What advice would you give your older self?

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘What advice would you give your older self?’

Lilah Raptopoulos
My colleague Robert Shrimsley has written a column for the FT Weekend magazine for years. They’re often satirical and sort of making fun of his own first world problems. And he wrote one recently that made me think of this letter that I’d written myself back when I was 19. It was meant to predict the course of my career, and it kind of did. It was really funny to read, actually. I sounded exactly the same, and I was borderline prophetic. I said I’d try to leave journalism and then come back live in another country, maybe write features one day for a place that seemed impossible to work at the time. The letter reminded me that we may grow and evolve and learn, but fundamentally we kind of just are who we are. That was the gist of Robert’s column, too. He wrote it giving advice to his older self. Someone once said to me, like, We don’t change that much. We just understand ourselves better. How does that change the way you think about your advice to your older self?

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t know. I mean, it’s a really key point because there are lots of things that I could advise my older self to do. Like, for example, go to the Glastonbury Music Fest, which I’ve never done because I know I’ll hate it and I’ve never done it because I know that even if the ghost of John Lennon appeared on stage, all that I would ever be able to focus on is the fact that it was muddy and it was, you know, it was going to take me three quarters of an hour to get to the toilet, Right? And that’s who I am.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve known Robert for a long time, and when he’s writing this column, he likes to walk around the newsroom and find whoever is in his line of vision and just wrestle through that idea with him. It’s like ping pong. It’s fun.

Robert Shrimsley
What about you, Lilah? What advice would you give? What would you give to the older you?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, god. Always go cheer at a marathon even if you’re tired that day or you’re gonna regret it.

Robert Shrimsley
Always what?

Lilah Raptopoulos
If there’s a marathon on, like, the London City Marathon and New York City Marathon or the Boston city and you’re, like, just hanging out at home? Go.

Robert Shrimsley
Why? That’s a ridiculous idea.

Lilah Raptopoulos
‘Cause it’s the best day, because it’s the best day in the city. I mean, like, everybody’s excited. They’re cheering each other on. It gives you energy. And I’ve missed some and I really have regretted it. So I would say do that. That’s not . . . you would be bothered by the crowds and how to get to the bathroom.

Robert Shrimsley
When the London Marathon is on, I will absolutely avoid anywhere that the route touches. That . . . That’s terrible advice to your future self. Don’t do that. Take it. Take it from me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
This week, Robert joins me to think about advice that we would give our future selves. And the exercise actually helps us understand our current selves, too, and think about what it means to live well. Then, our drinks columnist Alice Lascelles comes on to talk about non-alcoholic drinks. As people optimise their health more and drink less, this is a category that has surged in popularity. Alice actually thinks that it’s becoming the most interesting drinks category of all. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

Robert, hi. Welcome to the podcast.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi, Lilah. It’s good to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Such a pleasure to have you. So you recently wrote about advice that you would give not to your younger self but to your older self. And I would love to chat through this as a thought experiment because our team really liked it. We all started thinking what the advice we give to our older selves. And yeah, well, why do we keep thinking about our younger selves and what is that about?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I mean, it started as a joke in my head, a pastiche, because I’ve read three or four columns in recent in quite close order about advice I would give to my younger self, including one by somebody who really was still quite young and certainly by my standards. And I just thought, there’s something ridiculous about this, I’m going to mock this, and then how do I mock it? I could give advice to my younger self that’s mocking, but it would very quickly get worthy and serious. I didn’t want to do that. And then it occurred to me, OK, the only option left is to write advice to myself in 20 years’ time. What can I see about older me that might be rubbish, that I might want to, that I might want to warn myself of now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So, Robert, before we go on to the advice that you would give to your older self, I’m curious what listeners should know about you based on what you talk about in the column. We know you’re married, you’ve mentioned your wife in the piece. You have kids you write about a lot, the boy and the girl. Is that right?

Robert Shrimsley
I call them the spawn. Yeah. They’re both I mean, they’re not my kids anymore. My son is 20, 23. And my daughter is 20. So they’re not actually kids anymore. And so, you know, and I have a as you would expect, someone working for the FT a fairly comfortable existence. And I write about, you know, middle class obsessions, first world problems, you know, you know, I would often get people saying this is a first world problem. He said, well, that’s my postcode. I live in the first world.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. So, Robert, let’s do this thought experiment. What kind of advice would you give your older self? What did you kind of fall to? What are the things?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, there were the sort of the serious ones and the unserious ones. If I was pathetically conservative about drugs, I never really got into drugs at all. My, you know, my drug-taking culture barely got beyond aspirin. And an element of me thinks, well, when I’m sort of 70.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, why not?

Robert Shrimsley
I’ll dip in. I don’t think I’ll go too far. I don’t like needles, but you know, but, but, but, but maybe at 70, when there’s really nothing left to lose, you know, it really doesn’t matter if you blow your brain cells.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sure.

Robert Shrimsley
Actually maybe I can sit down and try all those things I never quite had the guts or desire to try.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Robert has a bunch of little things like that that may never happen, like try drugs or learn to paint or places to visit, like go back to that café in San Francisco or spend the spring in Italy. But there was one overarching theme.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, the big serious one is that you have to battle to stay interesting. What happens is as you get older and you . . . particularly if you retreat from work or full time uwork, is that your horizon narrows. You know, your scope for stories, the things you want to talk about, the issues in life. The space for conversation narrows. So you have to fight to stay interesting. You have to. It’s something you have to work out. It’s so easy to just, you know, retreat into your community or your current circle of friends and family. You know, your narrow world. I think the really big thing is never to do that until you are physically incapable of doing otherwise.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, Yeah, that’s a really good one.

Robert Shrimsley
The piece of advice I was still giving, I would still give myself, which if I was giving one piece of advice to my younger self, it was to learn to shut up more. One of my absolute chronic failings is an inability to stay quiet in meetings at work, in social gatherings. And I mean . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m sorry if I laughed too loudly.

Robert Shrimsley
I’m sorry, it’s true. There’s no way around this one. And the best I can do is tone it down occasionally. And even that won’t last for long.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean, you know, some of the advice that I was thinking I would give to older me is also kind of advice that I would give to my own parents who are like a proxy for future me in a weird way, like, you know, if you’re struggling to exercise, but you know, it’ll make you live longer. Just get a trainer.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, spend your hard-earned money.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, those people who advise you to have no money left when you die. To manage your money in such a way that there’s almost nothing left. You spent everything because you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
People advise that? I’ve never heard anything like that.

Robert Shrimsley
Absolutely. Don’t die with vast savings because that’s wasted. You should . . . you could have spent that improving your life. And again, maybe you’re thinking about leaving stuff to your children instead. But unless you can be very precise about the time of your death, that’s a difficult one to execute.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s interesting, Robert. It’s like this thought experiment of us thinking about our future selves and what we’ll want or what we should know. And all of that really just leads us back to us thinking about different generations and what they know better or worse than us even now.

Robert Shrimsley
I do think there are very few . . . There is wisdom that is translatable and which crosses the generations. And there is wisdom . . . so, for example, you know, if I was giving advice to my children or to my younger self about, say, relationships, I can think of lots of advice that would be completely useless. But one piece of advice I can think which is useful is to say, you know, the key test of a relationship is how much you like yourself when you’re with the person you’re with.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
And I think that will always be true. If they make you feel good about yourself or you feel good about yourself when you’re with them, then they could be a good fit. And if they don’t, then the odds are that they’re not. That’s a piece of wisdom that I think. Transcends all of the all of the changes in our world technology. But a lot of the things that I would offer as wisdom to my children, they’ll look at me as if I’m quite bonkers.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Robert, my last question is just like in writing this and in thinking about this, like, do you have any thoughts about or advice about just like good ways to think about the future? Like, wait, like humane ways to think about future us?

Robert Shrimsley
You know, I think you sometimes have to recognise the aspects of yourself that are your core, you. And I think. . . we have a natural self by dint of our genetics, our upbringing, whatever. There is a core us. I think you have to recognise your core you and either learn to appreciate it or if the serious problems with it address them. But I think, you know, you don’t want to be getting to the middle or second half of your life and still not liking your core you if you can possibly avoid it. Not everyone has that fortune of being able to do so. But I think recognising your essentials and, you know, and accepting them is, I think, quite an important thing. What do you think?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I think that’s right.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean give yourself a break is not a terrible piece of advice.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I think so too. Robert it’s been a total delight. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Robert Shrimsley
Pleasure, Lilah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve put links to some of my favourite of Roberts columns in the show notes.

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Over the past 10 years, you may have noticed that there’s been a gold rush on non-alcoholic drinks. They’ve gotten so buzzy that there’s now an award ceremony for them in London. My colleague was telling me about it. Her name is Alice Lascelles. She’s our drinks columnist, which is an amazing job. You recently were a judge at the World Alcohol-Free Awards, which is a real thing! And you published a piece about your experience that we really loved. And can you just like, what is it? What is it like? You know, can you set the scene? Like, did it feel weird and new or did it feel like kind of established and impressive? What was . . . 

Alice Lascelles
Yeah, well, I mean, did the fact that they were taking place at all is a watershed moment, I think, in that, you know, the non-alc category. So we were in a room, you know, in a in a restaurant near Tower Bridge, a real mixture of people tasting. So there was a real mix of perspectives and the atmosphere was really buoyant. I mean, there’s some joke in there about organising a piss up at a non-alc competition, but I’m not quite sure what the joke is. But the atmosphere, in spite of the lack of alcohol, was very buoyant because I think everyone was just really excited to be part of that moment and to meet each other as well.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alice joins me today to tell us what’s going on in this new frontier. This is a drinking trend that goes by many names. It goes by non-alc, NA, no-ABV or no alcohol by volume. But it all describes a broad category that’s as old as time. Things you drink that don’t get you drunk.

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Can you kind of just break this down for me as we get into what really worked and what didn’t? Like, As I understand it, it seems like there’s a couple of things going on. There’s like producers who are making non-alcoholic versions of spirits or alcoholic things like taking the alcohol out of wine and beer. And then there are cocktails and spirits that just naturally don’t have alcohol in them.

Alice Lascelles
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is that right?

Alice Lascelles
Yeah, that’s right. Well, sort of classifying the drinks was actually a real challenge for the organisers of this competition, because, I mean, first of all, how do you classify what fits in this category? Do you put Coca-Cola in it? Do you put orange juice or milk or, you know, what are the characteristics of a sort of adult non-alcoholic drink?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Interesting.

Alice Lascelles
Can you give non-alcoholic wine to a child or drink it for breakfast or, you know, there’s all of this sort of new questions it raises? So they did they did have to, you know, take a view on some things like is this a sophisticated drink or is this trying to emulate the kind of complexity or sort of flavour shape of wine or beer or, you know, the experience? Does it pair with food, that kind of thing? And they had to ask themselves, as well as simply looking at the ABV of the products. There are different categories. You have your sort of proxy drinks, so you’re kind of non-alcoholic wines in inverted commas or spirits or beers. But beer is one big exception here because beer has a long and storied history of sort of certainly low alcohol brewing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And what did you find? I mean, what was the kind of consensus about what makes something alcoholic? Like, what did you find was satisfying to your palate in a way that . . . 

Alice Lascelles
What scratches the itch? Well, obviously, you’re not going to get any kind of high from these products. So they’ve really got to overdeliver on flavour in a way. So I suppose what we were looking for was, does it give you that kind of sophisticated, well-rounded, kind of drinking experience that you get from an alcoholic drink? But no hangover.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But no hangover. Yeah. Alice also tried a few of these new kind of holistic homeopathic woo woo drinks. They’re called Nootropic. It’s an entirely unregulated space, but they claim to give you energy and the brain boost and some euphoria. Did you feel like you went anywhere or not really?

Alice Lascelles
Well, this was a difficult environment to assess, uh, the high as we were tasting, you know, flights of six at a time within the space of half an hour. So even if I did feel high, it would be hard to know which one was actually working. And I tasted a lot of these products in the past at home and got my husband to monitor my progress during the evening as well to tell me if I was behaving differently. And in most cases, they’ve had little to no effect on me, I’m afraid. But then again, you know, I’ve been drinking martinis professionally for 20 years, so I probably have the constitution of a rhino. So it would probably take a lot to have an effect.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So, Alice, let’s talk about the rise in non-alcoholic drinks. I have a lot of friends that have started drinking less. I have noticed mocktails on all sorts of restaurant menus, even ones where I wouldn’t expect them. And I guess what I’m most curious about is like, when and how did this happen? I feel like I blinked and it had happened. But is there, like, a timeline of how non-alcoholic drinks and low-ABV drinks got popular?

Alice Lascelles
Hmm. Well, I feel like I started to notice something happening about 10 years ago. This was at the height of sort of craft cocktails really taking off and some of the more forward thinking bartenders, I think, we’re looking for new kind of envelopes to push. And non-alc, you know, didn’t really exist as a category in cocktails at all then apart from a few sort of sickly mocktails. And so you got bartenders starting to do really interesting things with flavour and really, I suppose, approaching it as the ultimate challenge. Can you create a cocktail that tastes great, that doesn’t have any alcohol in it? So I think they were the real, the bartenders were the real trailblazers and started to create a more sophisticated kind of market for non-alc.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Alice, I’m curious why you think non-alcoholic drinks are extra popular now. Like, do you feel like it seems like we’re turning away from something and we’re turning towards something and I’m trying to pinpoint what that is and what you think.

Alice Lascelles
If we keep it focused to sort of Western Europe and the US, because markets behave differently obviously, but I think the first reason is we understand much better now about the impact of alcohol on your health, and I think that’s one of the reasons people are drinking less and particularly looking at the data, mental health. Anecdotally, there’s also social media has a role to play. Apparently people are more anxious about having their life on show. However, I think actually the most interesting area is where you see non-alc and alc kind of coexisting. So recently in London, Lucky Saint, which is a really big non-alc lager here in the UK, they recently opened a pub and they sell booze as well as non-alcoholic drinks. And the whole point is about creating the most inclusive space possible that caters to people who do drink and don’t drink, but also people who just want to mix it up a bit. Maybe moderate their drinking and I think that’s the real change now is it’s, you know, it’s not an either-or choice necessarily. It’s just more choice for everyone, really.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And I imagine, like, that’s where the most interesting stuff happens is when bartenders who are so knowledgeable in, like, every level of the drink that they’re making are also putting that knowledge to drinks without alcohol.

Alice Lascelles
Definitely. If there’s, if there’s a downside to the non-alc market at the moment is a lot of them still taste pretty rank. And I think that’s because you have people who are either I dunno, cynically capitalising on this gold rush or are doing it from coming at it from a well-meaning but inexperienced point of view, so you’re building products that are a nice idea, but there’s no expertise when it comes to flavour creation at all in their production. And so that was something we definitely had to deal with and confront in some areas of the awards that we were judging the other day.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alice, thank you so much. This is so much fun.

Alice Lascelles
Brilliant. Thanks.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the life and arts podcast of the Financial Times. Next week we are talking to the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld about romantic comedies, why we still love them and what about them might need to change. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to a wonderful discount on an FT subscription. That is also at FT.com/weekendpodcast. As you know, we love hearing from you. You can email us at FTWeekendpodcast@FT.com. The show is on Twitter at @FTweekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter @Lilahrap. I post a lot of behind the scenes stuff about the show on my Instagram. If you like the show, we would love if you shared it. Tell a friend that you think would like it. Post about us if there’s an episode you particularly loved. Or a true gift: go to Apple and write us a review. That really helps the show. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my exceptional team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer and the MVP of this episode. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.