Every year, as I get ready to file a tax return, I experience a strange sort of reckoning

Every year around this time, as a self-employed freelance writer, I spend several days going through the previous year’s income and expenditure in preparation for filing a tax return. And during this personal harvest ritual – with its stocktaking of the year’s yields and losses, its offerings of tribute and appeasement to the Revenue gods – I find that two big personal phenomena are to be observed.

The first is that, through those long and tedious evenings of fiscal self-reckoning, I find myself drifting inexorably rightward from my ordinary political position. For about eleven months of the year, I am basically a democratic socialist; once October comes around, though, just as surely as the leaves will start to turn gold and fall from the trees, I will find myself grumbling about the parasitic accumulation of capital by the State at the expense of free individuals and small-business owners like myself. I will find myself having become, in other words, an October libertarian.

This is a cyclical phenomenon, as reliably transient as the seasons themselves. By the time you read this column, I’ll with any luck be done with the whole process, and returned to my entrenchment on the leftward flank of Irish Times columnists.

The second phenomenon is, I think, less shallow, and more worthy of contemplation. Every October, as I work my way through the previous year’s bank and credit card statements, marking off items as taxable income and deductible expenses, the tedium and banality of the experience gives way, at a certain point, to a sense that I am reading my own autobiography. It is an autobiography of a peculiar sort, certainly: one that was produced in loose collaboration between me, a cluster of financial institutions – Visa, Stripe, PayPal, my bank – and countless retail businesses. It is focused solely on my identity as an economic actor, as a buyer (and sometimes seller) of services and goods.

There is a strange, productive tension between the austere formal radicalism of the text and the immediacy of its effect on the reader – which is to say, me. It can only really have one reader – and not merely for GDPR reasons, but because only I, its unwitting co-author and subject, can have any hope of understanding the thing, any chance of interpreting its gnomic entries, its dates and places and numbers.

For instance, as I write these words, I am sitting in a cafe tapping away at my laptop between sips of my second cup of coffee. This is a fairly unremarkable set of circumstances for me, and I’m likely to think no more of it as soon as I walk out the door. But this time next year, I will be going through my expenditures for October 2026, and I will come across a row containing today’s date and the current time, and the name of the coffee shop, and the sum of €62 (or whatever it is two flat whites in Dublin costs these days).

And I will think for a moment, and suddenly remember that it was a weekday morning, and that I was writing this very column. And then I’ll likely remember other things about the day. I might also think: can I write off the coffees as a business expense? If the coffees were bought to legitimise my presence in a cafe while I work, are they not roughly equivalent to the renting of office space? And then I will imagine my accountant narrowing his eyes, heavy with scepticism and filing-deadline exhaustion, and I will abandon the idea.

There are larger and more high-level realisations, of course, that emerge from perusing these data points. That I spend far too much money on takeaway coffees. That I have a helpless and financially crippling addiction to buying books at a rate that far outstrips my capacity to read them. And that the Apple corporation has over the years cleverly manoeuvred itself, and manipulated me, in such a way that a constant supply of direct debits and incidental transactions is being slow-dripped from my bank account into its coffers.

But it’s the smaller realisations that are the more remarkable; it’s the expenditures whose itemisation amounts to a kind of narrative of my movements through space and time (legible as autobiography in the way that a snail’s glistening trail is legible as autobiography). Why did you spend €50 on a taxi on the first week of February last year? Oh yes, you were on the way to the airport. And why were you on the way to the airport?

You read on, then, and see that the next item is a Stansted Express ticket to Liverpool Street, that the one following is a sum in British pounds for what seems to be a restaurant – and all of a sudden you remember that you were in London for book research, and that you had lunch with your friend in Spitalfields, and though you might not remember everything you talked about, you’ll remember that she was getting work done on her house, and that you ordered some kind of terrine, and that there wasn’t nearly enough bread to spread it on and that you had to ask for more.

And then other things about the trip will come back to you. The place you had dinner, the Waterstones in which you bought yet another book you still haven’t read. The fact that you were at a loose end that evening and bought a ticket on your phone for a cinema around the corner, and that you never saw the film because you’d failed to notice that it wasn’t actually on release yet, that you’d somehow booked a ticket not for that night, but for the Thursday of the following week when you’d no longer be in town.

And so all sorts of things – your minor administrative idiocies, your profligate consumption of coffee and books, your friendships, the pleasurable melancholy of an evening alone in central London – will come to you as you work your way through the double-entry bookkeeping of your days. And in this way, from these most numbing of absolutes – consumption, surveillance, good old-fashioned death and taxes – the particular details of your particular life can be reclaimed, and considered anew.