What am I trying to do here? The question rattles around, sharp-edged and insistent, in the mug of my mind. Record a podcast? Sure, that’s the surface. But it’s something more—a gnawing, restless urge to make sense of what keeps me awake through the endless nights and why my brain insists on dissecting the dark.
By day, officially, I optimise go-to-market strategies. Sales, marketing, the customer touchpoints, all that. I take brittle data and try to wring something useful out of it for business intelligence teams. But the part of me that sits up at 3 a.m., whispering into a microphone, is not just about numbers. It’s about brains. It’s about communication. Why we say what we do, why we bite our tongues, why we edge around silence.
I grew up in what the experts like to call a cult. I never liked that word. It’s dramatic; it’s lazy. High-control religion, if you want to be precise. Something that mapped out the who, what, when, and why of my life, right down to the marrow. From the outside, it looked bleak: no birthdays, no Christmas, no chit-chat with outsiders. On the inside, it was a machine built to squash questions flat. And if you did have a question, you learned to bury it.
By ten, I was already enrolled in ministry school, being taught to persuade, to sell the product of faith. But even then, there were two of me: the one putting on the show and the one taking notes, detached and quiet. Physically in, mentally out. A double exposure; it left me older than I should have been.
I was a quiet kid, which made me the perfect eavesdropper. Adults would park me in a corner at their gatherings, then carry on and forget I was there. I’d listen to them gossip or spar, and later, my parents would ask what I thought people “really meant.” I could see the cracks between words and intentions. Sometimes, people fought when they agreed. Sometimes, they agreed while fighting. Language as weapon, armour, fog.
That fascination with talk and silence followed me out of the religion. I left in my early thirties, and now, late forties, I’ve spent the years picking apart the mind from every angle: meditation, Buddhism, the forbidden things they used to warn me about—paganism, magic, mentalism. I write fiction, too: dystopian, cyberpunk. Still always about the mind, and the machines that want to shackle or set it loose.
A few years back, I started Insomnia Chats—a website, then a community, then Substack, and now, apparently, a podcast. It was meant for people who couldn’t sleep because their brains wouldn’t switch off. But it’s bigger than insomnia. It’s about everything that keeps us up: the noise, the lies, all the ways systems try to shape us.
That’s the real thing. I want to know how persuasion works. How we’re nudged, manipulated, herded by media, governments and clever algorithms. And more than that, I want to know how to push back. How to cut a clearing in your own mind for your own thoughts, not the ones piped in by unseen hands.
I work with AI. I think it can help, done right. But the whole setup is built to exploit—not to set us free. We need a different kind of model, one that doesn’t grind up attention and leave a trail of anxiety. I don’t have the shape of that yet, but I’m picking at the edges, trying to build toward it.
So what’s the point? Maybe just this: I want to help people hold their mental ground. See through the tricks, dodge the triggers, resist the mind-bugs seeping in from every screen. Carve out a spot for creativity, for oddness, for being the person you actually want to be. That’s my project. That’s what won’t let me sleep.
Thank you for reading and listening to insomniachat.com, the sanctuary for those who find themselves wide awake in the small hours of the night. This free social community and opinion page offers a safe space for insomniacs to connect and share their experiences via the chat and our private Insomnia Chat facebook group, with over 2.3k members. Founded by a fellow sleepless soul, insomniachat.com features chat forums, valuable resources, insightful opinions, honest reviews, and even helpful podcasts. Here, we don't claim to have all the answers, but we do offer a constant work in progress.
If you don’t like Facebook, cool, I get it, neither do I. Try out my free social community for people who enjoy speculative writing, thinking, cyberpunk, and mentalism. A place where a sleepless generation can get a distraction from the doom-scrolling algorithms trying to keep us hooked. No ads, no algorithms trying to nudge you this way or that. Social Media like it should be, free and without coercion
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