July 2025 – Glenn Myers

Medicinal compound

Works every time

Imagine a bottle of special liquid. If you drink it regularly, it reduces your visits to A&E, improves your mental health, adds years to your life and makes you more likely to do well with chronic illness or trauma.

This same stuff, taken in group drinking sessions, speeds up development goals, getting people working together to address climate change, improve health and education, and provide decent work opportunities.

If two warring sides in a conflict both drink it, the prospects of peacemaking climb.

What is it? Hope. The UN declared a recent day (July 12) as ‘international day of hope’. They came up with a way of measuring hope. Then, having measured how much hope was in a person, they came up with what they claimed were research-backed findings on the effect of hope on all the things mentioned above. Their website offers some colourful graphs. I wasn’t myself greatly convinced by the graphs, but surely the direction is clear.

Here’s a further point though that, properly, the UN isn’t able to make: no-one is better at hope than the Christians. Because Christ is King, we hope for a transformed world to come when he returns; because Christ is king we expect, believe and work for a foretaste of the transformation here and now. (Otherwise why pray ‘Thy Kingdom come?’). We hope, and act, therefore, because Christ is King. It doesn’t matter that it’s slow. It matters that it’s in the right direction.

A superpower.

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Slow mission is taking a summer break and will be back in September. Thank you so much for reading.

If I get my act together, by September I will have moved the blog to Substack. This means my blog will be in company with others of its kind, –nice for it–and also opens options for me to add extra material, perhaps behind a paywall.

Because you’re a loyal subscriber I’ll stick you for free behind the paywall, so you won’t have to pay anything and you should continue to receive the blogs by email as you do now. Most of the blog will remain free to everyone, but I may put some extra stuff, perhaps my books or new books, behind the paywall.

I’m also launching a bookshop that contains all the books I’ve reviewed and loved over the years, all available outside the Amazon empire, and delivered to your house, usually at a discount to the retail price. A slice of the selling price goes to support independent bricks-and-mortar bookshops.

You can of course cancel, or indeed tell your friends to subscribe, any time you want.

I get more feedback from the blog than I’ve ever done from my books, and I’m really pleased if you find this stuff useful.

The title of the Substack will be ‘Patient Revolution’, but nothing much else will change.

See you in September!

Curiosity

It may have killed the cat, but its lack will finish all of us off.

I read the glad news yesterday that the UK’s largest independent bookshop is about to be created in the city of York.

I was even gladder when I learnt that it was a branch of Toppings, which I know from the city of Ely, near my home, and I think is the greatest bookshop in the East. It has winding stairs, knowledgeable staff, a warm welcome, and books everywhere. Sometimes it overflows into the nearby Ely Cathedral to hold author events, and when authors do tours, Toppings in Ely is often on the circuit.

It accepted an early copy of one of my novels with the promise that if they sold it, I would supply more. Alas…

I could mark my travels over the years with bookshops enjoyed:

In New York we all visited the Strand bookstore with its 18 miles of shelves, though perhaps like New York itself, a little too cramped to be entirely comfortable.

Best for me was the Massachusetts Institute of Techology bookshop in Boston in the US, a general bookstore but with a slant towards science and SF. The MIT bookstore would be my luxury if I had a choice to take one thing to a desert island.

In Romania I found a bookshop in a mall with a delicious selection of English works –just the curated best– along with a cafe, the fug of smoke, and, hopefully, the whispered sounds of people plotting a revolution.
Singapore, our home for two years and fantastic in many ways, did sadly disappoint a little in the bookshop department. The shelves there were heavy with rubbishy management and self-help books. But it is a young country and perhaps its time will come.

Bookshops are cathedrals of curiosity. They are built so that we think, unthink, rethink, learn, cross out, and learn again. They are not just to provide tools for a job we have already decided to do. They are at their best when they slow us down, hold us up, serve up an alternative, give us pause. They may, please God, be nothing to do with the task at hand. They are infrastructure devoted to this truth: we may pick up the odd pebble here or there but the great ocean of truth lies all undiscovered around us.

In a world of brute, uncurious autocrats, who do not read, who say things are ‘quite simple’, they offer hope for the human species.

Slaves of productivity

Ramses II was an enlightened employer compared with modern economics.

Economists worry that some things resist being made more productive.

This is a problem because increasing productivity is the bush everyone hides behind when we want a way of paying for more government services without charging more tax.

Some things are easy-ish to make more productive and all the fun things with AI and robotics may give this long trend a further nudge. So if you take a driverless car to a driverless train to get somewhere, you aren’t paying a taxi driver or an engine driver, so it’s cheaper. Productivity has gone up. Similarly if you build cars on a robotic production line rather than employing workers to fit panels and tweak nuts, you can do the same thing. With the money thus saved you, and the state, can do things that you couldn’t previously afford – more government spending, no increase in tax.

But some things resist being made more productive. And perhaps we are nearing the end of long experiment in proving this. For example, you privatise a cleaning contract. The new firm sacks the cleaners and rehires them at worse conditions. Productivity has gone up but actually all you’ve done is grind the faces of the poor and apart for being monstrous, this will bite you back, right where it hurts. Perhaps by paying people less, you have to pay more by way of supplements to the lowly paid, for example, or face greater absenteeism and ill-health.

Or maybe you can cut GP appointments from 11 minutes to 8 minutes. You see more patients. Productivity is up. But that ignores the research that says a good relationship with a family doctor improves health and decreases hospitalizations. Longer appointments, not shorter ones, may actually buy you greater productivity alongside greater human thriving.

Or you can replace teachers with computers but what you end up with is a bunch of kids who can do procedural maths, not the deeply learnt, flexible, adaptive maths education that everyone needs. Their turgid education lasts a lifetime at goodness knows what cost.

You can improve productivity (or at least people have tried) in the care sector by making visits shorter, but it doesn’t work. Lingering over a cup of tea with your client may actually produce more life and fewer of the deaths and diseases of loneliness than zipping in and out making sure they’ve taken their pills.

We are slaves of increased productivity. As a slave-driver, Ramses II was an amateur in comparison. What are we doing to ourselves? We ought instead to be slaves of human thriving. Some things can be speeded up, fair enough. Some things need to be slowed down, and done with love and creativity and passion.

Living in a story

That makes things a lot simpler

We are living in a story.

If we realize this, it takes away a weight. We aren’t writing our own story.

In a story, characters have their own motivations and they follow them. But the whole architecture of the story, where it goes, how it ends, that’s in the hands of the story-teller.

In the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son has motivation: to get out and have fun. The father has motivation: to love his son. Neither of them knows how the story will work out. They just follow that which drives them.

What drives you? Follow that. (If it’s a good thing.) What constrains you? Let that also steer your course. Then let the Storyteller do his stuff.