03/10/2026
This one has taken me ages! Introducing:
A Risk Assessment Of Being Alive (abridged)
An important graph plotting every* human experience worth mentioning, and several that aren’t, against two simple questions. Does it hurt? And is it good for you?
Pain to pleasure runs left to right. Medicinal to poisonous runs top to bottom. Where you spend most of your time is between you and your GP.
Used properly, it can stop things before they start and separate what matters from what doesn’t. Used like every other risk assessment, it will hang on a wall and be ignored.
Truth, Love, Hate and Denial hold the four corners. Everything else is just getting through the day.
Scroll to see all corners > >
*This is the abridged edition. The unabridged version would take roughly eighty years to complete.
Pain + Medicinal
The things you put off. You dread them, reschedule them and rearrange the entire week around them, then feel noticeably better once they’re done. Nothing in this quadrant has ever been enjoyed. Almost everything in it has made someone a slightly better person, which they will mention.
Pleasure + Medicinal
The good stuff that is actually good for you. It feels like it ought to be harder to find, but most of it is free and nearly all of it is within reach. We just tend to walk straight past it on the way to somewhere worse.
Pain + Poisonous
The quadrant with nothing going for it. Things that hurt and then leave a mark: the small, corrosive indignities of modern life that do you no good whatsoever and happen anyway. Most of it is administered by machines, institutions and group chats, and none of it was your idea.
Pleasure + Poisonous
Where most of us actually live. Everything here feels marvellous at the time and sends the bill later, usually with interest. It’s the most honest quadrant on the chart, since nobody pretends any of it is good for them. They just go back for one more.
