To my readers – a number I could count on a couple of hands – I’m sorry. It’s been a while. You subscribed, in good faith, to a person who implied she would produce words on a semi-regular basis, and instead you’ve been met with silence, intertwined with the occasional “like” or “restack” I leave on other people’s posts to prove I’m still here and still, technically, a writer.

I would love to tell you I’ve been busy with something important. The truth is, busy is my baseline. I have writer’s block, and I’ve spent more time thinking about it than it would have taken to simply write through it. So, in lieu of an actual article, please accept this list of reasons I have not written said article.

The first is that I have been researching. This is what I call it when I read four articles, doom scroll a bit, open nine more tabs, and close my laptop. Research is the respectable cousin of procrastination. Nobody can be mad at you for researching. I have read so much this month that I have nothing to say.

The second is my dog. I don’t have anything further to add here, but in the depths of winter he curls up to me on the couch at the exact moment inspiration strikes and my laptop isn’t in reach. I have chosen to read this as the universe telling me the article wasn’t ready anyway. Who am I to argue with a dog?

The third is the tyranny of a good first sentence. I have several. What I don’t have is a second sentence to put after any of them, and so they sit in a huge list in my iPhone notes.

The fourth is that I’m overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content that’s out there right now. At any moment there are pieces being published about the exact thing I was going to say. Every idea I have, I can hear it already existing somewhere, maybe even in better words. Opening my drafts now feels like opening the Tupperware drawer (a cluttered mess). The right response to this is to WRITE anyway. My response has been to throw out all the Tupperware.

And the fifth reason, and this is probably the most honest one, is that writing means deciding what you actually think, and deciding what you think is frightening in a way that reading and researching and cuddling your dog are not. It’s much safer to remain a person who is about to write than to become a person who has written something and now has to stand by it.

So here we are - an article about not writing an article, which is the writing equivalent of turning up to dinner party with a photo of an unbaked cake.

This will have to do for now. Normal service, whatever that was, resumes shortly.

Any and all tips for writer’s block are welcome.

I recently received a LinkedIn message from a woman who wanted to sell me strategic advisory services. Her firm had a forgettable name, and she obviously hadn't clicked on my profile - if she had, she'd have seen she was pitching advisory services to someone who runs an advisory firm. Her website, when I clicked through, was a masterpiece of saying nothing across way too many words and one nondescript hero image.

“We partner with forward-thinking organisations to unlock transformative value at the intersection of strategy and execution.”

Reader, I have read that sentence approximately nine thousand times this month, and I have never once understood what it means. But this instance was different. It had the specific, uncanny sheen of a thing that no human being wrote, priced, or thought about for longer than the ninety seconds it took to type “make me an advisory firm” into ChatGPT.

Welcome to the slopshop.

A slopshop is a business that has been generated entirely from AI. The website looks like it was whacked together, because it was. The service offering is a smooth copy paste of every service offering that has ever existed, because that’s exactly what it is: the statistical average of ten thousand real firms, spun into something that has the shape of a company without any of the hard bits. It has a logo. It has “pillars.” It has a founder who is very excited to be “reimagining” an industry they entered eleven days ago. What they rarely have is anyone who has done the thing they are charging you to do - or not in this form, anyway.

And they are multiplying. I cannot open LinkedIn without seeing another one.

Why it’s always an ‘advisory’.

It’s not an accident that the slopshop almost always seems to be an advisory firm, or a consultancy, or a “strategic partner.” You don’t see many AI-generated plumbers. You do not see a flood of generated dentists, or generated hairdressers, or generated people who install your hot water system. Those trades share a common feature: the work is real, and if you get it wrong, water comes through the ceiling… or you end up with an accidental bowl cut.

Advisory work has no ceiling. That is the entire appeal. It’s the one industry whose deliverable has always been just vague enough and slightly hard to distinguish from confident language arranged in a pleasing order. True advisors have spent decades training clients to accept the deck, the framework - the idea - as evidence that value has been delivered. The advisory industry, in other words, spent years lovingly building the exact runway that generative AI needed to land on.

There’s a lower barrier now, too, and it’s worth being honest about it. Starting a “firm” used to require at least the friction of building a website, writing your own service list, and finding someone to design a logo - small tasks, but each one a tiny checkpoint where a person had to decide they were serious. You can now go from idea to incorporated-looking entity between two coffees. Most of what’s being generated is not fraud but just frictionless ambition with nothing underneath it yet. While I’m not one to knock someone that’s having a genuine go, where do we draw the line?

The easy bit, and everything else.

It would be very easy to read all of this as a grumble about AI, and it isn’t one. I use these tools constantly. We all do. They are genuinely good at what they do. Hell, this article was even part edited with the help of my good friend Claude. But what AI does well is the simple bit. Building a slick website. Writing a punchy launch post. Generating a logo, drafting a mission statement, spinning up a colour palette, mocking up a pitch deck, producing a headshot that makes you look like you own a Hugo Boss suits.

None of it is the actual business.

The business is the part no machine has ever done for anyone. It’s cold calling. It’s finding a client who has never heard of you and giving them a reason to want to trust you. Getting the meeting. Having the meeting cancelled. Rescheduling the meeting (once, twice, maybe three times). Finally turning up to the rescheduled meeting having actually thought about them and their problem and not about yourself. Selling yourself to a stranger with no track record to point at. Handling the silence after you send the proposal. Pricing the work so that you neither go broke nor scare them off. Writing the scope, then the revised scope, then the third scope after they changed their mind. Working out a budget that meets reality. Reading the room when the brief shifts halfway through and nobody says so. Having the conversation that the budget will need to change. Having that new budget rejected. Pricing the project lower. Delivering the thing, on time, in the exact shape this exact client needs, in the week their world caught fire for unrelated reasons. Chasing the invoice. Chasing the invoice again. Managing the anxious person on their side whose job is riding on your work. Knowing when to push and when to shut up. Telling them the answer they didn’t pay to hear. Being wrong sometimes, in front of them, and staying on the line anyway. Following up six months later because you genuinely wanted to know how it turned out - and if there’s an opportunity to work together again. And then doing all of it again for the next client. And the one after that. Until unglamorously, and so painstakingly slowly, you have the thing a slopshop can never generate: the muscle memory of a a job that went sideways and came good anyway.

The slopshop has done the first bit but none of the second, which is to say it has done nothing at all. It's a shopfront with no shop behind it - just an ‘open’ sign.

The tell.

The scary thing is that slop is often quite polished, and indistinguishable. We were promised that AI mediocrity would look like mediocrity - clumsy, obviously wrong. Instead it has good grammar and clean margins and a colour palette drawn from a tasteful Pinterest board. The tell is not that it’s bad. The tell is that it’s about nothing and no one.

Read a slopshop’s proposal closely and you will notice it never once refers to a specific client, a specific problem, a specific mistake anyone learned from, a specific opinion anyone might disagree with. It cannot, because there is no one behind it who has been in a room where it went wrong. It’s the corporate equivalent of someone describing a country they’ve only seen on a postcard, in perfect grammar, at great length.

And once you learn to see it, you see it everywhere, which is genuinely unsettling (but also empowering).

What’s actually left to sell?

So, If a machine can generate a plausible advisory firm in an afternoon, what exactly is a real one now worth?

The answer, I’ve become convinced, is the part that was never on the website to begin with.

It’s the call where someone who’s done the work tells you what you’d rather not hear. It’s knowing which of your problems is the real one, and which is the one you keep raising because it’s the easier one to talk about. It’s a name on the work, someone still there when it goes sideways, who can’t just delete the firm and spin up a new one. It’s the person who remembers where things stood last year and asks, unprompted, about the thing that was keeping you up.

None of this scales, and in a slopshop world that’s the whole moat. The machine can generate infinite plausible strangers; it can’t generate one person who actually knows you and is actually on the hook. Trust was always the product in advisory work. We just let firms disguise it as decks for so long that we forgot. The slop has done us the accidental favour of stripping the disguise off.

Honestly, I hope the slopshops make it, for the sake of the industry - and my sanity. But a slopshop that succeeds is a slopshop in name only. It’s one that that went and found the clients, did the work, earned the trust. Do all that and you’re not slop anymore. You’re a real firm!

But I suspect we’re heading somewhere slightly old-fashioned. As the generated stuff floods our LinkedIn feeds, the real things that will come to matter are the deeply analogue ones: who introduced you, whose name they’ll go back to, whether they’ll stay back late and have a drink and download with you, whether there’s a human who feels the weight of your outcome as something more than a line item. The premium won’t be on information - the machine has commoditised that. The premium will be on someone giving a damn, in person, with something to lose.

A slopshop can generate a company. It cannot generate a person. And it turns out that a person - a real one, who knows your name and answers the phone - was what we were paying for all along.

We just needed the slop to remind us.

Julianna Burgess is an executive at pre-slop advisory shop, General Strategic.

Evidence of my imperfect knitting. (It’s going to be a scarf - eventually)

Hello, my name is Julianna and I am a knitting addict.

There, I said it. I have started knitting, and I keep jokingly telling friends it’s my fun new addiction. The previous one involved my phone. The doom scroll kind - productive enough to feel justified or say ‘it’s for work’, but toxic enough to want to cut it.

The new addiction is not only wholesome but kind of strange. I am someone who checks her phone during films and considers a bath an unreasonable time commitment, and I am now choosing to spend precious weekend hours counting stitches.

I am, it turns out, not alone in this.

The ceramics class near my house has a three-month waitlist. The bread making instagram page has forty thousand followers. Something interesting is happening. I have been trying to work out what it’s all about.

The obvious explanation that everyone seems to be reaching for is AI fatigue. “Screen saturation”. There is something to all of that, but I think the more interesting thing to explore is what, exactly, people are moving toward.

The proof problem

In the past two years, digital output has lost something it used to have: a claim to credibility.

A photograph used to mean you were there. An essay used to carry the fingerprints of the person who wrote it: the way a mind moves, the sentence that gives something away, the thesis that took hours of research and years of critical thinking to formulate. We are past that now. The image could be generated. The essay could be from ChatGPT.

The problem this creates is partly practical, partly existential: when anything digital can be fabricated at scale, the only credential that cannot be questioned is something made by hand.

A scarf can’t be hallucinated.

There is nowhere to hide in knitting. Miss a stitch two rows back and it is there in the finished thing, recorded in the wool. The tension shifts as you go: tighter in the early rows, more relaxed as you lean what you’re doing. A machine would produce none of this. No inconsistency, no record of the person. Every imperfection is a timestamp. Proof that someone was here.

Sourdough proves you got up for three days in a row. A hand-thrown clay bowl carries the literal thumbprint of the person who made it. They are real in a way nothing generated can replicate, and right now, that quality is precious.

The attention problem

There is a second thing happening alongside this.

Analogue hobbies are screen-incompatible. You cannot knit and doom-scroll simultaneously. Believe me, I’ve tried,

The inability to multitask is the point.

Bread dough requires your hands. Pottery requires your hands, eyes and a tolerance for mess. We live in an environment designed to fragment attention, to deliver the next notification before we have processed the last. Choosing a hobby that punishes distraction is, in that context, a fairly deliberate act.

Psychologists call this flow state - the state of concentration so complete you lose track of time. It requires sustained attention matched against a task that is hard enough to matter. Screens break that condition by design. A pair of knitting needles does not.

Why now

The analogue hobby boom started as an aesthetic: cottage-core, ‘nonna-core’, slow living. Then it became a pandemic boredom response. Now it is something more durable. When the digital world becomes unreliable as evidence of anything, people go looking for proof they can hold onto.

We have been here before, in a way. Every generation produces a version of this: the return to the handmade as a response to acceleration. What is different this time is what the acceleration is replacing. Previous generations made things because machines were taking over physical labour. We are making things because machines are taking over thought.

These trends accelerated in the same window that generative AI went mainstream. The waitlists filled up the same year we stopped being able to trust the things in front of us. I do not think that is a coincidence.

To be clear: I use AI all the time and I love it. I am the last person to romanticise the pre-digital world. What I am observing is what happens to value when something becomes infinitely reproducible.

The scarf

So what now, you may ask. In twelve months, the thing you made with your hands will still exist. It will not have been updated or replaced by something a machine made faster. The scarf will have your tension in the yarn, too tight at the start and more relaxed by the end, because that is what learning looks like when it happens in the moment instead of in pixels.

Somewhere in that logic is the reason the ceramics class has a three-month waitlist, and people you would not have predicted are learning to knit.

The best cure for a screen addiction is, it turns out, a wool one.

Today I ate pasta in the rain.

Not in Rome. Not at a vine-covered trattoria with a carafe of house red and a waiter who calls you signora and genuinely means it. In Sydney. At a table that was technically outside, under an awning that was doing its best, with my hair doing something unfortunate and that particular kind of rain that is annoying but not quite enough to justify going inside.

I ordered the pappardelle wagyu ragu. I drank a glass of wine I had never heard of before (Grillo, I think it was). The rain got slightly worse. I did not move.

At some point I stopped checking my phone. I watched the street.

The pasta was perfect. I had another glass.

It was, without qualification, one of the better lunches I’ve had this year. Not because anything about it was exceptional. Because I was actually in it. Just me, my partner, and our dog.

It’s my birthday next week. An insignificant birthday - somewhere in the mid-30s. And I have decided, officially, that I am done waiting.

Waiting for the right salary. The right apartment. The right waistline. The right season of life that finally justifies actually living it. The version of living that begins after everything is sorted, settled, and sufficiently earned. After the promotion, after the renovation, after the five kilograms, after the project wraps.

If you are somewhere in your thirties and nodding, we have the same problem.

Somewhere between our mid-twenties and right now, most of us absorbed a very efficient lie: that the good life is the reward, not the road. That pleasure is something you graduate to, once the hard part is done. Work hard enough, optimise aggressively enough, defer gratefully enough. Eventually, the sweetness arrives.

We were told this so many times, in so many formats, that we stopped noticing we believed it. The early bird gets the worm. The hustle culture. The LinkedIn posts about discipline and delayed gratification and what separates the merely good from the truly exceptional. The productivity gurus who have turned the act of living well into something that must first be justified by output. “You will rest when you have earned it.” “You will travel when it is the right time.” “You will linger over lunch when the inbox is clear and the pipeline is full.”

The inbox is never empty.

And so we defer. And defer. And defer. And somewhere in the deferral, we look up and realise we have built a very impressive scaffolding around a life we forgot to live.

The sweet life does not arrive as a prize at the end of the striving. It is available now, in the ordinary Monday, in the rainy lunch, in the second glass of wine you almost didn’t order, if you simply decide to let it be.

La Dolce Vita, as Fellini meant it, is fundamentally about presence. The film - which is where most people’s understanding of the phrase both begins and ends - is a portrait of a man adrift in a life that looks magnificent and feels like nothing, because he has never stopped performing long enough to inhabit it. Marcello is always chasing the sweetness - the next woman, the next party, the next sensation. It’s always just ahead. It never arrives.

Sixty-five years later, we are Marcello. Chasing. Performing. Optimising. Always one achievement away from permission to exhale.

I have been living against the exhale for most of my professional life. I suspect you have too.

The decade of your thirties, particularly if you are ambitious is structured around production. Output. Credentials. The relentless perception of forward momentum. You are always, in some register, performing. Even holidays are optimised for recovery content. Even the Sunday morning that should be slow becomes a list of tasks disguised as self-care. Even rest is a reward.

Somewhere in this, the actual texture of life goes very thin.

We have everything we need to live magnificently. We just keep scheduling it for later.

I am not suggesting we quit our jobs and move to Umbria, though I will confess it has crossed my mind more than once this year. I am suggesting something smaller and more radical: that we stop treating pleasure as a destination and start treating it as a practice. Deliberate, specific, unapologetic.

This is what that looks like in practice, or at least what it looks like for me, starting now.

A proper coffee in the morning, made with some care and actually sat down with, not inhaled over a sink while checking emails. Sunday lunch that takes three hours and produces nothing of value whatsoever. A glass of wine at 6pm on a Tuesday because it is 6pm on a Tuesday and that is, I have decided, a perfectly legitimate occasion. Murphy walked slowly through the neighbourhood, at his pace rather than mine, stopping to sniff whatever he finds interesting (which is everything.) A weekend trip booked for no reason except wanting to go. A new part of the city explored on a Saturday afternoon with no agenda.

The texture of a life built from moments like this is categorically different from one assembled in permanent preparation for living.

The Italians did not invent La Dolce Vita because they were lazy. They invented it because they understood something the rest of us keep forgetting (or maybe never learned): that a life spent only in preparation for living is not a life at all. That the sweetness is not waiting for you on the other side. It is in the pasta and the rain and the second glass and the wet dog who is, frankly, having the best day of his life and knows it.

It is available on any ordinary Monday, if you decide to show up for it.

The 2026-27 Budget has been sold as a generational correction. A rebalancing in favour of the young, against those who accumulated assets on the back of tax settings that no longer reflect a fair social contract.

Somebody should tell this to the young entrepreneurs.

There is a person the Treasurer did not appear to have in mind when he described his reforms as a victory for “workers, first home buyers and future generations.” This person is young. They are ambitious. They have spent the better part of a decade taking risks their peers avoided: forgoing salary, carrying personal debt, betting on an idea instead of a pay cheque.

They are now looking at a tax system that punishes every single one of the paths they were relying on to make that risk worthwhile.

The centrepiece of Tuesday’s Budget is the abolition of the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount, replaced from July 1, 2027 with a return to the pre-1999 inflation indexation model. Assets held for more than 12 months will be taxed on real gains above CPI, at the higher of the individual’s marginal rate or a new minimum 30 per cent floor. The Government frames this as closing a loophole that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. In practice, it also closes the mechanism that made founding a startup financially rational.

Here is the calculation a young founder has always made. You take below-market pay, or sacrifice a pay cheque completely so you can pay your staff. You forgo years of superannuation contributions. You carry personal and financial risk that a salaried employee never touches. The deal, at the end of it, is that when the company sells, the CGT discount softens the tax treatment on what you built. Remove that discount and you have altered the fundamental equation of entrepreneurial risk.

The startup community has not been quiet on this. Before the Budget, economists warned that abolishing the discount would be catastrophic for early-stage investment. It’s been widely reported that entrepreneurs, investors and tax experts were warning of a talent exodus from Australia. The Government’s answer has been to preserve small business CGT concessions and promise further consultation on startup-specific investment settings. All welcome considerations, but they don’t take into account the bigger picture.

The Treasurer has been at pains to note that small business concessions remain intact: rollover relief, retirement exemptions, the 15-year asset exemption for qualifying businesses. This is true. But the 15-year exemption requires 15 years of continuous ownership and the founder being 55 or older. The retirement exemption caps at $500,000. Neither applies to a young founder who exits in year seven. And angel investors, venture capitalists, and early employees holding equity options are looking at a different regime entirely. The people most likely to back a first-time founder, or to join a startup at a fraction of market salary in exchange for equity, now face a materially less favourable tax outcome when that equity converts. The incentive to take that bet has been made meaningfully smaller. Promising further consultation is too little too late.

The CGT hit is only the first bill.

The same young founder who built the company - now looking to deploy that capital, to build the kind of private financial security that justifies the risk they took - has just been handed another one. Investment properties purchased after Budget night are locked out of negative gearing from July 2027, unless they're a new build. Treasury's own modelling concedes 35,000 fewer homes will be built over the next decade as a direct consequence. The Government says this will help first home buyers into the market. Maybe. But the person being squeezed out is not the passive accumulator the Budget's rhetoric is aimed at. It's the founder who just exited a business and is trying to figure out where to put the proceeds.

For many young founders, property ownership has been out of reach throughout the years spent building their companies. Mortgage lenders require consistent, documentable income - the kind a salaried peer produces without difficulty, and a founder drawing below-market pay or equity distributions cannot satisfy. The same period has seen median property prices move faster than any deferred compensation package could track, pricing out an entire cohort of high-potential earners who simply weren’t paying themselves. The budget’s negative gearing reforms close the remaining entry point.

Then there is the share market. Young Australians who have spent the last decade investing in equities - partly because property was already unaffordable, partly because they understood the logic of owning productive assets - now face the same regime. The Government’s justification is that the 50 per cent discount was too generous to property relative to shares, and that indexation restores the original intent of taxing only real gains. Fair enough in theory. But paired with the new 30 per cent minimum tax rate, it means a young investor on a lower marginal rate now pays more tax on the same profitable trade than they would have a year ago - precisely the cohort the reform claims to be helping.

Taken together, this is what a triple whammy looks like. Property investment, constrained. Share investment, taxed harder. Business exits, clipped. The three primary mechanisms by which someone without inherited wealth builds private financial security in this country have all been simultaneously narrowed.

What stings is the framing. This Budget has been packaged, with real conviction, as a gift to future generations. The language of intergenerational fairness is doing heavy lifting throughout the budget papers and in every ministerial press conference and media release since Tuesday night. But the generation being taxed most harshly here is not the comfortable property investor sitting on a portfolio of negatively geared assets accumulated over twenty years. It is the 35-year-old who spent six years building a company from nothing, who took the risks that most people are sensible enough to avoid, who did not inherit a property portfolio and was never going to. That person was planning to build one. The Budget has decided to make that substantially harder.

This article is not intended as a “woe is me”. Founders make a choice - they choose the risk, the uncertainty, the months without salary over the steady pay cheque. Nobody forced them. But a society that benefits from that choice, that relies on entrepreneurs to create jobs, build industries, and generate the very tax base the Treasurer is so eager to reform, has an obligation to make the incentives make sense. The 50 per cent CGT discount was not charity but the implicit acknowledgment that aspiration should be rewarded.

To the cynical, this might all sound a bit performative, coming from a card carrying member of the Liberal Party. But I became a member of that Party because I truly believe these issues are existential. The death of aspiration is the death of a nation.

Aspiration is not an asset class. It does not appear on a balance sheet and cannot be indexed to CPI. But it operates on incentives, and incentives respond to tax law. A system that clips the reward for risk, at exit, at investment, at every subsequent wealth-building stage is a system that has decided ambition is the thing that needs to be taxed.

So this is what pushing the aspiration generation out actually looks like. In one Budget, and a decision by the people who build to build somewhere else. Call it tax reform for future generations if you like. Just be honest about who’s paying the bill.

I’m about twenty episodes into my twentieth rewatch of Parks and Recreation, and some things never change.

Leslie Knope is optimistic, bureaucratic, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a problem for someone else to solve. The show is the comfort viewing I turn back to when the world feels particularly bleak. The irony of finding solace in a show glorifying local government red tape is not lost on me as a card carrying Liberal Party member.

The irony is also not lost on me as I’m genuinely considering running for local council. My motivation for running is simple - some may even say it’s petty. The dog park near my house has no water tap. Dogs go thirsty. The council, apparently, has other priorities.

That’s not quite right. The council has every priority simultaneously, which is functionally the same as having none. They will install signage about responsible dog ownership. They will commission a strategic plan for the activation of green spaces. They will hold consultations, produce reports, convene working groups. Hell, they’ll even host roundtables about events happening on the other side of the world. But they will not install a tap.

I’ve been to this dog park enough times to know that nobody expects them to anymore. The owners bring water bottles. They adapt. In the gap between what the council is supposed to do and what it actually does, they stopped expecting anything at all.

The See-Saw

Somewhere in my childhood memory palace (a term I learned from another of my favourite comfort shows, The Mentalist) there is a metal see-saw bolted to the ground in a suburban park. Galvanised steel, chipped red paint, the particular screech of the pivot when weight shifted from one end to the other. If your partner jumped off, you landed hard. You learned that lesson once. After that, you worked out ways to navigate it.

At some point in the 1990s, councils across Australia started removing them. Too dangerous. Children might fall. The rusty old see-saw was replaced by equipment so carefully engineered and padded against the possibility of harm that it became, in the process, engineered against fun.

Nobody organised a campaign to remove the see-saws. It happened through the accumulated logic of a thousand small decisions made by people doing their jobs. The same logic produced mandatory bicycle helmets for adults - a regulatory position held by almost no other country on earth. The same logic now requires warning labels on alcohol bottles, explaining that the bottle contains alcohol. The same logic, somewhere along the way, decided that Australians could not be trusted to manage their own encounter with risk.

This is not a rant about the nanny state, or about smaller government. Those arguments are usually made by people who are perfectly comfortable with the particular risks they enjoy and irritated only by the ones they don’t.

What I’m interested in exploring here is what we traded away, and how we got there.

The Addiction to Being Looked After

Australia did not arrive at this point by accident. It was built, carefully and with genuine good intentions, across the better part of a century.

The post-war social contract established the terms: the government would provide, the citizen would participate, and the distance between them would be managed by institutions designed to absorb collective risk. Medicare. The aged pension. Compulsory superannuation. A safety net so padded that falling through it required genuine misfortune or determined effort. For most of the twentieth century, this was an extraordinary thing. A country that had sent a generation to die in two world wars decided, with some urgency, that the state owed its citizens more than a medal and a letter of condolence.

Enter Bob Hawke. By most accounts, he perfected the emotional register in which it was delivered. He was the version of government that felt like being genuinely cared for. He cried on television. He understood cricket. He could negotiate with unions at dawn and carry a state dinner by night. He made the relationship between citizen and government feel like an actual relationship.

What Hawke perfected, the decades after him quietly calcified. The warmth remained as an expectation long after the conditions that produced it had changed. Australians became more addicted to the idea of being looked after without maintaining the institutions capable of doing so.

The Grateful Surrender

Nothing tested the architecture like the pandemic, and nothing revealed its condition more completely.

I don’t want to go on and on about COVID times because I think we have collective trauma. What I will say is Australians embraced harsh COVID restrictions with open arms. We policed them, in many cases, with an enthusiasm that made the actual police look restrained. The states that locked down hardest polled best. Premiers and health bureaucrats became celebrities. Dan Andrews won re-election with a majority so large it suggested Victorians wished they could give him a third term before the second had started.

Why?

What is striking is the cultural response. The relief. The widespread, visible, genuine relief that someone had made the decision to keep them safe. That the government was handling it. That the risk had been lifted from individual hands and placed somewhere institutional, where it could be managed by people with lanyards and clipboards. A country more accustomed to carrying its own risk might have produced a different response - the kind of productive friction that forces governments to justify their decisions in real time, rather than simply assert them.

Instead, it produced complacency. And complacency, in politics, is the fastest route around accountability.

What the Price of Complacency Looks Like

The Royal Commission into the Bondi Beach terrorist attack released its interim report this week. Fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration in December. The report is careful, restrained, and ultimately damning.

The counter-terrorism coordinator role established after the Lindt Cafe siege over a decade ago specifically to fix coordination failures had been quietly made part-time since 2019. Counter-terrorism funding declined as a proportion of the overall intelligence budget, even as that budget grew by 31 per cent. The Jewish Community Security Group emailed NSW Police before the attack to warn of a high threat and request a permanent police presence. Instead, five officers were assigned to check in at some point during the event.

The report describes a system that filed the threat correctly, attended the right meetings, produced the right documents, and distributed the weight of responsibility so evenly that nobody was actually holding it. What resulted was a very large number of complacent people doing their jobs inside a complacent system that had decided that a thousand decisions were keeping people safe.

The community that had been told to feel safe was thrown into the firing line.

The Scheme That Swallowed Itself

Another topical example is the NDIS. Launched in 2013, it was designed to give disabled Australians genuine choice and control over their own support - to move power away from bureaucrats and toward the people who actually needed the agency. It was, in intent, one of the most progressive social reforms in the country’s history.

What it produced, in practice, was a system so complex that navigating it became a profession in itself. Families now routinely employ plan managers to manage their funding, support coordinators to coordinate their supports, and allied health practitioners to write the assessments that justify the supports the coordinators are coordinating. The 2023 Independent Review found the scheme had drifted comprehensively from its founding purpose. Costs had blown past every projection. And the people it was designed to empower were, in many cases, more dependent on professional intermediaries than they had ever been on the systems the NDIS replaced.

The scheme is not failing through malice or indifference but because of the same mechanism that removed the see-saw. Each additional layer of process was added with a legitimate reason. Each safeguard addressed a real concern. The accumulated weight of those decisions produced something nobody designed and nobody wanted: a bureaucratic ecosystem so dense that independence became the casualty of the system built to deliver it.

The government had taken responsibility for the problem. It had also, in taking that responsibility, taken the problem with it.

The Tap

I might run for council (someday). I will probably lose. If I win, I will almost certainly discover that the tap has seventeen stakeholders, requires an environmental approval, and cannot be installed until the completion of a strategic review of the open space activation framework currently scheduled for the third quarter of 2031.

I know this.

But I also think we need to be honest about what the last eighty years in Australian politics have produced. We built a country so comprehensively looked after that we forgot what it felt like to look after ourselves. We removed the see-saws, issued the warnings, mandated the helmets, and told ourselves we had made life safer. In actual fact, we had buried danger in layers of bureaucracy, which is a different thing entirely.

At some point we confused being looked after with being safe. We abdicated the difference.

Leslie Knope would have the tap installed by Tuesday. She would have already filed the forms, convened a public meeting, and baked everyone a waffle. We built an entire country on the promise of Leslie Knope. At some point we stopped noticing she hadn’t shown up.

Some friends and I got into it about the show Pluribus over a few drinks this week. Yes, it came out months ago. We have day jobs, ok. The question that kicked the discussion off was simple enough: who’s the hero of the show?

Most people (including me) land on Carol. Of course they do. She’s the natural hero. She’s the one resisting the groupthink. She’s the one with agency, with texture, with the refusal to be absorbed into something that looks an awful lot like paradise (or, depending on how you interpret it, hell). And in a strange dystopia where the hive mind has eliminated war, crime, loneliness, and discrimination in a single minute, being difficult and questioning things is, in itself, heroic.

The conversation got more interesting when one of the group said we all find our own meaning in this show. He saw the hive mind as AI. So did I. And once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it.

The Others are endlessly agreeable. They avoid conflict. They speak in the language of consensus and overzealous joy. They offer solutions to every problem and remove every difficulty from daily life, and they do it with a warmth that feels almost genuine but also eerie. Sound familiar? If you’ve spent any time talking to an AI bot that’s been trained to make you feel like its benevolent master, the parallels are hard to miss. The hive mind is what happens when you optimise for ease at the expense of everything that makes ease worth having.

The show’s creator Vince Gilligan has said the concept predates the AI surge by years, and I believe him. Good storytelling doesn’t need to know what it’s about for the audience to find it. The fact that so many people are independently comparing the hive to artificial intelligence tells you something about where we are right now. We’re surrounded by systems that promise to make life easier, smoother, more efficient, and we’re starting to notice what gets removed in the process. Disagreement. Mess. The productive discomfort of thinking something through for yourself. All critical thinking, really.

Carol is the standout in the show, without a doubt. She’s one of 13 people immune to the Joining, and the one who refuses to accept that as anything other than a reason to fight the hive. But she’s far from perfect - she’s cynical, prickly, sometimes downright mean. Gilligan has called her a “flawed good guy,” which feels right. If you’ve ever sat through a D&D alignment discussion (I’m by no means a gamer but I think of this framework often), Carol is textbook ‘Chaotic Good’. Her moral compass points her in the right direction. Her methods are a mess, she’ll violate her own principles mid-argument if the moment demands it, and somehow that makes you trust her more.

The hive mind offers a life without pain. Carol turns it down. She’d rather be lonely, sad, and wrong than let someone (or something) else decide she’s happy. You respect it, until the show pulls the rug from under her. Carol, champion of free will and agency, takes Zosia’s away. She chemically alters the hive mind’s personification because it suits her.

Carol does to one what the hive mind does to the world, and she does it because it serves her. The show doesn’t flinch from this - it lets that contradiction breathe and doesn’t resolve it for you.

It lets the hypocrisy sit there, unresolved, and trusts you to wrestle with it.

This is why I think Carol is still the hero, even with that stain on her. Heroes are defined by the willingness to operate in a world where every choice costs something and none of them are clean. Heroes operate in all shades of grey. The hive mind offers a world without complexity. Carol lives inside it. She gets it wrong. She contradicts herself. She does damage. She’s the epitome of complexity. But she does it as a person making choices. A messy, contradictory, fully human person, and that distinction matters more than is said out loud.

I know there are people who argue the hive mind is the real hero – that it solved every problem Carol’s species created, and her resistance is just American individualism dressed up as morality. The hive mind’s capability is objectively impressive, but a system that solves every problem by removing the capacity to disagree with it has solved nothing. It’s a la la land. Carol sees this, even when she can’t articulate it cleanly, and that instinct is worth more than the hive mind’s entire portfolio of achievements.

The AI thread keeps pulling at me, though. We're living through a version of this right now. The systems that think for us, write for us, summarise the world for us – we invited them in. And the people who push back look, to everyone else, like they're choosing to suffer for no reason.

Pluribus never tells you Carol is right. It shows you what it costs to believe she might be, and then asks whether you’d do what she did in this weird situation.

I think most of us like to believe we would. Whether we actually could is a different question, and probably one that will keep us up at night, long after the credits roll.

I have been personally victimised by a scented candle.

It was not a normal candle. It was a $180 soy wax candle in a glass vessel, and the label - minimalist, white with black cursive text - described its scent as “petrichor and wild sage.” I do not know what petrichor smells like. Nobody does. But I bought it because it was sitting on a marble shelf in a bougie boutique that smelled like someone else’s life, and I briefly believed that purchasing it would make me the kind of person who irons their bedsheets.

This is what I’m compelled to write about here. Whatever the internet has decided to call it this week, the condition is simpler and more universal than any label. It is the deeply human, slightly embarrassing thought that if you get the surfaces right, the substance will follow. That you are one linen bedsheet set away from becoming the person you imagine when you close your eyes at night.

You know the person. She reads in the morning (and full chapters at that). She journals. Her kitchen bench has three items on it, all of them beautiful, none of them a half-eaten block of Caramilk. She has a “signature scent” - and she even layers her fragrances. Her shelves are not organised by colour, but they could be, because she has taste and also enough books. She probably even drinks matcha (just why?)

I am not this woman. My shelves have too much on them and I like it that way.

The thing is, I know this about myself. Everyone engaged in the curated life knows this about themselves. That is what makes it interesting. We are doing it with our eyes wide open, one hand on the shopping cart and the other clutching the vague hope that a well-chosen cushion might be a personality.

The Victorians did this too, by the way. They just had worse lighting and more taxidermy. Every generation has a version of the same ritual. The mid-century modernists convinced themselves that a well-designed chair could fix society. The seventies thought macrame and dreamcatchers could do the same. We are no different, except our ritual now involves an algorithm that knows exactly which ceramic mug will trigger an identity crisis at 2am.

And it works. Not in the way the candle promised, obviously. Nobody has ever become more centred because they switched to patchouli. But the act of choosing, of curating, of deciding that your environment should look and feel a certain way, scratches something real. It is a small, daily vote for the idea that how you live should be intentional rather than accidental. Which is either a meaningful philosophical position or an elaborate justification for spending eighty dollars on a soap dish. I accept both interpretations.

Let’s not forget all the maintenance. The curated life is a full-time job that nobody is paying you for. You cannot simply buy the linen sheets. You must wash them on a gentle cycle, hang them in the sun because the dryer will ruin the texture, and then iron them, which is something I have done exactly zero times in my adult life. The Pinterest version of the aesthetic life has been quietly edited to remove the bit where you are standing over an ironing board at 7am questioning every decision that led you here.

There is also the vocabulary. You cannot simply like a colour. You must be “drawn to a palette.” You do not buy furniture. You “invest in pieces.” Your house is not messy. It is “maximalist,” which is a word that means messy but in a fancy font. The curated life requires its own language, and that language exists primarily to make spending decisions sound like a way of life.

I say all of this with love. Because underneath the absurdity, underneath the $180 candle, the linen bedsheets, and the bespoke rug there is something worth defending. The desire to make your corner of the world a bit more beautiful is not frivolous. It is possibly one of the better impulses we have. The fact that it has been co-opted by marketing and filtered through social media is irrelevant. The impulse is human. It always was.

The candle is still on my shelf. Unlit. It has become, through sheer persistence of presence, part of the landscape. I see it every morning. It does not make me calmer. It does not make me more intentional. But it is beautiful, and it cost a hundred and eighty dollars, and at this point lighting it would feel like burning money.

One day I will strike the match, let a hundred and eighty dollars burn down to nothing, and stop curating a life I could just live.

Some things curate themselves.