College of Modern Anxiety

Everybody values THINKING, right?
We take thinking for granted…
Consider it obvious.

Can we let ourselves just THINK or
Does it have to be ‘critical thinking’?
Or creative thinking?
Or mindfulness?
Or meditation?

Why does thinking need to be qualified?
Or rebranded?
For us to consider it worthwhile?

According to Hannah Arendt
What’s crucial is “thinking without a 
Bannister”.

Only when it doesn’t have any limits
Put on it
like the need to be ‘productive’ or strategic’ or ‘creative’
Is thinking really free!!!

And only if thinking is really free can it
protect us from falling for 💩

Last month I started a new role as a contributor to Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton. I’ll be publishing two posts a week, and my first posts, a series called “From Cynicism to Sincerity” are out now.
It’s a personal essay on why millenials, like me, often talk as if we don’t care about what we’re saying, and how I dropped that affectation when I moved abroad. Personal reflection offers a jumping off point for an investigation of the political and social roots of my generation’s detachment: a cynicism that promised liberation in the ‘90s but ended up reinforcing reactionary politics in the 2010s, and a self-protective terror of vulnerability that patriarchal expectations demands.

I’ve been taking some time away from emails and social media to get a chance to think about new creative directions, but I’m back now to tell you about what’s happening at College of Modern Anxiety.
First, Reading Allowed is back next week. College of Modern Anxiety’s monthly place for great words and real talk is at a new time and place…
📍the second Tuesday of every month at 5:00 PM in the Library of Things at C. L. R. James Library in Dalston.

The first Reading Allowed of 2026 is this Tuesday at C.L.R. James Library in Dalston.
Last time, we traced surprising links between Derek Walcott’s Love After Love and Adam Giannelli’s Dear Stutter [“Certain words are still warm with your touch”], the two poems we read together at Reading Allowed.
Walcott reveals the surprising intimacy with oneself that the departure of a beloved can make possible:
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
While Giannelli portrayed the persistence of other people, and their judgments, even in solitude. Writing to his own stutter, he says:
We spent so much time alone together, skipping
stones across the river or staring at the telephone.
…making us wonder why his stutter is there with him, even when he is alone. 
It got us talking about the influence people, past and absent, have on us, and whether we are ever really alone.
Giannelli’s poem is an ambivalent love letter to his stutter, which takes on the characteristic of another voice, a constant companion—himself and yet not himself. We found the notion relatable that there are characteristics we can’t entirely think of as ourselves, but yet certainly are not not us either—our work personas, the people we have been in relationships, the pain in our knees.
Reading Allowed—College of Modern Anxiety’s monthly place for great words and real talk is at a new time and place. 
📍the second Tuesday of every month at 5:00 PM in the Library of Things at C. L. R. James Library in Dalston.

Sunday! Join us for Paths…
T.S. Eliot wrote “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Is he right?
Why do we make our way along our paths?
Do we ever really get anywhere new?
Can we ever find home?
What do we learn about ourselves along the way?
Join us at College of Modern Anxiety to explore the journeys we take, the paths we walk, what we get from them, and what we want from them.
We’ll use a combination of movement, drama, and art games, stories, poetry, and philosophy to bring you on a journey with us!
📍13:00–16:00, Dec 14th at The Post Bar, London
Sign up at: modernanxiety.org/event-details/paths
Or message me
-development

Tuesday is the last Reading Allowed of 2025. Come join us to see what unfolds in the words, and in yourself.
Reading Allowed—College of Modern Anxiety’s monthly place for great readings and real talk is at a new time and place.
📍the second Tuesday of every month at 5:00 PM in the Library of Things at C. L. R. James Library in Dalston. Starting this Tuesday, 11th of November

Comrades,
Following are the instructions for tomorrow’s covert coordination meeting which will take place on this secure channel at 1800 hours GMT.
If you have not yet enrolled with your cell captain, please do so now.
It is your responsibility to ensure you only take the call in a secure room which has been swept for listening devices. It is paramount that the obot Overlords do not intercept our rebellion planning activities. Please follow the standard Resistance Entry Protocol detailed below.
The meeting is code-named Self-Help for Cyborgs, a playshop on becoming human in the face of technology.
Find more information at modernanxiety.org

This is my for my far-flung friends,
If you’ve been curious about all this College of Modern Anxiety stuff I’m getting up to, now’s your chance to check it out!
I’m doing a remote session on Sunday at a time that should be accessible for my friends in most time zones—18h London time (that’s 10AM Vancouver time).
The session is Self-Help for Cyborgs, a playshop on becoming human in the face of technology. I’ve run it three times now and participants rave about it.
It also works really well in cyberspace!
So, please join me, and share this with your friends and family.
If cost is a barrier, get in touch—my policy is: if you can pay, pay; but if you can’t pay, come anyway!

Self-help for Cyborgs went great on Wednesday. There’s a game at the end of act 2 where I ask everybody to draw their cyborg selves, to think about how our machine enhancements help us work, play, connect with each other, but also the problems they create.
These are some of the wonderful drawings people made!
I’m excited to run the playshop again tomorrow morning at Braziers Park, and next Sunday in cyberspace! Sign up at modernanxiety.org

Why Cyborgs?
This playshop takes inspiration from Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, which advocates playing with the boundary lines between human, animal, and machine with irony and blasphemy; to have fun while doing it, but also to be responsible.
She says she’s making an argument “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”
Following Haraway, when thinking about how to fight back against our robot overlords and the deeper forces working to take away our very humanity and turn us into automatons, I believe that our fight for humanity has to come from the recognition that we are all already cyborgs, and that resisting the machine doesn’t mean trying to return to some imagined pure antediluvian humanity—after all, the problem of our reliance on technology goes all the way back to the invention of writing, as Plato points out—but being cyborgs on our terms; terms that support our freedom and the value of human life.