
Annoncering

You know who's a great actor? Michael Caine. He’s consistently churned out great films in every decade, started fashion trends, won two Oscars, made a fuckload of money, married beautiful women and has lived a life that’d be the envy of anyone on Earth.
Annoncering

Thanks to a chance encounter I had with a couple of tough lads on the mean streets of Broken Britain a few weeks back, I don’t have an iPhone any more. And I haven't taken up the offer of Orange’s speedy phone-replacement service. Instead, I found myself gravitating towards the words of Mark Fisher. When, at a recent talk in London, the all-round top bloke of British Marxism described iPhones as “individualised command centres”, it made me wonder what part of a human being really needs a smartphone. Who's insisting that we have them? Who's telling us that we must be able to respond to emails at all hours of the day? Who actually gives a shit about our Instagram accounts? People who don’t like you, that’s who. Which makes smartphones nothing more than a tool of self-loathing.
Annoncering
At the risk of this turning into a massive love-in, there’s a bit in Fisher's seminal Capitalist Realism where he tells the story of a student who insisted on keeping an earphone plugged in throughout one of his classes. When Fisher asks him to take it out, the guy tells him that it’s OK because there’s no music in it. Fisher theorises that the boy is doing this because he wants the comfort of knowing that he’s connected to “the entertainment matrix”: “To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food," writes Fisher, "to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand."I think it's only healthy to take yourself away from such things for a while. We’ve become completely attached to this matrix, and when removed from it we turn into incapable, agitated wrecks who can’t deal with a bus journey without the technological blanket of Candy Crush. It’s easy to give my parents' generation stick, but when you remember that they spent whole days without power due to industrial action, it's easy to see how pathetic us lot are. Learn to live without your communication comforters, because these polar storms are only gonna get worse, and you’re going to be shit at dealing with them.
Annoncering

In the bleak, remorseful morning after some godforsaken Glen's and coke house party, a wise person once told me that human beings don’t see the horizon enough. Not in a philosophical sense (although there is probably an argument for that, too) but in a very literal one. Because so many of us live in cities where we can't see beyond the next Pret, we have very little understanding of the scope and size of the world we live in. It can render us paranoid, selfish, unimaginative and depressed.Cities are obviously beautiful places, and I don’t think many of us are quite ready for that move to the sandy shores of Clacton just yet, but try to get out in the world every now and again and get a sense of just how small you are. It can be humbling and scary to consider such things in a society that tells us that we are our own Gods, but you'll feel a lot better about that passive-aggressive picture comment or unfinished report for doing it.Read Books
Again, clichéd advice, but clichés are clichéd for a reason. You aren’t going to become a great of your generation if all you do is scan read HypeBeast and zonk out to Netflix. Reading more will enrich your life, whatever you do. Read on buses, read on trains, read at lunch. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read Patrick Hamilton, read Carson McCullers and read footballers' autobiographies. Read to learn and read to live. Just don’t turn into that person who insists on making a really big deal of reading this year's Booker Prize winner on the tube.
Annoncering
Once you've crawled out the other side of the blizzard of hedonistic self-indulgence that is (or at least should be) your late teens and early twenties, it's easy to feel like you've become a little untethered from Who You Really Are. Your school days are long gone, innocence has been eagerly traded for experience and you can't talk to your old friends any more because they're too busy being married. So to whom do you turn? Back to the people who know you've been taking drugs all this time but who'll promise not to talk about it just as long as you calm down a bit.Eventually, you’ll come to realise that your parents aren't the blackshirts of fun you grew up thinking they were. They too are alone and confused in this world, but with the benefit of having already been through the same shit you’re dealing with now. Treat them as broken crash test dummies for your own existence; look at them, talk to them, rather than dismissing them as fuddy-duddies who wouldn’t let you listen to The Chronic 2001 in the car.

You’re not at school any more. You don’t have to live out this ridiculous idea that physical fitness is the preserve of witless removal-men-in-the-making, while you – with your Stilton-filled lifestyle of sedentary dandyism – are the beautiful, shining, enlightened one. You’re not; you sweat on your way to the bus stop and even if you’re still waspishly thin, your arteries probably look like Peperami sticks.
Annoncering
At the end of the day, life is fucking hard. It’s relentless, and it doesn’t stop until it really stops. How else can we divert our minds from our own existences? Alcohol is nature's way of slowing us down and making us feel good when our circumstances dictate that we shouldn't. It's the elixir of life; the juice of love and almost every great moment of my life is somehow tied to it. Life is bigger than you are, try to fight it and you'll lose. Without booze in your life, all you’re doing is trying to headbutt God.
Annoncering
