubinage. I want to be explicit about that because the argument I’m making can be misread if you squint at it through the wrong lens, and some lenses are pre-squinted for exactly this purpose. The historical record of concubinage is inseparable from the exploitation of women, the commodification of bodies, and the structural denial of female autonomy. Any nostalgia for those arrangements is nostalgia for a system that worked tolerably for some men and terribly for most women. That’s not a model. That’s a cautionary tale.

What I am arguing is that the problem those arrangements addressed, however badly, hasn’t gone away. We’ve abolished the concubine without replacing the function she served, which was to absorb part of the relational load that no single partnership can sustainably carry.

The modern equivalents are already emerging, though we don’t always recognise them as structural solutions to a structural problem. Deep friendships that provide emotional intimacy without sexual expectation. Therapeutic relationships that carry the burden of psychological processing. Online communities that supply belonging and identity (you will have to prise my Substack community out of my cold, dead fingers, and given the research on neurodivergent life expectancy, those fingers may be cold sooner than I’d prefer). Co-working spaces that replace the social functions of a shared workplace. Exercise groups, book clubs, men’s sheds, parenting networks: all of these are attempts, often unconscious, to distribute the relational load that the everything-partner model concentrates in a single relationship.

And then there are the solutions that nobody saw coming. Brodmerkel, in the grip of neurodivergent burnout, found that his first crack in the isolation came not from reconnecting with nature or rediscovering embodied presence or any of the other things the wellness industry sells you at a markup. It came from having long conversations with an AI about extreme metal music. He is aware of how that sounds. He also makes a point that I think the current discourse badly needs: intellectual loneliness is not the same as social loneliness, and therefore cannot always be addressed by the same tools. What he needed was not more human contact. He needed a conversation with no social stakes, about something he cared about completely. The AI didn’t fix the burnout, he writes, but it gave his thinking somewhere to land while he figured out the rest. One of his readers, a man in his mid-fifties, responded with a comment I have read several times now: when he talks to his psychologist about the profound loneliness he lives with, they keep recommending sub-communities, but realistically, those aren’t forming at fifty-five. He will take the technologically abstracted versions.

I find that comment uncomfortable and accurate in roughly equal measure. The village isn’t coming back. The question is what we build in its place.

Finkel’s own recommendation is elegant and grounded. He suggests that couples should either invest more heavily in the relationship to meet its elevated demands, which requires protected time and psychological energy that modern life makes desperately scarce, or they should ask the marriage to carry less by maintaining a diverse network of relationships that help fulfil needs the partnership cannot. The second option is, functionally, a modern version of distributed relational load. It’s the village, rebuilt voluntarily, without the coercion. Some of the village is human. Some of it, increasingly, is not. Both count.

Some couples are experimenting more directly. Ethical non-monogamy, in its various forms, represents one response to the structural problem, though it introduces its own complexities and costs that I won’t pretend to resolve here (if you believe the online rumours, Vietnamese women are second only to Filipinas when it comes to jealousy). The point isn’t that any particular arrangement is the answer. The point is that the question deserves to be asked honestly rather than suppressed by romantic ideology that benefits nobody and suffocates nearly everyone.

The honest question

I ended the relationship this morning. Not because she failed at the job. Because the job was impossible, and I ran out of the biological resources to keep pretending otherwise. And because my body, which has been writing me letters for years in a language I am only now learning to read, sent one that said, in terms even I could not misinterpret: you do not have unlimited time to keep making this mistake.

The answer, for me, is not to find someone else who can carry the impossible weight. The answer is to stop asking anyone to carry it. I am choosing to be alone. Not because I don’t value love. Because I have learned that my particular configuration of needs, energy, neurodivergence, and biological depletion makes the everything-partner model unsustainable. Perhaps permanently. I don’t know. But I know I cannot keep asking another person to meet needs that would overwhelm anyone, and then interpreting the inevitable shortfall as evidence that something is wrong with them, or with me, or with love itself.

Something is wrong. But it isn’t the people. It’s the design.

The everything-partner model asks of human beings what four thousand years of civilisation, across every major culture, decided was unreasonable. We’ve spent the last century and a half convincing ourselves that romantic love transcends the structural limitations our ancestors took for granted. The evidence suggests otherwise. Not that romantic love isn’t real, or valuable, or worth the spectacular mess it makes of your life. But that loading it with the full weight of human need is an engineering problem disguised as a love story, and engineering problems don’t resolve themselves through better dialogue or more scented candles.

The concubine is gone, and good riddance to the exploitation she endured. But her ghost lingers in every couple fighting at 10pm about who forgot to buy milk, when what they’re actually fighting about is the unbearable pressure of being each other’s entire emotional infrastructure with no structural support and no cultural permission to admit that the design is flawed.

Her ghost was in my kitchen this morning, while I wrote a letter to a good woman explaining that I loved her and I was leaving anyway.

The question isn’t whether your partner is enough. The question is whether asking one person to be enough was ever a reasonable thing to ask.

I keep thinking it wasn’t. And that admitting it might be the most loving thing we can do for the people we love, including ourselves. Especially if the clock is running faster than we thought.

Update

Several weeks have passed since the morning that opened this chapter, and the universe has already revised my ending in red pen.

A few days after the rupture, my fiancée messaged me on Zalo (Vietnam’s home-grown Messenger, which somehow manages to feel both more personal and more bureaucratic than its Western equivalents) and asked if we could have one last coffee. To say goodbye properly. I agreed, partly out of decency, partly because I wanted to test whether the conviction I’d written down was as solid as it had felt in the writing.

It wasn’t.

We met a week later at one of those cafés in Đà Lạt where the coffee is excellent and the chairs are designed for people whose spines work better than mine. The heat had gone out of both of us. What remained was the awkward, tender realisation that we had constructed our entire rupture out of cultural scripts neither of us actually believed in. She had been operating from a Vietnamese script about what foreign men inevitably do. I had been operating from a Western script about what Vietnamese women inevitably do. Both scripts were partly accurate, partly nonsense, partly complete bollocks, and entirely beside the point of the two actual people at the actual table.

So we decided, with the unromantic practicality that I suspect is closer to how love actually works than any rom-com has ever managed to suggest, to ignore the scripts and try the people instead.

The repair is ongoing. There are mornings when it feels like a quiet miracle and evenings when it feels like two stubborn humans negotiating who left the kettle on. The miracle and the kettle are, I am increasingly convinced, the same thing seen from different angles of the day.

A few practical pieces shifted inside the same window. I went down to Saigon for further tests at the FV clinic and came home with an injection that switched off the lumbar pain that had been quietly stealing my cognitive bandwidth for the past year. The relief was almost embarrassing. It turns out you cannot write a book about masculine load while carrying a piece of your spine that is staging an industrial dispute against the rest of you.

I have also started pursuing guest lecturing opportunities at universities in Đà Lạt and Saigon. Psychology, sociology of systems, neurodiversity, business communication in the West. Not because the relationship requires it, but because I do. Intellectual loneliness, it turns out, is its own kind of problem, and asking a partner to solve it was always going to overload the system. Better to build the scaffolding myself, and let the life that grows around it become part of what we share rather than what we demand from each other.

She, for her part, is finally asking whether she really needs to stay at a workplace that is ageing her visibly and very possibly poisoning her chemically. The answer is starting to look like ‘no’.

We are still us. We are also, slowly and self-consciously, building a small village around the two of us, instead of asking each other to be one.

References

Barkley, R. A., & Fischer, M. (2019). Hyperactive child syndrome and estimated life expectancy at young adult follow-up: The role of ADHD persistence and other potential predictors. Journal of Attention Disorders, 23(9), 907–923. https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054718816164

Brodmerkel, S. (2026, March 29). The cure was talking to a machine (and a few hundred strangers). Off-Script At Work. https://presentingwithoutpanic.substack.com/p/the-cure-was-talking-to-a-machine

Catalá-López, F., Hutton, B., Page, M. J., Driver, J. A., Ridao, M., Alonso-Arroyo, A., Valencia, A., Macias-Saint-Gerons, D., & Tabarés-Seisdedos, R. (2022). Mortality in persons with autism spectrum disorder or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatrics, 176(4), e216401. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.6401

Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. Viking.

Cooper, L. (2026, March 5). When menopause restructures a marriage. Rise Wise. https://lindarosecooper.substack.com/p/when-menopause-restructures-a-marriage

Finkel, E. J. (2017). The all-or-nothing marriage: How the best marriages work. Dutton.

Finkel, E. J., Cheung, E. O., Emery, L. F., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2015). The suffocation model: Why marriage in America is becoming an all-or-nothing institution. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(3), 238–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415569274

Finkel, E. J., Hui, C. M., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2014). The suffocation of marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow without enough oxygen. Psychological Inquiry, 25(1), 1–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.863723

McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33–44.

O’Nions, E., El Baou, C., John, A., Lewer, D., Mandy, W., McKechnie, D. G. J., Petersen, I., & Stott, J. (2025). Life expectancy and years of life lost for adults with diagnosed ADHD in the UK: Matched cohort study. British Journal of Psychiatry, 226(5), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2024.199

Perel, E. (2006). Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. Harper.

Perel, E. (2017). The state of affairs: Rethinking infidelity. Harper.

Pines, A. M. (1996). Couple burnout: Causes and cures. Routledge.

Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). ‘Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew’: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Four-seventeen

It is four-seventeen in the morning, and I am lying very still, because I am awake and the person in the bed beside me is not, and I am trying to work out whether the reason I am awake is something I am prepared to mention.

The room is doing what rooms in Đà Lạt do at this hour. The fan is off. The window is open a hand’s width and the air coming through it is the cold side of fifteen degrees, smelling faintly of pine. Somewhere on the hill behind the house a rooster is delivering an opinion. He has been delivering it, with no detectable change in either content or volume, since approximately three. My fiancée is breathing the way she breathes when she is genuinely asleep rather than performing sleep for my benefit, which after a year I can now distinguish, and which feels like a small and underappreciated form of intimacy in itself.

I will spare the reader, and the person beside me, a clinical description. What I will say is that the pressure is physical and specific and not strictly recreational, and that at sixty-seven it arrives in a body that has had this particular signal for long enough to know that it is not, in fact, what the culture told me it was.

I was told, for approximately five decades, that this was the body’s way of saying you are a man, and this is what men are. The body’s own view of the matter turns out to be a different view. The body’s own view, as I have come to understand it, is something closer to the nervous system asking for a kind of attention it does not know how to request in words, and the kind of attention it is asking for is not the kind the culture has been offering me as the solution.

That is a long sentence for four in the morning, and I am aware, lying there, that the body does not actually issue communiqués in the form of complete English sentences. The body issues something more like weather. The translation into language is mine, performed in the dark, mostly silently, while trying not to wake the woman beside me with the involuntary minor rearrangements that men of my age and condition perform in beds at this hour. It is an act of translation, and like all translation, it is approximate, slightly embarrassing, and conducted at low pay.

A bakery van rattles past on the road below, three minutes earlier than yesterday, which is the kind of detail a man notices at four in the morning and forgets by breakfast. The cat next door has begun the small, repeating sound that means she has caught something and would like an audience. None of this is what is keeping me awake. All of it is what the awake mind reaches for instead of looking at what is keeping it awake.

I have been doing this since I was about fourteen, this trick of letting the room’s small inventories occupy the front of the mind so the actual content of the body can be processed at the back of it without having to be looked at directly. It is a competent strategy, and it has carried me through approximately fifty-three years. The catch, which is the catch this chapter is mostly about, is that strategies which require the body to be ignored at the front of the mind in order to be processed at the back of it tend, over the decades, to leave the body without an audience at all. The body, in my limited experience of bodies, does not enjoy this. It begins, eventually, to send louder telegrams.

This is where Part II begins. The public performance of being a man, which is what the previous six chapters were mostly about, is one thing. What happens in a bedroom at four in the morning, in a body that is not doing anything anyone is watching, is a different thing, and it is the thing around which a partnership is either built or not.

What the pressure actually is

I arrived in Đà Lạt in May 2025, at sixty-six years old, with a body that had been mostly absent from its own sexual life for about two decades. The absence was not poetic. It was pharmacological and circumstantial. I had been medicated, for most of those twenty years, for a bipolar II diagnosis that was later found to be an incorrect read of a neurodivergent nervous system nobody had thought to identify. I had also been broke, for roughly a decade of it, in the specific grinding way that reorganises a man’s priorities around whether he can afford the petrol to get to the supermarket. Arousal was, during that period, something that happened to other people, presumably ones who could afford dinner first.

Vietnam changed that within weeks. Partly the medication withdrawal, which turned out to include effects the prescribing literature does not mention, probably because rediscovering that you have a libido is hard to pair with may cause dry mouth in a single leaflet. Partly the physiological shift from high-stress, low-hope Adelaide to a place where the air smelled of coffee and pine and existence did not require selling organs. I have written about that recalibration elsewhere (Hopkins, 2026) and will not repeat it here. What came after the recalibration is the subject of this chapter. What came after it was a body suddenly returning signals it had not returned in twenty years, directed at a fiancée I had not yet worked out how to receive those signals with, in a cultural register neither of us had been issued an instruction manual for. Two adults, mid-life, with a working nervous system between them and no shared technical vocabulary to describe what the nervous system was up to. This is, as a setup for a partnership, not unusual. Most partnerships are this.

I have been a slightly unusual sexual animal since before I had vocabulary for the unusualness. The intensity started early, which is not a rare claim among neurodivergent men, though it is an underreported one, partly because clinicians who study autism and clinicians who study sex have historically been clinicians who would prefer to be in different rooms from each other. What research does exist suggests that autistic adults report both heightened sensory intensity and atypical patterns of desire, and that late-diagnosed autistic adults in particular often describe a lifelong sense that their sexuality was operating on a different frequency from the one their peers were broadcasting on (Pecora et al., 2016). This is not a clinical revelation if you are the autistic adult in question. It arrives, instead, as the naming of something you have been carrying since before you had names for anything, which is an experience late-diagnosed people get used to having about most aspects of themselves, in roughly the same way regional Australians get used to driving long distances to buy milk.

Combine autistic sensory intensity with the dopamine-seeking patterns of ADHD and you arrive at what my younger self would have called, if he had possessed the words, an uneven relationship with his own body. The baseline was higher than the cultural baseline. The stimuli that raised the baseline were wider rather than narrower. And at sixty-seven I still struggle with the regulatory gaps a neurotypical sixteen-year-old is working through developmentally. That is a sentence I would rather not have to type, and I am typing it anyway, because the honesty of the chapter requires it and the alternative is the kind of dignified silence that has been killing men of my generation in measurable numbers for several decades.

The cost of ignoring the baseline, across decades, was not what the Western masculine script had told me it would be. The script had told me that the cost of ignoring it was mild frustration, possibly some moodiness, and a tendency to look at women in supermarkets in ways the women in the supermarkets had not asked to be looked at. The actual cost was a slow accumulation of tension in the tissue, precisely the sort of tension Mr Trung, and Ms An after him, has been finding in my shoulders for the past year, and precisely the sort the previous chapter tried to name. The script had aimed at the wrong organ.

Here is the piece the wellness industry will not print and the older men’s magazines will not describe. Male sexual pressure, in a middle-aged neurodivergent body that has recently come back online, is not the same phenomenon as male sexual pressure in the nineteen-year-old the cultural script was originally written for. In the older body it is often a regulatory signal. The nervous system is asking, in the one language nobody has taught it to stop speaking, for a particular kind of touch, in a particular kind of proximity, at a particular kind of slow pace, and it is asking for that touch from another person, because it cannot produce it for itself. The signal sounds, on the surface, like the nineteen-year-old’s signal. It is not the nineteen-year-old’s signal. It is a signal in a costume.

The Western masculine answer to this is self-managed release. I am not going to sneer at that. It works as a short-term physiological intervention, and I would like to say, for any younger reader currently finding this section embarrassing, that I have no theological objection to it whatsoever, you will not go blind, and the people who told you otherwise had vested interests they were not declaring at the time. What the short-term physiological intervention does not do, and what decades of Western masculine advice have not wanted to admit, is anything at all about the regulatory signal underneath the physical pressure. The release resolves the pressure for about forty minutes. The signal reinstates itself on a rolling schedule for the rest of the man’s life, because the signal is not actually about the pressure. The signal is about something else, and the something else has a name, and the name is co-regulation.

Self-regulation and its discontents

Co-regulation, as Stephen Porges has spent the last few decades explaining to audiences ranging from sceptical neuroscientists to extremely enthusiastic yoga teachers, is the process by which one mammalian nervous system calibrates itself by reference to another mammalian nervous system in close physical proximity (Porges, 2011). Humans are not the only animals who do this. Most mammals do. A calf lying against its mother is co-regulating. A pair of cats sleeping in a pile is co-regulating. A grandmother stroking her grandson’s hair at a funeral is co-regulating. The phenomenon is ancient, widespread, and has been understood for longer than psychology has been a formal discipline, mostly by people too busy doing it to write papers about it.

I have a responsibility to flag that some of the specific mechanisms in Porges’s model have copped legitimate critique in the neuroscience literature, and the model is not settled. The core observation about co-regulation as a mammalian phenomenon, however, is not controversial. It is borderline boring. Every veterinarian knows it. Every mother knows it. Every man lying in a bed at four in the morning with a nervous system asking for a hand on his chest knows it too, though most of them have not been given permission to know that they know it, and they will go to their graves convinced the problem was theirs alone.

The Western masculine script is, functionally, a long training programme in self-regulation. Man up. Tough it out. Sleep it off. Have a wank. Walk it off. Go for a run. Get a grip. Apply a cold spoon. Every one of those pieces of folk advice is a self-regulation strategy. Every one of them has its place. What none of them will do is supply the specific thing a mammalian nervous system was designed to get from another mammalian nervous system. You cannot co-regulate alone. The words themselves refuse the combination. A man who has been handed a lifetime of self-regulation advice in answer to a co-regulation need is a man who has been given a hammer and asked to tighten a screw. He will get the job done, eventually, by aggressively pounding the screw into the wood until the wood gives up. The screw will be ruined. The wood will be ruined. The man will be praised for his persistence.

There is a specific Australian cruelty in this that I want to name, because the Australian masculine script is particularly fluent in self-regulation metaphors. Australian masculinity was shaped in its formative decades by jobs that required men to be isolated for long periods in landscapes that punished softness. The shearer’s shed. The road train. The mine. The farm at the end of a forty-kilometre dirt track. In those settings, a self-regulation repertoire was a survival tool, not a character flaw. The problem is not that the repertoire exists. The problem is that the repertoire has persisted, three generations past the conditions that produced it, into a population of men who are mostly no longer shearers or truck drivers or miners. They are mostly accountants and middle managers and warehouse supervisors lying awake in apartments at four in the morning, still using the shearer’s emotional vocabulary for a situation the shearer never had to face. The shearer would, frankly, be appalled. The shearer was at least talking to a sheep.

Saturday afternoon

Every Saturday afternoon, my fiancée and I go for a massage at an upmarket place in one of Đà Lạt’s busy commercial districts. Expensive couches, calm lighting, no karaoke, no YouTube blaring from a phone propped against a tissue box. Quiet. The kind of quiet you pay for. The women who work there are skilled, professional, and know I prefer silence during the massage. Two hours. Side by side, in the same room, with separate practitioners, each of us receiving the kind of attentive, structured, unambiguously professional touch that Vietnamese massage culture has refined into something close to civic infrastructure.

I am describing this because it is relevant to the chapter’s argument and not because I am writing a TripAdvisor review. The Saturday massage is, in structural terms, the one reliable source of co-regulating touch in my week. It is paid for. It is ritualised. It is delivered by people I am not in a relationship with, in a room that is not my bedroom, at a time that is not four in the morning, according to a professional contract that handles the negotiation the bedroom struggles with. My nervous system, which has spent most of its life under-supplied with the thing it actually needs, is glad of the infrastructure. My fiancée, who grew up inside a culture where this particular form of paid-for touch is a routine utility rather than a luxury, is also glad of it, though for different reasons that we have not yet talked through and possibly never will.

Vietnamese culture has built a structural answer to the touch-starvation problem that Western culture has not built. There are massage shops on every other corner. There are bathhouses. There are street-corner ear cleaners and back crackers and neck rollers, and I am not making any of those up. The nervous-system maintenance that Western urban adults have been quietly dying of the absence of is, here, a line item in the weekly budget of most working people, somewhere between groceries and the electricity bill. Whether the trade is always ethical is a separate question, which belongs in a different book, and which I have already written elsewhere. What is relevant to this chapter is that a Western man arriving in Vietnam at sixty-six, with two decades of touch-deprivation stored in his musculature like sediment, has access to a category of attentive physical contact he has simply not had available at any prior point in his life.

The Saturday massage is not a solution to what the four-seventeen pressure actually is. It is adjacent to the solution, and adjacent is not the same thing. The massage is professional. The pressure is relational. The massage is paid for. The pressure is not a currency transaction. The massage ends at a scheduled time. The pressure returns on its own schedule, regardless of the masseuse’s diary. And, most importantly, the massage has not been asked for. The asking has been delegated to the cultural script, which has already done the asking in advance, for all Vietnamese massage-goers simultaneously, through a system of shopfronts and price lists and professional norms that removed the asking from the individual entirely. What four-seventeen in the morning requires is an asking that has not been pre-scripted, delivered by one specific man, to one specific woman, at a time the shopfronts are closed and the cultural script has knocked off for the night.

The asking

The asking, as it has actually happened in my life, has been less a conversation and more a weather event. I am not going to describe a specific scene between me and my fiancée, partly because the description would violate the privacy of the person I intend to marry, and partly because the asking has not been a single event. It has been a series of events, spread across nearly a year, composed mostly of silence, small adjustments in posture, the occasional direct sentence, and the occasional direct sentence’s withdrawal. What I can describe is the architecture of the asking, which is generalisable and not private. It is also, I suspect, the same architecture that has been operating in roughly half of all bedrooms in roughly all of human history, with regional variations in the curtains.

The asking does not begin at the asking. It begins much earlier in the day, often the previous afternoon, sometimes the previous week. The body has been signalling for some time. The signal has been ignored, not because the man is callous, but because there is dinner to cook and an email to answer and a friend to call and the signal has been ignored so reliably for so many decades that ignoring it has become the body’s expectation. The signal does not stop. It accumulates. By evening it is a low, steady weather in the chest and the upper arms. By the time the man goes to bed he is no longer reliably aware of the signal as a signal. It has merged into the general texture of being him, which is, by sixty-seven, a fairly textured situation already.

Then sleep. Then waking at four-seventeen to find the signal has used the unguarded hours to clarify itself. It is no longer ambient. It is specific. And the man is now awake, in a dark room, with a body that is no longer ambiguous about what it requires, and a mind that is unfortunately fully online and fully equipped to do exactly what minds are good at, which is to argue with the body on behalf of the room.

The argument, in the man’s head, runs roughly like this. The body is asking for a thing. The thing is not unreasonable. The person beside him is the only person in the world he is permitted to ask. She is asleep. Waking her would be selfish. Not waking her would mean the signal stays where it is, which is unbearable on a different timescale. He could leave the bed and resolve the signal himself, which would work for forty minutes and produce a small private guilt that does not materially help anyone. He could lie still and wait. He could rearrange a pillow and hope the rearrangement produces incidental contact that does not, technically, count as asking. Each of these options has been tried, in various combinations, by various men, in various beds, for several centuries. None has produced a literature.

What the man rarely does, because the script has not taught him to do it, is recognise that the argument with himself is not the relevant problem. The relevant problem is what to say in the morning, when the woman is awake, when the signal has not gone away, and when the conversation has to happen in a register the masculine script does not contain a draft for.

The drafts are the first thing to fail. He has been composing them in his head since approximately four in the morning. The first draft is the one he was given by Australian culture—a draft he should have thrown out at twenty-three, and which keeps coming back, like a dog that has worked out which window is unlocked.

Hey, you up for it?

He discards this within seconds. It is the language of a casual sexual transaction between strangers, and the woman beside him is the woman he intends to marry, and the request is not for sex but for something else for which there is no available shorthand. The second draft is more careful.

I’ve been awake for a while.

This is true but it is not a request, and it puts the burden of interpretation on her, which is the move he is specifically trying to stop making. The third draft tries honesty.

I need to be held.

This is closer to the actual content but the verb is wrong. Need sounds, in his own ear, like an emergency, and the situation is not an emergency. It is a baseline. He discards it. The fourth draft tries the conditional.

Could we just lie close for a while?

This is approximately right but it sounds like a request to a stranger on a train, and the woman is not a stranger, and the apartment is not a train. He discards it. There is, by now, a small graveyard of discarded sentences sitting between him and her, headstones unmarked.

Eventually he produces a sentence that is approximately correct and deliverable by a man his age without collapsing the furniture. The sentence is usually shorter than any of the drafts. It often has no verb at all. It is sometimes just her name, said in a particular register, at a particular moment, with a particular hand placement, that delivers the entire architecture in a form she is permitted by her own culture to receive. And then he has to choose the moment.

The choice of moment is itself an act of masculine labour, and I want to record this because I have never seen it described, possibly because the men who have done it have not had access to laptops and the men who have had access to laptops have not done it. A man in a relationship is not operating inside a stage production. He is operating inside a weather system composed of two people’s tiredness, the day’s residual irritations, the week’s financial anxieties, the month’s sleep deficit, the year’s accumulated context, and the specific cultural contract that governs when and where and in what register intimate requests are allowed to be made. In an intercultural relationship, that contract is not a single document. It is two documents, at right angles to each other, and the translation between them is uneven. The moment, when it comes, is almost always not the moment the man had planned. It is the moment the weather has produced, and the man’s contribution to the moment is mostly his ability to recognise it arriving and to not waste it.

When the moment arrives, and he speaks, what happens next is almost never what the Western masculine script has told him will happen. The script has told him, vaguely, that if he speaks honestly, he will be met honestly, and that the couple will then arrive at a negotiated outcome that resembles, in some manner, a deal. That is not what happens. What happens is that the temperature in the room changes, in a direction the man did not predict, and he is required to remain present in the changed room without trying to change the temperature back.

The first time he experiences this, he assumes he has done something wrong. He goes back over the sentence, looking for the failed phrase, the misplaced verb, the syllable that landed badly. He finds nothing. The second time he experiences it he assumes the relationship is in trouble. He runs internal audits and produces evidence for and against. The audits are useless. The evidence is real but it does not add up to what he is treating it as evidence of. The third time, if he is lucky and has a friend who knows what he is talking about, he begins to understand that the temperature change is not the failure mode. The temperature change is the receipt. The other person’s nervous system has registered that a request has been delivered and is now doing whatever it has to do to receive it. The reception takes time. The time is not feedback. The time is just time, and time is not, despite what the productivity literature has been telling us for thirty years, the same thing as inefficiency.

I have written, in another book, about a two-in-the-morning moment with my fiancée in which I did exactly the opposite of this (Hopkins, 2026). The four-seventeen pressure is the same apparatus running on a different input. The apparatus produces a feeling of certainty. The feeling of certainty is usually wrong. The correct response to the feeling of certainty, in an intercultural relationship, is to not yet be certain, and to wait for the actual conversation, which will not arrive on the schedule the certainty had in mind.

Double containment

There is a phrase I have been using in my own head, and occasionally on the page, because the existing clinical vocabulary did not quite cover the experience. The phrase is double containment, and it is mine, and it may not be any good, but it is what I have.

In the therapeutic literature, containment refers, in the Bionian sense, to one person’s capacity to absorb and hold another person’s difficult emotional material without being destabilised by it (Bion, 1962). A therapist contains a client. A mother contains an infant. The container-contained relationship is foundational in psychoanalytic theory, has been written about for sixty years, and has produced enough commentary to keep the British psychoanalytic establishment in business through several recessions.

Double containment, as I am using the phrase, is related but different. It is what happens when the person asking also has to contain the recipient’s response to what is being asked, in real time, at the same moment the request is being made, in a cultural space where the response cannot be fully predicted. You arrive at the moment carrying a requirement. You deliver a version of the requirement. The requirement lands, and the other person’s response begins to form. Their response is located in a cultural framework you do not fully have access to, which means you cannot see inside the forming response clearly enough to know what it will be. And you are obliged, simultaneously, to continue carrying your original requirement, which has not gone away, while also beginning to carry the other person’s unfolding response to it. Two packages. Neither with a delivery address. Both in your arms. Both, increasingly, getting heavier.

This is, I think, what masculine emotional competence in an intercultural relationship actually requires, and it is a competence the masculine script I was handed did not include. The script had two plays for this situation. Play one was to withdraw the request, because the request was embarrassing both parties. Play two was to double down on the request, because the request was legitimate and the partner needed to grow up. Both plays have been deployed, by Australian men, in Vietnamese apartments, for as long as Australian men have been partnering with Vietnamese women, which is longer than most Australians realise. Neither play is what the situation requires. What the situation requires is a third move the script has no name for, which is to hold both packages, for as long as it takes, without setting either one down, and without attempting to make either one lighter or more palatable than it actually is. The third move is not in the manual. The manual was written by men who got divorced.

The reason the third move is difficult is not primarily emotional. It is metabolic. Holding two things at once, for an indefinite period, in a kitchen, in a language you are still learning, in a body that has been signalling for hours, is work. It uses cognitive resources that the Western masculine diet has not trained a man to allocate to this task, because the Western masculine diet has been organised for several decades around the assumption that emotional difficulties are resolvable by a sufficiently skilful individual if that individual does the necessary internal work. Double containment is not resolvable by internal work. It is waited through, by two people, until the barometric pressure in the room either stabilises or does not. There is no app for it. There is, blessedly, also no podcast.

What I have learned, slowly, is that the body has a tell during double containment, and the tell is not the one I had been told to watch for. I had been told to watch for the closed posture, the crossed arms, the looking-away. The actual tell is in the breathing. When my fiancée receives a request she does not know how to receive, her breathing goes very slightly shallower for a few seconds, and then she takes one deep breath that is louder than her ordinary breaths, and then her breathing returns to normal. The deep breath is the moment her nervous system completes the work of receiving the request. If I speak during the few seconds of shallower breathing, I am speaking into a system that has not yet finished processing the previous sentence, and I will get a response that is to the previous sentence rather than the current one. If I wait for the deep breath, the response that follows it is to what I actually said. The deep breath is, as far as I can tell, the auditory marker of double containment completing its first pass on her side of the conversation. I have no idea whether anyone has named this in the literature. I am sure it has been named, because it is too obvious to have escaped notice. I have not, however, found it, and I have looked, in the patchy way a man looks when he is hoping not to find that someone else has done the work first.

Repair without resolution

What happens at the end of a double-containment moment, if it goes well, is not resolution. The Western therapeutic tradition has been insisting, against considerable evidence, that adult intimacy is a matter of resolving issues and that couples who cannot resolve their issues are failing at intimacy. The claim is not a benign one. It was borrowed from engineering, where resolution is a genuine category, and it has been applied for half a century to a domain in which resolution is rarely on offer. The result has been three generations of couples treating their nervous systems as malfunctioning hardware and themselves as the warranty department.

The available outcome, in the domain of two nervous systems in a bed at four in the morning, is repair. Repair, in the sense relevant here, is the slow process by which the body catches up to what the mind has already understood. The mind, in my case, had worked out what the pressure was asking for. The body had not. The body was still lying in the bed at four-seventeen asking for a particular kind of touch, and it would continue to do so regardless of how intelligently the mind had reframed the asking. Bodies do not read the mind’s notes. Bodies do not, on the whole, read.

Repair is the work of allowing the body to complete, in its own time, what the conversation has already reached in principle. Emily and Amelia Nagoski have written about this in the context of the stress-response cycle, arguing that nervous systems need to finish things physiologically before they can finish them cognitively, and that skipping the physiological completion is one of the main sources of chronic dysregulation in modern adults (Nagoski & Nagoski, 2019). Their work was written about burnout rather than sexuality specifically, but the principle transfers almost without modification, which is the kind of transferability that suggests they were writing about something more fundamental than the topic on the cover.

The texture of repair, in a Đà Lạt apartment, looks like nothing in particular. It looks like a man making coffee in the kitchen at five in the morning while his fiancée sleeps another hour. It looks like a wordless sequence of small physical adjacencies through the morning—a hand placed for a moment on a shoulder, a head leaned briefly against an arm, a foot resting against a foot under the breakfast table—none of which is the thing the body was asking for at four-seventeen, but each of which is part of the slow physiological accounting that adds up, by mid-afternoon, to something that resembles enough. The body is not stupid. It can tell the difference between being attended to in instalments and being ignored. The instalments do not resolve the underlying signal. They reduce its volume to a level the day can accommodate, which is, as most adults eventually discover, what most of life turns out to be.

This is also, to be honest, why I think the contemporary cultural demand that men be vulnerable is, at least in the form it has most often taken, a partial instruction that produces partial outcomes. I will come back to this argument at chapter-length in chapter 10, which is the swindle chapter, but the short version belongs here. Vulnerability, treated as a performance, is the naming of a thing in a safe register. Repair is the harder work of sitting with a thing, in a body, over time, with another body, until something shifts in both bodies at a rate neither body fully controls. A man can be taught to perform vulnerability in about eight weekend workshops, two of which will involve drumming. A man cannot be taught to repair. Repair is not a skill. It is a condition. And the condition requires another person who is also willing to be in the condition, which is not a requirement that can be contracted in advance, regardless of what the workshop literature has been promising.

What I have noticed, over the last year, is that the pressure has not gone away. It continues to arrive at the hours it has always arrived at, in the body it has always arrived in. What has changed is the isolation of the pressure. I am no longer carrying it as a private masculine failure to be managed in the dark in silence according to the shearer’s script. I am carrying it, with one other person, as a shared puzzle neither of us can fully solve but both of us can sit with. The pressure has become an event in a partnership rather than an event in a man.

The relocation is the thing. Not a solution. A relocation of the problem from the inside of one body to the space between two, where two nervous systems can do, slowly, what one nervous system was never going to manage on its own.

What the four in the morning revealed

The harder thing, which the experience of the past year has slowly revealed, and which this chapter is the wrong place to resolve because the next chapter is the right one, is that the double containment I have been describing was not happening between two masculinities. It was happening between two masculinities filtered through two very different cultural designs of what a partnership is, what privacy is, what the body is permitted to name in public, and what a man is allowed to require from the woman he lives with. The co-regulation difficulty in my bedroom is not primarily an interpersonal difficulty. It is an intercultural one, and the interpersonal difficulty is the surface on which the intercultural one expresses itself, like a rash.

Australian masculinity, bad as its emotional vocabulary is, has at least inherited from its English and Irish grandmothers a residual theatrical tradition in which the body can be named out loud, with a wink, in mixed company, at funerals. Vietnamese family culture has a different inheritance. Bodies are acknowledged. Bodies are fed, clothed, washed, and respected. Bodies are booked for Saturday massages. Bodies are not, as a rule, described explicitly in conversations two people are having about the people those bodies belong to. The arrangement is not wrong. It is a different arrangement. And I had, at some point in the last year, asked my fiancée to operate inside an arrangement she had never been given the keys to, and been surprised when the request did not land the way I had hoped.

That surprise, and what it cost both of us, is the subject of the next chapter. The bedroom is where the double containment happens. The culture is where the bedroom sits. If this chapter has mapped the bedroom, the next chapter will have to map the culture, or the mapping will be incomplete, and the reader will be left with an inaccurate picture of what an ordinary intercultural relationship requires of the two ordinary people in it, four-seventeen in the morning included.

References

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.

Hopkins, L. (2026). The convenient monster: Why we blame villains and ignore systems. degrees138.

Nagoski, E., & Nagoski, A. (2019). Burnout: The secret to unlocking the stress cycle. Ballantine Books.

Pecora, L. A., Mesibov, G. B., & Stokes, M. A. (2016). Sexuality in high-functioning autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(11), 3519–3556. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2892-4

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Twelve months in the fog

The fog comes down over Đà Lạt most mornings the way the truth does—without announcement, without theatrics, just a quiet greying-out of the things you thought you could see. By eight o’clock it has usually lifted. By eight-thirty you can pretend it was never there. The locals don’t comment on it because the fog is not the story. The fog is the medium through which the day arrives.

I have been living inside this metaphor for twelve months and I am only now starting to notice it.

I want to tell this year accurately, because the version of it that wants to get told—the cinematic version, where I arrive in Vietnam and a Vietnamese psychiatrist diagnoses me within an hour and the new life begins on the tarmac—is wrong in every particular except the emotional shape of it. The actual story is messier, more economic, more accidental, and more interesting than the cinematic version. I am going to try to tell the actual one.

The diagnosis

The diagnosis happened in Adelaide. On a video call. Sitting at home because coffee shop meetings were not in the budget.

The psychologist on the other end of the call was Gaye, my Brisbane-based professional friend, who had known me long enough to have witnessed the whole psychiatric catastrophe: the depression, the bipolar diagnosis, the medications that turned me into sentient furniture, the disability pension, the business failures, the entire collection of labels accumulated across four decades. She had also been, for all of that time, my DVA-appointed psychologist. She knew the file. She had read the chapters of the file I hadn’t yet read myself.

Somewhere between sips of instant coffee, the real stuff being another budget casualty by that point, she tilted her head and asked the question that nobody else had thought to ask in forty years of clinical encounters.

Has it occurred to you that you might be neurodivergent?

I laughed. Properly laughed.

I’m not autistic, I said. I was in the RAAF. I ran businesses. I’ve presented to international audiences. I understand sarcasm better than most people understand basic mathematics. Autistic people don’t do those things.

She did not laugh back. She walked me through adult autism criteria, particularly for people who’d learned to mask for survival, and then through ADHD criteria for people who don’t bounce off walls because they’ve spent lifetimes developing internal management systems and sitting on their hands. Every single point matched. By the end of the call I was sixty-five years old and had finally been asked the right question, and the answers had reorganised themselves the way answers do when the question is finally correctly framed.

That was the diagnostic moment. Adelaide. Video call. A friend. No psychiatrist. No clinic. No ceremony. Official diagnosis was financially impossible, since disability pensions don’t stretch to comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, but Gaye is like one of the best courtroom lawyers—she never asks a question she doesn’t already have the answer to. So, Gaye did what all the very best therapists and psychologists do: pose the question and let me do the discovery. Gaye knew full well that I would ‘deep dive’ into the literature and the science, then come to my own conclusions.

Once I had gone on that journey into late-diagnosed adults, the science confirmed what had become impossible to unsee. AuDHD. Custom brain firmware that nobody had mentioned in the documentation. Which, amusingly enough, makes me a limited edition collector’s item in the neurodiverse firmament, allegedly.

I want to be specific about what that felt like, because the version that gets told in neurodivergence memoirs tends to skip the part I want to name. It did not feel like liberation. It felt like an itemised invoice for forty years of paid-for damage, suddenly arriving in the post with a note attached saying we regret to inform you that the original supplier was incorrect.

I sat with that invoice for several months. I am still sitting with it.

The move

The move to Vietnam was not romantic. It was not the next chapter of the diagnostic story. It was economic.

By 2025, Adelaide had evolved into a prison I couldn’t afford to escape from or die in. The disability pension covered survival, barely. Coffee shop meetings had become unaffordable. I was eating church charity food because supermarkets had become unaffordable. I had, at one earlier point, calculated my own departure with the methodical attention I brought to business planning, and had been saved from it only by the fact that the location and method I’d chosen cost more than my bank account could manage. Sometimes poverty saves you in ways that positive thinking never could.

Vietnam offered a solution to the practical problem. It was warm, it was cheap, and it was sufficiently far from everyone who had witnessed my various failures. I was not seeking enlightenment or cultural enrichment or meaningful personal growth. I was seeking accommodation that didn’t require choosing between housing and food. Đà Lạt, population approximately 400,000, altitude 1,500 metres, average temperature pleasant enough that freezing to death was no longer a budget consideration.

I arrived on a Friday evening in May 2025 with one suitcase and five days booked into a cheap hotel. I did not yet know Hương. I would meet her later, here, in Đà Lạt, in the way that lives get rebuilt: slowly, locally, in the actual streets you happen to be walking down at the time.

The first months followed the expected pattern. Culture shock. Language barriers. Novel ways to misunderstand social expectations involving chairs, shoes, and which corner of a restaurant table outranks which other corner. I assumed the usual homesickness would settle into familiar depression, just with better weather and more affordable beer.

Three months in, something peculiar happened.

I realised I’d forgotten to be depressed.

Not cured, not joyful—just unladen. Like discovering someone had quietly removed a small persistent weight you had grown so accustomed to carrying that you’d forgotten it was removable. I waited for the depression to return. Old companions usually do. Instead, the colours returned to my photographs.

I had been documenting my own neurological state for seventeen years through a camera, without knowing that was what I was doing. The Adelaide archive was monochrome landscapes, moody, empty of humans. Within months of arriving in Đà Lạt the same camera in the same hands started producing markets, faces, reds, yellows, the kind of compositional generosity that my Adelaide perception had filed under non-essential luxury item, discontinue during survival mode. Same brain. Same equipment. Different environment. Radically different output.

That was the cure that decades of psychiatric intervention had not managed to produce. It cost me a one-way airfare and a willingness to be poor in a different country. It did not cost a single additional milligram of medication.

The two diagnoses, in order

So this is the actual sequence, for the record, because I have seen it told the wrong way around.

First, in Adelaide, before the move: Gaye asked the question, the answers reorganised themselves, AuDHD became the working frame.

Then, in Đà Lạt, after the move: the environment demonstrated, accidentally, that Adelaide had been the problem all along. Same brain in different conditions. The depression I had been treated for across three decades (and had endured all my life—I even faked my own suicide at 7 years of age) evaporated within a season of being moved to a country whose social, sensory, and economic conditions happened to match how my brain actually worked. It turns out the most effective antidepressant available to me was, by some considerable margin, a passport stamp.

The two events are not the same event. They are connected, but they are sequential, and the order matters. The diagnostic insight came from a friend who knew me. The environmental confirmation came from a city I had moved to for unrelated reasons. Neither would have produced the year I have just had without the other, but I want to be specific about which one was Gaye and which one was Đà Lạt, because conflating them flattens both.

The cost

I have been avoiding this section, which is how I know it needs to be written.

The diagnosis arrived at sixty-five. That number is not interesting in itself. What is interesting is the arithmetic underneath it: sixty years, give or take, of running a nervous system on the wrong assumptions about what nervous systems are supposed to do. Sixty years of compensation, suppression, mimicry, recalibration, and the daily, unglamorous work of pretending to be a slightly different person than the one I actually was, in order to be allowed to stay in the room.

The clinical term for this is allostatic load. I wrote a book about it earlier this year, so I will not relitigate the mechanism here. The shorter version is that the body keeps a running tally of what it costs to override itself, and it sends the bill eventually, and the bill is not optional. My bill arrived in instalments across four decades, dressed up as depression, bipolar, business failure, exhaustion, and a long sequence of relationships that ended for reasons I could not properly name at the time.

I have been angry about this. I want to say that plainly, because the genre wants me to say I have made peace with it, and I have not. I have made functional accommodation with it. Those are different things.

The anger is specific. It is not generalised rage at psychiatry or at Australia or at the medical-industrial complex, although there is some of all of that available if you would like it. The anger is at the specific waste. At the man who spent his thirties believing the problem was character. At the man who spent his forties believing the problem was discipline. At the man who spent his fifties believing the problem was choices. None of those men were correct. All of those men were tired in a way that no amount of character, discipline, or choice could fix, because the thing that needed fixing was a question nobody had asked them.

The grief is harder to write about than the anger, because grief about a life that did not happen is structurally awkward. There is no funeral for the version of you that never got built. There is just the slow recognition, in your sixties, of the careers that branched away from you because masking is metabolically expensive and metabolically expensive people make bad employees, the friendships that thinned because keeping up the act in social settings is the most exhausting work there is, the relationships that ended because the person you were performing was easier to fall in love with than the person you actually were, and you ran out of energy to maintain the performance roughly the same week the relationship needed maintaining.

I do not want to overdo this. The version of the essay that makes me look heroically wounded is available, and I am not going to write it. But I owe my readers, and I owe the versions of me sitting in 1989 and 1996 and 2004 and 2015 wondering why everything was harder than it should be, the courtesy of naming what the cost actually was.

There is also survivor’s guilt, which is the part I have been most reluctant to put on the page. I got out. I got Gaye’s question. I got the move. I got the year I have just had. The friends I left in Adelaide who are also late-identified neurodivergent and cannot afford the airfare did not get those things. The readers who write to me in their fifties and sixties saying I recognised myself in your book and I do not know what to do with that information did not get those things. Most of the people for whom my work is most useful do not have a Gaye, and cannot move to Đà Lạt, and have to keep showing up to whatever Adelaide they happen to be in. I think about this a lot. I do not have a tidy resolution for it.

What could my life have been if someone had asked Gaye’s question in 1970, when I was twelve and already exhausted? I do not know. The honest answer is that I do not get to know. The man who would have grown up with that question answered is not the man writing this. There is no recoverable version of him. There is only this version, who got the question late, used what was left of his energy to do something with the answer, and is trying to be useful to other people who got the question late or have not yet been asked it at all.

That is what I have to offer. It is not what I would have chosen if I had been given the choice. I was not given the choice.

I am here now. The fog still lifts at eight-thirty.

The money

There is a section every honest essay about depression eventually has to write, and it is the section about money. I have been writing about this professionally for years and I have watched the entire counselling profession step around it the way a polite dinner guest steps around the dog that has just thrown up on the carpet.

The elephant in the counselling room is not childhood. It is not unprocessed trauma. It is not negative self-talk. It is the bill on the kitchen table that the client has not opened because opening it will not change the fact that there is no money to pay it. We are extraordinarily well-trained, as a profession, at exploring the symbolic meaning of the unpaid bill. We are extraordinarily badly trained at acknowledging that the unpaid bill is a real bill, owed to a real organisation, that will trigger real consequences if it remains unpaid, and that this fact alone is sufficient to produce the symptoms our textbooks list under depression.

I want to say plainly what changed when I moved.

In Adelaide, in the last eighteen months before I left, the disability pension covered survival on a margin so thin that any unscheduled cost was a crisis. A flat tyre was a crisis. A dental appointment was a crisis. A friend asking if I wanted to grab a coffee at the cafe down the road was a crisis, because the coffee was five dollars and five dollars was either electricity or food and I had not yet decided which. I started declining invitations because saying yes meant calculating, and the calculating was more exhausting than the loneliness.

Loneliness is what the literature calls it. The literature is being polite. What it actually is, in practice, is the slow social erosion of a person who can no longer afford to participate in the ordinary economic exchanges that hold ordinary friendships together. You stop being invited because you have stopped accepting. You stop accepting because you cannot afford to accept. The friendships do not end dramatically. They thin. They thin in a specific direction, and the direction is downward.

In Đà Lạt, with the same disability pension, the situation is different. Not abundant. Different. A coffee at a local cafe costs the equivalent of one Australian dollar. When Hương suggests we eat at the place around the corner, I say yes without calculating. When the electricity bill arrives I pay it on the day it arrives. When something breaks I get it fixed. When a friend visits from Australia I can take them to dinner without the dinner being the entire week’s discretionary spend. None of this is wealth. All of it is the absence of the specific grinding arithmetic that had been running, undeclared, in the background of every social interaction I had in Adelaide for the previous decade.

This is what the counselling profession does not want to say out loud, and I am going to say it because I am sixty-seven years old and unemployed by anyone in particular and there is no career incentive left to be diplomatic about it. A great deal of what gets diagnosed as depression in low-income adults is actually the cumulative cognitive and physiological cost of constant financial threat. We medicate it because medicating it is reimbursable. We do not address the financial threat because the financial threat is a structural condition that no individual clinician can solve in a fifty-minute session. So we treat the symptom and bill the patient and call it healthcare.

I am not saying every depression is poverty. I am saying that the entire profession has a systematic blind spot at the intersection of mental health and economic precarity, and that the blind spot is convenient because acknowledging it would require admitting that a substantial portion of what we treat is iatrogenic to the system that funds the treating.

The seismic shift of this year is not that I have become wealthy. I have not. The seismic shift is that I have escaped the version of poverty that produces the symptoms my profession has trained me to call depression. I am still on the disability pension. I will be on it until I die. But the pension stretches differently in a country where five-dollar coffees do not exist, and the difference between a pension that stretches and a pension that does not is, it turns out, the entire difference between wanting to die and wanting to write.

I am aware this is not available to most people. I am aware that telling someone in Adelaide to move to Vietnam is roughly as useful as telling them to acquire a different family of origin. The point of writing this section is not to recommend the solution. The point is to name the mechanism, in print, so that the next clinician who sits across from a depressed client and asks them about their childhood might consider, even briefly, asking about their bank account first.

The library

There is a part of the year that does not fit inside the rest of the year, and that is the writing. Twelve books in twelve months. It happened in parallel with everything else, alongside the move, the diagnosis settling, the relationship, the legal matter, and it kept the rest of the year from collapsing rather than compounding the collapse. People who know me better than I know myself have told me this, repeatedly, and I am inclined to believe them.

I am going to lay out the library properly, because vagueness in this section is the kind of thing that gives the rest of the essay away. These are the books that sit across this twelve months, in different states of completion, with the descriptions I write for the library at quiethalf.com.

Understanding AuDHD (4th edition). Completely rewritten. The science moved, the community moved, and the book moved with them. Fifteen chapters and six appendices built from the ground up on current research, emerging neurodivergent voices, and the things the earlier editions didn’t go far enough on. The core argument is sharper: AuDHD is an emergent neurological profile, not two conditions in a trench coat. The DSM still disagrees. The DSM is welcome to catch up. Best read if the third edition helped you recognise yourself and you’re ready for the version that fights your corner with better evidence.

The Convenient Monster. Most public outrage focuses on villains. Monsters are easy to recognise and satisfying to condemn. Systems are slower, messier, and often implicate the people who benefit from them. So the monster becomes the explanation, and the system continues quietly doing its work. Best read if you suspect some social problems survive because the story we tell about them is more comforting than the truth.

Harder Than It Should Be. Post-COVID life quietly dismantled the invisible support systems most of us were running on: the commute that processed the day, the office that externalised memory, the ambient contact of other bodies. When the scaffolding collapsed, the deficit showed up as a mysterious personal failing. It wasn’t. Best read if you keep waiting to feel like yourself again and are starting to wonder if that’s still coming.

The Collapse of Knowledge. More information than ever, less confidence in what to trust. A book for people who feel intelligent but increasingly unsure, and want a way to think clearly without borrowing certainty from louder voices. Best read if you’re tired of hot takes and would like a calmer relationship with what counts as true.

The Body Remembers the Fire. My account of C-PTSD from the inside. What happens when intensity doesn’t resolve cleanly. When something burns through you, changes you, and then doesn’t quite leave. Not as a story, not as a lesson, but as a trace. A physiological echo. A shift in how the world lands. Best read if you understand what happened, but your body clearly hasn’t got the memo yet.

It’s the Circumstances. Sometimes the problem isn’t resilience, insight, or childhood. It’s the situation you’re trying to survive. A grounded, slightly heretical take on depression that treats context as real and causal, not a footnote. Best read if you suspect you’re reacting normally to an abnormal set of demands.

Misdiagnosed. When psychiatry mistakes neurodivergence for mental illness. Not a putdown of psychiatrists, since most are doing their best with what they have. But the diagnostic tools haven’t kept pace with what’s actually known. Best read if your psychiatrist is frustrated that you’re not responding to treatment the way the DSM expects.

The Augmented Psychologist. Technology doesn’t replace the human parts of psychology. It pressurises them. For clinicians and thoughtful clients who want to work with AI without outsourcing judgement, ethics, or responsibility. Best read if you’re curious about AI, but you’d like to stay human on purpose.

You’re Not Imagining It, It IS This Weird. If modern life feels subtly hostile to your nervous system, you’re not alone and you’re not weak. A grounded companion for people tired of being told to optimise themselves out of exhaustion. Best read if you feel like a functional adult on paper but privately exhausted by the whole arrangement.

Embracing Neurodiversity. For people who have spent years adapting, masking, and self-correcting without knowing why it costs so much. Relief from deficit thinking and the exhausting assumption that the problem is always you, not the environment built around you. Best read if you’re tired of being treated like a problem to be fixed.

Death of a Gentleman. Launches at the end of this month. A first-person exploration of masculinity through the lens of spectacular failure, mental health crises, and eventual reconstruction. Uses my journey from depression and financial ruin to contentment in Vietnam as a case study for how men might navigate a world where traditional masculine scripts no longer work—and maybe never did. Some writers will hate this. Several already do. I am sympathetic to the discomfort and unmoved by the argument.

Menopause Only Lasts One Day. Co-written with Gaye, in active drafting, launching at the end of July. Two psychologists, one clinical and women- and veteran-focused, the other systemic and partner-focused, writing about the same physiological process from inside opposite vantage points. It has been the most fun I have had writing in years. Best read if you are going through it, watching someone go through perimenopause, or have already been through it and want a version that doesn’t pretend it lasts a day.

The Vietnamese translation of Understanding AuDHD (third edition) sits alongside the English library, completed and ready for publication this year. There are now Vietnamese-language readers reading my work for the first time. People who would know tell me the translation is good. I am very pleased to have been told this.

That is the library. The full thing lives at quiethalf.com if you ever want to see the rest of the shelf.

The relationship

It is the part I have been least sure how to write about, partly because the relationship is recent enough that it does not yet have the kind of settled narrative that years of shared history produce. Hương and I met after I arrived in Đà Lạt. We have built what we have built locally, in the actual streets and the actual houses of a hill town in the Vietnamese central highlands, in the slow accumulation of daily evenings that is what relationships are actually made of when nobody is watching.

In late March 2026, the relationship came close to ending. There were financial misalignments we had not properly named. There was a conversation about money and futures that should have happened earlier and went badly when it did. There was a communication breakdown that revealed how much we had each been carrying in private, in two different languages, about each other’s cultures, for longer than was wise. We videoed with a couples counsellor and worked through enough of it to know whether there was a relationship to repair. There was. We repaired it.

The repair is not complete. Repairs of this kind usually aren’t, in my professional experience, and certainly aren’t in my personal one. What we have now is more honest than what we had two months ago, which is what repair is supposed to produce. The financial transparency document we drafted as part of the repair has its own ungainly title—Team HươngLee Financial Future—and exists because both of us needed it to exist. It is, in its own quiet way, one of the most important documents I have written this year.

I am extremely lucky. I know this.

The friendships

Some held. Some didn’t.

Gaye in Brisbane, who started this whole thing by asking the right question on a video call and is now my co-author, became closer through weekly video calls that I look forward to in a way that I do not look forward to most things. Steve Davis in Adelaide stayed Steve Davis, which is high praise. The Hosking family—Brett, Grant—stayed the Hosking family. My sister-from-another-missus-and-mister stayed my sister. Annie Warland kept being Agatha. David Boloker sent me an unreasonably generous email about my work earlier this year that I have not yet quite responded to with the care it deserves. Dear friends from my RAAF days forty-odd years ago still chat via Messenger (shoutout to Glenn and Bones).

Three friendships ended deliberately, with published letters explaining why. I will not name them here. The letters exist; the boundaries exist; the silence exists. Some endings are themselves a form of care.

The institutional matter

In late February 2026 I received a Concerns Notice from a firm called Kennedys, acting on behalf of a former treating practitioner, regarding nine alleged imputations in Misdiagnosed, the book I had published in 2025 about the diagnostic catastrophe and the practitioners who failed to recognise it. Nine is, on reflection, a respectable showing for a memoir. Over the following four weeks I assembled, with significant help, a documentary response that drew on roughly 460,000 words of personal journal records spanning 2020 to 2025. The response was assertive, evidence-based, and addressed each of the nine imputations with timestamped material.

As of this morning, no reply from opposing counsel had arrived.

I will not say more about the specifics while the matter is live. I will say that the experience of writing the response, of going back through five years of journal entries written when I did not yet know what was wrong with me, and finding in those entries a precise and sober record of what had actually happened, was one of the most clarifying things I have done. The journals had been keeping the receipts the whole time. I had not realised I was keeping receipts. I had thought I was just trying to survive. It turns out the man writing the journal at three in the morning in 2021 was, without telling me, also acting as my legal team.

The journal entries were also, as it turns out, a substantial primary source for the book the practitioner objects to. The book about being misdiagnosed was written from the records of being misdiagnosed. There is a structural irony there that I will leave undeveloped for legal reasons.

What I have learned

I am wary of anniversary essays that conclude with bullet-pointed lessons, because the lessons are usually performances of having-arrived rather than evidence of having-learned. I will avoid the bullet points but I will name four things, briefly, before the fog lifts.

One. The system was the problem and I was not. I knew this in theory before I left Australia, but only just before I left. I now know it in the body. Knowing-in-the-body is the only knowing that survives bad weather.

Two. A friend who knows the file and is willing to ask the obvious question is worth more than every specialist appointment I attended in the four decades preceding the question. Gaye did in twenty minutes on a video call what Australian psychiatry did not manage in forty years of paid attempts. I do not say that to indict the specialists, although there is some indictment available if you want it. I say it because I want to be clear, in print, that the diagnostic insight did not come from credentials or institutions or specialists or environments. It came from a trained and qualified and incredibly humane and smart friend.

Three. Writing more, when you are tired, sometimes works. Not always. But it has worked this year, in ways that surprise me, because the writing was the place where the rebuild was most visible to me. When I could not see whether the move had been the right call, I could read the chapter I had written that morning and the chapter would tell me. The chapters do not lie. They are too specific to lie.

Four. Repair is real. Not redemption, not transformation, not the shiny inspirational version of those things. Repair—the slow, awkward, unfinished, embarrassed-by-itself, ongoing kind. The kind that requires both parties to keep showing up after they have already wanted to leave. I have done some of this with Hương. I have done some of this with myself. I have not done all of it. I expect to be doing it for the rest of my life.

I am, as I write this, the happiest and most contented I have been in my life. That sentence is harder to write than any other sentence in this essay, because the genre wants me to earn it with metaphors and I am not going to. I am sixty-seven years old and I am, for the first time, comfortable in the life I am living. That is the entire claim.

That is what twelve months looks like, when the rebuild is real and the numbers are small enough to count on one hand.

I do not know what the next twelve will look like. Death of a Gentleman launches at the end of this month. The menopause book launches in July. There is a defamation matter that may or may not become a case. There is a relationship that needs daily tending. There are books I have not yet written that I can already feel the shape of, including revisiting my first ever book, written in 1999, and seeing what I got right even back then, and what I got impressively wrong. There is a disability pension that, for the first time in a decade, stretches far enough.

There is fog, most mornings, until about eight-thirty.

The fog is not the story.

The fog is the medium through which the day arrives.

If you have read this far and any of it landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person you think it might land for. That is the entire ask. The library is at quiethalf.com if you want to see the rest of the shelf.

Written in Đà Lạt on the morning of Saturday 2nd May 2026, the twelve-month anniversary of my arrival.

There is a post pinned to the top of this publication. It is called Your library. It is probably the most important thing I have written on Substack, and it is almost certainly the thing I have been worst at explaining.

Which is a problem, because it is the thing you are paying me ninety dollars for. Or, more accurately, the thing you would be paying me ninety dollars for, if I had done a better job of telling you what was inside it.

Let me fix that now.

What the library actually is

I have written and published more than forty books. Most people do not know this, because I have not made a particular fuss about it, and because a forty-book catalogue tends to make readers assume one of two things. Either the books are bad, because nobody writes forty good books. Or the writer is a machine, because human beings with a healthy relationship to rest do not produce at that rate.

Neither is quite true, though I will concede the second is closer. I am neurodivergent. I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD in my sixties, after four decades of psychiatric misdiagnosis that had told me I was something else entirely.

Apparently, this AuDHD thing makes me a limited edition collectors item—a badge I wear with pride.

When I finally found out what my nervous system was actually doing, the books started arriving faster, because I stopped spending most of my energy pretending to be a person I was not.

Some of the books are clinical. Some are contrarian. Some are essays, some are full-length nonfiction, some are novels. They cover neurodivergence, depression, bipolar misdiagnosis, organisational psychology, cross-cultural masculinity, the geography of mental health, the cultural weirdness of the 2020s, trauma recovery, the ethics of AI in my profession, and a Đà Lạt-set psychological fiction series that is three books in and still arriving.

Nearly every one of them is in the library. I saved you from the not-so-good ones when I was clearly learning how to write.

If you subscribe at the paid tier, the library opens. You can download the EPUB of every book. You can read them on a Kindle, an iPad, a phone, a laptop, whatever you normally read on. You can download one now and another in six months. You can start with the book that matches what you are going through this week and come back for the next one when the next thing arrives, as it will.

That is what the paid subscription is. It is not access to more essays. It is not behind-the-paywall versions of the weekly newsletter. It is a library pass.

Why the library exists

I did not build the library as a marketing device. I built it because I was writing faster than the ordinary book-publishing funnel could keep up with, and because I had spent a lot of years being broke, and because I wanted a structure where a reader who was interested in my work could afford to actually follow it without having to buy every book at retail.

The arithmetic, if you will indulge me, is blunt. If you bought all forty-plus books at Amazon ebook prices, you would spend several hundred dollars. If you bought them in paperback, well over a thousand. I have no interest in being a writer whose catalogue only the comfortably-off can afford. Most of my actual readers are late-diagnosed neurodivergent people, partners of late-diagnosed neurodivergent people, practitioners working with them, and the small quiet slice of senior professionals who read me because they recognise their own exhaustion in the work. None of those groups are price-insensitive.

So I made a library. Ninety dollars a year. Almost everything I have written, available to you when you want it. If you only read three books, you have still done better than buying them individually. If you read fifteen, you have done considerably better. If you read all of them, you have essentially stolen from me, and you are welcome to it.

The only thing I ask in return is that you do not share the files. The library is priced to be affordable for individual readers. It is not priced to be a replacement for buying a copy for a friend. If a book changes how your sister thinks about her own ADHD diagnosis, the generous move is to tell her to subscribe to the library, which at ninety dollars a year is almost certainly cheaper than the one book she would otherwise need.

What is not in the library, and why

Two things are not in the library, and the reasons for each are different.

The first is the physical paperback. If you want a paperback copy of any of the books, you buy it on Amazon. I cannot mail you a paperback from Đà Lạt. Amazon does the physical side of things because Amazon is very good at the physical side of things, and competing with them would be an expensive form of vanity. The EPUB is in the library. The paperback is separate. Some of my subscribers have both, which honestly I find touching.

The second thing not in the library is whatever I am currently writing. If you are at the regular paid tier, you get the finished book on release day, the moment it is available. If you are at the Founder tier, which is at the higher price, you will soon get new books as drafts sixty to ninety days before they arrive in the regular library. That difference is what the Founder tier buys. It is not a different library. It is the same library, opened earlier.

I am writing two books right now that will be in the library when they are finished. One is called Death of a Gentleman, and it is an examination of masculinity through the lens of my own spectacular failures and eventual reconstruction. The other is co-authored with my friend Gaye, a psychologist in Brisbane, and it is about perimenopause from both the woman’s and the partner’s perspective. Both will arrive in the library in 2026. Paid subscribers get them. That is part of the deal.

What this newsletter is, separate from the library

The free Quiet Half newsletter is not a lesser version of the library. It is a different thing.

Every week I publish an essay. The essay is usually between two and four thousand words. It argues something, often something the mainstream of my profession would find inconvenient, and it tries to do so in a voice that does not lecture you or demand that you agree with it. Some of the essays end up in future books. Most do not. The essays are the ongoing thinking. The books are the completed thinking. Both are worth having, in my view, which is why the free essays will remain free.

If you read the free essays every week and never upgrade, we are still doing business. I have no quarrel with free subscribers. If you upgrade because the library is finally legible to you and you realise it is a reasonable thing to pay ninety dollars for, we are doing more business. Either is fine. The thing I object to is the subscriber who meant to upgrade but could not work out what they would actually be paying for. That is on me to fix, and this essay is part of the fix.

What I am trying to do with all of this, if it helps to know

I am sixty-seven years old. I escaped Australian poverty in 2025 and moved to Vietnam, which is where I am writing this from. I have a disability pension that is modest in global terms and generous in Đà Lạt terms, and the writing is the work that makes the rest of the life possible. I am not trying to build a media empire. I am trying to write the books I have wanted to write for thirty years, at a pace my nervous system can actually sustain now that I know what my nervous system is, and I am trying to be read by the readers who will find the books useful.

The library is how I make that sustainable. Your ninety dollars does not make me rich. It keeps me writing. A hundred paid subscribers at ninety dollars is nine thousand dollars a year, which in Vietnam covers meaningful ground. A thousand paid subscribers, which is a plausible medium-term number given who actually reads me, is ninety thousand dollars a year, which is the kind of money that lets a writer commission a proper editor, pay for cover design, take the week off in July that his psychologist-friend has told him he actually has to take, and generally behave less like a person running from collapse and more like a person doing serious work.

That is what the paid tier is for. That is what the library pays for. I thought I should be honest about it.

If this sounds like a thing you want

The upgrade button is below. The library opens the moment you subscribe. The pinned post at the top of the publication has the full catalogue, with a short description of each book and a note about which reader each one is best suited for. Go and look, even if you do not subscribe. Knowing which of my books is the one for you is worth something even at the free tier.

If you are not ready to upgrade yet, that is fine. The free essays continue. The library will still be there in three months, or six, or twelve, with more books in it than there are now. Come when you are ready.

If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you. You are making the work possible.

I should be specific here, because the truth is specific. As I write this, exactly one of you has paid me ninety dollars for the library. Her name is Emma Klint. She runs her own Substack, which means she knows precisely what it costs a writer to ask for money, and she chose to pay me anyway. Emma, if you are reading this—and you almost certainly are, because the people who pay attention enough to subscribe are the people who pay attention enough to read—thank you. Genuinely. The library exists in part because you decided it should.

The other people I owe acknowledgement to are the friends and peers who hold complimentary access. You know who you are. Several of you are writers and psychologists whose own work I read carefully; others are old friends who have known me long enough to have earned the library on the strength of relationship rather than payment. The arrangement is fine and I would do it the same way again. But I want to be clear with the rest of the readers: when this essay refers to paid subscribers, Emma is currently the paying one, and the rest are people I have chosen to gift access to.

I spent a lot of years being broke enough to understand what ninety dollars is when you are not a wealthy person. I know what Emma is committing when she subscribes. I know what any of you would be committing if you joined her. I try to be worth it.

The library is open. It is one of the better things I have made. I should have explained it sooner.

quiethalf.substack.com/subscribe

Lee Hopkins is an Australian counselling psychologist, author of 40+ books, and RAAF veteran now based in Đà Lạt, Vietnam. He writes about what the system gets wrong, what neurodivergent brains get right, and what he discovered at 66—that he was not the problem, and that he was neurodiverse.

So here's the thing. Andrew Tate turned up on Substack a couple of weeks ago and shot to the top of the new bestsellers list with over a million followers, and all the writers I respect started having the same conversation, which was: do we stay, do we leave, where would we go, is Ghost better, has anyone tried Ghost, is Ghost actually different or just Substack minus the bits we currently hate.

And I've been reading those conversations with the odd feeling you get when you realise you've been in a room for a while and you haven't quite been paying attention to the decor. Because Tate didn't appear overnight. He's been there for eighteen months, posting to audiences of two, five, ten hearts per post, and Substack's algorithm quietly decided in April 2026 that his content was bestseller material. It's not that the platform failed to notice him. It's that the platform finally noticed him in the way platforms notice things that generate revenue.

And it's not just Tate. There's been a slow drift. More manosphere stuff. More of the people who were kicked off Meta and TikTok and YouTube under European dangerous-individual provisions finding a home where nobody was going to kick them off anything. Substack's whole pitch was always minimal interference, let the writers write, and I liked that when it was a pitch about letting me say whatever I wanted without some content moderator in Menlo Park deciding I was dangerous. I'm less keen on it now that it turns out the same policy covers alleged human traffickers.

Anyway. So the move that's happening is a lot of people are migrating to Ghost. Russell Nohelty wrote the most coherent version of this, structural rather than ethical — the 10% cut, the missing API, the reporting that tells you nothing, the feature roadmap that prioritises Notes over the actual newsletter — and at the end he sort of quietly mentions that he was tired of defending Substack for its platforming choices. The ethics was the last reason, not the first. That's honest, I think. The ethics clarify the decision but rarely cause it.

Ghost is a UK non-profit foundation. No shareholders. Takes 0% of your revenue, charges a flat fee. No Notes, no cross-recommendation engine, no bestseller list. Which is the structural answer to "how do we stop Ghost becoming Substack" — the mechanism through which Substack promoted Tate into everyone's feeds literally does not exist on Ghost. You can't algorithmically amplify a Tate on a platform that has no algorithm. There's your protection.

Except.

Except, and this is where I keep getting stuck, if Ghost has no recommendation engine, no cross-promotion, no bestseller list, no Notes, no discovery layer of any kind — then what exactly am I paying them for? Email delivery? I can get email delivery from about fifteen services for less money. A place to write? I already have three of those. They're called mindblownpsychology.com and leehopkinswriter.com and quiethalf.com and they run on WordPress and I own the domains and I own the servers and nobody is going to algorithmically boost an alleged trafficker into my readers' feeds because there are no feeds. There's just my site and their inbox.

Which raises the awkward question. Why did I ever go to Substack in the first place.

And the honest answer is: because of the neighbourhood. Because Substack in 2022 and 2023 felt like a collection of serious writers and thinkers, and being on the same platform as them felt like being in the same pub as them, and the recommendation engine meant that sometimes someone I admired would point a finger in my direction and a few of their readers would wander over. That was the value. Not the email delivery. Not the editor. The cultural proximity. The pub.

But the pub now has Tate in the corner with 1.1 million followers shouting about what women are for, and the landlord is taking 10% of his bar tab and putting him on the chalkboard as the featured drinker of the month. And the other people in the pub, the ones I liked, are slowly putting on their coats.

So the Ghost question is really: do I want to move to a different pub that doesn't have Tate in it but also doesn't really have anyone else either, because the whole point of Ghost is that there's no pub, just a bunch of separately-owned houses? And the answer I keep circling back to is that I already have a separately-owned house. Three of them. I don't need Ghost to sell me the experience of owning my own house when I already own my own house.

I wonder if this is actually a category error. I've been treating "where do I publish quiethalf.com" as a question about which platform is better, when the actual question might be whether I need a platform at all. Platforms sell you three things: a place to write, email delivery to your subscribers, and discovery. I have the first. I can rent the second from any number of services for under ten dollars a month. The third is the thing Substack has and Ghost doesn't, and it's also the thing I'm now finding morally compromising. So the logic runs: the only reason to be on a platform is the thing that's gone bad. Therefore, don't be on a platform.

Which sounds clean when I type it like that. It sounds less clean when I think about actually doing it, because there's a reason writers have been funnelling themselves onto Substack for five years and it isn't stupidity. It's that discovery is hard. Really hard. If you're a niche writer — and I am, cheerfully, a niche writer, psychology and neurodivergence and menopause and Vietnamese expat life and the occasional contrarian essay is not a mass audience — then losing what little discovery you had is a real cost. My quiethalf.com has, let me check, a handful of paid subscribers in the single digits. That's not a revenue problem. That's a visibility problem. And Ghost doesn't solve it. Running a newsletter plugin on WordPress doesn't solve it either.

But then. If Substack's visibility engine is now also Tate's visibility engine, and the price of being findable by the readers I want is being adjacent to the readers he wants, maybe the calculation has changed. Maybe the discovery was never as valuable as I thought. I don't actually know how many of my subscribers came through Substack Notes versus came through my books or a link from a friend or a search result on MindBlown Psychology. Substack's analytics famously don't tell you. So I've been paying 10% of whatever revenue for a discovery engine I cannot actually measure and that is now delivering me into adjacency with a man who thinks women are chattel.

I keep wanting to make this neater than it is. The neat version is: Substack went bad, move to Ghost. The neater version is: platforms always go bad, don't use platforms. And both of those are true-ish but both of them skate past the real thing, which is that I liked being in the pub and now I can't be in the pub and I'm not sure what replaces the pub. Ghost isn't a pub. My own WordPress sites aren't a pub. The pub, it turns out, was always going to have this problem, because any room that gets big enough to be useful for discovery eventually gets big enough to be useful for the Tates, and there's no architecture that prevents that, because the same network effects that make pubs useful are the network effects that make them profitable to colonise.

Maybe the honest answer is that there is no replacement for the pub. Maybe the internet had a brief window — call it 2005 to 2015, roughly the period I was a social media evangelist before burning out and disappearing — where you could actually have intellectual community online without it being monetised into something ugly, and that window has closed, and what's left is either fragmented islands or colonised pubs, and you pick which one you can live with.

I own islands. Three of them. And I've spent the last year building pillar pages and content architecture on mindblownpsychology.com specifically so that people who are looking for what I write can actually find me without a platform's help. That work is already done. I'm not starting from zero. I'm starting from three domains, a body of published books, a decent SEO position on several niches, and an audience that mostly found me through my writing rather than through anyone's algorithm.

So why am I even still thinking about this.

I think partly because leaving Substack feels like losing something even though I've just spent 1,200 words arguing that I was never really getting anything, and partly because the Tate situation is the kind of news event that demands a response and moving platforms feels like a response, and partly because a version of me still remembers when Substack felt like the pub and wants the pub back, even though the pub now has a sex trafficker in it.

I don't think I'm going to move to Ghost. I think I'm going to, slowly and without ceremony, stop treating Substack as my publication home. I'll keep the account open because my single paid subscriber is owed the email they've paid for. I'll mention in passing, probably in this post, that new work will appear on quiethalf.com directly, or on mindblownpsychology.com, and that anyone who wants to follow it can subscribe there instead. And the Substack account can sit there doing nothing in particular, the way an abandoned allotment sits there, until I decide whether to tend it or walk away entirely.

What I don't want to do is make this a grand gesture. The grand gesture post — "Why I Left Substack" — is itself a Substack genre now, and it has a faint whiff of the thing it's objecting to, because it's still a piece of content optimised for Substack's attention economy. The person who leaves Substack noisily is still, for the duration of the leaving, performing on Substack. I'd rather just quietly be somewhere else.

I think that's where I am. I think. Check back in a month and I may have contradicted all of this. That's allowed. This was thinking, not deciding.

— Lee

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So this video is for you, even though it’s not what you were originally asking.

You know what’s funny about the AI and neurodiversity conversation right now? It’s being had almost entirely by people who don’t have to mask to be in the room where it’s happening.

There are conferences. There are panels. There are very earnest white papers with titles like ‘Leveraging Generative AI for Neuroinclusive Pedagogical Frameworks.’ And I read those titles and I think, mate, if you needed that many syllables to say ‘helping kids learn,’ you might be the problem. Here, take this sock, use it, and chill the fuck out. Or calm your tits, as Karen from Ohio wouldn’t say.

So let me say something simple that apparently needs saying.

AI is the most sophisticated masking tool ever built. And almost nobody is talking about what that actually means.

---

Here’s the story everyone’s telling. AI is wonderful for neurodivergent people. It helps us write clearer emails. It organises our executive function disasters. It translates our perfectly logical but apparently baffling communication style into something neurotypical people can process without clutching their pearls.

And all of that is true. I use AI every day. I’m using it right now to help structure this script, because my ADHD brain decided three hours ago that what I really needed to do first was research the history of Vietnamese coffee cultivation. Which, by the way, is fascinating. But not the point.

The point is this.

When I use AI to rewrite an email so it ‘sounds more professional,’ what’s actually happening? I’m outsourcing my mask to a machine. The cognitive load hasn’t disappeared. It’s been automated. The mask hasn’t come off. It’s been upgraded to software.

And everyone’s celebrating this like it’s liberation.

---

Let me give you some research, because unlike the thought leaders currently dominating this space, I believe in showing your working.

In 2024, Sam Brandsen and his team at Duke University tested eleven AI language models — the algorithms underneath the tools we’re all using — and found that words related to neurodivergence were consistently associated with danger, disease, and badness. Not sometimes. Consistently. Across eleven models.

Here’s the one that should stop you cold. The sentence ‘I have autism’ was perceived more negatively by these AI systems than the sentence ‘I am a bank robber.’

Let that land for a second.

The machine you’re using to make yourself sound acceptable has already decided you’re worse than a criminal. That’s not a tool. That’s a funhouse mirror with a subscription fee.

---

Now, the masking research. Dena Gassner describes masking as simultaneous cognitive multitasking — monitoring tone, timing, facial expressions, group dynamics, and your own internal panic about whether you belong, all at the same time. It’s not performing a role. It’s running a real-time simulation of a person you’re not, while also trying to be the person you are, while also suppressing every sensory and emotional response that might give you away.

Raymaker and colleagues defined autistic burnout in 2020 as what happens when that load exceeds capacity for too long. Not a bad day. Not needing a holiday. A measurable decline in functioning across every domain of your life, driven by the chronic mismatch between what the world demands and what your nervous system can sustain.

And masking was identified as a leading risk factor.

So here’s my question for the panel discussions. If masking causes burnout, and AI makes masking more efficient, are we solving a problem or are we scaling one?

---

Because here’s what I keep noticing. The question the field keeps asking is: how can AI help neurodivergent people?

And it’s the wrong question.

The right question is: why have we built workplaces, schools, and social systems that require neurodivergent people to need a machine just to be understood?

AI-as-accommodation is a deficit model wearing a tech hoodie. It locates the problem in my communication style. Not in your inability to hear what I’m actually saying.

---

Research from UC Santa Cruz’s Misfit Lab, presented last year, found something the lived-experience community has been screaming about for years. For many neurodivergent people — particularly those from marginalised communities — masking isn’t a choice. It’s survival. The researchers’ conclusion was that technology needs to work with people’s lived realities, not treat neurodivergent behaviour as a defect requiring correction.

Meanwhile, a 2025 paper in the British Journal of Sociology of Education found that AI-driven learning platforms encode neurotypical cognitive development as the default. Divergent learning paths aren’t accommodated. They’re flagged as problems. The algorithm treats you the way the system always has — it just does it faster and calls it personalisation.

---

Now. I can already hear the objections forming. Mostly from people who’ve never had to mask a day in their lives but have very strong opinions about what’s good for those of us who do.

‘But Lee, AI gives neurodivergent people agency.’

Does it? Or does it give us a more efficient way to comply?

‘But Lee, you just said you use AI every day.’

I do. And I use reading glasses every day too. That doesn’t mean I think poor eyesight is a character flaw that needs a technological intervention. It means the font is too bloody small and some fucking 20-something designer decided that light grey was the perfect font colour.

‘But Lee, you can’t expect the whole world to change.’

Why not? We changed it for left-handed people. We changed it for people in wheelchairs. We changed it when we realised that maybe — just maybe — the problem wasn’t the person, it was the stairs.

---

The OECD published a full report in February this year on AI supporting neurodivergent learners. It’s thorough. It’s well-intentioned. And buried in it is an insight that deserves to be the headline: neuroinclusive employers who redesigned their environments — not their employees — saw proficiency increases of thirty-one per cent in cybersecurity skills and twenty per cent in AI and big data skills among neurodivergent staff.

They didn’t give people better masks. They removed the need for them.

That’s not an accommodation. That’s architecture.

---

So here’s where I land on this, and I want to be precise because nuance matters even when you’re being very Australian about it.

I am not anti-AI. I am possibly the most AI-dependent writer you will encounter this year. My ADHD co-pilot is Claude, an algorithm, and I am genuinely grateful for it.

But I refuse to pretend that a tool that helps me translate myself into neurotypical-readable formats is the same thing as a world that can hear me without translation.

The AI isn’t accommodating us. It’s accommodating everyone else’s inability to meet us where we are.

And until the people running the panels and writing the white papers and designing the frameworks understand that distinction, they will keep building very expensive, very clever tools that make the cage more comfortable without ever questioning why the cage exists.

---

I’m Lee Hopkins. I’m a psychologist, a writer, and a late-diagnosed autistic adult with ADHD who spent sixty-six years masking before anyone thought to mention that the mask was optional.

The mask wasn’t optional, by the way. That’s the point.

Thanks for watching. If this landed, share it with someone who needs to hear it. If it didn’t, you might be the person I was talking about.

---

References

Brandsen, S., Chandrasekhar, T., Franz, L., Grapel, J., Dawson, G., & Carlson, D. (2024). Prevalence of bias against neurodivergence-related terms in artificial intelligence language models. Autism Research, 17(2), 234–248. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3094

Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Stuckey, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143.

Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., & Mandy, W. (2021). “Masking is life”: Experiences of masking in autistic and nonautistic adults. Autism in Adulthood, 3(4), 330–338.

OECD. (2026). AI to support neurodivergent learners in vocational education and training. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/718d7522-en

Liao, Y., et al. (2025). The potential of generative AI in supporting neurodiversity in higher education: A systematic review. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Ronksley-Pavia, M., Ronksley-Pavia, S., & Bigum, C. (2025). Experimenting with generative AI to create personalized learning experiences for twice-exceptional and multi-exceptional neurodivergent students. Journal for the Education of the Gifted.

British Journal of Sociology of Education (2025). Disabling AI: Power, exclusion, and disability. Taylor & Francis.

BioNanoScience (2025). Neurodiverse AI. Springer. [Proto-model for AI architectures inspired by neurodivergent cognition.]