# the chapterist
> An independent editorial publication for people who are still building, endlessly curious, and not remotely finished.. 
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## Pages
### This is The Chapterist.
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/about/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T09:01:08.000Z
An independent publication about work, money, culture and health, written for people who are still in the middle of things rather than looking back at them.

It started with a cholesterol result and forty minutes of reading afterwards, all of it either a numbered list or an advert for a supplement. Nothing that treated the reader as someone who had already run a business, raised children, been made redundant, recovered. The assumption underneath most of it was that a certain age arrives and curiosity stops.

So the writing here goes the other way. It follows a real thing, usually something small, and stays with it long enough to find where it gets uncomfortable. Sometimes that produces something useful. Often it just produces a better description of the problem, which I think counts for more than it gets credit for.

Four sections. Play covers culture and the things worth your time. Build covers work, money and the business of making something. Move covers health, without the wellness. Speak covers the conversations worth having and a few that aren't.

Published every week. Free to read, free to subscribe.

A note on AI. Yes, it's used here. It'd be a strange thing to hide on a publication built on honesty, curiosity and calling out bullshit.

It helps with drafting, research and the awkward business of turning an idea into an article. It doesn't decide what The Chapterist thinks. The subjects, the arguments, the jokes and the disagreements are mine. Everything gets argued with, rewritten and signed off by a person.

My spelling has got worse as I've got older. This helps.

The Chapterist
## Posts
### Apparently, I've got my shit together
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/apparently-ive-got-my-shit-together/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T13:31:04.000Z
There's a survey out saying that because I'm past 50, I've now got my shit together. British Gas asked 2,000 adults and found that 50 is the age when people feel most confident and in control of their lives. Why British Gas is asking this rather than how to make our bills cheaper is a separate matter.

Well, why am I still Googling "how long does chicken last in the fridge?"

Only last week, I daydreamed my way past my M25 turning, making myself thirty minutes late for a meeting I didn't want to go to anyway.

Then there was the garden.

My wife wanted to get some tree surgeons in to cut the trees back. I told her not to worry about taking out a small mortgage to pay them. I'd do it.

My wife loves that bloody garden, the trees look more like bushes now.

I may have saved a fortune. But I now have a bad back, four butchered trees, and a temporary residency in the spare room.

So, to everyone who answered the survey and genuinely feels like they've got adulthood nailed by 50: fair play.

At 53, I'm still working this shit out.
### The Pigeonhole Years
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/pigeonhole-years/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T18:19:19.000Z
The equity release letter turned up on my sixtieth birthday. Not the week of. The actual day. Some database somewhere clearly ticked over at midnight and decided I was now ready to start selling bits of my house back to myself. Straight in the bin. Two weeks later, another one arrived. Different company, same assumption: you're 60 now. Time to start winding down.

Which was odd, because I wasn't. I was training for a half-marathon, still working, still trying to work out what I wanted the next decade of my career to look like. Funny how one birthday changes how everyone else sees you.

It's not just the letters. It's the GP who now blames everything on your age. Knee hurts? Age. Shoulder stiff? Age. Bit tired? Definitely age. Never mind you played football the night before and didn't stretch. Never mind my knee was knackered years ago trying to tackle a man everyone called Freddy the Fridge. The appointment that used to end with a plan now ends with a shrug and the suggestion that this is just how it is from here. You leave with a leaflet and a polite smile. The leaflet has a stock photo of someone walking slowly by a river, looking entirely at peace with everything.

> There isn't an abbreviation for it, which seems like an oversight. Everything else gets one. JGO. Just Getting Old. Straight into the notes, saves everyone the conversation. Diagnosis complete, no further action required, see you in six months.

And then it starts creeping into real life. Someone gives up their seat for you on the bus. You used to trip over something and your mates would laugh. Now they're asking if you need an ambulance. People stop inviting you out after nine.

It's the financial adviser who quietly switches from plans to protection, as if you've already decided the direction of travel — and fair enough, that's his job, but he could at least ask. The conversation that used to be about building quietly becomes a conversation about preserving, as though ambition comes with an expiry date, like a taste for very loud music or staying up past midnight. The investments, you later discover, have been moved into safe mode rather than growth mode. Nobody mentioned this. It was just done, on your behalf, based on the number.

The job adverts that say energetic self-starter and dynamic team player mean don't bother if you're over 45, which everyone knows and nobody says. The targeted ads appear for things you've never searched for, all based on the single data point of your birthday. Stairlifts. Funeral plans. Supplements with names that sound like they were discovered deep in a rainforest by someone with very specific beliefs about inflammation. Walk-in baths advertised by someone who looks genuinely delighted to be in one, as though this was the thing they'd been waiting for all along.

And then the language. Have you noticed the language. Winding down. Taking it easy. Your golden years. Finally putting your feet up. All very polite ways of saying: you're done now. Sit over there and be grateful.

On the leaflets. In the emails. The words start to change. Supportive. Low impact. Preserve. Safe. Freedom. Legacy. The word finally does a lot of heavy lifting. Finally relax. Finally slow down. Finally enjoy life. As if the preceding forty years were merely an obstacle course you've been permitted to stop running. As if enjoyment was something you had to earn and are now, at last, allowed.

Finally? Who said you weren't already?

What if you're not done? What if you still want to start a business, change your job, climb a bloody mountain? What if the standard-issue retirement package the cruise, the garden, the gentle hobby genuinely doesn't fit?

That's when you start to feel the pigeonhole years.

Still working? You can hear the thought process. Ah bless him. He can't afford to retire. Thinking about what's next? They don't mean promotion. They mean the transition. The handover. The graceful step back that you're presumably building toward. Keeping busy? Translation: found enough hobbies to fill the void yet?

Nobody asks what are you building anymore. They ask how are you filling your time.

So you ignore it. You bin the letters. You tell the GP it's the lack of warm-up, not the birth year. You keep building whatever you're building, and people get uncomfortable. Not openly. Just a flicker of something across the face when you don't play along. When you say you're starting something new at 62, they smile and say good for you in a tone that sits somewhere between encouragement and concern, as though you've announced you're taking up free solo climbing and they're being supportive about it. When you turn down the cruise and book the hiking trip instead, there's a pause. When you're more interested in the next decade than in consolidating the last one, it doesn't quite fit the model.

The letters keep coming. They've started to pile up because I can't be bothered to open them.

Might pop to Argos to get a bigger bin.

*Dispatches from a life still in progress*
### The 5am club and other minor illnesses
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/the-5am-club-and-other-minor-illnesses/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T08:09:08.000Z
There's a bloke on the internet who wakes up at 5am. 

By 5:03 he's journalled his intentions. By 5:07 he's done the gratitude ritual. At 5:12 he gets into a plunge bath that looks bloody freezing. Then it's the markets, the portfolio, and by 5:45 he's "won the morning."

By 7am he's apparently turned into the Wolf of Wall Street.

I watched this for three weeks. And here's the honest part: I didn't watch it to mock it. I watched it because some part of me, the part that still sets ambitious targets and feels vaguely guilty about the snooze button, wanted it to be true. There's something genuinely compelling about someone who seems to have found a formula. Even when the formula involves voluntarily lowering your body temperature before the postman's even up.

Three weeks of watching. Then one Tuesday I thought: fuck it, why not.

The house was properly dark. The kind of dark where you're not entirely sure you've actually woken up or it's still a dream. I made coffee, sat down with a notebook, and stared at the blank page.

What exactly does one journal at 5:07am?

"I am awake and I regret it" seemed the honest answer. "Today I will be intentional and focused" felt a bit much before the coffee had cooled. I wrote: "Coffee good. Everything else TBC."

By 5:12 I was supposed to be in the plunge bath. A nice little £99.99 number from Amazon. The internet says cold water immersion boosts mood, sharpens focus, speeds muscle recovery, reduces anxiety and improves sleep. It sounds, frankly, like a fucking miracle worker.

Researchers in South Australia have since gone through eleven separate studies and found that mood, in fact, stays exactly where it was. Inflammation goes up rather than down. And the stress relief, when it turns up, turns up about twelve hours later, meaning the man in the plunge bath at 5:12 in the morning is scheduled to feel serene at around teatime, by which point he's back in his emails with everyone else.

I didn't know any of that yet. I'd filled it the night before. Proper cold, ice and everything, just moving the ice from the chest freezer to the bath knackered me. I knew then I should have knocked it on the head.

Here's what the influencer doesn't mention: the gap between standing next to the bath and getting into the bath is not a physical problem. It's a philosophical one. You are warm. The water is not warm. Nothing about your body, your instincts, or your fifty-odd years of accumulated common sense is suggesting this is a good idea. You do it anyway, because you've watched a stranger on the internet do it forty-seven times and somewhere in your brain a wire has crossed.

I lasted twelve seconds. Well, I wasn't counting, so it might have been ten. Not twelve serene, meditative seconds. Twelve British seconds of standing in freezing water thinking "why would anyone voluntarily live like this" while the dog appeared in the doorway and looked at me with an expression I can only describe as professionally concerned.

I was having flashbacks. Not of a YouTube video but a documentary about interrogation techniques. Cold water used to break a person down, which is presumably why the CIA went in for it, and why nobody at the time described it as a wellness routine. Or maybe it was one of the Rambo films.

I got out, stood there dripping in the garden and had a quick look round hoping none of the neighbours saw it. Especially Trevor. He'd rip the piss out of me for a fortnight.

The internet had promised me a sharpened mind. What I had was a sharpened awareness that I'd made a significant error. The plunge bath sat there while my mind went: is there any way of getting this back in the box for a refund? I could say it arrived damaged. Rather than the truth, which is that I lost my bottle. Not sure they do refunds for that.

By day four I wasn't sharpened. I was knackered. Properly, bone-deep tired. Turns out when you're 52 and you shave ninety minutes off your sleep because a man with a YouTube channel swears it'll change your life, you don't get optimised. You get tired.

The mornings felt stolen from the wrong end of the day. I'd had emails at 10:30 the night before. Something mildly violent on Netflix at eleven. Lying awake at twenty to midnight wondering whether I'd locked the back door. Then the alarm at 5am and the specific despair of someone who has done this to themselves voluntarily.

Day six: a throat like sandpaper.

Not the "I've been talking too much" kind. The unmistakable "something is coming" kind that your body delivers with the quiet authority of someone who's been trying to get your attention for several days and has now decided to be direct about it.

I cancelled the ice bath. I cancelled the journalling. My morning was taken up locating the only 24-hour Tesco that was actually open, which, it turns out, has not signed up to the 5am programme either. Bought Lemsip. Went home. Got back into bed.

First sick day in seven years.

The same researchers found that people who do this regularly take about a third fewer sick days. What they don't find is that the sick days get any shorter.

Around 10am I made coffee and watched something completely mindless on television. No intentions set. No gratitude ritualised. No portfolio reviewed. Just a man on a sofa with a duvet and a mild temperature and, somewhere underneath the general discomfort, the faint sensation of having been let off something.

There's a version of that morning — the slow coffee, the aimless television, the absence of any agenda more pressing than getting through to lunchtime — that I couldn't have chosen for myself. I'd have felt guilty about it. The flu removed the choice entirely and handed me back a morning that felt, against all logic, like mine. No structure borrowed from a stranger. No ritual designed for someone else's life. Just the specific, unremarkable texture of being a person in a house with nowhere to be and nothing to perform.

A couple of weeks on, everything is back to normal. No ice, no rituals, no alarm set for a time that begins with the number five.

I still see the bloke on the internet. He's still at it, still up at 5am, still winning mornings with apparent sincerity. I'm not even sure it wouldn't work for me, given different hours, different evenings, a different version of the week.

But I'm winning somewhere around 6:30 to 7, depending on the night before.

The dog seems fine with this arrangement. I still feel guilty about the snooze button.

*Dispatches from a life still in progress.*
### Do You Really Need 10,000 Steps a Day?
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/do-you-really-need-10000-steps-a-day/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T18:24:32.000Z
First it was 10,000\. Now it's 7,000\. I'll wait until it's 3,000, then start.

The short answer, for anyone who arrived here wanting one: no. A review published in The Lancet Public Health last year reviewed fifty-seven studies and more than 160,000 adults and found that most of the benefit is banked by about seven thousand steps. Compared with two thousand, seven gets you a 47% lower risk of dying of anything at all, and a quarter off your cardiovascular risk. Beyond that the line keeps rising, just less steeply. It's a hill, not a cliff. Ten thousand isn't wrong and there's no medal for cutting back to seven.

The number was never medical to begin with. It came from a Japanese pedometer sold in the year after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the manpo-kei, and it was called that partly because the character for ten thousand is said to look like a man walking. A visual pun. Sixty years of global health behaviour, and a poster in a doctor's waiting room in Watford, all resting on a Japanese marketing department noticing that a number looked like a bloke.

A pun set a target for the entire developed world in 1965 and a research consortium has finally marked it down by thirty per cent.

What I want to know is why the correction pissed me off.

Because it did. I read the story on my phone, standing in the kitchen, and what came back was the hall. Twenty minutes of it, most evenings that February, back and forth past the coats, checking the wrist, doing sums. Four hundred to go. Then two hundred. Then swearing under my breath because I'd stopped to look and the stopping doesn't count. The dog used to come and stand in the doorway and watch me. She'd give it a minute, decide I was an idiot, and go back to the sofa.

Somewhere in your fifties you start being issued numbers about yourself. Not the ones you chose, like the mortgage or the pension or the mile time you used to run. These come from machines and from doctors, and get read back to you as facts. Cholesterol, in millimoles, with a stated ceiling. Blood pressure, two figures, the second one apparently mattering more than anyone previously mentioned. Resting heart rate. Grip strength, if you're unlucky enough to be measured for it, which is a phrase I'd never heard until the year I heard it three times. Bone density. That HbA1c figure that sits just inside the range and gets described as "fine, for now."

None of these negotiate. You can't appeal a cholesterol reading. Nobody publishes a meta-analysis in 2026 announcing that actually 6.2 was always alright and we've all been unnecessarily worried. The numbers only move one way, and the way they move is towards the day someone uses the word "manage" about your body.

The step count was the only one I could manipulate, and it turns out it wasn't even bloody true. I'd been taking orders from a bloke in a marketing department in the sixties with pedometers to shift. I owe the dog a card from Clintons for the number of times I dragged her round the block again when we were both done.

Which raises the awkward possibility that I'd never really been walking for my health.

I bought the watch in the January after my fiftieth. Not a serious one. The mid-range model, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that I wasn't going to be running any marathons and didn't need the version that measures blood oxygen at altitude. It arrived in a box the size of a paperback with more packaging than seemed necessary for something that fits on a wrist. I charged it overnight and put it on in the morning and by eleven o'clock it had already told me something about myself.

The first week was genuinely good. I walked to places I'd have driven to. I got off a stop early. There's a stretch of the canal near us I'd not walked properly in years and I walked it twice that week.

The second week I started checking at nine in the evening, and the third week I found myself at 9,340 with the news on, calculating.

That's the moment the thing turns. Not the walking. The scoreboard. Because a step count doesn't measure whether you moved, it measures whether you complied. By the end of it I'd worked out that thirty-three laps of the kitchen island was five hundred, and that you could get them done while the kettle boiled if you didn't mind being seen doing it. I never told anyone I did that. I'm telling you now and it still sounds worse written down.

Then there are the mornings I've gone to work with the watch still on the charger, and my brain does this weird thing where it just gives up on the whole day. Oh well. No steps today. Not my fault, no need to take the stairs.

It also can't see most of what you do. Digging the garden. An hour of weights. Carrying an Ikea chest of drawers up two flights of stairs, which is the one that nearly finished me. Whatever it was, it went in as four hundred steps and an arrow pointing down, and I remember standing at the top with my hands on my knees, shirt stuck to my back, breathing like a man who'd done something, pissed off with myself because the watch had recorded almost none of it.

The strange thing is that I walk plenty at my mum's. She lives by the sea, and I go down every few weeks, and I've never once looked at my wrist while I'm there. Along the front, past the faded shelters and the scooters and the bandstand nobody's using, down as far as the pier and back, because the pier is where you turn round, those are the rules. I looked once, out of curiosity, and it was somewhere north of eleven thousand and I hadn't noticed doing any of it. At home I have a loop. Out of the estate, along the main road, past the Esso garage and the Red Lion, sometimes a pint on the way, back the same way. Nothing on it is worth arriving at.

Then a Tuesday where I hit four thousand and knew by lunchtime I wouldn't get near it. So I stopped looking. And once you've stopped looking for one day you've broken something, and the watch knows, and it sends you a weekly summary with an arrow pointing downwards. By March it was in the drawer in the kitchen, the one with the takeaway menus and the spare keys and the instruction booklet for a boiler we replaced in 2019 and still haven't serviced. I told myself I'd start again properly in the spring, which made sense, because who wants to walk in the cold.

There's a Fitbit from 2019, a Garmin from 2022, and something cheap off Amazon from 2024\. At this rate I'll collect more watches than steps.

The official advice, for what it's worth, has never mentioned steps at all. The UK Chief Medical Officers ask for 150 minutes a week of something that makes you breathe harder, muscle work on two days, balance work as you get older, and less sitting still. That's it. It's unphotographable. Nothing to screenshot, which is presumably why nobody can name it and everybody could name the number invented to sell a pedometer.

The post I read it on was a man announcing he'd been let off. He said he'd spent years beating himself up over the number and could finally be happy with seven, and the word he reached for was freedom. Underneath, within a few hours, several dozen people had turned up to tell him what they walk. Twelve thousand suits me, I'll stick with it. Seven seems low, I feel better at eleven. Do more, not less. One man was on fifteen to twenty and said it had changed his life. Not one of them said well done.

The research says move a bit more than you did and it'll probably help, on a curve, with diminishing returns and no pass mark. What we heard was: new number. Seven. Go.

The other thing in the study, which nobody reported, is that the biggest gains are at the bottom. Getting from two thousand to five does more for you than getting from seven to ten. Which means the number was never aimed at the dog people or the golfers or anyone who walks to work without thinking about it. It was aimed at the man doing two thousand. And the thing least likely to help that man is a watch telling him at half past nine that he's 2,413 short of being who he meant to be today.

I got the watch out of the drawer last week. Dead, obviously. It took forty minutes on the charger before it would show me anything, and when it came on it wanted to know how my sleep had been for the last two years.

*Dispatches from a life still in progress.*
### Cassette Tapes and Driving Licences
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/cassette-tapes-and-driving-licences/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T08:09:44.000Z
The McDonald's car park at half eleven on a Tuesday. Four of you in a Fiesta that smelled of wet carpet and something electrical nobody ever located. One shared hot apple pie going round. Nowhere to be. Nowhere you'd come from, particularly. You'd just driven there because you could.

That was it. That was the whole point.

Passing your test was a rite of passage in a way that's hard to explain now without sounding like you're romanticising it which you are, but only slightly. It meant you could just go places. No more missing the last bus. No more asking. You filled the tank with £4.64 in change and you left.

The car was awful. A Fiesta older than you, with a cassette player that chewed every tape. A Renault 5 with a hole in the floor and a draught we called air conditioning. A Fiesta XR2 with one working speaker and a heater with one setting: freezing. It broke down at least once a month and your mate's dad always got it back on the road and you never once questioned what that cost him.

The rear view mirror came off every other week. There wasn't a glue on earth that could hold it.

Insurance was creative. You were a "named driver" on your dad's policy. He was the "main driver" despite never touching the car. Everyone did this. Nobody questioned it. The alternative was £1,500 to insure something worth £600, and you were seventeen with a paper licence that had cost you next to nothing.

The tests were flexible too. Clutch broke during one. Exhaust fell off during another. Stalled at a roundabout twice and the examiner sighed and ticked the box anyway. In the eighties the working rule was simple: if you didn't cause a pile-up in the first twenty minutes you had a reasonable chance.

Half the nation would fail now inside five minutes. Both hands on the wheel? You're having a laugh.

But the freedom felt enormous. Even though most of us just drove to McDonald's, or picked someone up so we could drive them home again, or went nowhere in particular. Just around. Do you remember that? You actually just drove around. The destination wasn't the point. The point was you could go.

Late-night drives talking rubbish. Parking badly in a lay-by and pretending you knew what you were doing. Feeling like an adult even though your mum was still waiting up.

> **Now only about a third of 17 to 25-year-olds hold a licence down nearly half from the early 1990s. They still want the independence. They just can't afford it.**

Lessons run at thirty to forty pounds an hour and you'll need dozens of them before you're anywhere near ready. Insurance for a seventeen-year-old in a Corsa starts at two thousand pounds. Add a half-decent car. Add the provisional, which is now thirty-four pounds when ours was about four. The maths doesn't work and they can see that.

We love saying kids these days don't want freedom. They do. They just don't think it arrives in the shape of a rusty Corsa with a nine-hundred percent insurance premium, and they're not wrong.

We're hardly in a position to judge anyway. We were the generation that didn't wear seatbelts properly, squeezed six people into a five-seat car, thought two pints was fine, and learned from uncles who said things like "just feel the bite, son." We talk about standards dropping. Meanwhile if you didn't pass in under ten lessons your mates took the piss.

A nineteen-year-old today can get most places by train or Uber. They can socialise without leaving the house. They can work without commuting. The urgency has changed. The ambition hasn't.

Driving used to be the first real taste of autonomy. Now it's just an option, still essential in outside cities, still expensive everywhere, still carrying more meaning than the object probably deserves.

Most of us over fifty are back in learner mode anyway. Not in cars but in careers, in technology, in health, in whatever comes next. We're all quietly revising something.

And we all occasionally wonder if we'd pass the test first time now.

*Dispatches from a life still in progress.*
### One-Take World
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/one-take-world/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T08:10:16.000Z
We live in a one-take world now. You tap out a message, send it. You snap a photo, post it. You record something, shrug, and let it fly. No drafts. No rehearsals. No second thoughts.

And for most things, that's exactly right. Nobody needs to rewrite "running ten minutes late" three times. Nobody needs to agonise over whether the WhatsApp to the plumber was the right tone. The one-take world gave us speed, ease, the ability to just communicate and move on.

And to be fair, it earned its place. The medical test result that used to take a week now arrives the same afternoon. The video call that puts you in the same room as someone on the other side of the world, for nothing, instantly. The fact that you can learn to do almost anything, rewire a plug, speak basic Spanish, understand what your pension is actually doing, without leaving the kitchen table. These are not small things.

But somewhere along the way speed stopped being a tool and became the only setting. Including for things that probably deserved longer.

There is now a warning system for long writing. TL;DR. Too Long; Didn't Read. A label attached to anything that requires more than three minutes of attention, as if the reader needs protecting from the effort of finishing something. We will make our own minds up, thank you, about what's too long to read.

Take the CV.

Thirty years of work. The projects that nearly broke you and didn't. The things you built from nothing. The moments where you held something together that was quietly falling apart, and nobody knew, and you didn't mention it, and it mattered enormously at the time. The jobs that taught you more by going wrong than the ones that went right. The relationships that made you better at what you do. The slow accumulation of knowing things, not from courses or certificates, but from having actually done them, repeatedly, over a long time, in the real world.

One page.

That's the current wisdom. Recruiters say it. Career coaches say it. Social media threads full of people who've never hired anyone worth hiring say it. Keep it tight. Make it scannable. Lead with impact. Nobody has time for more than one page.

The algorithm and the exhausted hiring manager have, between them, arrived at the same conclusion: if it can't be absorbed at a glance, it probably isn't worth absorbing.

The same person who will watch the top ten funniest videos ever for twenty-five minutes, or spend an evening watching someone build a shed on YouTube, has decided that five minutes on your CV is too much to ask. Thirty years. Too long. Next. Curriculum Vitae, incidentally, is Latin for "course of life." That course of life now gets scanned by something with no life, and it has to fit on a page.

Someone spent six months applying for jobs recently. Over fifty, long career, good at what they do. Their own conclusion: a long successful career behind them, and somehow it worked against them as often as it worked for them. A recruiter, somewhere, decided what mattered was what they were doing now, not what they did fifteen years ago. And they're right. Delete those fifteen years and suddenly the whole thing fits on one page. Problem solved.

Kubrick holds a Guinness World Record for the most takes of a single scene with dialogue. Not an action sequence. Not a special effect. A conversation between a small boy and a hotel cook in The Shining. 148 takes. Because take 147 wasn't quite right. The Beatles spent fifty-five hours recording Strawberry Fields Forever. One song. Nearly three days. Because they knew it would change everything. And it did. Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms forty-seven times. Same ending. Different words. Until one version finally stopped annoying him.

Nobody told Kubrick to keep it to one page. He would have told you that you were wasting everybody's time. Nobody suggested Hemingway didn't have time to draught forty-seven endings. If they did, you'd probably get one of his famous martinis over your head.

They weren't perfectionists in the anxious sense. They just believed the work deserved the time. That something made carefully was different in kind from something made quickly, in ways that mattered even when you couldn't quite say how.

And yet here we are. Compressing. Condensing. Reducing. Not because the content got less valuable but because the attention got shorter. The work didn't change. The willingness to sit with it did.

Which is why the one-page CV is the right symbol for this moment. It isn't really about recruitment. It's about what we've decided experience is worth. How much space we're prepared to give to the evidence of a life actually lived and worked. The answer, apparently, is one side of A4\. Margins not too tight. Font no smaller than eleven point. Preferably with a brief personal statement at the top that sounds like everyone else's brief personal statement at the top.

There are moments where the one-take world gets it completely right. The voice note a friend sent that said more in forty seconds than any email ever could, unscripted, slightly stumbling, entirely true. The photo you took without thinking, without composing, without checking the light, the one your daughter still has on her phone.

Some things are better unrehearsed. Better for being caught rather than constructed.

The sad part isn't that we invented speed. It's that we accidentally applied it to everything. Including the things that were never chores in the first place.

*Dispatches from a life still in progress.*
### FOFU: Fear of F**king up
URL: https://www.thechapterist.com/fofu/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T08:10:30.000Z
I nearly didn't apply for a job last year.

Not because I wasn't qualified. I was. Not because I didn't want it. I did. I spent three days reading the job description, closing the tab, opening it again, reading it once more and then going to make a coffee I didn't need.

What stopped me, temporarily, almost permanently, was the possibility that I might look desperate. That someone younger might get it. That I'd put myself forward and the answer would come back no, and the no would mean something different at this age than it would have meant at 32\. Not a setback. Just evidence, filed away by everyone watching, about where I actually stood.

I applied eventually. But I nearly didn't. And the thing that nearly stopped me wasn't lack of ability or lack of ambition.

It was FOFU.

The fear of f\*\*king up.

You've heard of FOMO. Everyone has. The fear of missing out, that low-level anxiety that someone somewhere is having a better time, living a better life, making better choices. FOMO is loud. FOMO is Instagram. FOMO belongs to the frantic, the people refreshing their feeds every ten minutes just in case something happened that they needed to know about.

FOFU feels quieter. A knot in your stomach. More real somehow. Plays more on your emotions. 

At 25 you try things because you don't know any better. At 32 you try things because you're ambitious and the consequences still feel worth the gamble and recovery is still realistic. At 55 you hesitate, because you finally understand consequences. You've felt them. You know what redundancy actually looks like, not as a concept but as a real thing that could change everything if you let it. You know what a bad investment looks like when you're living inside one. You know what embarrassment tastes like when you have to explain it to people who were counting on you, who trusted your judgement, who maybe reorganised their own plans around yours.

You know things. And knowing things, it turns out, can make you very careful.

Failure at 25 is a story. You post on LinkedIn. It becomes the thing that made you, the year everything went wrong and you came out the other side with better judgement and a good anecdote. It has narrative arc and a lesson and a point at which it turned around, and people nod approvingly because you're young enough for failure to look like character building. The mess is the point. The mess is evidence of trying. 

Failure at 55 doesn't work that way.

It's not a chapter in life. It feels more like a conclusion. Evidence, finally, that you miscalculated somewhere fundamental. And the people watching, colleagues, family, the professional world you've spent thirty years building a reputation inside, they already know your track record. Which means they'll have opinions about whether this was always coming. Whether the signs were there. Whether you should, at your age, with your experience, have known better.

Which is crazy because you know the people who matter don't care if you f\*\*k up but you still worry anyway. 

At 25 you're allowed to be clueless. At 55 you're supposed to be the steady hand. The experienced one. The person other people call when things go sideways, because you've seen enough to know what to do. That identity, capable, reliable, the one who's been around the block, is something you've built carefully over decades. It has real value. And risking it on something that might not work feels not just frightening but genuinely irresponsible. Like gambling with someone else's money.

So you don't apply. Or you apply but you hedge every sentence of the cover letter until the ambition is invisible. Or you have the idea and you research it for eight months and you get very close to launching it and then you find one more thing to check, one more reason to wait, one more version of not quite yet.

There's ego in it too. Which is uncomfortable to admit, and therefore worth admitting.

The business you research but never launch, part of that is genuine caution, real experience, pattern recognition that's earned and worth listening to. Your instincts at 55 are not the same as your instincts at 25\. They're heavier. Slower to move. Loaded with baggage you've accumulated over the years.

But part of it, and this is the part that's harder to look at directly, is not wanting to be seen trying and failing. Not wanting to be the person who had a go at something significant at 55 and it didn't work out. The person who should have known better. Who had all that experience and still got it wrong.

We tell ourselves we're being realistic. Measured. Sensible. Mature. We use the language of wisdom to describe fear.

The irony is you've already survived worse than whatever you're currently avoiding.

Financial dips that rewrote the plan. Health scares that arrived without warning. Career detours that felt like derailments and turned out to be something else. Markets crashing at exactly the wrong moment. Situations with no good answer that required you to choose the least bad one and live with it. Probably grief as well somewhere along the way.

You didn't fall apart. You're still here.

The fall isn't what you're actually scared of. You've fallen before. You know, in your body, that you can fall and get up. What you're scared of is the optics of falling. Looking foolish. Looking late. Looking like you miscalculated at an age when you were supposed to be past miscalculating. Looking like someone who should have known better, trying something they probably shouldn't.

That's the real thing. Not the failure. The being seen to fail. The loss of the narrative you've spent thirty years building, careful, capable, worth backing.

The strange thing is you can hold both at once. The genuine wisdom and the fear of f\*\*king up. If we're honest, when we claim we're using experience or staying cautious, both are usually true. That's exactly what makes them so useful. They've always gone hand-in-hand, but we've become way too comfortable using them as an excuse.

The vocabulary of maturity is very convenient that way.

FOMO was built for people chasing noise.

FOFU belongs to people who've built something. Who have something to lose. Who understand, finally and fully, what losing actually costs. Which is what makes it harder to name, harder to argue with, harder to push through.

Three days of opening and closing the tab. Then I applied. Sent it before I could find another reason not to. I sent it on a Tuesday. Had another caffeine hit, rechecked the email I'd checked four minutes earlier, then forgot about it while I argued with the dog about where my shoes were.

I never got a reply. It seems that to lose a reputation, someone has to actually acknowledge you exist.

*Dispatches from a life still in progress.*