THINK LIKE A CRAB

Gifts, grifts, and miracle fish

As everyone knows by now, the entire internet is a terrible plague upon humanity. And that’s on period, as the kids say, although they wouldn’t, if the internet hadn’t told them to speak in nonsense American tiktok language.

As well as crimes against coherence, the internet is also responsible for driving a wedge between families and friends, shutting down free speech, and causing children to grow up illiterate, entitled, and with an unnatural interest in eyebrow-styling trends.

Old people like myself can still vaguely remember a world in which we weren’t all pathetically addicted to glorified pocket calculators-cum-digital watches that tell us what to think, but the memories are fading. It was a different world, to say the least. Indeed, being in your fifties in 2025 feels a bit like you leapt here from another dimension. Like Dr Sam Beckett on an episode of Quantum Leap, except instead of leaping into the body of a beautiful and talented piano-playing, Kung Fu-fighting, macrame-weaving weapons expert, you’ve leapt into your own body, which is now old and a bit shit because of all the time you’ve spent looking at your phone.

One thing that the internet has given us, however, is help. Help for your internet addiction. Help for your bad posture caused by your internet addiction. And most especially, help in manifesting the life of your dreams, i.e. a life more interesting than looking at the internet for eight hours a day.

This kind of help is very much in demand and the people who provide it are not always entirely legit. The best way to judge the legitimacy of a self-help guru is not by seeing their qualifications or evidence of their abilities. Like supervillains, all a self-help guru really needs is a good origin story. Usually this is some variation on the theme of having been down and out, but turning it all around when they discovered the power of meditation/journaling/eating three pounds of prime ribeye steak for breakfast. (Or they can just nick a story from some poor sucker on the internet and style it out. Let them, I guess.)

If I ever decide to try my hand at self-help guru-ing, my origin story will be marine-based, if not decidedly fishy. You see, last July, for his ninth birthday, my nephew requested a present of some fish and a small fishtank. He was duly presented with a tank and twelve or thirteen minnows, all of which promptly died. The tank was turned off and left to fester in the corner of his bedroom. The fish phase was over – or so it seemed.

Then last week while tidying his room, my now-nearly-ten-year-old nephew found to his great excitement that one of the minnows was still alive. It had somehow survived for nearly a year without food, light, or a reliable source of oxygen.

It was, in short, a miracle minnow.

This experience would make a great turning point for my guru origin story, because if a fish can survive without any of the basic necessities of life, surely I – a broke homeless single lady – can manifest a house?

From what I can gather, manifesting houses is the most basic level of manifestation. A recent study showed that there are approximately 1200 articles written every day about how to manifest a house, and even though I have totally invented that statistic, it doesn’t stop it from being true. Indeed, many people have now gone beyond manifesting houses (too easy!) and are manifesting the whole life of their dreams.

The best way to manifest the life of your dreams is of course to help other people to manifest the life of their dreams. You could look at this as a pyramid scheme, but those of you with a growth mindset will see it for the opportunity it truly is. Eventually, everyone will be living their dream life of helping others to live their dream life, and the only people not living their dream life will be the people cleaning all the houses manifested by the people living their dream life.

Of course, even the cleaners will be aware from the internet that they too could manifest their dream life if only they weren’t wasting their time cleaning up the manifestations of self-help gurus. They could at the very least manifest a house (easy!)—if only they had the money to buy a house, which they don't, because the self-help gurus have manifested an outrageously low hourly rate for cleaners.

I’d love to help people manifest their dream life, but unless their dream life involves being homeless, single, and cleaning houses (which is what I've managed to manifest so far) I’m not sure I'd be much in demand.

Despite this, I do often think that I would make an excellent self-help guru. Not only do I have a great origin story up my sleeve, I also have an enigmatic personality. Just the other day, in fact, I stopped to talk to a couple of youngsters who were fishing for crab in the Marine Lake in Rhyl. (It's more like a big murky pond than a lake, but Marine Big Murky Pond doesn’t sound as nice.)

The youngsters weren't having much luck fishing, so I bestowed some self-help wisdom upon them.

“You’ve got to think like a crab,” I told them.

“Be a crab to catch a crab,” I added, enigmatically, as I walked away.

Being enigmatic is definitely a key skill for a self-help guru. After all, if you just outright tell people your secrets, what’s to stop them from doing whatever you did? But if you can't be enigmatic, the next best thing to do is to put your advice behind a paywall.

If I were a proper self-help guru, what I would have done is tell those kids that I knew how they could catch all the crabs they ever wanted – but they’d have to give me 50p first. 50p each, that is. Because I need to account for my emotional labour. “You’re not paying for five seconds of my time,” I would have told them, “but for the 53 years of experience that has produced this five seconds of wisdom.”

Then, once they’d paid up, I would have said, “Think like a crab.” And instead of walking away with the sound of their mocking laughter ringing in my ears, I would have walked away with a quid in my pocket and the start of a new career as a mollusc manifester. And that's on full stop.

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