I wrote a comedy sci fi article for my first Substack of 2026. Here’s an excerpt…
What happens when you swap feeling snuggly and warm with falling smugly offline and the social freefall of real life? Despite the best attempts of 2025 to drag us all down with it, it is possible to be happy in 2026? Check out my step by step plan to turn that ship around.
- Deactivate the worst offending social media accounts, the ones that plague your thoughts and kill your imagination, and delete the apps. Tell yourself it’s forever. Feels good doesn’t it? Nothing tastes as good as being offline feels.
- Don’t announce you’re deactivating because that is like mass dumping everyone who ever liked you. Just leave, GO, go on. RUN.
- Hot wire the nearest vehicle. Drive!! Your followers probably aren’t really following but you can’t be too careful. Driving fast, your car skids dramatically on the viaduct and the wheels come off. Jump out the car and fling your phone off the bridge into the surging river. Your followers will never find you now!
- Only joking. Put your phone in your pocket and keep walking. Walking is good for happiness.
- At night, enjoy the knock on effects of deactivation. The new richness of your sleep and dreams. It’s like moving abroad without saying goodbye. It’s like real life, only you don’t exist in real life anymore. You really have neglected that side of things to be honest.
- Throw yourself into cleaning your house as a distraction. Finally you can see yourself properly in the mirror. Try not to look for too long or –
- You can’t go out looking like that. Who would want to talk to you? Would YOU even talk to you?
- This kind of comment from your inner critic is unhelpful. Try to reply with facts like “Actually, I would not talk to myself, unless there was nobody else left on the planet”.
- Socialising, especially with new people, is good for happiness. Go to a party in real life. Yes, a party.
- Are you there now? Everyone is beautiful and amazing, dazzling aren’t they! They carry themselves devastatingly fashionably, with poise and dignity. When they meet you they make eye contact consistently and confidently like they’re from the beforetimes.
- So you’re at the party, it’s 2026. You realise you don’t belong here, in the here and now. You don’t belong in real life. You thought you were the main character but you’re having a midpoint crisis. You realise that unless you transform yourself quite drastically and immediately, you’re not going to be able to handle the rest of 2026 at all.
- You realise that you urgently need to get back to 2019, and explain how to do the next five years of life to someone who clearly didn’t know what they were doing, so that they (you) can be better equipped to for the present day, and more importantly, this party. Once you get back to 2019, live the last five years all over again, with the benefit of hindsight, and then come back to this amazing party much happier.
- Ready-ing yourself for quantum time travel, you find the toilet, push the hand soap dispenser three times to open a secret portal into your past…
Find out what happens next on my Substack…