Two Forthcoming Projects

Shamelessly nicked from here, and will be removed on request, but I regard this as an ad for the OU course this is taken from

I generally resist medicalisation, and I’ve previously written on ADHD, so this isn’t primarily going to be about that issue in spite of the illustration. Nonetheless it’s there, and it means that like many other people, perhaps even everyone, the cog that represents me doesn’t fit well into the social machine, which is a problem for both society and myself. I would also say that my ADHD is just something which came to the attention of educational psychologists and medical professionals in the ’70s, when it was called hyperactivity, and is an aspect of my personality among several which entails a poor fit with society. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a problematic work per se but maybe somewhat salvageable, there’s often a category at the end of each set of disorders labelled “not otherwise specified”, which is the wastebasket taxon as it were, a “diagnosis of elimination”. As a healthcare professional, I’m aware that the textbook cases are the exception, and most of the time people have an array of signs and symptoms which can’t be easily pigeonholed, and the real puzzle is why anyone at all actually has the same condition. Leaving that aside, it’s also unclear if it’s appropriate to view mental health analogously to physical health at all, and there’s the social model of disability. Hence I will assert myself, controversially, as being “neurodiverse, not otherwise specified” and leave it at that. Strictly speaking this is a neurodevelopmental condition rather than a mental health one, but let’s not get even more bogged down.

All that notwithstanding, a few days ago someone asked me what my plans were. I misunderstood the question, thinking I was being asked about how I planned to generate an income in the long term while it was really about our relationship, which of course I won’t go into here, except to say that a plan to generate an income can be very important to a relationship because it’s nice to be in a position to take care of someone well and have enough money to help others, and there is of course the psychological benefit of being gainfully employed, such as it is, and also occupied in something which connects to the common good in some way. It’s partly about good mental health and social obligation. That said, I completely reject the work ethic because most paid work is probably harmful in the long run to society and the person doing it, and the problem is finding work that doesn’t do more harm than good, and that’s rare. Even so, I do sometimes succeed in getting people to give me money for what I do. In particular, I currently have a couple of ideas for medium-term projects, which I’m going to outline here. In doing so, I’m going to yank this blog post in the direction of another blog of mine (which I hardly ever write), but these things happen.

I’ll use headings again, I think. At some point I might even work out how to do hyperlinks within the post, but that’ll probably involve tinkering with the HTML. I don’t think it can be done with the WordPress block editor (grr).

1. The Ethical Periodic Table

Right now I’m not sure what form this will take, but it seems to lend itself much more to something online, or perhaps an app, than a physical book. Like my second idea, this has been kicking around a while, and this is the thing. I’m pathologically procrastinative. In case you’re wondering about the wording of that last sentence, I’m trying to avoid using a noun to describe myself because I think that fixes one’s identity mentally in an unhelpful way. Anyway, it goes like this. The Periodic Table may be the most iconic symbol of science. Right now I’m hard pressed to think of another one, although the spurious “evolution” parade purporting to show constant progress and the chart of the “nine” planets come to mind, these however being very much popularisations. As well as having chemical and physical profiles, each element also has an ethical, social and political profile connected to how it interacts with human society. For instance, arsenic is very high in drinking water in Bangladesh, tantalum has been associated with civil war in the Congo and there is an issue with phosphorus and algal blooms, among many other things per element. My “vision” is to provide a clickable periodic table with links to information, which I hope will be regularly updated, to balanced social profiles of each element, and I’m also curious as to whether there’s a pattern here: do some groups of elements present bigger problems than others and are there possible substitutions? This clearly lends itself much more to a computer device treatment than a book of pages, although one of those books with tabs might work. This suggests it could be an app as well as a website.

2. Corner Shop Herbalism

I detest the tendency for certain exotic herbs to become pushed and regarded as miracle cures and the answer to everything. I think this distorts research and is often environmentally unsustainable. I also think there’s a lot of gatekeeping in my profession which does not serve the public interest, but at the same time I’m aware that many people lack the necessary knowledge to deal with their own health problems easily, particularly in the realm of diagnosis. Consequently, for decades now I’ve had the idea of producing a book called ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using herbal remedies which can easily be obtained over the counter or as invasive weeds or other common species in a foraging style, while maintaining their sustainable use. I’ve already planned this book to some extent and it covers a surprisingly large number of species, probably totalling more than a gross. This would be accompanied by various other chapters about when to seek professional help and details of why herbal medicine is a rational, vegan and useful approach to health. This could also be a website, but it lends itself also to being a physical book because that makes it a field guide useable with no electronic adjunct, and who knows when that might become necessary? We all know of the Carrington Event, after all.

Publicity And Marketing

This is the difficult, possibly insurmountable, obstacle. Self-publishing nowadays is easy. You just organise your manuscript into printable form, get a cover together and have people order it. People have different sets of skills, and the ability to publish without approaching a publisher replaces the problem of getting yourself published with the problem of publicity and marketing. This works fine for some people if they also have an aptitude in those areas, but it usually fails. I have a Kindle Fire, and I do recognise the considerable ethical issues with Amazon of course, but one thing I see a lot is a very large number of ebook adverts and recommendations. I have never followed up on any of these. Although I’ve advertised my business profusely myself, my usual response to an advert is to wonder what’s wrong with the product that it needs to be pushed. You don’t see ads for potatoes or petrol because people recognise the importance of those in their lives and they sell themselves.

Advertising is ethically and practically complicated. The German “Anzeige” translates both as “advertisement” and “announcement”, and I find this enlightening as to the nature of advertising. At its best, if you believe in the fruits of your labour as enhancing to potential customers’ quality of life, you still need to make them known to the public, and this is absolutely fine. However, the quality of goods and services often seems to be in inverse proportion of how heavily something is advertised, which supports my tendency to become suspicious of a product. There was a fairly prominent advert for the British Oxygen Corporation in the 1980s CE which depicted a lake full of flamingos which they claimed had previously been lifeless and that they had managed to restore to a healthy state. This immediately provoked the question in me whether they had done something dodgy more generally and were trying to boost their image. It isn’t relevant whether they actually did this, but if this kind of suspicion is often raised, it can make publicity counter-productive. On the other hand, maybe few people think like this. Regardless, there’s a tension between the contrariness of people generally and getting your product out there, and I don’t know how to resolve this.

I never pay for advertising now because of my history with it. The only advertising which ever worked was the Yellow Pages and by that I mean that no other form of paid advertising got me a single client. With the Yellow Pages, it worked to a limited extent and then, oddly, about half way through one year of advertising it suddenly cut off completely and I never got another customer (for want of a better word). I am still mystified by this. It’s clear that online advertising and other such activity killed the Yellow Pages, but there was no gradual decline in my case. It just stopped dead with no period of tapering off. After that, I cancelled the advertising and relied on word of mouth, which is of course very useful.

How to apply this to books though? Is the kind of marketing and publicity applicable to a herbal practice, and apparently not very, comparable to that of a book? It would seem to involve other aspects of publicity such as talks, walks, courses and signings, the first two of which I’ve done often and fairly successfully in terms of raising the general profile of herbalism but not clients. Would this work for a book? Is it possible to put together a course based on the ethical periodic table idea?

Many people worry about their image on the internet, and their data being used for nefarious purposes. Whereas these are legitimate concerns, mine are not in this area. From the start, I’ve thought of behaviour online as consisting of postcards. Everyone can see what you’re doing, but there are so many of them the chances of being noticed are minute. It’s like the lottery – the odds of winning are insignificant. In some places the odds are stacked against you, as for example with YouTube. As far as reading is concerned, there’s the issue of what might compete with the time which could be spent reading your own writing, and it’s notable that many people don’t even venture forth from social media to bother reading the content. I am guilty of that to some extent myself, but also watch myself so that I do it as little as possible. There’s much to be said about social media and personal data, but I won’t say it here because most of it is only relevant to my writing in terms of constituting a distraction from it. Consequently, I will do some promotion of the work on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t anticipate much response. How one would actually succeed in getting a response is another question, and I have no answers. I do know that my own efforts at search engine optimisation haven’t yielded much.

It’s easy to imagine a conspiracy or malice here, but in fact the answer is far more likely to be the impersonality and volume of the internet which causes this. Therefore, anything one does in this respect needs to be done for its own sake, and not to get an income or make a living. What one actually does to make a living is unknown, and as far as I can tell impossible. I’m always overawed by people who manage to have a full-time paid job because it is so far beyond my capabilities and I have no insight into how people do it. Consequently, I just do things which I consider worthwhile, and I definitely consider these two projects to be valuable, so I’ll be doing them with no expectation of a significant response. This is galling, but I’m used to it. I still don’t know how I’m going to survive though.

That’s all for today.

Blogging Success

Photo by Picography on Pexels.com

Yesterday I received an update from a blog I’m apparently subscribed to which mainly focusses on successful blogging. It’s a bit of a weird thing for me to bother with because I’m pretty much detached from success or failure on this blog, and in fact it’s hard to say what success even amounts to for it. However, it piqued my interest because of how it enumerated the common reasons for achieving success, by which I presume it means a large readership, engagement and positive responses, and also perhaps monetisation and profit. What I’m doing here has little or nothing to do with any of that.

What it actually reminds me of is an incident I experienced once in a café with a friend. I should emphasise the word “friend” here because there was no suggestion of attraction or romantic involvement at any point in our relationship. They were talking about their recent separation with their partner, and I was trying to be a good listener and doing all the usual stuff you’re supposed to do in that situation: reflecting back what they were saying, paying attention to the emotional content and all that stuff. All rather similar, I hope, to a herbal consultation. Anyway, apparently some bloke was earwigging and when my friend got up to go to the toilet, he said to me that I didn’t stand a chance with them because our conversation was focussing too much on them rather than myself. I didn’t reply to this but it’s long stuck in my mind as being two things: really bad advice for how a date should go, and a serious misreading of the situation. But it was also delivered with great confidence. I could relate this to Dunning-Kruger, but I won’t because I keep doing that and it’s probably getting boring. It was just amazing at how sure he was about his reading of the situation and that his terrible advice was correct.

This is to some extent how I feel about blogging advice, and I also feel like I’m in a good position to assess it. There are similarities between success in blogging as outlined above and success in romantic relationships, and looking at it in that way I’m in a detached relationship with this blog and its success, whatever that means. I am friends with this blog but not in love with it or looking to pursue a relationship. Therefore, when I look at advice about successful blogging I may ironically be in a better position to evaluate it because I don’t care all that much about how many people read my stuff and I’m not planning to make any money out of this. If I was, I’d probably try to make it more focussed on one subject. The gender blog, for example, gets loads more readers per post than this one even though I’m currently writing about once a year on there. I also think that some of the advice I’ve encountered is rather like that bloke in the café: it misreads the situation and is delivered with confidence. There’s actually a subreddit called confidentlyincorrect on this very subject, and it’s an interesting phenomenon, and let’s face it, it’s both connected to Dunning-Kruger and the NLP process of unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence.

Anyway, yesterday’s email impressed me with its incorrectitude. There was a bullet list at the start, which I’ll paraphrase as: Write as much content as possible, write longer articles, put lots of keywords into the body of the text and use the same formula for titles as everyone else does. I don’t do that last one because I’ve no idea what it is, but I do try to “grab the reader”, and I try to blog about topical issues some of the time. It doesn’t yield lots of views. My posts are often about four or five thousand words long, which is longer than the average of 1142 words. This is not by design: it simply takes me that long to say what I want to say, partly because my writing style is too verbose and I tend to wander off-topic a lot. As for frequency, I have been posting daily but now average less than that, and the modal frequency is less than weekly but more than once a month. The distribution of that particular curve is quite flat though: almost as many people blog daily as blog weekly, and almost as many people weekly as twice to thrice a month. Using the same formula for titles as everyone else really sounds like clickbait.

I do all those things but it doesn’t translate into views. Precisely because this doesn’t bother me, I’m more likely to see this in a neutral way, and if nothing else it does mean this is not a magic formula for getting them. A different project of mine, now long since abandoned, was my YouTube channel, where I once again followed the standard advice at the time, which incidentally has since changed. I remember some of the details. You were supposed to keep videos below three minutes in length, use saturated thumbnails with white impact text with a black background, edit out all the pauses, elicit a strong emotional response, get attention in the first few seconds of the video, include a call to action and encourage viewers to rate, share, comment, like and subscribe. As far as I remember, I did all of this. Like the advice given regarding blogging, following it didn’t result in getting loads of views, and in fact one of those pieces of advice, keeping it under three minutes, has now been discarded because of advertising and sponsorship. I did care about that. I do not care about this, not in that way anyway. I love this blog – as a friend!

Inadvertently communicating desperation drives people away of course. If you’re understood to be the best judge of your work and are visibly pushing it hard, it can raise doubts in people’s minds about how good it is. It suggests you are correctly perceiving it as of poor quality. This happens with me and advertising. If I see something advertised, it makes me wonder what’s wrong with it that it doesn’t sell itself. This is to some extent unfair because people can’t buy something if they don’t know it exists, but I’m mainly thinking of TV and video advertising here rather than something with a much lower profile.

Returning to the metablog I mentioned above, two things related to this point come to mind. One is that perhaps people who blog “successfully” have neither the time nor the inclination to tell other people how they did it. They lack the time because they’re either busy blogging successfully or busy enjoying their income from their success, so if they’re having to blog about how to blog well, maybe they aren’t doing as well as they’d like their readers to think they are. As for inclination, although I’m not going to say everyone’s a meanie, if you blog well in the sense that you make a considerable income from it, would you really want to teach others your trade secrets so they can compete successfully with you?

Maybe you would. However, that doesn’t mean you will end up giving good advice, because a number of cognitive biasses will have come to the fore if you’re successful. People are driven psychologically to develop a sense of agency. And we need this. The same situation can be a lot less threatening and depressing if you’ve managed to convince yourself that you are consciously acting to address the threat or problem even if it later turns out what you did made no practical difference. In fact it did make a difference because that sense of agency succeeded in tiding you over a period, perhaps ongoing, perhaps not, rather than suffering. However, a sense of agency can be misleading. You’re likely, post hoc, to misremember what you’ve done and, more importantly, to confuse correlation with causation. Studies have shown that poor people perceive a lack of control over their circumstances and attribute much success of others to luck, whereas rich people perceive that their personal qualities and decisions are the cause of their success. Consequently, they may be unreliable guides if they’re trying to help others achieve their success even if they’re acting in good faith.

Having said all that, I may myself be influenced by Dunning-Kruger at this point. Maybe I just don’t know enough about successful blogging to be able to judge the content of such courses. Whereas that may be so, someone attempting to sell their blogging skills to others is confronted with a problem. They can’t show their hand. Consequently, whereas they may be able to offer a sample of their content, if they give away the best quality and most useful information, potential customers can take that away and do it for themselves without paying a penny. Therefore they may have to present their poorer-quality content before reaching the paywall, but the people you’re trying to sell your stuff to will then see that low value stuff and might conclude that it’s representative of whatever else you have to offer that you’re asking money for. Thus for all I know there may be good advice out there which I just never see because of my cynicism.

The reason I don’t think this is true is based on my experience running a herbal practice. I spent the first four years practicing without accessing my mentor or any kind of social network based on the professional body or other herbalists. After that period, I decided it would be worthwhile to attend a continuing professional development (CPD) seminar on running a successful herbal practice. Most of the attendees were newly qualified and just setting up. It was a well-run session and I’m not dissing the qualities of the tutor, leader or facilitator, whatever you want to call her. However, every last bit of advice that she offered and which we discussed was something I had tried and persisted with for several years and hadn’t worked. There may be an argument that I simply hadn’t tried for long enough, but there’s also the question of cutting one’s losses. I don’t begrudge her willingness to help others along the way or even to attempt to make a living out of such a financially unsuccessful line of business, and I believed she thought it would help, but it really didn’t and only someone with little experience would believe it would. Once you’ve tried all that, you will have learnt that it’s all pointless in the sense that it doesn’t raise your profile or income or help you build the business. However, such seminars are quite possibly worthwhile in that they help the people offering them to make money and perhaps even to the participants in that they will feel encouraged for a while, and gain that all-important sense of agency.

In the end, I think you have to be detached from the results. This blog is a means of self-expression for me and to be honest I do want to be heard, but I’ve never been under any illusions that it will become popular or gain a wide readership. It’s one of those situations where the best piece of advice I can offer if you actually want to make money from a blog is to do the exact opposite of everything I’m doing. For a start, stick to a narrow range of subjects. I don’t do this partly because I can’t, but mainly because I’ve got no interest in getting lots of views. Probably what I’m most interested in is a high ratio of engagement compared to number of views, which sadly I don’t have. I want this to be a conversation. But this isn’t about me. It may well be that people offering advice on successful blogging genuinely believe their methods will work, and I can believe that successful bloggers will sometimes offer paid advice they genuinely believe in, but in fact all that amounts to, a lot of the time, is what they’ve done to keep themselves going while their profile and engagement has coincidentally risen. They might easily have done a completely different set of things and be offering those as a course instead. Then again, I’m not a member of their potential market, so I don’t have to engage in any rationalisation about whether or not their suggestions and training have any value to others. I dunno, maybe they’ll work but I don’t really care to be honest, and that apathy means that my own advice might paradoxically be more valuable. I’m not interested in doing something that boring though.