This is a story about substance dependancy...

The daily grind. How do you get through the working day? What is your routine?

150 million Americans drink coffee every day. That's roughly 50% of the entire population. No matter where you are in the world, you have some kind of vice to help you limp along.

Coca leaves, coffee and tobacco in the Americas. Tea and opium in Asia. Betel nut and Khat in Africa. Alcohol just about everywhere across the globe.

The workforce will literally down tools and be unable to work, without the substances that they're dependent on to pep them up and chill them out. The world functions through substance dependency.

Presently, I'm under pressure to addict myself to anti-depressants and tranquillisers in order to be able to work. My chemical-free life is unbearable. How am I supposed to cope with the relentless pressure without something to calm my jangled nerves? How am I supposed to cope with the futility of my existence without something to artificially raise my spirits?

Caffeine will alter my concentration span, so that I can feel productive even though my day is largely pointless and boring. Alcohol will shut my brain down and dull my senses, at the end of the day, when all there is to do is worry about having to do the same shitty stuff all over again tomorrow.

Yes, I could fill my life with kids, cats, dogs, guinea pigs, so that I'm too busy mopping up shit and snot to even notice that all I'm doing is perpetuating human misery. The opiate endorphins that are released during childrearing or caring for pets will make my life more bearable, at the expense of the poor unfortunates that I have spawned. Defining my existence by the fruit of my loins is merely handing on the problem to the next generation.

Doing sports merely floods my body with opiate endorphins, as my body tries to manage the pain of the muscle and joint damage that I have inflicted on my body. Yes, it's a 'natural' high, but it's every bit as natural as putting a synthetic opiate into your body, and a hell of a lot more likely to lead to arthritis and injury.

Pursuing adrenalin, through kitesurfing or skydiving, will give my brain a jolt of 'fight or flight' chemicals that I could get by fighting a tiger, or putting amphetamines into my body. The relief of having survived an encounter with a wild animal trying to kill me, will make me feel happy to be alive, but sooner or later you're going to get mauled to death. The pursuit of adrenalin knows no bounds : you will always have to push the envelope a little further each time.

I have a deep moral objection, to having to medicate myself to function in modern society. Just because everybody I know needs their morning cup of coffee, their cigarette breaks, the glass of wine when they get home from work... it doesn't mean that we are living our lives correctly.

Things have gotten even worse in modern life. Now people need anti-depressants and tranquillisers just to hold a job down and not have a nervous breakdown. People are popping pills from their doctor just to hang onto what they've got. "I'll lose my job if I don't have these pills to help me hide my crippling mental health problems" people say. Where is the cause and effect?

What if your mental health problems are a result of your job, your lifestyle, your life? What if your mental health problems are a symptom of having to do shitty work that you hate, and compete in the rat race?

We have been indoctrinated, at school, to prepare ourselves for a world of work, but it's not a real world. We are not supposed to be away from our families. We are not supposed to live with such insecurity, and in such uncaring environments.

From the very first day at school, we are being set up to compete with one another. Only a small number of the kids can get the "A" grades. Only a small number of students will get a first class degree. This prepares us for work, where only a small number of us will get the good jobs. It's a pyramid scheme, so most people are losing.

You've been set up to fail. Your rent is always going to be a significant proportion of your income. Your household expenses are always going to leave very little disposable income. The cost of childrearing will always leave you with less than you really need, to not feel anxious, afraid, insecure.

We are living in a world that has been completely shaped by market economics. The very design of our economy is designed to separate fools from their money, in the most efficient way. If you get a pay rise, the cost of goods and services will automatically rise to compensate. Prices are fluid, dynamic. Freedom is always going to be just out of reach.

Wouldn't you like it if only one parent had to work? Wouldn't you like to see more of your kids than just kissing them goodnight, and stealing a glance in the morning before you have to rush off to work? Wouldn't you like to be close to home, in case there's something you need to take care of, or just to see more of your loved ones? Why do you have to do a shitty commute that takes up hours of your day, and deprives you of time with your family? Why do you have to leave the village where you grew up, and go to the big polluted crowded city, in order to seek your fortune?

But don't worry about such existential questions. Just dope yourself up with tea, coffee, alcohol, antidepressants, tranquillisers. Don't worry about it, just zap your brain with enough chemicals to kill an elephant. Don't worry about it, just keep putting toxic stuff into your body, because you need that job, you need to stay in the rat race, you need to stay competitive.

Students are even taking Modafinil and Ritalin in order to stay awake and concentrate on their studies, because it's so important that they get good exam grades.

Doesn't all this sound like a terrible arms race to you? Doesn't it sound like our efforts to compete with one another are destroying our mental health? Doesn't it sound like we're sacrificing so much of our existence, to do more homework, study harder, work harder, work longer hours, deny our aching heart that cries out to be at home, cuddling our kids and hugging our loved ones.

Aren't we denying our very humanity, and using chemicals to mask problems that we label as mental illness? Wouldn't we all be more mentally healthy if modern society allowed us to be more human than just some worker-drone in an anonymous big city somewhere, with a cruel boss who only cares about productivity and timekeeping?

The lives we lead are collective madness. We are killing one another, not with guns, but with our relentless drive for good exam grades, pay rises and promotions.

I'm in favour of a general strike, because the madness has to stop.

Let's get some new kind of society under construction, where we worship happiness, not money.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #addiction #drugs

This is a story about respecting your elders...

Who's the responsible one round here? Who's got to carry the can, at the end of the day? Who's got to live with the consequences of bad decisions, and clean up other people's mess?

There isn't a class war going on. There's a generation war.

The baby boomers drove around in gas-guzzling cars, burnt dolphins to stay warm, dynamited the glaciers, blew up nuclear weapons under the polar ice caps, and generally whizzed around the globe spraying deadly chemicals on everything and saying "FUCK YOU GRANDCHILDREN, HA! HA! HA!".

I remember at school, when I was 10 or 11 years old, me and my friend Ben used to write long rhymes about saving the environment, and read them out at school events. We basically urged a modicum of control over the unmitigated climate disaster we saw all around us.

Growing up in the Thames Valley, huge numbers of my friends were asthmatic. Particulate emissions from internal combustion engines, gathered in the river valley, and in central Oxford the percentage of kids suffering from respiratory conditions was at the highest level in the country.

My friend Ben's parents had responsibly given up smoking for the health of their children, but mine would not listen to my pleas to stop wasting a significant proportion of the family income on something that was destructive to the health of us all. It was selfishness, plain and simple.

I still vividly remember one time when I begged my Dad to stop taking drugs. "Do you expect me to be a boring old fart?" he asked, incredulously. The tragic thing is, that I didn't need him to take drugs to look 'cool'. It was his own insecurity and pathetic attempt to impress young family members like my cousin Sue, that meant that he thought he was some kind of counter-culture hero, just because he took addictive drugs.

My Dad was adamant that I should not get to go to University, nor my sister, even though him and my Mum both enjoyed a free University eduction. My sister and I were both educated in state schools, even though my parents enjoyed the option of private/selective schooling.

My parents had substantial financial help from my grandparents to purchase their first home. No such help has been forthcoming from our parents, and indeed I bought my house without any financial support from my parents, as well as paying for my wedding & honeymoon out of my own pocket. My sister has - as a percentage of her income - possibly been even more financially independent than me.

As kids and adults, my sister and I have certainly been very economical, responsible, mature, in ways that my parents don't even come close to. We've paid our own way in life. We've grafted harder than my parents could possibly imagine.

And for what? So that my parents' generation can tell us that we're profligate, reckless with money, irresponsible, lazy? My parents' generation tell us we should save money for a rainy day, when the pensions that they draw bear no relation to the actual amount of money that they've saved up. The baby boomers are hoping to have hefty final salary pensions that far outstrip the amount of money they've paid into the schemes, to the point of causing a massive black hole in the nation's finances.

The upper-class Victorians used to say "children should be seen and not heard" but those children were reared by wet-nurses, nannies and au pairs, plus all the other servants. If you don't have servants to rear your children, you don't get to say such obnoxious things, because you're the only person in your child's life.

Infant mortality used to be very high, so ordinary Victorians cherished their children. Having a healthy child was a blessing, and something to be celebrated. There wasn't this strange culture of worshipping people with old-fashioned ideas, who sat idle for 30, 40 years, just criticising everything. Yes, we'd all like to retire and just sit around in our favourite chair reading shit newspapers and being mean to everybody, but the retirement age was always supposed to be just 1 year more than the average life expectancy.

Our economy is structured around the 'grey pound'. After the banks, the most powerful institutions in the country are the pension funds. These massive piles of money, managed by asset managers and institutional investors, for the benefit of their pension-drawing clients, decide everything about how this country is run. When we talk about things being run for the benefit of shareholders, those shareholders are mostly pension funds.

If anybody ever says to me "what have you given back to your parents?" or  "be grateful your parents gave you the gift of life" I'm going to struggle not to scream in their face with rage.

My whole life has been generating value for shareholders. Every penny and pound of profit that I have generated for my masters has gone into dividends and higher stock prices, to inflate the asset value of a pension fund somewhere. My whole life has been toiling to allow the baby boomers to have a life of idle luxury, not that they're fucking grateful.

But you know what? Things have gone way too far.

The older generation has fucked up the environment, fucked up the economy and demanded that young people suffer austerity, University tuition fees, job insecurity, wage stagnation, eye-watering rent, impossibly over-inflated house prices and listen to a sneering arrogant bunch of lazy grey-haired cunts telling them they're lazy and stupid the whole fucking time.

They say you should be nice to your kids because they'll choose your nursing home. Damn fucking straight, but you don't get to have 20 years of idle luxury before you go so damn senile that you have to be put in a home, so that your hard-pressed children can continue working all hours to pay for your profligacy, laziness and arrogance.

Yes, it's true that a huge proportion of wealth has been diverted into the hands of a few eye-wateringly rich families. However, WHO THE FUCK WAS ASLEEP ON THE JOB WHEN THAT HAPPENED?

Why the hell is it me who has to go on political marches, to demand that wealth is more fairly redistributed? My parents were too busy sat on their fucking arse taking drugs and reading books and newspapers to actually get off their lazy backsides and engage in the political process, for the good of the country and the good of us kids and grandkids.

Don't pretend like voting to leave the EU is somehow in the best interests of the country and future generations. One lazy pencil cross in a box doesn't make up for the idle years spent enjoying a free University education, job security, high pay, reckless drug taking, low cost of living, great housing, foreign holidays, new cars, superb pension and lots and lots of disposable income. YOU HAD IT FUCKING EASY, YOU STUPID OLD CUNTS.

As you can tell, this is a fairly calm and measured response to being sold down the river, and having my future destroyed by a bunch of people who won't be around to suffer the global warming and economic depression.

Literally, almost everybody I know my age or younger suffers from depression and/or anxiety. What a legacy!

We used to sing "he's got the whole world in his hands" but where is your fucking God now?

Tags: #parents #childhood #oxford #family #politics #capitalism

This is a story about dirty tricks...

The Government and affluent Londoners have completely misread the public mood. There is a complete disjoint between the media, politics, and the concerns and struggles of the general population.

Youth unemployment, ballooning student debt, a lower minumum wage for people aged 18 to 24, unaffordable house prices, ridiculous cost of living... these things don't just affect young people, but also their parents. Parents are waking up to the fact that their kids aren't lazy & stupid, but in fact millennials are far better behaved than any previous generation. You just have to look at falling alcohol consumption, smoking and teenage pregnancy rates, to see that today's young people are far more responsible than their parents and grandparents ever were.

Meanwhile, there's a population bubble that is coming up to retirement age and hoping to collect a final salary pension - an income that is not at all linked to how much they have paid in and asset values - that is causing a massive deficit that nobody is talking about.

Everybody's dug into their trenches.

Students quite rightly demand the same standard of education that their parents received, but must get themselves tens of thousands of pounds into debt, and there isn't even the guarantee of a good job at the end of an expensive education.

Pensioners quite rightly demand the same retirement age as their parents, but are going to live much longer, healthier, lives in their retirement, and expect to continue an extremely high standard of living: 3 foreign holidays a year, new cars and large empty houses, with expensive luxury kitchens & bathrooms, lavishly decorated.

Parents quite rightly expect their kids to move out, live independently, get married, have some grandkids. But that's not going to happen unless parents share some of their wealth, and many parents are already worried about whether they have enough money to maintain their high standard of living. So, the reality is kids never leave home, never become financially independent, are never able to escape the demeanment of being dependent on their parents.

Driving this drop in living standards is the fact that the West has been exporting its inflation for years. The postwar boom years were achieved by abandoning the gold standard and printing money. The only way that the value of the Pound, Dollar, Euro and Yen have been propped up is by an agreement called Bretton Woods, which defined a basket of so-called "hard" currencies.

Now, the people of the developing nations are demanding payback. These people have worked far harder and saved far more money, than the arrogant West. These people are quite rightly dissatisfied with being economically enslaved by a culture that broadcasts its profligacy to the world. If Hollywood is to be believed, we all live in mansions, drive supercars, fly helicopters and know the President of the United States of America, personally.

People want everything they were promised, but reality is a real let-down.

Even in London, where the streets are paved with gold, we live in tiny damp flats, with paper-thin walls where you can hear every little noise your neighbours make and the din from passing traffic is incessant. We are like sweaty sardines on a dangerously overcrowded public transportation network, working the longest hours in Europe, in the hope of affording some ludicrously overpriced piece of real estate. Pollution and crime is all around us. Yet, we are high-brow Guardian newspaper readers, who deign to patronise the ordinary working people outside the M25.

Nobody in the provinces gives a shit about a few malnourished brown people. They just want the cushy life their parents had: with a free University education, a seat on an uncrowded train, a 9 to 5 job that has a big enough salary for one parent to work, buy a house, pay the bills and raise some kids. However, that dream is never going to come to fruition.

People have been disengaged with politics for years. The disillusionment with the instruments that maintain the status quo, has reached crisis point. The wealthy elite have been too greedy for too long, and they have completely misread the public mood, the will of the people.

We're going to have problems when even the middle classes become squeezed, because their kids are a massive drain on their finances. The middle classes are the ones who still wield some political clout, and can even become somewhat radicalised.

Finger-pointing at immigrants will fool some simple-minded folks who didn't pay attention at school and who fail to see the spine-chilling parallels with the rise of far-right fascism in 1930s and 1940s Europe. However, it's only going to buy a very small amount of time, before the UK descends into all out chaos and destruction.

While one generation goes on strike, to demand that their final salary pensions aren't touched, and the protection of jobs that have become unnecessary due to technological advancements, another generation will have their lives made ever more miserable. Young people have to suffer train strikes, on services that are already overcrowded and cost a significant proportion of their income, in order to get to a job where they're paid less simply because they're young, and their money disappears into the black hole of the pensions deficit, with no hope of ever owning a home and having the luxury of going on strike themselves, for fear of losing their job.

We are being turned against one another, and against minority groups like immigrants and Muslims, when the real culprits for our suffering are the public-schooled wealthy elite, who become career politicians and rule over us. The real culprits are those who take out more than they've paid in. The real culprits are those who expect us to work harder than they would work themselves.

The enemy here is inequality, not immigration. The thing that we should be correcting is the rich:poor divide, not dismantling the safety net of social welfare, and blaming people who suffer long-term disability, or immigrants.

We have been manipulated by the media and politicians into voting against our self-interests. We have elected politicians who have massively increased national debt, while at the same time making people more insecure in their jobs, less financially well-off.

Now, the politically inactive class have become radicalised, in voting for right-wing policies, and for relinquishing politically progressive ideals, which had given us greater protection for ordinary working people.

A vote to leave the EU is further playing into the hands of wealthy property owners, who want to see the clock rolled back to a time when there were no labour unions, worker rights and there was no job security or opportunity to better yourself. Brexit is vote to increase the power of a bunch of Eton-educated toffs, who have never done a hard day's work in their lives.

Yes, things need to change, and things need to change quickly, if we are not going to suffer a terrible rebellion by a hard-pressed working public, that could sweep away most of the advancements that our society has made, at great expense.

However, reversing the result of a referendum that was already held once before, is not the way forward. The House of Commons should be just that: representative of the common person. Getting rid of EU gravy-trainers simply hands more power to the wealthy elite, who have presided over a shameful decline in the British public's standard of living, for far too long.

Voting Brexit sends completely the wrong message to the elite, and to nasty bigots, like UKIP's Nigel Farage. Voting Brexit emboldens those who wish to divide and rule us.

Tags: #politics #capitalism

This is a story about working class heroes...

What could be more symbolic of the ordinary working Englishman, than the white van driver? What embodies the British working class more than a beer-gutted builder, wolf whistling at a pretty girl in the street, from the vantage point of their scaffolding? What could be more patriotic than the colours of the St George's flag, and a rioting football hooligan, swilling lager while chanting racial abuse?

Oneupmanship is rife, even when people are talking about reverse snobbery. People say to me "everybody's got to work" as if they're some kind of class hero, some kind of fucking Victorian chimney sweep. They see themselves as hardworking, and everybody else as angst-filled spoiled brats.

But, this is stupidity, plain and simple.

The fact of the matter is, people don't have to work. There is enough wealth, that if it was all shared out, we'd have over $200,000 each, so a family of 2 adults and 3 kids would have a million dollars. That's enough to live for 548 years, in the developing world.

In actual fact, we have been programmed - brainwashed - to believe that what we do is productive and useful and necessary. Somehow, the world's going to come to an end without those sales forecasts. Somehow, everybody's going to die if you don't fill in your timesheet. Somehow, all the crops are going to fail if you don't sell any insurance policies today.

I was watching a documentary about legal highs last night, and the film-maker asked a guy who was manufacturing and selling legal drugs how he could live with himself, knowing that he was fuelling people's addictions: "everyone's gotta work" he said.

I worked for a weapons manufacturer, as my first job after college. If you don't think to yourself "what is the negative impact on the world of what I do?" then you're a fucking idiot. You can't hide behind "everyone's got to work".

"I was just following orders" is the equivalent of "everyone's got to work". Being a guard in a concentration camp, or an officer of an army committing a genocide... those things are jobs, and everyone's got to work, apparently. It's pathetic. You can't hide behind a justification like that.

Anyone who says I'm lazy is going to get a boot up their fucking arse. I've founded multiple businesses and worked 100+ hour weeks, in a non-stop career that hasn't included any breaks, any gap years, any sitting around reading fucking books. I've been in full-time education and employment since I was out of fucking nappies. Fuck off. Fuck all the way off.

What I'm talking about is conscientious objection. Yes, we normally associate that with people who refuse to do a government's killing for them. However, the way that wars are waged nowadays is not with boots on the ground, but in boardrooms, stock markets and with foreign currency trades.

There's an arms race, where multinational corporations have enslaved the world. If I have an economic monopoly, because I have used my stock price in order to acquire all my competitors, I obviously control the labour market as well the ability to manipulate prices.

I can buy a pair of jeans from Primark for £7. How is that possible? Somebody still has to pick the cotton. Somebody still has to operate the sewing machine. We haven't entered a robotic futuristic world yet.

Here's a picture of the very moment that I broke down, and became so depressed that I could no longer work. This is the West's lie, their fantasy, their trick. This is a robotic distribution centre, where goods are distributed to stores, for your consumption. This is what we believe is the reality of progress, and innovation.

However, somebody still has to pick the cotton. It might feel like we're arrived in a futuristic utopia, but the reality is that simply the shitty jobs have mostly been offshored. When I decided I wanted to be an electrician, it's because somebody in a callcentre in India can't clamber down the phone line and come and fix your lights.

The lack of a tangible reality, in almost everything I did as a software engineer, really started to fuck me up. Where's the physical proof that something I did was useful to humanity? In actual fact, I had proof of quite the opposite, having been right at the very heart of the credit crunch during 2007/2008.

Turning on each other and saying crap like "get a job" and "everybody's gotta work" is such utter bullshit. People who have become depressed and can't work have got it right. Propping up a system that enslaves most of humanity is total horseshit. You damn well should be depressed about your crappy job that ignores the blatant crime of economic imperialism. It is unconscionable.

We are now living in such a highly-leveraged society, that nobody can take their foot off the gas pedal. People have skin in the game - kids - so they think they have to keep servicing their debts, paying their rent/mortgage, working their crappy job. People mistakenly believe that work will set them free. Work will not set you free - you toil for your own demise.

The worship of corporate profits means that people must work longer hours for less money, in real terms. Wage inflation is rock bottom, and that means that your wealth is inflated away. The cost of goods, services, housing, food... all these things have massively increased, but average wages have barely budged.

The brainwashed massses are now fighting with one another. Instead of being pleased that your co-worker got that promotion, we think "it should have been me". We think "I could do what they do" and secretly hope that our peers are just as downtrodden as us, just as hard-up. There is jealousy, resentment.

The crabs in the bucket are pulling each other back down into their prison, whenever one of them is close to escape. The working public are crawling all over each other, in a seething mass of claws and excrement at the bottom of a plastic bucket, just waiting for the day that they're tossed into a pan of boiling water.

The government encourages us to report benefit cheats and other victimless crime. We are taught to bully and abuse people who don't work. We are brainwashed into thinking we're some kind of fucking hero, for working a shit job that does nothing except perpetuate human misery and further compound global problems.

Have a kid, get a dog. Try to pretend you're really important. Well done. Gold star. You worked your job, without giving a shit about what it really fucking means.

This is the reality of how your cotton pickers and callcentre staff get to work. This is the future. This is what you don't see, as a consequence of "everyone needs to work" and feeling smug about what a hard little worker you are.

Tags: #career #banking #capitalism #politics

This is a story about jobs for the boys...

Do you feel like you earn your salary? What is it that makes you think you're worth your wages? How do you value your contribution?

If you work a physical job, you're likely to feel pretty exhausted at the end of the day. Maybe your feet hurt, your back, your muscles. Perhaps you judge your working day based on how much energy you've expended. Perhaps your job involves standing up, walking around, even running around. Perhaps your job involves lifting, stacking, moving, shifting. Can your value therefore be considered a function of how many things you physically move? For example: boxes of stuff from the storeroom, products on shelves, patients from beds, or children from perilous situations.

Maybe you work an academic job, or something you have to be highly qualified for. Perhaps you judge your working day based on how hard you worked in the past. You maybe had to really concentrate at school and do all your homework. Perhaps you had to go to University and at least turn up for some of the lectures. You're probably pretty pleased with yourself that you beat the competition to those limited places, and got the necessary grades. Can your value be considered a function of how stressful your exams were, and how hard it was to write your disseration, your thesis?

Maybe you work a high pressure job, something you really have to concentrate on. Perhaps you have no time to judge your day, because you're just so busy that you don't have time to think about it. You maybe have to take sales calls all day long to meet your targets. You're always talking to people. Or maybe you have to watch a computer screen all day, like a stock-market trader or an air-traffic controller. Can your value be considered a function of your ability to concentrate, and keep busy with the task in hand for the whole working day?

Maybe you work a caring job, or something that delivers service directly to people. Perhaps you judge your working day based on how many people you deliver satisfactory outcomes for. Perhaps you have had to work on a caring bedside manner. Perhaps you have had to develop diplomatic skills for dealing with people. Can your value be considered to be a function of how many smiles you get each day, how many thank yous?

Maybe you work a repetitive job, or something that requires very little problem solving. Perhaps you have plenty of time to think and it's quite clear what needs to be done, but there are only a limited number of hours in the day. Perhaps you enter data in spreadsheets. Perhaps you type the answers that are written down on forms. Perhaps you work on a factory production line. Perhaps you deliver widgets. Can your value be considered a function of how many of these repetitive functions you can perform in a fixed period of time? Do you take pride in the tiny efficiency gains you can make in a job that has been easily mastered?

Maybe your job is to educate, inform, inspire, entertain. Your job is to titillate the attentions of other people. Your job is to spoon feed culture to the masses. Perhaps you had wide-eyed ambitions about bringing song and dance to the people. Perhaps you thought you were going to be a war journalist. Perhaps you thought you were going to set the minds of young people alight. Can your value be considered a function of your reach, your influence? Do you know how many followers you have? How many viewers? How many readers? How many listeners?

But what happens when your purpose is cloudy, unclear? What happens when you can't see what difference you're making, either to other people or to yourself?

Why do you do what you do? Is it possible to work a job, just because it puts food on the table and shoes on the children? Is it possible to work a job just because?

Everybody needs to work, right? But what if your job is makework? What if your job is made up, just to justify the salary of your manager, who has to have a certain headcount in order to get their promotion? What if your whole industry can't justify its existence? What if everything that your company does, and companies like it, is completely superfluous to human existence?

What do we need? Food, water, shelter, warmth, social bonds. Where does insurance fit in that world? Where does a law firm fit? Where does a bank fit? Where do technology companies fit?

If you woke up tomorrow, and your company didn't exist, and neither did any of its competitors, would the human race keel over and die? If you work for an agricultural business, then quite possibly. We need grains, we need vegetables. If you work for an accountancy firm, I think we'll all be just fine.

I've got nothing against the people who work in the service sector per se but should we value those industries more than, say, fishing, farming, building & caring?

Do you think I give a shit about the protection of intellectual property rights of a wealthy corporation? Do you think that I respect the instruments of capitalism as an efficient means to do more with less?

Fundamentally, how many people are living miserably? We might point to increases in life expectancy as an indicator of progress, but what if those lives are filled with stress, anxiety, depression? What if those lives are miserable and isolated, unfulfilled, unhappy?

Official statistics say that more than 1 in 4 of us are battling mental health problems. In truth, the real number must be much higher, because there are so many people who have undiagnosed problems. We know from suicide rates and prescriptions of psychiatric medications - such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs - that problems are growing at an alarming rate.

There's a direct correlation between my lack of job satisfaction, and my poor mental health. When I've been happy in my job, I've been overworked. When I've stopped to think about what I've been doing, I've realised that I've been building systems that perpetuate human misery.

It's said that for every 1% that unemployment increases, over 40,000 people will commit suicide. I built a system for JPMorgan that processed the equivalent of $163,000 for every man, woman and child on the planet, in Credit Default Swaps. You think that money is better off locked up in the banking system rather than being in people's pockets?

If I'm building banking systems that process $37 million a second, why the hell are people living in poverty? Why the hell has the National Health Service got to be left underfunded? Why the hell is science underfunded? Why the hell have I got to work a crappy job that I hate, in order to make thousands of people redundant?

Rational self-interest, and the philosophy of Ayn Rand has led us down a very dark path. It's actually in our rational self-interest to smash the systems that take us on a race to the bottom.

Perhaps it's time to throw our clogs into the loom?

You think that you want an A-list celebrity life, with all the trimmings and bling. However, collectively wanting this is leading us all down a path that makes humanity miserable, depressed, stressed, anxious, lonely and isolated.

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

This is a story about covering your ass...

If I was to mention the name of the project I'm working on and the name of my client, I would be picked up by paranoid people doing web searches. It's already happened to one of my colleagues. Naturally, I don't want to draw attention to the ups and downs that I've documented here, as I need the contract more than anybody realises.

The sensible thing to do would maybe be to take this site down, for fear of losing my income. However, nobody really does the sensible thing in their adult life. It looks to me like adults do reckless stuff and then live in fear, trying to protect their selfish crappy little lives. It looks to me like nobody does the sensible thing.

The sensible thing to do is not to have kids, not to perpetuate the misery and suffering, not to prop up capitalism and ecological destruction, warfare. The sensible thing to do is not to legitimise imperial aggression, by demanding that politicians protect our way of life. The sensible thing to do is to say "enough" and put down your tools and go on strike, in protest over the collision course with disaster that we are all collectively taking.

I'm not sure how my views are going to change, as I start to get a little bit more comfortable. By the end of the week, the wolf won't be at the door anymore. I'm going to have a lot of pressure and stress hanging around for 6 months, at least, and it'll take another 6 months before I have some kind of safety cushion. The litmus test is what I do once I have some kind of warchest again.

When I wrote about HSBC and the Customer Due Diligence project, I hadn't dug myself out of the hole, but I had been completely exhausted by the demands that had been placed on me. I've been an IT professional for 20 years, so I know how projects go, and I know how to blend into the corporate background and not make waves. I know how to kiss ass, I know that people don't want loose cannons and they want an easy life. However, it was an important project and I had something to contribute. I also couldn't live with my conscience if I didn't act during another banking stitch-up, having been near to ground zero during the credit crunch.

Now I have an early contract termination and probably a lack of decent reference to explain away, as something that I worry about. I'm pleased that I acted with integrity and ethics, but it's definitely me that suffered most of all. I martyred myself for no benefit to anybody, probably.

Why make yourself a martyr? Why make life harder for yourself than it needs to be? Why rock the boat? Well, it's simple: somebody has to be first.

I was told to wind my neck in, keep a low profile, not stick my head above the parapet. Of course I knew it was good advice - on a personal level - but I knew exactly what I was doing. Somebody has to be brave. Somebody has to take a stand, and push back. Somebody's got to raise their voice.

I hate the collective madness. There's no safety in numbers, when your whole flock goes running off the edge of the cliff.

Tags: #career #banking #capitalism #hsbc

This is a story about the collapse of civilisation...

What is it that causes empires to collapse? Why have fascinating ancient civilisations crumbled into ruins? Well, one prevailing theory seems to be that these societies failed to forgive debts, before there was a popular uprising.

There's a disrespect for working people that's highly prevalent in the world. We have a patronising attitude towards people who get themselves in heaps of credit card debt, or take out mortgages that they can't afford. We seem to assume that the when loans go bad, it's is somehow the fault of the borrowers.

In actual fact, having sat in on phonecalls with many people who are in a distressed debt situation, they did nothing more than try to make ends meet and have a lifestyle that should be considered completely normal in a developed Western country.

Most people who've got into a debt-spiral did so because there's no way to legitimately dig their way out of the hole. They already work the maximum hours that they're able to, but yet their earning potential has maxed out. When the car breaks down, they have to borrow to meet the shortfall, and this tips them into a downward spiral, because they'll never be able to find the extra cash, due to punitive interest rates.

The story is almost always the same. When things start going wrong, people hover up every bit of available credit in order to maintain their perfectly reasonable lifestyle. People still need to replace their clothes, and cheap clothes wear out very quickly. People still need to get to work, and transport costs are significant. People even need to service their addictions. Without tobacco and alcohol, many lives would simply be unbearable. These are not luxuries, and people are not profligate for expecting a minimum standard of living.

If you look at the kind of savings you can make by economising and shopping around, it's fairly depressing. You might be able to save a few pounds by shopping at another supermarket on the other side of town, but what about the extra fuel you burned getting there, and the extra wear & tear on the car? What about the waste of your time, that could have been spent working more hours... if they were offered?

The fact of the matter is, that in free market economics, prices will find a level that is just about affordable for people on an average wage. If you price things too high, then everybody goes bankrupt and just refuses to work because the game is a stupid one. If you price things too low, then there's untapped profits and people rise out of poverty and refuse to do shitty jobs anymore. So, things have to be priced just right so that everybody is looking at their bank balance and eking things out to the end of the month, every month, month after month, year after year.

If you're a politician, landlord or a businessman, you want to find the price elasticity of demand so that you know how much you can charge as taxes, rent and the price of your products, such that demand is not unduly impacted. You want to charge the maximum tax, maximum rent and maximum price for everything, without people saying "fuck this" in huge numbers. Everything is priced based on the limit of what most people will just about put up with.

Unfortunately, people get ground down. Working your whole life just to pay taxes and service debts starts to get pretty irritating. People can see that they don't stand any chance of ever getting ahead in life.

We can see that there's a link between poverty and ridiculous dreams. Where people are poor, gambling is popular, and there's no bigger tax on the poor than a lottery. The lottery is the ultimate con, because it robs the very poorest people of a significant proportion of their income, whilst also giving them false hope that they might one day escape their situation.

Other ridiculous dreams include becoming a professional athlete, and becoming a famous pop singer or movie star. The number of Premier League footballers and TV celebrities is a piss in the ocean. In percentage terms, you're more likely to win a lottery or some kind of accumulator bet.

So many kids these days say that they want to be "famous" but they have no idea what for... singing probably. Vast numbers of people watch singing contests like X-Factor, Pop Idol and The Voice, and unwittingly, they are buying into this fairytale dream that they're going to be plucked from obscurity and poverty one day, and get to live this A-list celebrity lifestyle that's rammed down our throats with shows like Made in Chelsea and The Only Way is Essex, let alone Keeping up with the Kardashians.

Panem et circenses has paved the way for the political class to become ever more powerful, with the proletariat feeling that their vote would make no difference, and their time is better devoted to watching banal wannabe celebrities croon on a television show, as well as spending money to vote on premium rate phone lines.

Banks are "too big to fail" but the ordinary working person receives no government bailout for their financial woes, when it becomes evident that they can no longer service the debt that they have run up. However, there has been no popular uprising yet, because people are resigned to government and corporate control of their lives.

For me, the rioting and looting that we saw in the Tottenham and Croydon riots in London is indicative of a huge portion of society who are taunted with expensive consumer goods that they'll never be able to afford, and offered no jobs or legitimate opportunity, in order to acquire the material things that they desire.

Debt has been the only way that people have been able to get the celebrity lifestyle that's rammed down everybody's throats. All those flashy new cars are on hire purchase. All those gold-plated iPhones are bought with credit cards. All those lovely clothes are purchased on storecards. I don't think these people are idiots, and I don't think they're financially reckless. They've been told their whole lives that they're entitled to these things.

However, the more that people are denied the things that they've been promised - houses, cars, holidays and all the trimmings - the more they're going to wonder why they should work, only to get deeper and deeper into debt, and to have a miserable life where they're just counting down to payday, only for their hard-earned cash to be swallowed by rent, debts, transport, food, clothing and other life essentials.

We are asking too much of our working people, and at some point they're going to realise that it's not the immigrants who are to blame, but the ruling class.

The party never stopped for the elite. The good times just kept rolling. You can't prop things up forever, when working people are so unhappy.

Tags: #capitalism #banking #politics

This is a story about ingratitude...

Give me liberty, or give me death!

How do you like living in the free world? Freedom of speech, not that anybody's even listening and you'll never get into print. Freedom to work, if you can get a job, and you'll have to pay exorbitant taxes. Freedom to do what you want, if you're not dead and have any spare time and energy after working a job until you're nearly 70 years old. Freedom to buy what you want, except you probably can't afford it.

There: that's the ingratitude part out of the way. Do I actually think like that? Some people think I do. You'll have to read between the lines to see where I am being self-mocking, humorous, sarcastic and even a little farsical in the interests of courting controversy.

This talk of death and suicide sounds a little flippant, a little melodramatic, but in actual fact, it's shaped my mindset.

I was always impossible to manage, and fearless talking to people of all ranks and status. I refuse to be cowed by credentials and hierarchy. I refuse to know my place.

If you were to just dip into part of my story, and try to make a knee-jerk assumption about me, you might assume that I think I'm better than other people. You might think I'm an entitled snob, a spoiled little brat. You would have misjudged me, and instead you've failed to understand that I'm coming at things from a totally different end of the spectrum.

I'm not claiming that I'm hard done by and that I've made my own luck and worked my way up from the bottom. On closer examination, these claims always prove to be horse-shit. When we look at people who claim to be self-made success stories, the tale is always ridiculous. For starters, many of the ones I've encountered came from loving homes in middle-class families, with parents who had a profession, a job for life. There has been financial security and a good education, even if they paint themselves as some sort of working class hero.

My tale is slightly different. I'm judging things based on the experiences I had when I had nothing. No roof over my head, and no money. I'm judging life based on how close I came to death. I literally made a life-or-death decision... actually on a couple of occasions.

So, I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have nothing. I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have to choose to act to stay alive, or else inaction would lead to death.

Based on this standpoint, I judge things very differently. You might think I'm ungrateful to have a "good" job. You might think I'm ungrateful for my opportunities. In actual fact though, I'm just judging things relatively. I think to myself "am I more or less happy than when I had nothing" and "am I more or less inclined to die, than the time that I nearly died before".

There's a cold hard rational core within me, that could quite easily slice my veins open, in a sudden brutally decisive act, if I decided that the effort of maintaining myself in a state of perpetual unhappiness and struggle would be ridiculous.

As a subject of Her Majesty the Queen of England, I was indoctrinated in the state schools of the United Kingdom, to become a loyal wage-slave, contributing to stability, increase and ornament of British commerce. Does it give me any pleasure or pride to say that? No, not really.

My very first job was for a Ministry of Defence subcontractor, and I actively contributed to Great Britain's military capability, as a naval power, to further their imperialist ambitions. Should that give me a lump in my throat when I see the Union Jack and hear the national anthem? Actually, no, it makes me think about the high price that is paid by the nations we have subjugated, in order to pay for the lifestyle I enjoyed.

Do people enjoy their lifestyle? Huge numbers of ordinary working age people can't afford a house, a family, a wedding. Most ordinary working folks hate their shitty jobs and their long commutes. Most ordinary working folks fret about getting ahead in the work rat race, or getting their kids good exam grades so that they can die an early death due to stress-related illness. But the good news is that you're not going to have to die in poverty if you drop dead at your desk, given that the pensions are in a meltdown.

It looks so hypocritical. The Westeners sit there in their sedentary jobs, comfort-eating themselves to death through obesity-related illness and giving themselves repetitive strain injury from their mouse and keyboard, cataracts from their computer screen and a bad back from slouching in a chair all day. Our short life expectancy is a function of stress, depression and poor lifestyle 'choices'. Meanwhile, the developing world slaves away, with the dream of attaining a western-style lifestyle. Supposedly, the West is the model the world should follow.

However, maybe we got it wrong. In other cultures, the smartest member of the family gets sent away to study and work, so that they can send money back to their family to support them. Isn't that something to get out of bed in the morning? Being the breadwinner for your family.

Instead of the young, fit and active people being the economic providers, we have instead tipped our society on its head, where we worship the 'grey pound'. Since the pension funds became the biggest investors in all our companies, and all the wealth pooled in the accounts and property portfolios of the baby boomers, we now have an impoverished youth, who have a much lower quality of life than their mothers and fathers, and far fewer opportunities to provide for even themselves and their own offspring, let alone feathering the nest still further of their elderly relatives.

I went to the Southampton Boat Show last year, and instead of successful young businessmen treating themself to a toy, as a reward for their hard work, ambition and ingenuity, it was baby-boomers who were spending their kids and grandkids inheritance, as a reward for having created an asset bubble that has meant crashes in both the stock market and the housing market.

I know that all the pounds of economic output that I generate will simply disappear into a pensions black hole, to pay out final-salary schemes for a generation who have nothing but contempt for their kids and grandkids.

Would you toil and toil, if you had no prospect of ever being self sufficient? If you were simply working for ungrateful masters who called you lazy and stupid? If the wealth that you generated simply inflated asset prices further out of reach, concentrated in the hands of the idle coffin-dodgers who didn't work to create the very assets that they own?

Since when did it become a bad thing to be motivated to work? Why should we be so fearful of immigrants, who are young, fit and economically active? The very language smacks of greedy hoarders who are like a dog in a manger.

Every year we have more students than ever before achieving the top exam grades, yet we print headlines and stories asking if exams are getting easier. Homework and the pressure to succeed is driving ever increasing numbers of young people to suicide, but yet it isn't good enough.

The prospects for young people are awful. The minimum wage is lower, and they'll never be able to get married, have kids and buy a house like their parents did. Why do we label them as 'gangs', 'hoodlums' and 'thugs' and mock them for their materialistic attachments to modestly priced bling, like gold cellphones and other trinkets that cost a fraction of the homes and cars that their parents had as their status-symbols?

Why do we not see the link between demanding endless dividends on our shares and ever-increasing capital gains, and the need for corporations to suppress wage inflation, which impoverishes our working-age people?

There are many people who would say that I'm not entitled to ask these questions, given my six-figure income. There are many people who think I should just shut up and take the money, because it's there.

In actual fact, I'm going further than just asking difficult questions. I'm actually putting my job on the line.

I lost two big money contracts because I refuse to be bought. I refuse to stay my tongue, just because I'm being paid a lot of money. Is it unprofessional, arrogant, reckless, stupid? Actually, it's none of those things.

I struggled a lot with middle-class guilt, but predictably, I did very little about it. I used to wring my hands and say "but what can I do?" while reading the Observer and The Guardian newspapers, and having passionate discussions about putting the world to rights, while quaffing expensive wine in fine restaurants in North London. This was hypocrisy. The final straw would have been going on a sponsored run and doing some kind of gift-aid contribution out of my salary every month, to salve my conscience and give me some kind of sense of smug satisfaction that I'd played my part.

Instead, I went on a journey. I've been to the bottom and back again. You might think that my risk was underwritten by my middle-class family, but they actually turned their back on me, when I had apparently left my social rank and become 'untouchable'. I was disowned, disinherited.

I can never claim to know what it was like growing up in abject poverty. My parents might claim that they never had any money, what with my mum being a student and my dad working behind a bar in a caravan site, when I was born. However, my granddads were both professional men with good pension provisions, who were able to bail out my drug-addled hopeless parents whenever they really hit hard times. The same privilege was never extended to me. Perhaps I should have recklessly sowed my wild oats, and then pled poverty when there were extra mouths to feed, like they did.

A parent's relief that their child is alive and physically healthy has no bearing on whether a person feels grateful to be alive. I didn't choose to be born and I don't want to go on living, if life is just endless misery and suffering. If you expect your kids to love you unconditionally, you're just plain wrong. It totally depends on how you treat them, and there's a real generational problem.

Handing over a planet and an economy that's absolutely fucked, and then retiring, is pretty ridiculous if the generation who are going to have to clean up the mess, accept austerity measures and live a lifestyle that is unimaginably frugal, in order to allow pollution to return to safe levels. It's a bad deal, by anybody's reckoning.

It's in my nature to question everything and anything. There are no taboos for me. There is no 'respect your elders' bullshit, because the first question is "why?". Why should I respect the generation that proliferated nuclear armaments, caused global warming, deforestation, pollution of the water table, an asset bubble that's priced ordinary working people out of the market, an unprecedented increase in the rich:poor gap and widespread economic calamity and didn't think about how they were going to afford their retirement, except by mortgaging the future of their children and grandchildren.

Why do I work? I can't tell you, but I can tell you what damage working does to humanity.

The wealth that I generate goes to corporations, who pay it out in the form of dividends or use it to inflate asset prices, to generate growth for their majority shareholders, who are institutional investors - asset managers - whose job it is to generate yet more wealth for an idle elite who expect to receive final salary pensions and an amazing lifestyle, in return for having wrecked the world.

And you wonder why I struggle to get out of bed in the morning and get excited about going to work?

People that I've worked with throughout my career have read what I've written, and I'm slowly making myself unemployable. How could you employ me, knowing that I don't subscribe to the groupthink? How could you employ me, knowing that I speak my mind, and have no respect for the instruments of power? How could you employ me, knowing that I'm not cowed by fear and insecurity?

I'm impossible to control, using the millstone of debt and the threat of destitution. For me, destitution is freedom. Freedom from the oppression of working a job that only serves to line the pockets of an ungrateful elite who have no respect for the workers of the world, and are only interested in a comfortable retirement at the expense of over 50% of the world's people.

Obviously, I think to myself "I must take this down" or "I must cover this up" or "I must keep my mouth shut". There's a part of me that just wants to take the king's shilling and let him call the tune, no matter how maddened I am by degrading myself as the court jester.

There is so much false promise. Work today and be happy tomorrow. Fritter away my cash on good times to forget about the soul-less day-to-day existence and futility of it all, is what I could so easily do. I've done it before.

I sometimes laugh at myself, so full of middle-class angst, but there's a deep seriousness here. It's just bullying groupthink to call somebody a hypocrite or a champagne socialist. The fact of the matter is, somebody has to do something, because we're sleepwalking towards disaster. The middle classes are just about comfortable enough to write letters and furrow their brows with concern, but not enough to actually risk their jobs or their reputations and good social standing.

Every day I sit at my desk, unable to not think about the bigger picture, unable to put the futility of it all out of my mind. I think "what the hell am I doing here?" and even though I'm good at my job and I am perfectly capable of toeing the line and keeping my bosses happy, I inevitably start to rock the boat, just because I have so much barely concealed contempt for a system that so obviously fails to serve the bulk of humanity.

I've let a genie out of the bottle, by considering the wider questions that we face as a species. I've gone down a rabbit-hole of thought, and I can't stop chasing that rabbit, even though I'm throwing away golden opportunities that people would love to have themselves.

Please try not to get caught in the trap of thinking this is a simple case of ingratitude.

My values and my work are really not at all aligned, and it grates with me, to the point where I really don't give a shit if I lose my job, but I'm not stupid... I know that I only have to play by the rules for a short amount of time, and then I can let the world know what I really think and who I really am, before my horrified bosses get rid of me. Please just kill me.

Tags: #career #capitalism #banking #suicide #depression #parents #family #childhood

This is a story about being a contrarian...

I remember sitting down with a mortgage broker in 2007, and he said "just focus on the teaser rate, don't worry about the interest rate after the initial 2 year discount. When your 2 years is up, we'll get you another great deal!". I said to this guy "you do realise I work with Credit Default Swaps, don't you?". Naturally, I ignored his advice and went for a deal that I could afford if there was a credit crunch.

I didn't even want to buy a house anyway. I wanted to put all my money into gold, in 2005/6, and I had opened an account at a bullion vault and bought a small amount... at $550 a troy ounce. The dollar was also really weak so it was a cheap buy.

I thought the housing market looked massively dodgy and the amount of money I saw flying around at JPMorgan, in the credit markets, was ridiculous. Clearly, the bubble was about to burst and a store of wealth in a scarce commodity looked like the best bet. There were plenty of dumbasses around though.

In Cambridge in 2011, I read the original paper on Bitcoin. I thought it looked a damnsight more interesting than my startup. By the end of that year, I had started buying Bitcoins. I bought hundreds.

By the spring of 2012, I wanted to pump all of my wealth into Bitcoin. I was buying Bitcoins at $5 a pop. I was certain that there were big capital gains to be made in the emerging Cryptocurrency. Again, dumbassses didn't see the potential, but even I frittered away those first Bitcoins that I bought, rather than keeping them as an investment. Unless I was going to make a sizeable bet I wasn't interested.

Come the summer of 2013 I was running out of money. My solution: invest in Bitcoin miners and buy bitcoins at $100. I borrowed every penny I could lay my hands on and sank it all into Bitcoin. I offered to cut friends and family in on the potential rewards. Two friends let me manage an investment for them. My family wouldn't give me a cent, even to help me keep a roof over my head.

An idiot - my father - called me "lucky" when I sold my Bitcoins for well over 1,000% return, later that year. I sold my bitcoin miners for a profit. I made money for my friends.

At some point, you've been "lucky" so many times that it's statistically improbable that it's luck, and in actual fact, all the analysis and reading, and time spent thinking about the macroeconomic environment, somehow seems to beat "luck".

If I'd taken the advice of the idiots, I'd be working in a factory in the provinces for minimum wage, or I'd be dead, although the two things sounds pretty much the same to me. Is it "luck" that means I'm not? Well, I'm not arrogant enough to believe that it was smart choices or hard work that mean I am where I am. I know that I'm "lucky" to be alive, to have functioning kidneys, to have enough brain cells left to not be left as a vegetable.

How do you unpick luck from your story?

There's a snobbery that's coming across, and perhaps you even think I imagine myself as some kind of smarty pants. Well, it's pretty clear from this tale that I've taken some pretty dumb risks and done some staggeringly dumb stuff, lately.

I like to think of it as some kind of karma. If your family treat you like a worthless piece of shit and a know-nothing waste of space, then why shouldn't the wider world be a little kinder to you, and gift you the occasional lucky break when you really need one?

These are my fundamental rules for life:

• Be nice to your kids
• Invest in scarce commodities

That is all.

Tags: #banking #capitalism #parents #family

This is a story about the hardest part of the journey...

People often give up when they're closer than they think they are to making a breakthrough. The first 80% of a task is always the bit that seems quite easy, like you're making really good progress. The final 20% is tough. Progress seems to slow to a snail's pace, and self-doubt creeps in. It's easy to quit in the final leg, believing you're never going to achieve your goal.

I'm racked with nervousness about whether I'm following the right path. There are lots of things that I feel somewhat full of regret about. There's lots of stuff that I feel a bit stupid and embarrassed about. There are plenty of things that, on reflection, look pretty dumb, arrogant, crazy.

In particular, I'm following a cyclical pattern. I keep repeating the same formula, because I know it sort of works. It's easy for me to stay living where I live, getting more work in the field I know best and pretty much acting the way I've always acted. The pressure to stay in this loop is undeniable.

I need to get my head above water. I'm not in any position to just sack off the western lifestyle and leave a smoking crater in my reputation, creditworthiness and ability to continue to function in the mainstream.

Believe me, I'm so tempted right now to just disappear. I would love to grab my tent, sleeping bag and a few other essentials, and just go off-grid. Suicidal thoughts have reached a crescendo in my head... they stalk me every waking hour of the day. It's clear what's driving this sinking feeling in my heart: the fact that life for the next 6 months is going to be very much a paint-by-numbers exercise.

I've done the commuting thing for 20 years. I've done the IT thing for 20 years. I've done the city living thing for 20 years. I've done the urban solitude thing for 20 years. There is no novelty, no joy, no challenge, no surprises... it's just a case of turning the pedals, and plodding along. The monotony, the drudgery, the formula, the routine... it's worse than a prison sentence.

Do I have a reason for living? Not really. What would it be? Is it a reason for living, to pay rent and service debts? Is work a reason for living, if you're just selling your brain and body to the highest bidder to work on bullshit projects? How can you take pride in your work when you've done the same thing, over and over and over again, for 20 miserable boring years.

I used to work to live. I had a nice lifestyle and I always took my full holiday allowance, travelling to exotic destinations and pursuing exciting activities, adventures. That was less than 10% of the time. The rest of the time was spent watching the clock. Two clocks actually: one that counted down until the end of the working week, and one that counted down until the day that I no longer had to do a job that I had nothing but contempt for.

In truth, I hadn't really reckoned on living this long. Certainly in recent years I decided that things would be wrapped up neatly if I just shuffled off my mortal coil, and my life insurance would at least leave a small legacy for my sister and my niece. I don't really fancy growing old and infirm, and facing yet more of the same bullshit that's been such a chore.

I remember being in hospital, and I really wasn't at all scared that I was going to die, even though my prognosis was that I had about a 30% chance of surviving, such was the damage to my internal organs.

Things haven't really moved on much. I have no dependents. My family ditched me, so I've ditched them. I've not been able to rebuild my social life. I take no pleasure or satisfaction from doing the same job I've been doing for 20 years. I'm too trapped by the mechanisms of capitalism to be able to pursue travel and adventure. I'm too paralysed by fear of dropping out of the rat race and becoming unemployable, to do something gutsy, which would be a one-way ticket.

You see, I'm acutely aware that my perception of the world is coloured by my mood disorder. When I'm depressed, I see everything as pointless, relentlessly horrible and never going to improve. However, I'm able to be rational, and I know that it's foolish to make a permanent change for a temporary problem.

If I throw away the ability to be able to earn huge amounts of money very quickly, then I'm very much limiting my future options. As it stands, at the moment, I can potentially dig myself out of a financial hole and feather the nest very quickly. It seems churlish to not even be prepared to toe the line for 6 short months. However, if you've followed my story at all, you'll know that 6 months is a long time for me... a lot can happen in my life in that period.

My timescales are heavily compressed. Gains need to be shored up quickly or else the hard work will be undone. Things need to happen faster, not slower than normal. Asking somebody whose life is extremely fragile to work harder, longer and suffer more than their peers is likely to lead to the "fuck it" button being pushed. Whatever happened to supporting those who are weaker?

I can see now, where the cracks are. I can see why people slip through the nets and sink to the bottom. I understand where we are hindering, not helping. Life is pretty vicious and unforgiving.

It's true that I'm pretty resilient. It's true that it's remarkable that I've made it this far, and that I still apparently have the opportunity to fight my way back, to recover... and then to perhaps thrive and prosper.

Hopefully, this feeling will pass, but from experience, I think it's going to get harder before it gets easier.

It's like this blog. There are less people reading than ever before, and I'm getting less feedback and encouragement than ever before. I'm not sure why I'm even writing anymore. I've failed to shame my parents into acting with any common decency (although perhaps that was always doomed to fail) and I've as yet failed to feel better, using writing as some kind of shrink, a silent counsellor... to deal with my fucked up head.

But, my experience tells me that doubt always creeps in. I've written 240,000 words and I plan to write 300,000. I plan to write every day for at least a year. Who knows what it will achieve? Sometimes, you don't know until you do it.

When I wrote on a forum every day, it brought me friends, a sense of identity, self-respect and even a sense of achievement when I wrote something that a lot of people found useful. This is kind of like a repetition of that, except that this time I'm publicly dissecting my own psyche.

Is it useful to externalise my internal monologue? Is it useful to psychologically expose myself like this? I've found introspection and self-examination useful in the past, and there's no reason why 'open sourcing' the contents of my brain shouldn't be interesting to somebody somewhere sometime.

They say the most interesting writing is when people are raw & authentic. I'm not really trying to emulate any writers or follow any formula to gain an audience. I just need to get stuff out of my brain and onto paper. I need to pick things to bits and figure out what makes me tick, so I can hopefully begin to open a new, happier chapter in my life.

Watch this space.

Travel doesn't have to mean jetting around the globe to me. I'd be happy in my tent in a muddy field, I think. I'm so sick of the global rat race.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #career #mentalhealth #homeless