This is a story about not reading enough...

Writers don't really want any more writers. Writers want more readers. You could write a brilliant book and find that hardly anybody wants to read it, let alone pay for it. I'm not writing a brilliant book. I'm churning out words into the ether. I'm not writing for self-aggrandisement. I'm writing because my self-esteem has collapsed and I'm suicidal.

If I wanted to get rich from writing, I would write a "How to be a Better Writer" book, or I would run a creative writing course. Far more people want to be writers than there are paying readers to support their ambitions.

We all want to be heard above the roaring waves in the sea of digital noise. This modern world is isolating, and it's also disheartening when everything you do is compared against a global benchmark. If you microblog on Twitter, why don't you have millions of followers? If you've written something, why isn't it a bestseller? If you founded a little tech startup, why isn't it valued at a billion dollars?

What's the difference between one blogger's Wordpress site and another's? Now that we're all competing on the same level playing field - the self-publishing revolution that is the Internet - isn't it clearer than ever that the differences between human beings are marginal? I find it just as interesting reading a mommyblog as I do reading whatever is flavour of the month. In fact, I find the mommyblogs far more interesting than the pretentious wank pedalled elsewhere in the interests of clickbait.

A clique of established writers tell me I don't have anything interesting or high value to say. Whenever I read articles about National Novel Writing Month or other writing festivals, the message is the same: your writing is boring, low quality, narcissistic and you shouldn't bother. In other words, clear off and make room for the established players.

Well, guess what? Tough titties.

I need writing and the community of people writing for non-commercial reasons. I don't need to support people who've already achieved the thing that we all dream about doing: a job that we love.

For sure, writing and the other creative arts are not a hobby. We need entertainers. We need people who are brave enough to share. To try and establish some pecking order and say that lesser mortals should keep their mouths shut and not share their content, is elitist in a way that I despise.

I was saddened to read about how much trouble The Guardian and The Observer are in, especially in light of the fact that they're newspapers that are supported by trust money, not by media moguls. The Guardian broke the Edward Snowden whistleblowing, and had GCHQ jumping all over them for their trouble. Press freedom is important, and the colonisation of journalism by advertising revenue hungry organisations, churning out human interest clickbait, is to the detriment of all of us.

I lament the death of the novel, as we increasingly consume what we read in bite-size chunks that we 'pay' for with our eyeballs, thanks to the rise and rise of the Facebook news feed as the vast consumer of our spare time. However, to attack budding writers, and to effectively picket them and call them 'scabs' for writing free content, is not going to fight the rising tide. It's inevitable that our reading habits will change forever. The idea of paying for a printed novel is all but dead except for those who have a paper fetish and like to advertise their pseudo-intellectualism by having large bookcases.

I note that I passed 400,000 words and 1 year of blogging without even noticing. The supposed discipline and difficulty of overcoming writer's block is largely overstated. It's true that my writing is very lightly edited, but actually if you go back and read what I've written a few days later, you will see that I have been making myriad edits, corrections, revisions, improvements. But, in this content-rich era, who has the time to read anything once, let alone twice?

Some friends derive a great deal of pleasure from reading their favourite books again and again. Those books must have been pored over by their authors, and certainly they are great works of fiction. However, just as we once bought a few high quality garments made by skilled clothes-makers, now we live in the era of fast fashion, where we now buy many cheap things to wear, that are quickly worn out and thrown away.

Whether it's wood pulp and ink, or cotton and dye, to waste those things is not sustainable on a planet of finite resources. However, the Internet is not running out of bytes. There's nothing wrong with churning out page upon page of writing, which may catch the eye of one of the billions of readers. Even if it's just some linguistics algorithm at Google that slightly improves its natural language parsing ability, by processing my words, then it hasn't been a fruitless exercise.

I don't think people are reading less. I just think they're reading fewer books. I certainly think that people are turned off by the endless intellectual masturbation of the elites.

If there's a shortage, it's not a shortage of readers. I think there's a shortage of candid tales written by people who are brave enough to actually write the things that nobody had dared to say, or had previously been allowed to publish.

No matter what government stats say, there are undoubtedly painful societal changes afoot. There is so much contradictory data. How can quality of life be increasing and the amount of people with clinical depression also be increasing? How can we be so amazingly interconnected by technology and we feel so lonely and isolated?

Writing has changed. Instead of writing a book, publishing it, and sitting back to enjoy praise and admiration, writing has now become a conversation. Interactions and discussions have replaced lectures and speeches.

Sure, I'd like to see micropayments succeed, to replace the ad-revenue driven model that's mostly hoovered up by Google & Facebook, so that my favourite writers can continue to pay their bills.

However, just as the 15-hour working week has been predicted for a long time, writing and other creative arts are going to feel the pinch first. There are a virtually unlimited number of people who would rather be writers than picking vegetables in the fields, or flipping burgers.

To call aspiring writers narcissistic, self-aggrandising spammers, is breathtakingly insulting. In a way, I'm an intellectual migrant, seeking asylum from the warzone of wage slavery. In a way, every 'successful' writer who tells me that I should stop writing, or mocks my work as low quality, is the same as somebody who says "bloody immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs".

You're damn straight I want to be a penniless writer. I want to smoke a pipe and wear a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Have you tried the working world? It's fucking awful. I've worked harder than you, and that's why I'm prepared to work for 'nothing'... because it's a damnsight more rewarding than the crap I've been doing for my whole career.

You know what? People who have been having a tough time have reached out to me, and shared their stories. I would never betray their confidence, but people have confided their stories about depression, suicide, alcoholism, addiction and becoming jaded and disillusioned with wage slavery.

I read an article saying how hard it is being a struggling artist in London, and the only comments on social media were "get a proper job" and "art is just a hobby". While I disagree that art and entertainment are valueless, I do think that those who are upset about how their novelist ambitions are being thwarted should try writing something that is actually relatable.

Of course it's naïve as hell and a cliché to say "if my writing helps one person who is going through a tough time, it will have been worth it" but guess what? I think it already has. A number of private discussions have confirmed that there are plenty of people out there, lurking quietly, feeling like nobody understands what they're going through, feeling like they're the only one who's going through what they're going through.

When I was struggling with mental health issues, suicidal thoughts, addiction, alcoholism and a lack of employment opportunities that were in line with my values and needs, I found a few books and blogs that helped me immensely. I gratefully hoovered up the words that few brave people had shared, and I felt less alone.

I don't want to pat myself on the back. I'm not declaring what I've done to be a success. I'm not saying I've saved lives or anything else so self-congratulatory.

All I'm saying is that if you want the mommybloggers and every other wannabe writer out there to shut up, to make more room for your pretentious crap, then it's you who should shut up, because like you say... there are already more than enough good novels out there.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about homeostasis...

Do I think I'm smarter than a doctor? Well, consider how much training in psychiatry a generalist has had. A general physician must be knowledgeable of heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, gall bladder, large intestine, small intestine, ears, nose, throat, eyes, bones, veins, arteries, muscles, tendons. A general physician must be familiar with viruses, bacterial infections and parasites. A general physician must be familiar with eczema, psoriasis, warts, bunions, corns, fungal infections and allergies. On top of all that, a general physician has a basic grounding in the most complex organ of all: the brain.

"Would you take antibiotics if you got an infection?"

This is good question. Antibiotics are a pretty blunt instrument. Antibiotics are very damaging to the health of the gut microbiome. There are "good" bacteria and there are "bad" bacteria, and killing both can be very bad for you. Widespread antibiotic use is also the reason why we have super resistant bacteria like MRSA. It's quite possible that our heavy usage of antibiotics might be something that ends up causing huge numbers of people to die in a microbial infection epidemic.

"Would you get your leg set in plaster cast if it was broken?"

Yes, of course I would. Don't be so stupid.

"Would you take insulin if you were diabetic?"

Yes, but I wouldn't increase my risk of diabetes through bad diet.

"So why don't you take antidepressants to fix your broken brain chemistry?"

Well, my brain chemistry isn't broken. It's not like there's a broken bone. It's not like I've got a malfunctioning pancreas. It's not like I have an infection. My brain is doing what it's supposed to do: it's responding to environmental stimuli and telling me "WARNING: something is wrong!".

If you were feeling a sharp pain in your hand, you could take painkillers, or you could remove the sharp object that was hurting your hand. Pain is a feedback mechanism, telling your brain that something is damaging your body.

My body is getting very damaged. I sit on my arse, bored out of my mind, getting fat and unfit. The environment I work in is completely unstimulating. The environment that I work in could not be more unnatural.

Humans need natural light, exercise, social contact, stimulation, challenges, variation, goals. I have none of these things. I'm trapped inside a shitty office, mainly dealing with a computer. I don't even need to get out of my chair all day long. The work that I do is mind-numbingly boring and easy. The only goal is to get old and die so I don't have to go to work anymore.

Obviously, my brain - as an organ - is a lot smarter than any amount of doctors and psychoanalysts. My brain is virtually unchanged from the one that evolved 2.5 million years ago. My brain kept me safe from sabre-tooth tigers and allowed me to kill wooly mammoths to have enough to eat. My brain told me to move when things got too hot, too cold, or when I was hungry, thirsty... whatever. My brain helped me survive. My brain knows when something is wrong.

London's daytime population is circa 11 million people, with millions of people travelling in from the surrounding areas to take part in the rat race. The rush hour tube is awful. There is no personal space. People are crammed together like sardines in a tin. You think that's natural? You think that's healthy?

London's roads are crammed with cyclists, mopeds, motorcycles, cars, vans, lorries, busses and trucks. Every road junction has traffic coming at you from all directions, and scurrying commuters trying to get across the road without being squashed.

London's buildings are packed to capacity. Any spare land is built upon, as high as the planning officers will allow. Every apartment is sublet and sublet, until many cheaper places have 5 people living in one room. Every office uses hotdesking to increase the capacity. Nobody has their own desk anymore.

My brain screams out in agony at this assault on my senses. I have no car at the moment, so I can't escape when it all gets too much. To escape would mean dragging my luggage on tubes and trains, along with the rest of the heaving masses of people.

I have a little oasis of calm at home, where my apartment block is set back from the road in a gated community, and it overlooks the River Thames. At the back of the building, the sound of thousands of people, all shouting at one another, echoes around the courtyard off the hard surfaces of the buildings. Drunk people argue outside the pub. Road rage incidents occur between drivers. Teenagers squabble. Fraught mothers yell at their kids. Meathead fucknuggets yell at the top of their lungs to show off. At the front of the building, on the balcony, things are mostly calm, except for the riverboat cruises blaring out disco music at high volume, and the Thames speedboat thrill rides, zooming along at top speed.

London is pure theatre, and I fear I might crumble to nothing without its stimulation, but the entertainment is purely monkeys at the zoo, squabbling, masturbating, copulating and screeching as loud as they can.

It's clear that I need to make environmental, lifestyle changes. The problem is not my brain chemistry. The problem is the shit that I'm forced to do. I need to be in London, because London's where the jobs are. I need to work, because how else am I going to have a roof over my head and food on the table?

An obvious quick fix for my mental health would be to escape to some more unspoiled wilderness, which isn't so desperately overpopulated. I need to escape from dead-end boring jobs that I can do with my eyes closed, in shitty offices with artificial lighting, full of boring drones who I have no need or interest in talking to.

It's a shitty compromised situation, where I'm forced into yet more wage slavery until I reach a level of financial comfort where I can truly consider my health needs. It makes sense to earn a lot of money very quickly, so I can escape the rat race sooner. I need a financial safety net which I can use to find a job that doesn't desperately depress me and stress me out.

Life is fucking agony at the moment, but what choice do I have? Short term pain for long term gain, in theory.

Work hard. Complain harder.

Tags: #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #career #london

This is a story about bravery...

How do terrorists win? By spreading terror. There's a video going round on the Internet of a prankster in Arab head-dress throwing a black duffel bag at people and shouting "Allahu Akbar!". His unwitting victims run for their lives. For me, this is anecdotal evidence that the terrorists are winning.

I tend to be a little irreverent and it's easy to miss my satire or irony sometimes, but I'm disappointed when people act as thought police, and act with more offence than is strictly justified by their personal involvement with a tragedy. Taking up the position of moral outrage is simply thought policing, when no outrage is warranted.

When I write about terrorism on 9/11 or 7/7, I'm always mindful that family members, friends or work colleagues of people who lost somebody during those attacks, might be offended. However, there are billions of Netizens and the chance of somebody directly affected reading my stuff is negligible. It's in the greater public interest that I should discuss the terror that obviously affects so many, instead of self-censoring because of the tiny risk that anybody might take legitimate offence.

Having grown up in the UK, from 1979 to present, I lived through the IRA's bombing campaign. Far more people died in 1985 through 1995 than in recent years, including 2001. I used to work near the Baltic Exchange and I live and work in Canary Wharf. Both of these places were blown up by IRA bombs.

So am I Irelandophobic? Am I afraid that every Irishman I meet is a terrorist? Do I detest the Irish, because they all carry some collective responsibility for the actions of a small handful of their fellow countrymen? No. Of course not. Some of my best friends are Irish. The Irish have shown me nothing but love.

Being brave doesn't mean dropping bombs on people from 30,000ft, safe in the cockpit of your $350 million fighter jet. Being brave doesn't mean killing civilians in a drone strike, pushing buttons on your joystick, watching everything remotely on a TV screen. Being brave doesn't mean being racially abusive - "build a wall" and "send them home" - while you teach your kids to fear and reject people who look different, and are from a different culture.

Being brave certainly doesn't involve shutting down people who appear to be desecrating the memory of the dead.

If we're going to move forward as a race, we've got to get over this whole "your tribe killed somebody from my tribe" bullshit. A couple of days ago there was great offence taken at a stag party taking selfies at Ground Zero. Hey! Guess what? Nearly every inch of the globe has had human blood spilt on it at some point, at the hands of another human. Get over it.

We need to move beyond the "brown/black/Irish kills privileged white shocker!" type headline trolling. There are underprivileged people who get killed in gang shootings and knifings every day here in London, but it never makes the national news. If you're not white caucasian and you're poor, attacks that are not overtly religiously motivated just aren't news outside London. However, a bunch of whites appear to be mocking some other whites, and that's global news? What the fuck is that all about?

An estimated 675 people have been shot and killed by police in the USA this year so far. There were 990 last year. If we say that in the 15 years since 9/11, on average 700 people have been killed by police each year, then over 10,000 people have died at the hands of the police. America, you had fewer than 3,000 killed in 9/11, but you've killed more than 3 times as many since then, just with your cops.

Grief is a kind of hobby. "You just can't say this stuff today... people are grieving" I hear you say. Well, who's grieving for those 10,000 people who got gunned down by cops? When is the day that you grieve for them?

Lest we forget.

Well you did forget, didn't you? You forgot that being afraid of black and brown people means that terrorism is winning. Terrorism affects your life. Terrorism is something you're afraid of, so the terrorists have successfully created terror. The terrorists have won.

You forgot that the biggest threat to your life is not terrorism, but guns in the hands of your fellow Americans. Toddlers kill more Americans than terrorists do.

Maybe I have no right to contribute to this debate, because I'm not American. However, Donald Trump waded in on the side of Brexit, and the UK has suffered a huge upsurge in racially abusive attacks on our own people, as a result of the referendum result. In a little under two months, the presidential election could possibly elect a racist into office, and cause a further wave of abuse and attacks.

Europe is a more dangerous place when anti-Islamic sentiment is allowed to foment. Europe suffers the consequences for America's rhetoric. The UK becomes a proxy target for anti-American attacks, when the phoney war on Islam is perpetuated.

Terrorism is just a phoney distraction. So few people are dying in terrorist attacks that it shouldn't even get any media attention. It's not relevant. It's counterproductive to spread terror for the terrorists.

I'm expecting to get shot down in a big way, for any number of reasons, in writing this piece. I'm not trying to be deliberately offensive. I'm not being insensitive. If you lost your mom in 9/11, I'm sorry, but I really don't think you personally know anybody who lost their life on that day. 0.0001% of the population were killed.

There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015. I should be far more worried about an American with a gun than an Arab with a bomb.

If we use this day for anything, perhaps it should be to reflect on how well the British and the Irish generally get along today. If ever there's an example of putting terrorism behind us, it must surely follow this model. I love the Irish. I don't see us as different. We were all Europeans, until Donald bloody Trump wandered into our debate and we voted to leave the EU.

The brave thing to do is to act irreverently. Don't allow the terrorists and the thought police to disseminate fear and mistrust.

Tags: #terrorism

This is a story about tiny fractions...

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. In theory, I'm 1/365th safer today than I am the rest of the year. By my calculations, 0.27% of the time, we are trying to prevent suicide. The other 99.73% of the time, we are not trying to prevent suicide.

There are various ways that we try and make suicidal people feel responsible, selfish and guilt tripped. "Nobody is responsible for your life except you" is something I often hear. This is plainly wrong.

Individualism has led to the collapse of local communities. Individualism has led to silent commuter trains, with everybody listening to their own music through their headphones. Individualism has led to unpleasant levels of competition, where we trample each other for the few jobs. We lie, cheat and steal, because we are all rodents in the rat race.

If we took collective responsibility for our suffering, then we could collectively bargain to improve our situation. With the power of the collective things can improve. As individuals, we are divided and ruled over by cruel elites who care nothing about the mental health epidemic and soaring suicide rates.

Suicide is everywhere.

Suicide is in our schools, where there is enormous pressure to achieve academically. Our exam grades will govern our future so we no longer have a childhood. Bullying is rampant, and it destroys the quality of life of children and drives them to self harm and suicide. Bullying is not getting better. Bullying is getting worse. Bullying was terrible when I was a kid, and unbearable. It must be unspeakably awful now. No wonder self harm, depression and anxiety affect so many children in school.

Suicide is in our workplace, where our jobs are insecure and hidden inflation means that our wages are shrinking in real terms. The steady increase in suicide rates, since the 2008 financial crisis, has now reached the point where it's the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 - 'breadwinners' in the prime of their life.

Suicide is in our homes, where thinking "at least I'm not a starving African" doesn't actually put food on the table and a roof over your head. Bills, debts, rent/mortgage and the many things that we need to live in Western society, are not going away with a few people saying "chin up" and "it can't be that bad... other people have it worse". We've been putting a brave face on everything for years, and some people reach breaking point.

To say that suicide is a selfish act is dumb. To say that suicide is running away from your responsibilities is dumb. To say that suicide is dumping a load of pain onto other people is dumb. In actual fact, a suicidal person has almost definitely been struggling with overwhelmingly awful and painfully intolerable feelings, for longer than you can even imagine. To ask them to continue to prop up the status quo any longer is selfish.

When a person reaches the point where they're attempting suicide, they've exhausted all avenues. When a person attempts suicide, they have taken responsibility for their own life. A person attempting suicide has tried everything that they have the means to change. They're out of ideas. They're out of energy. They've gone as far as they're able to go... on their own.

To make accusations that suicide is running away from problems, selfish, is why suicidal people feel so isolated and alone. Taking your own life is not something you do, surrounded by loving friends and family. Attempting suicide is done when you're all alone. Suicide is just you, and death.

You'd be surprised how people step back when you reach the point of considering the end of your own life. People don't want to be near you. People don't see you anymore. People shun you, like you're a leper, like you're a ticking time bomb.

You'd be surprised at how many days I've spent in hospital, all alone, no visitors. That hurts. That sends a message.

It's easy to put something on social media saying "you'd be missed if you died" but, seriously, how much does that really reconcile with that person's experiences? If you say you'd miss them, then when was the last time you actually took the time to see them? When was the last time you actually took advantage of the fact they're still alive?

It's a binary thing: people are either alive, or they're dead. There's no use saying "we didn't know what to do" when somebody's dead. There's a spectacular lack of discussion and action around improving the lives of people who are suicidal. Instead, there is an endless stream of trite platitudes, that you've heard over and over again.

Believe me, I've got plenty of perspective. All that "it isn't so bad" bullshit, and the "other people have it worse" bullying is the reason why we arrived at this state where suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45. Suicide kills 3 times as many men as it does women. Believe me when I say that I want to go to Africa and distribute food and clean water. Believe me when I say I want to pull Syrian children out of the rubble.

Aren't you all just being total dicks though, if you expect our most suicidally depressed people to be the ones acting charitably? Why should the mentally ill be doing good work, while everybody else just keeps making bombs to drop on Syria, and working jobs that economically enslave the developing world?

I've got plenty of perspective, and what I see is a selfish society. What I see is collective insanity, where we are working bullshit jobs. We're working jobs that actually destroy lives. What I see is a bunch of people whose mental health and will to live are being badly damaged, and a bunch more people who want things to stay the same or get even worse.

How bad does it have to get? Does it have to be your son or daughter who takes their own life before you get it?

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about trying to stay ahead of the game...

The Olympics and the Tour de France have been full of sportsmen and women using a variety of drugs to enhance their performance. Doping in sport became so widespread that it was virtually impossible to compete without performance enhancing drugs.

We think that competition is linked to sport and that athletes are naturally competitive, but in fact competition is present in every aspect of our daily lives.

You want an attractive girlfriend or boyfriend, right? The more universally appealing a person is, the more potential suitors are vying to try their luck. The 'hotter' somebody is, the more people are trying to hop into bed with them. Attractiveness means few genetic defects: looking flawless, perfect. The pre-programmed urge to reproduce with the healthiest person who'll have you, is the reason why you're alive today.

We all know that alcohol is a social lubricant. "Dutch courage" means that after a few drinks we are disinhibited, and we can overcome the social awkwardness of talking to the objects of our affection. When we're drunk we take that chance of rejection, leaning in and kissing somebody for the first time.

It's pretty clear that those who are intoxicated will be braver and less anxious about rejection and humiliation, than those sober singles who are nervously hoping to be asked to dance, and trying to muster the courage to chat somebody up. Therefore, there's a pressure to get drunk, and get your date tipsy, if you're hoping to couple off and copulate.

Cocaine gives artificial confidence. Cocaine makes people talkative, gregarious and removes their self-conscious awkwardness, shyness. We tend to be very attracted to confident and outgoing people. The pack alphas are naturally the most confident, and we want to mate with the alphas, not the betas. Royal families are inbred as hell, but every girl wants to marry a prince. Cocaine can help you to talk and act confidently, which makes you more attractive, and cocaine is very likely to bring the affections of potential mates.

So, it's pretty clear that in order to compete with other blokes eyeing up the skimpily clad girls on a night out, being tanked up on alcohol and having snorted a couple of lines of cocaine is going to give you the competitive edge. There's a high incentive to be intoxicated with alcohol and cocaine.

At work, many of us are mandated to work longer hours than we are able to do with our normal sleep/wake cycle. 54% of adult Americans drink coffee every day. Anecdotally, so many people say "I can't function without my morning coffee". It's quite commonplace for people to joke on social media about homicidal tendencies before they've had their fix of caffeine. Many a true word is spoken in jest.

Because so many office workers drink coffee, the working hours take this into consideration. Without coffee, the 9am start time would have to be 10:30am. Without coffee, those late nights in the office would be pointless, because nobody would be able to concentrate and stay awake.

Caffeine is a wakefulness promoting agent, and it's a concentration aid. Caffeine is great for concentrating on laborious boring repetitive tasks for long periods.

However, when nearly everybody is drinking coffee, it becomes a necessity for coworkers to drink it too, in order to match the office hours and concentration span of their colleagues. If your workmates spot your eyelids getting heavy, somebody is bound to suggest to you "can I get you a coffee?". Nobody is likely to say "maybe we should all go home early, not work such long hours and stop drinking so much damn coffee".

There is a huge incentive to drink tea, coffee and energy drinks at work, in order to compete for the pay rises and promotions, and not be seen as a weak member of the team.

We live in a culture that fuels depression and anxiety. The news bombards us with all of the world's problems in full gory high-definition detail. The economy is tanking and we have to live with job insecurity, skyrocketing housing costs and little hope of ever being able to collect a good pension, let alone have our kids able to expect a good education and be able to live on a planet that hasn't been destroyed by climate change. It's depressing as hell. It's stressful as hell.

Instead of trying to change the world around us and improve things, instead we have medicated ourselves in vast numbers. 61 million antidepressant prescriptions were written for 65 million people in the UK, in 2015. Most people will take powerful psychiatric medication at some point in their lives, whether that's sleeping pills, tranquillisers or antidepressants. The very sickest will have to take antipsychotics and mood stabilisers.

Our jobs are stressful, and we're fearful of losing our jobs. If we lose our jobs we'll lose our houses. If we lose our houses, we'll be homeless. The number of homeless people has soared by 80% in a single year in some parts of the country. There is plenty of reason to live in fear of destitution.

Doctors hardly have any time to speak to their patients, and they hardly have any budget to prescribe talk therapy, so people who are stressed out get sent away with tranquillisers. People who can't sleep get sent away with sleeping pills. People who are miserable, exhausted and can't cope get sent away with antidepressants. There's a pill for every ill, but it could be a sane reaction to an insane world, in a great many cases.

When so many people who you work with are insulated from the stressful and depressing nature of the work, and the way that capitalism is raping the natural world and enslaving the poor, it's easy to see how they are able to keep working, because they're drugged up to the eyeballs.

If your job, your house, your family and everything depends on you keeping your job, of course you're going to drug yourself up with happy pills so you can keep trudging along on the treadmill. Who can afford to have a nervous breakdown? Who can afford the risk of losing their job, to take time out to rest and recuperate? Who wants to let their bosses know that they can't cope with the stress, when everybody else seems to be doing OK?

There is peer pressure to put up with shit at work and not complain. Put up and shut up. Fit in or fuck off.

Because of the hyper-competitive work arena, of course we need to mask our mental health symptoms with pills, even if the underlying issue is a deep unease with the bullshit jobs and the negative effects on the world.

"Everybody's got to work"... but what if you're a debt collector? What if you're price gouging your customers who need their gas & electricity, so that you can make more money for your bosses? What if you're manufacturing weapons? Honestly, have a think about what you do for a job, and ask yourself if it's improving the human condition, or not.

Collectively, we should stop and say "this is madness". We can't sit here in the UK where the economy is 80% service industries, and say that what we're doing is productive and useful. It's impossible that we should need so many lawyers and accountants. It's impossible that we should need so many bankers. It's impossible that we should need so much software. It's impossible that we should sit here idly counting beans, while some poor person is out in the beating sun growing our food, earning $1.50 a day.

For sure you don't want to end up in the field picking fruit and vegetables for a pittance of a wage, but that doesn't mean you have to prop up the status quo.

Acting with your conscience and with ethics as an individual is likely to hurt nobody but you, but it's also harmful to you to load yourself up with performance enhancing drugs, simply so you can compete.

It's only in the spirit of non-competition that we can end the rat race and smash the tables of the money lenders and other idle social parasites. The parasite class need to be cast out from society. The parasite class are antisocial. The parasite class are making billions of people's lives miserable.

There's no way to win a rigged game. The only thing you can do is not lose, by not taking part.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #capitalism #politics #alcohol #caffeine

This is a story about feeling healthy...

If we score ourselves as 100% when we are feeling healthy, it may surprise you to learn that depression sufferers score themselves at 30% when they are depressed. Being depressed means not enjoying the things that you normally enjoy. Being depressed means feeling tired all the time.

There is a good amount of data to show that the richer we are, the more satisfied with life we are. Don't believe all that nonsense about how "the rich cry too". It's pointless propaganda. There is good hard data that shows that the more well off we are financially, the happier we are.

So, let's imagine this hypothetical situation.

I'm depressed at the moment because my well paid job is truly appalling. I'm earning a lot, but I don't get to spend it. I'm earning a lot because it's all going into a pot of money that I get to spend when I retire at age 65. It seems like the sensible thing to do is to save up for retirement. But is it?

Imagine that I take my dream job, which pays enough money for me to rent a shitty room in a shitty house, never save any money, but I can enjoy my life and have a nice time. I'll reach age 65, and then my health and wealth will be so f**ked that my 'wellness' score will drop to zero: I'll be as good as dead.

We can actually measure quality of life, and calculate which is the better strategy.

Let's imagine that quitting the rat race means I'm no longer depressed, but I'm a little bit stressed about money. Let's imagine that I'm not totally depressed, so my quality of life is currently 60% lower than what it would be if my mental health was perfectly normal. That means that my quality of life will improve from 40% to 90%, just by quitting my terrible job and going off to do something fulfilling that won't pay very well.

In the red part of the diagram above, you can see that I have a brilliant retirement, where I'm at 90% health, but my old age means that my body is starting to let me down. I have loads of money, so I'm having a great time, until I drop dead at age 75 from a heart attack because I had such a stressful and boring job, sat at a desk getting fat, unfit and miserable.

In the orange part of the diagram above, you can see that I have a brilliant time from age 37 to age 65. I grow old disgracefully, living a hand-to-mouth existence that's fairly free from grown-up responsibilities and sensible retirement planning. Without the millstone of a mortgage and a pension plan, my existence is fulfilled and hedonistic and I can have a brilliant time up until the day I'm too old to work.

As you can see, the "live for today" strategy scores 30 points, and the "live for tomorrow" strategy scores 20 points.

Using these hard numbers, you can see that I will have better quality of life not working in the rat race, even though it will leave me destitute and dying on the streets when I'm 65. I could literally kill myself on my 65th birthday, and I will have had a much better life than if I die 10 years later in wealth and comfort.

I kinda felt this intuitively, but it's good to see some hard numbers that confirm my hunch.

I hope I die before I get old.

Tags: #depression #career

This is a story about bang for your buck...

The churches have their tithes. The government have their taxes. The world has charities. It's pretty clear that these systems of wealth distribution and assistance for impoverished and vulnerable people, have spectacularly failed.

Tonight, I'm going to eat my dinner. Eating my dinner is something I want to do. Eating my dinner is something I enjoy. I get a kick out of eating my dinner.

So, why don't I start a Just Giving charity fundraising page, so that people can sponsor me to eat my dinner? You can sponsor me to go to work. You can sponsor me to go for a little jog around the park, having a lovely time waving at everybody. You can sponsor me to jump out of an aeroplane. You can sponsor me to abseil down a cliff. Even though you'll be donating to whichever charity I've chosen, it won't make any difference to the world.

You want to make a difference, right?

You buy Fairtrade coffee, bananas and chocolate. You recycle your bottles, plastic containers and cardboard. You give £10 a month via direct debit to the Red Cross. You throw your loose change into a collection bucket, when somebody jangles one in front of your face. You went to a pop concert one time, that was supposed to end poverty once and for all.

Maybe you work for a charity. Maybe you do volunteering. Maybe you organise bring & buy jumble sales. Maybe you bake cakes and sell them to raise money. Maybe it's you who is chugging the collection tins and getting people to reach for their wallets.

However, have you considered whether what you're doing is effective?

Clearly, whatever you're doing, it's not effective. Poverty is not history. In fact, wealth inequality is growing to unprecedented levels.

There are a number of ways we justify our inaction:

• "I do my bit"
• "I already give what money I can afford"
• "I already give what time I can spare"
• "I can't help everybody"
• "It won't make any difference. The world is a cruel place. Life is hard"
• "The world is overpopulated. Africans should stop having babies"
• "That's just the way things are"
• "We've got to look after our own"
• "Charity begins at home"

On closer examination, these beliefs are delusional, and only serve to prop up the status quo. All the reasons for inaction boil down to the same thing: "I'm not going to do any more until other people do too".

We are in a rat race. We are desperately trying to not lag behind the other rats in the race. We are desperately trying to keep up.

The mega wealthy race ahead, while our incomes stagnate. Since the 1980's the average wage increase has been just 40%, but for the wealthiest, their income has increased nearly 300%. As a proportion of their income, the wealthiest share less than ever. The wealthiest guard their income from taxation. The wealthiest spend a very small proportion of their income, meaning that it never enters the economy.

All humans need clothes. A poor person buys a £30 pair of jeans. 20% of the ticket price of those jeans is VAT, so the poor person paid £5 in tax. Let's say that the poor person earned £100 on the day that they bought the jeans. That means their effective tax rate was 5%, on clothes that they needed to buy. If a rich person bought the same pair of jeans, and they earn £1,000 a day, then their effective tax rate is 0.5% for the clothes that they need. A much smaller proportion of the rich people's income goes on essential items like food and clothing. As a proportion of their income, the amount of tax that the rich pay is tiny.

We can't afford the rich.

The rich are responsible for an expensive army and police force, in order to maintain the status quo and protect their wealth. The rich are responsible for deciding to bomb brown people to bits, in order to maintain conflict, to sell them weapons and stop them from ever reaching prosperity. If we let the brown people ever become prosperous, they might be unhappy about growing our food and manufacturing our goods, while we sit around idly doing nothing.

We spend more on 'defence' than on education.

If we were to spend more on education, then people would realise that our struggle is for nothing. Our labour contributes to nothing more than our own enslavement.

Capital growth, through effortless income from interest, dividends and increased asset prices, far outstrips our ability to earn money through work.

Our whole society is topsy-turvy. The old people who are dying are the ones who own all the dividend earning shares, through the pension funds. The old people who are dying earn all the property. The old people who are dying do not work, and they demand to earn money for no effort. The institutional investment managers who look after huge pension funds also do no work. Pension funds simply own huge portfolios of stocks & shares, interest bearing financial instruments and property. Instead of society being run to benefit our children, our workers, and protect the vulnerable, instead we toil so that an ever-growing number of retiring baby boomers can be idle.

I don't begrudge people some time off if they've earned it, but baby boomers are responsible for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, climate change, pollution, deforestation, war, famine, economic ruin, the end of free university education, no jobs, unaffordable housing and keeping politicians in power who are intent on destroying all life on earth. Instead of protesting at the planet being raped, these insufferable hippies sat around taking drugs and passed on all the problems to their grandchildren.

For me to teach a starving African to write computer code is ridiculous. The world doesn't need any more websites or apps. We've had programmable electronic computers for 60 years, and the world has become a more unequal place, still full of suffering and pain.

For me to volunteer at a soup kitchen is ridiculous. We are manufacturing homeless vulnerable people faster than we can feed them. The Salvation Army was founded in 1865, and there are still shamefully large numbers of people who are homeless and hungry.

For me to work for a charity is ridiculous. The charity model of fundraise & spend has completely failed. The church model of a tithe on our income has completely failed. The government model of taxation has completely failed.

We live in a pyramid scheme, and those at the top of the pyramid want to be idle and earn money effortlessly. There is no dignity in labour. Through work we only impoverish ourselves, because the wealthy get more wealthy while not doing any work. We expend our energy and the finite years of our life, but our wealth is eroded faster than we can earn money.

We shape ourselves in the image of those we are trying to keep up with. We imitate those who we aspire to be. We aspire to be wealthy, and in so doing, we protect our wealth from taxation and tithe. We believe we are being virtuous by being thrifty. We believe we are being smart by saving our money instead of spending it.

In actual fact, the financial system has broken down and fails to serve 99% of the people who are trapped within its confines.

The most effective thing that we can do to fight poverty, income inequality, injustice and the enslavement of the 99% is to campaign to flip the iceberg upside down. We can't afford the rich, and the plutocracy has to end. Our political system is overrun with public schoolboys who earn their money from trust funds and offshore investments, meaning that they pay nothing in tax. We can no longer be governed by people who don't play by the same rules as the rest of us.

The House of Commons was supposed to be a democratic instrument. The House of Commons was supposed to be representative of ordinary working people with a conscience, not Bullingdon Club Tory toffs who've only known a life of wealth and privilege.

I'm not waiting for my neighbour to be more generous before I decide to contribute more to the greater good. I'm looking for my opportunity to topple the cruel elites who have their snouts in the trough, greedily stuffing their ugly faces.

The most effective thing you can do with your time and your money? Campaign for political reform. Campaign for economic reform. Campaign for societal reform.

It makes no sense that the whole of the planet and 99% of humanity is there so that the baby boomers can have an idle retirement. If it was up to me, I'd ban the over 65s from voting until the climate and the economy start improving. You can't leave this kind of bullshit fuckup as a legacy, and expect to reap any rewards or have any say in a future that you ruined.

Here's my golden rule: leave things better than you find them, or else you are antisocial and you should be excluded from society.

Tags: #charity #politics #climate #capitalism

This is a story about being chewed up and spat out...

London might only be the 17th most expensive city in the world to live in, but it's still in the top 20. I call it home, and I have nowhere else I can saunter back to if things don't work out. Where would I go?

The work that I do demands that I have my bum on a seat in an office a stone's throw away from the Bank of England, 5 days a week. It's not like I'm one of those fabled tech workers who can just idly tap away on a keyboard from some remote location. I get paid to be in the same room as my colleagues, face to face. I need to be in London for my work. It's not like I could just pop into town for meetings. I spend at least 40 hours a week immersed in my job.

How bad do you want it?

In order to remain in London, I've slept on night busses, in parks, on heathland, in squats and in hostels.

Nobody is underwriting my risk. When things have gone wrong, it's meant homelessness. I don't mean the kind of homeless where you sleep on your friend's couch. I mean the kind of homeless where you're dirty and you're getting robbed in a park, freezing cold, snatching some fitful sleep in a bush.

Lots of petulant children will run away to London, get tired, hungry, dirty and find out that being homeless is pretty shit. They will slink off back to their families. I don't have that option. Homeless means homeless, in my case.

Sometimes being homeless means living in a dormitory with 15, 20 even 30 people, all snoring and farting. People come into the dorm and make a racket all night, and then they cause an almighty disturbance in the morning, as they fuck about with their luggage. Theft is a constant problem. People have taken my wallet out from under my pillow while I slept. None of your valuables are safe, even in the lockers, which are often prised open with crowbars. It's exhausting, being in such close proximity to so many other human beings, night & day, 7 days a week. It's relentless.

Sleeping in the parks and on heathland is welcome relief from the stress of having to live in such close quarters with other people. The weather is a problem though: fine summer evenings are all well and good, but rain and cold weather are miserable. Muggings and thefts are a nightly occurence, as well as fights and generally being preyed upon by other homeless and vulnerable people. To keep clothed and clean is hard enough, let alone keeping a few possessions safe.

When I was in the position where I knew that homelessness was a very real threat, I prepared. I would sit with homeless people and talk to them for hours, making notes on how to survive. I found out which night busses you could sleep on. I found out what the laws around squatting were. I learned how to spot overgrown back gardens of houses that were unoccupied, that could be used as campsites. I learned where the soup kitchens and Hare Krishna gave out free food. I learned how to spot friend from foe. I learned how to stay away from trouble. I learned where the cheapest hostels were. I learned how to stay reasonably clean and presentable, using showers in railway stations and such like.

A friend stayed one night in a youth hostel, and asked me where you could get a shower when you were homeless. He was clearly considering the possibility of homelessness, as if it was some jolly adventure, a silly fun game, When the day of reckoning came, his parents paid for him to go home and stay with them rent free. He knew which side his bread was buttered. His risk was underwritten. He didn't want to stay in London badly enough. He had backup options.

My backup option is a tent and a sleeping bag.

I've lived in doss houses, with 8 people in a room, all working black market jobs and spending all their money and spare time messed up on drugs. I've seen the grimmest possible working and living conditions. I've been bitten to death by bed bugs. I've experienced the cold and the damp of London's shittest accommodation, where people just about eke out an existence.

Now, I live in a lovely apartment, but it comes at a price. Not only is the rent extortionate, but I also have to drag myself into a job that I hate, 5 days a week. There are few words to describe just how incompatible my job is with my mental health. There is so little stimulation and challenge, that the hands of the clock seem almost stationary. I'm battling severe depression and 'recovering' from addiction. Do you think it's a great idea to be so alone with my thoughts, with no distracting tasks to hurl myself into? Do you think it's a great idea that I have to be a steady dependable worker, turning up on time and working all the hours, when my moods are unstable and I'm exhausted from all the stress and anxiety of getting myself off the streets and off the drugs?

It's a fucking miracle that I'm paying my rent, paying my bills, servicing my debts, working my job, pleasing my bosses, putting on my suit and looking like I've got my shit together.

I really haven't got my shit together, and I'm not taking passengers or carrying any dead wood, because I don't have the spare capacity to do that. It wasn't that long ago that I was hospitalised with the stress of it all. It's still a pretty desperate situation, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface.

What more do you want from me? What more can I give?

Why don't you get a job? Why don't you try working full time? Why don't you try taking responsibility and paying the rent, the bills and paying off your debts?

It sickens me that anybody would suggest that I could be doing something more fun and in line with my values. It's a joke that anybody suggests that I could take my foot off the gas, take some time out. How the fuck could I do that, when it's me who's the responsible one round here, holding down a job and paying the rent & bills.

Yes, it's OK if you can go back and live with your family. It's OK if somebody's there to pick up the pieces of your failed idle fantasies, when they don't work out. But a fuck up for me means homelessness and destitution. Nobody underwrites my risk.

It's not that hard though: get a fucking job and work it, or fuck off back to mummy. Don't hang around in my fucking home town, mooching off people and talking about your grand plans, when really you're just sponging off those who are genuinely working hard. I'm sick of the bullshitters.

I know the difference between those who are genuinely industrious and hardworking, and those who expect to get paid for nothing. I know the difference between those who are genuinely facing homelessness and destitution if they don't get off their backsides and work their way out of a bad position, and those who have a comfortable position to fall back on, if they hit [not very] hard times.

My charity seems to have attracted more than a couple of idle wasters, but thankfully, I also have some other people who recognise that I'm vulnerable and can be taken advantage of. I'd go mad if I didn't have the counsel of true friends, who can tell me the truth, when people are looking for a free ride at my expense.

I don't mind giving people a chance. I don't mind taking a risk. I don't tend to lend more than I can afford to lose. Everybody deserves a break.

I would never ask anybody to work harder than I'm prepared to work myself.

But, if you don't share in the risk, you don't share in the reward.

Tags: #homeless #london

This is a story about earning money...

In the agricultural revolution, the scythe, the plough and the mill brought about greater productivity in our fields, and put more bread in our bellies. In the industrial revolution, the steam engine, the foundry and great big machines brought about greater productivity in our factories, and put shoes on our feet. In the information revolution, the spreadsheet, email and meetings have brought about greater productivity in our offices, and put zeroes on the end of the bank balances of the mega wealthy.

The average return on capital is exceeding the growth rate. This means that no matter how hard you work, the rich will get richer and poor will get poorer. If you are already wealthy, you will grow more wealthy, but for the rest of us our wages are falling in real terms.

"The triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism is largely illusory.” -- Thomas Piketty

It's a depressing situation, but sadly it's true. We are now living in the era of the supermanager. The remuneration for those at the top of the pyramid is completely unhinged and insane. There is absolutely no way that the eye-watering salaries demanded by top executives, in any way reflects their productivity. In fact, quite the opposite.

The National Health Service (NHS) has spent billions on re-organisation. The NHS is drowning under a sea of managers, while front-line services are cut back.

The reason why economic growth is stagnant, is because productivity is an illusion. When nearly everybody is a manager, hardly anybody is actually doing any work.

Managers only do three things:

1. Any good news from their team, they just forward to their boss
2. Any pressure / demands / requests / questions from their boss, they just forward to their team
3. They think up ways to justify their jobs

A manager has a lot of time to dream up creative ways of wasting everyone's time, because they don't actually do any work. A manager needs to look busy, so they come up with all kinds of time-wasting scams and schemes in order to justify their pointless existence.

Microsoft have actually cottoned on to the fact that there is a giant army of middle managers, who do nothing but forward emails up and down the chain of command. In the email program Microsoft Outlook, there are actually buttons that make it even easier to just forward good news to your boss, and to forward other requests and things to your team. I literally just need two buttons to do my job. I don't even have to do any typing.

People don't like doing the typing.

Everything's a copy & paste job. Being a manager has become a job of forwarding emails and sitting in meetings because you're bored. If you feel really pointless, you can do a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to bore the shit out of everybody. Nobody writes concise emails that everybody can dutifully ignore because they're pointless noise.

There are a few idealistic young employees - unpaid interns - who do all the work, which is then re-hashed as it works its way up through the ranks of middle management. Every layer of management is careful to remove any reference that would give credit to the person who actually did the work. Managers pass things off as their own effort, although secretly they know that they don't actually do anything.

This is so much worse than Imposter Syndrome. Most managers are actually imposters. They're there for the comfy seat, free coffee, warm office and hefty pay packet at the end of the month.

It's no wonder that lean startups are actually able to deliver great things: they're unencumbered by the valueless people who try to add value when actually they do nothing of the sort.

Trying to get a decision out of the chain of command is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Managers know that the only way they're going to get fired is if they make a decision that turns out to be wrong. The easiest way to be secure in your job is to avoid taking decisions. The very managers who were hired to be executives - high-powered decision makers - are actually avoiding ever making a decision, in case it ends up reflecting badly on them. No manager has the guts to actually make a decision and face the potential consequences. Middle managers are experts in avoiding all responsibility.

We now have an office culture, completely dominated by a kind of 'pass the parcel' children's game. Everybody knows that things are going badly because nobody is doing any work and nobody is making any decisions or showing any kind of leadership. Instead, the buck gets passed round and round, as everybody tries to blame everybody else, and avoid any responsibility themselves. Often, it's the very people who are too busy doing the actual work who get blamed, because they didn't have the time to play the silly game and cover their arses.

You can be assured that when things go wrong, the blame will trickle down, until some poor sod on the front line is criticised for not staying on top of a totally unreasonable workload. Some poor scapegoat will be blamed, because they made a minor error, through exhaustion and stress.

What's remarkable is how few 'executives' actually face the chop themselves, when everything screws up. You would have thought that the whole point about receiving a big salary would be because you were the one taking responsibility, and therefore you would be to blame when things go wrong. However, there is absolutely no corporate accountability. It is the workers who are held accountable by their managers, because the workers are too busy to spend time justifying their existence and covering their arses.

The most profitable thing of all is to sit idle, on a pile of money. You can never make a mistake if you simply earn interest on your capital. There's nothing ventured at all, when your wealth is growing simply because you own the casino. House always wins.

If you have wealth, if you have success, if you have an audience and fame, then you can leverage it to become even more wealthy. What - pray tell - is the innovative business idea behind Keeping Up With the Kardiashians? Presumably, some family who are completely lacking in wealth and fame would also like to be highly paid to be featured on reality TV? However, it is only those who already have wealth who are given the opportunity to make more wealth.

This era of low growth and wealth worship is absolutely destroying society. The economy is run for a tiny elite with unimaginable wealth, while the vast majority struggle in dead-end careers that are stressful and boring.

Middle management is just a position in the lower order of the entourage of the oligarchs, royalty and fat cat plutocrats. Middle managers have bought into the belief that they are going to succeed in the capitalist's pyramid scheme. Organisation charts give the belief that you are 'only' a certain number of layers of management from being the CEO, but it's a con, because each layer of middle management expands the base of the pyramid by a factor of 10.

Organisations have now started to throw around job titles like "Vice President" and "Managing Director", and there are even CEOs who are not actually CEOs. An organisation like HSBC might have hundreds of "CEO"s amongst their 230,000 staff. It's just a bullshit job title given away to make somebody think they're getting ahead in the game.

The fact of the matter is that while we toil in the hope of a promotion and a pay rise, we are wasting our time because we are becoming de-skilled and institutionalised. Our grandfathers could build houses and fix mechanical things. Our office-based service industry economy has left most people unable to even change a lightbulb.

Come the revolution, when there are power cuts and the Internet stops working, how much use are your skills in forwarding emails?

The middle managers might be able to justify their jobs today, and are attempting to stuff as much money in the mattress as possible, but it won't be enough. Even property deeds, policing and the rule of law won't matter when the masses rise up in anger at having been oppressed for too long. Even soldiers are feeling the economic squeeze, and will be unwilling to turn their guns on their own people, in order to protect the plutocrats.

The unwillingness to address income inequality and share the wealth can only lead to popular uprisings.

Tags: #capitalism #career #banking #politics

This is a story about quotations...

I live a fairly isolated existence. Work, sleep & eat. None of my friends live very nearby, and I'm in a strange part of London that you'd probably only visit if you were working in Canary Wharf.

Of course, I'm not short of ideas for what I could do with my leisure time - if I had any - in order to get a bit of a social life going again. If I had the time and the money, I could be having plenty of fun. It's just that it's hard to do that when I'm so drained from working a full time job that's utter bullshit. Most of the time I can't even handle speaking to people on the telephone. I just want to be left alone to compose my thoughts and try to unwind, in the few waking hours where I'm not trapped at my desk.

On a Wednesday night, I go to the pub with a friend. We have 3 pints of weak continental lager and put the world to rights, sitting in the beer garden. It's lovely.

Every so often, a friend will chat to me on Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. That is also nice. I stayed up chatting until 3am on Friday night / Saturday morning.

From these chats, I often take away lovely things that were said, to treasure.

A psychiatrist once said to me "we can only play the cards that we are dealt" and when I was struggling with accusations that I was weak and that I was making up mental health problems, attention seeking and all kinds of horrible blame and stuff being thrown at me, it was a lovely nonjudgemental thing to hear.

Having been labelled as some kind of devil child by my parents, or subjected to relentless abuse by my ex-wife, it's been such a relief to have some kinder points of view at long last.

"Anybody who has a second kid after a 10 year gap is just looking for a free babysitter"

I love my sister to bits, but I could never understand why we couldn't be siblings. Why did I have to be so mature? Why was I - a child - chided for being childish? So fucking ridiculous.

My friend who pointed out how ridiculous it is to have such a big age gap between kids, also pointed out that it's healthy to have your kids play together, keep each other company. It's really boring and lonely playing on your own while your parents are getting drunk and taking drugs. Sure, I can entertain myself. Sure, I have a good imagination. Sure, I can sit down and work on a project in total isolation from all social stimulation. However, those first 10 years of my life shaped me into somebody who assumes that I never get to keep any friends, because my parents kept yanking me out of school to go traipsing all over the fucking place. Parents, I assumed, were just people who sat around lazily - off their fucking heads - and never wanted to play with me.

I ingratiated myself with other families, and spent far more time immersed in their family life than my non-existant own. I knew that something was inherently wrong at home. I could see the differences in our home lives. I could see how things were supposed to be: brothers and sisters playing together, being kids, but I was always just a visitor in those lives.

There's a lot of important social development that goes on in the first 7 years of a child's life. It's hardly like I'm selfish and never learned how to share or play nice with others, but I certainly don't feel any security in relationships. I'm completely mistrustful of all friendships. I assume that everything is just transitory, fleeting, superficial.

"[Your parents] have to protect their own self image. No way will they say [they] fucked up.

[Your mother] will occasionally drunkenly exclaim "oh it's all my fault!"

But it's attention seeking and the response sought is "of course it isn't".

They just get so entrenched in their own self serving view of what happened"

It's exhausting, being expected to prop up your parents bullshit view of the world. I wondered why I would feel so drained from a visit to see my parents, or a phonecall, and it's because they've not been working to raise a healthy happy child. They've been working to try and cover up and bury their guilt for being drugged up alkie fuckups.

I've been expected to work so hard on keeping up appearances. It's bullshit. It's ground me down. I've had enough. Hence this blog, and the full disclosure of the bullshit I've put up with.

It is remarkable how many people have gotten in contact to say their mothers are/were functional alcoholics too. It's remarkable how many parents there are out there who think they're some kind of aristocracy who get to palm their kids off on the hired help, and then swan off doing their high society bullshit. Except that they don't have any hired help so in fact the kids simply get palmed off on the state schools and other families that are more loving and welcoming.

Sure, you could accuse me of being a manchild. An overgrown baby.

I refuse to just bottle this shit up. Sure, it might be a case of arrested development. It might be a case of a bunch of stuff that supposedly I could just get over. How? How am I supposed to move forward?

I got to today, and to some outward appearances it looks like I've got my shit together, but clearly all that happened is that I did grow up, man the fuck up, put a brave face on stuff and generally just get on with it. However, it doesn't seem to have taken away the need to actually feel loved and cherished for a little bit. Maybe this is a bit spoiled princessy, I don't know. I'm just trying to purge these feelings and get to a point where I want to go on living.

It was super nice when a lovely family in Ireland took me in for some desperately needed shelter from the disintegration of my life. Just being in a loving family home - even if it wasn't my own - has kept me going.

Actually, thinking about it recently, I thought how much it would upset that lovely Irish family, to know that they helped me and that I ended up taking my own life anyway. Even if it was only a few weeks that I spent in their home, I'm still acutely aware that they deserve better than any implied ingratitude for their help.

But, I'm still missing enough regular social contact. What I get is great, and I'm super grateful to those friends who drop by, suggest meeting up, email me and contact me on messenger. It does keep me limping along.

My hope is, that as I start to get on top of the debts I ran up just staying alive, I will loosen the purse strings and start to take a risk in thinking about some work that might be more rewarding. There's no way that I can dare to dream at the moment, because I simply have to knuckle down and put money in the bank, even though it's soul-destroying and I hate it.

To reach November sounds like no time at all, but I think that only takes me to zero. It'll be the depths of winter. Perhaps my work contract won't be renewed. I'll have 11 months left on a 12 month rent contract, with my flatmate already 4 months in rent arrears and not having paid any bills for as long as I can remember. It's quite a lot of pressure.

I'm setting myself these little goals and breaking up the blocks of time. It was friends who encouraged me to take some time off here and there, but it prolongs the suffering.

It's easy to dream up a million different things I might do when I reach breakeven, but it feels so far away, even if it isn't when you're happily just chugging through your healthy fulfilling and stimulating life.

I'm loathe to upset the apple cart. There are a couple of bridges that are worth leaving unburnt. I'm probably not even in debt enough to declare bankruptcy at the moment, but it doesn't take long for the circling vultures to put you in the shit again. You have to run just to stand still. I just can't stand the bullshit of the rat race. I just can't stand the relentless pressure to pay money just to be alive, breathing.

I'm trying to string together all the sporadic social contact I have, and use all the little messages of support, to limp myself along.

At some point, I can imagine that I will look back and laugh, while also cringing with embarrassment, about just how much I've moaned and complained. In retrospect, the pain and discomfort will be quickly forgotten, and I'll wonder why I was making such a big fuss. Either that, or I won't actually make it.

It has been a long time that I've been dealing with depression. It has been a long time that I've been dealing with suicidal thoughts. I'm grateful when my friends give me a reality check, but also, I do have to still go home at some point and face facts. It's great to talk about this or that amazing venture, but the fact is that bills still have to be paid, debts have to be serviced, people still want their pound of flesh.

It must be hard on my friends, because I have good physical health, skills that are in demand, no dependents and plenty of other advantages in life. I'm quite pleased that only a very small handful of my friends have trotted out the old adages of "be grateful you have a job" etc. etc.

I get quite a lot of "chin up" and "look on the bright side" which is OK because I know people mean well when they say it, and it's a common mistake to make. It's not even a mistake, because it does show that people care, which is nice and helpful.

Probably the most fruitful discussions I'm having at the moment have been around how it's OK to be upset about things. We try so hard to put a brave face on things and pretend that everything's OK, that we perhaps don't even admit to ourselves how close we are to snapping. "A right to be angry" is something I never explored before.

There's just all this societal pressure to be grateful. But that whole gratitude argument breaks down when your life becomes sheer depressed misery. What am I supposed to be grateful for, if life is miserable? Am I supposed to want more misery? Am I supposed to be excited to have another 30 or 40 years of misery to look forward to?

It's easy to extrapolate from my position, today, trapped into a horrible corner. But, what's the alternative? The 'dream' job that will lead me to financial problems and bankruptcy because I can't afford the cost of living and I can't repay my debts? Quitting the rat race, that will lead me to social exclusion and being spat on in the street by people who think I'm a worthless bum? A life on benefits where I'm despised by ignorant mean selfish shits, who tell me to "get a job" and think I'm a scrounger?

It's actually pretty hard and pretty scary, thinking about starting over again when you're not in the first flush of youth. It's pretty challenging, rebuilding your social life and getting the people around you again that give you enough love and support to make your life liveable again.

I know I need to try harder to reconnect with friends. I need to travel to see people. I need to put myself out there. I need to invite myself into people's lives.

Perhaps things will be different once I've broken through the psychological barrier of this work/debt problem that I'm suffering at the moment.

Tags: #friends #parents #childhood