The Point
At some stage in reading through this collection you have probably asked yourself what it is for. The question is reasonable.
The internet carries an enormous amount of material from people who have done interesting things and observed other people doing interesting things and who write about the observations in ways that accumulate into what might charitably be called a body of work and what might less charitably be called a man talking about himself at considerable length. You are permitted to wonder whether this falls into that category.
Let me try to answer directly, since directness has been the general approach throughout and I see no reason to abandon it.
The point is the observation. Not the observation as evidence for an argument, not the observation as a route toward a recommendation, not the observation arranged into the shape of a lesson. Just the observation itself, offered as what it is—a set of things I noticed over several decades of work that struck me as worth attending to, written down in the hope that someone reading them might find in their own experience some echo of what I am describing, or might find that the echo is absent and that its absence is itself informative. I am not trying to change anyone’s mind about anything. I am not making a case. I am describing what I found.
The purpose, if it extends beyond that, is something I’d describe as a demonstration that curiosity doesn’t diminish with age. I say demonstration because I’m aware that stating this as a principle would immediately make it sound like a motivational claim, the kind of thing you read on a framed print above someone’s desk, and I have no interest in being that. What I notice, in my own life and in the lives of the men I spent time with across those years, is that the curiosity a person feels about other people, about the texture of experience, about the questions that don’t have clean answers, tends to survive the passage of time better than almost anything else. It survives better than physical capacity, better than certainty, better than the particular ambitions that drove earlier stages of life.
If those decades of work gave me anything to carry into the present, it was a confirmed understanding that continuing to be curious about things—all kinds of things, including things that might seem undignified or eccentric or beside the point—is not only available at sixty but is possibly more pleasurable at sixty than it was at thirty, because by sixty you have stopped needing the curiosity to resolve into something useful. You can be curious for its own sake.
Now to the question of what I am selling, which I can see forming behind the more polite questions, and which I may as well answer since it will otherwise sit in the room for the rest of the conversation.
No thing. I am selling no-thing. Or no-thing in the manner that selling usually operates—the identified product, the specified price, the call to action, the manufactured urgency. People sometimes assume there must be something for sale. They’re right, though probably not in the way they expect.
You will not find anywhere on these pages a button that says click here to book now or a clock counting down to the expiry of an offer that, in any case, was never going to expire, or a list of testimonials assembled to resolve your hesitation before you’ve had time to form it, or the cheerful implication that this is the last available spoon and you should act immediately before someone else takes it.
A thing doesn’t need to be anything other than the thing it is.
This strikes me as a principle worth stating plainly in a context where most things are required to be something beyond themselves—a brand, a proposition, a value-add, a scalable opportunity. What I have written here is what I noticed and how I have thought about it. It stands or falls as that, without the support of a sales mechanism. If it interests you, you’ll keep reading. If it doesn’t, the decision to stop is also perfectly legitimate and I hold no brief against it.
There is, if I’m honest, an offer somewhere in here. But I want to be precise about what the offer is and what it isn’t, because imprecision about this would undercut the entire approach. I am not offering a product, a treatment, a session of predetermined duration and specified content, a service that can be described completely in advance and delivered reliably to specification.
What I am offering, to the extent I am offering anything, is my particular way of being with another man. The quality of attention I can bring, the conversations that tend to become available in the space that quality of attention creates, the experience of being in the company of someone who will leave what you say where it belongs and not extract it and do something with it. If that interests you, and if it seems like something that would be useful to you, we might meet.
I notice that the absence of a more explicit offer makes some people uneasy. They read through the observations, they find something in them that seems relevant to their own experience, and then they look for the mechanism—the next step, the pathway from reading to having. They suspect there is a hidden agenda underlying the apparent absence of one.
The suspicion is understandable.
We live in a world where the absence of an explicit sales proposition tends to mean that the sales proposition is simply concealed more cleverly than usual, and a man with decades of experience in the world as it operates has reasonable grounds for that suspicion. I notice it and I don’t fault it.
But there is genuinely no hidden mechanism. The observations exist because I found them worth writing. The offer exists because I continue to find this kind of time with another man interesting and because some men find it useful. The connection between the observations and the offer is not a funnel. It is more like a portrait—something that, if it resembles the kind of person you would find it useful to spend time with, suggests that spending time together might be worth investigating. And if the portrait doesn’t resemble that, the portrait still stands as what it is: a set of observations from a man who spent a significant portion of his life in a room with other men, attending to what happened.
The range of outcomes available from that portrait seems worth naming. You and I may never meet and may never communicate in any form. That is fine. The observations will have been what they were whether or not they lead anywhere beyond themselves.
We might communicate once—a question, an exchange, something that gets resolved in a single conversation and requires nothing more. We might meet once in person and find that what the observations suggested is confirmed, modified, or contradicted by the reality of the meeting.
We might, over time, become something I would describe as friends, though I use the word without much confidence in its precision, since friendship covers so much territory that the word itself has become almost too general to be useful.
Or you might decide, at any point in this process, that you dislike me. This is also available. I have no investment in being liked by everyone, and a man who insists on it tends, in my experience, to become progressively less likeable in proportion to his insistence.
What I bring to any meeting, if a meeting happens, is what I have brought throughout the work as I have described it here: the attention, the refraining, the curiosity that is still intact and not yet prepared to diminish, a certain amount of accumulated experience of what happens when two people are genuinely present with each other rather than performing presence at each other.
And a readiness to be surprised. I have been surprised consistently across the decades by what men carry and what they find they can put down and what they discover when they put it down. I expect this to continue and I find I look forward to it.
I will lend you a spoon to stir your coffee. I want it back. This is not a metaphor for anything in particular. It is simply a thing.
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