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I write every day about living with bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression. I've written and published more than 1.3 million words

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Shame

5 min read

This is a story about responsibility...

Before and After

What a difference a day can make. 24 little hours. Now imagine that your life is nonstop round-the-clock bullshit perpetrated against you because you're trapped into a death spiral by people who profess to actually giving a shit about human life.

A great deal of preparations have gone into preparing the excuses why our own sons, brothers, nephews and other male members of our society are abandoned to a slow death ending in suicide. There's a lot of arse covering that has happened.

I'm an expert in arse covering.

I've seen arse covering throughout my career. I know it when I see it. I can smell bullshit and arse covering from a million miles away. I know when some utter dead-wood piece of shit is just covering their arse. I know when total cunts are throwing their colleagues under the fucking bus.

From my very earliest memories of childhood, I can remember my parents getting their excuses ready for why they were such utter cunts. Apparently I was a difficult child. It wasn't their fault. Apparently I used to cry in my cot out of spite. Apparently I used to shit my nappies to deliberately inconvenience my mum & dad. Apparently my very arrival on this earth was all part of the devil's plan to ruin my ma & pa's drug taking binge. Apparently if you were to shave my head you'd see the numerals 666 on my skull.

So, I have no doubt that my parents have covered their own conscience from the very day that I was born. I have no doubt that their own drug fuelled paranoia has meant that they've spent plenty of time getting their story straight. No your honour, he was always just evil you see, they'll say. Two against one. My word against theirs. Cunts.

If a plant was withered and dying, we would be in little doubt that it had been under-watered, perhaps had insufficient daylight or the soil was not very nutritious. Only in the madness of the world do we declare children to be evil little shits. Only in the folly of drug-addled parenthood would two grown adults believe that their child was a satanic agent sent to ruin their buzz. Cunts.

So, shame on them, not shame on me.

I've taken enough shame over the years. I've taken an unfair proportion of blame. I've taken an unreasonable amount of responsibility for my own birth. I've been saddled witth the debt of my parents' guilt and bullshit, but it's not my burden to carry. I'm fucked off with it all.

Shame on you, those who would tell me I'm a bad person from the day I formed my very earliest memories. Shame on you, those who would make me feel like a fucking inconvenience my whole life.

I'm sorry, not sorry, if I ever stole the limelight from you during your drug binges. I'm sorry, not sorry, that I ever deprived you of precious cash to spend on booze and drugs. I'm sorry, not sorry, that there was a tiny amount of time investment needed to palm me off on the state, so that I could be raised by my teachers and my friends parents.

You got a free fucking ride, in replicating your genes into me, but this is where the buck stops. You don't get to clone your selfish fucking genes any further. I have no intention of ever allowing the lineage of your selfish fucked up character traits to be perpetrated on humanity for any further generations. You absolutely awful people.

There's a sickness inside me, in the genes that I carry, passed on from lazy, arrogant, paranoid and selfish, self-centred arseholes who care about nobody but themselves and their drug taking, but this is where it ends. This is the end of the line. This is where somebody takes a stand.

Do I have anything to be ashamed of?

My parents constantly shamed me. Nothing was ever good enough. Unsatisfied with me, my parents took further steps to humiliate me and destroy my self esteem and happiness. Repeatedly, my very identity was violated and destroyed by the self-centred cunts who ruled my life until the day I could finally escape their clutches. There is nothing I want to give my parents credit for, except my unshakable belief that their genes should die as soon as possible.

Taking responsibility is about not perpetrating more pain and suffering in the world. Shame on you, my parents.

Do I have things to be ashamed of? Of course.

Have I paid my debts? Many, many, many times over, and now I'm exhausted.

Do I die in shame? Not at all. I couldn't have done any more in the circumstances. There's no pride, but I know that there's nothing left to give, and I maintained my integrity.

To perpetuate the misery that was inflicted upon me, would be a crime. The stain that my parents have left on the world must come to an end. In their old age, they'll pass away peacefully in their sleep. When I'm dead too, the nightmare is more or less over.

Eating poison to hurt your enemy is foolish, but my very existence serves to support this bullshit notion that children fucked up their drug binge, and they were cursed with an evil child sent by satan himself. I know it's ridiculous, but I can't take the risk of this horse shit continuing.

I'm so sick and tired of being told to live in shame, when I have little to be ashamed of.

I stand by my sins. I welcome the end.

 

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Downfall

2 min read

This is a story about the race to the bottom...

Piranha

The world is bleeding me dry of my creative output, and for what? It's 5am and I have been writing for many hours. I've already produced the equivalent of many many novels. The harsh and uncaring universe couldn't give a shit.

If you haven't managed to follow things, this is what a crisis looks like. I've been steadily yelling out louder and louder that I'm barely able to hang on, but now I'm compelled to write and write until I either kill myself or somebody eases me away from the keyboard and tells me that things are going to be OK.

Evidently, things are not going to be OK.

It's been months, if not years, that I've been generally abandoned. The universe clearly doesn't give a fuck and neither do my family. It's easy for me to be scientific about things and understand why the cosmos wouldn't give two hoots about my insignificant little blip in the grand scheme of things, but I literally couldn't do much more in terms of flagging up the distress I'm in and begging for some kind of support.

This is what the endgame looks like.

I'm already exhausted. I've limped along for years after my parents completely reneged on their promise to lend a teeny tiny helping hand to assist me in rebuilding my life after it was shattered by a mean selfish ex who herself shat on the bond that we'd made to support each other in sickness and in health. The world is a place full of utter cunts, just spewing offspring that the parents have little intention of taking any responsibility for. The commitment of partnership is total bullshit. There are so few people on planet Earth with any integrity. It's heartbreaking.

So, I find myself on wind-down mode. I'm working my bollocks off to leave this world with some integrity. My debts are covered by money in my business, and a life insurance policy. My assets are probably worth more than I'm aware of. The wealth that I've generated hasn't disappeared into thin air. Some lazy cunts have benefitted from my industriousness, ingenuity and labour.

I stand by my sins with honour. I welcome the end. I eagerly anticipate the sweet release of death.

Goodbye.

 

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Clean Conscience

2 min read

This is a story about immorality...

Clear Conscience

When the end comes, did you feed people? Did you clothe people? Did you shelter people from the storm?

If you profited from human misery, you're going to find it pretty hard to live with yourself, knowing that you're about to die.

If you didn't build anything of consequence, or bring joy to people's lives, the chances are that you were simply a perpetrator of human suffering.

"Oh I just did the accounting"

Yes, but you probably helped the loan sharks to kneecap ordinary people. Debt is slavery. Did you work for the banks, in raping the planet and taking all her natural resources in order to poison the very air we breathe? How are you able to sleep at night? Because you shredded all the evidence? What a load of horse shit!

Have you extrapolated what you do, and considered a planet where we all perpetrated the same fucktardery as you do? It's literally Hell on Earth when everybody is just a selfish shitbag.

You can't say "other people were doing it too" as any kind of defence. Morality is absolute, not relative. Just because you were surrounded with other monsters who were riding roughshod over the struggling masses, doesn't mean that you are somewhat in the clear. Your conscience doesn't lie: if you're fucking people over, you're a bad person.

Unquestionably capitalism doesn't work for the vast majority. When less than 70 individuals have more money than over 50% of the global population put together, you've gotta call out that system as utter bullshit.

Sure, you've gotta pay your mortgage and your kids need shoes, but what the fuck kind of world are they going to inherit anyway if you're just an immoral fucktard. It's no defence to say "I was just following orders" or "I was just doing what everybody else was doing".

Stop. Think. Act.

 

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Seasonal Variation

3 min read

This is a story about cyclical natures...

Columbia Road

Summer = happy. Winter = sad. It's usually that simple. Why would anybody be happy in winter? Winter is a time of hibernation, cold, hunger and death.

However, human society has evolved to take advantage of seasonal variations. We all tend to have a wild time in August, as our children are off school and we also enjoy the good weather and general festivities. Summer brings optimism and joy, in line with our increased energy levels due to longer days and the balmy air temperature.

Frankly, this summer has been the most depressing that I can remember.

I thrive on human connection, and most people are distracted with all the fun of the fair at the moment. The bright lights and fanfare of the Olympics and other theatrical bullshit are titillating the fickle attentions of the proletariat. It's mighty dull for anybody who doesn't subscribe to the mass hysteria that can afflict our society of simpletons.

So, I'm riding out the summer, waiting for reality to bite and the true situation to reveal itself. Things always look better when bathed in golden sunlight. In the shortening days of the autumn, things are going to look pretty bleak. I don't relish the collapse in the current mood of delusional optimism, but at least destruction heralds reconstruction. So many things are broken. Limping along thinking everything is OK is not helping anybody.

I have now come to understand my own cyclical nature. Normally my moods are dictated by the prevailing weather, but now my mental health is so deeply damaged that even summertime cannot lift my depression. However, I'm able to appreciate that all of humanity is similarly affected by the weakness that means they feel unreasonably happy when the sun is shining.

Last year, I predicted a winter of discontent. This was plainly wrong.

But! I tend to be a bit premature with all my proclamations of doom. The number of years that I've been talking about a collapse in the London housing market have proven ridiculously wrong... although the bubble continues to inflate to epic proportions.

I was once young and naïve. Now I'm old and cynical.

I've made a few smart predictions: the credit crunch, the commodity boom (gold, oil) and Bitcoin. I've profited from astute investment and hedging during every crisis of the last 20 years. I'm most definitely proactive, not reactive.

The simplest thing to predict is that summer must come to an end. People will come back from holiday. The kids will go back to school. Workers will go back to their jobs.

In the cold light of day, everything's going to look pretty shit.

 

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Content is King

4 min read

This is a story about monarchy...

Inflatable Crown

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.

 

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Escaping the Rat

4 min read

This is a story about bullshit jobs...

Rat Attack

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.

 

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Pax Americana

3 min read

This is a story about world peace...

American Boy

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.

 

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Male Competition

3 min read

This is a story about the jungle...

Christmas Chez Ryland

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.

 

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102 Blog Posts : A Sleepless Night

3 min read

This is a story about tireless commitment...

London sunset

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.

 

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Barrier to Entry

6 min read

This is a story about surprises...

Blurry Barrier

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.

Thames Barrier

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.

 

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