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 (forthcoming) explores why rising anxiety, burnout, loneliness and social fragmentation are not simply personal failings, but increasingly predictable consequences of the economic, political and technological systems that organise modern life. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, political economy and technology, it argues that power has migrated from external institutions into the nervous system itself, reshaping attention, identity and behaviour through environments designed for optimisation, prediction and continuous engagement. Rather than asking how individuals can cope better, The Algorithmic State asks a more fundamental question: what kind of society would allow people to finally 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 gathers ongoing writing on psychology, technology, ethics, and contemporary life. Posts explore how systems shape inner experience — attention, belonging, mental health — and why so much distress now treated as personal is better understood as structural and designed.
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 —
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
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
The Procrastination Machine
Once, procrastination required effort. You had to leave the desk, find a newspaper, make tea or stare deliberately out of the window. Now avoidance
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
The Market Became the Machine
At three in the morning, a warehouse worker follows instructions from a handheld scanner. Walk to aisle fourteen. Retrieve the item. Twelve seconds late. Another
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