There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and filling out surveys. In days of yore, they came in paper form. They took “just a few minutes of your time” and were almost always done out of some sense of moral duty to make the collective better.

Secretly, I have always enjoyed a good survey. I’m not talking the “yes or no” types – I’m interested in multiple-choice answers, or the trusted “on a scale of one to 10” variety. My maximum attention span for these administrative curiosities is about 90 seconds. After that, I get bored, lose interest and check my WhatsApp to see if any of the 50 group chats I’m in have posted a poll about whether Sunday or Monday would suit better for a Zoom that should be an email.

As an extremely lucky, and immensely grateful, recipient of the Basic Income for Artists (BIA) grant in 2022, I accepted my place on the scheme knowing there would be a survey to be completed every six months to track my progress. The BIA was, and is, a research project to find out if giving artists €325 a week would improve their lives and creative output. Spoiler alert: it does. It was a game-changer for me, and not just monetarily. It awakened in me an awareness that my life was not what I thought it was.

Being a writer is a strange gig. Whilst people love books, TV shows and films, and some even like reading journalism and the odd trip to the theatre, writing is