When my wife asked me what I was reading, I said: “It’s a new book about how to half-arse everything in your life.”
“Oh,” she said. “Did you write it?”
When it comes to doing a half-arsed job, who among us needs lessons? Certainly not me – my entire academic life consisted of racing to finish one late homework assignment after another, each time thinking: “I’ve done my best in the time allotted,” but also: “Oh well, it is what it is.” In hindsight it was perfect training for a career in journalism. My entire adult life has been exactly the same.
But Half-Arse Human: How to Live Better Without Burning Out celebrates the advantages of the slapdash, “it is what it is” existence. With plenty of humour and no little wisdom, author Leena Norms makes the case that “anything worth doing is worth half-arsing”.
Even if, like me, you’re considered an inveterate half-arser, Norms has something to teach you: half-arsing doesn’t have to be a systemic failing you’ve reconciled yourself to; it can also be a strategy.
“Maybe your instinct to half-arse isn’t bad,” Norms says. “I think we’re all trying to shimmy through life, trying not to exhaust ourselves, and taking loads of shortcuts. It’s about accepting that shortcuts are OK as long as we think about why we’re doing them.” I’m not sure about this – my instinct to half-arse certainly feels bad. But I’m willing to reconsider if I’m to be allowed to carry on.
Norms (her actual surname is Normington; Norms was a username abbreviation that stuck) is a published poet and prolific YouTuber whose videos featuring book recommendations, poetry tips and life advice have amassed more than 24m views. Even for someone so skilled at multitasking, finding the space to write a book on top of all that required a little strategic half-arsing.
“I informed myself and everybody in my life that I would not be putting in 100% anywhere else,” she says. “I probably didn’t exercise as much as I should have. I definitely didn’t eat as healthily. I didn’t accept loads of different plans and trips and stuff. I accepted the fact that my wardrobe was going to be a mess and I probably wasn’t going to have clean knickers all the time.”
For most authors, Norms included, a completed book ends up being a lesson in thwarted ambition, a reining-in of grander intentions in the teeth of practical realities. “I actually had, I think, 18 chapters planned for this book, which was stupid,” she says. “That was just bad planning from me. But it meant that all of the worst ones, I just cut.”
In the end she settled on nine chapters, covering subjects including home, style, career and the body – all areas where self-help books have traditionally encouraged the kind of all-or-nothing commitment that overwhelmingly leads to failure. Half-Arse Human is designed to help you find that point where your expectations meet your actual level of motivation, to half-arse your way toward doing something, rather than doing nothing.
“It’s part pep talk, which we all need in our lives,” says Norms. “We all need to hear the same advice in different ways, from different people, to help it really sink in, so this is my take on the pep talk that I think would work on me.”
In her former job in publishing, Norms digested a lot of self-help books, and some of their absurdities are duly shredded here, but she’s not averse to cherrypicking tactics that have worked for her in the past. She’s a fan, for example, of habit-stacking, from James Clear’s 2018 bestseller Atomic Habits. Habit-stacking is the practice of linking a desired new habit – running, say – to a habit you have already, like showering.
“The idea was: every time I needed a shower, I’d try to make time for a 20-minute jog beforehand,” she writes. “Do I always do this? Absolutely not. But it has resulted in me running several times a week, which, even at my fail rate, is much higher than it was before.” This is the essence of half-arsing: that failing half the time is far better than doing nothing all the time.
The most immediately appealing parts of the book are those that simply grant one permission to half-arse. “I absolve you of the moral obligation to rise early,” writes Norms. If you need to make room in your schedule to get more done, give up something, but don’t rob yourself of sleep. Apart from sun protection, you can safely ignore all forms of skin care, she suggests. And when it comes to developing an exercise routine, Norms cautions against overoptimism: “Set a rough idea of how regularly you’d like to do it and then HALVE THAT RATE.”
But Half-Arse Human isn’t really a tribute to slothful complacency. If anything, it’s a call to activism. The germ of the book came from Norms’ struggle to be a good vegan. She ate meat with “wild abandon” until she was 30, and struggled with the commitment and ideological purity required to give it up. But half-arsing means embracing ideological impurity: eventually she came to the conclusion that it was better to be a bad vegan than a self-reproachful carnivore, or even a perfect vegetarian. Every step, no matter how incremental, is a step forward.
In one of the book’s most persuasive bits of advice, Norms suggests the strategy of “tag-team” veganism, ie outsourcing half of the commitment to someone else: you each eat vegan every other day, so together you add up to one whole vegan.
“That came from when I was a meat-eater, and one of my friends was worrying about being vegan and occasionally eating meat, and feeling really guilty about it,” Norms says. “And I was like: ‘Well, on the day you’ve eaten meat, text me and I won’t eat meat that day.’”
Did it work? Did she reach full veganism by following the half-arsed path?
“No, I still say half,” she says. “Loads of our wine is filtered through fish guts [isinglass, made from the dried swim bladders of fish, is used to clarify beer and wine]. To claim to be a vegan is an ambitious statement. And I still knit with wool and stuff.”
Perhaps the most provocative assertions in the book come from the career chapter, which details the manifold benefits of half-arsing your job. Why make paid work the centre of your existence? Getting ahead for its own sake is unlikely to make you feel fulfilled. Indeed, it generally only brings more work, more responsibility and more stress. Most people never get hired to do their dream job, and nobody enjoys every aspect of what they do for a living.
“I spent a lot of time when I worked in office jobs answering emails,” says Norms. “And I’d be like, answering emails isn’t actually my job, so I’m not trying to win during every email. There are a lot of self-help books that talk about ‘inbox zero’ and stuff like that. And it’s like, but why? In pursuit of what?” This is obviously music to the ears of someone like me – who has 27,000 unread emails in his inbox, and no intention of doing anything about it.
Overall, Half-Arse Human amounts to a grand stock-taking exercise: why am I doing what I’m doing, and how much of it is a complete waste of my time? But even half-arsing is not a strategy worth pursuing for its own sake. The final chapter is, perhaps inevitably, called What to Whole-Arse. There’s some advice on finding a project you can happily give your whole arse to; a project that offers you some combination of things you’re good at, things that actually need doing and things that bring you joy.
My question is: can I – or should I – even risk half-arsing 2025, given that I just finished half-arsing my way through 2024?
“You say you really half-arsed it last year, but maybe the big error was thinking you could do that much in a year,” says Norms. “Planning Me is the enemy, not Doing Me. It’s the bastard who turns up on 1 January and writes a resolution list, not the person who’s there the other 364 days.”
