This is a story about monarchy...

I lied about the monarchy thing, OK? Actually this is about search engine optimisation (SEO).

Do you want to know how you reach the top of Google search, so you appear on the first page when people are looking for you and your shit? Well, there used to be some neat ways to cheat the system, but now sadly, you're going to have to flex those fingers and get writing.

Google uses some things like meaningful domain names (thisismyshit.com is more meaningful than this-is-my-shit.co.xyz, for example) as well as well named pages, titles etc. Also, having links to your site from other highly ranked pages is also important.

However, some poor c**t has got to do the typing.

It's all well and good getting links to your site from other highly ranked pages, but who the hell wrote the crap that got those pages highly ranked in the first place? All the early-adopters of the web built pages packed full of actual meaningful shit, and then Google indexed those pages.

Now, we have the rise of the link-building bots and the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialists. There are an army of fucktards out there, posting comments on blogs that are just links, as well as every other scam to get Google to increase the search rank of their client's sites.

I'm not sure if you've found this, but sometimes when you're searching for stuff, you find a lot of sites that are nothing but meaningless tosh. This especially happens when you're looking to buy something and you're putting quite a specific technical search term into the box. You're inundated with fucking content aggregation sites that add absolutely nothing to your life and in fact detract from your entire search for meaningful content.

You might not see it, but there's a massive scrap going on in the digital realm for your eyeballs. Even though you're only worth a few tens of dollars each year to advertisers, when you scale that over billions of freetards, there's quite a lot of profit to be made. Facebook is absolutely wiping the floor with the competition. We are all heavily wedded to social media for our daily fix of baby pictures and Facebragging.

How do you compete in this sea of noise?

Writing a witty webcomic or doing some hilarious web videos is a terrible idea. The fact of the matter is that the written word is still the most indexable thing for search. How does anybody's first foray onto the interweb begin? Normally a Google search is the way that that vast untapped market of digitally naïve people are stumbling into the technological future. If you write stuff - on a regular website - at least you know it's discoverable by search.

Facebook and Twitter are utter bastards. It's very unlikely that your witty posts and tweets will ever see the light of day. Facebook and Twitter are walled gardens. The business model of the dominant social media brands is to keep you locked in through your investment in their platform, and the fact that all your friends are similarly locked in.

However, the vast quantity of user-generated content has to see the light of day sometime. Even the administrators of hugely popular Facebook pages are going to wonder why they're not getting particularly rich, but Facebook makes a brilliant rake from their creative endeavours.

Twitter is utter shite. You might have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of Twitter followers. What fucking difference does it make? Is anybody actually getting heard or discovered through Twitter? No.

The established players are hoovering up your creative output, storing it, and hiding it where nobody can see it.

There's no denying the impact that can be made by publicly publishing the output of your endeavours in plain text on the open web, where the search engines can make it available to billions of people. Raw words are searchable. Your written content will be discoverable to the whole of humanity.

Don't fall into the trap of throwaway videos. Write. And write some more.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about bullshit jobs...

In the east end of London, sandwiched inbetween Hackney and the area that used to be responsible for producing clothes and shoes, is the tiny oasis of Silicon Roundabout. The concrete mostronsities that sprung up in the postwar era, after the factories were bombed to shit, are now home to the darlings of the UK's tech industry.

TechHub, which is just a stone's throw away from the Old Street roundabout, prides itself on not having a proper ceiling to conceal its air conditioning ducts. The desks are battered and constructed from scaffolding. The urban decay of the whole area is part of the appeal. I mean, you can work in a disused underground train carriage for fuck's sake... some kind of hyper-trendy modern office.

And yet, this hipster village borders the City of London, where the world's investment banks and hedge funds headquarter themselves. Money is made hand-over-fist in London's financial districts, and all of the profits are enabled by smart tech people. There isn't a single cent that lines the pocket of a capitalist without some computer geek having written some software to make it possible.

There are two kinds of brain drain in operation.

Jaded City workers jack in the corporate humdrum of suits and 9 to 5, to head into the world of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout in order to grow a ridiculous beard and ride a bicycle with fixed gearing. Meanwhile, the very smartest are poached from the digital agencies and other parts of the thriving software community, in order to build the backbone of the financial system and re-architect the whole world economy.

Sadly, the main conduits for smart people still deliver the bulk of those graduating with first-class degrees and 2:1s from the best institutions, straight into the hands of bloodsucking parasites.

What was your degree in? Chemistry? Geography? Psychology? English? History? Epidemiology? Medieval iconography?

Who fucking cares?

If you're smart enough to have risen to the top of your classes, you're going to be hoovered up by the financial services sector, which dominates 80% of the British economy. Sooner or later, you're going to find yourself working in a towering phallus of glass and steel, which is a monument to the stupendous stupidity of man.

While red-braces wearing men fill their wheelbarrows with worthless paper, the rest of the world rumbles on, but is seen as unimportant compared with the "masters of the universe". It's obvious that you can't eat a futures contract, or a derivative, but yet the bulk of the 'money' in the world is derived from legal contracts that are almost impenentrably complex. Clever little cunts just coming up with clever schemes to scam the 'real' economy out of their labour and productive output.

How did it all begin?

Well, at the Royal Exchange, a farmer decided to sell his crop of wheat before it had been even harvested. This was the original futures contract. From this grew options, swaptions, interest rate derivatives, exotic credit derivatives and every flavour of cuntery inbetween. It's utter horse shit.

Now, you work all fucking day and your salary isn't even a rounding error on a balance sheet somewhere.

The amount of cash in circulation is nothing. It's meaningless. Financial services and the abolition of the gold standard means that the bankers are just adding extra zeros onto the end of everything just to prop up an utter horseshit system based on perpetual growth. As long as the masters of the universe are getting more zeros on their salaries and bonuses. That's the real reason why anybody has to suffer austerity.

Sorry about that.

Tags: #capitalism #banking

This is a story about world peace...

The star spangled banner. I'm not even an US citizen, and yet I feel a lump in my throat when I see the flag of the United States of America and hear the national anthem belted out by an angelic singer. I look at a Route 66 road sign and I'm transported to every Hollywood movie I've ever watched. American iconograhphy is embedded in every cell of my body.

We live in a world of uneasy peace. The Manhatten Project perfected atomic warfare before any other nation. The USA obilterated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing Japan to her knees. America's military might is the iron fist that rules the world.

Do I object to the USA's role as world policeman and dominant culture? I'm torn.

The conventional view is that the atom bomb and America's willingness to evaporate hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in an indiscriminate detonation of a weapon of mass destruction, was somehow for the greater good. It seems to me that the age of terror was actually ushered in by Western superpowers. Nothing could be more terrifying than nuclear holocaust.

The hypocrisy of the USA is palpable. While Israel benfits from nukes, tanks, guns, drones and warplanes, the Palestinian people are crowded together in occupied ghettos that bear no resembleance to the territories that were drawn up by the United Nations.

The United States is quite the warmonger, invading countries willy-nilly and committing a worldwide campaign of imperialist expansion.

However, everybody loves Mickey fucking Mouse, undeniably.

It's impossible to hate America. The people are so fucking nice. Have a nice fucking day. They're so damn positive and upbeat.

In a country where getting sick can see you bankrupt, and falling on hard times can see you more destitute than in a developing world country, the land of the 'free' is actually packed full of optimists, and for that reason I love it.

Britain and Japan are full of monarchic flag wavers who believe that they are owed some kind of divine right to rule. Clearly the inbreeding of the royal families has affected the mental capacity of residents. However, the United States is full of patriotic and positive citizens, who are happy just to cling onto the mistaken belief that they may be elevated from dire poverty and become one of the chosen few. It could happen. Anything can happen in America.

Even though the statistician/economist/socialist that dwells within me tells me that it's utterly fucking insane to cling onto the impossible dream that an average Joe might escape devastating poverty, at least there's fucking hope. Britain is a place where you'll know your place, which might mean free healthcare and not panhandling and hustling, but there's no upside either.

Do I want Trump to have the codes to nuke anybody though? No.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about the jungle...

What you have to understand about being a human male, is that the competition never really went away. We are all still fighting to be able to fuck the hottest females.

I was searching to find an image of me with swollen muscles. God knows why I would have swollen muscles. Perhaps because of the harsh physical demands of survival. But instead I find a comparative photo. This photo compares my friend Posh Will with myself, in the clutches of self-destruction mode. I probably haven't had a decent meal in several weeks, in this photo, taken around Christmas day 2013. What does this image tell us?

My friend Posh Will is obviously credited with pulling me from the rubble of my botched attempt to relocate to the beach and live the dream.

At the wedding of Posh Will and Space Girl, there was the concept of the "conversion project". Both Posh Will and I were particularly keen on the idea of finding girls who were enamoured with kitesurfing and outdoor pursuits. While I chased girls who were already engaged in extreme sports, Posh Will sought a life partner who held the right temperament to be able to cope with the rigours of being wedded to an adrenalin junkie. His strategy clearly paid off, for he is now happily married, while I am a shattered remnant of the man I used to be.

The friendly rivalry between two old friends persists. I used to joke about our hourly rate. While Posh Will used to work all the hours that God sent, I have always been an expert in dodging responsibility. Despite the eye-watering salary that PW commands, it doesn't actually look that great when you work out how hard he has to work, compared with my hourly rate of pay.

However, now that PW and I work within a few hundred metres of each other, PW's work schedule has become a lot more reasonable. While my own working week looks particularly lax, it's clear that PW has won. I turn up, keep my office chair warm, but PW is doing similar hours to me and getting far more job satisfaction that I am.

I've lost. On every level.

I love PW and his lovely wife. They took me into their home and nurtured me back to health. They opened the door of possibility for me and recovery. I'm not actually in direct competition with PW. I love him to bits, even if he won't return my calls.

So, male competition is utter bullshit. It will destroy friendships and make you insecure and unhappy with your partner. Fuck male competition We don't need it. Yes, it might make you and your girlfriend horny that you might have beaten somebody in your game of squash, but remember the zero-sum game.

For every winner there must be a loser.

Tags: #friends

This is a story about tireless commitment...

I came up with a list of 102 titles of blog posts that I wanted to write something about. I wrote a few of them, but the vast majority are in the waiting room. I'm terribly frustrated that those ideas and feelings are circling with nowhere to go. If you haven't already got the idea... this whole blog is somewhere where my pent-up frustrations are being expressed.

Actually, confession time: this whole blog is where I work out the whole live vs. die decision in real time, right in front of your very eyes.

Now, despite being somewhat tipsy from end-of-working-week indulgence in alcohol, I've decided at 2:19am to do a kind of live-blog as I attempt to make sure that I've covered off all 102 topics that are on my list.

Why would I do this?

Well, it's quite simple: I'm stalked by suicidal thoughts during most of my waking hours. I can't be too close to a sharp knife, a London bus or an underground train without thinking about the oblivion of suicide. This is alarmist language, but the reality is with me every moment of the day: I'm struggling to find the energy and enthusiasm to go on living.

Anhedonia - the complete lack of reward from all normal activities - has sucked the life from within me, and I feel like a mime artist doing a performance with no idea why it delights my audience. Life is brutal. From the moment I wake up to the moment I pass out, I'm asking myself "why bother?".

Yes it's melodramatic etcetera. Basically: fuck you. Goodbye.

I present to you, now, a string of live blog posts that attempt to catch up on the backlog of writing that I have not been able to pursue given my bullshit job. Due to said bullshit job, I've not been able to write the bulk of 102 blog posts that explain my existential crisis, and resolve the unreconcilable difference between what I experience and know intuitively to be worthwhile, and the horse shit that seems to bring cold hard cash into my bank balance.

I wait. Tick follows tock. I patiently wait for my moment to express my frustration at the structure and routine of human existence.

This is a fucking time capsule. Clearly, I have somewhat lost my grip on 'reality' but I don't give a fuck anymore. This is life and fucking death. These are the last acts of a crazed lunatic. This is the evidence for the postmortem.

Enjoy.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about surprises...

We are very keen to jump to conclusions. So many of us read the headline and assume that we know the story. Surprisingly large numbers of people will comment on a social media post without even clicking through and reading the content. It's so easy to walk in on a chapter of somebody's life and assume that you know the whole story.

Mental health problems? Blah blah blah... go and see a doctor, get some happy pills and all your problems will go away. No need to hear the end of that story. All problems can be medicalised and will be just fine if you just speak to the right specialist. For sure there are people out there who deal with this kind of stuff. Not my problem. Go away.

Drugs? Say no more. We know how this ends. Yes, your story is bound to involve selling your own grandmother to unscrupulous rogues in order to raise money for your dirty habit, and basically you're filthy scum and don't even deserve to have your story heard. GET OUT OF MY EYES AND EARS and go away.

Nervous breakdown? Why not take up yoga? Stop and smell the flowers. Do cartwheels in a field. Other people have things so much harder than you so I don't even know what you're complaining about. Everybody's life is terrible. Get a grip on yourself. It's all in your head. Why don't you exercise more? Salsa dancing? Homeopathy? I'll write the end of your story for you: all your problems went away and you were magically transported to the land of milk & honey. The end. Go away.

Sex addiction? You filthy pervert. Go away.

Workaholic? You should try sitting around on your arse on a continous jolly holiday. Why don't you retire or take up knitting? If you force yourself to smile, you'll suddenly feel much happier about everything. Take some deep breaths. Have you thought about shutting down the system and rebooting? Failing that, you can reformat the hard-disk and reinstall the operating system.

Isolated, lonely and suicidal? Chin up. Look on the bright side. Suicide is so selfish. Suicide just leaves a big mess for other people to clean up. You're so attention seeking. Cry for help. If you were serious you'd have done it already. Go away.

We are being told that problems are all in our heads, and the only person holding us back from achieving our full potential is ourself. This is utter bullshit. There are so many barriers to entry and things that are holding us back. Life is more complicated than every self-help book, motivational quote and trite soundbite that sounds inspirational but is actually really depressingly useless.

People who are happy and fulfilled are the ones who go to the gym, cook organic freshly prepared meals, don't smoke, don't drink, do yoga, meditate, smell the flowers, swim in the ocean and generally swan around having a lovely time. Doing those things is not the cure or the answer to anything. Doing those things is a symptom of the fact that your life is pretty bloody perfect. There's a reason why people are depressed, stressed and anxious, and it's not that they haven't done enough yoga.

The yoga can wait. It really can. I'm far too worried about earning enough money to pay my rent, bills, food, transport and other cost of living expenses, while also keeping myself washed, clean shaven, hair cut, nails clipped, nose and ear hair trimmed, and with enough clean clothes that are not completely threadbare in order to have a reasonably professional appearance. I'm far too worried about servicing my debts, staying on top of my taxes, keeping up with the administrative headaches that our bureaucratic government forces upon us, as well as turning up at work and keeping a seat warm from Monday to Friday. The yoga can wait. I'm far too preoccupied with my soul-destroying job that makes me suicidally desperate for escape, but escape is eternally just out of reach.

So you're going to quit your job and go travelling? What about your kids? What about your pets? What about your family? What about money? Oh, you don't have any money? Well you could save some up, couldn't you? Oh, you've been trying to save some up, but you're having a crisis NOW? Well, can't you just postpone your crisis, perhaps for another 30 years?

So you're going to quit your job and find a new career? What about your rent? What about your bills? What about all the money you need to pay for tuition and certification? What about the money you're going to need to fund yourself when you're looking for an entry-level job? What about the huge drop in income you're going to have, having no experience in your new career? What about the tent that you're going to buy because clearly you're going to go homeless if you lose your source of income?

So you're going to leave the city and get away from the rat race? What about the fact you don't have any friends or family anywhere else? What about the fact that there are no opportunities anywhere else? What about the fact that you've got nowhere to live, no car, no van, no tent, no cardboard box?

Oh yes, the world is stuffed full of opportunities to avoid the sources of stress that are destroying you. Yeah, sure it's all in your head and you should just imagine what you want to be, snap your fingers and it will come true. How's about a ballerina, footballer, pop singer, astronaut, fireman, deep sea diver? Yeah. The only thing holding you back is YOU you stupid dummy. How silly of you.

Or you could just do some yoga. Yoga fixes everything.

Here's the image that you had to click through to see, and scroll all the way down here. I hope the reward was worth it. Well done. Gold star.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction #career #depression

This is a story about science fiction...

Do you know what the trouble with physics is? Are you aware how much the scientific community is dominated by dogma, doctrine and the status quo? The business world is full of powerful dinosaurs who have too much to lose if they were dethroned. So why would science be any different?

Let's start with a madness that afflicts nearly every physicist.

Do you know what the difference between a model and a theory is? A theory is some equation, algorithm or logical thought experiment, that can empirically explain real-world observations and make testable predictions.

If I have a theory that explains the arc that a ball will trace when I throw it, it should be able to predict where it lands. I plug in the wind speed, the weight of the ball, the size of the ball, the strength of gravity on the planet, and the initial force and angle that will be imparted on the projectile, and the theory gives me the expected result. By testing various different balls and various different throws, the theory can be said to be proven insofar as the predictions are in agreement with the measurements, within a margin of error.

If I take various measurements from various experiments and gather them together in some great big database, and then attempt to infer a relationship between the measurements and the outcome, then I have a model. For example, it's fairly obvious that a heavy ball will not travel very far versus a light ball, when thrown with the same force. From the data, there emerges this statistical correlation between the weight and the distance, but there is no underlying theory that predicts much beyond this simple association of variables.

This is what we understand as the most important distinction between theory and model: that theories can make useful predictions that are testable, and give us some elegant mathematically expressible equation about the true nature of the universe, but models can only give us clunky retro-fitted attempts to make sense of vast swathes of data.

To understand the theory of a thrown ball, we had to employ the laws of motion, the laws of drag coefficients (wind resistance) as well as gravity. Newtonian mechanics tells us about the movement of objects in a frictionless universe. Fluid dynamics tells us about an object travelling through something like air or water. General Relativity tells us about objects acted upon by the force of gravity. Through the combination of these three theories, we can accurately predict where a thrown ball is going to land.

However, a model can make a reasonably decent job of the numbers, within a margin of error. Big heavy balls didn't travel very far, and small light balls flew further. No need for all that theory mumbo-jumbo. A model can easily be within the same order of magnitude as the theoretical predictions.

Have you heard of the Standard Model of particle physics?

The Standard Model tells us what goes on at a subatomic scale. Or rather, it attempts to, given vast quantities of experimental data.

Before I tell you any more about the Standard Model, let me let you in on a little secret. It doesn't scale. Yes, that's right. The Standard Model is very successful at the subatomic scale, but when we use it to model the entire universe, it doesn't work. In order to use the Standard Model to explain what is observable in the universe, cosmologists have had to invent 3 massive cludges, for which there is no experimental evidence to confirm the existence of: inflation, dark matter and dark energy.

The Standard Model concerns itself with stuff that we can see, and how things interact with each other. However, cosmology has had to invent dark matter (27% of the universe, but you can't see it), dark energy (68.3% of the universe, but you can't measure or detect it) and inflation (which attempts to explain how we got into this mess in the first place).

Religion is often derided for asking the faithful flock to accept things at face value without evidence, but now the dominant science of physics and cosmology asks us to to believe that over 95% of the universe is made up from stuff that's never been seen, never been measured, is not predicted by any fundamental theory and was basically dreamt up because our favoured model of the subatomic world doesn't scale.

Now, please don't get confused with quantum mechanics.

Quantum theory is quite empirically testable. The quantum behaviour of the universe is nearly impossible to visualise. Our day-to-day experience of the world is a deterministic one. When I put down the ball and look away, when I look back it's still there. When I throw the ball, I can know both its momentum and its location. I can predict where balls are going to land, in the deterministic world of the macro scale. Things get mighty weird in the quantum world, but that doesn't mean that things are not underpinned by good theoretical science.

The problem comes in when we model. The Standard Model has over 20 free constants, which are tweakable numbers fed in from experiments. The Standard Model is designed to be constantly improved, as new data become available. The often touted defence about how well tested and accurate the Standard Model is, is null-and-void, because many of those experiments actually feed back into the model itself. The Standard Model automatically adjusts itself to match experimental observation.

The problem with the Standard Model is that it doesn't make any testable predictions. The tests that we have done have simply improved the model. The experimental measurements change the free constants that are plugged into the model. The model confirms itself, but it doesn't tell us anything we hadn't already experimentally measured.

The only true test of the Standard Model would be to scale it up to see if it matches observations from cosmology. It doesn't scale.

Models don't give us fundamental theories that underpin the universe, and allow us to make predictions about previously unobserved phenomena that we can then design experiments to investigate. Models cannot be proven or disproven, because they do not make predictions. Models are unassailable, because they can adapt themselves to include any new experimental data.

The whole era of shut up and calculate has been a hinderance to the progress of theoretical physics. When people talk about the staggering accuracy and number of experiments that confirm the Standard Model, they ignore the fact that the model is only as accurate as the measurements that were used to build it. The model has told us nothing about the fundamental nature of reality.

Now, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detected a bump in experimental data at 75 GeV, we had over 300 papers published to explain such an anomaly. The bump turned out to be nothing more than noise, a glitch. Physicists are writing science fiction - fan fiction - to explain the workings of the universe, but none of it is backed by testable theory that makes useful predictions.

Show me the physics that predicts a discovery in advance as opposed to proton smashing and attempting to retrofit data to a model. The current design of experiments completely contradicts the scientific method.

Until we return to the era of coming up with hypotheses and fundamental theories that make testable predictions, and then building experiments to prove or disprove those theories, we will be stuck with our multi billion dollar particle smashers, that do nothing except to improve the accuracy of models by a few percentage points, and unearth no useful physics at all.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about lies, damn lies and statistics...

What do you think the main cause of death is for men under the age of 45? Road traffic accidents? Infectious diseases? Cancer? Industrial accidents? Drug abuse? Murder? War? Terrorism? Starvation? Auto-erotic asphyxiation?

It's suicide.

It's well documented that the number of people dying in wars has dropped immensely in the last hundred years. The number of people dying of starvation has nosedived in just the last 40 or 50 years. In theory, we are living in a time of peace and plenty.

At its peak in the 20th century, death by starvation never exceeded 1% of the population. Most people were not starving to death. The 60 million soldiers and civilians who died in World War II accounted for 2.6% of the population, but 12.5 million babies were also born in that period.

Even for your grandparents and great grandparents, the chances of dying through war or starvation were surprisingly slim.

But what are the chances of you buying some land, building a house, having a job or some project to work on where you feel happy and fulfilled? What are the chances of meeting a nice girl and settling down and having some kids, living close to your family, near where you grew up? What are the chances that you'll be able to stay on top of your finances, and have the things you need for you and your family? What are the chances that you'll have the basic essentials you need in your bio-psycho-social world?

You would have thought that now we have the high-yield agricultural techniques to grow all the food that we need, and we have the means of mass producing everything else, we should be free to pursue arts and education. We should be released from the need to do bullshit jobs. We should be freed from the prison of the office.

The benefits of working part-time are unquestionable. Not working at all is arguably bad for you, because the structure, routine and socialisation of working is good to keep the brain ticking over, but working 5 days a week or more is counterproductive.

Empirically, it has been proven that the same productivity can be achieved in a 3 day week as a 5 day week. There is so much 'padding' and pointless time wasting, as we attempt to spin out our bullshit jobs to last all day, all week. The jobs are utter bullshit anyway. There isn't going to be any less food on the table or fewer houses built because some social media marketing person didn't tweet enough, or some corporate lawyer or accountant didn't turn up for work.

Wars galvanise whole nations into action and hunger is something that cannot be ignored. The drive to fight and protect, hunt and gather, build shelter... these things are instinctive, and human.

However, there is no instinct to put on a shirt and tie and go and sit at a desk for 7 or 8 hours staring out of the window, bored out of your mind.

The link between going to work, getting paid your salary, and then using that salary to pay your rent, buy food and drive your kids to school is a very tenuous one. For sure, once you've got skin in the game you're utterly fucked and you just have to go along with what everybody else is doing, no matter how insane it is. You can't rock the boat when you're living a hand-to-mouth existence where you're never more than one or two months away from being evicted or having your home repossessed (i.e. mortgage foreclosure).

In the UK, 8.6 million people live with Damocles sword hanging over them... just one missed paycheque would see them unable to pay their rent or mortgage, putting them at risk of homelessness.

The pressure is ridiculous, and although the chance of you dying by war or famine is really small, the chance of you ever escaping the rat race is also really small. You hate your stressful shitty life where you've got absolutely no hope of ever getting ahead. You'll never escape the stress and relentless bullshit. Why wouldn't suicide become a more and more attractive option?

This is what we're seeing. There is no hope for people, but there is a mountain of stress and anxiety.

Depression rates are soaring. There is a mental health epidemic that is raging out of control.

Were we born to just pay bills and then die? Is that much of a life?

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about getting rich or dying trying...

People come to London seeking their fortune. I went to Ireland seeking my salvation. In a way, I kinda found it.

My life had fallen apart. I had lost a lucrative contract with Barclays through no fault of my own (the guy who terminated my contract was then sacked because of his stupid decision) as well as breaking up with my girlfriend, being evicted from my apartment in Swiss Cottage (again, through no fault of my own) and had once again found myself homeless and unemployed. Many friends took sides during my breakup, and I ended up suddenly alone.

It was January, in the depths of a depressing British winter. No job, no money, no friends, no girlfriend, no nothing. I was fucked.

A friend who I met in the summer, when I first became homeless, had returned to the emerald isle. He had generously made an open offer that I could go and stay with him and his family if I ever needed it, and oh boy did I need it. I was suicidally depressed and a big danger to myself. Camden council had been supremely unhelpful to a resident who they owed a legal duty of care, but they didn't give a shit whether I lived or died.

I guess a lot of unimaginative runaways go to London, and a huge proportion of them will end up in Camden Town. Camden is cool, undoubtably. Camden is full of wide-eyed young people, tourists, and huge amounts of recreational drugs, casual sex and music venues. It's a great place to spend a summer on a shoestring, smoking strong cannabis and chatting up girls.

I had made a couple of similarly Peter Pan-esque pals in Camden, in their mid thirties and working dead-end jobs on low pay, forced into living in hostels and dreadful squat-like houses with several people sleeping in every room. For me, it was a hugely novel experience, having been a wealthy IT consultant working in banking since I took my first big money contract at the age of 20, for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. After 17 or so years of fabulous wealth, slumming it for a summer was almost fun.

My girlfriend at the time was a waitress at an Italian restaurant. Despite having a degree in economics from the University of Bologna, she had rejected the rat race in favour of a minimum wage job and getting ridiculously stoned every day. She was fun and easy going, just so long as all you wanted to do was sit around while she chain-smoked joints, and have great sex of course.

I wouldn't say I outgrew my circle of friends, because I loved them dearly, but the stresses and demands of my contract at Barclays were not really compatible with the lifestyle of casual labour and the pursuit of recreational drugs. At some point, the worlds were going to collide.

My girlfriend and most of my friends felt that I had arrogantly snubbed them, but in fact I was desperately dependent on our social circle for my wellbeing and happiness. When things all fell apart, I did too. I was devastated by the collapse of my social life, as well as losing the structure and routine of my employment.

I ran away to Ireland, and my friend picked me up from Cork airport and took me back to the little village of Killavullen, that he and his family call home. Nestled in the hillside above the village, looking over the valley below and just at the edge of a vast forest, my friend's family home is a peaceful idyll that is completely unlike the rat race of London.

The timing was not ideal, and I arrived in the middle of various challenges facing the family, but they welcomed me and treated me with incredible warmth, kindness, care, despite the crises that they were dealing with. It's not my place to be indiscreet about the family matters that I became aware of, but suffice to say the last thing they needed was some sick burnt out heartbroken citydweller suddenly thrust into the mix.

My state of mind collapsed still further, as it became clear that there would be no reconciliation with my former friends: I was a pariah. There was nothing for me back in London, except a certain collapse in my will to live. My friend's family insisted that I should stay with them until I felt fit and well enough to return home. I missed my return flight and didn't book another.

I tried to go along with the flow of family and village life, getting to know the people that my friend grew up with, and his family.

My friend and I went panning for gold - I had bought him a kit while in England and had brought it over to Ireland for him - as well as climbing to the top of the 'mountain' that he lived on. We drove around the vast forest that covered the hillside, and explored the neighbouring villages, as well as nearby Cork city centre. Although I had visited Ireland twice before, I had missed the point about stopping to smell the shamrocks. I'm always in the mode of rush, rush, rush.

We travelled to the huge cliffs at Old Head, and I stood there on the edge, having had a haircut, a shave, a bunch of hot meals and having slept in a warm comfortable bed in a welcoming family home for some time. Instead of wanting to jump off the edge of the cliff, I was actually happy to be alive.

Tags: #friends #homeless #london #ireland #family #suicide #depression #career #banking #computing

This is a story about taking a break...

This time last year I was charging around Ireland, exhausted and stressed out of my mind to the point where I was losing my marbles, because I'd had such a rough ride up to the point that I finally got out of the country for a few days break.

August is a dreadful time to get anything done. The French have the right idea, basically taking the whole month off work, leaving the cities and heading for the coast. I peaked a little early this year, because I wanted to be on holiday while celebrating my birthday.

A friend raised the very valid point that becoming engaged in debate is exactly what I'm looking for when I'm courting controversy. To say that I'm shitposting or attention seeking would be untrue, but there's certainly a reason why I don't just keep a private journal.

Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, most of my peers have spawned offspring, and that means they're taking their snot-nosed little shits on holiday. Can you sense the provocative sarcasm? Certainly the irony in my tone has not come across effectively at times, causing offence to stressed out mummies and daddies over my irreverence towards the magic of parenthood.

Every so often I reconsider whether what I've been writing is balanced and fair, and occasionally somebody tells me I'm out of line or otherwise gives me feedback that directs my attention towards points of view I hadn't considered.

However, now we are in the middle of the school holidays, I definitely feel like any attempts to address my critics would fall on deaf ears. Most of my child-encumbered chums are too busy trying to stop their offspring drowning while in the paddling pool or World War III from kicking off in the back of their family-sized car packed with infants and infant paraphernalia.

Unless you've met me during your sprogged-up years, you're not going to know that I'm actually poking fun. For my own amusement, I'm assuming a caricature: that of the footloose and fancy free bachelor, who is too much of a cultured citydweller to be bothered with mopping up sick and pooh. In actual fact, if you have met me during your years of parenthood, I hope you think I'm at least a little bit sympathetic to the trials and tribulations of raising unruly offspring, and it's obvious that I actually like kids.

Ironically, those friends who genuinely are footloose and fancy free and have rejected the commitments of family life, have also missed the point. While they are off partying around the world, with buttloads of disposable income and zero fucks given for how the other half live, they've ignorantly chided me for not being more grateful for my lot in life. A couple of pals who life has conferred considerable good luck upon, have deigned to give me a lecture on homelessness and the struggles of the working class... presumably while also sipping champagne on a yacht and completely failing to see the irony.

The irony is not lost on me, no matter what you might think, and believe me when I say that I do consider those who have not been fortunate in life when I bemoan my own situation. I hope that I always give an adequate nod to say that I acknowledge my own fortune that I haven't had my limbs all cut off and lemon juice squeezed in my eyes while my testicles are removed with a rusty spoon. My God I'm so glad that didn't happen to me. Oh how terribly fortunate I am. I can hold up a prompt sign if you like, so you know when I'm being sarcastic.

I have this strange habit of directing what I write at various groups of people or individuals, which must be very confusing as a reader, but it's also confusing for me as a writer. Who am I writing for now? My passive-aggressive attacks on my parents, and my rebuttals of my critics, have fallen on deaf ears. It's the school holidays and everybody's off on the beach or at a country show.

I could stop, regroup, and even take this opportunity to actually write on themes rather than using my writing as a vehicle to deal with the demons of my mind and argue aloud with the thrust of my critics words, even if they're not reading or responding.

There's something satisfying in knowing that you've won the argument, whether your opponent listened and responded or not. So many people are terrible at debating anyway, believing that contradiction is the same thing. "No it isn't" then "yes it is" repeated ad nauseam. Yawn!

And so it is, I feel like I'm talking to myself, and this feeling is further exacerbated by the summer break and the "calm before the storm" moment I'm facing, where I feel like I'm shouting into an empty room, but I also know that I'm closer than I think to making a breakthrough.

Taking a break can so easily mean the abandonment of a project, and the web is littered with abandoned blogs. I might not have achieved much, but I've certainly achieved a degree of consistency.

I'm so close to turning a corner, and yet it feels like I'm getting nowhere during a lonely school holiday where everyone is distracted spending time with their families in the sunshine while I plug away at an unfulfilling job and continue to bare every aspect of my soul on the public Internet.

I could stop, but then I would be like Wile E. Coyote when he runs off the cliff. It's only when he stops running and looks down that he falls. If that cartoon coyote just kept running he would be fine.

That's the discipline of the completer-finisher. That's my discipline. I don't stop. I don't give up. Not until I achieve something. Not until I reach some kind of goal. The project's not done. I have to continue even if it's bleeding me dry.

Anyway, void, I know you're always here listening to me and it's mighty therapeutic to be able to talk at length. Feels a bit weird continuing to blog away when so many people are off on their summer holidays, but there we go!

Tags: #writing #ireland