Most Read Columns of 2024
Some reading for the in-between time, and a peak notions thank you
It’s been a big year over here at Peak Notions. There are twice as many of us as there were at the close of 2023. I published my book, whose theme was based in large part on what I have been doing here on Substack since 2022. I was able to take the time to focus on writing it thanks to paid subscribers, who directly fund my work and continue to make a wonderful reality of my delusion that writing might be a way to make a living.
Peak Notions is my home. It’s an intellectual and social refuge for me as someone who doesn’t comfortably belong on any one political or ideological team, and doesn’t particularly want to. I’ve gained and lost subscribers this year as new people read one column and subscribe, feeling that they know what to expect, but then become irked when another one contradicts that assumption. I know this because they get in touch to tell me.
It’s a good thing — a sign that what you read here is not designed to palliate or sate the desires of readers who want to feel right, smart, or comforted. I’m too busy trying to figure out what on earth is happening (have you seen the world right now!?) to affirm the beliefs anyone walked in here with. The reality is that the world is ideologically siloed. Perhaps unprecedentedly so, and especially online. But most of us have questions, even if we’re not asking them. I ask my questions here. Sometimes, I find answers. Usually, I just find more questions.
This is place where I share my very best work. The work that takes longer to produce and research, that is less invested in reacting quickly to current events or hot topics and more invested in producing an honest perspective that isn’t the one you find everywhere else. We live in a world of prepackaged ideas, ready for easy consumption. Falling prey to this temptation is how we become ungenerous, uncharitable, self-righteous (and a pain in the arse at the family dinner table).
Below, you’ll find six of the most read Peak Notions columns of 2024. I’m immensely grateful to everyone who got in touch this year to connect over something I’ve written here on Substack, to (politely) tell me I’m wrong, ask a question or share their thoughts. Thank you for reading and listening. I’m excited to share what is coming in 2025 and to keep asking annoying questions along with you.
Most Read Columns of 2024
“Everyone is free to have a bad take (gender irrelevant), and Mac Ghlionn’s take is bad. Not because he is questioning the influence of celebrity culture on young girls (a practice feminists are - in theory - very much on board with) but because his take is a bit of an overboiled ham. Women are not taking to the streets in cowboy boots and declaring their hatred of babies. They’re telling us that in the UK at least, in general, women would like to have more children than they currently have. It might be worth listening when they tell us why they don’t.”
The most-read post from this year is on the motherhood question, how we talk about it, and what might be missing from a collective conversation on why motherhood has become an unappealing or unlikely prospect for growing numbers of women.
“Like all choices, it brings its own unique costs and benefits from having to switch your favourite brand of biscuit to accepting that you just can’t be physically present in the lives of your friends. For a long time, I felt trapped in my London life. Now, I feel free. I feel intensely lucky, if far away from almost all of the people I feel the deepest connection to. That’s undoubtedly a high cost to pay.”
Emigration to Australia from my native Ireland is at its highest level in ten years. I write about what it’s like to leave life as you know it behind, begin again far from where you started, how I think about my new home country, and that timeless emigrant’s question - ‘will I stay?’
“It frightened the rich and powerful in suggesting that a desire to eat them may once again be coming into fashion among the hungry and less advantaged, and it unleashed a sort of frothing schadenfreude among swathes of otherwise seemingly compassionate left wing people which, hopefully, frightened us all into remembering that shooting someone in the back is not a moral action simply because you prefer the guy holding the gun.”
The CEO shooting story didn’t change the world we live in. It confirmed an enormous cultural shift that had already occurred, one many didn’t notice because of the siloed information environments in which most of us live. I write about how some on the left have come to condone murder, and what is lost in the process.
“My brother and I would taunt her endlessly about it. The size – the mass – of the gasp. The luxuriant way it filled a room. Its disproportionate sense of drama in a person so otherwise undramatic. You sound, we would tell her, like someone on meth sanding a wardrobe; like a dog’s squashed chew toy reinflating; like an overzealous under 7s basketball coach with a broken whistle; like a forklift elevating a palette full of toilet seats; like a woman who’s about to demand to speak to the manager. You sound like a crazy person.”
This column on becoming our parents as we age, for both better and worse, was not one I thought would be widely read but it seems to have touched a nerve. It’s humbling to find your parent’s habits or expressions - especially the ones that you always hated - emerging from your body like some dormant intergenerational destiny. Or to look in the mirror one day and see a parent looking back.
“As we learned from social media trends which arose around Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and about five different iterations of the pandemic, ‘raising awareness’ can often look like self-congratulatory ideological masturbation rather than doing much of anything at all. That isn’t how reality works. It’s just how the internet works. Sometimes.”
This column was one of the most responded to this year, both positively and negatively. It’s not about Israel or Palestine, it’s about ideological bandwagoning, and the fact that your silence is not a space for other people to fill with their own interpretations. Silence has many meanings, and it’s okay not to share a take on everything all the time. Yes - even issues or topics that people feel very strongly about.
“From the outside, it will likely look like a short, unathletic-looking woman doing something mundane, gracelessly, unimpressively and slowly. Moving along in a small body, offering it small challenges. Maybe even futile, like a fool running into a wall. Yet I know better. I know that it’s a triumph, a gigantic act of will and self-service. Not a fluffy, ‘honour your body’ type service but a hard one. A commitment to learning and relearning uncomfortable lessons. It’s only a silly little run. It’s also an act of wilful defiance against myself. The weaker parts of myself. The ones that shrink in shame, or aim to disappear, or to prioritise short-term comfort over caring for my own wellbeing. Nobody else will do it. Nobody else should.”
This column on the dark legacy of millennial body image and relearning my relationship with exercise was another one I didn’t anticipate would find its way home to a lot of people. At this time of year, when all that negative body stuff comes back up, it might be helpful to anyone learning to embrace how unnatural it can feel to treat your body with the respect it deserves.
I genuinely can't wait for each new article. Easily the best money I spend each month. Thank you.
You did amazing work this year, and your book was truly fabulous.
But since saying this to you would help send parts of your brain into a death-spiral of uncontrollably yikes, and then I'd be directly responsible for less of your writing appearing in 2025, I will merely say: you did okay by us all this year. Could have been a lot worse - and when I look back on everything I read in 2024, I will always consider your work as being some of it.