Algernon

I gave him to my friend
He was my friend then
I thought he was the best choice
I should have seen it coming

We had argued vaguely
Over candlelight and empty bottles
That keeping him in a cage
Was the worst thing I could do

“He was born in a cage”
It was all he knew
I wished I was him, he was lucky
Back then

When I came back
I asked my friend 
Where’s Algernon
He looked a little ashamed

Poem composed 22/05/2005 at 11:02

What’s this got to do with Hamsters and Hippies (and love triangles)?

When I was a university student, I used to live in a big shared flat in York. At the time, my girlfriend, Julia, was a thirty-year-old with a four-year-old child, engaged in a custody battle with her first husband who used to beat her. I was eighteen, reading this young kid The Chamber of Secrets as a bedtime story. For some reason, I owned a hamster even though I was a perpetually stoned art student with too much shit going on in my life. I suppose I just inexplicably wanted even more extra responsibility.

In my defence, I had grown up in a family that kept swarms of guinea pigs, budgies, loads of awesome cats, and one shitty Yorkshire terrier. My house had been heaving not only with my own siblings, but we were also foster carers. We had opened our nuclear family core wide raw so that other people could come and live with us to protect themselves from their own relatives. So, I knew how shit worked, and how it didn’t. Amidst all this, I just wanted a little friend who didn’t require large chunks of my student loan (unlike Julia, whose rent and legal fees I inexplicably/inevitably found myself lending her money for).

So I had a little Russian dwarf hamster which I named Algernon. I know he’s a hamster and not a super-intelligent mouse, but the name Algernon actually comes from the Norman French als gernons, which literally translates to “with moustaches” or “whiskered man”. It started out in the 11th century as a somewhat unusual descriptive nickname before evolving into a proper given name. I’d had hamsters before (all with equally cool names) and I knew how to look after them. I discovered the hard way with a hamster called Dylan that you shouldn’t give them magic mushrooms, but that’s another story.

One of my housemates was called Neil. If you want to imagine what he was like, just imagine Neil from The Young Ones—a hippie guy who was incredibly annoying because he basically had zero grasp of reality. Neil was from Swindon, which he described as a concrete shithole; a maze of shoebox estates, multistorey car parks and depressing offices. At the time The Office was just getting popular and Neil assured us that where he was from was even more soul-destroying than seeing Ricky Gervais’s comedy career taking off. Neil was the kind of guy who, if you had run out of weed, you’d go talk to him in the hope of getting some smoke, because he always had some on account of being famously stingy. After about forty minutes of vapid philosophical bullshit and quoting Bill Hicks, or pretending to like Nick Drake (I do now, at the time not so much, I was more into Autechre) he might roll a one-skinner, smoke nearly all of it himself, and pass you the dregs. I think he did this intentionally. At first I used to enjoy our chats, but when they were not sufficiently seasoned with herb they quickly got insipid. So it goes.

Neil didn’t like the fact that I had a hamster who I kept in a cage. Despite being quite a nervous guy, he had incredibly firm convictions about how the world should be, especially regarding animals and cages. He was always saying “you should let him go, man” and “he’s a wild animal, an intelligent life-form, he shouldn’t be in a cage, man.”

One time I was going away with Julia on some trip down south to Croydon (where she was from and also where Peep Show is set). I left my hamster in the care of Neil as they had a strong bond and my other housemates were much more stoned and likely to forget to change his water. You know where this is going. When I came back, I asked Neil, “where’s Algernon?” and he casually answered that he’d released him. I think his actual words were that he’d “set him free.” Not outside, but in his bedroom. Algernon proceeded to chew through all Neil’s furniture, wires, and other shit. The idiotic hippie even had to start putting his guitar out of reach as he was worried the rodent would gnaw another hole in it. Neil would leave food out for him (the odd bit of worthless lettuce, completely insufficient to support an active hamster), but Algernon of course became quite wild, probably living off big spiders and the occasional pile of seeds from the feed I had bought when he was still my pet. Algernon chewed a hole underneath Neil’s bed, got a lot of fluff from somewhere, and made a little den. I decided that Algernon was Neil’s problem now.

Hamsters are very active at night. In a cage, they can make an awful racket, spinning on their wheels and chewing the bars of their cages. Just general hamster hijinx. But, if you let them have free roam of your entire room, they might just freak you out. You’d feel like you had a poltergeist or something. Algernon kept Neil awake night after night.

Now, the backdrop to this shared student flat in York is a weird love triangle. Neil saw me as utterly out-of-touch with nature because I had a hamster in a cage and thought it was more fun to smoke weed than hoard it because he knew otherwise nobody would want to talk to him because he was an annoying hippie. My hamster wasn’t the only thing Neil wanted to liberate from me... he also had a massive crush on my girlfriend. Julia was annoyingly nice to everyone and a total spark of life. For some reason Neil ended up tagging along when we went back to visit the Yorkshire Dales, where I was from and where Julia’s son still lived. As I recall, Julia wanted to make a film in the style of Ingmar Bergman, and Neil was to play some sprite or something. Neil had completely fallen in love with the place. He also fell in love with Julia. But I was never threatened by Neil; he just wasn’t on Julia’s radar. She needed somebody who had enough togetherness to be a vague father figure, and enough cash to keep her afloat, and while I only just made the grade (and as soon as my student loan was gone so was she), I definitely beat Neil—the stupid hippie with holes in his bed.

After I don’t know how many months, sleep-deprived and heartbroken, Neil finally managed to re-capture the now feral hamster. He took Algernon to the North Yorkshire Dales—to the exact spot where we had all gone camping and where he had portrayed a wood sprite. It was a steep wooded slope near the waterfalls walk. Neil ceremonially released Algernon “back” into the wild.

When he came back, he looked like he had endured a crucible of limestone and fast-flowing streams. I remember Neil getting violently ill around that time because he insisted he could drink the water straight from the falls. He had said this when we were out filming, and I had explicitly told him the streams were full of agricultural runoff from the nearby farms, but he didn’t believe me. “They look so clear and clean, man… how can you say they are full of chemicals, man.” I told him he could get Weil’s disease from the rats’ piss in the water. His blind, romantic idealism violently collided with the grim reality of the British countryside. Nature poisoned him for his ignorance, just as it undoubtedly killed Algernon for it. When Neil told me that he’d released my pet, I was impassive. The whole story was boring to me by that point. I’d given up on the hamster and I knew that arguing with Neil was about as pointless as a French Royalist getting a haircut in August 1792.

I have an image of Neil releasing Algernon, and Algernon kind of looking around thinking, Oh shit. I’d have much preferred your bedroom. Even my cage was better than this. Because obviously, he wasn’t native to the British countryside. Neil probably thought he was returning him to his ancestral roots, but hamsters actually hail from the freezing steppes of Eurasia. And they aren’t just cute little seed-eaters; wild hamsters are incredibly tough, opportunistic omnivores that will absolutely eat insects, frogs, and even small birds if they can get hold of them. But a little domesticated Russian dwarf hamster doesn’t stand a chance against a British bird of prey. On that steep, wooded slope, a short-eared owl if he made it to the evening, or a sparrowhawk was the most likely culprit. Maybe a kestrel. That’s exactly what I imagine his last vision was: just some fucking claws descending upon him from the canopy. Or, there’s a very high possibility the poor bastard froze to fucking death on his very first night.

Either way, that hamster is going to be some kind of tiny skeleton hidden somewhere in those ancient forests now. Or an owl pellet long gone. Crushed to atoms in an indifferent wilderness. Freedom isn’t about being in or out of a cage. That was what Neil never understood. I looked at Algernon in his tiny cage and I knew he had a lot more freedom than me. Fewer responsibilities. But that was before he wound up lining the stomach of a perfect flying winged apex dinosaur with a scissored knife-beak for a face. My friend Neil, who is no longer my friend, stole my hamster and released it to die because of an ideology based on the naivety of a guy who thought I knew nothing about nature just because I understood its cruelty better than him.

(PS the second love triangle wasn’t really a triangle but Julia ditched me for another bloke with the same name as me and the same career but he was just a few years older… which is ironic really since when I met her I was 17 and she was 29… is that irony? I don’t know but it pissed me off enough at the time to inspire me to move to Japan, where I promptly found myself part of the rat-race.)

Don’t want to fork-out for a fucking subscription? I don’t blame you. Perhaps you can just send me some cashish though because you love me and want to ensure I keep writing until the end of my short life.

buy me some lettuce

Homo Digitalis

Homo Evolutis

Homo Apathicus

Homo Idiota

Homo Culicidae

Homo Formicidae

Homo Detritus

Homo Obscenus

Homo Assumptus

Homo Morionis

Homo Digitalis. 

Justificwtf

I spent exactly nine minutes writing and editing the poem you just read. I know this because the metadata on the original 2017 Word document tells me so. I would love to claim it was birthed in a fugue state of pure, unadulterated genius, but the reality is I likely spent six of those minutes Googling Latin terminology. My dad’s generation were the last ones forced to wear shorts and conjugate verbs in a dead language, and frankly, who has the time now? Mostly just bored taxonomists looking to name an exotic species they’ve spotted in the canopy, just as the bulldozers and the smoke from the palm oil plantation roll in down the road.

The catalyst for this nine-minute sprint was Homo evolutis—a term coined by Juan Enriquez (an academic and biotech investor) and Steve Gullans in a 2009 TED Talk, later expanded into a 2011 book which has literally the most annoying formatting you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s like a Laurence Sterne-obsessed ghostwriter tried to make a gene-splicing clinic’s whitepaper into viral fodder.

Homo Evolutis: TEDsplaining nonsense

I initially wrote the premise off as the profoundly stupid idea that our children might be a different species to us simply because of technology. You cannot breed into a new taxonomic classification just because you have a smartphone. Enriquez was peddling ‘directed evolution’: the breathtaking arrogance that tech-investors and biotech startups can hack the human genome like a piece of software, taking direct control over our biological destiny. I sent the video to a biologist friend of mine, who laughed his arse off. True speciation requires a bit more than an iPad addiction. It requires genetic mutation and reproductive isolation, not a venture capital firm with a CRISPR kit. To think we can engineer our way out of our current humanity is to invite a hyper-capitalist, eugenics-lite catastrophe.

You see the exact same pseudo-intellectual scam in Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. Harari posits that, having supposedly conquered famine and plague (700 million starving souls might disagree), humanity’s next logical step is to upgrade itself into gods via bioengineering and artificial intelligence. It’s no wonder this has become the darling text of Silicon Valley tech-bros and Davos billionaires. Harari shares his vision of Dataism, where algorithms render the vast majority of humanity economically and politically useless. This is basically a business plan to these people.

Human virus and the myth of nature’s balance

For a long time, I harboured this deep conviction that humans were a unique pestilence. I used to think we shared more in common with a virus than with other mammals, and that the rest of the animal kingdom was striving for noble, harmonious equilibrium.

Watch enough David Attenborough, however, and that romantic illusion is soon turned inside-out by a hungry jaguar. The natural balance of things is actually just a terrifying war of attrition. Take ants. They just march around fucking everything over until they run out of things to fuck over, and then they move on. The only difference is that ants are tiny, they lack nuclear launch codes, and they occasionally get their brains hijacked by a cordyceps fungus.

Interestingly, ants evolved from wasps. They evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors during the Cretaceous period and lost their wings to dominate the terrestrial ecological niche. Yet, the queens still fly when they want to piss off and start a new colony. It’s not unlike our own super-billionaires, the ones with helicopters and their own space programmes, flying above the fray while the rest of us get sat on during the picnic. They have a widespread platform for their moronic ideas, using their vast resources. Much like a $44 billion buyout of our most infectious, information-spreading substrate to turn hapless fux into zombies. A digital cordyceps, otherwise known as X—the Pornhub of bullshit.

Slapping ‘Homo’ in front of a buzzword doesn’t make it evolutionary theory. It is simply the ultimate billionaire hubris: the flying queens deciding to engineer themselves away from the ground-dwelling ants, perfectly content to ignore the ecological firestorm they are leaving behind.

The truth is, humans aren’t uniquely malicious. All life forms, given half a chance, will breed and consume until the oxygen runs out. Look at yeast. Look at rabbits. The only thing that keeps any population in check is the availability of resources. The only reason we sit at the top of the food chain, orchestrating ecological destruction, is that we unlocked the cheat code: extracting incredibly high-yield energy from liquefied prehistoric forests.

The bit that stops your heart

This poem is a precursor to what I consider my best piece, Ant Monkeys—a poem I originally published in The Vein, and which YouTube banned for “hate speech” a decade later. It was a Kafkaesque ruling I’m still paranoid about, as if comparing ourselves to a special breed of formicidae primates was somehow a targeted slur. I haven’t re-published it since then, though the argument in my appeal was that my hatred was targeted at the entire human species, not one particular marginalised group. YouTube stuck by their automated ruling.

Worthless Poet--Keep the change

The promise of Homo Digitalis was always a lethal illusion of enhancement. Like the foxglove’s cardiac glycosides, our digital substrate merely overclocks the circuitry, forcing the cultural heart to beat with an unnatural, violent rhythm right up until the moment of catastrophic arrhythmia. When Dr. Gachet prescribed digitalis for Van Gogh’s melancholia, the chronic toxicity left the artist with xanthopsia—a neurological glitch that washed his vision in sickly yellow hues and corrupted his optics with swirling halos. We are suffering the exact same toxicity today. Our shared reality is bathed in the pukesome glare of an algorithmic, modernised yellow journalism; a weaponised disinformation that distorts our world while convincing us we’ve never seen so clearly.

Like disinformation, the foxglove and its supply of digitalis is a masterclass in selective hospitality and targeted warfare. The digital substrate (the algorithm, the social media platform) is the foxglove. It is painted with bright, ultraviolet nectar guides (notifications, dopamine hits, metrics) designed exclusively to attract the busy, buzzing workers who cross-pollinate the data. These are your automatons; the clickfux, the red-hatted-haters, the rage-trojans, the hypocritical sycophantic illiterate maggot-brains. They are attracted to this moreish data-stream and they bumble right into it. But to the larger, mammalian ecosystem—the culture at large, the people trying to understand the mindless stupidity of it all—it is packed with a lethal, heart-stopping toxin. It protects its own architecture by poisoning anyone with a real beating mammalian heart that tries to graze on it.

My post-truth poetry is born entirely in that toxic system and its foetid yellow glare. For me, a short poem like this or an angry essay is the necessary counter-measure to the crushing gravity of this digital melancholia. I wrote last time about Suigenesis—the radical, generative decision to rescue the self from the noise and actually start living, even as the system goes into cardiac arrest.

I may have been influenced to publish this old poem and write this desperate essay about winged-ant queen billionaires and heart-stopping toxins because I recently heard that my father is still having heart problems despite his triple-bypass and other invasive surgeries. I remember the foxgloves that grew in the wild abandoned triangle of land behind the mowed lawn of my grandparent’s garden. I found those tall white and purple foxgloves so alluring, but my dad told me not to touch them because they were poisonous. He then went to the pub with my granddad and came home stinking drunk. We all have our vices. Mine is my complicated relationship to my own species, and myself.

Humpanzee

hooting, howling, yelling, yowling, wooping, whelping, baying, barking
motherfucking humpanzee
drooling, puking, sweating, farting, pissing, shitting, coming, bleeding
motherfucking humpanzee
groping, fucking, sucking, swallowing, licking, spanking, rubbing, wanking
motherfucking humpanzee
coughing, chocking, smoking, wheezing, spitting, hacking, drowning, dying
motherfucking humpanzee

OK every poem reads better with a little justification. Well what more do I need than the words themselves… they express almost every facet of human obsession in an ape-like fashion.

Speaking of ape-like, if you ever think we’re a smarter species than the other animals, it really depends on how you define that. Let’s look at another piece… much more famous (and deservedly so) from an installation in Brussels (2012).

This piece by Spanish artist Isaac Cordal always spoke strongly to me. It’s called Follow The Leaders and it shows a bunch of politicians arguing about whatever the fuck they always argue about whilst the water rises around them. Perhaps a metaphor?

Recently in the world that most simian of moronic billionaires, the orange tyrant and pedo of America, Donald Trump told the UN that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”

HOW FUCKING STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE?

It’s enraging. It makes me so mad that I want to go to Costco and buy the BIGGEST fucking TV (on credit card) and walk right outta there with a gallon bottle of whisky and a big fat bucket of cancer chicken.

It makes me so mad that when I look in the eyes of my own child, all I see are the confused eyes of the helpless creature you meet at the start of the game, Scorn—you know the one which you have to decide whether to take to the Saw Room or the Scoop Room.

Look at those eyes people!

That’s how I used to feel as I watched my dad buy YET another big 4×4 that he really didn’t need. That’s the face I wore all through my childhood as they taught us WE should be the ones to switch off lights and reduce our impact on the world. Now, it’s too late.

Like a barber-shop on the steps of the guillotine, we left it too fucking late people. The world is fucked and so are the Humpanzees that run the whole shit show.

So, yeah I’m still mad about all that, maybe a little more so than ever. But fuck it, right, as long as we can keep on shitting our Costco products with their microplastics into the sea and voting for people who tell us “everything is fine, and the people who say otherwise, they are liars (“I’m not a liar, I’m not a rapist, I’m a self-made man, I should get the Nobel prize!”).

Right, I’m off to be sick into a bucket of squiggles fried in batter. Enjoy your day.

originally published at stephenprime.com like ages ago hence the old news references. get over it.

The Grasshopper

They had a gigantic garden full of grass and ponds in the shade of strong trees
Over the walls outlandish insects lived in alien chorus
Curious as I was young I followed my eyes and feet
Out of the shade and into the heat
Between the gap I went through, beyond the wall into the tall grass
All around I could hear the sound of many nights spent falling asleep by an open window
And there waiting for me I found a singing creature
A big green grasshopper
With yellow tilting side to side eyes
Scary looking thing
So I took off my top and with t-shirt gloves
I plucked the sissing hissing from its sissing position
Held it to the light, the sun, for sister Helen to see
Yelled to the sky then set it free, hops silhouetted by the glorious sun
Gleaming Wing, Knees Spring Mechanically
Free of gravity, perfect symmetry

In the sun it became black, the silhouette danced and was gone,
Nowhere to be seen, so I put the top back on
But “LEERGHNNNHAH!!!aaAHELP!!!”
Fiendish crafty devil he had crawled in the sleeve
His glorious leap imaginary
So I ploughed across the pasture with it on my back
As I ran I tore not just at grass with feet and bare legs
But also at cloth top with berserk fear hands
Like I was running barefoot over scorpions
Fear loathed me and off came the top, left in trail for police if I never did stop.
Sorry, but return I did, and gathered up my garment
Prickly insect like the memory of a cactus on back and in hand
I took it back with me to the dark bit of the garden
Back through the gap
Back into barriers and organisation and fucking ponds!
I took the ugly bug of freedom and released it
Down upon trimmed lawn and saw the
Tilting unblinking yellow eyes with helpless
Antennae dangling in silence in between
Shock bangs loud as I smashed its
Only ever asked one question head
Why?

I’m still proud of this one. It was originally published, under my real name (DOXX ALERT) in a very early issue of Aesthetica Magazine, back when all they published were their mates’ poems. I just checked and Aesthetica did re-open creative writing submissions in 2013, but this one is on a print-only issue from 2003-4, so you won’t be able to find it there. It’s been sitting in old Word docs and dusty magazine archives for nearly thirty years, so I hope you Substache informavores enjoy it.

The Formal Glitch

The original mission was a stream-of-consciousness prose poem without full stops. Let’s say I was in the flow. This was stream of consciousness and my consciousness was mega fucking high(tened). But, being human and massively flawed, I accidentally dropped a full stop in the middle of the draft. I can hear the noise and feel the spring of the fountain nib even now as I stabbed the page with that dot of ink. I was gutted at first, but then I realised: that accidental puncture is the perfect metaphor for the poem itself. It’s the moment the “barriers and organisation” of the adult world trip you up. You’re running barefoot and berserk, and then—clunk—the grammar of the state catches your heel.

Innocence vs. The Smashed Head of Experience

There’s a bit of a William Blake arc here, if I say so me sen. It’s the classic move from Innocence (the gigantic garden, the singing creature) to the violent, jagged reality of Experience.

The grasshopper is a mechanical, fiendish crafty devil. It’s an alien in a German pasture that shouldn’t be in a Yorkshire lad’s sleeve. The “berserk fear” of the insect on the skin is the moment the natural world becomes too much. Too fucking real, too prickly tactile like the memory of a cactus. We admire freedom until it’s crawling down our backs, at which point we retreat to the fucking ponds and the trimmed lawns of safety.

The Final “Why?”

Read more

This poem graced the the pages of The Vein back in 2012. Yes, Stephen Prime was getting published back in those days. Kids born back then are the new griefers in GTA Online (I know this because my son has an Oppressor Mk II and he knows how to use it).

Without further ado, here is the poem, resurrected once more from the pixelated ashes for your pleasure and pain. Notice how prophetic it is.

Recipe for Disaster poem

Take one dictatorship posing as a democracy
Slow roast until the heart is black and the meat is thirsty
Add two or three cracked liberalists
Whisk together with million dollar missiles
Pour in a few hundred thousand dead soldiers
And a good pinch of murdered women and children
Let it rise for a few years in a lukewarm temperature
of media hype and propaganda masquerading as fact
Nuke it all up so it’s scalding on the inside and frozen in the middle
Then serve with a drizzle of oil gravy and lashings of ultra-violence

Pwem Explainy Thing

How about them apples eh? Fuck me did I know how to read the future or what? Well, actually no… sadly bullshit stinks as bad today as it did back then. But it hits a little harder in 2026, don’t you think? Well it doesn’t matter what you think because Jami liked it enough to publish it and that is all the validation I will ever need.

Now get yourself a whisk (or better yet a whisky) and see if you can follow the recipe at home. Be sure to take a photo and share it on instagrat and tag us with the hashtag #letseattheapocalypse.

The Historical Context: 2012 vs. The Long Burn

Written god knows actually when, all we know is that Recipe for Disaster poem was published in 2012. We were marinating in the post-2008 financial collapse while watching the Arab Spring transition from a hopeful democratic appetiser into a scorched-earth main course. The “dictatorship posing as a democracy” wasn’t just a dig at the obvious despots; it was a middle finger to the neoliberal consensus that was already slow-roasting the middle class until their “hearts were black”.

Prophetic or Just Perpetual Bullshit?

Is it prophetic? Fuck off. It’s better than prophetic—it’s a recursive loop. The reason it hits harder in 2026 isn’t that I am a wizard; it’s because the “lukewarm temperature of media hype” has finally reached a rolling boil. In 2012, we had propaganda masquerading as fact; in 2026, we have generative AI hallucinations masquerading as reality.

The 1912 Paradox (The Century-Old Stench)

Would this have been true in 1912? Absolutely. Swap “million dollar missiles” for “Dreadnought battleships” and the recipe remains identical. 1912 was the calm before the Great War—the ultimate “Recipe for Disaster” where the meat was thirsty for a nationalism that would eventually “nuke” the entire European continent into a “frozen middle”. The smell of the bullshit is a historical constant; only the brand of the whisk changes.

Gastronomic-Geopolitical Deconstruction.

Ultimately, this poem is a reminder that the apocalypse is a tasting menu. Did I read the future? No. I just knew that the chef was a maniac and humanity is always cooking up death and destruction and marinating it in lies.

Originally published on stephenprime.com and The Vein

I’m pulling it out of the archives for Substack today. My publication stats say I have grown 800% in the last 90 days, and I have a bunch of great people I regularly engage with reading this newsletter, so consider this fair warning: you ought to get used to me being sullen from time to time.

Don’t panic. I haven’t hit the ‘manopause‘ or anything ludicrous like that (I don’t even believe it exists). It actually comes down to a fundamental thesis on human energy. People often misunderstand what being an introvert actually means. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are shy or misanthropic; it is entirely about how your internal battery works.

Extroverts recharge in public. They draw energy from the crowd, the noise, the idle banter in the lift. Introverts recharge in private. We get our energy from being alone. Forced small talk is a parasitic drain on a finite power reserve.

So, here is a little rhyming reminder of that from 2017.

Just I’ve better things to do

I am not friendly
I am not mean
It's just that on idle chatter
I am not keen

If you try to talk while
my dog's doing a shit
Don't expect me to be
too thrilled about it

If you try strike up a conversation
While I am in the lift
Don't be surprised
at my conversational thrift

If you tend to natter,
in the corridor, say
Don't be alarmed if
I tell you to go away

I'm not a bad person
Really, I'm not
Just I've better things to do
than talk to all you lot

The Energy Economy of the Introvert

If you want to understand why a harmless bit of idle chatter in a lift can feel like a psychic vampire draining your life force, we have to look past the pop-psychology labels and dig into the actual mechanics of the human brain. If you have a brain you will enjoy this next bit.

You probably know about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is essentially corporate astrology. You have likely taken it—perhaps forced into it during a team-building exercise —and been assigned a four-letter acronym that supposedly defines your entire personality’s operating system.

The problem is, modern psychology views the MBTI with the same raised eyebrow a physicist reserves for a flat-earther. It relies on strict binary categories: you are allegedly either an ‘I’ (Introvert) or an ‘E’ (Extrovert), a ‘T’ (Thinker) or an ‘F’ (Feeler). But human personality does not exist in rigid, mutually exclusive boxes; it exists on a spectrum. Furthermore, Myers-Briggs lacks empirical validity and what psychometricians call ‘test-retest reliability’. You can take the assessment on a Tuesday, take it again a month later after a strong cup of coffee and a bad commute, and end up with an entirely different personality type.

Serious, empirically rigorous psychometrics favours the Big Five trait model (often remembered by the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). If you search the literature for Costa and McCrae’s ‘Five-Factor Model’, you will find an absolute avalanche of citations; it is the undisputed heavyweight champion of quantitative psychology, measuring extraversion as a sliding scale rather than a fixed box, and we all sit somewhere along that continuum.

So, if the binaries are defunct, why do the labels ‘Introvert’ and ‘Extrovert’ still stick so stubbornly to our shitty cultural fan?

Jung’s Lunatics

The terms were originally coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1920s, specifically in his 1921 work Psychological Types. Jung theorised that extroverts direct their psychological energy outwards towards people and objects, while introverts direct it inwards towards concepts and ideas. Jung himself actually warned against treating these as absolute binaries, noting that “there is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.”

The labels survived the evolution of modern psychology because they are incredibly efficient heuristics. Humans love cognitive shortcuts. Even if the MBTI framework is profoundly flawed, the broad strokes of Jung’s observation map perfectly onto how we experience social friction in our daily lives. The labels persist because they give us a shared, instantly recognisable vocabulary to explain our boundaries without needing to cite clinical literature at the person cornering us in the corridor.

But beneath the defunct tests and the cultural shorthand, the introvert/extrovert divide is rooted in a very real, measurable physiological difference in how our brains process stimuli and dopamine. It is, quite literally, an energy economy.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Hans Eysenck proposed that the difference between introverts and extroverts comes down to their baseline levels of ‘cortical arousal’. Your brain has a network called the reticular activating system (RAS), which regulates your levels of wakefulness and how much sensory information you let in.

Eysenck posited that introverts naturally have a higher baseline of arousal. Their mental resting state is already incredibly active. That’s why you punch yourself in the temples saying “shut the fuck up monkey brain, I HATE you.” No, just me? Anyway, due to this, a busy corridor, a loud room, or the boringly unpredictable demands of small talk quickly push introverts past their optimal level of stimulation into the red zone of being overwhelmed. Extroverts, conversely, have a lower baseline of cortical arousal. They don’t have a monkey bashing cymbals in their heads... probably just like a stupid sloth or something. They are chronically under-stimulated in quiet environments. They need external stimuli—crowds, noise, the frantic energy of a party, or idle chatter in the lift—to bump their arousal up to a comfortable, optimal level. I never understood those fux who go to Starbucks to work on their laptops and I always just assumed they were showing off their latest apple product. Turns out they ARE wired differently.

Eysenck even proved all this with a famously bizarre ‘lemon juice experiment’. He placed drops of lemon juice on the tongues of introverts and extroverts. The introverts reliably salivated significantly more than the extroverts. Because their baseline arousal to stimuli was already so high, their physiological reaction to the sourness was far more intense.

Dope mine

This brings us to dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical (and something my stupbeautifulid neurodivergent brain has a hard fucking time with). More recent studies, such as those discussed by cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, show that extroverts have a more active dopamine reward network when it comes to social engagement. When an extrovert strikes up a conversation while your dog is doing a shit, they are getting a hit of dopamine. They are plugging into the grid of other people to charge their batteries.

This biological reality does not stop at the edge of the physical world, which brings us to the precise reason why logging onto social media is so fundamentally exhausting, and probably why I just typed this poem into FarceBuck and then left. Your reticular activating system does not differentiate between a physical nuisance cornering you in a corridor and a digital one performing for the algorithm in your feed. It simply registers stimulus.

When an extrovert opens a social platform, it acts as a dopamine slot machine or a Skinner Box. They are plugging into a global grid of performative outrage, bikini photos, and relentless digital nattering to charge their batteries. But for the introvert, the algorithmic feed is just an infinitely scrolling, inescapable lift. It is a manufactured environment designed to forcefully extract your finite social energy. Participating in that sphere—even just to drop a link to your own work—triggers the exact same cortical overstimulation as being trapped in a crowded room.

You might wonder: if social media algorithms are essentially digital slot machines designed to hack the human nervous system with dopamine hits, why doesn’t that feel good for introverts too? The truth is, it does, but only for about three seconds. We are still human; our brains like validation. But dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. It is the chemical of seeking and anticipation, and it amps up the nervous system.

For the extrovert’s stupid sloth, that algorithmic hit of validation is clean, sustainable fuel. It wakes the sloth up to a comfortable cruising altitude. The social reward perfectly matches their neurological craving. But for the introvert, that dopamine hit is essentially ‘dirty energy’. You are giving a concentrated shot of digital espresso to the monkey that is already bashing cymbals in your head.

It overclocks the system. The sudden spike of dopamine forces your already highly-aroused brain to process the performative context, the micro-anxieties of how to respond, and the sheer noise of the feed. The cost of processing that social stimulus instantly bankrupts whatever fleeting reward the notification brought, leading to a massive and immediate crash. How do I know this? Just look at the car-crash of my social media accounts.

For the introvert, the reward simply does not outweigh the cost. The interaction is not a dopamine hit; it is an active, taxing expenditure of finite energy. Especially if your dog is doing a shit because it’s almost like you are doing a shit yourself and then you have to pick it up and put it in your pocket. Same thing gets triggered if a big influencer deigns to mock your small group of freaks that you spent years cultivating.

This is the simple truth of the energy economy. So I mean it when I say in the poem that I am not mean, and I mean it when I say I am not unfriendly. It just means your battery operates on a different voltage. Extroverts recharge in public. Introverts recharge in private. To reset the system, clear the cache, and lower that cortical arousal back to a manageable hum, we have to unplug. We have to walk away from the nattering in the corridor and go sit in a quiet room.

Not because I hate you (although chances are if you are an idiot I do hate you). Just because I have better things to do which are literally more rewarding due to my brain’s neurochemical wiring. Or, I could, you know just go and become a full-on meth head.

Check it out you can get 30 days trial on a year’s subscription for FUCKING FREE. Click it, then cancel in 29 days just like Netflix except more personality, more insulting, more unhinged and hopefully more likely to forget to cancel and just pay me for writing like my dream job.

Swine Clearance

This article was originally published at stephenprime.com. I just wanted you to know that.

So what what’s it going to be then, eh? What should I publish on Substack today? Not to moan or anything, but substack’s algorithm still hasn’t made up its mind about me… could be because I never published anything original here. A lot of what I’ve published is stuff you can already read on my blog at stephenprime.com. If you haven’t been over there yet, pop on by. It’s full of great content, such as my HanaKuso poem.

But here’s something just for you people… something you will only find on substack. It’s a poem I wrote on 23/05/2014 and it’s just been sat there on my hard drive in a word .doc all these fucking years.

Why should you care? Well, you wanted some original poetry… here’s Force Fed Fuck Food

Eat up
Go on
Get stuck in
It's only your children's
Future

It's not your concern
My parents shrug
My friends know
But they don't see it
Apathy
Mindless blind hopeless
Apathy of ignorance
Apathy of lies
Apathy of media orca cry
Apathy of nuclear
Apathy of waste
Apathy of hate
Of race
Of religion
Apathy
A pathetic excuse

And there you have it. Don’t you feel all warm and fuzzy now? Who said poems couldn’t change the world. I wrote this in 2014… I was clearly angry then. What was I so angry about? Obama was president then, Brexit was just a weird gripe that a small group of ill-informed racist pricks had, and the price of a pint was still under a fiver.

Imagine if I wrote this poem today? How much longer would it have to be? Well… I think the problem now is that people LOST that wonderful apathy that, it turned out, was holding the world together. Some serious algorithm whipped up by Cambridge Analytica or something got the whole world all riled up with Surgically Targetted Disinformation. Yes, that was a real thing, as you’d know if you watched The Great Hack.

Anyway, so if I were to write this poem today I would probably not be all pissed off about Apathy. I mean, it’s still there, but it doesn’t bother me as much. Ironically, I’ve become more apathetic. Because social media depresses me and I couldn’t engage with the world any more… so I had to withdraw. Yes, I know, it’s a pathetic excuse—gold-plated irony. But whereas apathy used to upset me to this degree that it would burst out of me like a blister, nowadays I find Hate much more despicable. And billionaires. And what’s the worst? Hateful billionaires. I mean, fuck those guys… seriously FUCK THEM.

What a shame the world is going to shit even faster and more assuredly than ever. But in the meantime, what can we do about it. Nothing? That would be apathy. No… we must not do nothing, but all I can really do, my only weapon against it, is to try and keep going and keep writing. I hope my words don’t depress you. There’s this brilliant guy called Arran Stibbe who writes about the linguistics of climate and ecolinguistics. His outlook is brilliant. He used to work with people with terminal illnesses, and he studied how they talk about the short time they have left on Earth. Some people just gave up and became very sad and then they died. Other people, they accepted it. They accepted it, and then they tried to make the most of the short time they had left. Spending it with family, friends. Enjoying what they HAD, not worrying about what they DIDN’T have. Those people lived a dignified existence to the end. Stibbe says that’s basically our choices now with climate change. It’s too late. We could have stopped it, but we didn’t. So now we must live in the short space we have left before it all comes crashing down. It’s sad. It’s beautiful. It’s not our fault. It’s not apathy, not hate, not anger even… just acceptance. Maybe that’s what I should write about next.

Thanks for reading!

DON’T LET APATHY PREVENT YOU FROM SUBSCRIBING I NEED YOUR LOVE

I wrote this poem in 2017 and as far as I can tell I just typed it directly into FarceBuck. At the time I was blissfully unaware, but reading it today it really smacks of Musk.

Scientists are sending a rocket to the moon
It will be loaded with nukes and dynamite and stuff that goes boom
They plan to test the moon’s durability against such attacks
The motive behind the project is pure scientific facts
People have criticised the whole thing saying
What if the moon really does blow up?
If that happens the earth’s orbit would be compromised and
Tides would change
Mountains would be flattened
An ice age might come from nowhere
Or we could all spin off and crash into Venus
We’d all be up a certain solar creek
Some have called the project “innovative”
Whilst critics call it “suicidally irresponsible”
But curiosity won’t be satisfied until the moon’s strength
Has been put to the test 
How can we know that it won’t suddenly crumble to chalk in the sky one day?
How can we sleep in our beds at night
If we don’t send a nuke up there first and give it a good shake?
This really needs to be done, 
It needs to be done soon
And it needs to be done with nukes on the taxpayer’s bill
So up goes the rocket
3, 2, 1 blast-off
And later there’s the live footage
Astronauts rigging the moon to blow
“Houston, we got her primed for a party, hit the button on my mark”
3, 2, 1 boom
And the moon starts reverberating
Like a giant cymbal made of thin stone
The moon gyres and gimbles
Cracks start to appear
“I told you we never should have come up here”
One slightly less idiotic astronaut yells in the other astronaut’s ear
“No no, she’ll hold. She can take it, can’t you my dear?”
Meanwhile the entire world watches in the grip of fear
How would you rather the scenario ends?
The moon goes caput, or she holds and we do it again
Whichever it is the moral stays the same
The human race is fucking insane. 

Guess what! I even made a LubeChew video about this as well. Here it is all embedded. My favourite part is the bit where the woman slaps the man even though it was totally not his fault.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER BIT:

This poem was first published in my book Ratio: An eX Twitter Eulogy by Hungry Wolf Press. If you subscribe to me at Substack and go to the Chat bit and ask nicely I will even send you a free Audibook version. FREE. FULL AUDIOBOOK. YES. Wait, what’s that, you don’t want it… nah, I can’t say I am surprised. Thanks for reading all the way down here though. You must be really bored… Sure you don’t want that book?

Subscribe now

AntiProConInOverUnderalism

I’m pro-abortion 
Because I’m anti-overpopulation 
because I’m pro-population control
because I’m anti-control 
because I’m in over under
I’m not rich 
So I’m anti-capitalist 
I’m not straight
So I’m anti-linearity
Anti Pro Con
Anti-anti 
Double-negative 
Double-helix of shame & shopping carts
Credit card rosaries 
tap here for salvation 
the market will redeem you
Even as it claims you

I’m not clean I’m not pure I’m not approved 
I’m an in over under ad campaign 
Choking on hashtags, hemorrhaging personal info
Bless me, Father Algorithm, for I have clicked 
Bless me for I have shared 
Bless me for I have sinned in HD 
and lost it somewhere on my HDD

I’m pro-rot
Because decay feeds the next thing
I’m pro-failure
Because it’s honest
I’m pro-meat
Because it’s mortal
I’m pro-death
Because I’ve seen what living costs
I don’t want your flag
Your algorithm
Your smiling fascism of good intentions
I want dirt,
truth under fingernails,
a bloodstream climate march fundamentalism
Overunderism
The house always wins
Power is the mind-killer
No control controlled by its need for control
I’m anti-comfort
Because comfort breeds silence
I’m anti-progress
Because it forgets its corpses

we recycle the apocalypse 
we pray to Wi-Fi
we dream in pop-up windows 
and wake to the sacrament of system updates 
On the alter of the church of the bleeding screen

anti-hope anti-cure anti-happy-hour antidote
I’m anti-overunderstanding, pro-confusion, anti-everything and anything
AntiOverUnderism
ProConAntiOverUnderalism
AntiProConInOverUnderalism
we don't want to stick the landing with this one... 
we want to smash into the runway with everyone inside 
screaming "fire!!" – 
burning with their heads tucked between their legs. 
Cut it up, fuck it up.
AntiProConInOverUnderalism—
the gospel of not knowing we know nothing
a faith without subject or predicate
the holy static between ad breaks
the psalm in the supermarket
the sermon of human ruin
fire in the runway / cloistered saints gyrating / children reciting safety procedures backwards 
a choir of coverups
we crash-land in perfect contradiction
all of us shouting the name of the new religion—
AntiProConInOverUnderalism!

Would you like to hear a song my friend who goes by the moniker Wolfugue made from my lyrics? No? Listen to it anyway.

PWEM ANALYSIS

For the eggheads and the geeks, and the thickos who can’t understand my poetic genius (lol) here is a justification. I got AI to write some of this bit cos I can’t always reach down there to toot my own horn.

In a wager, an over/under bet isn’t about who wins; it’s about how much happens—how many goals, points, deaths, whatever. The house posts a number—say, “50.” You bet the game will end over or under that total. It’s disloyal gambling because you don’t care about the game or team or whatever you’re betting on, you only care if it’s higher or lower. It’s quantitative number-fucking, cold hard bet logic. You could be betting on the number of people whose dick gets bitten off by bonobos whilst flashing their parts to kids at a zoo… it doesn’t matter what you bet on either as the house always wins.

To be in over–under—metaphorically—is to live inside that wager.
You’re not cheering for sides anymore, you’re betting on volume, on the degree of ruin or success. You’re complicit even when you’re disgusted, because the system makes you a participant. You keep refreshing the feed, watching the markets, the news tickers, hoping catastrophe will fall just within your bet.

It’s a kind of spiritual addiction that mirrors the economic one:

• Over — the manic hunger, the speculative boom, the faith in endless growth.

• Under — the crash, the scarcity, the fear, the debt spiral.
  Society oscillates between those poles like a gambler chasing losses.

So Antiproconinunoverunderalism becomes a kind of mock-ideology, a creed of resistance to the creed of wagers.

The name: Antiproconinoverunderalism

• Anti- — against.

• Pro- — for.

• Con- — with / against again.

• In- — within.

• Over-Under- — the gambling hinge, the market pulse.

• -alism — the pseudo-ism of all isms.

It eats itself grammatically, like capitalism does ideologically. You can’t tell if it’s for or against anything. It’s the ideological ouroboros. It’s also somehow really funny. Hahah.. aaahah. lolcry.

So, yeah… I am very happy with my poem, a little less so with the state of society. But, you know… I hear Elon Musk is buying a pneumatic cock to fuck his way through his Fleshlight®collection, so every cloud has a creamy plastic centre.

Originally published at https://stephenprime.com/antiproconinoverunderalism/

Was I being oversensitive?
When I let it get to me that
Everyone thought my kite was really
Good

First; of course it was good
I’m a fucking grownup
And a fucking artist
I know my kite was good
I stole the design from Jaws

It was a great white kite
Circling the others like they would be devoured

Yeah, all the other kites were made by kids
My kid’s kite was also a shark
But he didn’t take my advice and drew it profile
It looked a bit unimposing

My kite was like the Jaws poster, a big 
Triangular shape with more triangles
Charging up from under
It was very easy to draw it and make it look good

That’s why I did that. I didn’t want
To look stupid
And I didn’t want to put in too much effort
It was just one of those parent child school things

But all the other grownups said my kite was 
Really good
Jousu they said, the most patronising word of all
It means skilled or good at something

Didn’t need to hear that though
Because I wasn’t there to be praised
I was just there to fly
A kite we made with our kids

Why did they make such a big thing of saying how
Great my kite was
It was great, but sure I didn’t need to be 
Told
Like I was six years old

My own six-year-old, whose kite
Was shite
He needed to be told
But not me, I knew I had the best kite

But saying that mine was best put me
At the same level as all the kids
I was sensitive you see
I was the only foreigner there
The only dad
All the other parents were mums
Dads I guess stay at home brooding 
Or some shit

Well maybe next time I will stay at home
And brood
Worrying if they thought I was just another kid
Because my kite was fucking awesome
Maybe next time I’ll just stay at home
Brooding
Getting all angry that someone said a nice thing to me
And like a real man I’ll write poetry
And complain about how I felt about something
Meaningless
That happened a long time ago
A time when I could still fly kites
With my child and feel
Free and dangerous
As my apex predator sliced through the air
Oblivious to something
Oblivious to what? I don’t know. 
But thanks for pointing it out
Thanks for making me feel stupid
And whose fault is that?

Like my insecurities I could not let go
And the kite I made is resting
Unflown for years
In the attic 
And I still cannot let go
Of that feeling of doubt

Did they really think my kite was good
Should I care
Is it ok to care
Is it ok to be offended
Should I not be offended
Should I throw the kite away
Should I take the kite and fly it
Should I burn the kite
Should I write a poem about it
Too late for all that

I miss kites
I miss my son
And I wish I had a brain that doesn’t 
Constantly 
Turn every little thing into a great long poem of nothingness like this one 

Why did they make such a big thing of saying how Great my kite was It was great, but sure I didn’t need to be Told Like I was six years old

Originally published Dec 6th 2024 at https://stephenprime.com/kite/

If you like it be sure to check out more stuff and also YouTubby

Thanks for reading peeps!