I've always been awkward about writing "About Me" pages. I'd open one, fiddle with a few sentences, decide I'd written far too much, cut half of it, put something else back, then read it a few days later and think, "Who am I trying to impress?" Or, more often, "What the f$%k was I on when I wrote that?"
Anyway. I’m Mark, the person behind All of It Belongs. I’m from Dublin.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been drawn to making things and finding out how they work. Things like art, music, technology, people, minds, the ridiculous things we do, and the world’s latest “what on earth is going on?” I’ve never kept those interests separate, and I’ve never been keen to start.
I can start telling you something, absolutely certain I know where I’m going. Then one thought sends me sideways, and suddenly we’re discussing why the kettle takes longer when you’re watching it, why every kitchen has a drawer full of keys to doors nobody owns, and whether the damp patch on the wall is a dog. It is! Forget the kettle. There was a connection. I’m almost certain.
The funny part—or at least the mortifying part, depending on the day—is that I usually notice it happening. I’m watching your face, clocking the crease in your forehead, trying to work out whether you’re confused, bored, being polite, or wondering how we got so far from the point. Sometimes I stop and say, “Sorry, I did have a point when I started.” I did. It’ll come back in six months, along with what you were wearing and what was behind you. By then I’ll have walked into the kitchen and forgotten why.
Dinner is much the same. I’m listening to you while also hearing the next table, the cutlery, the dragging chairs, someone laughing behind me, the gossip from tables 12, 6, and 2, and of course the music. It’s a lot of information for one meal, and sometimes I often miss the bit you were actually saying.
The winding route here
My working life hasn’t followed a track so much as wandered off one. I started in retail, aviation, customer service, and logistics, then moved into supply chain, systems analysis, and process improvement, working with big names such as Nokia Siemens Networks, Diageo, and Mars. I enjoyed my time figuring out how systems worked, where they didn’t, and how to make the information in front of people more useful.
In 2017, I went out on my own in multimedia and video production. I’ve made work for businesses, organisations and events, and won the Creative Oceania Irish Wedding Videographer of the Year award in 2020. I am also a very proud fellow of the Possibility Studies Network. Turns out making things was never a hobby I could keep in one box.
I went back to university in my late thirties to study Psychology and Disruptive Technologies at Dublin City University, and I loved it. I finally had somewhere to take questions apart properly, see what other people had found out, and leave with even more questions than I arrived with. I graduated in 2025 with first-class honours and the Chancellor’s Medal. I’m still hugely proud of that.
University let me mash psychology, data and technology together. I built a web-based assessment tool for a health research project, did UX research into cognitive load in neurosurgeons, and developed a social-media simulator for my final-year research. Different projects, same itch: how do people think, how do they use the things around them, and what might we notice if we look more closely?
While I was still finishing my bachelor’s, I conceived and pitched a PhD project in spatial reasoning and computational thinking, wrote funding proposals, and secured industry sponsorship. I began the project in September 2025, a month before my formal graduation.
I withdrew during my first year after experiencing severe burnout. That experience prompted me to seek an assessment for ADHD and autism. I found out I have both, and it helped explain a lot that had bothered me for years.
There’s a lot more to the PhD story than fits here. So, stick around. I’ll tell my story fully when I’m ready.
After I withdrew, I had to step away from that kind of work for a while - to recover. So, I've been trying to build a living around the things I am devoted to and make, and this site is part of that.
Outside work and study, I lead local youth initiatives, am often involved in national programmes, and I’m chair of the Bonnybrook Parish Pastoral Council. I’m slowly building an NGO too. I also sing and play music. Apparently, I still haven’t found a box big enough.
Why I made All of It Belongs
I started All of It Belongs because I wanted somewhere to bring everything together: my interests, the things I make, the questions I follow, the communities I work with, and the different parts of my life. I also wanted somewhere to express myself and make sense of my ADHD and autism diagnoses while dealing with the burnout that followed the PhD experience.
That personal need is part of why this place exists, but it isn’t the whole point. I want the work to help and inspire people, and to speak up for those whose lives and perspectives get pushed to the margins. That includes neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ people and others I think of as “otherwise”: anyone who doesn’t fit what society treats as the default.
I can only speak from where I stand, and I’m not trying to speak for everyone. I want to question narrow assumptions, make space for complexity, and help people feel a little less alone—or at least see a possibility they hadn’t seen before.
A piece might begin with something that happened to me, but it might just as easily begin with a public argument, a news story, a piece of music, an image, a question about humans, or someone else’s account. Then it often wanders. The thread running through it, I think, is the gap between what’s said and what’s actually experienced: the hidden rules, the overlooked details, and the moments when the familiar explanation doesn’t quite fit.
The point of inspiration is sometimes a TikTok psychic in Southern Tennessee reading oracle cards for "the collective". You know those? I'll shout, "I AM THE F***ING COLLECTIVE. Oh my God, they've got me!" I didn't go looking for her. But something she says lodges in my head, a question forms, and suddenly I need to know whether anyone's researched it—or whether some philosopher has already lost half his life to it. A few hours later: twelve tabs, a pile of half-read articles, and 4,000 words in a document that didn't exist that morning. And often, a document that I will completely forget about by noon.
Sometimes I spend a whole afternoon discovering I was wrong from the start. That’s annoying, especially when I was enjoying my argument. Still, I’d rather find out than defend it for ten years.
Not everything I want to make is an essay. Sometimes I want to make a film, take photographs, work on music, or try an idea just to see what happens. I’ll publish regularly, in more than one form: personal writing and essays about ideas, people, culture and what’s happening in the world, alongside photography, film, music and other things I’ve made. Some days it’ll be funny. Other days I’ll be properly bothered. And now and then a piece might follow a thought somewhere neither of us expected.
This isn’t a memoir or a full account of my life. I’ll write about personal experiences when they belong in the work. Some things aren’t ready yet; others may remain private. You don’t need to know my whole life before you’re allowed to read the first thing.
So, hello! You’re very welcome here.
This page took me over a month to write.
Seems about right.