This is a story about self-esteem...

The idea that we should be able to happily exist without external validation was concocted by smug twats who enjoy an abundance of ego-massaging. It's all very well and good saying that it's needy and insecure to require compliments, praise, flattery, applause, positive feedback and sexual advances, but people who say that we shouldn't need those things in order to feel attractive, valuable and cherished, are morons who completely take for granted the privileged position they enjoy.

I was one of that small group of kids who get labelled as the bad weirdos. There are good weirdos - everybody loves the outrageously camp kid. Everyone loves the goth kid. Everyone loves anybody who is a cool weirdo. Nobody likes the handful of kids who are freakishly cerebral. In fact everyone hates those fucking know-all boffin geeky nerds. "Fuck those guys" says literally everyone in the whole goddam school. "Let's make those kids' lives sheer uninterrupted misery for their entire childhood" everyone says.

Away from school, where my reputation didn't precede me, I was able to lose my virginity at 15 and snog tons of girls. Away from school, I wasn't held back by the label attached to me by all the ill-considered things my parents did to single me out. At school I was fucked over very badly by my parents insistent and completely selfish decisions to make me a marked man. Example: sending me to school on a girls' bike, with obvious and predictable end results, completely in line with any reasonable person's expectation of what would happen, and completely ignoring my protestations. I had no other means of transport available over a considerable and unwalkable distance, so I was quite literally forced into a situation which any parent with a smidge of care, compassion or empathy for their child would never dream of doing to fuck their child over in such an extreme way, with lasting and traumatic consequences.

Net result: ostracised child, bullied every day. Extremely bullied every day.

If I was ever going to struggle with self-esteem, I was bound to struggle doubly because I was a pariah at school. I went to 8 different schools. At the penultimate school I attended I had managed to make friends over the summer months, in places away from my parents' life-destroying fucked up selfish cuntishness, and I was enjoying popularity and attention from girls. I went away to Reading music festival and enjoyed the attention of girls. I went dancing - underage - to nightclubs and enjoyed the attention of girls and even managed to lose my virginity.

When school started - school number 7 - I had no option but to ride the only bike which was capable of the journey on Dorset's steep hills, of many miles to the school. My dad had stolen the bike. It was a girls' bike.

Wouldn't you just buy your kid a decent bike, if you were going to expect them to ride to school every day from the stupid house you've bought in the middle of fucking nowhere with no other option, to travel the fucking miles to get to school. The only life lesson I learned is that my parents are fucking cunts.

My paper round brought in a weekly income of £10 per week. My washing up job at the local pub brought in a further £10 a week. Theoretically, that's enough to save up enough money to buy a mountain bike or a road bike with high enough quality gears to be ridden every day on extremely steep hills for many miles, but by the time I'd saved enough money the damage had been done.

Perhaps, you might say, I should have kept my bike out of sight and walked the final mile to and from school, but you have to understand also, that my route to school passed the boarding house, and the children who were boarding were driven by minibus past me cycling as they were ferried by minibus to and from school. Some of the boarders also walked, instead of waiting to catch the minibus. There was no fucking way I could avoid some degree of exposure of this life-destroying single example of my parents cuntishness.

You could say I was "cock blocked" by my parents.

The friends I had made over the summer remained friends, but had to publicly distance themselves from me at school, lest they become bullying targets themselves. You might say that they're not very good friends for doing that, but you fail to appreciate just how fucking awful it is to be hated by 1,200 kids.

I was ostracised; I was an outcast; I was an untouchable.

My self-esteem was decimated.

I did not have a normal childhood. I did not have a childhood sweetheart. I did not have girlfriends. I did not have anything, until I finally escaped from my parents cuntish meddling, by getting the fuck away from them and their selfish deliberate actions which ruined my childhood.

I then embarked upon a crusade to have as much sex as possible as a reaction to the sex starvation of my adolescence.

I fucked everyone I could, as much as I could. I fucked even when I really didn't want to fuck, because every single time I had sex, I felt like I was winning. I felt a desperate need to catch up. I felt like if I could have enough sex, I'd feel better about myself; I'd feel attractive and sexually desirable.

I went to gay clubs and I absolutely adored having my bum pinched and men wanting to dirty dance, try to kiss me and make indecent proposals. So many men asked for my number and said flattering things. I felt good about myself.

Every time I feel lonely and want a cuddle. Every time I wish I had somebody to kiss. Every time there's no hand to hold or significant other to tell my good news, and my bad, then I'm transported back to my unhappy adolescence, and by extension my entire ruined bullied childhood. I don't care about the bad decisions I made when I was 18+. I care that my opportunity for a childhood sweetheart and normal adolescent development was denied to me. I care that my self-esteem was so badly damaged and my childhood was such misery, because of things which were entirely preventable, if only my parents weren't so fucked up on drugs and alcohol: I expressed clear and well articulated opinions. My needs were simple and I explained the drastically negative consequences of their selfish cuntish fucked-up shit that left me no recourse to salvage any shred of dignity.

This was a long time ago.

Why am I writing about it now?

Why is the bitterness re-surfacing?

All parents fuck their kids up, don't they?

On balance, my life is not the most fucked up it could have been. At least my parents didn't peel off all my skin and pour salt and lemon juice on the bloody flesh, huh?

I have to live with the consequences for the rest of my life so it's up to me to say how terrible things have been.

One of the consequences has been my extreme prudence with contraception and a great deal of thought and effort put into the handling of any so-called 'accidents'. One of the consequences has been my decision to behave in a way which absolutely guarantees that I'll never become like my parents. It's not one single decision. It's a decision which gets made over and over and over, ad nauseam. It's physically nauseating and painful to deny a fundamental part of my humanity. It's easy to go along with the crowd and do what everybody else is doing. It's easy to be one of the herd. It's hard to make an ethical decision, and a decision which goes against every gene in every cell of my body. Every physical part of me screams to reproduce, and I have to overrule that innate instinct using my fucking brain because it's obviously the only way to guarantee I'm 100% nothing like my father.

Sure, I could fall in love and be talked into almost anything, while my brain is flooded with serotonin and oxytocin, but my normal childhood development was so fucking messed up that I have no idea what a normal healthy happy relationship looks or smells like. I have a gaping big hole in my life, where most people have happy childhood memories and a set of formative experiences which govern the way they approach love, romance and sex. Sure, I adore my childhood friends - the nerdy geeky bullied outcasts - but each tiny handful children who were my friends, were snatched away from me during each of the unnecessary school changes and house moves thrust upon me by my selfish fucked-up druggie alkie loser work-shy cunt parents.

Why such vicious, clumsy words?

Why such bitterness?

I felt like I'd managed to shake off the stigma of being the nerdy geeky bullied kid and re-invent myself. I felt like I'd managed to escape my past. I went to London and re-invented myself. I got far far away from anybody who might seek to undermine my newfound self-confidence, in a place where nobody knew me and I was free to forget the things which were perpetrated against me, forcibly and inescapably.

I had fucking won.

The reasons why I suffered a major financial setback, and indeed ended up without major pieces of my life again, are beyond the scope of this self-pitying essay. I can easily analyse the root causes and trace the origin of my insecurities, hangups and damaged self-esteem back to childhood trauma. However, my life philosophy and personality drives me to look forward and achieve positive things, as opposed to living in the past.

Working very hard to rebuild my wealth has been a slow and painful process - which still continues - and it denies me the coping mechanism which I developed as a young man: yes my childhood was fucking shit, but I'm rich now so it doesn't matter. Ergo, if I'm not rich, then all I'm left with is a shit childhood. The bitterness is inversely proportional to my wealth.

I have a very money first mindset, which assumes that if I get rich first, then everything I want and need in life will follow. My life experiences have reinforced this worldview. Where the hell would I find the self-confidence to date without a wad of dollars in my fat wallet? It sounds very vulgar, but we must consider how dreadfully damaged my self-esteem was in childhood, and how I've compensated using money.

To be heavily reliant on a steady flow of sex and money to prop up my fragile ego is not at all pleasant. Masturbating in isolated poverty is an insufferable cruelty, salting the wounds of childhood, which feel as fresh as ever. It shocks me that I can be plunged back into angsty teenaged hatred and resentment of the injustice of my situation, by something as trivial as a temporary setback in my finances.

This is the vulnerable exposed throbbing pulsating nub of my insecurity. This is the thing which anyone can easily prod and poke at, cynically and sadistically, to make me wither and collapse. If you're the kind of sicko - who I've encountered far too many of in my life - who enjoys making a person writhe in torment, then you'll find that you'll be richly rewarded if you choose to bully me on this topic.

Why do I write about this at such length?

I own the story now. I expose my most vulnerable things, so that nobody else can threaten to do it and have power over me. I have agency.

Tags: #sex #relationships #childhood #parents

This is a story about brainwork...

In 2008 I became suicidally depressed. I'd been part of the project which had been at the centre of the global financial crisis: namely the trading of quadrillions of dollars worth of credit default swaps (CDS) which had grown in notional book value to be manyfold greater than the aggregate value of all the tangible things, such as precious metals, rare gemstones, property, factories, oil, gas, coffee, coins, banknotes and anything else which you could point at and say "that's worth something".

The world had lost its mind.

I knew it was coming of course. I had bought gold in 2005. I had negotiated a great mortgage in 2007 knowing there was a credit crunch on the horizon. In some ways I had tangible proof that I had been doing something valuable because I owned property, cars, boats and other things, as well as considerable amounts of liquid assets. In short: I was rich.

I got rich from data and software. I got rich off the back of investment banking and derivatives contracts. I got rich off a whole lot of nothing.

In 2008 it really felt like I'd presided over the most awful crime ever perpetrated against humanity.

I'd worked hard and I'd done my job very effectively. I thought about the bigger picture and I knew - deep down - that what we were doing at JPMorgan was wrong, but I'm an engineer and I like delivering engineering solutions. If somebody asks me "can you do this?" then I want to be the problem-solving can-do guy who comes up with the solution and delivers a working system. Often times I stop and take a step back, and think about the context of what I'm doing - I consider the ethics - but that's not really my job. I just design and build software systems.

The whole "I just work here" or "I was just following orders" thing is how the Nazis managed to kill 6 million jews, so I'm not going to hide behind that flimsy defence.

I know what I did was wrong.

So, I decided to completely ditch investment banking. I decided to do something that was the polar opposite of investment banking. I retrained in the building trade.

Instead of working in an office, I worked in customers' houses. Instead of working to devise arcane and impenetrably complicated ways of moving imaginary wealth around the globe, I helped build houses for people to live in. Instead of working for a massive faceless global corporation, intent on destroying the worldwide economy and plunging us all into the deepest and longest recession in history, I worked for myself - I was a sole trader; a man with a van.

I discovered that what I'd always suspected was true: I work hard.

It's hard to prove that you work hard, when all your hard work is hidden away behind the scenes. You have no idea how hard it was to build all the websites and apps that you use every day. You completely take for granted all the facets of the modern world, where you can speak to your phone and express your unique special snowflake personality on social media. The geeks and the nerds are derided as autistic-spectrum weirdo scum, who are all potential paedophile predator perverts who deserved to have a miserable childhood getting bullied at school.

While we celebrate the doctors, nurses, firemen, policemen and suchlike, because their contribution to society is conspicuously obvious and easy to understand - like a game of cops & robbers - questions such as "what is the internet?" belie the hideous complexity of that innocuous 4-word question. If you're looking for a convenient Google-provided soundbite synopsis that you can parrot to other people, in the vague hope of sounding intelligent, you're doing a disservice to those geeks and nerds who you persecuted at school, who are the architects of the fourth industrial revolution.

It's very hard for me to prove to you that I've been working very hard during my 21-year full-time career. You're quite likely to accuse me of not working very hard at all, because there are people out there who do a lot more physical labour, and what they produce is a lot more tangible and more easily understood in a childlike brain.

It was immensely frustrating to me that I had no easily understood empirical evidence to prove how hard I work; to prove that I'm a busy bee.

I started to write.

I've written the equivalent of 22 novels over the course of 3 years.

Of course a lot of what I've written is manic rantings, but one should be mindful that during the course of the 3 years I've also written a lot of software, and software doesn't work if it's wrong. One missing semicolon in millions of lines of code and the whole thing will be kaput. You should consider the fact that it's a facet of my profession to write with coherence and attention to detail, because my editor has zero tolerance for mistakes: the computer can't handle errors.

It pleases me that I've produced 1.1 million words in my spare time as proof that I'm not an idle drug addict loser. It pleases me that I have a tangible asset, which vastly exceeds the length of the King James Bible.

Would you accuse an author of a bestselling series of novels, as being unproductive and not working for their living?

I say again: I've been writing in addition to my full-time day job.

It's true that sometimes I find my day job very easy and unchallenging, but there are other days when there are gremlins in the incomprehensibly huge and complex computer software systems, and those problems are very hard to diagnose and fix. Manual labour is governed by a simple and well understood set of physical laws: the energy requirements to lift and move heavy objects is quite easy to calculate. The amount of brainwork required to fix a problem with one of your beloved apps or websites - to give a facile example - which might affect millions of people, is not an easy calculation at all. If you think what I do is unimportant, you should see the public response every time Instagram stops working or Snapchat introduces a major change.

My motivation for writing this is, of course, insecurity. I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Imposter syndrome asserts itself and I wonder what the hell I've been doing with two decades of my life, with nothing to show for it except a lot of crummy software which almost nobody is aware even exists. I would struggle to explain to either of my grandmothers what I do for a living, especially now they're dead.

I exist in a strange part of the world. I'm a 'tame' geek who can speak plain English. I don't surround myself with other technologists and I'm cursed with a bleeding-heart liberal streak and an inquiring mind, which causes me to question whether I'm part of the problem or part of the solution.

Because of my guilt, work ethic and insecurity, I feel like I have to create a very conspicuous and public display of my productivity, which can be easily understood. Here's the headline: 1.1 million words in 3 years.

I write because I'm afraid that you'll write me off as a lazy junkie waste-of-space loser who doesn't do anything productive or useful. I write because I don't see much other evidence that I ever existed or did anything notable; that I ever contributed to society.

"Use your talent and energy for good" I hear you say. Yup. That's working out really great for the oppressed workers, isn't it? I'm so glad that charity has been so successful that it's made itself completely redundant as a concept.

I write because I haven't decided what else to do, but I'm still thinking, of course. You might think that thinking is useless, but what is writing except for thinking on a page?

Tags: #writing #philosophy #career #work #economics #banking

This is a story about computer brains...

Let us imagine that I want to set my computer a simple task: I want it to point to the end of my nose. My computer doesn't know what a face is, what a nose is, or even that it can and should point to a certain part of my anatomy. I could write a program which tells my dumb computer exactly what to do - how to divine the position of my nose from an image, and then the relatively straightforward job of then asking the computer for the co-ordinates of the end of my nose, once the nose has been located. I could also use artificial intelligence, and more importantly machine learning.

Why does milk taste sweet?

You might not think of yourself as having a very sweet tooth, but in fact you used to have an insatiable appetite for sweet things. Your body is programmed to seek the wet, fatty, sweet goodness of milk, which provides the perfect sustenance for your growing brain and body. The reward circuitry is self-reinforcing and gives you a hit of dopamine every time you suck on the tit and get a mouthful of your mother's milk, which causes the neural pathways in your brain to become stronger, while others are pruned away. Eventually, you become hard-wired to stuff fat and sugar into your mouth, when to begin with you had only the reward part.

That's machine learning.

We need to give our machine - our computer - a reward. Let's say that for a high-resolution digital photograph of perhaps 8 megapixels, assuming that most of the photos we give the computer will have the nose tip somewhere around the middle, the worst possible guess would be somewhere near the edges. We can set up a super simple reward for our artificial intelligence, giving it a hit of computer dopamine every time it guesses a point somewhere in the middle of the photo.

Obviously this is very flawed.

Very quickly, our artificial computer brain will learn to make guesses in the middle. Even though our computer doesn't know what "middle" is, it will quickly become hard-wired to guess in the middle of the photos we show it, because that's how we set up our reward system.

The guesses are not close to the tip of the nose, but they're a lot closer than if we just let the computer guess completely at random.

We need to refine our reward system.

So, we take a library of thousands and thousands of photos of people's faces, then we record the location of the tip of the nose by manually clicking on the tip of the nose ourselves. We create a huge database full of the correct locations of nose tips, created by humans.

Then, we set up the reward system to reward guesses which are close to the correct location of the nose tip. The closer the guess, the bigger the reward.

Now, we train our computer system with the big database of photos and nose tip locations. Every time the computer guesses, it gets a reward based on how close the guess was. We can run the training millions and millions of times. We keep doing the training until the computer gets really really good at guessing the location of the nose tip.

Remember, the computer has no idea what a face is, and it has no idea what it's really doing. Nobody wrote a program instructing the computer how to do anything. The truth is, nobody really knows how exactly the computer is getting better and better at figuring out where the nose tip is. Nobody could predict how the computer brain is going to wire itself up. The computer sees all those thousands and thousands of photos, which are all very different in immeasurable ways, and somehow it begins to make associations between what it 'sees' and how it should intelligently guess the location of the nose tip.

That's a neural network.

The really interesting thing that happens next, is that we show the computer a photo of a face it hasn't seen before, and it's able to guess where the nose tip is. We use the same artificial intelligence with a brand new face which the computer hasn't been trained to locate the nose tip of, and it's still able to figure it out, because the neural network has hard-wired itself to be really good at fulfilling the rewarding task of pointing to nose tips.

There's nothing particularly amazing or hard to understand about machine learning and artificial intelligence. We're simply training our computer slaves to do simple tasks, by setting a quantifiably measurable reward system, so that the neural network can practice for long enough to get good.

The predictive text suggestions on your phone come from machine learning, which has seen vast quantities of stuff written by people, such that it's fairly easy to guess the word that's likely to follow, based on what you've just written.

So, what about training a computer to be more human and be able to have a conversation? How are we ever going to pass the Turing test and trick somebody into thinking they're talking to a real person?

We need to come up with a way to train artificial intelligence to speak just like a person.

Every time you use a text-messaging service to have a conversation, that data is harvested and analysed. Quintillions of messages are sent between people every year, and all that data can be fed into a machine learning system to train it to come up with typical responses to things people say. Google Mail makes absolutely brilliant "canned response" suggestions, which are usually totally appropriate for the context, because Google has seen quadrillions of banal emails saying little more than "thanks and kind regards". Google employees don't read your emails because they don't have to - a machine does it and it effervesces the very essence of your exchange, such that it knows whether you should reply "love you too" or "see you in the office tomorrow".

It's of no particular use - beyond the present applications - to have so much aggregated data, unless we want to have a very bland, homogenous and unsatisfying experience of life. We we slavishly obey the conclusions of vast pools of data which have been analysed, we'll end up in some sort of dystopian nightmare where are life outcomes are decided at birth, using available data, and reality will become like a piece of text composed by the predictive suggestions your phone came up with.

As an example, I'm going to generate a random number between 1 and 437, which corresponds to the page number of the novel I'm reading at the moment, then I'm going to generate another random number between 1 and 50 and use that word as the 'seed' for the predictive text feature on my fancy brand new iPhone Xs.

Let's go...

Ok... page 35 has been randomly selected.

And... word 17 has been randomly selected.

The 17th word on page 35 of my novel was "of".

OF COURSE IT WAS "of".

Chances are, it was going to be "a", "an", "of", "the", "is", "as", "to" and any one of a zillion different super common words. Let's use the word "sycamore" because it was on page 35.

Here's what my phone just generated:

"Sycamore is a good one and I have had to go back and I get the feeling of being able and then they are taught to work and they have had to do it a little while I’m not gonna was a very long and I have a very good relationship"

Clearly, machine-generated text leaves a lot to be desired.

Critically though, do we really want a single machine mind which can spit out decent text, or do we actually want personalities? Do we want a single generic face which is composed of the average set of features from all 7.6 billion people on the planet, or do we want variation?

Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that we should all be training an artificially intelligent system capable of machine learning, to be just like us, as an individual. It's no use that Google harvests all our data, because it aggregates it all together. It's no use that all the messages you've typed on apps from Apple, Facebook and Google, all the emails you've written and all the documents you've created, are absolutely fucking useless because they contain very little of your personality. Most of the messages you wrote were about food, sex, your children and your pets. Most of the emails you wrote were about the bullshit made-up numbers you type into spreadsheets all day long, which you call your "job". None of it is any use to train an artificially intelligent system to think and act like you.

I haven't figured out the reward system yet, but I'm building up a huge database of stuff I've thought. This stream-of-consciousness seems like utter madness, but I've very deliberately expressed myself in a certain manner: pouring my inner monologue out onto the page. It's ridiculous egotism and something which lots of writers have fallen foul of over the centuries, believing they're immortalising themselves with their words, but we are in an unprecedented era of exponentially growing computer power, yet most of our efforts are diverted into meaningless exchanges which expose very little of the interior of our minds.

173 years ago, Henry David Thoreau built himself a cabin in the woods, lived alone with his thoughts and wrote perhaps 2 million words in the journal he kept for 24 years. It's highly unlikely that his handwritten text will ever be digitised because of the incredible effort involved. By contrast, my 1.1 million words have been extensively search indexed by Google and other search engines, and my digital legacy is conveniently stored in 'the cloud' with perfect fidelity. While most people have been wasting the gifts of the information age by asking their partner if they need to buy bread and milk, I've been gaining what can only be described as a head start in the race to be immortalised by advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

How the hell did you think they were going to get the contents out of your brain and into another [artificial] one? Did you think it was going to require no effort at all on your part? Did you think that somebody was going to invent some kind of data-transfer cable?

Yes, it's horribly arrogant to think that anybody would have any interest in spinning up a digital version of me, but you remember that bullied kid at school who everybody hated and ostracised? You remember that you called that kid "nerd" and "geek" and generally abused them because they were good at maths and physics? You remember how you made it your mission in life to make their life as thoroughly miserable as possible?

They're your boss now. They're rich and you're poor.

Those geeks and nerds are suddenly on top of the pile.

You thought you were top dog when you were a kid, but now you're getting left for dust. You're being left to fester in your own filth. You're the underclass.

All of those skills you developed in bullying and abuse quickly became redundant, when all that geek stuff became highly lucrative.

Those late-gained skills of using Facebook groups to share your vile bigotry amongst your fellow thick-skulled dunderheads, has done nothing except line the pockets of the geeks. The geeks have been using the internet for decades to discuss the creation of a better world, where the knuckle-dragging primitives who thought they owned the playground, have somehow been left unaccounted for by 'accident'.

I'm not a big fan of the social exclusion and elitism which is emerging at the moment, but I'm damned if I'm going to stop keeping my technology skills up to date and investing my time and energy in my digital persona. Having put up with a lifetime's worth of bullying during my childhood, I'll be damned if I'm gonna meekly shuffle off into a quiet corner now. I'm sorry that you weren't paying attention when the world went digital and now it's super hard for you to catch up, but that's what happens when you're too busy making vulnerable people's lives a misery, to notice that you're wasting valuable time.

Every word I write is harvested by thousands of computers which comprise part of 'the cloud' and although billions of webpages are lost every single day, content is king and my 1.1 million words can be easily copied from one place to another, unlike the contents of your brain.

This might be a core dump of the contents of my mind, hurriedly written down in a state of kernel panic but it's taken a huge investment of time and effort, which unfortunately has always been required to achieve anything. Without the large databases manually created by humans, the machines would have no datasets to learn from and artificial intelligence wouldn't even be a thing.

Tags: #computing #writing

This is a story about a lack of imagination...

There's global moral panic - hysteria - that screen time is rotting our children's minds. There's a widely-held belief that our kids are not getting enough wholesome 'playing in the dirt' outdoors growing up time as we nostalgically remember getting in our own childhoods. "All this used to be fields" we say, even though we grew up on a housing estate in a dismal suburb, and watched lots of TV, with our parents worrying that 4 or maybe even 5 whole channels of colour audiovisual entertainment would warp our fragile young minds and leave us as dribbling morons.

I was dragged around museums, art galleries, stately homes, ancient ruins, churches, cathedrals, mosques, cobbled streets and other sites of historical and cultural interest, in the hope that some of those educational experiences would rub off on me and undo some of the dumb. Never was there an opportunity missed for extreme panic that I was enjoying my childhood too much, and I should be forced to endure some interminable excruciating lecture from an insufferable bore about their particular academic fetish.

I suppose it's a parenting strategy, to provide your children as a captive audience for people who're so lacking in charisma and life skills that they're unable to cope in the real world - roundly ignored by people their own age - while meanwhile the parents can get drunk, smoke and take drugs, and otherwise leave the bothersome business of raising offspring to a state or charity funded organisation masquerading as an educational establishment.

Why the obsession with constant education and cultural experiences anyway?

Oh, you're taking little Hugo to the museum are you? How wonderful of you. How original. Slow clap.

[I stole that line from a poster on the London Underground, mocking sharp-elbowed ambitious middle-class mothers, eager to cram their children's heads full of stuff that'll make 'em sound smart at a university interview, in the hope of barging to the front of the queue; getting a so-called head start in life]

You should read about Asian tiger parenting if you want to get a chilling glimpse into the kind of future we're headed into. Instead of worrying that iPhones and iPads are rotting your children's minds, you should be more concerned that exam result league tables, homework, extracurricular activities and the obsession with your children's academic achievements, is psychologically destroying your precious little darlings. The anxious, withdrawn, introverted adults who prefer to communicate almost exclusively via memes shared via the internet, aren't a product of the internet and modern technology, but actually the very predictable and unfortunate result of placing an excessively heavy burden of expectation on little kids.

"They'll thank me for it later in life" /  "If I don't give them a head start in life they'll end up working in McDonalds"

Wrong.

I do empathise with the fears of parents, of course, but I must point out the consequences of the collective insanity of believing your precious little darling is special and different, and they need to be pushed to the limit during every waking hour in order to realise their full potential.

Both childhood and parenthood look to me - as an outside observer - like an unpleasant pressure cooker for all involved, producing a plethora of psychiatric problems. There's an obsession over school catchment areas, 11-plus examinations, grammar schools and a set of metrics, which measure children's academic abilities at an ever-earlier age.

Children are somewhat cursed with filial obedience - they naturally want to please their parents. What's a kid got to these days to get their parents off their back. Seemingly, they need to completely eschew iPhones, iPads, video game consoles, television, and bury their heads in scrolls of parchment (novels would rot their fragile brains, of course).

Culturally, we seem to celebrate abstinence at the moment. We loudly boast about how little sugar we're eating. Every month seems to have a catchy name - like Stoptober - related to giving something up like alcohol or tobacco. Low-fat, low-carb, low-fun, low-stimulation, low-enjoyment seems to be the name of the game. It's as if we're seeing the rebirth of the puritans. Should we all thrash ourselves with nettles too?

I feel guilty for spending a week at a Disney-esque resort, with rollercoaster rides, water slides and other low-brow entertainment, with no historical or cultural authenticity at all - everything's brand new and made of modern materials. I feel guilty for enjoying things which were created to entertain, not to educate. I feel guilty for having a good time instead of expanding my mind. That guilt has its origins in upbringing; in a childhood dominated by my parents' panic about my mind melting and me forgetting everything I'd learned, if I stopped being educated for a single second and just got to sit and watch cartoons with my bad influence friends.

I see no evidence that technology, entertainment, games and screen-time in general, is creating a generation who are less imaginative, less creative, less academically gifted, less talented, less well-informed and less knowledgeable. If anything, the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. Give a child access to YouTube and Wikipedia and they will willingly and eagerly embark upon a self-directed learning journey, which will deliver far more valuable facts for your precious darling to regurgitate, into their brainbox, than an unlimited amount of nagging, arguments, tears, tantrums, private tutors, private schools and trips to sites of historical and cultural significance.

What do I know though? I'm an idiot who likes mindless entertainment.

Tags: #childhood #parents

This is a story about stasis...

When I was a child I used to wish my life away. My life seemed to be spent boxed into a car filled with thick plumes of cigarette smoke, while my selfish cunts of parents drove around scoring drugs and looking for people to get high and drunk with. My life was a waiting game, waiting for the moment when I was legally old enough to earn money and drive a car, to get the fuck away from that pair of selfish alcoholic druggie losers; to escape the misery of being dragged around and ignored; told to be seen and not heard, lest I spoil my parents' buzz.

I developed the ability to put myself into a trance. I developed the ability to patiently sit and wait. I developed the ability to retreat inwards into worlds of fantasy and imagination. I developed the ability to artifically suspend myself into a cryogenically-frozen state. I waited. I waited and waited and waited. I became the master of waiting.

If somebody offered you £1 million to be put to sleep for a year, would you take it? Of course you fucking would.

If somebody offered you £1 million to be put to sleep for three years, would you take it? You'd think a little harder about it, wouldn't you? You'd think about how much the lives of people around you would move on in those three years. Unmarried friends could be married and have a child by the time you regained consciousness. In your twenties you'd be giving up more than 10% of the life you'd lived so far. In your forties you'd be giving up over 10% of your remaining productive pre-retirement years. In your fifties, you'd be giving up more than 10% of the years you could expect to remain alive.

This is the crux of the matter: would you trade 1 out of the last 10 years of your life, so that you could have £1 million to spend in the remaining 9 years?

Most of the world's problems seem to stem from parents mortgaging their children's future. "Sure, I can't look after my child or or pay for my child's needs now but if the child can just put themselves into suspended animation for a few years, then everything will be just fucking perfect" seems to the all-too-common selfish decision by cunts. "Sure, I can't afford to look after myself, let alone any offspring I spawn, but if I have enough children then their organs can be harvested to pay for my selfish cuntish don't-give-a-fuck lifestyle" seems to be the prevailing philosophy amongst most parents.

Thus we arrive at Xanax.

Xanax is an imperfect solution to your parents' cuntishness.

Xanax is everything your parents ever hoped for: it allows a child to be able to pause its existence and needs for a while, because its parents traded years of its life in return for cold hard cash. The Xanax-addled generations are a result of parents' lifestyles of pure unadulterated selfishness; sheer wilful negligence.

Having been sold into slavery before I was even fucking born, what else am I going to do to salve my existential angst, except kill myself. Xanax offers a dreadful sort-of solution.

Perhaps one day I will emerge from my cryogenic freezer to find that the debts which I did not incur - they were incurred by my parents - have been paid off and I'm a free man, but until that day I need to remain in suspended animation, because many years of my life were sold to pay for my parents alcoholic druggie selfish self-centred cuntish lifestyle choices. Cunts.

My daily choices always remain the same: kill myself or intoxicate myself until the day when the generation of cunts who sold us into slavery are dead and buried. My ethical decision always remains the same: don't have children until you have the time, energy, enthusiasm and money to invest in them.

As you can tell, I'm angry.

Tags: #parents #childhood

This is a story about fucking up your life...

I am cooking pulled pork. The recipe called for the pork to be put in an ovenproof glass dish. By chance, I bought an ovenproof glass dish two days ago. I bought it because it was perfect for chopping lines of supercrack and not losing any of the precious powder when in a messed-up state.

Sometime before dawn on Friday I was thinking about ending my life. I had bought razor blades at the same time as I bought the ovenproof glass dish. I bought the razor blades so I could chop lines of supercrack. I did not buy the razor blades so I could sever veins and the radial arteries in my arms. I did not buy the razor blades so I could sever my carotid arteries and jugular veins in my neck. However, I was motivated to do so.

I've papered over my bedroom windows to stop perverts from peeping in. I couldn't tell how light it was outside, although I knew dawn had broken. My perception of time was completely warped, but it was so quiet that I assumed that it was earlier than 9am, because otherwise I'd have heard lots of noise of people getting ready for work and school.

I checked the time. It was 1:24pm.

I was supposed to be on a video conference at 9:45am.

Fuck.

I messaged a guy in my team and told him I was so sick that I hadn't been able to contact him until then, which was technically true. What I didn't tell him was that I'd been fucked up on supercrack and I was convinced that my life was ruined and I might as well kill myself.

I was convinced that my life was so ruined that I'd never be able to fix everything.

I was convinced that I'd messed up my job and I was going to lose it.

I was convinced that I'd messed up my accommodation and I was going to be made homeless.

I was convinced that all my hopes of becoming debt free, and eventually wealthy, were destroyed.

Strangely, I'd spent most of the 18 hours up to this point thinking about how to make the software at work more efficient, as well as designing in my head a system to improve internet security which could be adopted as a new standard. You'd have thought that these things were just useless insanity, utter nonsense and gibberish.

I took a shower.

I suddenly felt a lot better.

I opened up my laptop and I rewrote 5,000 lines of code, reducing the system to just 500 lines. I ran the tests. My code did exactly the same job as the old code, except it was 1,000% more efficient. I couldn't quite believe that I'd managed to do my job, and do my job really well, when I was supposed to be sick.

It was 5 o'clock and time to stop work for the day, although I'd only worked half the day.

Then, I started developing my idea for improving internet security. I was fairly convinced that I was going to discover that I'd completely overlooked an important loophole when I actually applied formal computer science to the problem. I was certain that sooner or later, I'd spot an obvious mistake in the messed-up thinking I'd had at 3am, while high on supercrack.

At 11pm the academic paper I'd written - which specified the system protocol and addressed any security concerns - was finished. I'd checked and double-checked it. It was watertight. I listed every assumption. I attacked it from every angle. Every niggling doubt was comprehensively addressed. I knew my theory's strengths as well as its weaknesses. It was, without being too big-headed, a brilliant piece of work.

Instead of feeling like I've had a relapse and everything is ruined, so I might as well let myself descend back into the depths of hell, I feel like I learned something. All of the anticipated reward from drug taking turned out to be a big disappointment. All of the anticipated paranoia and feeling like I'm about to die and life is shit - i.e. all of the negative feelings - were present, reminding me that drug addiction is hell, and the so-called 'high' isn't worth the side effects and comedown.

My life is shit in many ways. I'm socially isolated, financially distressed and trapped in the rat race, lest I end up destitute. I'm forced to do things I don't want to do, go places I don't want to go to; my time and my freedom are owned by somebody else. I can't do what I want. My life is miserable. However, the stuff I fucked up with my relapse, such as making a mess of my bedroom, destabilising my mental health, risking my job, neglecting relationships, exhausting myself and generally playing with fire, is something which will clearly only get worse and worse if I were to continue taking drugs. I was reminded of my first novel, where I wrote about a character who took the pursuit of drug addiction to its ultimate conclusion. I was reminded of the drug-addict fantasy which inspired my first novel: to have an unlimited supply of drugs and to escape the tyranny of wage slavery, rent, bills and bullshit McJobs. I was reminded where it leads, which I already explored at length in my first novel. I explored that course of action in fiction so that I never had to reach rock bottom myself. My novel saved my life.

So, I'm currently cooking pulled pork in my apartment. The rent and bills are paid. There's money in the bank. I still have my job.

I'm cooking pulled pork in the dish which I bought to take drugs with.

I had the opportunity to order more supercrack on Friday morning, which would have been delivered today. If I had ordered more I wouldn't be writing this. Instead, I would be fucking myself up and fucking up more of the things around me. I already fucked up my MacBook Pro for the 3rd time, but thankfully it's not too badly fucked up, and the part that's fucked up is covered by warranty anyway. I have another MacBook Pro, which I'm trying to coax back into life, but it's fucked up from the last time I didn't stop my supercrack binge before things got fucked up. The sum total I've spent on MacBooks which I've fucked up on supercrack is about £6,000. I took an ice bath with my Apple Watch then dropped my iPhone in the bath, because I was trying to deal with malignant hyperthermia as a result of supercrack overdose, which cost me another £900. The total amount I've spent on supercrack in my lifetime is about £500 and most of that got flushed down the toilet. I bought 10 grams of supercrack last year for £150, which was enough to get high every day for 1 year and 10 months, although I'd obviously die before I got chance to use it all.

My priorities are the same as any ordinary person. I want a job, a home, friends, a partner, a pet. I want to earn more than my modest monthly expenditure, excluding the £10 a month I spend on supercrack, on average. If I have surplus cash I don't spend it on supercrack. I buy supercrack because all the things I need are so far out of reach. For example: I have time off work booked for 3 weeks time, but I don't have anybody to go on holiday with, and I need to plan, book and pay for a holiday, which is difficult when I'm very deep in debt.

The so-called 'choice' to relapse into addiction is not a choice at all. The only choice is the choice to kill myself. I could kill myself quickly with poison or overdose, electrocution, hanging or ligature, blood loss, falling from a great height, suffocation, asphyxiation or self-immolation. The hope that addiction holds is of hedonistic pleasure, before heart failure or respiratory arrest. Every heroin addict has a little bit of hope that they'll 'go over' and die every time they depress the plunger of the syringe. Every coke or meth addict hopes that their heart will explode at the very moment they orgasm in the ecstatic throes of drug-fuelled sex.

Every addiction is held firmly in place, not by the power of the chemicals involved, but because there are no realistic better options. What heroin addict is going to suffer the agony of withdrawal, the misery of losing the only thing in their life which brings them any pleasure, to work a minimum-wage zero-hours contract McJob and be stripped of their dignity and cursed to spend all their hard-earned cash on a dirty, mouldy, flea and bed-bug infested shithole, 2 hours bus ride away from work, leaving them so little money that they have to go begging to a food bank just to be able to eat.

Theoretically I can earn a gross income of £151,200, which is why I'm alive and in reasonably good health. I've been through years of addiction, alcoholism, mental health problems, hospitalisations for major medical emergencies, homelessness and of no fixed abode, divorce, psych wards and being sectioned, losing hundreds of thousands of pounds, losing friends, having to give my cat to my parents for safe keeping, becoming estranged from my family, moving house many times, moving around the country, sleeping rough, detox, rehab, the shame of former work colleagues finding out my secrets and gossiping about me, reputational damage, suicide attempts, having to sell my house, having to quit as CEO of my own company, the guilt of not giving my investors a good return on their investment, the unpaid debt I owe to my guardian angel, being arrested X times and locked up X times, being cautioned by the police X times, being on bail pending investigation, being interviewed by the police, being assessed by innumberable psychiatrists and prescribed myriad psychiatric medications, and ultimately having taken heaps of dangerous drugs and medications at dangerous dosages and in dangerous combinations. How many people could go through those experiences and not lose their mind entirely, finding themselves institutionalised and permanently excluded from society?

The reason why I'm alive and functional is because theoretically I can earn a gross income of £151,200. In practice it means that if I manage to work for 5 or 6 weeks a year, I'm a hell of a lot better off than 99.999% of the people who struggle with mental health problems, substance abuse problems and debt.

"Money doesn't make you happy" is a lie. Money sure as shit helps you deal with a multitude of problems.

Just like an investment bank, when shit goes wrong I double down. If a bet goes against me, I make the exactly same bet again, but I double the stake. Just like an investment bank, I'm able to borrow as much as I want so I can beat the players who aren't able to continue to play when the stakes become too high. I use my wealth to bully life into giving me what I want, instead of allowing myself to be bullied out of the poker game by the high-rollers.

The only game in life I can't win at is drugs. It doesn't matter how rich you are, if it's you against the drugs you're always going to lose. There's no winning in addiction. Not losing is the best you can hope for with addiction. To not lose in the game of addiction is a rare success, which requires extreme wealth. Even the very wealthy - like Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse - found that their idea of nirvana (sic.) was not all it was cracked (sic.) up to be. Kurt Cobain said once in a private video that he wanted to get rich so he didn't have to work and could get high on smack every day. He got so rich he could have retired and gotten high for the rest of his life, so why did he kill himself? Writing a novel allowed me to live that life - in a fictional world - to find out what would've happened to me. I wrote that book so I didn't have to experience what happened to my fictional central protagonist in real life. What happened to my fictional character could very easily have been me. I know where I was headed.

Presently, I'm very frustrated that I must spend my time creating software - or fixing other people's software - but it's churlish to complain when I'm fortunate enough to have a skill which means that even a homeless junkie alcoholic with mental health problems who's known to the police, is highly sought-after by organisations, who gladly pay relatively obscene amounts of money for the work that I can do, even when utterly fucked-up by drink and drugs. While Sports Direct employees are sacked for taking toilet breaks, I've literally gone AWOL on a week-long drug binges, been taken to hospital by the police and later been welcomed back to work, despite being a gibbering wreck on a massive comedown. This is not arrogance I promise you. I don't expect to receive special treatment. I don't expect my so-called 'misbehaviour' to be excused. I don't feel entitled to be able to treat my good fortune with such apparent contempt.

The day I start taking things for granted will be the day my world falls apart and my good fortune disappears. People's compassion, forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt will no longer be given to me if I expect to get away with taking the piss. If I anticipate escaping the consequences of my actions forever, then they'll lock me up and throw away the key.

I'm very angry and bitter about my ruined childhood, the abuse perpetrated against me by my ex-wife and being taken advantage of by a handful of greedy and immoral people, all of whol completely lack a conscience. However, I am able to remind myself that there's no value in analysing the chain of responsibility, tracing it back to those who are ultimately to blame: the horrible people of bad character who feel no guilt for the misery and suffering they cause, who feel no obligation to pay compensation for the damage they've done; feel no remorse for the pain of their victims. Even with the full force of the law behind me, those slippery vermin will always weasel out of paying the fair price for their antisocial, criminal, abusive, negligent, selfish and downright cuntish behaviour. My personal life strategy is to be so good at what I do and work so hard, that those scummy rats are left scurrying around in the slurry-filled sewers, enviously fuming about my privileged and fortunate life. When at long last they're on their deathbed, their guilty conscience will torment them and they'll be filled with regret for the misery and suffering they caused. Their dying days will be filled with fear and distress, which they deserve every single second of. Cunts.

My life is not fucked up. I did take a chance and nearly fucked up my life. I was lucky that I haven't suffered any worst-case consequences. I can't take my good fortune for granted. I am feeling grateful that things haven't ended as badly as they could have done and I am reminding myself that I was lucky not smart. I am reminding myself that there are substantial negative consequences, which far outweigh the euphoria I was seeking. Ironically, of course, I didn't even get any euphoria I was looking for. I just got paranoia, sleep deprivation, damage to my work reputation, destabilised mental health, a broken laptop and a messed up bedroom... all of which I predicted in advance.

I do have an oven-proof dish though. The pulled pork was delicious.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #recovery #relapse #supercrack

This is a story about shame...

The holes in my wall tell a story. I picked up a massive wardrobe and moved it to block the entrance to my bedroom in an attempt to barricade myself in, because I wanted privacy so badly; I so desperately wanted the certainty of knowing that nobody would barge in on me unexpectedly. In fact, I spent the best part of two days and nights without sleep, attempting to secure my bedroom against would-be perverts hoping to barge in and catch a glimpse of me in my nest of shame.

Obviously, it's somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When somebody spends a couple of days dismantling beds, bookcases, chests of drawers and heaving heavy pieces of furniture into their barricade, it's pretty noisy and the work is exhausting. As a person gets more physically tired and sleep deprived, they gey clumsy and they make mistakes, such as toppling a massive heavy thing with sharp corners into a wall, gouging out plaster and leaving an ugly hole.

My body is covered with battle scars from my efforts to keep my shame private. I have an enormous scar on my left calf and another one on my right thigh. I have a broken nose from where I was balancing a piece of furniture above my head in an attempt to cover a window.

My paranoia stems from my childhood, when I was constantly bullied, at home and at school. Nobody respected my privacy or my right to live a dignified life. My paranoia stems from an abusive relationship, where I was punched in the face, screamed at and generally verbally abused, and regularly had to put a door in-between my ex and I, which she would spend hours aggressively kicking while I was trapped in a room with no toilet, food drink, or exit other than to face the violent abusive woman on the other side of the door. My paranoia stems from not having a space of my own where I can lock the door and feel confident that I'm the only one with the key; feeling like I have no right to privacy and that I can expect somebody to barge in at any moment. Being a guest in somebody's home is not the same as having your own safe space. Being a prisoner in your own home is truly traumatic.

I built myself a summerhouse in 2009 and then insulated and carpeted it in 2013. I finally had my own miniature house with a front door I could lock, although it had no running water or toilet. I improvised a water supply using the garden hose and locked myself in there until my ex-wife moved out. I would have starved to death if she hadn't, but I didn't care... I wanted to escape from that abusive relationship.

I could have had a clean break, but my ex-wife put me through hell with the divorce. I arranged a quick and easy house sale, which would have allowed us both to get on with our lives, but she sabotaged me at every opportunity. She ruined my chance of escape and recovery. She sabotaged my efforts to rebuild my life.

London is not a good place to be sick and poor.

London is not a good place to be paranoid.

London is not private.

However, at least London is anonymous. I completely lost my mind on the streets of London and nobody paid me the blindest bit of attention. Nobody would remember my face. I'm never going to see anybody who remembers me when I was insane, penniless, homeless, destitute and in a very shameful sorry state indeed. London was the perfect place to recover from the trauma, without getting paranoid about my neighbours witnessing what should be a private affair.

Privacy is important when you're struggling. Privacy is important when your life is filled with shame.

Invasion of privacy sows the seeds of paranoia, leading to psychosis and schizophrenia. Human interest is a powerful force, which is the reason why fly-on-the wall documentaries and reality TV shows are so enthralling, and why we love to read people's blogs, diaries and journals. It's impossible to tear your eyes away from the spectacle of somebody struggling. People will line up like it's a fucking spectator sport, watching somebody suffer and not doing the slightest thing to intervene or otherwise fucking off and minding their own business. People know when they're being watched. Knowing that you're being watched makes everything a million times worse. "Why don't they do something or just fuck off?" you think to yourself, and soon it's all you can think about; the audience is spellbound and they'll literally spend hours watching and talking amongst themselves: "ooh it's awful isn't it?" and "yes I know. it's been going on for ages" ... but they never get bored.

I've recovered a remarkable amount since those dark days of 2013/4. In fact, I've made a miraculous recovery, but it's very far from complete.

I've gone from owning my own home and a summerhouse, to now renting an apartment. I've gone from financial security to mountainous debts. I've gone from having every right to privacy, to the situation where I have to show my bank statements to letting agents and allow my landlord to come into my home. Instead of being my own boss, I have to submit myself to security vetting and allow people to pore over the details of my private life. I've been poked, prodded and generally put into a goldfish bowl to be gawped at by numerous doctors, consultants, psychiatrists, social workers and a whole heap of wannabe amateur psychiatrists, who think they've got me all figured out, but who fail to recognise that it's grossly insulting and patronising for them to take a lazy glance and think they know me.

Things are very difficult.

I've had so many years and months of shame and swallowing my pride, and it fucking sucks.

I've had so many people judge me who I really didn't invite to pass judgement, and who really have no place, prying into my private affairs. I'm doing a good job of living a normal life within society's rules. I don't deserve to have people sitting in judgement of who I am, what I am, and whether my thoughts, feelings, actions, intentions, character and other attributes of me and my personality, are somehow acceptable to the self-appointed nosy busybodies.

Where is my space where I can feel safe? Where can I be free from the tyranny of the judgement of puffed-up pompous twats who think they know best and they have a right to barge in on me in my private shame; to embarrass me.

That's why I work so damn hard. I'm trying to earn enough to buy a place which is mine and nobody has the right to come barging into. I'm trying to get my little slice of privacy and free myself of the tyranny of having to kowtow to other people's judgement... most often other people's inferior judgement.

Please, give me some space. Have I not always used it wisely? Have I not proven myself to be very capable of doing amazing things, when given the space; the trust?

I have my shame, which I'm attempting to de-fuse by making everything about myself as public as possible, but it's a slow process. I feel like I'm only halfway there.

I have my flaws. I have things I want to keep private.

I need dignity.

Tags: #privacy #paranoia #divorce #house #debt #apartment #injury #hospital #london

This is a story about the writing on the wall...

Life has become an agonisingly slow experience, like watching each individual frame of a movie film being shown with a slide projector, with a narrator who's intent on painstakingly explaining each frame in minute detail long after each new image has been well and truly absorbed and digested by the audience. It's like death by Powerpoint where the fucktard presenter insists on reading out every single bullet point of their pitiful presentation, long after the audience already read all the fucking words.

If you can't see death coming I don't know what's wrong with you. Death is one of the few certainties in life, so why would you hold out any hope of your childen becoming the next Einstein or Mozart, when it's far more likely that you'll all die in a road traffic accident, and you're certainly going to die anonymous and unwept by 99.9999% of humanity.

My own mortality is something quite palpable to me. I've spent enough times in my life where I've literally had to make life or death decisions regarding my own survival. Whether it was through a leisure pursuit gone wrong, such as finding myself in the mountains or the sea when shit's gone awry, or lying on the floor of my bedroom with lungs filled with fluid, arrhythmic heartbeat and failing organs as a result of drug overdose, I've had plenty of time to contemplate death and the decisions that led up to it.

With extreme sports, it was fucking awful at the time but I laugh about it now. With extreme drug abuse, it was fucking awful at the time but I laugh about it now.

The point is, we can all imagine the worst. It's easy to say "told you so" with the benefit of hindsight.

I've survived so many things which should have killed me that I've now developed some foresight. I can tell you with absolute certainty that I'm going to die.

None of this should be shocking. People die every day. We treat human life incredibly cheaply. We even train our doctors - the people who are supposed to treat life as sacrosanct - that we can't save anybody. Everybody's just going to fucking die so take the money and fuck those guys; screw those losers.

Nobody cares about zero suicides and zero deaths. Nobody cares about deaths at all. We're somewhat resigned to our fate.

Yes, here's me who has more years than I deserve. There are people out there with terminal illnesses who're dying (sic.) to have another day on this earth. Who the fuck am I to irreverantly dismiss my "gift" of life and good health?

It's not good health.

It's not happiness.

I reject it.

When a parent screams at their child that they should be grateful for the "gift" of life, they're just screaming because they're afraid that their genes aren't going to survive for long enough to be replicated. Life is not a gift. Life is a curse. Being trapped in a flesh prison on a journey to an inevitable painful death is not a gift, you fucking cunts. Passing on that curse to new generations is not a generous "gift" just the same as getting people addicted to crack or heroin is not the answer to your own addiction, although it might provide the income to allow you to keep getting high. Perpetuation of the cycle of misery is not a "gift"

Somebody's gotta be the last one. Somebody's gotta be the final one. Somebody's gotta say "enough".

Tags: #suicide #parents #childhood

This is a story about numbing the pain...

I remember a time when I used to plan my weekends to make sure I was busy and socialising. I used to throw parties, take friends out on my boat, go out for dinner and otherwise ensure that I was engaged in the lives of the people around me. I put a great deal of thought and effort into bringing people together. When I had free time I'd scroll through my list of contacts and phone people who I hadn't spoken to, to maintain the bond of friendship.

I don't do any of that anymore.

My life became chaotic and collapsed, due to relationship breakdown, mental health problems and drug addiction. I was highly embarrassed that my picture-postcard perfect little life had become pockmarked and blemished. I was deeply ashamed that I was seemingly failing; fucking up. As addiction began to dominate my life I was no longer reliable. I bailed out on attending the stag do of one of my best friends, simply because I was too deep in addiction hell. I nearly bailed on my own stag do because I was struggling so much with addiction.

That was a transformative period of my life, from around 2006 to 2012 or thereabouts.

Friends travelled from all over the country for the combined birthday and engagement part of my [now] ex-wife and I. She threw a tantrum, because I had a huge number of great friends and perhaps she was feeling insecure, who knows? She said it was the worst night of her life, so I called a cab for us to go home. She wanted to stay. Why does anybody want to stay at the "worst night of [their] life"? It didn't make any sense to me.

My whole life no longer made any sense. Instead of being the guy who arranged for huge groups of people to come together and travel all over the world; instead of being a socialite who arranged gatherings and generally threw wild parties, I slowly allowed myself to be beaten - quite literally - into submission. I curtailed my gregarious and outgoing nature, in the face of the stroppy tyrant who I was trying to placate.

Of course, I should have walked away.

I was trying to change to please somebody. I was in love and I thought that it was the grown-up mature and sensible thing to work really hard to please the person you love. I thought that hard work would conquer the day. I was wrong.

I tried so hard, sacrificing so much that was important about myself, and becoming more and more isolated and depressed, because she took such objection to the fact that I was generally liked by a lot of people and seemingly able to inspire get-togethers. She threw tantrums about all the things I loved doing: organising group holidays all over the world; arranging to meet up; arranging parties and generally being a social butterfly. She worked hard to socially isolate me and break my spirit, and I let her do it. It was my mistake. I messed up.

I didn't realise that you could just break up with awful people.

I didn't realise that you should just give up on horrid people.

I didn't realise that walking away was an option.

I ignored my friends when they told me to dump the "poison dwarf".

Writing this now, I sound a little bitter and twisted about it. It happend. I can't change it. It's history and there's no point dwelling in the past. I need to move forwards and get on with my life.

There's a whole clusterfuck of stuff to do with my loser druggie parents and their selfish fucked-up selfish shit that they perpetrated agains me, ruining my childhood, that I'm very bitter about. I'm never gonna get to re-live my childhood. It fucking CUTS ME UP that I speak to so many people who fondly remember their childhoods and generally reminisce about things from their childhood that were completely denied to me because my parents are a couple of selfish bullying druggie alcoholic fucktard losers, completely devoid of any sense of responsibility towards their children or otherwise able to act with a shred of human decency. That shit FUCKS ME UP. But, whatever... it was a long time ago. I need to move on. I'll never forgive. I'll never forget. But it's no use clinging onto the bitterness and knowledge that my childhood was unnecessarily and brutally fucked up by that pair of selfish self-centred druggie cunts.

Don't talk to me about personal responsibility.

I take personal responsibility to a level you couldn't even comprehend.

You have no idea how much I lay awake at night thinking about my place in the world and how to make things right and do the right thing. You have no idea how much I deny myself my bestial instincts to rut and reproduce, like the rest of you filthy fucks, not giving a shit about the consequences. You have no idea how hard it is to live a life with as little hypocrisy as you can muster, and the guilt for the hypocrisy that you're fully aware of but is seemingly unavoidable.

The only way to live a life free from the original sin of being born a white man in wealthy western middle-class society, is to kill myself. The guilt I feel because I'm not a starving African paraplegic lesbian, is enough to drive me insane. I genuinely feel empathy for anybody I come into contact with, and I want to make a difference in the world, but I'm also cursed with a rational mind and a kind of brutal pragmatic realism, which means I cynically see every attempt to improve the human condition will be quickly thwarted by the ubiquitous greed and selfishness... but that doesn't mean I don't try really hard, through the avenues which are available to me.

Ultimately, I earn a lot of money which doesn't feel like a fair reward for my contribution to humanity. I'm cursed with cynicism and a realist's depression at the state of the world. I drink. I've drunk for as long as I can remember. My parents are alcoholics, so why the hell wouldn't I drink?

As I puffed and panted my way up the steep hill, walking home with a bag full of bottles of wine, I felt my chest tighten. I know that I'm killing myself.

I drink and it's killing me.

I drink A LOT.

My heart bleeds for the world. I'm a hand-wringing Guardian reader. I'm a lefty-libtard snowflake. I still believe that a better society is possible, and it upsets me that a tiny elite are stopping the will of the people from being realised.

I'm attempting to deal with my mountainous personal responsibilities, while also reconciling my heartfelt values in a world which economically incentivises me to screw everybody else over. Why not sell deadly drugs? Why not work for a bank which helps launder the proceeds of crime? Why not generally sell your soul to the highest bidder?

It. Fucks. Me. Up.

I've tried to be kind and generous, and all that's ended up doing is bankrolling some of the most selfish fucked-up awful people to perpetuate and perpetrate misery-making onto humanity.

It's a messed up situation.

I drink because otherwise I'd kill myself. I drink because it's a long drawn-out way of killing myself. I drink because maybe I don't have the guts to do the ethical thing, and immolate myself in protest at the shit I see all around me.

It seems foolish to injure myself in this way, by choosing to drink so much, but how else am I supposed to cope? How am I supposed to get through the day and suffer the bullshit which I'm all-too-able to perceive with a mind which has been developed into a hyper-rational thinking machine. I see the cognitive dissonances everywhere. The sickening stench of bullshit is overpoweringly strong.

I'm sorely tempted to make a grand gesture instead of allowing myself to be written off as another "natural causes" death, when in fact the truth is that my physical health has suffered dreadfully because of the awfulness of the world I see around me. My mental health is dictated by the bullshit of meaningless jobs and unfair wealth distribution, and the senesless selfishness; lack of anybody who wants to change the world for the better. The suffering directly correlates with the urge to reach for the bottle - why the hell not?

Why the hell not? I see no reason to be miserable, sober and fit. I'd rather be dead.

I can't imagine anything worse than having to face the bullshit of existence without intoxication, and without the hope that I might suddenly drop dead from a heart attack.

I honestly think that I'll feel relieved when I know I'm about to die. Finally some fucking peace.

Tags: #suicide #alcohol #addiction #parents #childhood #divorce

This is a story about quality of life...

Two years ago, on this day, I was writing about how depressed I was. I was researching into how depressed people rated their quality of life - I found out that it was 70% lower than happy healthy normal people. At the time I was trapped in a job which I hated. I had serious doubts about my skills and experience, so I'd taken some work which I knew I could do with my eyes closed, but I was bored out of my mind.

I hypothesised that my quality of life wasn't going to improve until I retired, because I couldn't stand my job but I couldn't imagine being able to get another one that was any better. My job was the reason why I was so depressed, anxious, bored, demotivated and miserable, and the only alternative was to be a penniless writer, which would bring its own problems... not least how to save up enough money to be able to afford to retire.

This got me thinking about retirement.

I presume that the first few years of retirement are excellent, because old age and age-related health problems haven't started to have a major impact on quality of life. Modern medicine, safer working conditions, good diet, better air quality and a multitude of other things have improved massively for the baby-boomer generation, and those retirees will live much longer than their parents. For my generation and people younger than me, we've worked longer hours, commuted further, had far more financial insecurity, job insecurity and housing insecurity, and we have no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - the retirement age keeps getting older and older and the prospect of an impoverished old age seems increasingly likely. Retirement looks like it's not something worth even daring to dream about.

I started thinking about how good retirement would be anyway - sour grapes perhaps - what with the inevitable demise of my health. It seems unlikely that I'm going to live beyond 85 years old, being a man.

With partial deafness, partial blindness, mild incontinence, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, liver disease, kidney problems, back problems, joint problems and a whole host of other things I might expect to affect me in old age, exacerbated by decades of miserable office work, it seems unlikely that I'd be lucky enough to enjoy even 50% of the quality of life in my eighties as I enjoy in my sixties.

These are very conservative estimates of course. I could drop dead at age 70.

With all those things considered, I then started to do the calculations to work out whether it was worth shackling myself to a miserable job or not. I started to calculate if it was worth being miserable and depressed today, in the hope of a better life if and when I retire. My conclusion was simple: NO.

As you can see from the graphic above, I can increase my quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) by a maximum of 30 points if I live for today, or a maximum of 30 points if I live for retirement. Obviously if I was to die at age 80, I'll only have benefitted by 24 points. If I was to die at 75, I'll only have benefitted by 17 points. If I was to die at 70, I'll only benefit by 9 points.

So, I might as well plan on the pessimistic assumption that I'll die early. In fact, I can at least guarantee when I'll die, because I always have the option of committing suicide. In fact, it seems sensible to plan for the day I commit suicide instead of the day I die, because old age, sickness and infirmity seems like an undesirable fate. Why would I be miserable today, so I can spend more years as a geriatric, waiting to die?

I'm hoping to get myself into a strong position by the time I'm 40 so that I can exploit the fact that I haven't rutted and spawned offspring like a mindless beast, and I'm therefore free from any responsibility for brats I brought into existence. Soon, I won't need to shackle myself to miserable boring bullshit office jobs which I hate, because I'll have recovered my financial security and stability, such that I'm free to do what I want without a guilty conscience - I won't owe anything to anybody, and I won't be running away from any responsibilities.

By the spring next year, I should be feeling quite wealthy again, and much more free to be able to dare to dream. Perhaps I'll travel. Perhaps I'll write. Perhaps I'll create art. I can pretty much do whatever I want, once I've finally dealt with all the consequences of divorce which caused my life to collapse. It's hard on a man, losing everything - it nearly cost me my life.

It's been so hard getting to where I am today, and I can't believe there are still so many months before I get back to a truly safe and secure position. I can't believe it's taken so long and it's been so difficult. Perhaps that's why so many men commit suicide. Perhaps that's why rip-off merchants have run off with so much of my money. It's hard to do things right. I've always tried to do things the right way.

I'm now at the point where I've worked too hard for too long to see the chance of breaking free get away from me. I really think I'll just kill myself right now if there are any major setbacks, because I've been trying so hard to overcome a heap of problems and I've got nothing left to give. I deserve a break. I deserve things to pan out for me.

It'll soon be my turn to start enjoying life and the fruits of my labour; the payoff for my struggle through adversity; the rewards for my ingenuity and sheer determination to fix problems. I've overcome terrible obstacles and put up with so much suffering and I've done the miserable work that nobody else would do, because it's awful. Now I deserve to be like those spoiled brats who've been allowed to do whatever the fuck they want - follow their dreams - because they have doting indulgent parents. Maybe I'll be a student. Maybe I'll have a gap year. Maybe I'll take a dead-end job with no career prospects, because it's rewarding. Whatever. I can do whatever I want... soon.

It's been a slog. I can't take much more slog.

Tags: #career #depression #suicide #parents #childhood