📍Why The Answer Exists & How it Was Born

Unscripted and unsparing - the story behind the book.

The Highland Writer's Contemplation: Sunrise, Mountains, Notepad & Pen

I am not a media-trained spokesman. I am not a polished influencer with a content strategy and a ring light. I am a man who has spent thirty years trying to understand why so many people arrive at the middle of their lives - perhaps, for some, even the end of their lives - with a deep pang telling them that something has gone profoundly wrong. Not wrong in the way that a promotion, holiday or a facelift might fix. Wrong in the way that suggests the whole life they have been living was built on someone else’s design. Because it simply does not make sense to me why every single one of us shouldn’t enjoy a self-actualised life; that question is what drove me to write The Answer. And on 22nd June 2026, I am launching the Good Being Movement - the civilisational project that grew from the same ‘root cause’.

At various junctures in my life, I have been described as a malcontent, agitator, maverick, outlier and troublemaker. I have made my peace with all of it. I have come to understand that such judgements are reliably the opinion of those policing a convention, trying to repel anyone with the temerity to see things differently to themselves. I see opportunity where others see dead-ends. I see potential where others have written the person off. I see an alternative path when others insist it is simply not worth pursuing. I am a potential-maximiser by nature; I cheer for the underdog by default; life has taught me that golden wonders can be just around the corner from the bleakest situations, by hard-earned vocation, and by the specific and irreversible education of my own suffering - I see The Way. [And please don't think that observation pours from any particular dogma or ideology other than my own. I may be a spiritual creature by nature. But all I see in any scripture of any particular creed or religious persuasion is one more reason to delineate our human family with barriers, division and suspicion of another’s 'Way'. My devotion, if I have one, is Holism. So, yes, I believe in a Higher Power. But she, he, they or it, do not speak one particular language and are not hindered by a binary view on the world. Because, if there is a ‘Creator’, how could they belong to a single people's viewpoint? It would be naïve to think otherwise. As far as I can tell, ALL of the conflict in human history stems from such mired thinking as this “God is mine and mine alone!” mentality. It simply does not stack up. It is time to progress. Period.]

Nearly thirty years ago I began to understand something that practical observation has since confirmed across approximately 3,500 coaching interventions: 90% of the people I meet are in the wrong job, or not engaged by their work at all. And the same 90% cannot stand in front of a mirror and tell the person looking back that they love them unconditionally. Those two statistics are not coincidental. They are the same truth seen from different points-of-view. That connection of dots is the philosophical engine underneath The Answer. It is also, I believe, one of the most important things to understand about a civilisation standing at the edge of the greatest disruption to the employment landscape in human history.

But I cannot tell you any of this honestly without first going somewhere much harder. In 2014, my wife Karen and I lost our son Dirk on his due date, at the end of a forty-week pregnancy that had been one of the great delights of my life - rendered even more magical because we had tried for a baby for ten years. We held that completely perfect human being in our arms. He was everything we could have imagined - and more. Only his heart was not beating. And then, along with parenthood and a million dreamed-of futures, he was gone. Mother Nature is clever in the way she invests a lifetime’s love in a parent’s heart in the time it takes to grow a baby. The cruelty is in what remains when the baby cannot receive it. What then?

What followed, amid the clinical negligence, the devious cover-ups, the institutional self-righteousness that compounded our grief and elongated our agony, was a barbarity I will not dress up here. Only to say this: it very nearly finished me, and certainly broke me. Not nearly in the way people sometimes use that word. Nearly in the way that means I know what the precipice of oblivion feels like because I stood at its edge. The cortisol ripped my faculties into shreds. The bodily flinching had me empathising with shell-shocked veterans of the Somme. The Duncan I had been was gone, trapped in a maze of flashbacks.

I acknowledge that it is impossible to get through life unscathed. There are times when it feels as though we are being ground like wheat ears in a flour-mill. My life has felt mill-like. But here is what the mill does not tell you while it is grinding: the flour is the whole point. The grinding is not punishment. It is preparation. And this book exists to help us turn what feel like excuses for not living life to the full into the very reasons for doing so.

What kept me going was Karen. Her love and courage through all of it are things I will never be able to properly account for. And the small, stubborn flicker in my chest that refused, even at its lowest, to extinguish entirely. And a responsibility I felt toward a world I was not yet ready to leave.

Then, against all odds, in December 2016, against every medical prognosis, our son Dylan arrived and brought the light back with him. He will be ten in December of this year. He is the living proof of the argument at the heart of everything I have written: that adversity is not life breaking you. It is life directing you back to your innermost truth. That the worst thing that happens to you and the best thing that comes from you are, more often than not, borne of the same story.

This book has a strange history. In April 2023, I flew to Santa Barbara and launched its predecessor - a 120,000-word work I had spent more than five years writing. Built on over thirty years of evidence, and a solution I was utterly convinced was groundbreaking, I came home believing I had delivered something significant to the world. Within a week, two developments connected to the arrival of artificial intelligence as a public force made me understand I had not yet tackled the most urgent question of our time. So, I de-published the book. I went back to the drawingboard. What eventually emerged from that three-year recalibration is The Answer.

There is a story connected to all of this that I tell in the accompanying film, below, and I want to share a version of it here. For some time before that American trip, I had carried a certainty that I was going to meet Chris Evans, the fomer BBC broadcaster and Virgin Radio DJ, and that he was exactly the reader this book was written for and needed. It was not a hunch or a hope. It was an absolute knowing: the kind that arrives from somewhere beneath ordinary cognition, from what I can only describe as the soul/spirit continuum. I cared about this vision so much, it manifest in reality.

https://youtu.be/9iLjlmpVdfU

On the Saturday after we arrived back in England, staying with old friends near Henley, our plan to drive to Marlow evaporated in a haze of clothes shopping. I felt disgruntled and restless. On the Sunday morning I announced we were going to stick to the plan, regardless. Karen and our friend received this with the kind of dismissive ‘phttt’ noise that does little to conceal its own verdict.

We drove through the back lanes east along The Thames and arrived at the roundabout marking Marlow High Street, punctuated by the old medieval cross, and Karen said: “Duncan, you are not going to believe who is crossing the road.” Standing on the island in the middle of the road was Chris Evans himself. She said, “Quick! Jump out!” So, as soon as we found a spot to pull in, I did - no speech prepared, no composure, a paralysing cousin of stage fright strangling whatever script I might have attempted - and made a thorough dog's dinner of the whole encounter. Nevertheless, Chris was extraordinarily gracious. He gave me a hug, asked me how long I was in town, suggested I shove my business card in his pocket (as he had an arm-full of coffee and pastries), and signed-off by saying his manager would be in touch.

Because the manager never called, I sent a beautifully wrapped copy of the book and, still, weeks passed by, and I heard nothing. According to the cauldrons of Capitalism, I had feedback to analyse and lessons to learn. Eventually, after deep and profound soul-searching, I came to understand that the ensuing weeks and months of silence were a gift. Because concealed within that melting pot of that rejection was the acceptance that the book was not yet good enough.

Through the long, hard road of starting again, the architecture of the Good Being Meaning of Life-Engine rose from the disappointment. The framework that sits at the heart of The Answer could not, I genuinely believe, have been articulated as it now is without that particular sequence of events. If Chris Evans is ever watching: I owe you a debt of gratitude, Man! Thank you!

So, this film is not be deemed a promotional device. It is not slick enough for that. It is the testimony of how the work came into being, told without a script, without an autocue, without rehearsal and without apology for the fact that I live with cPTSD and the transcript reads the way it does. Therefore, it is a stream of consciousness because that is the only honest option available to me. The authenticity is the very point of it. The rawness is the evidence of how life is.

The film ends with artificial intelligence. Not as a diversion, but as the reason urgency is not optional. ‘The Singularity’ is fast approaching. The entire employment landscape of our species is under grave and accelerating threat. History tells us that human beings take at least a generation to absorb a disruption of this magnitude and that in the interval, enormous and tangible suffering accumulates.

Trust me. I know. I have spent thirty years working with precisely that suffering - people marooned between a vocation that no longer exists and a Sense of Self that was built entirely around everything we associate with work. Only for the self-image to fracture to such an extent that people no longer identify with the person staring back from their mirrors. I know what that disconnection does to a person. I have lived a version of it.

The question The Answer puts before the reader is whether we use this historic moment to build a truly cohesive, sustainable, egalitarian civilisation - one in which every person possesses a stake and understands their own purpose and their own capacity to contribute good to the communities they aspire to belong to - or whether we slide, through inaction, division and disconnection, toward something far darker. I think of Dylan. I think of the world he will inherit from me. That thought is not abstract for me. It is the reason I wrote every page. I write as the baby-boomer who recognises there could be few more self-absorbed generations in human history than ours, and that we must step up and take responsibility for the mess we have made of the world.

I believe this book helps show the way, perhaps not to Utopia itself, but to a more considered, caring, cooperative extrapolation of the course we are on. I do not say that lightly. I say it after thirty years of evidence, after a loss that nearly erased me, after a recovery I am still completing, and after a decision to stop waiting for either the permission or the polish to say what I actually think.

The film runs to thirty-three minutes. It is unedited, unbuffed and entirely honest. If any part of what I have written here has landed somewhere real rather than passing through you as abstract language, I would ask you to watch it.

Adversity is not life breaking you. It is life's compass directing you to your truth, your love, and your purpose.

It is time to listen.

Duncan M M Bolam

Founder, Good Being Movement | The Purpose Coach | Author, The Answer

Nairn, Highland Scotland | goodbeing.blog