Turning 40, buying a house: creative boom, creative slump

2026 started out like pretty much any other year, but then in February my wife Hannah found a house on Rightmove that she liked the look of, I reviewed the spreadsheets and dimly began to realise that home ownership might be a realistic prospect for us after all, and then things went from 0 to 100 really fast.

I won’t tell the full story here, because it’s long and exhausting, but let’s just say that the last few months –the final few months of my thirties – have been some of the most challenging of my entire life. However, they’ve also been rewarding in ways I never expected.

The curious thing about it all is how my creativity responded to the intense stress. First a remarkable creative flowering that I never expected, followed by a sudden slump.

In addition to my usual full-time freelance work, I’ve been attempting to navigate the realities of attempting to buy a house in a very challenging economic climate. Between our first conversations looking at house number one in February, and actually signing on the line for house number three in June, mortgage rates spiralled out of control thanks to Donald Trump’s escapades in Iran. We ended up paying an absolute fortune for a tank of heating oil, too. Aside from everything else, just trying to get all the financial ducks in a row was an experience I did not enjoy. For a while it felt that consequential decision after consequential decision was lining up in my head, and it felt exactly like the curious (and curiously unhealthy) way my brain used to visualise email pressure back in the burnouty days of 2019, when I’d have no choice but see invisible emails piling up in a big unread stack in my mind, whether or not I was actually looking at my inbox. (More about this in my book The Farthest Shore.)

Just like there’s a very particular way my mind visualises everything in complex branching timelines, or the way I don’t really understand colour and essentially see in monochrome, there’s also a very particular way my mind visualises emails. I can’t explain it. I don’t think I could even draw a picture for you.

Anyway, back in 2019 I developed methods to safely deal with digital overwhelm, deconstruct these unhelpful ways of visualisation. But 2026’s 0 to 100 happened really quickly, so I didn’t have time to develop coping mechanisms for ‘you’re buying a house in end-times capitalism while trying to keep all your other plates spinning; think fast!’

March felt insane. I look at my calendar now and it is covered in overlapping scrawls. Countless appointments with mortgage advisers and solicitors, house viewings, possible futures opening up and collapsing on themselves, combined with a busy month at work – and I haven’t even mentioned the health scare I had in March yet (I’m fine, but things were anxious for a bit). An absolute emotional roller coaster.

And yet, despite all this, my creativity was flowing…

Me being me, I was unable to stop continuing my ever-evolving personal studies on AI, Permacomputing, Gothic literature, Romanticism, poetry, analogue photography, art and all the rest of it. I was unable to stop creating, and for a while in March and April it felt that the creativity was effortless and boundless.

I seemed to be bursting with ideas. I managed to fit in a few short overnighters in the mountains, and I came back with some of my best images of the year so far, as well as verses of poetry that seemed to spark out of my fingertips. I filled notebooks with ideas. I actually kept my analogue records up to date.

One of these ideas was a concept for an entirely new computer aligned with Permacomputing principles – a system that wouldn’t have any of the cruft or rubbish that modern computers are burdened with, none of the enshittification or malign business models, just pure creativity and mental freedom tuned to my own specific needs. A beautiful thing for ever – as perfect as the analogue world, but with the advantages of digital. I’ve now been thinking about this system for several months and have written a fair chunk of C++ code, building a new operating system from scratch in my spare time, as well as sourcing components for the hardware. Because this is the kind of thing my brain likes to do when faced with impossible to-do lists: come up with highly absorbing side quests!

I’ve actually been doing some personal writing as well. Looking back at March and April, I’m really not sure how I managed to fit all this in. Perhaps it’s no wonder that I was sleeping badly, and that my running and cycling were at a low ebb.

I think the burst of creativity was a kind of mental defence mechanism, cushioning the curious, artistic, childlike heart of me against the hardcore left-brained adulting that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

I’m glad I had this wave to ride, but of course it did not last!

May was another insane month. I had two magazines to send to print simultaneously while also attempting to bring the house purchase to completion. Honestly, things started to fray a bit, and I wrote in my journal that I felt closer to burnout than at any point since 2019.

My personal art, writing and photography all steeply nosedived in May. I completely stopped running and cycling because I didn’t have the energy. I suppose you can keep up a certain level of intensity of a while, but only for so long.

Weirdly, the final straw was trying to plan my own 40th birthday celebration. I was to turn 40 only two days before the house purchase was due to complete. It sounds ridiculous when I put it down in writing now, but all I wanted to do was enjoy a quiet weekend in the Glen Coe campsite with my friends, go to the pub, and climb a mountain of my choice, but somehow this proved too complicated to manage. The plan fell apart for a dozen stupid reasons and I remember feeling insanely frustrated that I could not manage to do this one thing that I wanted to do – especially as I rarely make a big thing of birthdays, but just this once, faced with a huge life change on the horizon, I felt the need to pause and mark the moment.

In the end, Hannah and I ended up visiting my brother James and his partner Nicole in Inverness at their invitation. It was a lovely, quiet weekend, and to be honest all I could mentally cope with at the time anyway. I got into a silly argument with Nicole about Beethoven, of all things, which was a sign that I needed to take better care of myself (Nicole and I have known each other for a long time and we have never argued about something as silly as Beethoven before!)

Then came the house completion date. Then desperately trying to catch up on packing. Then a job in the Austrian Alps (which, honestly, was a breath of fresh air). Then removals. Then trying to get our old place ready before handing the keys back and asking nicely for our deposit to be returned. Then endless attempts to get hold of the electricians, joiners, plumbers and so on in order for the new house to be actually habitable.

Other than Austria, I did almost no work in June because Life Stuff occupied 150% of my time, but even now I am sitting here wondering if I could have squeezed in a bit more, if maybe that might have made things feel a bit easier for now, here in July with a catch-up to-do list as long as my arm and a house that still doesn’t have a functioning kitchen.

I know the answer to that. If I’d attempted to work through June, I would have completely broken myself.

Friends, it has been a lot. I’m not fishing for sympathy, and I recognise that this has all been both self-inflicted and working towards something good, but it really has been a lot.

As a creative freelancer in the outdoor industry, I honestly never thought that home ownership would be on the cards for me and Hannah. We are both self-employed and don’t have massive incomes. I’ve been in this career since 2014, and as recently as 2024 I wrote that home ownership was not a financially responsible choice.

It took me almost 12 years from a cold start before my finances were in a state where home ownership was realistic. There are two sides to this, of course: the actual numbers on the spreadsheet, and the mindset. It’s quite possible to be financially secure but convinced you’re not. The outdoor industry remains a bit fragile and volatile, and I’ve had enough scares to make me extremely wary about big life decisions like this. Not to mention the fact that the world overall is fragile and volatile too. I mean, we live in a world where one person can be a trillionaire while countless others starve, where rich anti-people build artificial replacements for human beings while climate change annihilates the glaciers I love. That anxiety feeds into it, too, for me – I don’t think I can ever completely step away from that, no matter how much I try to ignore the news, because the news won’t always ignore me.

But there’s also the fact that Hannah and I are both 40 now, and if we were ever going to be home owners, this was always going to be pretty much the time. The longer into your forties you leave it the more difficult it is to get a mortgage of any kind, let alone a favourable one.

Ultimately, we have to live in the world we live in.

The thing that makes it all worthwhile? Weirdly, it’s our new hall and staircase. I can’t wait to turn this into a beautiful gallery showing my photos and artwork. I also can’t work to create the Walden Zone of my dreams: an offline library/studio, possibly a garage conversion, possibly in the garden. Things that have never been possible before. Hannah has a beautiful craft studio looking out over the hills, and this is a place we can put our own stamp on.

What about now, in the second week of July? The pressure is still on, as I have a lot of work to catch up on. But this is a known challenge. The 0 to 100 of the last few months has – I hope – finally decelerated, and I can feel my creativity slowly begin to well back up again. Hopefully my running and cycling will come with it back too!

Reader, thanks for bearing with me these last few weeks while I have posted zilch on Substack. I’ll get back to my previous cadence when I can, and I can’t wait to share some of the ideas I’ve been working on.