Dear friends,
My new single “Wicked Things” drops next Friday!
I’m slowly figuring out how the modern world works, so here’s a pre-save button for Spotify. Pressing it won’t just bring a little rock ‘n’ roll to your week—it’ll also give the release a big boost.
Apparently, even music must bend to the algorithms these days. Simply put: pre-saving signals to Spotify that the track “has value”, which means it gets pushed to more people. Given that my songs seem to swing between 5 and 500,000 plays, this makes a big difference!
Thanks for your support, everyone! Now, let’s dive into today’s newsletter.
What Does Living With Yourself Look Like?
Many of us live with a sense of distance.
Distance between:
Where we are now and the life we want.
A dream we have and the difficulty of realizing it.
The psychological balance that always seems just out of reach.
To live is to exist in a gap.
The problem is that we experience this as a dearth of something.
We trick ourselves into the belief that having it would be to fix ourselves.
One of the great songs — “Bittersweet Symphony” alludes to this — “You know the one that takes you to the places where all the things meet, yeah”
I write about this because I see everywhere people unhappy about where they are now.
It seems to me we have designed our lives to live in a state of deficit.
However, to live in a state of never being happy with where you are now is not a happy existence.
It is to build your own cage and to decide to live in it.
The productivity experts sold us the myth that if you just do enough, you will arrive at your mythical imagined destination.
“Choose a dam goal and aim towards it!” shouts Jordan Peterson at us on YouTube — while appearing to be such an unhappy, perpetually tortured soul.
Doing so much as if to never be at all…
I’m not sure that promises made by people perpetually angry at everything are the best ones to follow.
If an instructor seems too unhappy, maybe it’s worth questioning the instruction.
All this said — I do love a goal — and aim towards it.
But what is missed by the carnival of hucksters online is that something else also happens while you are in the process of moving towards a destination:
Life itself.
It’s about more than just the goal.
Happiness doesn’t come from simply reaching it—it comes from how you live while moving toward what you aspire to.
Because here’s the thing — you can do it in misery, or — you can do it joyfully.
"Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”
— Joseph Campbell
Let me return to the premise at the start:
Many of us live with a sense of distance.
I have come not to look at this gap as one of deficit — but as one of infinite potential.
This gap is not something
to break out of
to escape
to avoid
This gap is where the good stuff exists — something called life itself.
This space is where your potential resides.
Yes, it is a wonder to apply this to things — whether writing a song, building a business, or learning a language.
But it is the doing of the thing itself that is life.
Life does not begin when you attain what you want.
Life is what happens during the experience of choosing to live in a certain way.
I understand that many of us can feel unhappy about a multitude of things — some within our control, some not.
For me, what helps me is this question:
What does living with myself really look like?
You could fill this question up with all the books of the earth. But I will name you three things that help me.
Do The Thing You Are Not Doing
For 15 years, I had learned the piano on my yearly list.
When the pandemic hit and we still had no idea about how bad it was going to get, I realised that time had changed. Suddenly, it was even shorter than it was before.
My God, mortality is the most beautiful instructor!
I have hacked away in the most gloriously undignified way at it ever since — and written, I believe, some of my best songs on it.
Learning piano in your 40s is a bit of a nightmare. It’s slow. You forget what you did yesterday. You discover that your love of it is not complemented by that elusive thing — talent.
But my God, I love it!
And my, what a compensation that is — especially when you’d like to be competent at something you find difficult.
I don’t love it in the way that I am called to practice it for 8 hours a day. In fact, like too many of the things we love, there are more days that I don’t get to it than do.
My friend Lucia of Forgotten Female Composers — a world-class pianist — recently popped around and berated me for the dust on my piano at home!
However, after 15 years of hating the idea that I might leave this life never having learned to play the piano, I’ve at least become a bit of a tinkerer.
Funnily enough, though, I realised at the start of the year that in coming back to music, I wanted to step things up a level.
And so I have a new goal — and that is that I hope one day to play some songs on piano in my live set.
I realised that despite the fun I was having on the piano, I was in danger of becoming a forever noodler.
Living with myself?
I want to be able to play songs to people on the piano.
This is not something that will change my life or anyone else’s.
But yesterday I went to the studio and laid down one of my missing songs — Tell Me Where to Begin (pulled from existence when Universal took over EMI) — on the piano.
I cannot tell you the rich and fulfilling this felt.
It is nothing to move the world.
But it reminded me:
Our experience of our potential is a very textured, tactile experience.
It is not about the attainment of something — it is far more granular than that.
It’s about how it makes your atoms fizz.
Oh! I did something I’ve never done before!
Well, that’s nice!
Now, Jordan Peterson would shout at me —
THAT’S BECAUSE YOU CHOSE A GOAL AND DAM WELL STUCK TO IT!
But the point I make is that, in some ways, the doing of it is irrelevant.
What mattered was more what I was able to channel through it. The song didn’t come out of willpower, it did not come out of brute force — it came by being receptive to an ongoing murmur inside me.
A STORY ABOUT MURMURS
And so, a story about where this song came from.
I tell it not just because it recalls the first time I played piano, but because it speaks to how something shifts—both in you and in the world—when you do something that helps you live with yourself.
One morning, in 2012, I had a dream.
I was in a bar in Neukölln, sitting at a piano, smoking a cigarette with John Lennon. Rich plumes of smoke flittered through the air. I was drinking a Hefeweizen, and John—acerbic but instructive—was berating me for never having started on the instrument.
“Look, Jim, it’s easy, you just plonk…”
He began playing the plinky, swung C minor chord that starts the song.
I told him I liked it and asked what he’d do next.
“I’d just descend the bass and fookin’ howl…”
That’s when I woke up.
I sat up, croaky-voiced, lumbered over to the piano, and, a little bleary-eyed, started singing:
I’m weak and I don’t know where my anger is
I’m weak and I don’t know where I should begin
I’m weak, can you tell me where the danger is?
Though I’m brokenhearted, I’ve not even started…
I knew I was onto something. That song got me signed to EMI and became my first single on a major label.
The moral of the story?
Do the thing you are not doing.
Usually, the thing gnawing at us does so for a reason.
That reason is our potential calling to us in a silent voice.
Unhappiness is often less about our circumstances and more about our refusal to listen to the voice singing inside us.
To Love Is To Work At Being More Present
The second thing that helps me is love.
The problem with the world is not a lack of love.
It’s a lack of effort in applying the love that already exists.
I’ve written many times about my love/hate relationship with Silicon Valley. My problem with it isn’t just that it has shattered our capacity to concentrate—but what that actually means.
Simply put:
To love is to give yourself fully to who you are with.
Our fragmented attention makes this nearly impossible.
We are distracted.
To live in a state of distraction is to be unable to be present with what is before you.
It is to be here and yet not here.
This is why I remain relentless in my personal war against:
a) grind culture
b) productivity experts
c) Silicon Valley
We have handed over the keys to the kingdom—our consciousness—to leaders who have no real understanding of living beyond constant doing.
Doing is one-half of existence.
Being is the other.
Much of our unhappiness comes from never fully being here.
We watch live gigs through our phones.
We post on social media not for our followers but wishing we had 100,000 more.
We speak to our loved ones without ever fully setting down today’s work.
And then we wonder why we are unhappy.
Life is built on fundamentals, and those fundamentals have been obliterated by how we’ve complicated the basics of existence.
The foundation of everything is presence.
That includes love.
Presence, however, takes work.
And so does love.
Nothing in this world is more taken for granted than love.
Why?
Because love takes fucking effort.
Holiness, then, is the effort we put into love.
That is the sacrament.
For me, the greatest change in my life over the last 20 years has been the one thing I never actually planned.
Only now do I realize—
Everything I was working toward was first predicated on an effort to be more present. With what I do. With who I love.
The world will always fumble with how it measures success.
But success, first and foremost, is a state of being.
Don’t measure it by your status in society or by how you believe others see you.
Measure it instead by this:
What does living with yourself look like?
How to Measure the Doing
It strikes me that part of the deficit we live with comes from knowing we will never get everything done.
Happiness, then, is in part about reconciling with limitation.
I cannot tell you how much peace this has brought to my life.
Not to aspire exponentially.
But to limit joyfully.
This is not about constriction.
It’s about accepting that you are human, not a god.
Our society runs on the pretext of more, more, more.
More money.
More content.
More happiness.
Yawn.
What I try to do is live each day with a dual mindset.
First, I apply a joyful cap to my activities.
My to-do list is always five clear items. No more. No less.
All I try to do is enough.
But what does “enough” mean?
Enough means knowing—every single day—that I lived a good day.
Damn, five things is a lot.
Here’s the thing:
Yes, living in our potential is where we find what Joseph Campbell calls our bliss.
But potential is alive. It’s fizzing.
It’s like the godhead—fuzzy, kinetic, yearning to be shaped and to shape.
To direct this potential, even just a little each day—that is a good day.
When it moves gently, we experience growth.
And with growth, a soft, spiralling upwards.
Yes, hopefully, something goes well on the outside.
Money is—nice.
An audience is—nice.
“Success” is—nice.
But all of it is utterly vacuous unless you are true to this question:
What does living with yourself look like?
Have a beautiful weekend everyone!
Jim
PS Last week I developed an unexpected superpower…
This speaks to me in volumes and on every level Jamie!👏👏 Your observations about love in particular though, are beautiful. Thank you my dear friend (who l never see but who is still my friend!💯) 🙏 Hope you also had a wonderful weekend!🎉😍