This week in Sunday Life I remove comments from my blog. Just for a bit.

Illo by Geoff McFetridge

When I’m feeling a tad on the smug side of my life situation, I find a little visit to the comments section of my blog sets me straight. In the main, comments on my blog are helpful sharings of tips and links. But every now and then a snarky interloper pipes up, like a foul air bubble in the lower intestine, to pull apart the most banal detritus of my existence.

Such as whether I Photoshop out a gap in my teeth.

Or how many times I say “um” in a podcast.

I find it a practice in mindful ego control, mostly. I observe the snarkiness bubble to the surface. Smile. And accept that I put myself out on a limb by having a public blog, ergo I must accept some flack. And then I let the stinky snark float on past, ignoring the urge to pop it with well-crafted comeback. It’s a bit like handling a toddler: acknowledge good behaviour, ignore bad behaviour. With time, I’ve developed a lovely Teflon calm from the process.

I’m lucky, though. I’ve only had to remove two comments in almost two-and-half years of running my blog. But this is not the norm. Monitoring comments has become a laborious chore for many (some bloggers I know remove 40 per cent of contributions daily). So much so, a growing number of the big blogging names have dropped their comments sections altogether, despite the commercial reality that comments are traffic drivers, which, in turn, are monetisation drivers.

This is no trifle issue. It’s dictating news agendas, hurting people in humiliating and irreversible ways and driving some to suicide. Nasty comments can be hate-bombed into the interweb by cowards who hide behind pseudonyms and there’s nothing that can be done to discipline or control them. Unlike a hand-posted letter to the editor of yore, these comments are not carefully and mindfully prepared. And social media commentators argue commenting contradicts the original notion of the social media “conversation”. They’re more akin to an impulsive heckle at a footy match – unaccountable and mostly about me too-ism. As a result, the Australian Press Council last month called for a discussion on online reader comments as part of their broader enquiry into media standards.

Apropos of something, I love the Swedes. They’re so often the first to buck the system, mostly in the nude and incorporating a community garden. Last month they led the way once more when three of the nation’s four newspapers banned anonymous online comments.

All of which has got me thinking: should I take a stand and drop comments on my blog?

This week in Sunday Life I’m unbalanced

Photo by Eugene Tan via Aquabumps

I believe I’ve found the very latest first-world lament. “I’m so sick of trying to get enough ‘me time’,” my friend Sal shared over the phone during the week. “I think it’s easier just to be overcommitted and be done with it. Know what I mean?”

I would’ve coughed up my latte. Or my chardonnay. But I was too busy eating my organic, grass-fed granola.

Actually, I’ve been waiting for someone to pipe up along these lines for a while. The pursuit of life balance has become yet another thing most of us are crap at, which means it’s yet another thing we feel compelled to master, which means it’s yet another thing to add to our to-do list.

Life balance is elusive. Just how do you ensure the right balls are in the air in the right ratios? For every new commitment you take on, do you allocate the same amount of time for sitting in a bath or Cooking a Quality Meal or doing a Meaningful Craft Project with your kid? If a passion, work project or a sick partner suddenly require more of your time, do you have to put on the breaks? “Woah world! No can do – I’m behind on my yoga class quotient!”

Scoff not. A friend told me they were stood up recently by someone citing they were “owed some hang time”. Hang time. Me time. I get it. But, seriously, the idea of “owing” it is as dispiriting as Sunday night ironing.

It’s a reality, of course, that most of us need more hang time. Life is well out of whack. But is fighting the tide, constantly trying to redress things – tit-for-tat-ish – the solution?

How about I pause then to cite the very latest research that answers such a hypothetical.

This week in Sunday Life I’m twee

photo by Nicole L Hill

To be nostalgic about an era you have to have been fondly engaged in it first time around. Which is why I’m not very nostalgic. I was largely absent from most eras I traversed. We only had one TV channel for much of my childhood, didn’t live near shops and my parents had a thing for down-scaling to the “Australian-made”, wholemeal, unpackaged version of…everything. So I never wore anything fluorescent, didn’t watch Molly die and don’t know the words to “Girls on Film”.

I also never owned a doll, except for a Barbie Hairtastic Styling Head my uncle’s ex-wife gave me (the one where you cut her hair – but don’t worry Mum! – a simple tug and more emerges from her latex skull). I gave my new Head a mud bath in the dam that very Christmas day, which clogged her follicles.

So my brother fashioned her a Mohawk. And that was that.

I wasn’t girly, so, by rights when I say “this week I’m twee” I’m really only observing from a distance, for “twee” is but a nostalgic romp back to sweetness’n’lite, Holly-Hobby-tea-parties-and-needlepoint girliness.

To be twee is to wear cute floral rompers with a T-shirt emblazoned with kittens (bought on Etsy.com). It’s to squee! at the idea of an afternoon tea. And to collect retro eggcups that you then “instagram” and put on Tumbler. One twee blogger listed what it takes to be twee:

#3 Sit on a curb every time you experience a significant emotion

#4 Push your hair behind your ears (because it “makes you look self-conscious and self-consciousness is pretty goddamn cute” and

#10 Spend hours creating a mixed tape for someone special.

This week in Sunday Life I visit a witch. Yep, a witch.

photo by Carlos Gotay

On long road trips, in the back seat of the family Ford Falcon XB, my five siblings and I played the hypothetical game “how much would you have to be paid to…”. How much would you have to be paid to, say, drink a cup of warm sick? Sit in a pond of leeches for five minutes? Ten minutes?

You know how it went. Before Wii, we all played a version of it. It was deliriously fun and simultaneously flexed our little moral compasses, preparing us for real life.

So, let me put this hypothetical quandary to you: if you could be given a vision of your future, but it could mean learning some seriously dire news, would you sign up?

A while back I learned of a witch who’s reportedly one of the best tarot readers around. The caveat is that she tells it as it is, warts and all. Ly de Angeles is the high priestess of the international Coven of WildWood Gate. She’s been practicing as a witch for 30 years and she once told a young woman, “Looks like there’s a death in the family… No, it’ll be you.” She detailed it was going to be in a plane crash. And so it came to be several years later.

I wavered for a while, and was warned against it, but curiosity pulled me in and on Tuesday I fronted up to her dark basement abode to get slapped with my destiny.

This week in Sunday Life I car share

Photo by Charlotte Abramow

I own a power drill. It has moved house with me – shifting from one shelf under the sink to the next – three times. And you know how many times I’ve used it in our five years together? Twice. Which is normal apparently. The average drill emerges from under the sink for 12 minutes in its lifetime.

This sad statistic confirms a festering sentiment out there in the world: owning stuff is annoying and increasingly cluttery and inefficient. It’s like that itchy jumper you had to wear as a kid. It scratches at you incessantly, prompting a violent desire to strip.

But buying stuff is only a fraction of the equation. The real pain is living with it – storing the waffle maker in the bulging corner cupboard, servicing the lawnmower, packing up the Barbie campervan when you move house. And how can I explain it…it’s also the way it all just sits there idle, making you feel guilty like a dog needing a walk.

As Rachel Bosman author of What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption said when we spoke via email this week, “you don’t need to own a drill, you just need a hole in the wall…so borrow the drill, don’t own one”. Beautifully put. And indeed neighbourhood share schemes are popping up everywhere – in Australia there’s The Sharehood and Landshare, which launched in February and connects people wanting to grow veggies with folk who have a spare patch.

In March, sharing – instead of owning – was dubbed one of Time magazine’s Ten Ideas That Will Change the World. Since then much as been made of our itch to “live light”. Bosman confirms it’s not (just) an ethical or environmental crusade. It goes deeper than that.

This week I gave the concept a crack by signing up for car sharing, mostly because I find owning a car incredibly annoying. I also find this statistic staggering: on average we use our cars 8 per cent of the week. The rest of the time they hang about idle accumulating duco damage and parking tickets (at least mine does).

This week I decide less

by John Rensten / Getty Images

I have two seemingly unrelated theories about life.

First, successful people eat boring breakfasts. Crude, but true. Look around the busy exec-y types you know – they eat vegemite on toast, or porridge. Every day. And don’t put any further thought to it. It’s only ratbags like me who deliberate wildly between boiled eggs, quinoa porridge and left-over Indian.

The second, kids – despite their protestations – don’t actually want to be asked what after-school activity they prefer for next semester, or what they’d like on their sandwich today. I don’t have kids, but I was talking about this with friends-who-are-parents last weekend. As one said, “It was better, wasn’t it – for everyone – back when we were told ‘hey, kids it’s devon and tomato sauce today’. We’d move on to wrestling with our sister. What have we done?” We’ve bludgeoned kids with decisions, that’s what.

I’ve touched on this issue before in this column: the chore that is making decisions. But, seriously, it’s the sexiest topic doing the psychology rounds at the moment and so I thought I should re-penetrate with the latest findings. They all say the same thing: we’re a society suffering “decision fatigue”. The New York Times magazine this month ran a long feature on the subject and there’s emerged a spate of books to choose from about the art of choosing. At every turn, we have to make more decisions – whether to reply to an email, to pay for extra legroom, to subscribe to the weekly newsletter. We’re expected to have an opinion on everything and it’s leaving us choicely buggered.

A study earlier this year found, unlike, say, running fatigue  – which sees us hit a wall – decision fatigue sees us do dumb things, like reverting to default or safe options, or to making decisions that keep our options open…which just prolongs the fatigue. After a day spent making decisions, judges in the US were found to default to more severe parole sentences in the afternoon. They were decision-spent, so set conservative sentences that kept options open (they could always reduce them later). Another study found when we have to choose the customized extras for our car, we deliberate conscientiously at the start of the form, then eventually “give in” to the default options (nattily, companies put the more expensive decisions at the end of forms).  Or, of course, we put off deciding.

But, friends, I’m interested in solutions here. And preferably ones that are dictated to me. Because this is the point: the less pithy decisions we make, the more decisive energy we have for the important ones.

Fix #1: set your life up to make less decisions.

Eat the same breakfast. Wear a suit. Buy the same brand of frozen peas.

This week in Sunday Life I simply get stopped

by jamie nelson

During the week there was a moment – a very brief one – in which I was flying through the air, superman-style, and cruising towards a pile of rocks, when it occurred to me, “this is going to be majorly inconvenient”.

I landed on all fours, putting out my neck, and gouging a neat, golf ball-sized chunk of me-ness from my knee. But, in that brief moment, all I could think was, “Goddamn, this is totally putting a stop to my plans – three months in the making – to go surfing for four days with my best mate who’s just flown in and has three kids and so never, ever gets four days to surf with a friend”.

Then, splat.

Indeed, I spent the next four days, after a stint in emergency, shuffling about like Gumby. (Have you ever tried going to the toilet without bending your knees? Definitely funny, in a Gumby kinda way).

Quite obviously I was stopped. In my tracks, unable to do any activity as every limb was accounted for with stitches or gashes. (And it was definitely funny that it was specifically every corporeal surface required for surfing – feet, palms and knees.) This is my idea of purgatory and it’s happened many times over, and always just prior to Big Plans for Something Important. Yeah, you too?

This week in Sunday Life I trust the process

I had dinner with a guy recently who dedicated entrée to telling me that all writers are self-indulged w*nkers. “You all go on about the pain of writing,” he said. “Plumbers don’t write about how hard their work is, you don’t read about ‘plumber’s block’.”

I’m a writer. I had to respond. First, I said, with the spine tingle of a good comeback, plumbers don’t write. “Perhaps they take out their frustration on an S-bend,” I suggested gently. “We know about writer’s pain because we read their work. “

Second, writing is a creative process. And any creative process – whether it’s painting or interpretive dancing or inventing a new S-bend wrench – is the expression of the human struggle to share our inner selves. Displaying our inside, or “true”, selves is all about standing out on the farthest limb, exposed and vulnerable, and saying “here!”. We all have, at our core, an important urge to do this, and yet at the same time a primal fear of it. Ergo, creative block.

Funnily, not long after I found myself at the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival chatting to a bunch of writers about the pain of the creative struggle. (Here’s a new collective noun for you: “a writer’s festival of whingers”.) Whether you’re a writer or wrench inventor or embarking on a big, formative project, you know this struggle. It’s an important one. A damn tough one, too.

There was consensus from most of the writers: just start. It doesn’t matter if you produce crap. From the crap, something always emerges.

This week in Sunday Life I get myself a mirror

photo by Charlotte Abramow

Louise Hay, the world’s biggest self-help publisher and author, is laughing at me. What’s your first thought when you wake up, she asks.

“Um, most days it’s, ‘Shit, I have so much to do’. Then I start composing emails and conversations in my head…” I stop and look at Louise’s face.

“OK. Correction. I used to wake up that way.”

This week Hay gave me a lesson in affirmations as she ate breakfast (scrambled eggs, three sausages and five prunes). (For more tips from my i/v with Louise click here.)

“Become aware of your self-critique and turn it into past tense,” she instructs.

This proves challenging. Yet highly entertaining for Hay. Hay’s 84 and I’m astounded by her energy and sparkle (her whole being is awesomely clear and bright) as she helps me switch my negative self-talkin’ ways.

If Hay didn’t invent positive-speak, she packaged and delivered it to the masses. Her first book, You Can Heal Your Life – which explains illness in terms of negative emotions in your body – has sold more than 50 million copies. When folk tell you your throat infection is about trapped creativity, they’ve read Hay. When they start quoting pretty much any self-help mantra they’re read one of her authors (she publishes Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer and dozens more).

I was born acerbic and I’m one of those people who protects their ego by taking the piss out of themselves before someone else can. “So I’ve got a lot of resistance to affirmations,” I tell her. (Dammit! Correction. I used to.)

So Hay shares her favourite trick after forty years of healing others and curing herself of cancer. “Get a mirror.”

This week in Sunday Life I do the opposite

Photo by Angela Boatwright

George Costanza is not one of life’s most inspired or bountiful contributors. But there are two things I give him full props for: the under-the-desk nap (I employed it during my newspaper days doing the 4am shift; the trick is to pull the swivel chair in after you and use it as a leg rest), and his “The Opposite” theory.

Given everything he’d done in life had been so wrong, George reasoned that if he did the exact opposite of what he normally did, he’d get it right. It works and he picks up a hot woman instantly with the line, “I’m unemployed and I live with my parents”. (Women’s attraction to raw honesty really is their Achilles heel.)

Rather than being a mere Seinfeld absurdity, this idea has much appeal and merit. When I worked in magazines, coverlines that went, “Everything You Know About [insert topic: skin whiteners, nipple covers, reversible jackets…] is Wrong” always focus-grouped well. It’s not so much that we like to be corrected.

We like opposites. They feel fresh.

This week, though, I realized opposites are also productive. Recently I read a theory by Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, for dealing with compulsions and procrastination. Whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t, he advises.