I have a rather faddish personality.
In school, football was my thing. I played as much as I could, whatever the weather. Lunchtimes, evenings, weekends, in the park, in the playground, in the garden. At the same time, my father and I followed Swindon Town home and away, across the country, from one embarrassing result to the next. Football was my first love.
In my teenage years, I rode the wave of pop-punk into emo in the late 1990s and early 2000s, playing guitar for a couple of bands and bass in another. When I got to university I found myself putting on alternative club nights, DJing live and on the radio. I wrote for the student paper. I got involved in student politics. When I left uni, I took Spanish classes. I travelled. I got into running.
And then there was political blogging, which is probably how many of you got to know me. Trying to make sense of first a shock general election defeat in 2015 and then the rise of Corbynism - a political movement I abhorred - I started writing about my opposition to it all.
The point is, over my forty years on the planet, I’ve poked my nose into quite a few different things. There is so much out there to see and do and learn about, so many experiences to be had.
But at the same time I’ve never stuck with anything too deeply for that long. I am what Isaiah Berlin, in his famous essay, termed a fox; someone who knows many things. This stands in contrast to a hedgehog, someone who knows one big thing.
Berlin was talking about how writers and thinkers approach the world, but for my purposes I am mapping it here to personality traits, passions and interests.
Saying foxes know many things is not to say foxes know more than hedgehogs. Hedgehogs will tend to know their one big thing in great detail. Foxes may have wider interests but tend to do so at a shallower level. The distinction is perhaps akin to specialist vs generalist, but I wouldn’t know for sure: as a fox, I’ve picked up the idea without reading through Berlin’s original text.
Being a fox no doubt has its advantages and disadvantages. I like having a broader range of interests, but that comes at the cost of never being a true expert in any of them. I’m not a very good runner. My Spanish is rudimentary.
I wonder, as we come out of two years of lockdowns and restrictions, whether my vulpine nature makes thinking about the future difficult. The question hangs in the air: as the world opens up, as we all have more freedom, what do I do now?
For hedgehogs, I imagine the answer is fairly easy - pick up the thing it is that you love, and get back to enjoying it. For me, I’m finding that harder. Having spent two years in survival mode - just get through the homeschooling as best you can while trying to work, you miss your friends and family but this won’t last forever, you’ll get there, you’ll get there - I now find myself walking out into the light, blinking, wondering exactly what it was I was waiting for. What should my purpose be?
How to cope with this existential confusion? Albert Camus talked about the Absurd, the condition where the human need to seek meaning is met by a fundamentally indifferent universe. Camus tells us that, like Sisyphus forever carrying the rock up the mountain, nothing that we do really matters; we will be forgotten soon enough, in the grand sweep of things. And so the only response must be to find happiness on our own terms. To throw ourselves into life with great enthusiasm; everything we achieve is in defiance of the Absurd, a rebellion against the uncaring nature of the cosmos.
I find this philosophy hugely appealing, yet there is a hole here. What do you do when you aren’t sure what it is you want to achieve? For a hedgehog, this perhaps isn’t difficult. But for the fox that I am, I’m not sure what I should now be throwing myself into. In an open sea, how to know which way to set sail? Hedgehogs have their North Star to point the way. Foxes lack such a strong guiding light.
And that explains the thinking behind this Substack. I think that one thing I want is to write; it is a creative outlet I’ve always enjoyed. I liked writing about politics, but I intend for this Substack to span a wider range of topics than just the manifold and depressing failures of the modern left (though that will no doubt feature too). This is an experiment for me, so I’d like to try and touch upon ideas I’ve not really covered in the past.
Maybe, just like my other interests, this will end up being a phase; something I do for a while before moving on to other things. But even if that is what happens, that’s ok. If it represents a kick back against the Absurd, and if it brings you some enjoyment, it’ll have been worthwhile.
So, welcome aboard. It’s good to have you along.