On the Difficulty of Giving Fictional Names to Real People

The email arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, between a council tax reminder and a newsletter from a bakery I’d visited once in 2018 and never managed to unsubscribe from. It was from a woman called Christine — not her real name either, I suspect, but that’s rather the point — who wrote to tell me that Margaret from the post office was upset.

I’d written about Margaret six months earlier. She was the woman who’d served behind the counter at the post office on Abbeydale Road for what I imagined was the entirety of recorded human history, and who had once refused to sell me a book of stamps because I’d said “cheers” instead of “thank you” and she felt I wasn’t taking the transaction seriously. I’d written the piece as a gentle tribute to her exacting standards and the disappearing world of counter-service formality. I thought she’d have been flattered. I’d changed her name, obviously. Margaret wasn’t Margaret. But I’d chosen Margaret because it felt right — a name that belonged to a woman of a certain generation, a certain bearing, a certain willingness to tell you you’d filled in the wrong form.

The real Margaret, Christine told me, had read the piece. She’d recognised herself immediately — the stamp incident, the formality, the specific brand of professional disdain — and she’d been offended. Not by the content. By the name. “She thinks you’ve made her sound like a Sunday school teacher,” Christine wrote. “She’s always hated the name Margaret.”

I sat with this for a long time. What I’d done, I realised, was a kind of identity theft in reverse: I’d taken a woman’s actual life and grafted it onto a name she despised. Worse, in some ways, than using her real name. At least if I’d called her Jean, she might have felt seen. Instead I’d made her into someone she’d spent sixty years not wanting to be.

The Dinner Lady Years

This was not my first mistake with names. In the early days of writing about my own life, I took an approach I can only describe as catastrophically lazy. I gave everyone the same six names, all of them belonging to the dinner ladies at my primary school. There was a Maureen, a Barbara, a Glenis, a Carol, a Janet, and a Heather, and between them they covered every woman I’d ever encountered. Men fared slightly better only because I had a wider palette — the dinner ladies were, regrettably, all women — but the principle was the same. I wasn’t creating characters. I was applying stickers.

The problem became apparent the first time I tried to write about two women in the same piece. “Maureen said this, and then Maureen said that” — it read like a Beckett play performed by a single, increasingly confused actor. Worse, it stripped every scene of its specificity. A Maureen in a Sheffield post office and a Maureen in a Leeds hospital waiting room and a Maureen on a National Express coach to London are all, somehow, different women. But on the page they blur into a single composite Maureen who has done too much, been too many places, and doesn’t ring true in any of them.

There was also the problem of tone. Heather, one of my primary school dinner ladies, had a specific quality — she was the one who surreptitiously gave you extra chips if you looked thin or sad — and every time I called a stranger Heather, I was importing that chip-dispensing warmth into situations where it didn’t belong. The woman at the Co-op who once threw my change at me because I’d put my hand out too early was not a Heather. She was something sharper. But I didn’t have a sharper name in my repertoire, so she became Heather, and the piece lost a dimension.

The first time an editor queried one of my names, I knew the approach was broken. “Is Glenis a real name?” she asked, referring to a woman I’d written about who ran a jumble sale at the church hall. I was affronted. Glenis was absolutely a real name. Glenis was the name of a woman who could fold a duvet cover in under thirty seconds and who once told me, with great specificity, that my mother’s skirt was too short for a Tuesday. But the editor was American, and to her, Glenis sounded like something I’d invented — a name from a part of Britain she’d never encountered, carried by a woman she couldn’t picture. The name was right for Sheffield but wrong for her. This, I realised, was another layer of the problem. Names are place-specific in ways that aren’t always legible to people from other places. A name that feels authentically, recognisably local to you might read as fictional to someone from another region, or another country entirely.

What a Name Carries

What I’ve come to understand, slowly and through a series of small embarrassments, is that a name is never just a label. It’s a dense little packet of information: region, era, class, the aspirations of parents, the weight of a grandmother’s maiden name pressed into service as a first. In South Yorkshire, names tell you things before the person even speaks. A man called Trevor who works at the tool hire shop on London Road is not the same man as a Tarquin who runs a gallery in Sharrow Vale, and the difference isn’t just occupational. Trevor was probably named for an uncle who worked at Steelpec. Tarquin was named for a character in a book his mother read during pregnancy, quite possibly while eating something with quinoa in it. You can hear their whole lives in two syllables each.

A name places you. Not just in the country but in the decade, the social stratum, the specific kind of school you went to. Susan and Susan are different people depending on whether their mothers were the sort who added an extra ‘a’ — Susana — or the sort who went the other way and called her Sue. Kevin is a name that carries an entire cultural moment, a brief window in the 1960s and 70s when every other boy in South Yorkshire was called Kevin, and now you can hear a Kevin and know he’s in his late fifties and has opinions about whether a chip butty should have butter on the bread. He thinks it should. He’s right.

Then there’s the question of nicknames, which in Britain operate as a social shorthand that given names never quite manage. A Margaret might be Maggie to her friends, Marge to her sisters, Mrs H to the people at the post office, and “the woman from number 42” to the neighbours who’ve never quite caught her name. Each version is a different relationship, a different intimacy, a different social contract. When you choose a pseudonym, you’re also choosing which version of the person you’re claiming to know — and the version you choose says as much about you as it does about them. Calling someone Margaret when everyone who actually knows her calls her Marge is a declaration that you don’t know her at all, that you’ve observed her from the outside and imposed a formality she doesn’t wear in her own life.

The Authors Guild maintains detailed guidance on writing about real people that addresses this precise tension — the ethical and legal dimensions of depicting identifiable individuals in personal non-fiction. Their resources, shaped by the professional writing community’s hard-won experience, focus on protecting real subjects while maintaining narrative authenticity. It’s a reminder that the obligation isn’t just legal. It’s moral. The person you’re writing about didn’t ask to be a character in your essay. The very least you can do is make sure the character you create from them is one they’d recognise if they ever stumbled across it.

But here’s the complication no amount of professional guidance can fully resolve: you can’t simply ask them. You can’t go back to the woman at the Co-op and say, “I’m writing about the time you gave me the wrong change and then refused to acknowledge it, and I need to know what name you’d prefer I used when I describe the specific way you sighed at me.” The whole ecology of these encounters depends on their ordinariness. The moment you make someone aware they’re being observed, the observation becomes useless. You become a journalist. They become a subject. And the small, unguarded truth of the interaction — the sigh, the shrug, the way she called the next customer “love” without looking up — evaporates like breath in a cold room.

The Difficulty of Invention

So you invent. And the invention has to be good enough that it feels true without being true, specific without being identifiable, respectful without being sanitised. This is considerably harder than it sounds.

For a while, I tried a systematic approach. I kept a notebook — a proper paper one, because the whole point of this exercise is that some things shouldn’t be searchable — divided into columns: real person, key characteristics, invented name. The invented names I drew from a mental catalogue of names that belonged to the right region and the right generation. A woman of seventy in South Yorkshire could be a Dorothy, a Brenda, a Pauline, an Eileen. A man of sixty could be a Malcolm, a Barry, a Dennis, a Ray. I was building a casting directory for a theatre of the everyday, and the casting had to be precise.

The problem with the notebook method was that I’d start second-guessing myself. Was Dorothy too gentle for a woman who’d told a teenager to stop vaping in the queue at Greggs? Was Barry too cheerful for a man who’d been sighing at bus timetables since 1987? I’d spend forty minutes choosing a name for someone who appeared in three sentences of a 2,000-word essay. I was, as my father would say, polishing a brick.

I went through a phase of trying to find names through more structured means — not out of enthusiasm for automation, but because I was stuck, and stuckness makes you reach for things you’d normally dismiss. I looked at character name generators of various kinds, from the literary to the absurdly fantastical. A character name generator aimed at fiction writers, for instance, can produce something that sounds like it belongs in a novel. What it cannot produce is something that sounds like it belongs on Ecclesall Road on a wet Tuesday. The gap between what a generator produces and what a specific street in a specific city requires is the gap between data and life. Names aren’t generated. They’re inherited, shortened, misspelled on school registers, shouted across playgrounds, mumbled in introductions at bad parties. They arrive in a person’s life already carrying history, and your job is to find a name that carries the right history.

What I settled on, eventually, was something closer to listening than inventing. I’d think about the person — their posture, their clothes, the way they held their body at the till — and I’d wait for a name to arrive. Not construct one. Wait for one. It sounds pretentious, and it is, but it also works. The woman at the Co-op who threw my change wasn’t a Heather and she wasn’t a Margaret. She was a Val. I don’t know why. She just was. The name arrived the way the right word arrives when you’re writing a sentence and you try three wrong ones first: not through logic but through a kind of acoustic recognition. You hear it before you think it.

Ray

There’s a further complication, one I think about more than is probably healthy. When you write about someone regularly enough — when the same person appears across multiple pieces, becomes a recurring figure in your internal landscape — you develop a relationship with the invented version of them that is, in its own peculiar way, real.

The man who feeds pigeons in Norfolk Park has appeared in three of my essays. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know his name. But I’ve given him one — Ray — and the name has become, for me and apparently for some readers, inseparable from the man himself. I’ve had people ask me after him by his fictional name, as though he were a mutual acquaintance. “How’s Ray doing?” someone said at a reading once, and I knew exactly who they meant. I also knew that Ray’s real name was probably not Ray, and that the real man had no idea he was being discussed by strangers under a name he’d never heard.

This is the strange intimacy of the pseudonym. You know someone — their habits, their schedule, the particular angle at which they scatter bread, the way they nod at the dog walkers in the morning — better than you know some of your own relatives. But you don’t know their name. The name you’ve given them is a fiction wrapped around a truth, and the fiction has, through repetition, become its own kind of truth. If I met the real pigeon man tomorrow and learned his name was actually Keith, I think I’d be disappointed. Not in Keith — in the gap between Keith and Ray, the gap where three years of quiet observation has built a person who doesn’t quite exist but who I know better than Keith.

What makes it stranger is that the invented name, over time, begins to colour the real person. I’ve started to think of the pigeon man as Ray even when I see him in the park. He is Ray to me now, in a way that feels dishonest and yet somehow more honest than not naming him at all. To observe someone for three years and never give them a name in your mind is to keep them at a distance that feels more exploitative, not less — as though they’re a specimen rather than a person. The name, even though it’s invented, is an act of recognition. It says: I see you, I notice you, I’ve thought about you enough to give you a name. The fact that the name is wrong — that his real name is probably Keith or Brian or something I’d never guess — is almost beside the point. The gesture matters more than the accuracy.

Names carry class in a way that almost nothing else in British life does so transparently. The Institute of Education Sciences, through its work collecting and reporting education statistics, documents how demographic patterns track with educational outcomes across generations. The data is American, but the principle translates, and names are among the most legible markers of those patterns. They’re not neutral. They arrive in the world already encoded with information about the people who chose them, the place they were chosen, and the future the choosers imagined for the child. A name can signal aspiration, tradition, rebellion, or indifference. When I name a character, I’m not just choosing a word. I’m choosing a social position, a set of probabilities, a life that the real person lived but the fictional version has to embody in shorthand.

This is why the wrong name unravels everything. If I call the post office woman Margaret, I’m telling you she’s a certain kind of person — Church of England, probably, a woman who irons her tea towels and has a drawer specifically for batteries — and if the real woman was a Jean, a Jean who wore leopard print and had a motorbike in her youth and once told a man in the queue that he could mind his own business, then everything I’ve written about her is sitting on top of a fault line. The details might be right — the stamp incident, the sigh, the formality — but the name has undermined them all. The reader who knew her, if there is one, feels the wrongness immediately, the way you feel a draft in a room before you’ve found the window it’s coming from.

I’ve got better at it, I think. Or at least I’ve got more deliberate. I no longer use dinner ladies’ names. I no longer give everyone the same six labels. I try to find names that feel like they belong to the specific street, the specific era, the specific social world of the person I’m writing about. I try to honour the real person by inventing someone who could plausibly be them — not a disguise, but a parallel. A woman who might have lived the same life under a different name.

The Margaret incident taught me something I should probably have known already: that names matter to people in ways that are not entirely rational and not entirely explicable. Margaret didn’t want to be Margaret. She wanted to be herself. And the best I can do, as someone who writes about real people under invented names, is to invent names that the real people might have chosen for themselves — names that carry the right weight, the right region, the right year, the right sound. Names that, if the real person ever read the piece, would make them think: well, at least he got that right.

I haven’t been back to that post office. Not because I’m afraid of running into the real Margaret — or Jean, or Val, or whatever her name actually is — but because I’m afraid I’d get her name wrong to her face. After all this careful thought about the ethics and craft of naming, I suspect I’d walk in, open my mouth, and call her something completely wrong. Some habits, it turns out, are harder to rename than others.

The drawer is in the bedroom, third one down. It sticks unless you lift it slightly and pull at an angle, which I have never fixed because fixing it would mean engaging with the contents, and the contents are a problem.

Here is what is inside. One Moleskine notebook with a protagonist named Marcus who works in a town planning office and is having a quiet crisis about a roundabout. Three pages of description, no plot. A Word document printed out and annotated by hand—eleven pages of a short story about two brothers in a pub in Bakewell, the annotations growing less frequent and more desperate as the pages go on. A Tesco receipt from 2019 used as a bookmark on page 47 of someone else’s novel, which I was reading for research, or inspiration, or permission. A notebook from Paperchase—closed down now, like most things that existed in 2019—with a first line I was quite proud of: “The morning Gordon disappeared, his wife made toast as though nothing had changed, which in a sense was true.” Then nothing. A blank page. Then a shopping list. Then nothing again.

I open this drawer roughly twice a year. I look at the contents. I close the drawer. I do not throw anything away.

There is a particular kind of object that exists only in the homes of people who once thought they might write something. It is not quite a diary, not quite a journal, not quite a manuscript. It is a document that begins with enormous energy and then, somewhere around page four or page eleven or page thirty-two, runs out of whatever fuel it was running on. The energy at the start is always astonishing. The handwriting is careful. The margins are respected. By the end—by the point where it stops—the handwriting has degenerated into something half-cursive, half-frantic, and the margins are full of notes to self that read like messages from a person losing a debate with themselves: “Make this clearer,” “Why would he do this??”, “TIME JUMP??”

The drawer is not a failure drawer. That is the thing I need you to understand. If it were a failure drawer, I would have emptied it. I have failed at many things and disposed of the evidence with the ruthless efficiency of someone who has moved house four times in a decade. I do not keep failures. I keep things that are unfinished, which is a different category entirely, and one I think about more than is probably healthy.

What the Half-Novels Are Actually About

Here is what I have come to believe about the drawer. It is not evidence of a dream I abandoned. It is evidence of a particular kind of optimism that cannot survive contact with a full Tuesday.

A full Tuesday, for those who have not experienced one recently, goes roughly like this. You wake at six-fifteen because the alarm goes off, and also because the bin lorry is doing its rounds. You make tea. You check your phone for reasons that are not good enough. You have a meeting at nine-thirty that could have been an email, and an email at eleven that should have been a meeting, and a lunch break that you spend returning something to Argos. By the time you sit down at half past eight in the evening, the protagonist called Marcus who works in a town planning office is not waiting for you. He is not even a person. He is a name in a notebook in a drawer that sticks. The crisis about the roundabout has been replaced by a crisis about the boiler, which is making a sound that the internet suggests is either normal or catastrophic.

The half-novel dies not because you lack imagination. Imagination is the easy part. What kills it is the absence of structure—the capacity to sit down on a Tuesday and know what comes next, not because you are inspired but because you planned it on Sunday when you had forty-five minutes and a cup of coffee and the boiler was working. Structure is the boring, unglamorous, deeply unphotogenic thing that separates the people who write books from the people who have drawers.

I have friends who have written books. They are not more talented than I am, though they are certainly more disciplined. When I ask them about their process—and I have asked, at dinner parties, in pubs, on walks along the canal where the conversation has turned to the question of what we are all doing with our lives—they describe something that sounds less like inspiration and more like plumbing. They talk about outlines. Chapter summaries. Beat sheets and story arcs and character motivations written on index cards and pinned to a wall. They talk about structure the way a builder talks about scaffolding: as something that is not the building but without which there is no building.

I have never done any of this. I have always started with a first line and a feeling and a vague sense that the story will reveal itself if I keep going. It never does. The story does not reveal itself. The story requires a plan, and I have never had a plan, and so the story dies on page eleven in a notebook in a drawer that sticks.

The Gap Between the Story You Meant to Tell and the One You Have Time For

There is a gap, in midlife, between the story you meant to tell and the story you actually have time for. The story you meant to tell is a novel. It has a structure, a theme, a cast of characters who change and grow and suffer in ways that are meaningful. It takes two years to write and when it is finished it is good, or at least it is finished, which is its own form of good.

The story you have time for is an essay, or a text message, or a conversation with the cat about whether it is time for dinner. The story you have time for is three pages in a notebook before the bin lorry comes.

I think a lot of people my age live in this gap. They have the drawer. They have the notebook with the first line they were quite proud of. They have the Word document with the annotations that become less frequent and more desperate. And they have the feeling, which they do not talk about at dinner parties because it is embarrassing, that the thing in the drawer still counts as something. That the three pages of Marcus and his roundabout are not nothing. That the first line about Gordon’s wife making toast is a real thing that happened, even if nothing happened after it.

The question is whether that feeling is self-delusion or something more honest. I have gone back and forth on this. Some days I think the drawer is a monument to a fantasy version of myself—the person who was going to write a novel, the person who had the time and the talent and the discipline, the person who did not exist but whose existence I was briefly able to imagine on a Sunday afternoon in a Paperchase that has since closed down. Other days I think the drawer is something more interesting: a record of the stories I almost told, which is not the same as the stories I failed to tell. Almost is a real thing. Almost is a category. Almost is the space between the first line and the second line, and that space is where most of my creative life has been lived.

On Structure, and the Absence of It

The reason I have never finished a novel I was proud of is not that I lack the desire. I have desire in quantities that are, frankly, inconvenient. The reason I have never finished a novel I was proud of is that I have never had a way to plan and revise that did not require already knowing how novels work. I know how essays work. I know how emails work. I know how conversations in pubs work. I do not know how novels work, and the knowledge cannot be faked, and the lack of it becomes apparent somewhere around page eleven when Marcus is still in the town planning office and I have no idea what he does next.

What I needed, and what I did not have, was structure. Not inspiration—inspiration is the easy part, the part that comes free with the first line. Structure. A way of knowing what scene follows what scene, what a beat sheet looks like, how to plan a chapter so that it earns the next chapter. A way of revising that is not simply re-reading what you have written and feeling a vague sense of discouragement.

I have spent enough time around other writers to know that the barrier for most of us is architecture, not imagination. The Authors Guild has published best practices for writers navigating AI tools, and what strikes me about their guidance is the tension it sits with rather than resolves: a writer’s original voice is what makes writing worth reading, and yet the tools that might help you find your structure are built on patterns borrowed from everyone else. I feel that tension in my own drawer. The voice in the first line about Gordon’s wife is mine. The silence on the page after it is also mine, and no tool will fix that silence by itself.

Still, I have looked at what exists, the way you look at anything that promises to help with something you have failed at for years. Reedsy’s plot generator offers structured frameworks—3-Act, Save the Cat, the Hero’s Journey—as scaffolding rather than innate creative knowledge, which is at least honest about what it is doing. The lighter-weight tools like Squibler, Perchance, and QuillBot tend to produce a single output from a single prompt, which has never been what I needed; I do not lack for words, I lack for a plan. I have been circling, without committing to, the Unsloppy AI Writing App, which approaches the problem differently from most one-shot generic AI story generators. Rather than asking you to type a prompt and hope for a finished chapter, it builds a proof sheet and beat sheet first—scene-by-scene scaffolding you can revise before any prose gets generated. That matters because it is exactly the step I have never been able to do alone: planning what comes next before I need it. Whether this puts Unsloppy at the forefront of AI novel writing app technology is a claim I will leave to people who review software rather than write essays about drawers, but the approach certainly addresses the specific gap between wanting to write and knowing how to plan.

That same discipline applies to editorial structure: before publishing, editors need a way to test scattered notes become an argument readers can follow, which is where how Unsloppy AI Writing App fits the writing workflow can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.

Whether the Unfinished Thing Still Counts

I think it does. I think the three pages of Marcus and his roundabout count as something. I think the eleven pages of the brothers in the pub in Bakewell count as something. I think the first line about Gordon counts as something, even though nothing followed it, even though the page after it is blank and then has a shopping list on it.

They count because they were attempts, and attempts are not nothing. They count because they were made with genuine seriousness, in the way that only a person alone in a room with a notebook can be serious. They count because the person who wrote them believed, briefly, that the story would reveal itself, and that belief—however naïve, however frequently disproven—is a kind of optimism that I am not ready to throw away.

The drawer is not a monument to failure. It is a monument to the gap between wanting and doing, between the first line and the second line, between the story I meant to tell and the story I had time for. It is a monument to Tuesdays.

What I wonder now is whether the gap is permanent, or whether it is just a structural problem—the absence of a plan, the absence of scaffolding, the absence of a way to revise that is not simply re-reading and feeling discouraged. I wonder whether Marcus is still in the town planning office, waiting for someone to tell him what happens next. I wonder whether Gordon’s wife is still making toast, waiting for someone to explain what changed.

I close the drawer. I lift it slightly and push it at an angle and it slides shut. The bedroom is quiet. The boiler is making a sound that the internet says is either normal or catastrophic. Somewhere in a notebook in a drawer that sticks, a man called Marcus is still having a quiet crisis about a roundabout, and I owe him an answer.

My mother has a look. It’s not anger, exactly, and it’s not disappointment. It’s a weary, knowing resignation, usually paired with a slow head shake and a single, softly spoken word: “Tom.” The tone carries no surprise. It’s the sound of a prophecy coming true. And the prophecy, murmured around the Wrigglesworth household for as long as anyone can remember, was that I’d end up with my father’s stubbornness. Not his knack for fixing a boiler with a stern look and a bent coat hanger. Just the sheer, immovable, granite-like refusal to budge.

It’s a strange thing to inherit, a stubborn streak. You can’t hold it in your hand or tuck it into a savings account. It’s more of a ghostly heirloom, a spectre that moves into your decision-making and refuses to pay rent. I first felt its presence on a family holiday to the Lake District in the late 1980s. My father, armed with a tattered Ordnance Survey map and an unshakeable faith in his internal compass, decided we’d take a “scenic shortcut” down from Catbells. My mother, eyeing the sheer, scree-covered slope, suggested—with the patience of a saint reasoning with a very polite brick wall—that the well-trodden path might be the wiser choice. My father’s response was textbook. He didn’t argue. He just tightened his rucksack strap, gave a little sniff, and started descending into what was, for all intents and purposes, a small ravine. We followed, naturally. A line of Wrigglesworths sliding on our backsides down a mountain, because the alternative—admitting he’d got it wrong—was a concept that simply didn’t exist in his world.

Decades on, I’m the curator of that very same world. The stubbornness didn’t arrive with trumpets. It crept in, dressed up as principles, a strong sense of direction, a commendable refusal to be swayed by the crowd. It’s why I once burned an entire Saturday afternoon assembling a flat-pack wardrobe using only the ghost of a diagram I’d glanced at before recycling the instructions. “It’s just a box with a door,” I told myself—a sentence that carries the seeds of its own destruction. Three hours, two misplaced dowels, and one deeply worrying structural wobble later, I was still at it, jaw set in that familiar, inherited clench. My partner had wisely retreated to the garden with a book, only returning to place a cup of tea and the retrieved, slightly crumpled instructions silently on the floor beside me. I ignored them for another forty-five minutes.

In my father, I often found this trait maddening. The refusal to ask for directions. The insistence on finishing a DIY job long past the point of no return. The quiet, unshakeable conviction that his way of loading the dishwasher was the only correct way. Yet, in myself, I’ve rebranded it as “determination” or “sticking to my guns.” It’s a masterclass in self-deception. When I spend an extra hour re-editing a paragraph that was already fine, I’m not being stubborn; I’m being meticulous. When I refuse to upgrade my phone until the old one is a shattered mosaic of glass and regret, I’m not being obstinate; I’m being economically prudent. The line between a principled stand and pig-headedness is so thin it’s practically invisible, and I suspect I’ve been on the wrong side of it more often than I’d like to admit.

The Compass That Only Points One Way

This internal compass isn’t always a curse, mind you. There’s a resilience bundled up with it, a doggedness that can be handy. When a project at work slams into a wall, I’m the one still chipping away long after more sensible colleagues have decamped to the pub. Not because I’m more capable, but because leaving a problem unsolved creates a mental itch I’m physically incapable of not scratching. It’s the same impulse that drove my father to spend a whole winter restoring a vintage motorcycle that, to the untrained eye, looked like a pile of rust nursing a grudge. He’d emerge from the garage, hands black with grease, a look of deep satisfaction on his face, having just spent four hours freeing a single seized piston. “It’s coming along,” he’d say, and you almost believed him.

I catch that same satisfaction in myself now, though in less mechanically impressive settings. The quiet triumph of finally getting a sourdough starter to bubble after a week of feeding it like a finicky pet. The grim pleasure of untangling a box of old Christmas lights—a task that has broken lesser mortals. The deep, resonant “Aha!” when I crack a cryptic crossword clue that’s been taunting me for days. These aren’t the victories of a flexible mind. They’re the hard-won trophies of a stubborn one, a mind that simply refuses to let go. My father would understand completely. He’d probably just nod, a faint smile on his face, and say, “You’ve got to see it through.”

But the inheritance cuts both ways. For every sourdough victory, there’s a social moment where a tactical retreat would have been the wiser, kinder move. I’ve clung to arguments in pubs long after the point of interest, defending a position on, say, the optimal thickness of a crumpet with the fervour of a barrister in a murder trial. I’ve seen the look on my friends’ faces—a cocktail of boredom, pity, and a desperate wish to talk about literally anything else—and still, the words keep coming. It’s not that I need to be right; it’s that I cannot bear to be wrong. The distinction is subtle but significant. My father, I suspect, was the same. It wasn’t ego, exactly. It was a sort of intellectual integrity taken to a pathological extreme. A fact, once stated, had to be defended to the death, even if that fact concerned the correct way to fold a map or the precise boiling time for an egg.

The Quiet Wars of Domestic Life

This inherited trait has turned the most mundane corners of domestic life into a series of quiet, internal skirmishes. The thermostat, for instance, has become a monument to passive resistance. I will not turn it up. I will put on another jumper, brew another pot of tea, and wrap myself in a blanket like a disgruntled burrito before I admit the house is cold. My partner, a woman of far greater pragmatism, will simply walk over and click the dial. The sound of the boiler firing up is, to me, the sound of defeat. I can almost hear my father’s voice: “Put a jumper on, it’s not the Arctic.” He would have been proud. She just thinks I’m being ridiculous.

This extends to the kitchen, a room that has become a stage for my most Wrigglesworthian performances. There is a correct way to load the dishwasher, and I am its sole guardian. Plates must be arranged by size, bowls must face inwards at a precise angle, and cutlery must be sorted by type to prevent “nesting.” My partner, a free spirit who apparently believes the dishwasher is a magical box that cleans items through sheer goodwill, simply tosses things in. I have, on more than one occasion, found myself silently re-arranging the entire load after she’s gone to bed, a ghostly figure in the kitchen light, restoring order to the universe. It’s not about cleanliness; it’s about the principle. It’s about the quiet, unshakeable belief that there is a right way, and that way is my way. My father’s way.

The Unspoken Apology

Perhaps the most defining mark of this inherited stubbornness is the profound difficulty with the words “I’m sorry.” They don’t come naturally. They have to be mined, extracted from deep within like some rare and reluctant mineral. My father was a master of the non-apology apology. “I regret that you’ve taken it that way,” he’d say, a sentence that manages to sound conciliatory while placing the blame squarely on the other person’s emotional response. Or, after a particularly tense standoff, he’d simply appear with a cup of tea. The tea was the apology. The tea said, “The matter is closed, and I am making a gesture of peace, but we will never speak of this again.” I now find myself making that exact same cup of tea. The ritual is identical: the quiet clink of the spoon, the careful pouring of the milk, the silent offering. It’s a peace treaty written in tannins.

This isn’t to say my father was a cold man. Far from it. His stubbornness was the bedrock of a deep and abiding loyalty. He was immovable in his affections, a fixed point in a chaotic world. If you were in his corner, you were in his corner for life, and no amount of evidence to the contrary would shift him. He was stubborn in his love, stubborn in his support, stubborn in his belief that his family was, despite all available evidence, the most brilliant collection of people ever assembled. That’s the part of the inheritance I hope I’ve received in full measure. The pig-headedness about dishwasher loading is a small price to pay for the unshakeable conviction that the people you love are fundamentally, irreducibly wonderful.

Learning to Bend So You Don’t Break

So, what do you do with an inheritance like this? You can’t sell it, and you can’t give it back. You have to learn to live with it, to manage it, to recognise when it’s a tool and when it’s a trap. I’m trying to learn the art of the graceful retreat, the strategic surrender. It’s a work in progress. I still feel a physical resistance to saying “You’re right,” but I’m getting better at saying, “Let’s try it your way.” It’s a small linguistic sidestep that avoids the white flag while achieving the same result. My father never mastered this. His version of compromise was to say, “We’ll do it your way,” in a tone that made it perfectly clear your way was a catastrophic mistake he would be silently monitoring for errors. The monitoring was the key part.

I’m also learning to laugh at it. To see the absurdity in rearranging a dishwasher at midnight or spending twenty minutes debating the correct pronunciation of “scone.” To recognise the familiar clench of the jaw and think, “Ah, there you are, you old bastard,” as if greeting a troublesome but beloved family ghost. Because that’s what it is, really. A ghost. A thread of my father’s character, woven inextricably into my own. It’s in the way I hold a pen, the way I approach a problem, the way I silently fume when someone suggests a different route on a car journey. He’s not gone. He’s just stubbornly refusing to leave.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is stubbornness always a negative trait?

Not at all. While it can lead to unnecessary conflict and an inability to adapt, stubbornness is also the engine of perseverance. It’s what keeps you going on a difficult project, helps you stick to your principles, and allows you to see long-term goals through to completion. The key is self-awareness—knowing when your stubbornness is serving you and when it’s just serving your ego.

How can you tell if you’ve inherited a parent’s personality trait?

Often, you’ll notice it in your reactions to everyday situations. A sudden flash of temper that feels eerily familiar, a particular phrase you catch yourself saying, or a rigid approach to a simple task. For me, the moment of recognition came when I found myself locked in a silent battle of wills with a piece of furniture, completely unable to walk away. It’s also telling when other family members point it out, usually with a mix of exasperation and affection.

What’s the best way to deal with a stubborn family member?

Direct confrontation rarely works and often entrenches their position. Instead, try offering face-saving alternatives. Phrase suggestions as questions, give them time to come around to an idea on their own, and pick your battles. Sometimes, the most effective strategy is the one my mother perfected: a quiet, knowing look, a cup of tea, and the patience to wait for the storm to pass. Remember, you can’t out-stubborn a stubborn person, but you can out-manoeuvre them with kindness.

Can you unlearn inherited stubbornness?

You can’t erase a fundamental part of your temperament, but you can learn to manage it. The first step is recognising the pattern. When you feel that familiar resistance rising, pause and ask yourself: “Is this the hill I want to die on?” Often, the answer is no. Practising flexibility in small, low-stakes situations can build the muscle of letting go, making it easier to bend on the bigger things when it truly matters.

In the end, I suppose I’ll keep the inheritance. It’s a family heirloom, after all, and you don’t just throw those away. You polish them up, you learn their quirks, and you pass them on, whether you mean to or not. I see a glint of it already in my nephew’s eye when he’s told it’s time to turn off his video game. A little Wrigglesworth jaw-set. A tiny, immovable force of nature. My father would have been delighted. I’ll just make him a cup of tea.

I woke up this morning, made a cup of tea, and immediately felt like I’d already blown it. Not because I’d done anything wrong—I’d barely done anything at all. But that familiar voice in my head was already at it, tallying my shortcomings. I should have been up earlier. I should have squeezed in some exercise. I should have read a chapter of that book everyone’s been banging on about. Instead, I just stood there in my kitchen, watching the kettle boil, and felt a wave of guilt for simply existing without producing something.

That’s productivity guilt. It’s the low-grade anxiety that whispers you’re not doing enough, even when you’re doing everything you can. It’s the reason you can’t sink into a lazy Sunday without mentally cataloguing all the tasks you’re ignoring. It’s the pang of shame when someone asks what you got up to over the weekend and your answer is, honestly, “not much.” And it’s everywhere.

The Cult of the Hustle

We’re living in an age that worships busyness. If you’re not grinding, optimizing, or building a side-hustle, are you even trying? Social media feeds are a parade of 4 a.m. risers, bullet-journaling obsessives, and people who somehow run a marathon before breakfast and then record a podcast about how you’re just not committed enough. The message is blunt: your worth equals your output.

I’ve fallen for it more times than I’d like to admit. I’ll finish a solid day’s work, tick off the big tasks, and still feel a twinge of guilt when I flop onto the sofa to watch a film. Shouldn’t I be learning to code? Networking? Finally tackling that cupboard under the stairs? The irony is thick enough to spread on toast. I’m tired, but my brain insists I’m slacking. It’s like having a tiny, clipboard-wielding manager living in my head, perpetually unimpressed.

This guilt isn’t just annoying—it’s self-defeating. When we constantly berate ourselves for not doing enough, we drain the very energy we need to do anything at all. We end up in a cycle of burnout and recovery, never quite feeling like we’ve earned a rest. And when we do rest, we can’t enjoy it because we’re too busy feeling guilty about it.

Where Does This Guilt Come From?

Part of it is cultural. We’ve been conditioned to equate busyness with importance. If you’re not busy, you’re not important. If you’re not important, you’re not valuable. It’s a toxic little equation that’s been drilled into us since childhood, reinforced by every “rise and grind” post and every well-meaning relative asking, “So, what are you doing with your life?”

But there’s a personal side to it, too. For me, productivity guilt often masks a deeper fear of inadequacy. If I’m not constantly achieving, I worry I’ll be left behind. That I’ll wake up one day and realize I’ve squandered my potential. That everyone else is secretly doing more, being more, while I’m just here, watching Grand Designs for the fourth time.

Technology pours fuel on the fire. Our phones are portals to an endless highlight reel of other people’s accomplishments. Every notification is a reminder that someone, somewhere, is doing something more impressive than you. It’s hard to feel good about finishing a book when your feed is full of people who’ve written one.

The Myth of the Perfect Routine

I’ve tried every productivity system going. Pomodoro timers, bullet journals, time-blocking, the Eisenhower Matrix—you name it, I’ve failed at it. Not because the systems are useless, but because I was trying to turn myself into a productivity machine rather than a human being who occasionally gets things done.

Most productivity advice assumes we’re robots. It doesn’t make room for the days when you’re tired, sad, or just not feeling it. It doesn’t account for the fact that sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a nap. Instead, it piles on the guilt when you inevitably fall short of the impossible standard it sets.

I once read about a CEO who wakes up at 3:30 a.m. to meditate and exercise before work. I tried it. Once. I spent the entire day feeling like I’d been hit by a bus. Some people thrive on that schedule; I am not one of them. And that’s fine. The trick is to find what works for you, not to twist yourself into someone else’s idea of productivity.

Redefining Productivity

What if we redefined productivity to include rest? What if we measured our days not by how many tasks we completed, but by how we felt? I’m not suggesting we all quit our jobs and lie in a field all day—though that does sound lovely—but rather that we give ourselves permission to be human.

For me, this has meant learning to spot the difference between genuine laziness and a genuine need for rest. Laziness is when you’re avoiding something you actually want to do because it’s hard. Rest is when you’re recharging so you can do the things you want to do. The tricky part is that they can look identical from the outside. Both involve lying on the sofa. The difference is in how you feel: drained or restored.

I’ve started asking myself a simple question when guilt creeps in: “What do I actually need right now?” Sometimes the answer is a walk. Sometimes it’s a nap. Sometimes it’s just sitting and staring at the wall for ten minutes. Giving myself permission to do these things without guilt has, paradoxically, made me more productive when I do work. I’m not constantly fighting my own brain.

The Value of Doing Nothing

There’s a particular kind of magic in doing nothing. Not scrolling through your phone, not listening to a podcast, not even reading a book—just sitting. It’s in these moments that ideas often surface, unbidden. The mind, freed from the pressure to produce, starts to wander. And wandering is where creativity lives.

I’ve had some of my best ideas while staring out of a train window or sitting in a park, doing absolutely nothing. These aren’t moments I could have scheduled or optimized. They happened because I allowed myself to be bored. In a world that’s terrified of boredom, that’s a radical act.

Research backs this up. Studies have shown that mind-wandering is linked to creative problem-solving. When we let our brains drift, they make connections that focused thinking misses. So that time you spent daydreaming about what you’d do if you won the lottery? That wasn’t wasted. That was your brain doing its best work.

Practical Ways to Ease the Guilt

So how do we break free from productivity guilt? Here are a few things that have helped me:

1. Set realistic expectations

If your to-do list has 47 items on it, you’re going to feel guilty. Try picking three things that actually matter and focus on those. Everything else is a bonus. I’ve found that a shorter list not only reduces guilt but also makes me more likely to actually complete the important tasks.

2. Schedule rest like it’s a task

This might sound counterintuitive, but putting “rest” on your calendar can help. It’s a reminder that downtime is not a failure—it’s part of the plan. When I block out an hour to read a novel or go for a walk, I’m less likely to feel guilty about it because it’s officially sanctioned.

3. Curate your inputs

Unfollow the hustle gurus. Mute the people who make you feel inadequate. Your social media feed should inspire you, not shame you. I’ve been ruthless about this, and it’s made a noticeable difference in my mental state.

4. Celebrate small wins

We’re quick to beat ourselves up over what we didn’t do, but how often do we acknowledge what we did? I’ve started ending my day by writing down three things I accomplished, no matter how small. “Made a decent cup of tea” counts. It’s a small practice, but it shifts the focus from lack to abundance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is productivity guilt?

Productivity guilt is the feeling of anxiety or shame that arises when you believe you’re not doing enough, even during designated rest time. It’s often driven by societal pressure to constantly achieve and can lead to burnout if left unchecked.

How can I tell if I’m resting or just being lazy?

The key difference is intention and outcome. Rest is a deliberate choice to recharge, and it leaves you feeling refreshed. Laziness is avoiding tasks you genuinely want or need to do, often accompanied by a sense of stagnation. If you feel better after the break, it was rest. If you feel worse, it might have been avoidance.

Is it possible to be too productive?

Yes. Over-productivity can lead to burnout, strained relationships, and diminished creativity. When you prioritize output over well-being, you risk losing the very energy and inspiration that fuel meaningful work. Balance is essential.

How do I stop comparing my productivity to others?

Start by recognizing that everyone’s circumstances, energy levels, and goals are different. Limit exposure to social media content that triggers comparison, and focus on your own progress. Remember that what you see online is often a curated highlight reel, not the full picture.

When all is said and done, productivity guilt is a thief. It steals your joy, your rest, and your sense of self-worth. The antidote isn’t more productivity; it’s more compassion. For yourself. For your limitations. For the simple fact that you are a human being, not a machine. And sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is absolutely nothing at all.

I spent most of last Sunday afternoon staring at a wall. Not in a meditative, soul-searching way. More in the manner of a man who has been gently stunned by a low-hanging beam. I had a list of things I could have been doing — repainting the bathroom, finally sorting out the jungle of cables behind the television, writing something that might vaguely resemble a novel — but instead, I sat. And as I sat, a familiar, unwelcome companion sidled up next to me: productivity guilt.

It’s a peculiarly modern affliction, this nagging sense that every moment must be optimized, every hour accounted for on a timesheet submitted to the stern headmaster in your own head. You know the one. He’s got a clipboard and a disappointed sigh that could wither a houseplant. He’s been running the show since you first learned that resting was something you had to earn.

I’ve been trying to trace the origins of my own personal headmaster. He wasn’t there in childhood, I don’t think. Childhood was a long, lazy river of unexamined afternoons. You’d finish your homework—if you bothered—and then you’d just… be. You’d lie on the carpet and watch the dust motes dance in the sunbeam. You’d build a fort out of sofa cushions for no reason other than it was Tuesday. Nobody was keeping score. Nobody was telling you that your fort-building metrics were down from the previous quarter.

But somewhere along the line, the river got dammed and diverted into a series of locks and canals, all designed for maximum efficiency. School, with its grades and gold stars. Work, with its KPIs and quarterly reviews. Even our hobbies got hijacked. Suddenly, reading a book wasn’t just reading a book; it was part of a personal development plan. Going for a walk wasn’t a stroll; it was a step-count-optimized cardiovascular event. The simple act of cooking a meal became a performance, judged by a panel of imaginary Instagram critics.

The problem with productivity guilt isn’t just that it makes you feel bad for resting. It’s that it poisons the rest itself. You can’t simply enjoy a quiet moment because a part of your brain is running a cost-benefit analysis. Is this the most restorative use of my time? Should I be listening to an educational podcast while I do nothing? Could I be doing nothing more efficiently? The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.

The Industrial Revolution of the Soul

I have a theory that we’ve accidentally applied the logic of the factory floor to our inner lives. The Industrial Revolution taught us to see time as a raw material, something to be processed into units of output. A good day was a productive day. A bad day was an unproductive one. This worked brilliantly for making cotton and widgets, but it’s a terrible way to run a human being.

We are not machines. We are not even particularly efficient biological systems. We are gloriously, messily cyclical. We have seasons and tides and rhythms that have nothing to do with a neatly formatted Google Calendar. Some days, the most productive thing you can do is to be profoundly unproductive, to let the mental soil lie fallow so it can replenish itself. But try telling that to the headmaster. He’ll just tap his watch and raise an eyebrow.

I once read a quote by the author and artist Austin Kleon that stuck with me: “If you want to be productive, get bored.” It sounds counterintuitive, almost heretical. But there’s a deep truth in it. Boredom is the fallow field. It’s the space where seemingly nothing happens, but where the nutrients are actually being restored. When we constantly fill every spare second with a podcast, a scroll, a notification, we’re strip-mining our own attention. We’re leaving no room for the quiet connections that our brains need to make.

Productivity guilt is the fear of that fallow field. It’s the terror that if we stop planting and harvesting, we’ll starve. But the real starvation comes from never letting the land rest. We end up with a life that is technically full but spiritually barren, a high-yield crop of burnout.

The Comparison Trap

Of course, the headmaster doesn’t work alone. He has a whole faculty of accomplices, and their primary teaching tool is comparison. Social media is their staff room. We scroll through the highlight reels of other people’s lives — the promotions, the perfectly risen sourdough, the 5am miracle morning routines — and we measure our own messy, uncurated reality against it. We always come up short.

What we forget is that the person posting about their 5am run probably went back to bed at 7am. The sourdough might have a perfect crust but a gummy, inedible interior. The promotion came with a panic attack in the stationery cupboard. We’re comparing our internal blooper reel to everyone else’s external trailer, and it’s a game we’re rigged to lose.

This comparison is the fuel for productivity guilt. It whispers that you’re not just failing to meet your own potential, you’re failing to keep up with the pack. You’re being left behind. Everyone else has figured out the cheat code to life, and you’re still fumbling with the controller, accidentally pausing the game every few minutes.

The Hustle Culture Hangover

We’ve been sold a story that the only worthwhile life is one of relentless hustle. Sleep when you’re dead. Rise and grind. The story has its own aesthetic now — the 4am alarm clock, the bullet journal, the cold brew in a reusable cup. It’s a seductive narrative, especially when you’re young and hungry and terrified of being ordinary. But it’s a story with a very dark ending.

I bought into it for a while. I had my elaborate morning routine, my productivity apps, my carefully colour-coded calendar. I was optimizing my sleep, my diet, my exercise, my work. And I was miserable. I was so busy managing my life that I forgot to live it. The headmaster was delighted, of course. He had never had such a diligent student. But the rest of me was running on fumes.

The hangover from hustle culture is a deep, bone-aching exhaustion coupled with a persistent sense of failure. Because the hustle never ends. There’s always another email, another project, another goal. The finish line is a mirage. And when you inevitably collapse from the pace, the guilt rushes in to fill the void. You should be hustling. You’re falling behind. What’s wrong with you?

The Unseen Value of ‘Wasted’ Time

Here’s a radical thought: what if the time we label as ‘wasted’ is actually the most valuable time we have? What if staring at a wall, or taking a long, aimless walk, or simply sitting with a cup of tea and letting your mind wander is not a bug in the human operating system, but a feature?

Neuroscience is beginning to catch up with what poets and philosophers have known for centuries. The brain has a network called the default mode network, which becomes active when we’re not focused on a specific task. This is the network of daydreaming, of mind-wandering, of making unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. It’s the source of creativity, of insight, of those ‘aha!’ moments that arrive in the shower or just as you’re falling asleep. When we fill every moment with focused activity, we starve this network. We become efficient but unimaginative. Productive but dull.

I’ve had some of my best ideas while doing absolutely nothing of consequence. A plot twist for a story arrived while I was watching a spider build a web on my window. A solution to a tricky personal problem surfaced while I was mindlessly weeding the garden. These moments weren’t scheduled. They weren’t optimized. They were gifts from the fallow field.

So why do we feel so guilty about them? Because they don’t look like work. They don’t produce a tangible output that we can tick off a list. In a culture obsessed with measurable results, the unmeasurable is suspect. But the most important things in life — love, joy, peace, a sense of meaning — are stubbornly unmeasurable. You can’t put them on a spreadsheet. You can’t optimize them with an app. You can only make space for them and hope they show up.

Redefining a ‘Good Day’

If we want to break free from productivity guilt, we need to change the definition of a good day. A good day cannot simply be a day where you got a lot of things done. That’s a recipe for a lifetime of dissatisfaction, because the to-do list is a hydra. Cut off one head, and two more grow in its place.

What if a good day was a day where you were kind to yourself? A day where you paid attention to something beautiful? A day where you connected, even briefly, with another human being? A day where you allowed yourself to rest without apology? These things don’t make for an impressive LinkedIn post, but they make for a life that feels worth living.

I’m trying to learn this. It’s slow going. The headmaster is a tenacious old goat. But I’m starting to schedule ‘nothing’ into my calendar. I’m learning to call it ‘strategic fallow time’ to appease the part of my brain that needs a business case for everything. And sometimes, on a good day, I can sit and stare at a wall and feel not guilt, but a quiet, rebellious peace.

The Art of Doing One Thing at a Time

Another antidote to productivity guilt is the radical act of single-tasking. We’ve been sold the myth of multitasking, but the brain doesn’t multitask; it just switches rapidly between tasks, depleting its resources with each switch. The result is a day that feels busy but accomplishes very little of substance, leaving you exhausted and guilty.

There’s a deep, quiet satisfaction in doing just one thing. Reading a book without checking your phone. Having a conversation without mentally composing your to-do list. Eating a meal without watching a screen. It feels almost subversive, like you’re getting away with something. And in a way, you are. You’re reclaiming your attention from the cult of productivity.

Embracing the Unfinished

Part of the problem is our relationship with completion. We treat our lives like a video game where the goal is to clear every side quest and reach 100% completion. But life isn’t a game with a final credits sequence. It’s a messy, sprawling, open-ended affair. There will always be unfinished business. The laundry will never be fully done. The inbox will never be fully empty. The novel will always need another draft.

Accepting this is liberating. It means you can stop waiting for the moment when everything is finally ‘done’ and start living now, in the glorious, chaotic middle of things. You can put down the burden of completion and pick up the lighter load of simply being present.

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” — Lin Yutang

That quote, from the Chinese writer Lin Yutang, has become a bit of a mantra for me. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. And what is more non-essential than the guilt we heap upon ourselves for not being productive enough? The guilt itself is a waste of energy. It doesn’t help us do more; it just makes us feel worse while we’re doing less.

A Quiet Rebellion

So, this is my quiet rebellion. I’m not going to tell you to optimize your morning routine or hack your sleep schedule. I’m not going to give you five tips for a more productive day. Instead, I’m going to suggest you do something truly radical: waste a little time today. Deliberately. Joyfully. Without apology.

Sit in the sun and do nothing. Stare out the window. Take a nap. Read a trashy novel. Watch a film you’ve seen a dozen times before. Let your mind wander. Let the headmaster sputter and fume. He’ll get over it. Or he won’t. Either way, you’ll have had a nap, and that’s a win in my book.

Productivity guilt is a thief. It steals the pleasure of a quiet moment, the satisfaction of a job left for tomorrow, the simple joy of being alive without a purpose. It’s time we stopped letting it pick our pockets. The world will keep spinning if you take an afternoon off. The emails will still be there. But you might just find that you’re a little more human when you return to them.

There’s a stillness that settles over a garden in the early morning, a quiet so complete it feels almost intrusive. I never used to notice it. Before, the garden was just a backdrop—a green smear beyond the kitchen window while I made coffee and planned the day. Now, I stand in it. I notice the way the light catches the dew on a spider’s web strung between the lavender and the rosemary, the way a single rose holds its shape against the wind. I notice because I’m looking for something, though I couldn’t tell you what. A sign, perhaps. A reason. A rhythm.

Grief, I’ve learned, isn’t a tidy line. It doesn’t follow a neat arc from sorrow to acceptance. It’s more like a stubborn weed with a taproot that goes deeper than you think, popping up in unexpected places long after you thought you’d pulled it out. My father died two years ago this autumn, and I still find myself reaching for the phone to tell him about a particularly good crop of tomatoes, only to remember the line doesn’t connect to anywhere he is. The silence that follows is a physical weight, a hollowing out. And then, almost without thinking, I go outside. I dig. I plant. I wait.

Gardening, for me, became a kind of conversation. Not a replacement for the one I lost, but a new dialect, spoken in the language of soil and seasons. My father was a gardener, though he would have scoffed at the title. He had an allotment, a scrappy patch of land behind the community centre where he grew vegetables with a kind of stubborn optimism. He’d bring home carrier bags full of runner beans, their pods bulging and stringy, and my mother would sigh and spend the evening slicing them. I didn’t inherit his green fingers, not at first. I inherited his grief, and then, slowly, his garden.

The First Spade of Earth

I started with a single pot. A terracotta thing, chipped at the rim, that had been sitting empty on the patio for years. I filled it with compost, pushed in a supermarket basil plant, and watched it die within a fortnight. Overwatering, probably. Or underwatering. I couldn’t tell. I was still in that phase of grief where everything felt like a personal failure, where the world’s indifference was a constant, low-grade insult. The dead basil was just another item on a long list of things I couldn’t keep alive.

But something shifted. I bought another plant. Then a packet of seeds. I cleared a small border, my back aching in a way that felt strangely satisfying. I learned the difference between annuals and perennials, between compost and topsoil. I discovered that you can’t rush a seed. You put it in the dark, you water it, and you wait. The waiting is the hardest part, especially when you’re already waiting for a grief to ease, for a memory to stop stinging. But the seed doesn’t care about your timeline. It has its own.

My father’s allotment was a masterclass in patience. He’d plant his leeks in neat, soldierly rows and then stand back, arms folded, as if daring them to grow. He never fussed. He understood that a garden is a partnership, not a dictatorship. You provide the conditions, and nature does the rest. I, on the other hand, was a hoverer. I’d check the soil moisture three times a day, peer at the stems for signs of progress, and feel a disproportionate sense of betrayal when a slug had feasted overnight. It took me a long time to learn that hovering doesn’t help. What helps is showing up, doing the work, and then stepping back. Trusting the process. Trusting the roots you can’t see.

Weeding Through the Mess

There’s a meditative quality to weeding that I’ve come to rely on. It’s mindless and mindful all at once. Your hands know what to do: identify the intruder, grip it low, pull steadily until you feel the root give way. Your mind, meanwhile, is free to wander. I’ve had some of my most honest conversations with myself while kneeling on a foam pad, yanking out ground elder. I’ve cried into the flower beds, the tears mixing with the soil in a way that felt less melodramatic than it sounds. I’ve laughed at the absurdity of a squirrel burying a peanut in my freshly turned compost. The garden holds all of it without judgment.

Grief, too, needs weeding. You have to identify the thoughts that are choking out the good ones. The guilt, the anger, the endless replays of things you should have said or done. You have to grip them low and pull, knowing they’ll probably come back, but also knowing that each time you pull them, they’re a little weaker. The soil of your mind gets a little clearer. There’s more room for the things you actually want to grow: gratitude, memory, a sense of peace that doesn’t feel like a betrayal.

I remember a particular afternoon, about six months after he died. I was digging a new bed for a climbing rose, and I hit a patch of clay so dense it felt like concrete. I hacked at it with a pickaxe, sweating and swearing, and suddenly I was furious. Not at the clay, but at him. For leaving. For all the things we’d never say. I took that fury and I channelled it into the ground, breaking up the clay, mixing in grit and compost until the soil was loose and dark and ready. I planted the rose, a variety called ‘Compassion’, with pale pink petals and a scent like old-fashioned soap. It’s thriving now. Every time I see it, I think of that afternoon, and I feel a quiet sense of accomplishment. I turned my anger into something beautiful. I think he would have liked that.

The Seasons of Loss

One of the cruellest tricks of grief is how it ignores the calendar. The world keeps turning, the seasons keep changing, and you’re expected to change with them. But grief has its own seasons, and they don’t always match the ones outside your window. You can be in the depths of an internal winter while the garden is exploding with summer growth, and the dissonance is jarring. The sun feels like an accusation. The birdsong sounds like mockery.

But the garden also offers a counter-narrative. It shows you that death is not an ending, but a transformation. The leaves fall, the plants die back, and everything looks barren and finished. But underneath, the roots are storing energy. The bulbs are waiting. The garden is not dead; it’s resting. It’s preparing. I started to see my own grief in those terms. The periods of withdrawal, the days when I couldn’t face the world, weren’t a failure to move on. They were a necessary fallow period. A time for the soil of the self to regenerate.

Autumn was his favourite season. He loved the crispness in the air, the smell of bonfires, the ritual of putting the garden to bed. He’d spend a whole weekend cutting back, mulching, tidying, his movements slow and deliberate. I used to think it was a sad time, a time of endings. Now I see it as a time of trust. You trust that the bulbs you plant will find their way through the dark earth. You trust that the bare branches will bud again. You trust in the cycle, even when you can’t see the evidence. That trust is a hard-won thing. It’s a choice you make, over and over, to believe in a future you can’t yet imagine.

Harvesting What Remains

There is a particular joy in harvesting something you’ve grown yourself. It’s a small, tangible victory against entropy. You put a seed in the ground, you tended it, and now you’re holding a carrot, crooked and earthy, that exists because of your care. It’s a reminder that you can still create, still nurture, still bring something to fruition. In the fog of grief, that reminder is a lifeline.

I’ve started growing his favourites: runner beans, of course, but also beetroot, which he’d pickle in jars and give away to anyone who stood still long enough. The first time I harvested my own beetroot, I boiled them, sliced them, and ate them with a splash of vinegar. They tasted of earth and memory. I didn’t cry. I just sat at the kitchen table, chewing slowly, and felt a connection that was both painful and comforting. It was a kind of communion, a shared meal across the divide. I’ve since learned to make his beetroot chutney, though mine is never quite as good. I think he’d be secretly pleased about that.

The garden has also become a place of unexpected generosity. You plant a few courgette seeds, and suddenly you’re foisting marrows on neighbours, colleagues, the postman. There’s a camaraderie among gardeners, a shared understanding of abundance and failure. I’ve swapped cuttings with strangers, received unsolicited advice from old men in allotments, and found myself part of a quiet community I never knew existed. Grief can be isolating. It builds walls around you. But a garden, if you let it, can build bridges. A gift of home-grown rhubarb is a small act of connection, a way of saying, “I’m still here. I’m still growing.”

Finding a New Rhythm

I won’t pretend that gardening has cured me. Grief isn’t an illness to be cured; it’s a landscape to be navigated. But the garden has given me a rhythm, a structure that holds me when I feel like falling apart. There are always tasks to be done: seeds to sow, weeds to pull, plants to water. These small, repetitive acts anchor me in the present. They pull me out of the past, where the loss lives, and out of the future, where the fear lives, and plant me firmly in the now. The now is where the soil is. The now is where the growth happens.

I’ve also learned to listen. Not to voices, but to the garden itself. The rustle of leaves, the hum of bees, the subtle changes in light and temperature. It’s a kind of attention that I’d lost, or maybe never had. My father had it. He could stand in his allotment for ten minutes, just looking, and then tell you exactly what needed doing. I’m not there yet, but I’m learning. I’m learning to read the signs: a yellowing leaf, a patch of dry soil, a plant that’s outgrown its pot. I’m learning to respond, not react. That’s a skill that’s bled into the rest of my life. I’m better at listening to myself, at recognising when I need rest, when I need company, when I need to be alone with my hands in the dirt.

I still talk to him, sometimes. Not out loud, or at least not when anyone’s around. But when I’m tying in a clematis or pricking out seedlings, I’ll find myself explaining what I’m doing, as if he’s standing behind me with his arms folded. I’ll ask his advice, and in the silence, I’ll hear his voice: “Don’t overwater. Give it time. Let it be.” It’s not a ghost story. It’s just memory, deep and embodied, surfacing in the place where it feels most at home. The garden is where he lives now, in a way. Not in any supernatural sense, but in the habits he passed on, the knowledge he planted in me without either of us realising. I’m tending that inheritance. I’m keeping it alive.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can gardening help with the grieving process?

Gardening offers a gentle, non-verbal way to process loss. The physical act of tending to plants—digging, weeding, watering—can serve as a grounding exercise, pulling you into the present moment and away from ruminative thoughts. It also provides a sense of purpose and a tangible outcome, which can be especially valuable when grief makes the world feel meaningless. The cyclical nature of a garden, with its seasons of death and rebirth, can offer a quiet metaphor for the grieving process itself, reminding you that periods of dormancy are natural and that growth will come again.

What if I don’t have a garden or any gardening experience?

You don’t need a large space or a wealth of knowledge to start. A single pot on a windowsill, a small container of herbs, or even a houseplant can provide a similar sense of connection and routine. The key is the act of caring for something living. Start with something resilient, like a spider plant or a pot of mint, and pay attention to its needs. The learning process itself—reading about the plant, noticing how it responds to light and water—can be a meditative and healing practice. Many community gardens also offer plots and a supportive environment for beginners.

Is it normal to feel angry or sad while gardening after a loss?

Absolutely. Gardening can be a surprisingly emotional activity, especially when it’s tied to memories of a loved one. The physical exertion of digging or clearing can release pent-up feelings, and the solitude of the garden provides a safe space for those emotions to surface. It’s not uncommon to cry, feel frustrated, or even direct anger at the person you’ve lost. These reactions are a natural part of grief, and the garden can hold them without judgment. Over time, the garden may also become a place where you feel a sense of peace and connection to that person.

How do I create a memorial garden for someone I’ve lost?

A memorial garden can be as simple or elaborate as you like. Start by choosing plants that had meaning for the person you’re remembering—their favourite flowers, a tree they loved, or vegetables they enjoyed growing. You might include a bench or a special stone, or simply dedicate a corner of your existing garden to their memory. The act of planning and planting itself can be a meaningful ritual. Focus on creating a space that feels comforting to you, where you can sit and remember. The garden will grow and change over time, just as your relationship with your grief will.

What if I don’t feel a connection to the person I’ve lost while gardening?

That’s perfectly fine. Gardening doesn’t have to be a direct line to your loved one’s memory to be helpful. Sometimes, the benefit is simply in the act itself: the rhythm of the tasks, the focus required, the time spent outdoors. The connection may come later, or it may come in unexpected ways—a particular scent, a visiting bird, the way the light falls. Don’t force it. Let the garden be what it is: a place of quiet work and gradual growth. The emotional resonance often develops on its own, in its own time.

It started, as these things often do, with a quiet vibration against my skin. A gentle nudge, a digital whisper: You’ve been sitting for an hour. Time to move! I was in the middle of a paragraph, wrestling a sentence that refused to behave. The interruption was not welcome. I glanced down at the sleek black band strapped to my wrist, its tiny screen glowing with self-satisfied encouragement, and felt a flicker of something I hadn’t expected: resentment.

For two years, I was a devoted disciple of the step. I wore that fitness tracker like a badge of honour, a silent testament to my commitment to a quantified, optimized self. It tracked my steps, my sleep, my heart rate, my standing hours, my stair climbs. Probably, if I’d let it, the exact number of times I rolled my eyes at its persistent, buzzing demands. I was a man in a relationship with a piece of silicone and circuitry, and like many relationships, it started with the best of intentions and slowly curdled into a quiet, passive-aggressive war.

The Honeymoon Phase: A World of Rings and Numbers

I remember the unboxing. The clean, minimalist packaging. The smooth, pebble-like feel of the device. It wasn’t just a gadget; it was a promise. A promise of a better, healthier, more optimized me. I set up my profile, punched in my goals, and closed my first ring. A little burst of digital confetti on the screen. I’d done it. I’d stood up for one minute. I was a champion of micro-movement.

Soon, my life was a series of numbers. 10,000 steps was the holy grail. Eight hours of sleep was the elusive white whale. A resting heart rate below 60 was a source of quiet, smug pride. I’d find myself pacing around my living room at 11:47 PM, phone in hand, trying to hit that final step goal before the clock struck midnight and reset my progress to a cold, unforgiving zero. I was no longer going for a walk to clear my head or enjoy the evening air; I was going for a walk to generate data. The tail was wagging the dog, and the dog was wearing a very expensive step counter.

The Tyranny of the Sleep Score

The real trouble began with the sleep tracking. What was once a natural, restorative process became a nightly performance review. I’d wake up, stretch, and immediately reach for my phone to see if the data agreed with how I felt. A poor sleep score—a 72, for instance—would cast a pall over the entire morning. I’d suddenly feel tired, as if the number had drained my energy retroactively. The tracker had become the ultimate authority on my own well-being, and I had ceded all trust in my internal signals.

I’d lie in bed, rigid with anxiety, thinking, I need to fall asleep now, or my REM cycles will be insufficient. The very act of trying to optimize my sleep was destroying it. The metrics weren’t just observing the experience; they were actively corrupting it. The gentle, intuitive art of listening to my body was being replaced by the frantic, anxious science of obeying a dashboard. A good night’s sleep was no longer defined by waking up refreshed, but by a score of 90 or above.

The 10,000-Step Stupor

The steps were the worst. The sacred, unassailable 10,000 steps. I’d walk laps around my garden in the rain, not for the pleasure of feeling the drops on my face or smelling the wet earth, but to close a ring. I’d march on the spot while waiting for the kettle to boil. My walks, once a source of creative inspiration and mental quiet, became transactional. I was no longer a thinker, an observer of the world; I was a step-generating machine, a fleshy cog in a self-imposed gamification system.

One Tuesday, I found myself in a beautiful park, the autumn leaves a riot of crimson and gold. A heron stood motionless by the pond. I didn’t see it. My eyes were glued to my wrist, watching the step count tick upwards, mentally calculating how many more circuits of the path I needed to reach my arbitrary goal. I was physically present but mentally absent, trapped in a prison of my own making. The tracker, which had promised to enhance my life, was instead causing me to miss it entirely.

The Great Unshackling

The decision to take it off wasn’t a dramatic, cinematic moment. No slow-motion montage, no soaring orchestral score. It was a Tuesday evening. The battery had died, and I’d misplaced the proprietary charging cable, a slender white serpent that seemed designed to slither into the darkest corners of my desk drawer. I looked at the blank, lifeless screen on my wrist and felt a strange, unexpected lightness. A quiet relief. I didn’t look for the cable. I simply unclasped the band and set the device down on my nightstand, a small, dark monument to a two-year experiment in self-surveillance.

The first few days were disorienting. I felt a phantom buzz on my wrist, a neurological ghost of notifications past. I’d finish a walk and instinctively look at my empty wrist, a momentary panic setting in: Did it even count if it wasn’t counted? I had to consciously remind myself that the walk itself was the point. The feeling of my legs moving, the rhythm of my breath, the clarity of my thoughts—these were the real metrics, not a number on a screen.

Reclaiming the Intuitive Self

Without the constant, low-grade anxiety of closing rings and hitting targets, I started to notice things again. I noticed when I was tired, not because a score told me my sleep was “fair,” but because my eyelids were heavy and my thoughts were sluggish. I ate when I was hungry, not when an app suggested I’d burned enough calories to justify a snack. I went for a run because my legs felt like running, not because I needed to maintain a streak. The internal cues, which had been drowned out by the noise of data, slowly began to re-emerge, tentative at first, then with growing confidence.

This wasn’t a rejection of health or fitness. Far from it. I still run, I still walk, I still try to get a decent night’s sleep. But the motivation has shifted from external validation to internal feeling. A run is now measured by how my lungs feel and the clarity of my mind afterwards, not by a split time or a calorie count. A good night’s sleep is defined by waking up feeling rested, not by a graph of my REM cycles. I’ve swapped the dashboard for a dialogue with my own body, and the conversation, while less data-driven, is infinitely more meaningful.

The Unquantifiable Life

The fundamental flaw in the fitness tracker philosophy is the belief that everything worth knowing can be measured. It reduces the rich, messy, glorious experience of being alive to a series of data points. It can’t measure the joy of a spontaneous dance in the kitchen. It can’t track the restorative power of a deep belly laugh with a friend. It has no metric for the feeling of sun on your skin or the quiet satisfaction of a day spent doing absolutely nothing of quantifiable value. These are the moments that stitch together a life, and they exist blissfully outside the world of the algorithm.

By deleting the tracker, I wasn’t just removing a gadget from my wrist; I was making a philosophical choice. I was choosing to trust the messy, imprecise, and often unreliable operating system of my own consciousness over the cold, hard logic of a sensor. I was choosing to be a person who experiences his life, rather than a user who manages it. The irony is that in letting go of the need to optimize every biological function, I feel healthier and more balanced than I ever did when I was chasing a perfect score.

Frequently Asked Questions from the Recently Unchained

Don’t you worry you’ll become a complete sloth without the reminders?

It’s a fair concern, and one I had myself. The fear is that the tracker was the only thing standing between you and a life of permanent, moss-covered inertia. But here’s the thing: your body has its own reminders. It’s called stiffness. It’s called a foggy brain. It’s called that jittery, cooped-up feeling that screams at you to go outside and do something. These signals are far more powerful and persuasive than a buzz on the wrist, once you relearn how to listen to them. You don’t need a device to tell you that you’ve been sitting for an hour; your back will do that for you, and with a lot more urgency.

What about accountability? Didn’t the tracker keep you honest?

It kept me accountable to a number, not to myself. There’s a difference. True accountability isn’t about hitting an arbitrary target set by a software developer in California; it’s about being honest with yourself about how you feel and what you need. If I spend a day lounging on the sofa reading a brilliant novel, a tracker will shame me for my “inactivity.” But my mind and soul might be telling me it was the most restorative day of the month. I’d rather be accountable to the latter. The tracker’s version of honesty was a one-size-fits-all tyranny that left no room for the complexity of being human.

Do you think fitness trackers are completely useless?

Not at all. I think they can be brilliant tools for a specific purpose. For someone recovering from surgery who needs to monitor their heart rate, or for a professional athlete in a very specific training block, the data can be invaluable. My issue is with their blanket application as a lifestyle necessity for the average person. They can create a helpful awareness in the beginning, but the risk is that they encourage a dependency that disconnects you from your own body’s wisdom. They’re a good servant but a terrible master. My problem wasn’t the tracker; it was the relationship I had developed with it. It had become the master, and I, a very obedient, very anxious servant.

What was the single biggest change you noticed after you took it off?

The silence. Not just the literal silence of no more buzzing, but the mental silence. The constant, low-level background noise of “How many steps? What’s my heart rate? How long did I sleep? I need to stand up. I need to walk more. I’m behind on my goal.” That entire cognitive load just vanished. My mind felt like a room after you finally turn off a rattling, droning air conditioner. There was a sudden, profound peace. I could think again, without a digital taskmaster interrupting my thoughts. That mental space, that quiet, is worth more than any step count.

So, the tracker sits in a drawer now, a small, dark relic of a quantified past. My wrist is bare, save for the faint tan line that serves as a quiet reminder of a two-year experiment in self-surveillance. I’m not anti-technology. I’m pro-sanity. And for me, sanity meant firing the tiny, tyrannical boss I had strapped to my wrist. My steps are once again my own, uncounted and gloriously free.