This is a story about vanity projects...

Do you really and truly believe in altruism? Do you really do random acts of kindness for the benefit of strangers? Are you truly charitable and selfless?

It's fairly obvious that charitable giving and sponsored fun runs are all about the warm fuzzy feeling you get, thinking of yourself as oh-so-beneficent. You're reading this page in English on a computer, smartphone or tablet, so you must be amongst the wealthiest 10% on the planet. Don't you feel a little guilty about that? Quick... give away a tiny fraction of your wealth to make yourself feel a little better!

What about that sponsored skydive or abseil?

"It was so scary and I raised so much money"

Yes, it was scary, but you still wanted to do it, didn't you? It was a tick in the box: something that was on your bucket list. You basically emotionally blackmailed your friends into paying for you to do something you've always wanted to do.

"I ran the marathon and it was really hard"

Yes, but you wanted to run a marathon so you could tell people you've run a marathon. You might like running, or even if you don't, you like telling people that you did something that was really hard. I bet you tell people that you eat things you really don't like the taste of, because they're healthy. You're a real martyr, aren't you?

The point I'm making is that all projects are vanity projects. We can't help but wonder how we're going to be perceived at any moment. Every photo you share on Facebook or Instagram, every word you write on your CV, every time you get dressed... it's all driven by vanity.

"Oh no, not me. I don't care what I look like"

Actually, you do. Perhaps you wear scruffy clothes and leave your hair all messy. But, that's your identity: you like telling people how much you don't care about your appearance. In fact, you've very deliberately cultivated a look. You care very much that people think "hey, look at that person who doesn't care about their appearance" but those people have been duped... you care as much as anybody else. It takes effort to not care as much as you do.

What do we have to do if we want to avoid being accused of being self indulgent and vain? Sit in silence, naked in the corner of a room facing the walls? Never have a personality of our own, an opinion or tastes and aesthetic preferences? Are we supposed to step aside and let the writers, artists, musicians, photographers, actors, dancers, models, poets, interior designers and everybody else do their good work because they're humble and authentic, but anybody else would be vain and self indulgent if they were to attempt self-expression?

I write a lot about my thoughts and feelings. I write a lot about my personality: who I am and where I've come from. I write a lot about what makes me tick. I relate every part of the human condition to my own experiences. I'm totally egocentric, aren't I?

How else are we supposed to understand and relate to the world, except through direct comparison with our own unique set of experiences? Am I supposed to only talk by sharing dead philosophers' quotes and dry academic articles, full of meaningless statistics gathered from faceless opinion polls and psychological tests? Am I supposed to bury my whole personality and shut the fuck up, because only great minds have the right to write and publish, and the hoi polloi exist only to buy and read their great works?

I've given a few university lectures and done a bunch public speaking and let me tell you: it feels good. They say that public speaking is as terrifying as anything you could ever do. I've jumped out of aeroplanes on my own with no instructor holding my hand, and it's true, that first time you stand up and speak is quite scary, but then you relax into it and enjoy it. When people laugh at the right moments and you look at all those attentive faces in the room, lecture theatre or debating chamber, it's a rush; it's a buzz.

If a teacher doesn't have a certain theatrical flair and a desire to be adored by their audience, are they going to be a good teacher? It's always a little stressful, standing up in front of people and performing. There's always a chance that you're going to say something wrong and have a whole bunch of people laughing at you. There's absolutely no way that anybody would put themselves through that kind of ordeal unless they were getting a kick out of it.

I'm not saying teachers and lecturers are bad people; I'm just saying that there's a certain amount of vanity involved. We wanna be adored.

We all want an audience. We all want to be rock stars. We want Twitter and Instagram followers. We want people to read what we write, look at our photographs, like, comment and share. We want to be noticed.

I'm kind of an introvert. I get tired of people and the social performance. I get tired of being on show and playing a role: good boyfriend material, an attentive and loyal friend, a well behaved schoolboy, an obedient slave. Sometimes I just want to draw the curtains and be alone with my thoughts.

However, we all need a stage. We need to feel smart and funny and likeable. If you're sharing passive-aggressive memes on Facebook, you're cultivating the image of somebody shy and introverted, dryly humorous, ironic, witty. If you're putting videos of yourself on Youtube, pulling funny faces and talking nonsensically, you're broadcasting your carefree extrovert big personality. Either way, you want to be adored and you care what the world thinks.

Show me one person who's not self indulgent. Show me one person who's not vain.

Even the most quiet and stoical are well aware that they've become known for being quiet and stoical. We grow into roles, and we feel like we have to maintain that image, because it's so integral to our identity: it's what people expect from us and we don't want to let our audience down.

So, I make no apology for the lack of utility to my writing. I've given up on the idea that "if I can help just one person with my writing, it will have been worth it". Fuck that. I want readers, and millions of them. I want fame. ADORE ME!

What the actual fuck is wrong with a little vanity? Vanity props up self esteem. Vanity makes us feel self-confident, which allows us to get good jobs, attractive sexual partners and be popular amongst our friends. What the fuck is wrong with that?

Excuse me. I now need to go and stand in front of the mirror for a few hours, staring at my own reflection.

Tags: #selfesteem

This is a story about body shopping...

Because I'm a genius, I've figured out a brilliant business plan: buy low, sell high.

It used to be the case that companies would have their own IT staff, because it made sense to have people trained up and retain their skills, given how integral information technology is to every business in this day and age. Businesses would recruit technologists as permanent members of staff, and pay them a professional-grade salary.

Then, the IT crowd figured out that there was a skills shortage and that they were being underpaid for the amount of value that they were generating for their paymasters. Some IT professionals became technology entrepreneurs and others became IT contractors, selling their skills to the highest bidder.

As the year 2000 approached and panic spread about the millennium (Y2K) bug, IT contractors could pretty much name their price. It was quite clear just how valuable IT had become to big business and the running of the technological world around us.

Consultancies started to hoover up all the graduates coming out of the Computer Science degree courses at university, and also maths, physics, engineering and other technical disciplines too. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for anybody who had an aptitude for programming, so why not corner the market in anybody with the slightest ability to write software?

If you can hire a graduate for £25k per annum, how much do you think you could charge a client for a day of their time?

IT contractors probably charge circa £500 a day. The best get £700 to £1,000 per day. The worst get £300 per day.

£25k per annum equates to a cost of less than £70 a day, but you can't ask your fresh uni graduate to work weekends, you're going to have to give them some holiday and you're going to have to train them. Let's assume that our graduate is only billable for 26 weeks of the year and they cost a shitload to train and for taxes and other overheads. That means they cost the 'consultancy' (a.k.a. body shop) about £250 a day... in the absolute worst-case scenario.

A recruitment consultant will charge a 30% mark-up on an experienced IT contractor who's been working for 10+ years and is an absolute expert in their field: the best of the best. So, assuming the contractor is getting £700 a day, the company who needs them is paying £910 a day.

How much do you think our fresh graduate is charged to clients for, given they only cost the consultancy £250 a day? Answer: £1,200 a day and upwards.

This is the consultancy model: place a shitload of inexperienced people on client sites and charge a whopping 400%+ mark-up on them. Leave them to flounder and figure stuff out at the client's expense.

The IT contractor's role is now to go around cleaning up messes left by the poor kids who have the unenviable task of doing a job that they don't have the knowledge or experience to do, while getting underpaid to do it. The IT contractor's role is that of the grown up, the nanny, the only person who's even remotely worth the money.

Most companies are trying to trim their IT budgets and they got their fingers burned by offshoring a load of roles to India and other parts of Asia. You get what you pay for, unless you're paying for inexperienced graduates in this case.

For sure, graduates are smart nice people, strong communicators and they learn quickly. For sure, when "all that IT stuff is done" then you can say goodbye to all those pesky technology people without having costly redundancies.

The reality is that there's a load of crap software out there that's been developed by a bunch of amateurs, and it will fall to bits... if it even works in the first place.

It's professional suicide to write this stuff, but everybody's too busy making easy money doing bodyshopping that nobody important is going to read this. My IT expert friends might read this and chortle "yes that's so true!" but the consultancies are only interested in bums on seats. They don't care who I am or what I have to say: they only want me when the shit hits the fan and they need somebody to come and mop up the mess, as inevitably happens.

It pains me to see IT go from being a profession filled with experts and people who take pride in doing a good job, to being seen as some kind of dirty necessity. It fucks me off when the consultancies suck up to their clients and seemingly agree that there's no long-term value in having software experts in their firm.

"Get the job done, fuck off and let us go back to doing our business" seems to be the attitude. That's why the dinosaurs are dying and the startups are taking over. IT is your business, fools. Look at Amazon: are they a retailler or a technology company, first and foremost? Do you think Amazon is going to sack all their software developers now that they "have a website that works"?

The era of offshoring was a costly mistake that was brilliant for the consultancies, because they got to build huge development centres and skill up their own graduates at the expense of greedy Western corporations. Now the body-shop 'consultancies' in the UK have monopolised the IT contract market, flooding it with inexperienced people and charging top dollar for them.

I'm hoping - and not just for personal gain - that the whole thing comes full circle, and we'll revert to an era of experts being in demand and companies recognising that they need technologists as much as any other business critical function. Software's not some crap you can get on the cheap... it's an investment in the future of your company. One day, all businesses are going to be technology companies.

Tags: #career #computing

This is a story about the pecking order...

Respect my authority. I did well in school and I've risen up the chain of command. I have stripes on my epaulettes and letters after my name. I've got a fancy job title and I'm very well paid. Don't-you-know-who-I-am and I'm oh-so-superior to the likes of you. Back in your place, underling. Get back in line.

Our systems of population control breed subservience. Why don't the workers rise up and seize the means of production?

"I'm not good with numbers"

"I've got no interest in politics"

"I just keep my head down and do what I'm told"

Could there be anything more degrading than having your fellow human beings sitting in judgement over you? Who are they to say "yay" or "nay" on the question of your utility? How dare they decide your fate!

Job insecurity keeps wages down, because workers develop a misplaced sense of gratitude for their income. In hard economic terms, workers get a terrible deal: they do all the work and they only see a tiny fraction of the profit. Why on earth would they do that?

"You're easily replaced"

Yes. While I dislike people who attempt to make themselves into key-man dependencies and build little fiefdoms of complexity to make themselves indispensable, I also think that the commodification of human beings is one of the most awful things that's happening in the modern world.

What happened to the artisan; the craftsman?

Small is beautiful, in a way. Think back to a time when each village had a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker. There was the blacksmith, the miller, the cobbler, the tailor, the farrier, the thatcher. There were apprentices aplenty and sons followed in their father's footsteps.

Of course, it's easy to bring up infant mortality and the large number of women who died during childbirth. Infections and treatable diseases used to be fatal. In the past, manual labour, poor diet and poor healthcare, meant that life expectancy was much lower. People were superstitious and afraid of death and disease. Nobody went skydiving.

Now, nobody has any place. We live with terrible insecurity. We could lose our jobs and have our homes repossessed at any moment. If your job becomes redundant due to ever-advancing technological changes and globalisation, you're unlikely to be able to afford to retrain. Besides, how would you ever even compete with all the people who are already trained and vying for the few available jobs?

What's the purpose of anything? What meaning is there to anything?

It was pretty clear why you got up at the crack of dawn to light the fire in the ovens: because if you didn't, people wouldn't have any bread and they'd be pissed off about that. In the village, everybody would be like "no fucking bread" and "yeah, I know. Shit isn't it!"

Now, why did you work hard at school, go to university, battle through those job interviews and kiss arses as you squirmed your way up the greasy pole; the career ladder? So you can punch numbers into a spreadsheet and give powerpoint presentations? So you can go to meetings and sit on cramped commuter trains? So you can eat pre-packaged sandwiches at your desk, getting crumbs all over the keyboard? Why the fuck are you even alive? What's the point of your existence?

If you're trying to get a fancier car so you can impress your friends and neighbours, or if you're trying to get a pay rise and a promotion, so you can 'win' and brag about how rich and successful you are, then perhaps you've found your purpose. Perhaps status symbols and meaningless job titles are the answer to the big question: why are we here?

What happens when it all goes bang and the whole fucking mess comes tumbling down? What happens when you realise you wasted your whole fucking life? You can't eat university diplomas or bonds or banknotes. You can't keep a house warm with supply chain statistics or flow diagrams. You can't live in an insurance certificate or legal contract. You can't clothe yourself with tax returns, essays, dissertations or theses.

Our world has divided into two camps: the celebrities and the nobodies; the powerful and the powerless; the rich and the poor; the smart and the stupid; the valuable and the valueless.

Did you ever notice how anybody who's anybody is rich, famous, powerful, smart and incredibly valuable to humanity, and everybody else is a worthless nobody who can go to hell? "Everybody else" accounts for 99% of the world's population, by the way.

Who wants to read the autobiography of Ahmad who sits behind the counter at my local dry cleaner? He must be pretty stupid if he's not powerful or rich. He's not famous so he can't have any value. He knows his place, which is about the only good thing we can say about him, right?

Modern society has led to city living because of economies of scale. It makes sense to have a multi-billion dollar mass transit system in a city, to make it easy for everybody to get to work efficiently. It makes sense to build all the high-rise head offices that can hold thousands of people, in one place. The net result is urban solitude and anonymity. Nobody knows who their neighbours are. Nobody knows who the local shopkeepers are. Nobody knows anybody, except the rich famous people who are the only ones with any value: they're indispensable.

One face is the same as another. Two workers who've held the same job title are interchangeable. Hire and fire. Who gives a fuck... human lives are cheap. Make the balloon go higher by chucking more bodies onto the fire.

We are running our economy by the numbers: we're wedded to our spreadsheets and all we care about is that this month's numbers are bigger than last month's numbers. Growth! Growth! Growth! More! More! More!

The top tier - our rulers, our managers, our executives - look at the graphs: are they going up? Who gives a fuck what's going on at the bottom. The tip of the iceberg is in charge of the rest.

You're drowning and freezing cold in the icy depths. You're part of that huge mass of ice beneath the surface, but you'd better not try and climb out of the water or else you'll topple the whole system and plunge the tiny tip into the depths... and nobody wants that, do they?

Chances are that you could do a better job than those in charge, because the country couldn't get much worse: inequality is a disgrace, poverty is rife, depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing, life is miserable and there are few prospects.

We're supposed to be ruled over by a house of commons: ordinary people from all walks of life. In fact, career politicians and massive political parties supported by wealthy donors & commercial interests, completely dominate the political landscape. We live in a plutocracy, as evidenced by the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

I count the middle class in the 'poor' bracket.

Of course, it seems ridiculous to suggest that well paid educated professional people in the middle class are poor - they have the best jobs, high quality housing and disposable income - but within a generation or two, the middle class are going to be utterly fucked. Skyrocketing house prices just don't work: they will erode your wealth, because you want somewhere for your kids and grandkids to live, don't you? Unless you live in a castle big enough for all future generations of your family, you're going to need some affordable housing at some point.

University tuition fees and the cost of student accommodation, comes on top of the private school fees you paid in order to get your little darlings the straight-A grades they needed to get onto the few degree courses that might lead to an actual job. A job doing fucking what exactly?

OK, so your silver-spooned little shits got themselves a degree and a professional qualification in law or accountancy or something, but you're going to have to fork out £100k+ to get them onto the housing ladder. Your terribly bright and brilliant kids now need a place to live near their job - London and the South-East - which means top dollar house prices.

Wealth has been hoarded by the baby-boomers who were gifted it by good luck and the inflation that eroded their debts relative to their incomes. The baby-boomers are now having to fork out all that filthy lucre in order to support their children and grandkids. There just aren't any well paid jobs that allow our special snowflake millennials to support themselves financially, no matter how hard they work.

So, the only group who have a place are the ones at the top of the pile: the ones who already control more wealth than they could ever spend in a hundred lifetimes, and who can easily generate some more because they already have the money, the fame and the power to make a success out of whatever the fuck they want to do. I mean, Paris Hilton is a DJ now, for fuck's sake: she presses the play button on a CD player and people pay to see that fucking shit.

All in all, why bother? Why the struggle? Why the stress? Why the anxiety and and the insecurity and the hideousness of battling over the crumbs from the cake?

We're all fighting with each other at the bottom, like crabs in a bucket, pulling down anybody who tries to escape.

Just stay in your place though. Don't complain. I'm sure those in charge know best.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #economics

This is a story about social animals...

For solitary creatures, there are two drives that ensure they live long enough to reproduce: hunger and libido. If you didn't feel hungry, you'd be too busy fucking to stop and eat, so you'd die of starvation. In fact you'd probably die of starvation before you even reached sexual maturity. If you didn't have a sex drive, you'd be too busy gorging yourself on food to have sex.

There's a delicate balance between effort, pain and reward. In animal studies, laboratory tests have measured the amount of work - in calories - that an animal is prepared to do to get a food pellet. There's no point burning more calories than the reward, so animals will only work so hard for something to eat. Tests also showed that animals are prepared to suffer a certain amount of pain if they're hungry: lab rats will cross an electrified floor to get to a food pellet, even though it hurts their feet. The same goes for sex: the horny rats will work and put up with pain, in order to mate.

When we examine social animals, like us, the co-operative rewards are harder to understand. It's clear that individuals will die if they don't get enough food, and genes will die if individuals don't reproduce, but what's in it for us to be social? Well, the lone wolf is very unlikely to be able to hunt and kill prey on its own.

Dogs are the perfect animal to help us understand praise. A dog will fetch a stick for its owner, even though it gets no food or sex. Humans have figured out that if you can make a dog believe you're the alpha of the wolf pack, then the dog will go wild for your approval. Through body language cues, such as bared teeth or wagging tails, the message of social approval or disapproval can be sent. Dogs are evolved to seek praise, because it bonds their hunting pack together.

We can then start to see how different drugs affect our brains, through changes in our behaviour.

Let's start with amphetamines (speed, whizz, base, meth etc.)

Amphetamines suppress appetite. Because one side of the triangle has been suppressed, it leaves room for an increased sex drive and more pleasurable lovemaking. Addicts who inject crystal methamphetamine can masturbate or fuck (or both!) for 12 hours.

Heroin suppresses your sex drive. Heroin addicts can be perfectly functional people, who eat enough to stay healthy, but they're getting their kicks from the junk, so they don't need sex.

Cocaine removes your insecurity and need for praise. When you're high on coke, you know you're the best. Instead of nervously looking around to see who's approving and who's disapproving, you act as if you're the alpha of the pack; king of the hill; top dog.

Addictions are nothing more than a temporary perversion of our natural urges; survival instincts; drives. We simply retrain our brains to want drugs instead of food, sex and praise.

Last night, I couldn't sleep because I had cravings. I was lying awake, daydreaming about going to a dealer and buying the thing I was really craving. It was a craving like every craving I've ever had. The craving completely consumed me and I could hardly think about anything else. There was only one thing that my heart desired.

So, today I went to the [meat] dealer, and bought myself some [dried South African beef] product. I travelled across London with single-minded purpose: I was out to score and feed my addiction.

I can't emphasise enough how similar drug cravings are to feeling hungry or horny. The urges are identical. Drug cravings are indistinguishable from the natural urges that keep us alive. Saying "you've got no willpower" to somebody, while stuffing your face with a big pie, is ridiculous. How often have you given up food and how long have you fasted for? Try doing it for 28 days. Try doing it for 13 weeks. Try doing it for life.

Of course, if the brain can be trained to like something, it can also be untrained. Rabid animals get driven mad by hydrophobia: swallowing gives rabid animals painful spasms in their larynx, so they start to fear water even though they're desperately thirsty. There are several foods that are said to be an acquired taste: it takes some time for our brains to learn to associate the strange flavours with nourishment. Often, an upset stomach or a bout of food poisoning is enough to create a strong link in our brains that causes us to reject certain foods.

Alcoholics can break their addiction by taking medication that will make them throw up if they drink. This kind of negative conditioning can break the perverted programming of the brain. Instead of eagerly anticipating the reward of a 'buzz' every time you get drunk, you begin to associate alcoholic drinks with nausea.

Unfortunately, the programming can work in reverse. If you have lots of fantastic sex when you take drugs, you can then start to crave drugs every time you get horny. 'Normal' sex can start to feel uninteresting and not worth bothering with. Your libido becomes your enemy: driving you to seek drugs every time your nut-sack needs emptying.

I've been well aware for some time, that I need to stay on top of my libido or else it will work in harmony with residual drug cravings to overpower any freedom of choice that I supposedly have. "Willpower" and the feelings of guilt we have about all indulgences of our natural urges, are the attempts to impose morality on an entirely amoral thing: we have no control over our desires.

Yesterday was a new one on me: a hunger for food that was as strong as any drug craving I've ever experienced. Addiction works in strange and subtle ways, inhabiting your subconscious and trying to subvert your supposed freedom of choice. Lots of addicts will relapse 'by accident' because the levers being pulled in their brains are powerfully influenced by forces that we rarely acknowledge.

We rarely talk about showing off or trying to get a shag, but those things are far more influential on our world than almost anything except stuffing our faces with pies.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol

This is a story about captive thinking...

How long did you have to stay in formal education before you were allowed to investigate your own hypotheses, pen and publish your own papers, unfettered by outside influence?

Your entire schooling was a sifting and sorting exercise, to allegedly find the 'brightest' minds. We have independent and selective schools. We stream children into sets and the 'smartest' are in the top set. The children all sit identical exams which are marked by people who are looking for specific answers: box tickers. The very last thing that our school system encourages is independent thought.

The most obedient and unquestioning children - completely devoid of any free-thinking tendencies - then carry on to university, where they will learn that further education is about massaging egos. The 'right' answer is the one that panders to the person who will be grading the work. You simply need to regurgitate answers that will satisfy the particular academic fetishes of the question setter, re-asserting the status quo and re-affirming the preconceived worldview of those seeking and holding tenure. Nobody ever got anywhere in academia by going against the grain.

Eventually, those who emerge with first-class and 2:1 degrees from red-brick universities, are a single homogenous mass of privileged middle-class people, who have had virtually identical life experiences. Any streak of independent thinking has been thrashed out of 'the cream of the crop' by an education system that attempts to make everything uniform and regular.

If you're learning a dead language - ancient Greek or Latin - then there's a finite limit to what can be studied. You read the classics and then you're tested on a subject which is unchanging, because you're poring over the few available texts. Plato and Socrates aren't going to be writing any more.

Many subjects have a common feature to the academic fetish: the enticement of studying something which you believe you can master, because the pool of available evidence is very unlikely to grow, given that the authors are long since dead.

In order to get published, you need a publisher who is prepared to print your work. Penguin won't even consider authors who are not at least undergraduates. Essentially, the body of literature is shifted away from a reflection of reality and towards the thoughts and views of the handful of people who demonstrated least capacity for free thinking.

Facebook started in universities, as a tool for sharing photos of student nights out. You can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends. All this talk about sophisticated algorithms feeding us fake news and things that we like: utter bullshit.

We have a natural propensity to build groups of socioeconomically and educationally similar people around ourselves. Your Facebook buddies are all from your top set in the selective school that you attended, university friends and people in professional roles just like you. It's your network that chooses what gets shown to you: no fancy algorithms needed.

And so, in this bubble - this echo-chamber - of groupthink, you've learned what to say to get your buddies coo'ing in agreement. You know what is speakable and unspeakable. You have learned never to challenge the status quo or say anything controversial.

If you're looking for a test of this hypothesis, let's look at grammar.

Why is it that when you detect bad grammar, you can't see beyond it? Whoever is expressing their point of view, it doesn't matter how astutely observed and significant their words... if there are grammatical errors, then that's all you can see. There's a kind of force-field that shames people into keeping their mouths shut, no matter how important their contribution.

When Michael Gove said that people don't want experts, in a way he's right. Of course, it's completely ridiculous to suggest that we want a layman flying a plane, performing brain surgery or even fixing the plumbing, but there's a point that's been overlooked by people who consider themselves well educated: you don't know fuck all, mate. Yes... and you did understand the double negative, didn't you?

Just take a look at recent events: a complete failure by politicians, journalists and other professional commentators to read the national mood and have even the slightest idea what's going on right under their noses. To paraphrase the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld: you didn't know how much you didn't know.

I hate to use this turn of phrase, but ivory towers are rather called to mind. How can you even call yourself an expert, when your expertise is worthless? It's intellectual masturbation. Pointless make-work.

The monopoly that is held on thinking, through the control of publishing, the media and academia, means that there's a single uniform narrative that doesn't chime with reality. Nobody ever got fired for going along with the status quo. Nobody ever failed to get a research grant or lost professional credibility, because they were part of the pack: not challenging or advancing our thinking and theories in the slightest.

For sure, if you want qualifications, kudos and a safe job, it's best if you toe the line and kiss the arses above you. There's bound to be some powerful old man somewhere, who needs his ego regularly polishing. That's your real job: making powerful people feel smart.

This is the fundamental reason why everything gets bogged down with a lack of change: nobody is seeking truth, beauty, simplicity, incontrovertible fact, testable theory matching observable evidence. Instead, we're all just kissing the arse of somebody 'above' us: the question setter; the person marking the test; the old man who controls the money.

There's no place for free thinkers in the academic, political or commercial world.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about political correctness gone mad...

The liberal metropolitan elites are on the right side of history, right? The neanderthal knuckle-draggers are simply poorly educated angry white men, who need to step aside and make way for the black one-legged Muslim lesbian immigrants to take all the jobs and go on the dole, right? I probably can't even say black. It's political correctness gone mad.

Right, I've probably successfully got your heckles up. Now, get your calculator out.

The average wage in the UK is roughly £26,000. The average house price is £260,000. Assuming you can borrow three and a half times your income, you can get a mortgage of £91,000. So, you'll need a deposit of £169,000.

For the current tax year, average take home pay is £1,737. Average rent in the UK is £900 a month, leaving £837 a month for council tax, gas, electric, water, sewerage, food & drink, toiletries, cleaning products, transport, clothing, mobile phone, Internet, home & life insurance, home maintenance, alcohol & tobacco, gambling & lottery, going out and saving money.

Let's assume that our average UK citizen is a super scrimpy person who lives on budget baked beans and never turns on the heating or any lights. They can probably save a maximum of £500 per month, which leaves them £337 a month to spend on everything else. To save up the £170k they need to buy a house, they'll need to be thrifty for the next 28 years... assuming house prices don't go up.

Of course, this also assumes that you can even get a job that pays about £12.50 an hour, when 80% of all new jobs being created pay less than £17,000 per annum. Most jobs pay less than the average, because the average wage is skewed by a small number of very high earners.

OK, but we can all just go on benefits, right?

Well, housing benefit doesn't pay enough to rent a place. Rents are higher than housing benefit. If you work more than 16 hours a week, your benefits will be cut off, so you can't use housing benefit to top up your income. If you're a 'snowflake' millennial, you'll have just £57.90 to live on each week, plus your housing benefit that isn't enough to pay the rent.

So, what's the solution?

Well, if you're an immigrant you might be prepared to live in an appallingly shit house, with several people in every room. Many of us grew up in houses with sitting rooms and dining rooms. If you have a look round a house full of economic migrants who are all working for minimum wage, you're not going to find any reception rooms: every room is a bedroom.

Who cleans the toilets? Who waits the tables? Who serves the coffee? Who picks up the litter? Who hoovers your office? Who washes your car? Who built your house? Who unblocked your drain?

When we want something, we demand rock-bottom prices. We believe all the bullshit about 'rogue traders' and 'rip-off Britain' when in actual fact we are mostly idle and spoiled. We wanted cheap goods, so the factories moved to the Far East. We wanted easy jobs, so the immigrants came to do all the shitty ones. We wanted big fat undeserved early pensions, so asset prices bubbled. The petit bourgeois rentier class is a parasite on young people who need somewhere to live.

"Build some more houses!"

Yes, but who's going to build them? You wanted people who work hard for peanuts, so you got Poles. It's a fairly established middle-class thing to do: to demand Eastern European builders, because your British counterparts are supposedly lazy and work-shy, but aren't you part of the problem if you're not rolling up your sleeves and getting on with the job yourself?

The UK population was 50 million in the 1950s. Now it's 65 million. If there were 30 children in a school classroom in the fifties, there would be 39 today. If there were 1 million cars in the fifties, there are 1.3 million now. Hang on! That can't be right, can it?

Yes, ostensibly our observations don't match the hard numbers. Our day-to-day experiences don't tally with the facts, data and opinion polls.

Of course, I picked a difficult example: car ownership has soared, along with our living standards.

Our living standards have soared, haven't they?

Well, why do so many people want to go back to some kind of golden era of yesteryear? Perhaps 1954 would be the perfect year for us to roll the clock back to: when rationing ended.

"Britain's full" we hear. Certainly, many of us perceive overcrowding, congestion, heavy traffic, problems making a doctor's appointment, problems getting our kids into the school we want our little darlings to go to. What the hell? And there's always some darkies in the queue too... it must be all those mozzies, right?

The liberal metropolitan elites [like me] will tell you that you're imagining things. You're just not colourblind enough. If you squint your eyes - like a Chinaman - you'll see that your crowded train carriage actually has plenty of seats, and the few passengers are white men wearing hats, reading broadsheet newspapers and puffing pipes.

There's clearly a mismatch between perception, reality and what the 'facts' tell us. How can Britain have filled up when the population has only increased by 30%?

Let's look at the example of the economic migrant.

I don't live in The City of London. I live out near Canary Wharf and commute into the Square Mile for work. I migrate each day, for economic reasons. The official population of the City is 12,000 people, but in fact the population on a miserable Monday morning is more like 400,000. That's a 33 fold increase. That's a helluva migration every day.

In the desperate struggle of the rat race, both parents are now working, when previously the husband's sole income was adequate for the household's meagre expenses. I'm sorry to be so heteronormative, but women were housewives and men were the breadwinners. With sexual equality comes a doubling of the workforce, taking up space on the trains and roads, struggling to get to work each morning.

If both parents are working, who's going to clean the house? We're going to need a Lithuanian cleaner. Who's going to look after the kids? We're going to need a Spanish au pair. Who's going to prepare lunch? We're going to need an Italian sandwich maker.

We cluster together where all the jobs are: London and the South-East. We all commute huge distances on horribly overcrowded transport networks, because it's cheaper for our employers to build massive office blocks. The more office blocks you get in one place, the bigger the pool of potential employees, creating a liquid market for commoditised humans.

Most of the UK is an also-ran. Who gives a fuck about job losses across the whole country, when London earns so much tax for the treasury and financial services dominates 80% of the 'economy'.

Of course, it's disingenuous to think that the coal mines are going to re-open, the demand for steel can remain constantly high forever, and there will always be a need for unskilled manual labour. However, didn't we forget that a lot of people have been thrown onto the scrap heap, because we only worship facts and figures, not lives?

Is it possible that the knuckle-draggers  -- who hanker for a yesteryear of homophobia, sexism, bigotry and an empire riding roughshod over the developing world -- also have a small handful amongst their number who are right? Their quality of life would have been a lot better when they could have afforded to buy a house, get married, have kids and earn a living without having to resort to government handouts, black market jobs, benefit fraud, drug dealing and other degrading things.

I feel like I need to be the liberal metropolitan elitist who empathises with the plight of the scrounger, the NEET, the JAM family, the council-estate dwelling na'er do well. It's terribly patronising, but what have the unwashed masses noticed that we haven't?

I'm not even allowed to raise the questions without tarring myself with the brush we lazily swish over the enemies of progress: bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, FASCIST!

I hate UKIP, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and their ilk, but they're shrewd in their observation that people have detected a certain lack of greatness in their once-great nations. Perhaps they weren't great places to be an educated black gay woman, in those yesteryear eras, but isn't politics about the greater good, to some extent? We don't have to lynch the blacks for the benefit of the whites. Trump et. al. have emboldened the racists, and that's awful, but why are they so angry?

Until the liberal metropolitan elites can accept that "[poor ill-educated] white male" has become a pejorative term amongst a sneering set of arrogant, privileged people who rule over them, doesn't it seem obvious that the anger is going to boil over?

Football, X-Factor, Big Brother and all of the other distractions and titillations are inadequate to contain the dissatisfied masses: they don't have any prospects; they don't have anything to hope for, except for a life of miserable poverty; they're unwanted in 'their own' country.

That's what "take are (sic) country back" means... it means that through the Internet, the masses have figured out that they outnumber the rulers and their court, and they want their fair slice of the pie. They've been misdirected into blaming immigrants, because that's always the last desperate ploy played by the greedy people who control the country. The simple fools don't even realise that the rich get even richer during times of war and conflict. Who's going to fight this imaginary fight that we're being whipped into national hysteria over? It will be the poorest, least educated and least privileged who will lose out, yet again.

Sadly, unless income inequality and declining living standards are addressed, there's little to offer the angry people except a cathartic bloodletting. Obviously, it offends my liberal sensibilities to see anger misdirected at the hardworking immigrants who cook me delicious halal food and act as a kind of lightning rod, stopping me from getting beaten up as a yuppie... a gentrifier.

What happened to class warfare? What happened to the labour movement? What happened to revolution?

TV melted your brain, dude.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about keeping a diary...

I nearly wrote about what I had for breakfast. I used to write a blog post and then throw it away and write another one: it was a useful warm-up exercise. Now, there's less quality control: I'm dealing with a lot of competing pressures and I have to write when I really don't feel like writing. It upsets me.

The very last thing that I want to do is start writing about movies and TV that I've watched and other totally banal things that are happening in my uneventful life. I could share pictures of food. Maybe I could write about a really big pooh that I had. No.

There's so much that needs to be written about and so little time. I have no time for shitty diary entries about whatever's grinding my gears at a particular moment. I hate when my writing is so tainted by the immediate demands of bashing words out at a given moment, rather than a natural flow of thoughts that have been slowly brewing and bubbling to the surface.

I was feeling horribly hungover until about now, so I didn't feel like writing earlier. What's the point of doing something when you don't feel like doing it? It's hardly going to be my best work, is it? What's the point of spending your most productive periods watching shitty TV, and cramming your creativity into snatched moments when you've just woken up, or you're tired?

I don't know why I'm so cranky, but I was feeling super annoyed with myself for publishing what I wrote earlier and I deleted it. I actually rewrote my original blog post about not drinking. I'm a little happier with it, but it's a reminder that I want and need to take my pet project seriously. Who wants to read about what I had for breakfast? Who wants to read crap that I wrote when I'm tired or hungover? What's the point of churning out crap?

The Internet is full of crap, and I'm not saying that what I write is great, but you've got to at least try, haven't you? The whole point of my project is that it's something I can be proud of. It might be low quality, but if it's not the best that I can do, then I'm knowingly doing a shit job, which is shameful.

Ideally, I'd like to write at 3pm every day. That feels like the sweet spot. I don't know why, it just is.

But.

Sometimes I want to write at 11am, because there's something I really want to write about.

Also.

I want to write at midnight, because there's a thought bouncing around inside my head and I just have to express it.

And.

I want to write at 8am, because I can't stop thinking about something.

One more thing.

I want to write at 5pm, because I want to write every day and getting it done at five in the evening means that I can relax for the evening.

However.

I want to write at 8pm because that's when it suits me at that particular moment.

Essentially, I'd rather write when it fits naturally, because then I'll write something that I'm pleased with, rather than something rushed. It's not a case of writing for writing's sake, even though it is. Who can possibly say in advance, when they're going to feel like writing?

I've noticed that I have a load of half-finished ideas and forgotten titles: things that I would have ordinarily written about. Instead, those things are lost. I need to start carrying a notebook and to keep better notes. I make a note of the title of a blog post when an idea really speaks to me, but I've written up none of those ideas up because I've not been in the mood when I've sat down at the keyboard.

I feel like I'm losing my mind, because there are so many things rattling around in my head, but they remain unexpressed.

How can I get what I want if I can't express what I want? Am I impossible to please?

It's impossible to know, when my world has been travelling, socialising, fitting in, people pleasing.

Everybody's going to go back to work soon. Time to go back to your job. Party's over.

For me, TV goes off. Writing starts. Writing is my work. Thinking is my world.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about being drunk...

I've been consuming far too much alcohol, but I don't really believe in New Year's resolutions or pointless periods of abstinence. For a bet, I beat my friend's 100-day sobriety record, but it proved nothing.

For my liver and my bulging belly, drinking less would be beneficial, but I'm not going to quit completely, just like I'm not going to join a gym or destroy my knees and hips running.

To say "I'm going to drink less" is ridiculous, because I always get the thirst for alcohol after the first couple of drinks, and then all self-control is lost.

I was so hungover today that I almost felt like starting drinking again, just to feel better. I guess I have a natural instinct that it would be the beginning of the slippery slope to alcoholism if I were to do that.

I've been drinking every day for quite a while now, but I don't think it's getting worse, nor am I turning into an alcoholic. I'm drinking as a very unhealthy coping mechanism, which isn't good, but what else should I do? Cut myself? Take up smoking?

Alcoholism and drug abuse are symptomatic of a need to self-medicate. Alcohol is a useful crutch, so I shan't be giving it up. I've already extensively proven that I can have periods of total abstinence, when I put my mind to it. Why bother giving up something that's a useful stress reliever, that the vast majority of people use?

I'm starting to sound a bit defensive, and I guess that's because I know that I'm drinking more than I'd really like to be, but that will change as my life improves. Alcohol does improve my life, up to a point, although I'm drinking too much at the moment.

Twice during the festive season, I thought "I wish I hadn't drunk so much" and had a horrible moment where the room was spinning when I went to bed. I haven't thrown up or anything so vulgar and juvenile though: the bucket pictured above was never used as a vomit receptacle.

I'm not an alcoholic because I don't go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Tags: #alcohol

This is a story about a year in review...

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I'll begin.

For anybody following along at home, there are a few highlights buried in the 600,000+ words I've written to date. There's some required reading for anybody making a study of my psyche.

I decided I wanted to write something more popular and so I drew some graphs explaining mood disorders, like bipolar. It was my most read blog post of 2016.

Along the same lines, I wrote about the onset of depression and attempts to treat it.

I wrote a letter to myself.

I was an inpatient on a secure psychiatric ward, so naturally I came up with a bizarre thought experiment. I even did a drawing of my quantum suicide experiment.

When I was bored out of my mind at work one day, I wrote a short story called The Factory.

If you ever wondered why I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear, this is half the story.

Everything you never wanted to know about addiction.

But, is it art? This is a good example of me rambling while strung-out. I'm surprised I could even see the keyboard. I just like the title and it's a bit of a private joke, sorry.

There's a 3-part account of the time I lost my mind and started hearing voices.

That'll probably do. There's a lot to get through there.

Of course, there's also the first draft of my novel if you have time to read 53,000 words. I'm going to start editing it tomorrow, so any feedback would be gratefully received.

I've slightly bent the rules, because I have a bit of a warped sense of time, but these are all significant pieces of writing for me, that I associate with the events of 2016.

Happy New Year's Eve.

Tags: #writing #bipolar #depression #suicide #physics #addiction #mentalhealth

This is a story about discipline & routine...

"You can finish that later" she says. Only, there won't be a later if I don't have some scaffolding - a framework - on which to hang the shreds of my life.

Writing isn't just an idle pastime for me. It's a project that gives me some control over my own life. It's something I can work on without some waste-of-space middle manager denying me the opportunity to let my creative juices flow. Who knows when I'll get another job: it's not my decision. What have I got to feel proud about? What reason have I got to get out of bed every day?

When you start taking the odd day off here and there, why not the odd week or two? Why not have a month off, or a year? It's a slippery slope. I know not many people are reading, but knowing that I write every day does give a reason to keep coming back.

When I was writing my novel, I was touched when friends would ask where my next chapter was. It was also really hard work to catch up on my target word count when I got behind. I hate feeling rushed, too.

Of course, you can't really get behind on a blog, but my target is to write every day, not to attain a certain word count by a certain deadline. However, both disciplines are important, if you're taking a writing project seriously, which I am.

Why am I serious about a non-commercial venture that makes me so vulnerable on the public Internet? Why am I so serious about sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings every single day, without fail? Well, it's because it's the only lifeline I feel secure about. People can let you down. Stress can get the better of you. Circumstances can conspire to make your life an unliveable Hell. However, I need nothing more than a screen, an Internet connection and a keyboard, in order to ground myself; to feel content that my story's still being told, by the most reliable source: me.

Obviously, I'm an unreliable source. I can go off the rails; relapse. But, when that happens I'm acutely aware that anybody who's been reading occasionally, will notice that I've gone quiet: I'm not keeping to my routine. It's an early warning system and it's also a role; a duty. I feel a little duty-bound to write every day, in the same way you feel like you have to get up and go to work, even though you don't want to.

You could skip work - bunk off - but you won't. There's something that keeps you going and going, in whatever you do. There are people who are counting on you. What will your boss say? What will your colleagues think?

I broke the spell and I have the kind of job where I can take long chunks of time off anyway. Contracting doesn't mandate that I spend 52 weeks a year flying a desk. If my contract has ended, who's gonna tell me that I need to keep working? The boss? I'm my own boss. The downside of being in charge, is that I'm free on my own recognisance. It's up to me to structure my life: find work and try not to relapse.

I can't leave my writing until "later" or "tomorrow" because it's not some job where I'll get paid my salary anyway. In the world of wage slavery, you know your job will still be there, waiting for you. Until you run your own business, you don't really understand what an opportunity cost is. Everything can wait until tomorrow, in the world of never-ending made up jobs and make-work.

I'm not saying what I do is important per se, but it's important to me. To prioritise writing a novel ahead of looking for a job sounds like madness, but I've worked full time for the best part of 20 years, and I was in full-time education for 13 years before that. There will always be more work, or something else to study, but there's only a finite amount of time and opportunity to create something new.

While the bulk of humanity is engaged in the rote-learning of facts, regurgitation of other people's words and slavishly following rules laid down for them, there's a tiny minority who look at that entire world as absurd and ludicrous. The herd isn't going anywhere and it won't be hard to track down when I need it.

And so, for now, to keep my sanity and preserve my progress, I have to zig when everybody else zags. I have no control over when I'll get hired and what the contract will be, so to give myself some kind of stability and routine, I write.

I write every day.

Tags: #writing