The Pub Man Expert

Why some of us would rather solve immigration, Gaza, interest rates and the Vikings than examine our own lives.

It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting in my office doing what I apparently now regard as relaxing.

Working on Relay.

It’s going really well. I’ve made a fairly major change to the way my Eisenhands system works, given myself a Commercial Foreman to kick arse in much the same way as my software Foreman does, and learned yet another lesson that I seem to have to learn repeatedly:

Stop sticking deterministic code everywhere and get out of the bloody way.

The agents know what they’re doing.

Chesterton, meanwhile, is clawing desperately at my chair because he has decided the only acceptable place for a six-pound chihuahua is directly on top of me.

And somewhere in the living room, YouTube is still running.

I’d been watching a bit of telly this morning because it’s Saturday and I occasionally pretend to be a normal person. YouTube then wandered off by itself into a succession of videos about converting trucks into camper vans.

I am so tempted.

Honestly.

I could absolutely do it.

Someone stop me.

But eventually YouTube exhausted camper vans and decided that what my Saturday afternoon really needed was Triggernometry.

Oh dear.

If you’ve never seen it, Triggernometry is basically Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster sitting in a studio discussing whatever enormous question humanity has failed to solve that week.

I always feel slightly sorry for Francis Foster.

Konstantin is clearly the interviewer. Francis increasingly seems to have been assigned the role of the bloke who occasionally says something funny, mentions having been a teacher and asks a slightly dopey question while Konstantin waits patiently to resume the interview.

I imagine Francis is perfectly aware of this.

(watch one minute of this, its quite funny)

Anyway.

That isn’t actually the point.

I’m sitting here half working, half listening, and every so often something floats through from the living room.

The trans debate.

Oh, here we bloody go.

What does it mean to be English?

Is Rishi Sunak English?

Something about the Middle East.

Something about immigration.

Something about economics.

Another enormous subject.

Another enormous subject.

Another enormous subject.

And suddenly I thought:

God. I used to do this.

Not podcasting.

The other bit.

Trying to solve the outside world as a substitute for solving the inside one.

I used to have opinions about absolutely everything.

Bond markets.

Politics.

Geopolitics.

Immigration.

The Middle East.

Monetary policy.

The European Union.

Whatever enormous complicated subject happened to appear in front of me, I would construct a thesis about it.

Usually just enough of a thesis to sound clever in a pub.

The Pub Man Expert.

I once went on a family holiday to Italy and took with me a book about the history of the Federal Reserve.

Not a little airport book about money.

The history of the Federal Reserve.

In immense detail.

There I was, surrounded by Italy, my family presumably doing normal holiday things, while I sat there diligently studying the institutional history of American monetary policy like Jerome Powell might ring me on Tuesday morning and say:

“Steve, mate, I’m really stuck on this one. What do you reckon?”

Honestly.

I actually did this.

And I thought this was a perfectly reasonable way to spend a holiday.

The strange thing is that almost none of it had any practical relationship with my life whatsoever.

Suppose I became the world’s leading amateur expert on Israel and Palestine.

Then what?

I’m not negotiating a peace agreement.

Suppose I developed the definitive theory of British immigration policy.

Then what?

Nobody is ringing me from Downing Street.

Suppose I correctly diagnose what central banks should do with interest rates next year.

Lovely.

They still aren’t asking me.

There is obviously nothing wrong with being interested in the world. Curiosity is good. Understanding things is good.

But there is a point where curiosity turns into something else.

Information porn.

And I think there is a particular type of man who is incredibly susceptible to it.

I know because I was one.

Endlessly consuming opinions.

Endlessly constructing arguments.

Endlessly finding another gigantic external problem to think about.

Because there is something wonderfully comforting about problems you cannot actually solve.

They require nothing from you.

You can spend six hours analysing the collapse of Western civilisation and still avoid making the phone call you’ve been putting off for three weeks.

You can develop a sophisticated theory about masculinity while having absolutely no idea who you are.

You can diagnose everything wrong with society without ever asking what might be wrong with your own life.

And because the subjects are enormous and serious, it feels productive.

It feels intellectual.

It feels important.

It isn’t avoidance.

You’re engaged with the issues.

I look at some men now and I recognise it instantly.

Ukraine.

Gaza.

Trans people.

Immigration.

Trump.

Woke.

Anti-woke.

Masculinity.

Civilisation.

Birth rates.

The end of Europe.

One enormous external abstraction after another.

And underneath it all, sometimes, I wonder if there’s just a bloke who really doesn’t want to sit quietly in a room and ask himself one considerably smaller question:

Am I actually happy?

I certainly didn’t.

And so, instead of going back to Relay, I stopped what I was doing and started writing this article.

I’ve just reached the end of draft one.

And dear God.

From the living room, Triggernometry has moved on again.

They’re now talking about the bloody Vikings.

I kid you not.

The Vikings.

We have apparently finished with trans people, immigration, national identity, the Middle East and the future of Western civilisation, and have now moved on to solving Nordic historical problems.

It’s almost too perfect.

Chesterton has finally got onto my knee.

I’m going back to my software.

The lads can sort out the Vikings.