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clare's writing

Books & Ideas

My writing spans non-fiction, fiction, and public commentary on how contemporary systems shape inner life and belonging.

Non-Fiction

The Algorithmic State

The Algorithmic State begins with a reversal: it has become more profitable to redesign people than to repair what makes them anxious, distracted, exhausted and alone. It traces how the market’s imperatives—to measure, rank, optimise and extract—were written into code, and how that code became an environment that trains attention, desire and behaviour through the nervous system. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience and political economy, it shows how distress is recast as personal failure, then sold back as treatment, resilience and self-improvement. It asks how to reclaim our time, agency, relationships and capacity to stand down.

Fiction

Borderless

Borderless (2026) is a literary novel about the seduction of reinvention. When Charlotte Hughes leaves London for India, she imagines she can escape the borders that have shaped her life—of nation, class, ambition and identity. Instead, she discovers that every crossing creates new boundaries, and every search for freedom carries its own forms of exile. Spanning Delhi, Bangalore, Goa and the Himalayan foothills, Borderless is an exploration of love, power, belonging and the uneasy freedoms of contemporary global life.

Belonging

Statement

Our Mission: We are called to restore belonging in a time that quietly erodes it. Our mission is to challenge the idea that anxiety, burnout, and disconnection are personal failures, and to make visible the systems that shape how we live, work, relate, and understand ourselves. We resist the reduction of inner life to performance, optimisation, or data, and argue instead for forms of life that allow depth, relationship, and meaning to endure.

our

Latest Blog Posts

This blog brings together essays on psychology, technology, ethics and contemporary life — especially the ways institutions, markets and digital systems shape attention, belonging and mental health.

The focus is not self-improvement, but interpretation: connecting private experience to public conditions and asking what becomes visible when distress is understood in context rather than in isolation.

Essays are also published on Substack, for readers who want accessible writing that takes complexity seriously without hiding behind jargon.

 

Rather than offering advice or self-improvement strategies, the writing focuses on sense-making: connecting private experience to public conditions, and examining how digital, institutional, and cultural forces organise how we live, relate, and understand ourselves.

 

Essays published here are also shared via Substack and are intended for readers interested in thoughtful, accessible writing that takes complexity seriously without retreating into jargon.

Perfection by Design

From Influencers to Infrastructure Before TikTok, influencers built audiences on YouTube and Facebook. Today’s creator economy is the matured expression of that earlier ecosystem —

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The Algorithmic Mind

The human mind is ancient. The environment now training it is not.   Our attention was shaped in a world of scarcity. Novelty mattered because

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Surviving, Not Thriving

We have mistaken a structural condition for a personal one.   Anxiety, burnout, emotional exhaustion and fragmentation are treated as failures of resilience: disorders of

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Who Owns Inner Life?

This is not another argument about artificial intelligence. Nor is it another argument about mental health.   They have become the same conversation.   For

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The Labyrinth of Choice

The modern platform presents itself as a landscape of possibility.   Endless films. Endless products. Endless faces, opinions and destinations. Every screen appears to offer

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