This is a story about the decision to end your life...

No matter what stupid inspirational quote memes say, we don't get to "choose" to be happy. We are ruled by our moods, not vice-versa. Perception is an illusion. The glass half empty person is just as correct as the glass half full person, and neither gets to choose their perspective on the world.

There's an enormous amount of pressure to look on the bright side, be happy & upbeat, to keep problems bottled up inside and to be uncomplaining. Anybody who speaks up is criticised for being a whiney crybaby, negative and a killjoy.

I spent the best part of 8 years with a partner who used to throw a tantrum whenever things didn't go her way. My argument in this essay is that logical despair is different.

If you've spent much time with me, you'll know that I'm pretty calm and pragmatic even in stressful situations. If you've been with me when things have been going wrong or getting stressful, you'll hopefully know that I am that positive upbeat person, who tries to find the silver lining in every cloud.

It's interesting to me that I'm writing - right now - in a position where I am feeling more positive than I have done all week. This is temporary, because I don't have to go to work tomorrow.

"Why don't you just quit your job if it's so boring, and it's making you so miserable and depressed?" I hear you ask.

Well, guess what? You've got to pay to play. Even for me to live in a hostel bed or take a cheap lodging in a house, is going to cost me circa £500 per month. What about travel? What about food? You have to run just to stand still.

So maybe I could get myself some government benefits that would help with my housing costs and give me a little money with which to survive? I'm certainly eligible. Even though I have worked for a few months here and there, my mental health is so wrecked by the stress and the rat race, that the ensuing depression destroys any chance of stability. My life yo-yos up and down like crazy. I swing from earning money and appearing to have my shit together, to then being barely able to leave the house, the bedroom, the bed.

I can't imagine anything much worse than having a government handout that's inadequate to live on, and slipping deeper and deeper into problems. Welfare looks like an agonisingly slow death, with no hope of escape. The Conservative government has found that cutting welfare benefits has been very popular with their ignorant smug arrogant wealthy voters, and have plunged a great many vulnerable people into a position of unbearable stress and financial insecurity.

"What about getting your dream job?" I hear you ask.

Well, let's explore a couple of examples.

There's an IT position at a mental health charity currently on offer here in London. I would be both experienced and qualified to work that job, and it's also doing important work that is in line with my values. The salary is £28,000 per annum. That's a take-home pay of £1,850.

In London, it generally costs around £700 a month to rent an absolutely terrible room in an absolutely terrible apartment. £700 a month will mean that you don't have a lounge. £700 a month will mean that you'll spend your whole time in your bedroom. I guess that'd only be 38% of my income... so not so bad?

What do you dream of for the future? Would you like to get married, have kids, own your own home? Well... that's not going to happen on £28,000 per annum. Assuming that you could save up a 5% deposit, that would be £25,000 for an average price London home of £494,000. Normally, you can only borrow a multiple of 3.5 times your salary, which is less than £100,000. The sums just don't add up.

So, the answer is to leave London, right? Well, London is my home. London is where I live. London is also where the jobs are. If there's a job for £28,000 in London, just think how little that job would pay outside of London. The 'dream' jobs probably only exist in London. Most head offices are in London.

Perhaps I could be a writer, surviving off Patreon donations? J. L. Westover produces these great comics, but doesn't even make $500 a month. You can't live on $500 a month.

Although I'm very much fixating on the financial and work aspects of life, really, why wouldn't I concentrate on those? I'm going to hand over the remaining best years of my life to somebody else, in return for money that I then just put straight into the hands of those who own the land and the means of production. It would be OK if life was somehow liveable, but it's not.

I can't go part-time, because it's simply not permitted for a single man to do it. There are hardly any women doing the job I do anyway. It would just blow the minds of my employers if I said they needed to let me work part-time. It would not compute. They would not know how to cope. The message is simple in the jobs that I do: fit in or fuck off.

So, the kind of 'part-time' that I do, is to work for as long as I can, and then have a breakdown.

I'm exhausted. I'm so very exhausted from repeated cycles of destruction and salvation. It's exhausting getting to the limit of your credit facilities, and then having to drag yourself through yet another health-destroying stint of bullshit. It's exhausting having your bank balance emptied, just staying alive, and your morale and sense of happiness emptied, just to keep paying rent and bills.

Why do I do it? Who am I helping? What am I improving?

The wealth that I generate certainly doesn't disappear. I genuinely do work very hard indeed. Why do I never see the fruits of my labour?

Well, the system is a con. The free market will ensure that prices are always set at a level where most people have to keep slaving away in dead end jobs. We are consumption machines. Sure, you can stop buying pointless material goods, but are you going to go homeless and starve? Even homelessness is being criminalised. It's a crime to be alive and not work some bullshit job. It's a crime to be using up oxygen and looking at the view, without helping the rich get richer. There's a tax on life.

I'm so ground down by it all.

It's not just a chemical imbalance in my brain that's causing me to feel depressed and hopeless. Genuinely, what's the best that I can hope for? That I retire rich, but I'm old and my health is destroyed? That I quit the rat race, but I'm spat upon by people in the street and told "get a job you lazy bum"? That I claim welfare benefits from government drones who hate my guts and call me a worthless scrounger behind my back. That I put myself at the mercy of a Conservative government who would rather see me kill myself because it's cheaper?

Office work is as deadly as smoking, according to a paper published in The Lancet. Perhaps I just need to join a gym? Yep... that costs money. If I'm earning £28,000 in my dream job, that gym membership will delay me in saving up the £394,000 I need in order to be able to buy a house. It should only take me about 40 years, assuming that house price inflation drops to 0%.

People are literally being bored to death. Being bored at work has been proven to lead to an early death. People are even starting to sue their employers for a 'bore out' where they are left virtually brain dead, depressed and unable to work because of the soul-crushing agony of working a ridiculously boring bullshit job.

For sure, I can suffer in wage slavery for as long as I can bear it, and then take time away from the rat race. However, that sprint and coast behaviour is exactly the kind of thing that exacerbates my mood disorder. What could be more bipolar than having to do some depressing mental health and wellbeing destroying months and years of boring bullshit, and then being released to enjoy some temporary freedom.

There's a mad panic when I'm suddenly released from the anchor chains that have been weighing me down. I rush around at breakneck pace, trying to pack as much into the time as possible, before the dreaded day comes around again that I have to go back to my bullshit day job.

That dread is the thing that rules my life at the moment.

I reach Friday, and I should be relieved and happy that it's the weekend, but instead I drink myself into oblivion because it's taken every ounce of resolve just to limp through the working week. On Saturday - today - I have a strange feeling of calm. Momentarily, I forget about how fucking awful my life is. I almost feel positive and upbeat. On Sunday, the existential dread starts to grow. What am I doing? Why am I trapped in this motherfucking cycle? Why can't I escape? On Monday, I want to run away and become a homeless person, hunted by Shylocks looking for their pound of flesh, or else just kill myself to end the horrible cycle and endless pain.

You're probably thinking this:

"Everybody hates their job"

Yeah? Well, why don't you get your dream job then? Why don't you follow your dreams and your passions? Also, how destructive has the cycle of bullshit been in your life? Have you been hospitalised due to suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts? Have you been homeless and destitute?

Sleeping on your mate's couch does not count as homeless.

For sure, I'm a reasonably smart and resourceful person. I've come up with loads of scams and schemes to make money over the years. But what you've got to understand is that it's exhausting, stressful and risky to undertake some new venture.

Somebody has to pay the rent and the bills every month. Presently, I seem to have subsidised at least 3 people to work on their dreams at my own personal expense. People live in my apartment, use my electric, gas, water and internet, not paying rent, going after their own little slice of happiness, and I'm the one who picks up the bill at the end of every month. I'm the fucking sensible one. I'm the one who makes sure there's enough money in the bank that we don't all end up living on the streets. I've lived on the streets. It's hard to come back from that one.

I'm not doing the whole working for the biggest bank in Europe on the number one project while homeless thing again. It was exhausting and stressful.

I'm fed up of being promised shit and let down.

I'm fed up of being taken for a ride.

I'm fed up of fuckups telling me how to live my fucking life while they benefit from my charity.

Yes, a friend once took me in when I was down on my luck and going through my divorce. I offered to pay rent and he declined. I paid bills when I was there. I also helped my friend to make some profitable investments, which netted him a couple of sizeable cash lump sums.

I'm not a fucking mug. I can't go through life buying lottery tickets.

I've done a rational analysis of the economic framework that I'm trapped within, and it's incompatible with my mental health. Society doesn't want my kind of crazy to be alive. There's no place for me in the world.

I could limp along in the gig economy, living some kind of hand-to-mouth existence. I could move to some cheap part of the country, or the world. I could try and eke out an existence, in some damp cave or perhaps die of an infected wound in some remote wilderness.

Of course my ideas are naïve and romanticised and unrealistic and incredibly black & white, all or nothing.

The problem is that I'm not wrong. I'm smart enough to have done the analysis. I've gathered the data. I've got the experience.

Do what you love and get dicked over, be financially insecure and never be able to follow your dreams, because you're already following your dreams, right? I mean, why should a nurse get to look after patients and buy a house and not live with crippling debt, right?

Do what pays the bills, and you'll be old and nearly dead by the time you get to enjoy it, if you don't die of stress related illness and the health damage from your sedentary office bullshit job before you even get to the point where you can quit the rat race.

In a way, this crisis has come about because I already ticked everything on my bucket list. I decided that life was lived backwards, and it made no sense to be doing adventure sports when you're old and your bones break easily and take a long time to heal.

It's no tragedy, to end my life because I'm exhausted and sick of the bullshit. All I have ahead of me is health problems and death. In the long run, we're all dead anyway.

Prolonging the agony only serves to make the rich even richer. I have deep-seated moral objections to being part of the problem when I can't be part of the solution. I find it indefensible to say that I was just doing what everybody else was doing, following orders, sticking with the crowd and being part of the herd.

The more I stick around on the planet, the more chance there is that I will accidentally spawn some infants who will inherit a dying world, and a broken system that enslaves people into bullshit jobs that bore them to death. Life is not a gift I want to share. Life is a curse I want to break.

It's strange writing these words when I'm not even in the very worst depths of despair. It's nice to feel that I'm being a little more logical, and less pulled by the emotional torment of the working week.

Yes, at the small scale, it looks ridiculous. What does a few more months or years matter? Stick with it. Things can change.

But the reality is that I've been around the block a bunch of times. Been there, done that. I've actually experienced a whole heap of jobs in a whole heap of industry sectors. I've experienced all kinds of cultures. I've tried to forge my way through life all kinds of different ways. Fundamentally, there is an incompatibility between what I find acceptable and sustainable, and the way the river is flowing. I can't swim upstream forever. I can't fight the onrushing floods.

It seems only logical to give up at some point.

Tags: #suicide #depression #career #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about being a writer...

I can hear the sound of a pencil snapping. I can hear the gnashing of teeth. I can hear the foam frothing at the mouth. I sense the fingers, poised over the keys, ready to launch into an angry tirade against me.

"You're not a proper writer"

You're right. I'm not.

I don't get paid to write. I don't answer to an editor. I'm not dependent on anybody else to decide whether the work that I produce is worthy of publishing.

So much of what I write is unworthy of publishing.

I wrote an eBook earlier in the year. In fact, I stayed up all night writing 12,000 words in one marathon sprint, because a literary agent had asked to see the first few chapters of a book I was planning on writing. It was total garbage and I'm ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed of the crap that I produced.

In my defence, I was in the middle of a crisis. I had been sick for several months and I wasn't able to pay my rent. I couldn't face re-entering the rat race. My flatmate had offered to make introductions in the book world - he's well connected - and it seemed to make sense to my exhausted and drug-addled mind at the time. I would get an advance from a publisher and then write a book. Simple!

I really don't think that you can write a high quality work of literature when you're burnt out, depressed and you're on a comedown from the best part of 3 months of drug abuse. I cringe at what I wrote and who I shared it with, even though it was semi-coherant and just about readable.

The concept behind this blog is sound: it's a place where I can get the jumbled up things that are racing around inside my head into some structured form. I've tagged everything so that I can go back later and edit things. The reason why it's done publicly is so that it's not an isolating and lonely exercise. I not only have to tell the stories of the past, but I need to weave in the thoughts and feelings that threaten to derail me in the present day. In so doing, I'm able to keep moving forwards.

The concept behind the book I hope to eventually write is sound. The world has plenty of happily ever after tales, fantasies and fiction. When I have been unwell, what I have found to be in short supply has been well written tales about navigating and surviving the underworld of mental health services, hospitals, government agencies, living on the streets and drug addiction. Who are you, if that doesn't match the demonised images we have of the junkie, the hobo and the madman?

We love it when mild-mannered Clark Kent tosses aside his geeky glasses and tears open his shirt, to reveal a superhero lurking underneath an unassuming veneer. Plenty of rich bankers snort cocaine in the toilets, but how many people can say they've been all the way to the bottom and back up again? Those who are 'in recovery' keep their dark past shrouded in secrecy and anonymity. We are so fearful of our reputations being tarnished and us becoming unemployable, that authentic stories are in short supply, unless you want to join the Alcoholics Anonymous cult.

What I've written to date is full of bitter angry rants, blame and finger-pointing, lamentations about what might have been and endless repetition of the pain I feel over things I can't fix.

While what I've written is too unwieldy and repetitive, and filled with harsh words directed at my perceived persecutors, it's about as honest and candid version of a "stream of consciousness" text as you're likely to find.

Many people consider themselves to be 'curators' and prefer to share links and quotations. So many texts will be peppered with the references to the source text that informed the author, as if we wouldn't believe what was written without such things. I like to think that what I write is original content, but of course I have my influences. Of course I will be falling into the pitfall that every 'new' writer must also do, which is to think themselves original also, while producing very much the same work as those who went before them.

The main reason why I'm not a writer - aside from the fact that I never attended some creative writing course - is that I don't get paid by anybody else to write. I'm my own patron. I'm not writing for advertising revenue. I'm not writing for royalties. I'm not writing to impress my editor. Writing is a job I'm told. Well, that must suck.

I wrote a piece that I thought would be popular, and published it. It was popular. It was really depressing just how popular it was. I decided that I would stop writing for me, and write something that I thought other people would like. They really liked it. That depressed the hell out of me.

I absolutely loathe my day job. I feel unbearably compromised in my life, because I have to spend 40 hours a week bored out of my mind, trapped somewhere I don't want to be. However, I'm well paid and I do have enough spare time to write a lot. I'm not happy about this, you understand? But it's an arrangement that works a hell of a lot better than being completely flat broke, and also having to write crap that somebody else thinks is a good idea.

I guess I have no artistic compromise at the moment. Soon, perhaps I will have the time, energy and good health to write the book that I want to write. Although the fear that it may be rejected by the gatekeepers - the literary agents and publishers - means that I would be more likely to write something popular than authentic, which isn't the point at all.

It's important to me that I get to tell at least one story in a coherent way, well edited and with a dedicated investment of time, to produce a piece of work that can be easily picked up and read by anybody.

Arguably, at the moment I have something better: a living document that is also an invitation for people to collaborate. I'm literally begging the world to reach out and connect with me, by sharing my very innermost thoughts and feelings, darkest memories, worst fears, frustrations and my hopes & dreams.

I know I have gone rather off-piste at times, and I regret the period circa mid-December 2015 to the start of April 2016, but it's still an interesting record of my messed up brain and horrible consequences of what was going on at that time, which can be read in-between the lines of those blog posts.

Now I feel I am writing with fluidity and perhaps a little too much verbosity, but at least it's hopefully clear that my mind is now unclouded and my mental health is markedly improved, even if I'm desperately depressed and suicidal.

That sounds like a contradiction, but I do feel that I'm my truest version of myself that I can remember being for a long time. The depression and suicidal thoughts are very clearly linked to how trapped I am in a situation that feels desperately unpleasant.

Yes, it would be easy to point at my well paid contract, my lovely apartment and the fact that in a couple of months my debts will be paid off and I'll be free again. But, I feel like I already have everything I want: all I want to do is sit and write. The day job is a horrible distraction from the thing I really want to be doing: writing.

Who knows where it goes from here. It certainly doesn't seem like the right economic climate to be giving up a good job to enter into a highly competitive arena that's notoriously badly paid. However, perhaps I've already arrived, because I just about have the means to bootstrap myself.

I'm very grateful to both friends and strangers who have encouraged me in saying that they think I could write professionally, but perhaps I already do. I certainly put zero effort into my day job, and I'm putting every bit of spare time and energy I can into writing.

Perhaps writing will never pay the bills ever again, because of the willingness of people like me to 'work' for 'free'.

To me, writing does not feel like 'work' and neither is it 'free' because I do get an enormous kick out of the feedback I receive. Writing is immensely rewarding. Not in terms of money I could use to pay my rent and bills, but in terms of making a tangible contribution to people's lives and having that validated in the things that they tell me and the conversations that it starts.

Perhaps I'm going to stop calling myself an IT consultant and start calling myself a writer, given that it's where the bulk of my time and effort is invested.

What do you think?

Can I call myself a writer yet?

Tags: #writing

This is a story about clock watching...

In 3 weeks' time I celebrate a year of blogging [almost] every day as well as 6 months 'clean' (whatever that means). I'll have pretty much proven my point that stress, anxiety, depression, hypomania, addiction, homelessness, destitution, social isolation and every other ailment that threatens every single one of us, can be swept under the carpet.

My life is hideously painful: basically, Fuck My Life.

Nothing has any purpose or any meaning. To volunteer at a soup kitchen makes a mockery of everything, if the vital exercise of feeding the homeless is seen as a fucking hobby. To spawn children because it's fulfilling to nurture things, is to ignore the fact that there are already plenty of hungry mouths, the planet is fucked and existence is pain and suffering.

I'm going to continue until the 21st of September, keeping everything the same, in the hope that my depression will somehow lift. I doubt that my mood will improve without medication, or impoverishing myself by setting myself on collision course with destitution and homelessness again. Who wants to be functional in a dysfunctional society?

On the 21st of September, I have to make a choice: whether to continue for another couple of months, to possibly reach financial security and wealth again. Would loosening of the purse strings and retail therapy make life more palatable? It's distasteful to say that money brings happiness, but it's obvious that lack of money brings stress and anxiety.

Through comfort eating and alcohol, I'm limping along. My waistline is suffering and I'm getting quite depressed about my physique too. It's a vicious cycle, because depression is one of the reasons why I feel so drained and unable to stay active. You might think that a boring day at work should leave plenty of energy to do other things, but in fact quite the opposite is true: it's so draining being bored all day.

It doesn't make any sense that I'm so exhausted and depressed. I do all the right things: good sleep hygiene, good diet, good routine. I do a lot of walking, some cycling. I occasionally see friends or have a little more interaction with my work colleagues than the bare minimum. I'm working my job, saving my money, paying down my debts. I'm a model fucking citizen.

Yes, a lot of people find their lives mundane and boring, but if those people are as desperately suicidal as I am, then society is about to collapse at any moment, because I'm always just on the brink of either drawing the curtains and going to bed for 2 months, killing myself or running away, where nobody can send me a fucking bill or harass me on the telephone. If there are vast swathes of people who think like that, because they have a modest dislike of the rat race, society is utterly fucked and why the hell aren't they speaking up?

I had no choice but to speak up. I could have died in silence, misunderstood, and with people keen to mis-label me. At least by recording my thoughts and feelings in great detail, I have a fighting chance of dealing with hateful people who would wish me buried as a madman and an addict, even though I can clearly be neither if I'm holding down a highly desirable job, paying my rent, paying my bills. Can't anybody see that the attempts to pigeon hole people are ridiculous, insulting and desecrate the memory of those who can't stand the bullshit any longer?

I steer clear of talking about conspiracies, because that's the hallmark of somebody who has succumbed to paranoia. When a mind implodes, the vultures of organised religion swoop on the poor fool, and fill their head with all kinds of falsehoods about deities and miracles. Sometimes, when a person's grip on reality is loosened by the relentless hardships of life, they will start believing that the universe is conspiring against them. Even though we are ruled by cruel and evil plutocrats with insatiable greed, no conspiracy could really work successfully to control 7 billion people.

Instead, we are collectively the architects of our own demise. Every time we say "I was just following orders", "I was just doing what I was told" and "I was just doing what everybody else was doing" we illustrate the fact that we hide behind pathetic excuses for behaviour that is to the detriment of the greater good. In the relentless pursuit of the impossible dream that we might one day be elevated from struggle and poverty, we actually collectively enslave each other.

My aim is to play by the rules, so that I can die with integrity. I aim to cut away from the mainstream as soon as I have reached the point of break-even. To become fixated with the unattainable goal of 'getting ahead' is to make myself a lifelong slave. Who gives a shit if I can retire fabulously wealthy, if I gave away my youth and my health so cheaply?

And so, I watch the clock tick down. I'm just killing time. All I'm doing is waiting. Waiting for the day that I can show that my point is proven: yes, it's possible to look like a fine upstanding member of the community, wearing my smart suit and going to work in a fancy office. It's possible to be valued immensely by the capitalist system, and very well remunerated. It's possible to do without drugs & alcohol. It's possible to do without doctors, medications and psychotherapists. Then, with everything we supposedly hold dear in life, I reject it all because I think it's morally wrong to prop up a corrupt system that enslaves so many.

The end of the collective insanity can only come to an end, when individuals are brave enough to vote with their feet and risk their lives and their livelihoods.

So many poor fools are buying lottery tickets and working dead-end careers hoping for a promotion that will elevate them from a position of financial insecurity, into a tolerable situation. This mistaken belief that there's some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is akin to the donkey that keeps trudging along to try and get the carrot that's suspended just out of reach... always just out of reach.

You've got to pay to play, and you have to run just to stand still. Even the homeless are criminalised. Anybody who doesn't conform is bullied and tortured. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

At some point, it's time to give up.

Tags: #writing #suicide #depression

This is a story about brain hijack...

Who's in charge around here? Do you believe in free will? Do you believe that your choices are completely unbiased? Do you believe that every decision that you make is based on rational thought? Do you believe in willpower?

Addiction is a terrifying thing. Most of us have a fear of needles. When we hear the word "addiction" we wince with anticipated pain, as if somebody had stuck something sharp into our sensitive flesh. We squirm with the idea of the pain, which is associated with memories of every time we cut ourselves, hurt ourselves on thorny plants and visited the doctor's surgery for inoculations.

There's a widely held belief that if you so much as look at a syringe filled with heroin, you will immediately be compelled to murder your grandmother and steal her valuables. Just being in the same room as some cocaine will compel you to steal a car or rob a bank. It's an automatic reaction. The drugs will take over your mind, and turn you from whoever you are today into some kind of monster, the moment that poisoned chalice touches your lips.

In reality, you are probably completely unaware that some of your friends are popping one too many opiate-based painkillers. You are completely unaware that a bunch of your respected work colleagues are out partying at the weekend, high as a kite. You are completely unaware that a huge proportion of everyone you know, has used marijuana on a regular basis, at one time or another, and somehow managed to resist moving onto crack cocaine.

We need to be careful, because drugs impair our judgement. Just because most of us don't die when we try weed, cocaine and ecstasy, we can then be convinced that we're in no way exhibiting addictive behaviour. Some of us will be emboldened to try 'hard' drugs.

People are finding out that drugs are not actually instantly addictive, and those who experiment with drugs don't immediately jettison their morality and go out on a crime spree. This creates complacency. This creates a culture where we mistrust the warning messages, because they are full of lies and over-exaggerations.

However, drugs do dull your wits. You probably think that you're super smart and you're saying some really profound stuff. You're probably think you're taking a walk on the beach with your girlfriend, watching the sunset, until the drugs wear off and you realise you're dragging a mannequin around a car park.

Children are particularly receptive to subtle changes in their parents' behaviour and mood. You might think that getting stoned in front of your kids makes you a cool parent. "Yeah! I'm a hippy!" and "Yeah! I'm fighting the power! Counter-culture revolution! Yeah!". In actual fact, you're just turning yourself into a dribbling wreck, emotionally distant from the subtle cues that tell you to hug your kids and otherwise pay attention to what's going on. There's a reason why a nursing mother's senses are heightened after the birth of a child, and it's not so you can find those crumbs of crack that are hidden in the carpet.

Even smoking is super selfish. The health risks of passive smoking are well known and understood, but consider the weight difference between you and your baby. Let's say your kid weighs 7kg (15lbs) and you weigh 70kg (154lbs). That means that you weigh 10 times as much as your child. If you're inhaling 2mg of nicotine from your cigarette smoke, your child is inhaling 20mg. If you smoke in your car with your kid, you're making them smoke the equivalent of packs and packs of cigarettes. You are addicting them to nicotine and making them quit smoking, over and over and over again.

We were always driving places, when I was growing up. Small car. Both parents smoking. They call it 'hot boxing' now, when stoners are keeping all their dope smoke in a confined space, so that everybody gets really intoxicated on the chemicals. That's what selfish smokers are doing to children. I'm super glad that there are now laws in place to protect children from their selfish parents' addictions.

And so, I arrived in adulthood with a brain that was no stranger to addiction and withdrawal. I have far stronger willpower than either of my parents, because I have been able to resist the urge to smoke, and I have quit many addictive drugs cold turkey. I've got more will power than my parents could even dream of: they would not even give up smoking for the health of my sister and I, despite the obvious damage that it was doing and the financial consequences.

This is the power of addiction: even though you are destroying the health of your children and putting them through a horrible experience, you tell yourself that it's somehow OK to do that, despite an unambiguous message from doctors and other healthcare professionals. The only reason not to comply with the necessity of doing the best by your children, would be pure bloody-minded selfish stupidity... which is the addiction part.

I find it very hard to respect somebody lecturing me on addiction, when they're puffing on cigarettes and drinking tea, coffee & alcoholic drinks.

You may be surprised to learn that rich addicts do not become homeless junkies, destitute and forced into a life of crime. You may be surprised to learn that, given the opportunity to quit drugs on their own terms, most people's addictions will just fizzle out.

The brain is a homeostatic organ, and whatever chemicals you put into your body to get a buzz or a high will soon lose their potency. Pretty soon, the pursuit of drugs gets boring. Addictions are naturally self-limiting.

Rats who live in sterile cages with no stimulation, socialisation, sex or interesting food, will kill themselves with drugs. Rats who live in a pleasant environment will shun drugs, because they're getting everything they need in their happy ratty little lives. It's shitty lives that create the conditions where addiction can exist.

I work my arse off in a shitty boring unstimulating job, with no disposable income to be spent on fun and socialising. I go to work, I come home, I write because it doesn't cost any money. I don't spend any money on extravagances. I just buy basic food. I eat, sleep and work. And where's it getting me?

Of course thoughts of addiction are present. The thought process goes like this: my life is shit; I want to die. Then I think I could just run away and become a hobo. Then I realise that will soon lead to the stress of being cold and hungry and dirty; with people thinking that I'm worthless scum. This is how a person arrives at the idea that addiction takes care of both the short term need to feel better, and the long term view that you're going to die anyway. So much easier to have a brief period of happiness and then kill yourself, than to have a long period where you slowly starve to death and suffer the health consequences of living on the street. It's better to burn out than fade away.

Abstinence is easy. Living a shitty hopeless life is hard.

Because I've mastered abstinence so easily, I can get a little complacent about the appeal of simply relapsing and quickly reaching death's door. If this year has taught me anything, it's that the struggle isn't really worth it. All my hard work has yielded so little improvement in my mood. I'm so depressed all the time, and things really aren't improving. To go to the doctor, chasing happy pills, is just on the same addictive continuum. When the happy pills wear off, I'll have to go back for stronger and stronger drugs, until I end up in exactly the same place. Skip to the end. Cut out the pointless bit in the middle.

I had thought that because I obviously can't be going through any kind of drug withdrawal or comedown, and abstinence is a simple and easy thing, that I had gotten on top of addictive thoughts, but actually they just went into my subconcious.

Last night I had a nightmare where I had obtained some drugs, and nobody would leave me alone. I was just being chased and harassed. I never actually got to use the drugs, which is maybe what made it such a stressful nightmare, but it's interesting how badly I did want to use those drugs in my dream. I expect the whole thing was triggered by the fact I'd been looking at a website selling drugs, the night before.

In actual fact, I'd rather just kill myself. It's been long enough to show that addiction, abstinence and willpower are just utter bullshit. I'm completely "clean and sober" as fucktards like to say. Addiction has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with unbearable lives. I'd rather kill myself in protest at an unliveable life, due to unreasonable demands to work a bullshit job with no hope of ever doing anything fulfilling or purposeful.

The coroner can take samples of my hair and blood, and see not a single trace of any drugs in my system.

Only a fool does the same things expecting different results. Why would the conditions that created an addiction, not also keep somebody in an addiction, if they were still the same?

It seems logical that I should kill myself, as a protest about how unbearable a meaningless life of wage slavery is.

It doesn't seem selfish to want to commit suicide. It doesn't seem like depression is telling me lies. It seems like a brave thing to do, to stand up to an oppressive and miserable life and take a stand against exploitation by the ruling class. It seems like a brave thing to do, to refuse to be told I'm weak, broken, faulty. It seems to be a brave thing to do, to show that I'm not OK with turning my back on the suffering of humanity.

Lots of people impoverish themselves in their attempt to help other people. Lots of people will make mistakes, despite being dedicated to trying to improve the lives of others. It seems better to simply reach a point that is beyond reproach, and then kill yourself.

What's the difference between a saint and a sinner? Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

It's not a case of "once an addict, always an addict". It's simply the case that anybody can fall from grace at any time. Anybody can make a mistake at any moment.

If you have money, kids, a lovely home and a loving family, you are probably safer than most because you have some security, purpose, happiness. However, one slip and you're fucked.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #suicide #depression #capitalism #parents

This is a story about spreading yourself thinly...

I write too much. I wake up and I want to write before I go to work. I want to write before lunch. I want to write in the afternoon. I want to write when I get home. I want to write when really I should be going to sleep.

On paper, I'm not working very hard at the moment. I only work 40 hours a week. I'm only working Monday to Friday. However, there is zero creativity, zero problem solving, zero critical thinking and zero challenge in the day job. Therefore, I write whenever I can.

By the time I get home, it's like I'm a shaken can of fizzy soda and my frustration just explodes when I get in front of a keyboard. It's a challenge to write concise 700 word 'reader friendly' pieces that would allow people to keep up.

Anybody who reads one of my blog posts will probably think that I don't do much proofreading and editing. That's because I'm reliant on a couple of friends to cast their eye over what I've written, and spot anything I've missed. I'm so keen to publish, that I just hit the button, and then go back and re-read what I've written.

I know that often times when I read something, the smallest spelling and grammar mistakes can make me judge the content to be garbage. I can't help but judge the author, if they weren't able to make a passable attempt at the basics.

Because I've been quite successful in my career, I arrogantly assume that my skills are transferrable to whatever I try. It's been humbling to learn some really basic things in the last couple of years. You might laugh, and I hope you do, but here are a couple of things I only recently got to grips with:

• Lose and loose - I don't think I ever used "lose". I knew how to pronounce them, but I would more often than not write "loose" when I meant "lose"
• Complement and compliment - I very rarely mean that something complements something else. What I mostly talk about are compliments
• Less and fewer - I think I instinctively knew the difference, but I still have to proof-read before I spot the occasional mistake
• Capitalising mum & dad - I knew that there were instances where these needed capitalising, but I didn't know the rule
• Capitalising Internet - I always used to capitalise it. Then I stopped. Then I realised that I'd misread what a friend had written about capitalising it, so I had to start capitalising it again

There's a tendency to want to try and use big words that I recently learned. There's a tendency to want to show off. I want people to think I'm smart. I want people to think I'm a good writer.

However, I do love George Orwell's advice on writing, and in particular when he says never to use a long word when a short one will suffice.

My writing is probably filled with clichés, mixed metaphors, dangling participles, split infinitives and lack of the subjunctive. However, the quality probably falls somewhere in-between Earnest Hemmingway and the comments section of a Britain First Facebook post; although quite possibly closer to the latter than the former.

It's quite exhausting, working a full time job and also writing 3 or 4 times a day. I put a lot into it. I genuinely open up the taps and give it my all when I'm doing it, even if the editing that I do is a slow process of refinement that happens over the course of several days. I refine. I make lots of little tweaks and changes. I read, re-read and review what I've written and then I try to polish the turd.

Of course, I'm careening out of control. I have no idea where I'm headed or why. I can easily be distracted from one idea or theme by some pressing emotion. Powerful emotions keep bubbling up, causing nauseating repetition and laboured points to crop up again & again.

Probably my favourite authors are those who have been published posthumously. In particular Robert Tressel and John Kennedy Toole. This is not because of some morbid fascination, but actually the fact that there's something desperately frustrated that comes across in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and A Confederacy of Dunces. There's something wonderful about Tressel's 250,000 word book, because it labours the same point over and over so many times - it's almost unreadable, but well worth persevering with, because you want to know how it ends.

Joseph Heller's sarcasm, irony and dry wit makes Catch 22 impenetrable at first. Every sentence packs a powerful punch. You have to understand Heller's humour before you can make any headway with the plot. In terms of the density of what he packs into that novel, it's a breathtakingly good work of fiction.

Of course I don't compare myself to, or even attempt to emulate these authors. All I know how to do is record my stream of consciousness as best as I can, in the hope that I leave some small mark on the world. I feel so worthless and insignificant sometimes, when laid low with depression and low self-esteem. I live with the crushing fear of dying as a misunderstood person whose memory would be desecrated by my persecutors.

I leave no descendents. Who's going to tell my story accurately?

That's why I write. The closer I feel to losing my will to live, the more I write.

Publish or perish.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about revolting peasants...

The problem with a race to the bottom is that once taken to its ultimate conclusion, mass extinction or war, revolution & regression are the only options.

As a technologist it seems like the huge cash mountains, built up by the dominant players in the information age, might lead to innovations that could solve some of the crises facing humanity.

If you think that Elon Musk and his Gigafactory producing staggering amounts of lithium batteries is the answer, you haven't looked at the fundamentals. Batteries are about energy storage, and energy still has to be generated somehow. Lithium is a metal, and all metals have to be mined. All that production capacity for batteries drives the price much lower, while the countries who have the mineral reserves can price gouge for their scarce resources.

Let's imagine that the gulf states move from oil to solar, because they're hot desert countries with very little cloud cover. Let's imagine that China produces all those solar panels, and also fulfils its ambitions to become one of the world's top lithium exporters, to rival Chile, who are currently number one.

Wealth is going to continue to flow to the gulf states, because we're still wedded to petroleum products. Nobody has yet come up with a realistic way of moving huge container ships, aeroplanes, freight trains and heavy goods vehicles, without fuel oil, kerosene and diesel. Most industrial plant used in mining runs on diesel. Crude oil is still the grease on the wheels of industry.

Automotive transport is a disproportionately high energy user in the USA because it's a wealthy country where almost every household has a car. In China, only 13% of the population have a car. Electric self-driving cars might be a big deal in the land of the free, but the 320 million people in the USA just can't compare to China's 1,360 million.

The bulk of what's going on in the tech world at the moment is silly toys for silly boys. Yes, the achievements of the SpaceX project are incredible. Yes, electric vehicles appear to go some way towards addressing climate change. However, it's an absolute piss in the ocean for most people on the planet.

I'm not even that worried about the rise of the robots, and automation. The main problem we've got is the social disruption. For sure, things like Uber seem to deliver a great advancement for people who are already wealthy. As a rich city dweller, being able to have a "private driver" (to borrow from Uber's tagline) feels like the promised future has arrived. In fact, what's happening is that a load of cab drivers who invested a lot in their local 'knowledge' and fleet of vehicles are now on the scrap heap. Uber attracts immigrants who can raise the money to buy a Toyota Prius, and are prepared to accept appalling working conditions.

For every person's livelihood robbed by technological 'advancement', a whole family is put into an economically precarious position. What are all London's black cab drivers going to do, with their investment in their vehicles and the approximately 3 years it took them to memorise 125,000 points of interest?

It seems logical and rational that people should adapt to change as quickly as they can, because hesitation will only leave them further behind. However, people don't tend to like it very much when the rug is pulled out from under their feet. People tend to dig their heels in, complain and protest, when their comfort zone is threatened.

From weaving looms to agricultural mechanisation, the peasants have been deeply unhappy with technological advancements. For hundreds of years, people have wrung their hands about the proletariat being left idle, while the machines till the fields and make our clothes. Clearly, the workforce has adapted. New types of jobs have been created. We have seen the rise and rise of the service sector, and entertainment.

You would have thought that people would be happy. We have low mortality rates, and we no longer have to work in the blazing heat and pouring rain, out in the fields, or in the choking smog of the industrial towns. We sit in our air-conditioned offices, moving a mouse around and tapping on a keyboard. These should be halcyon days.

However, we have failed to stem the flow of information and imagery of the excesses of the wealthiest 1% flaunting their money on the world stage.

We can't help but compare ourselves with others, and most of our media is obsessed with the super-rich. The idea of a jet-set lifestyle, with limousine transport is part of what makes Uber so successful. We have been promised a better life for so long, but yet we are stuck with the drudgery of menial jobs. Suddenly we too can be chauffeur driven around. However, we forget that we are living in a tiny bubble.

The very vast majority are still living absolutely shit lives of grinding poverty. While wage increases at the bottom of the food chain look very good in percentage terms, they really don't measure up to the increased expectations of those people who are being paid marginally more. Also, there is little data to suggest that increasing somebody's salary from $1 a day to $2 a day is transformative to their quality of life.

Nearly 50% of the world's population uses the Internet, and so implicitly, those people expect to soon have a helicopter, a superyacht, a private jet and an idyllic desert island. These are the images that we see every day. This is what we're promised. I can follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram, just like I can follow my mate Fred Bloggs from down the road. It takes one swipe of my finger on my smartphone to compare myself with the top 0.1% of the population, just the same as it does to compare myself with the 99.9%.

I'm not given to comparing myself with the billions of other Internet users. Looking at Twitter is depressing. Guess what? Everybody's got a mum. Everybody's got cats & babies. Everybody's got the same worries about money, relationships and how attractive their body is. Everybody blogs. Everybody photographs. We're all just so much meat in the mincer.

There is a bit of us that needs to feel special and unique and different. "Big data" doesn't care that you're special, unique and different. Technology says that you're just one of billions of users. You're just one pair of eyeballs in a sea of marketing opportunities. Tech is a numbers game. You're a statistically negligible number.

As our communities have collapsed, and we have been driven into increasingly desperate lonely isolated lives, where our only connection with the world is through social networking, the war on our workplace rages on. The same technology that knows if you're engaging with advertising can be used to make sure that we're paying attention while we're working our jobs. Eye-tracking technology could easily be used to deduct money from your wages every time you stare out of the window, instead of focussing on your spreadsheets and email.

Technology is developing very fast, and the hype suggests that exponential growth is delivering all the things that we've been imagining for hundreds of years.

The truth, however, is that somebody still has to mine your lithium, install your solar panels, and actually permit the switch to be thrown to enable our robotic overlords.

What we're going to find is that even though the geeks might be right, people still don't like to end up standing around with their dick in their hands, looking like a total idiot. The message from the technologists seems to be "this is better, so you'd better get on with accepting the future" and "evolve or die".

It's been very frustrating as a technologist to be held back by dinosaurs who just don't 'get it'. It's been very frustrating to work with organisations that are extremely resistant to change. A lot of people who I meet in my job have 99 reasons why something won't work, and will be deliberately obstructive. In order to get anything done, I've had to become extremely resourceful about going round people who just want to protect their jobs.

There are more people than you think who are having a shitty time. There are all those people who society has been happy to leave festering in the "economically inactive" bucket. There are the vast majority, who are seen as a commodity pool, to be given zero hours contract McJobs on minimum wage. There are the jaded, disillusioned, demotivated and demoralised people who are educated and intelligent enough to see that the system's pretty crooked - the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer - who are also bored zombies in their horrible office jobs.

The thumb screws are getting tightened on the working class, with austerity, benefit cuts, job insecurity, pay cuts in real terms, ever-increasing cost of living (i.e. food, housing, energy, transport) and every other thing that creates a death by a thousand cuts.

And why are the ordinary people suffering this low growth, high stress environment? So that we can have bank bailouts, corporate welfare and tax breaks for millionaires.

Yes, us technologists can imagine a utopian society of endless leisure time, self-driving electric cars and android servants, but we are very unlikely to get there while the bankers, oligarchs and politicians are attempting to feather their already plump nests.

Already, we see anger directed at gentrification. How long before the peasants march to Palo Alto with their pitchforks and burning torches, in order to lop off the heads of the plutocrats who say "let them eat Facebook likes"?

Tags: #computing #socialmedia

This is a story about temptation...

Flat 188 doesn't actually exist. Flat 188 never existed. Flat 188 was invented by me as a drop-off location for drugs being delivered from around the globe, mostly originating in China.

I'm not sure if the production of 'research' chemicals in China is done in clandestine laboratories, or with full state sanctioning and full quality control that you would expect of goods produced in the Far East. However, in countries with drug laws that are less draconian than our own in the United Kingdom, some fellow psychonauts submitted their Internet-procured chemicals to laboratory quality testing, and found that what they had bought was often greater than 99% purity.

My first foolish foray into the stupid world of research chemicals and experimentation on myself, was with the original piperazine of abuse: BZP. This chemical is basically only good for worming cattle. The piperazines are great anthelmintics, which means that they get rid of parasites from your digestive tract, like roundworms, pinworms, tapeworms, hookworms, whipworms and other little bastards that live in your gut.

Because of loopholes in the law, many analogues of banned chemicals became available to order on the Internet as 'research chemicals' with packaging that labelled them as "unfit for human consumption" and "toxic". Naturally, everybody who bought these toxic chemicals heeded the warnings and had no intention of the substances entering their body, but there were a few accidents now and again.

Obviously, I'm being very flippant. Purchasing some random compound off the Internet and ingesting it seems pretty foolish, on the face of it, but anybody who has dabbled with street drugs knows that they are far more likely to be sold any old shit that the dealer had lying around when they decided to cut their nondescript white powder with something to bulk it out.

The solution is not to do drugs right? Well, get this through your thick skull: people don't "do drugs". What people do is they buy escapism. People buy escape from their shitty intolerable lives. Drugs work far better than that red sports car that was supposed to make you attractive to the opposite sex and make all your problems go away. Advertisers sell a certain dream. Drugs deliver dreams... temporarily, and for a price.

Tonight, I broke my "don't tempt yourself" rule, by looking at a purveyor of research chemicals on the Internet. I didn't look at the website in Holland where my drug of choice - supercrack - can be purchased. At least, I presume it can still be purchased on there. I haven't bought any for nearly 9 months. The stuff is so fucking cheap that if I still had half a gram still knocking around somewhere, that'd last me for over a month of life-destroying insanity, without food, without sleep.

So, I looked at a research chemical seller on the Internet. Basically, the website is now clearly just a front for a Chinese vendor who will ship directly from the Far East in packaging that's so discreet that it will easily slip through customs unnoticed.

What would I order? Synthetic benzodiazepines. Mother's little helpers.

What's the big appeal of benzos? Well, it's 11:35pm on a Monday night and I have to go back to a job I hate for the next two motherfucking months just to break even. I have to keep turning up with my fake smile and sitting quietly in my chair and not rocking the motherfucking boat. The chance of me having to actually apply myself, stretch myself, challenge myself is precisely zero. I might as well be asleep in the chair, except that would attract attention.

It's so fucking hard to put myself into a trance and just put up with the dreadful bullshit that I've seen a million times before. I'm in autopilot. I'm running my bit of the project very well, and I haven't even taken my mind out of neutral gear yet. I haven't even actually engaged my brain. It sounds arrogant, but you would be amazed at how much of a paint-by-numbers exercise everything is. The hardest thing is keeping my big mouth shut.

I work with a few cool people who have been through some shit before, and we exchange knowing glances at each other, as we're all mercenaries doing the same thing, but it's so soul-destroying. Basically, to attempt to extract any meaning or purpose from my day job would only be to sabotage an extremely highly paid contract.

I'm economically, financially incentivised to put myself into a drug-induced coma, so I can sit in my chair and quietly look intelligent. I've done enough to prove that I'm a worthwhile member of the team. I can coast until the end of the project now, never breaking a sweat. It's just a case of watching the clock tick down to zero.

And so, I want to send my brain to sleep. I want to be in a drugged-up benzodiazepine haze, so that the time just melts away into a foggy amnesia where I wake up in 2 or 3 months time, and all my financial problems have gone away because I sat in an office chair keeping it warm.

It really is that simple. Sit in my chair popping pills, and keep collecting the cheques at the end of each week. People will love me for keeping my mouth shut and not making a fuss. It's truly the best thing I could be doing for myself and the project. Nobody would thank me for trying to help out in areas that I'm not responsible for.

It's so sorely tempting to order a couple of hundred innocent little pills that will make a couple of months fly by that would otherwise be maddeningly boring to the point where it might drive me insane with frustration.

If you can sense that I'm trying to talk myself into this, and justify it, you're correct.

It's too easy to live in a drug-induced coma, when the working world is such utter bullshit.

If I was going to do it, I would probably not have shared this with you. In a way, my blog gives me accountability. My blog gives me full transparency. My blog makes me kinda honest.

There's nothing dishonest with drug taking per se. It's stigma that drives behaviour underground into the shadows, but everybody's got to find a way to cope. Everybody has to find a way to get through their days.

This feels like a watershed moment. During my 'advent calendar' last year, I knew that a crisis was brewing. I knew that something had to give. However, I wanted to keep my cards close to my chest until my "Cold Turkey" joke on Boxing Day.

Now, the joke's on me but I don't care. I'm having a crisis and there's nothing I can do about it except be honest and document how it unfolds.

Tags: #drugs #addiction

This is a story about being homeless...

This first map shows everywhere I lived, as I was dragged around all over the place by my fucking parents. The stupid cunts then decided to move back to the village where I briefly first went to school. I went to 8 different schools. What a shower of shits. I cried and cried that we were leaving the sweet little village in the Cotswolds where my parents now live again. What a pointless waste of time & money, as well as being totally destructive of a stable and happy childhood.

This second map shows the 25+ places that I have attempted to make my home. From number 5 to number 25, this was all a consequence of my parents reneging on an insistent demand that they should be involved in 'helping' me, only to find that they then didn't honour their promise at all when I was in a vulnerable and precarious position. A stitch in time saves nine, as they say. Cunts.

I now live on the Isle of Dogs and my home is very nice. I'm reasonably settled and stable, but I am quite far away from any friends, and there isn't really much on the 'island'. I would much rather live in North London, where most of my friends are, and there is more going on that I'd be interested in getting involved in.

However, having had such a horrific time the past few years, I'm happy to just have some stability in where I'm living. Can you imagine how exhausting it is, moving between all those different places with all your worldly possessions? It's only because I had good training with the Dorset Expeditionary Society that I have been able to just about cope. I'd call it an adventure, but it's been more like a nightmare.

Anyway, perhaps this snapshot gives you some appreciation for the shit that people are going through in their private lives. We are quick to condemn people as not making smart life choices, or being deserving of the consequences of some decision they supposedly took with free will. The reality is that one small thing can create absolute chaos in somebody's life, and destroy them.

Much like the butterfly that flapped its wings in Japan, causing a hurricane in America, seemingly small insignificant things can have a big impact on the stability of a person's life. That's why it's important to keep your promises and honour your commitments. That's why it's important to act with integrity. That's why it's important to treat your kids with decency and respect, and not just be a drug addict drunkard waste of fucking space, fucking up their life in pursuit of your high.

As you can tell, I'm thoroughly exhausted by all the stress, and fucked off by the suggestion that it was in any way my free will that took my on this torturous path through life. Survival and stability is all I ask for.

Tags: #homeless #parents #childhood #london

This is a story about how to fuck up a kid...

I love the symbolism of this image. What it means to me is this: we have to jump through hoops, like some kind of trained circus animal.

What made you decide that you could give your kids a brilliant life? What made you decide that creating new life on an overcrowded planet was a great idea?

Was it the fact that climate change is an undisputed problem, and your children will inherit a drowning world?

Was it the fact that neoliberal capitalism has given us a cruel ruling elite who have enslaved most of humanity in menial jobs, and left the rest to starve?

Was it that a small handful of oligarchs, monarchs and plutocrats control all the world's wealth, and the chances of being elevated from poverty are the same as being hit by an asteroid, twice, on the way to collect your lottery winnings?

Was it that the social structure of the tribe, the clan and the extended family has now all-but ended, as we are forced to roam the entire planet in search of a golden opportunity that does not exist, and we are forced to content ourselves with social media, text message and video-chat interactions, that are in place of actual face-to-face human relationships with our nearest and dearest?

It won't be long before our babies are whisked away from us at birth, and we can do nothing but follow their progress on a Twitter page, as they forge their way through an educational system designed to produce compliant drones, who have no hope but to join the enslaved masses in some soul-crushingly dreadful job. And the reason why we never get to see our children? So we can continue to pursue our unfulfilling jobs for as many hours as we can possibly work before collapsing with exhaustion.

I have this little fantasy about being a dad. In my fantasy, me and some imagined partner are woken up early in the morning by our two children. One child is a toddler, and the other is slightly older but still a preschooler. The kids clamber into bed and we all spend the morning watching cartoons together. Then we all get up and dressed and eat pancakes together around the kitchen table.

Then, I also have this imagined version of reality.

I wake up before the kids, get showered and dressed although I'm desperately tired. I then have a stressful commute through traffic and endless crowds of people. I arrive at a job that I hate, because it's boring and stressful, underpaid and my bosses have nothing but contempt for me and the capitalist scum who run all the corporations have no gratitude or respect for the workers who toil to line their pockets. I get to look at a photograph of my children on my desk, but this is merely a form of emotional bribery. Without the picture of my kids on my desk, I would question what the hell I was even doing, and just quit the awful job.

In my imagined version of reality, I work extra late to try and impress the bosses and get a precious promotion that may allow the basic essentials of life to be bought without constant financial struggle to make ends meet. Every time the car breaks down or some home improvements are needed, it always costs more than any savings that have been put away as contingency for these eventualities. A debt spiral has been happening because of having to use short-term borrowing to simply meet the cost of living. Then more debt was incurred servicing the first debt. This wasn't money that was spent on frivolities, but on such things as fixing broken plumbing and essential child-rearing equipment like cribs and pushchairs.

My imagination tells me that, in reality, I would then struggle home late through yet another stressful commute, only to find that the kids are already in bed. My partner is exhausted from the demands of working a part time job that brings in marginally more money than the cost of the childcare that we must pay for so that she can have her very badly paid job. Juggling work and childcare arrangements, she must travel twice as far as a normal commute, in order to pick up and drop off the kids at their daycare facilities. The household budget is super tight, and extremely diligent use of discount coupons, shopper loyalty schemes and knowing the cheapest supermarket to obtain our groceries for each product, is the only way that a few extra pounds can be found to balance the books.

Exhausted and stressed - in this imaginary reality - we collapse into bed. The pressure that me and my imaginary partner are under means that we are arguing all the time, so we aren't having sex or any kind of physical intimacy anymore. We are just two exhausted scared and anxious people, trying to survive and hide the desperation of the situation from the children.

The children - I imagine - are browbeaten into believing that they have one shot at getting good school grades and not fucking up their lives. Me and my imaginary partner tell our kids how important it is that they study hard and try their best, so that they can go to university and get a great job. We repeatedly tell our kids that life is a struggle, and the world is a mean place, and that they should stop laughing and playing, and knuckle down and do some damn homework.

Grow up! Concentrate! This is important! Pay attention! You have no idea what the real world's like! We rebuke our little kids. We are desperately anxious that our children should not suffer the same fate that we endure. Endless arguments over schoolwork and bad grades. Endless stress about whether or not our kids are thriving in the rigid educational system. Every bit of spare time we have goes into educational activities. We can't just make a fort out of cushions... we have to turn it into a history lesson, or a lesson about the physics of why buildings don't fall down. Everything is twisted into an opportunity to try and cram a bit more knowledge into our little kids' craniums.

Your kid drives themselves nuts with the pressure and expectation placed upon them. Kids are sensitive to their parents anxiety. Kids are like sponges, and they're getting the message loud & clear about how important it is that they apply themselves and try their hardest. Some kids will respond, and will allow themselves to have their personality dissected, sifted and sorted. Some kids will quietly allow themselves to be judged and graded by complete strangers who couldn't give two fucks about who they are as an individual.

Then, finally, it's time for the big wide world that we've promised our children is the whole reason why they can't have a childhood. The whole reason why we didn't let our kids play in the dirt, or spend time with their friends, was so that they could have their noses in books, writing essays or taking mock examinations. Now, it's time for your kids to spread their wings and be whatever they want to be.

Use your imagination! Follow your dreams! Find your passion! We tell our precious children.

What we really mean is: go get a sensible job for a reputable corporation, shovelling shit for the capitalists.

Childhood was jettisoned in favour of academic achievements. We told our kids they couldn't be friends with some of the other children, because they were too stupid and a bad influence. We told our kids they couldn't laugh, play and have the simple joys of their childhood, because there was too much at stake. Our kids' precious future was on the line. It was life or death.

And now, your kids have the same shitty job that doesn't pay the bills and is inadequate to support a family. Your kids busted their balls to get their grades, go to university, follow their dreams. Guess what? There aren't any jobs for historians or philosophers. There aren't any jobs where you need to speak dead languages like Latin or Ancient Greek. There aren't any jobs for artists.

Your kids are going to have to get a job keeping score for the capitalists, while they wait for the planet to become totally uninhabitable. It's a football game with 21 referees and 2 goalkeepers. It's a rowing race with 20 coxswains and 2 rowers. Over 80% of the 'economy' is made up by service sector bullshit.

This is it? This is what you you wanted to give your kids? This is the life that you thought your children would be so happy to live? Did you think about this stuff? You did think about this stuff, didn't you? No? Why didn't you think about this stuff?

"Everything will be alright in the end"

No. It probably won't be.

Things probably won't be alright in the end, because everybody has that attitude. Through collective wilful stupidity, and a desire to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes, we spawn yet more children in the hope that one of the little fuckers is smart enough to solve the world's problems. It's like setting alight to the basement of your house, in the hope that it will put out a fire in the roof.

Don't get me wrong; I love kids. I think kids are cute and I love the way that they make me feel happy when I look after them. I definitely feel very fulfilled as an animal, when I'm playing make-believe daddy, and imagining that I might have kids of my own. There's definitely something biologically right about reproducing one's genes. However, ethically it would seem to be the wrong thing to do.

You know, you made your choice, and I like you and your kids. But collectively it's fucking insane.

I would say that the only way to redeem yourself now would be to pull your kids out of school. Go and live near your parents, uncles and aunties. Form a little village of your relatives. Let your kids play and be children. Teach your kids about the grave responsibility that faces them, but don't fucking bullshit them. Stop selling this lie that hard work and a lost childhood will somehow pave the way for a happy adulthood.

Just look at the goddam stats. Soaring rates of mental illness and suicide. Almost everybody hates their fucking job and doesn't get to spend enough time with their families. Almost everybody is stressed as fuck about money, job insecurity and the uncertainty over whether they will be able to provide housing, food, clothing and everything else they need for them and their children. It's fucking awful.

But, you know what? There are more of us than the goddam capitalists who want to maintain the status quo. Sure there are police and the army, who are there to make sure that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. However, the system only continues to function while we all collectively help to prop it up. Are you happy? Is this what you want for your children? Is this it?

Is this it?

Tags: #capitalism #childhood

This is a story about ethics...

Let us suppose for a moment that the great scientists who gave us our quantum mechanical world, were also animal lovers. Instead of putting cats into boxes with radioactively decaying elements which trigger poison gas to be released, killing the poor innocent creatures, how's about if we dress them up in clothes instead?

In this alternative quantum experiment, instead of Erwin Schroëdinger's original design, we shall instead be putting socks on the poor cat that faced a 50% probability of death before.

In our new experiment, we shall be putting different coloured socks on the cat. The socks can be whatever colour we like, but they're always different colours from each other.

As the cat walks into the room, we can see that the cat is wearing a pink sock. We can't see the cat's other foot yet, but we know that the other sock is not going to be pink.

It's not like the second sock decided to choose its colour when we looked at the first. It's not like the second sock needed to know the colour of the first, and have the information transmitted to it as soon as we made our first observation.

John Stewart Bell penned a tongue-in-cheek scientific paper explaining the simplicity of hidden variables, which seem to offer a much more objective reality than the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. For sure, the likes of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had elegantly described the subatomic world with mathematical precision, but the need to abandon a tangible objective reality seems unnecessary if we say that there are hidden variables.

However, from this simple thought experiment comes a theory that is very real and very testable. Bell's theorem says that the experimental results will differ significantly in a quantum world versus one that behaves classically. Quantum mechanics makes predictions that no classical theory could. Therefore, if you want to know whether probabilistic behaviour indicates a failure to truly imagine what's going on in the subatomic world, you just have to do the experiments.

If Bell's theorem were proven correct, this could suggest that experimental observations are "known" in advance, and in fact we are living in the 'clockwork' universe as predicted, for example, by Newtonian mechanics. Were you to know the precise starting conditions of everything, you would be able to predict everything that would ever happen: no surprises!

In short, Bell's theorem was tested, and the result was surprising: we may be living in a superdeterministic reality, where there is no free will and all outcomes are fixed in advance.

Tags: #physics