The first six entries of this counterclock guide are free to all, the last six, including How to Ruin a Dinner Party, How to Develop a Slave Mentality and How to be Anxious and Afraid All the Time are for paying subscribers, as are the upcoming pieces, How to Make Love and How to Write a Masterpiece…
How to Bring a First World Country to its Knees
First of all, and most importantly, you should be living in a high-tech civilised state that, by virtue of the totalising demands of industrial technology, is completely dependent on an ever-increasing need for energy and non-renewable resources (such as water, copper, sand and graphite). This will ensure a fundamentally exploitative relationship with nature and human nature and, at the same time, the eventual exhaustion of both; which is to say exhaustion of your resource-base and exhaustion of the human spirit. This way, collapse, precipitated by a series of secondary crises (environmental collapse, social collapse, financial collapse, etc.), is guaranteed no matter what you do.
Now, assuming you’ve got this far, and have some legislative control over the fate of a highly industrialised ‘first world’ country, here is how to proceed to finish off the job in short order. First, make sure you squander any natural resources you’re lucky enough to have. If you’re sitting on a goldmine of oil and gas, for example don’t use it to build long-term wealth, just burn through it as quickly as possible with no plan to benefit the country (bonus points if you sell off the rights to private companies and then act surprised when the profits don’t benefit the nation). Next, sell off all your assets (such as council houses) and privatise everything. Water, energy, railways—sell it all, along with whatever land you can get your hands on, to the highest foreign investor and let the magic of the free market annihilate public services while sucking wealth out of the country. When prices skyrocket and services crumble, make sure to blame foreign powers and ‘market forces’ rather than your own incompetence. Next, deindustrialise. Why manufacture quality goods at home, like you once did, when you can cheaply offshore everything to China and depend on the financial sector instead? You’ll turn everywhere but a few square miles of the capital into a wasteland, but nevermind! Finally, to keep your now precarious economy afloat, throw open the immigration floodgates (to drive up house prices and drive down wages), allow landlords to bleed renters dry, cut public services to the bone and let the now privatised natural monopolies (water, gas, electricity, rail, health services) gouge whatever money is left over from the weekly spend. As the population struggles with rising costs and declining living standards and is forced to shoplift on a massive scale just to survive, distract them with culture wars, immigration panics, celebrity gossip and sport.
And there you have it! A once-strong economy reduced to a cheap, fragile, outsourced, debt-ridden shell of its former self. Now simply sit back and enjoy the collapse, while politicians pretend to argue over who’s to blame.
How to Fail at Work
Just as it is a doddle to completely ruin your life in a few seconds (jumping out of a third floor window, for example) so it is easy to get fired. Just stop turning up for work. The trick is to keep your job, but to get nowhere and, ideally, be disliked by everyone there. For this you need to choose the right kind of environment, not a low-key family business or shoddy bottom feeder, where lax rules and interesting ne’er-do-wells might be found. No, you need to find and stay at a large company or established institution, the kind of place where (despite what people say) thinking the same as everyone else matters. This is difficult because, first of all, you need to be the kind of person who actually sees the world differently to the mass, who actually lives (not merely thinks) differently to them and who actually refuses to participate in its social rituals. This radical actuality will put you at a psychic distance from everyone in the office before you open your mouth. Although you are cheerful, warm-hearted and creative (only thus could you actually live differently to the world), the groupmind will automatically and intuitively reject you, although never for reasons they can quite articulate, which makes it is difficult for you to get in any trouble. There’s no real evidence, just something off about you, so you’ll be disliked and get nowhere.
How to Lose a Girlfriend
First, be incapable of really loving someone, after that it’s all downhill. Next, choose a girl you don’t love. Perhaps you really fancy her or you’re lonely and need some company, but deep down there’s no real togetherness, just on the surface, enough to sustain everyday conversation. This will then ensure that there are a range of uncomfortable, miscued exchanges in which neither of you are really engaged by the other’s humorous comment, lengthy anecdote or harangue. This you’ll pass off as a moment of tiredness perhaps or of having other things on your mind. Slowly realise that there is something missing in your life and start dreaming of a future where you are fulfilled, a future that doesn’t include her except in a tagged-on-the-end-of-your-life sort of a way. Her fine senses will pick up on your lack of love for her and she will start to be awkward, emotional, accusatory and critical of your every move; then she’ll seem to be the problem here. There will be more arguments over bafflingly trivial things. Your sex life will become like wrestling. All communication about matters of importance will be kept to a minimum and a dreary sense of doom, which both of you pretend is not there, will hang over you. You’ll have a few ‘us’ talks which will break the tension and trick you both into believing that you’re back on track, but tension will build again until she makes a decision to leave.
Alternatively, if you’d like a short-cut to losing a girlfriend, but don’t have the guts to leave her, simply behave like a selfish bastard until she gets the message and walks out on you.
How to Lose Your Readers
1. Attack the guardians of the cultural industry; target totems of the professional class.1 2. Alienate individual allies, particularly those on the left (but annoy the right too). 3. Criticise ego; be unlikeable. 4. Do not specialise (making it difficult to ‘place’ you). 5. Adhere to a philosophy that is on the fringe of a fringe of a fringe. 6. Oppose civilisation, particularly industrial civilisation, and criticise all its principle (and popular) sops; porn, video games, travel and sport. 7. And then, despite all this opposition and antagonism, be cheerful, even accept this ghoulish illusion as it is (this is most outrageous). 8. Be a white, middle-aged, working class, English man who values his cultural tradition. 9. Make sure your style of writing is too difficult for people with too little learning and too simple and straightforward for those with too much. 10. Speak of the reality2 love, death, truth and God — and debatable, cheesy, airy-fairy or old-fashioned notions like ‘morality’. 11. Critique atheistic scientism and the foundations of Greek / Enlightenment rationalist thought as well as Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism and Buddhism. 12. And finally, and this is most important, it’s not actually necessary to try to upset folk — which is just childish. All you have to do is to say something. This will really upset them.
How to Be Sick and Tired all the Time
Start by living in a poisoned, polluted world saturated with nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter and microplastics.3 Consume contaminated water and low-nutrient food laced with pesticides, heavy metals, nitrates, bisphenols and endocrine disruptors. Processed foods and hyper-refined carbs are a good choice for nutrition, but ordinary fruit and vegetables grown in depleted soil work fine because they can’t give you everything your body needs either. You should be sure to hardly use your body, only for brief or easy, repetitive tasks, like getting dressed, walking to your car and scrolling through your phone. Talking of your phone, use it all the time, this will decrease your attention span, increase your cortisol and adrenaline levels and lead to, amongst other things, cytokine Imbalance, dopamine desensitisation and reduction in seratonin, which will negatively affect your immune system and prevent you from sleeping or ever being really relaxed. Top all this off, if you can, by feeling lonely and bored, doing a meaningless job, getting angered easily, resisting fate and, most importantly of all, fretting and worrying all the time about things which are out of your control4 all of which will weaken your spirit (i.e. your body) and bring on constant fatigue, illness, injury, pain and suffering in no time.
How to Stunt Your Child’s Development
This one is very easy, and there are so many ways to do it! You can, for example, isolate them from nature completely and make them blind to sensory nuance, afraid of dirt, danger and uncertainty and addicted to security and stimulation. Nature here includes human society and culture, which the good old screen can handily cut your kids off from while, at the same time, catastrophically stunting their intelligence by corrupting their attention and giving them all the answers they need at the swipe a thumb. Another simple tactic for producing monsters is to heap all your frustrated ambitions onto the shoulders of your children and compelling them to struggle towards a success that, through want of the conscious initiative that produces graceful competence, will generate resentment (towards you), frustration, lack of joy and an essential mediocrity that they’ll need to conceal with tricks, lies and spiritual compromise. Suppressing your child’s gendered sexuality, understanding of death, self-awareness and curiosity are really easy too — just apply irritation, ridicule or lack of interest if these natural instincts surface — and they all have truly disastrous consequences, as does making your little one’s life far too easy by pandering to his or her demands. If you don’t have the money or the inclination to ruin your children by spoiling them, a cheaper and far more effective tactic is to psychologically stunt them by making your little man or little woman your best friend, ideally because your partner, for whatever reason, does not or cannot meet your emotional needs. Your child will then grow up with a crippling fear of independence, unable ever to free themselves from your emotionally needy shadow. This will properly fuck them up!
(This is just a small sample of ways to destroy your child’s soul. See How to Brainwash Your Children for some more.)