This is a story about artistic integrity...

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Does the piper ever get to play, for their own amusement and freedom of expression?

If you look at my life strategy, it's pretty insane. I've picked a career that uses skills that I mastered as a child, and I now find the job mind-numbingly boring, easy and soul-destroying. I've picked an industry which is essentially just keeping a running total of who owes who what: simple addition and subtraction. I've chosen maximum income, for minimum effort. My life is constrained - certain rules have to be adhered to - but I have set things up so that I can jump through the pointless hoops as effortlessly as possible.

My theory is, that if I were to mix work and pleasure, then it would break my heart whenever I had to compromise. Let's imagine my passion in life is painting. I'd like to paint 1970's sci-fi inspired futuristic cityscapes, clinging to the rocky surface of distant planets. Those paintings are very intricate; detailed. The attraction of that art, for me, is the sense of scale that's given when you paint thousands of tiny windows on the buildings, and lots of tiny people in space suits, wandering around in their futuristic world. However, there's probably only a niché market for such paintings, and they'd take hundreds of hours to paint. Commercially, I'd be far better off splattering a canvas with bright primary colours and calling it abstract modern art - it would take far less effort and would have a much broader appeal. In order to pay my rent, I'd be economically incentivised to produce crap that I hated, because it would be much more profitable.

My strategy is to earn a lot and not work very hard, so I have lots of money and spare time to pursue whatever passions I have, without compromise.

Of course, there is always compromise.

Luckily, there is a Nick Grant who is a rapper, a Nick Grant who is a photographer, a Nick Grant who is an expert in sewerage processing, a Nick Grant who is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, a Nick Grant who's a toastmaster, a Nick Grant who's an expert in credit risk management, a Nick Grant who's a researcher in the Elementary Particle Physics department at the University of Warwick, a Nick Grant who's the CEO of Severn Trent, a Nick Grant who's a Labour Party candidate, barrister and head of legal services for Sainsbury's, a Nick Grant who's the concertmaster of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, a Nick Grant who's the strategy director for Cancer Research UK, and there's even a series of fictional Nick Grant Adventure books by Jamie Dodson.

This means that I can pretty much write whatever I want on the public Internet, under my real name, without the fear that most salary earning wage slaves would have, that our employers will discover our deepest darkest secrets, prejudicing our career progression and perhaps even jeopardising our employment.

However, ex-colleagues from places like JPMorgan and HSBC occasionally visit this site, and pick up juicy tidbits about the implosion of my life and see the thrashing of my legs, beneath the surface of the water, when I'm swanning about trying to look as serene as possible in my professional capacity. I have old bosses as friends on Facebook and following me on Twitter.

I took an insane gamble. Instead of locking down my social media to only friends who can be trusted to not gossip with anybody connected with my former employers; instead of editing and censoring myself; instead of setting up a pseudonym - a pen name - I write under my real name, with real details that leave me no plausible deniability, to say "it isn't me" and "it must be another Nick Grant".

I guess there aren't that many people who leave the privileged and highly paid world of financial services and IT, in pursuit of the risky dream of doing something more rewarding in an intangible way. Earning bucketloads of cash is all the reward you'd want, right? Why would you want to earn less money being an electrician? Why would you want to have all that stress and risk your life savings, trying to start your own company? Why would somebody who's been a steady dependable 9 to 5 worker, with decades of dedicated service under their belt, suddenly lose their mind and end up in psychiatric hospitals, drug rehab and homeless?

So many of us dream of making a big change in our lives, but when we face up to the reality of the risks, sacrifices and effort involved, we decide that maybe the timing's just not quite right... maybe we'll do it next year, or the year after. We end up boring our friends and family with our grand plans that will never be implemented: forever on the drawing board.

When somebody is mad enough to unshackle themselves from the golden handcuffs and give something a proper go, it's big news. There are hundreds, if not thousands of bored office-working drones, who are fascinated to know the details of the trials and tribulations of anybody who had the guts to follow through on a plan to retrain in a completely different field, or start a business. When you quit your soul-destroying job, you're the underdog; David taking on Goliath - your former colleagues want to live your exciting life, vicariously. Former colleagues are rooting for you to succeed. Former colleagues want to know if you fail spectacularly, to re-affirm that they made the right decision, staying in their nice safe boring jobs.

Bootstrapping means taking on projects where you're not beholden to somebody for the funding. The whole point of me doing a job I hate, is that it's provided the dosh to do whatever I want without having to kiss ass, kowtow and do things in a way that they approve of. The whole point of founding my businesses with my own money, was so that I could run things exactly how I wanted, without investors and lenders breathing down my neck and making stupid suggestions about my business plan.

When it comes to a personal memoir type project, where I'm pouring my guts out, I'm somewhat burning the bridge back to the straight-laced world of boring jobs for boring people with boring lives. I have a CV that says I've worked for various companies and I have various qualifications. People who get salaried jobs by sending off their CV and going for interviews, are not allowed to have exciting lives where they do things that don't neatly fit into boxes. The world that provides my income has a strict rule: fit in or fuck off.

So, I made a decision. I decided FUCK IT. I decided that I would just write whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I would be myself, I wouldn't censor, I wouldn't edit and waste time considering what the drones of the corporate world of wage slavery would think about my unorthodox life.

And so, with practice, my passion and - dare I say - my skill, is to document my innermost thoughts and feelings, publicly. It might not be art and it might not be commercial, but it sure as hell isn't compromised. I have moments of fear, where I think that I need to hide my blog, put a sticking plaster over the semicolon tattoo behind my ear, find out just precisely what my former colleagues are prepared to say about me: put them on the spot and say "look, do you judge me on the good work that you saw, or on the secret life that I chose to reveal to you?"

It drove me paranoid and crazy, trying to maintain a squeaky clean perfect professional image, whilst also dealing with all sorts of awful things in my private life. It exhausted me to the point where I lost my mind, covering up the fact that life outside the office was chaotic and unstable, and I didn't want anybody to know that I was just about surviving in grotty student flats, hostels, hotels and friends' sofas. I didn't want anybody to know that my engine had run out of petrol and was running on fumes. I didn't want anybody to know that I had no margin for error, no safety buffer: my finances were on the brink of total disaster.

Why should anybody know these things? If I get stuff fixed up and pick up where I left off, then who would be any the wiser? What people don't know can't hurt them, can it?

However, it hurt me. It hurt me every time a friend thought it was hilarious to tell my ex JPMorgan colleagues things that considerably damaged my reputation. It hurt me every time the grape vine managed to spread gossip about my attempts to find job satisfaction. "I heard you're an electrician now!" a colleague from HSBC who I hadn't spoken to for 6 years, said to me when we connected on LinkedIn. How the fuck do people find this stuff out?

"Oh you were in The Priory... like some kind of rock star. So cool!"

Not cool. That kind of stuff colours people's opinion of you. They make assumptions and whisper behind your back. "Shall we invite Nick to the pub at lunchtime?" somebody says. "No, better not... he's a recovering alcoholic, isn't he?" [I'm not, by the way]

What I write is repetitive. I have no idea what chapter of my life you're going to walk in on. I have no idea what I'm going to be writing about when you dip into my private world. So, I cover the same theme over and over again: I am me.

I'm no longer the straight-laced perfect employee with the immaculate CV. What are those gaps in my employment history? Well, in the context of me being your wage slave, that's none of your fucking business. You don't pay me enough to bribe me to act a certain way and to gag me. You don't pay me enough for me to compromise my integrity, my identity.

I've suffered enough boredom and I've been patient for long enough to have earned the right to be myself; the right to be creative; the right to express myself without hesitation; the right to not have to wear a mask; the right to not live in fear of negative judgement.

What happens if and when the worlds collide? Well, I've set the challenge: it's up to other people to decide whether to judge me on what they see in the office versus what they discover through my candour, in a totally unrelated context.

I'd love to make it into print. I have a penchant for debate, and strong views about government and society. At some point, my ambitions to be an author and to get involved in politics are going to be realised. Every word I write on the public Internet makes me more discoverable to somebody, somewhere, on some topic or other. If I simply wanted a book deal or to raise my profile, I could compromise and conform; I could channel my energy into being commercial and popular.

What does it mean to be authentic? You think it's some fucking option that we all have? You think it's a fucking lifestyle choice?

To be authentic is a risk and it's a privilege. You could lose friends and fall out with your family. You could lose your job. How are you going to find your true voice? The voice that speaks with childlike honesty; fearlessness; tapping into your live stream of thoughts, rather than the lines you've memorised; the act you've learned to play. It takes practice, to be able to express what you feel, rather than say what you think people want to hear. Many of us are disciplined to engage our brains before our mouths: to hesitate, withhold and communicate in a manner that conforms to social norms. We are coached and bullied into hiding our unique outlook and personality.

If I make myself unemployable, I'll be forced to try and monetise the things that I have a natural aptitude for. At the moment, writing is effortless, but I could push myself to write with more purpose, spend time editing and reconnect with some literary agents I started conversations with last year.

If I find myself barred from the land of boring jobs and immaculate CVs, then my energy - my creative output - will have to be expressed in ways that come naturally to me, not just easily. In a way, I'll be unbounded; unleashed; unchained. Of course, it invites hypomania to come and destabilise everything, but at least my crazy projects usually result in cold hard cash in my pocket and something else to add to my portfolio.

I'm scared. I can't play the game any more. I have a contract - ink dried on paper - and I can do the job with my eyes closed. I've been in hospital enough times with kidney problems to know when I'm in trouble, and to know when I can look after myself. I can't humour everybody with this "my health comes first" bullshit anymore. I'm the guy who's pissed copious amounts of blood on more than one occasion, and done the calculations: how long have I got before total organ failure will kill me? I'm the guy who knows when I'm in deep shit, and when I can take a calculated risk.

What scares me more than anything is going through all the same old shit I've been doing since I was a teenager. What scares me more than anything is playing the same fucking games, wearing the stupid fucking mask, and acting and speaking the lines I've learnt and spoken a zillion times before.

I've got a fairly simple plan: conform and comply just enough to get what I want out of some rich fucking banks who I don't give two shits about. The last thing I want to be doing in the world is help some dinosaur of a bank run a simple software project at snail's pace, but they're going to pay me a king's ransom to do it, and it gives me a tiny taste of freedom... I put up, shut up, suffer the boredom, and the reward for my patience is that I keep a bit of integrity; a bit of dignity; a bit of identity.

Maybe I should do this job or that job, people suggest. Wouldn't I be great as a carpet salesman, or a tyre fitter? Isn't my natural calling in life to be a supply chain analyst or a fork lift truck driver?

Maybe it's the mission of the company that I need to get right. Selling people financial products they don't need or want, and profiting on the margin between the borrowing rate and the lending rate, using fractional reserve banking, is hardly going to give you a warm fuzzy feeling, is it? Perhaps I should work for a charity that's managed to help a handful of individuals and a large number of donors to feel better about how disgustingly wealthy they are and ignore the fact that the gap between the rich and poor is growing. Perhaps I should simply find my place in the whole fucked up mess, where I can delude myself into thinking I'm making a positive difference.

But, I've seen too much. I know too much. I know that things are rotten to the core and it sickens me to emotionally involve myself, when everybody wants you to just STFU, keep your head down, do what you're told, not rock the boat and don't for god's sake solve any problems at the root cause.

Writing's the only time I can let rip and not get bogged down by the wilful ignorance and DGAF attitude of those around me. I'm not saying I'm superior and I've got all the answers, but I'm saying that when I get a hunch and I set out to prove my point, I've got plenty of examples of things I've done that have worked, when I'm free from constraints and naysayers.

I love this quote:

"People who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it"

Somebody's gotta be positive. Somebody's gotta do the math, calculate the risks and take a chance. Somebody has to be brave and stick to their guns. Somebody has to persevere through the setbacks. Somebody has to keep going when the way ahead looks blocked, to figure out how to overcome the obstacles.

I also love this quote:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat" -- Theodore Roosevelt

I feel gagged. I feel cheated out of the opportunity to demonstrate the best of my abilities; to tap into my creativity and problem solving skills. I feel jealous of those people with inherited wealth, trust funds and other advantages that allow them to dispense with the wearisome world of bullshit jobs, and instead they can flounce around reading interesting things, writing, debating & discussing, composing, painting, drawing, sculpting and generally expressing themselves.

To have those prizes just out of reach, because of the demands of societal conformity, is agonising to the point where it makes me want to give up. I've worked hard enough for long enough that I should be in a different position. I'm left miming the same actions that I've done a thousand times before, in order to keep the money flowing, the rent paid and the food on the table, which is like some kind of psychological torture.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I knew I would get a contract fairly quickly, and I know that I will be able to run the project really well, very easily. I've seen it all before; done it all before. I can see all the way to the end: no surprises. Because it's all just a means to an end, it makes it that much harder. I've got nothing to prove, and the fact that I'm employed to solve the same old problems in the same old way, time & time again, simply proves that they might as well just give me the money and not bother with the project, if they're not going to listen to the experts who know how to build better systems than these follies; these white elephants.

I've got this easy money contract all lined up. I know what the hell is going on with my kidneys. I've been in hospital enough times with rhabdomyolysis to know when the numbers say I'm fucked, and when the numbers say I've dodged another bullet and I'm fine & dandy. I know when I'm in big trouble and in desperate need of assistance, and I know when my tough little body is patched up and working again.

It's been agonising, to string this client; this consultancy; this agent along, while I've been in limbo: who could have predicted that it'd take nearly 15 hours of dialysis before my kidneys rebooted? Was I ever worried about my life, my health? You're asking the wrong question. You'd have thought that if you pissed absolute jet black liquid and you couldn't feel your foot or your calf, you'd be straight over to A&E, but it doesn't work like that if you're already at the limit of what you can take.

I phoned my client and said I wasn't going to make the 30 minute induction and I was too sick to start work that week. Chances are, that was the end of that: they'd just cancel the contract.

Things in my life are either there to be endured, they're an adventure, something good that's happening, or I've had enough and I'm going to self destruct.

Being in hospital again has been part adventure - I've never had dialysis before - partly something good, in terms of her seeing first hand the shit that I've been through a bunch of times. But there's the actual boring work that has to be endured if I still have a contract by the time I get discharged. There's the self destruct threat, because I've solved all these problems before. Everything's been overcome, so far as I can see. My client will wait until Monday for me to start work, my blood tests are stable and my kidneys are definitely working.

I had no control over whether the client would wait for me to get well. I had no control over when my kidneys would reboot. To discharge myself would have been suicide, so it didn't matter whether I lost the contract or not.

Nobody can see that the recent acute kidney failure is not the root cause of the problem here. Why did I let the problem get so bad? Why am I not afraid of a catastrophic chain of life-changing or life-ending events? My kidneys are working AND the client says I can start work on Monday, but why would I trust my knowledge, experience and the blood test data, and discharge myself, when I could just get another job in a few weeks or months? Why don't I avoid all risk, act like a sensible normal person, and just do everything I'm told?

There's a delicate chain here: I was lucky that my client has waited this long for me to get well, I was lucky that my kidneys recovered quickly, I'm lucky that I have a job that's easy money, I'm lucky that I don't have to suffer more agents and interviews, I'm lucky that I've got a financial lifeline that fixes my cashflow, I'm lucky that this contract keeps me within touching distance of the day when things are stable again, and I have the opportunity to think about doing something rewarding, challenging, creative and everything else I need as the antidote to 20 years of office boredom.

The ticking time bomb exploded, but it was unseen. I couldn't hang on any longer. I couldn't take any more delays and setbacks. My patience for being depressed, stressed and running out of runway, without success at securing a job (that I didn't really want anyway) had expired. I'd been strung along too long. Christmas and New Year slowed everything down and stopped progress, so the agony was drawn out longer than I could take.

Somebody's going to end up not getting what they want.

The doctors want to discharge me with blood tests that show my kidneys are clearing the remaining backlog of toxic crap out of my blood on their own. They want me to have an operation to have a dialysis line put in my jugular vein. They want to do more observation, without dialysis, to know how my kidneys are doing without any assistance.

Her and our friends want me to follow the doctor's advice, and treat my health as if my life hangs by a thread. They care about me. They don't care about my client. They know that there will be other jobs.

I want good quality sleep in my own bed for a couple of nights. I want to try on my ankle splint and get used to getting around on crutches. I want to make a plan for how I'm going to get to work during the tube strike. I want to figure out my medications so I'm not fuzzy-headed and sleepy during the day. I need to not have to start all over again. I need to balance the small risk that my kidneys might take a long time to clear the backlog of creatinine, against the big risk that I can't be out of work any longer, and I can't face starting the job hunt all over again, without depression and stress destroying me.

Yeah, I'm going to feel shit. I was always going to feel shit. I'm going to wish I was more well rested. I'm going to wish things worked out differently. I'm going to wish I could just press the fast forward button and be 6 months further through the year, and everything's gone exactly how I know it's going to go, but I don't have to suffer the boredom, the monotony and the ridiculous deja-vu of solving the same problems in the same way, over and over again.

What's the alternative? I can't cut & run. I can't switch career. I can't chase some stupid pipe dream.

Some people think I'm a know-it-all. Some people think I'm reckless and stupid. Some people think the answer to all my problems is to do the things I've tried before: regular salaried jobs, doctor's advice, safe & sensible behaviour, conformity to the norm.

All I can tell you is, I can make dumb decisions and get myself into deadly situations, but I'm also a bit of an expert in recovering from some very harrowing shit.

It's a bit unfair to ask people who care about me - both loved ones and professionals - to allow me to take what they see as an unnecessary risk, but the flip side is a complex web of psychological risks and consequences that are almost too hard to explain.

If I seem impatient, foolish, arrogant, entitled or somehow like I deserve different treatment and life opportunities to everybody else, all I can say is this: at some point you can't keep trying anymore, you give up and you slip away. At some point, it doesn't seem worth the struggle and the stress, just to line somebody else's pockets and allow them the freedom to pursue their artistic creative ambitions and generally waft around having a lovely time.

If I get what I want, start my job tired and in pain, work for at least 6 months, bored out of my mind and upset that I wasn't well rested and properly prepared; but at least the cashflow hole is plugged, my stress starts to go down, I start to relax about the purse strings, I can show my love and appreciation for the people who I care about and who care about me, I can start to improve my work:life balance and I can start to dream about longer-term ambitions, without torturing myself because things are so far out of reach.

If you think I expect this to happen overnight, you're wrong. I'm forecasting 6 months to stabilise, 6 more months to build up a healthy safety cushion, and another year before I can even dare to dream and start to think about a less soul-destroying life.

As I wrote before, I've got some amazing pieces of the puzzle in place - more love and support than I've ever had in my adult life - but I still can't afford to have other important things slip away for the sake of an acceptably small risk and some short-term pain, discomfort, exhaustion and a bit of extra stress. There is no perfect solution.

There is one thing that nobody can take away from me right at the moment: I'm a penniless writer.

Tags: #writing #art #hospital #career

This is a story about the wanker of the wharf...

London's financial services sector is the gift that keeps on giving. Through Y2K, the dot com bubble bursting, 9/11, 7/7 and the credit crunch, the good times never stopped rolling.

I'm now experiencing deja vu. My very first contract in Docklands was at Harbour Exchange, working for Lloyds TSB. I wore a shirt with cufflinks shaped like taps. I thought I epitomised the height of business fashion. In my defence, I was only 20 years old.

As I look around the glimmering tower blocks on the wharf, and look at their revolving doors leading into their fancy foyers, I realise that I've done at least two tours with so many of the companies: HSBC, JPMorgan, Barclays, Lloyds and others too.

It's good that these places will have me back. Why wouldn't they? I left on good terms, with great references and a bunch of people who'd remember me and some of the things I did when I was there.

But, I've started to burn bridges.

I know how to play the game and keep my mouth shut; not rock the boat. I know that the whole banking world keeps you hostage with golden handcuffs. You're ridiculously well paid, so you try to silence the voices in your head that say: what we're doing here is just not ethical.

You can immerse yourself in the propaganda, that says that the financial products that we offer are greasing the wheels of commerce, but you know that deep down, most of what you're doing is helping the rich to hide their wealth and shield it from taxation. When you ask your customer what their source of wealth is, they're not exactly going to say that it's sweatshops and drugs, are they? They're not exactly going to confess that their family is wealthy because they embezzled a load of money, leaving their fellow citizens starving.

Even a close friend, who seems reasonably ethical banker, has helped his father - a judge - to hide the family wealth in an offshore trust. They had some problems proving that they controlled the money, in order to get a mortgage, but the bank was eventually satisfied. The people who work in banks are outsmarting the ones who work for the regulators and the taxman, so that's why the rich pay very little tax, while the poor shoulder the burden of social programs. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

Am I a hypocrite? Am I ungrateful, when I bite the hand that feeds me? Well, the easy defence is just to say that if I didn't do my job, somebody else would. Isn't it better that I'm on the inside, trying to make things better, than on the outside where I would have very little power and influence. I could easily throw my clogs into the loom, if I thought that was the right thing to do.

Fintech is a conflation of financial and technology. Fintech tends to mean the challenger banks and ecosystem that exists outside of the long-standing institutions. Arguably, I've been working on Fintech - financial services technology - since 1998, but yet I might get mocked by my startup buddies as working for dinosaurs. Indeed, one well-respected friend from the venture capital world, even wrote a blog post which suggested that my return to Canary Wharf was an admission of defeat; a failure.

I do feel like a failure. Even though I just secured yet another contract for yet another massive bank, doing some cool stuff with AI and other bleeding-edge tech, and I'm going to be exceedingly well remunerated, I still feel like I sold out. I'm also really worried about my chequered past catching up with me. Instead of popping a champagne cork in celebration of my new role, last night, instead I have butterflies in my tummy and I'm incredibly anxious about getting everything signed, starting the job and making a good first impression, without any hiccups.

My self-assured manner and my self-confidence has all been destroyed, replaced instead with self-doubt. I started looking for a new contract on the 30th of November, and it took all this time to get one. I take that pretty personally, and I worry that I'm not a competitive candidate anymore: I'm not making the grade, amongst the other contractors in the market.

Obviously, when I actually start working these contracts, I realise that there's a real lack of tech pedigree and good leadership. I realise that there is a need for my skills and experience, and I can add value.

However, I struggle to play the game anymore. I struggle to keep my mouth shut for the benefit of my career and my bank balance. I struggle to let things go, for my own personal benefit. When I see wrongdoing and incompetence, I feel that I have a responsibility to the general public, to not just turn a blind eye. I feel like I have to act ethically... not because the regulators are watching, but because it's the right thing to do.

I struggle to do the work anymore. I don't enjoy tech for tech's sake. Often times I don't really believe that tech is improving anything. Most projects are doing the same kinds of things that have been done time and time again, for years. You'd have thought that if we were solving real problems, we'd have solved them already and moved on to something more useful, like finding a cure for cancer. The banking problem - debit account A and credit account B - is not a hard one to solve.

Who the hell am I, to sit idle for the whole month of November, writing a novel instead of trying to get a job. Who am I to arrogantly assume that I'll be able to win another lucrative contract, instead of getting a regular job like everybody else does? Who am I to only work 4 or 5 months of the year? Who the hell do I think I am?

Well, you're welcome to hate me if you like. I'm a banker; a capitalist pig; a lickspittle of the wealthy elites who cause so much human misery.

However, I'm an ideological misfit. I know that I'm well remunerated, but I don't confuse that with value. I don't feel valuable, I feel like I'm wasting my time building stuff that doesn't help; it hinders. I feel bribed into doing a job, because I need the money. Aren't we all? Yes, so why work a job that's just as pointless, but get paid a lot less? Do you think that by depriving that massive corporation of yourself, you're hurting them?

Arguably, if we were to all take an ethical stance with our employment, and refuse to work for weapons manufacturers and banks, we would starve them of the manpower they need to function. However, humanity responds to incentives: if you couldn't buy guns, somebody would start sharpening pointy sticks and selling them; if you couldn't get a bank loan, loan sharks would lend money.

The problem is when you follow a set of rules to their ultimate conclusion, you get some undesirable outcomes. Free-market capitalism might work when you're conquering the Wild West and building all the critical infrastructure to colonise the New World, but what about when it's all done, and populations start exploding? Is it right that being born into wealth or poverty is not a choice: inherited wealth and ownership determine everything.

If we pressed the 'reset' button and set all the bank balances to be the same, how many would lose and how many would gain? Yes, it's unfair that some who've worked very hard would lose out, but what about those who think it's unfair that their inherited wealth shouldn't be subjected to a Robin Hood tax? Surely it's more unfair that some people have a lifelong trust fund income, while others have to flip burgers and still can't afford to raise their families. Surely, there are more people who would benefit, than lose.

So, eventually I arrive at the conclusion that we need to have debt forgiveness, or else civilisation will be destroyed. I mean, what are the wealthy even doing with all their ill-gotten gains? It's dog in a manger behaviour that's the problem here, not jealousy.

In the rigged system we've built, success is not about hard work. The fable of the girl who swept the factory floor being promoted up the career ladder until she was eventually the CEO, is total horse-shit. We know that all the best jobs go to wealthy men from a handful of powerful families. You could bust your ass your whole life, and still have nothing to show for it except the little plastic stars on your McDonalds name badge.

To say "twas ever thus" and blame human nature, is disingenuous. You don't have to look very hard to see that civilisations rise and fall, based on the satisfaction of the hoi polloi. It doesn't matter how high you build the walls: when enough people want to smash down your defences, you'll find that even the most robust barriers are too flimsy to protect you.

What do we really believe in? What cause are we fighting for?

The top echelons of society are wealthy enough to have their every whim catered for, but what do they believe in? How many of our rulers are passionately engaged in the pursuit of something more meaningful than money?

I wanted to save up and buy a house. I wanted luxury holidays and fine dining. I had become totally bourgeois.

If we leave noble causes - like the search for scientific knowledge, world peace and hunger - to a handful of charity workers, while we ourselves fret about buying a bigger house or another boat, then our most educated and powerful portion of society is consumed by the consumer economy, which is intent only on separating fools from their money.

Western civilisation will fall, as if knocked over by a feather, because we believe in nothing.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #banking

This is a story about real life, far from the Internet...

Are you familiar with the acronym "IRL"? By some definitions, it stands for: In Real Life. Many people believe IRL is a synonym for any human interaction that occurs face-to-face. Did you also notice that I always capitalise the word Internet? Ever wonder why I do that?

If I speak to somebody on the phone, is that real life? If I send them a handwritten letter, is that real life?

The distinction between 'real' life, and the life we live with technology mediating our interactions with each other, has become rather pointless. I'm no great fan of video chat, but it's certainly an advancement on the telephone. All telephone calls are routed through digital exchanges, and the same infrastructure that carries your voice also carries the data of your Internet connection. There's nothing much more real about having a face to face conversation, shouting through a wall at your neighbour, making a Skype call (who does that anymore anyway?) or phoning somebody on their mobile.

The Internet is a real place, hence the noun. People can meet there, trade goods, gossip. "But you can't physically interact" I hear you wail. "What about touch, smell, taste?" Yeah yeah yeah. Are you saying that the phone-calls you used to make on that old rotary-dial telephone weren't real life?

This is the beginning of a piece I've been wanting to write for ages. I made a note on my smartphone of the title, but I'd already been mulling the topic since a friend - who I've seen in real life only twice since childhood - made the very good point about the Internet being a real place. I was thinking about writing this well before a different friend - who I hadn't seen in real life for nearly 20 years - posted an article on this topic on Facebook. The timing is too perfect.

I've lived 'online' since I saved up my money from my job washing up in a hotel kitchen in order to buy a modem. When I bought my modem, the Internet wasn't yet a big thing. Instead, I used to get magazines that had loads of phone numbers in them of dial-up bulletin boards. Using technology that predated the Internet in the guise we know it today, I used to be text-chatting online, electronically mailing people and playing online computer games, via bulletin board systems (BBSs).

Then, I took to Internet newsgroups which were a popular fore-runner to the forums and social media pages we have today. I even met a rock climbing partner on a newsgroup. If you don't think that putting your life in the hands of a random stranger off the Internet is real life then I don't know what is.

I spent thousands of hours reading and contributing to three kitesurfing forums. People who I first met online had countless evenings spent drinking, weekends away and holidays to exotic locations together. All of which occurred away from keyboard but it was very much real life. It was real when we were all talking to each other on the Internet all week long, during our dull office hours, waiting for the next time we could go to the ocean together.

This is where things get super blurry. I have so many friends I've made through social media (newsgroups, forums) and a lot of old friends I'm able to still remain in some kind of contact with because we are connected via Facebook. Would I have been able to pick up an old friendship with school/college friends who I hadn't seen for circa 20 years, if there hadn't been some real and somehow tangible tie together, even if it was mediated by binary ones and zeros in the ether of the 'cloud'?

The dust has been gathering on my keyboard since I completed the first draft of my novel. I haven't been blogging regularly for a while. I miss writing and I miss having an open dialogue with everybody and anybody on the Internet. The Internet has brought me friends and fortune. I've never regretted the investment of time I've made in channelling my creative energies into a public space that creates nothing tangible per se. What is software? What does it mean to publish a blog or a book online? If you can't hold it, sniff it, lick it... if it doesn't gather dust, does it really exist?

There was one slightly embarrassing moment in my recent adventures Away From Keyboard.

I was out for dinner with another friend. You could say I know him in real life because the first time I met him was face to face... or you could say I know him through the Internet, because he was introduced to me by somebody I know from an Internet discussion forum. Either way, it's immaterial to the embarrassing story.

Over dinner, my friend expressed his incredulity at the fact that the value of all the coal bought and sold is a tiny fraction of the total value of all the financial contracts (securities) that are created off the back of the physical commodity. So many more coal futures and options contracts are bought and sold by speculators, hoping to profit from a movement in the price of the commodity, versus anybody who actually wants the real coal. The dirty black lumps of carbon are almost unimportant... the 'value' in the financial markets dwarfs the heavy industry that mines coal out of the ground and ships it to power stations and for people to heat their homes.

The embarrassing thing was that I went to speak and then I realised that I had nothing to add. I was left speechless. I've written at length on my blog about the staggering 'value' of the derivatives contracts versus the real economy. Is it me who's splitting hairs, expecting us to care about food and housing and water and healthcare and transport? Is it me who's the luddite, saying that the global financial markets are utter horse shit because it's all just digital money in the Fintech 'cloud'?

Maybe the real embarrassment is that I'd had that conversation before, with a hedge fund manager and a director of an investment bank. We were on our way home from the airport, having been kitesurfing in real life with 20 people from an Internet discussion forum. I was just about to start work for JPMorgan, dealing with Credit Default Swaps. We thought that the financial markets were overleveraged and that there was going to be a crash. That was 2005.

Did I put my money where my mouth was? Yes. I bought dollars at nearly $2 for every £1 I paid, and bought gold at $550/oz. One ounce of gold cost £225 back then. One ounce of gold is worth £920 today.

The point is not to be a doom-monger or gloat in a "told you so" kind of way, but to try and express how tired I am by everything. Being Cassandra is shit. Churning out my thoughts into the ether has allowed me to say everything that needed to be said, but it left me kind of breathlessly shocked to encounter anybody who'd arrived at the same rational and reasonable analysis of a ridiculous situation. That's one thing you don't get when you're lecturing the Internet: any kind of feedback that anybody agrees with you.

So, what's my closing conclusion? I'm back blogging, because I love writing, but aside from setting out my position clearly for posterity, some time away from keyboard is pretty handy to remind oneself that there are a lot of people out there in the real world who share my values and concerns.

Tags: #socialmedia #writing #computing #banking #capitalism

This is a story about euthanasia...

I need to cover what I'm about to write with a hefty preamble, full of caveats and other disclaimers, because there are so many considerations with this issue, but it's an issue I need to tackle.

Firstly, let's consider this: nobody really wants to die.

For people who are in pain and other kinds of physical discomfort, or are otherwise afflicted by diseases, injuries or genetic problems that mean their quality of life is terrible, or certainly going to end up terrible: these people do not want to die. Those people would dearly love for a cure or some kind of relief from their symptoms that doesn't come with intolerable side effects.

Clearly people who want to prematurely end their lives in a dignified manner, have exhausted all treatment options, and their future looks bleak: pain, discomfort, infirmity, senility and disability.

Alzheimers and other kinds of incurable degenerative brain diseases carry the added worry that the sufferer will no longer be of a sound and rational mind when the illness reaches its late stages, and they will burden their carers, while perhaps not even being able to recognise their loved ones any more.

Let's also consider this: some people have hope, while others do not.

Yes, there's always a chance of a miracle cure. Yes, there's always a 1-in-a-trillion shot that God might personally intervene to remove the horrible afflictions that he originally cursed you with.

Most people love life and can't bear the thought of being torn from the arms of their loved ones. Most people cry out in fear, when they think they're about to die. Most people fight to survive.

There are people who have gone through many bouts of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, transplants and who take bucketloads of medications with horrible side effects, and generally battle through awful sickness and pain, holding out hope that their ailments will be at least treated well enough to prolong their lives a little longer.

Some people might spend a long time on a transplant list, barely surviving, while oxygen and dialysis just about preserve them while they wait for a donor match. An agonising race against time happens: will a donor arrive before the illness kills the poor helpless person who can only sit and wait?

I feel like I should use softer language, to cushion the blows for every person who's lost a child, parent, friend, partner, relative. Death is painful, and all the more so knowing that a person had so much more life left in them. Death can be so cruel. People so deserving of more life can be snatched away, while others who are seemingly careless with the gift of life can seem so selfish and ungrateful for their good fortune to have been spared by the gods.

And it's the ungrateful ones I want to talk about.

What do you do with the alcoholic who 'wants' to drink themself to death? What do you do with a suicidal person?

The footballer George Best famously received a liver transplant, and then proceeded to court controversy when he was caught drinking again. Instead of demonstrating his gratitude for his stay of execution, by becoming teetotal, he was clearly the same person - ungrateful for life some might say - as he was before he received an organ donation.

What do you do with somebody who is determined to kill themself? Do you put them in a straightjacket and keep them in a padded cell indefinitely, just so that they can die of old age in an asylum?

It might be the case that a suicidal person is in perfectly good physical health and does not abuse drugs or alcohol, but they are nonetheless determined to end their own life prematurely.

There's a general belief that telling people that their lifestyle is much akin to suicide, will curtail their health-damaging behaviour. Doctors mostly seem to take the route of saying "if you keep drinking, you're going to die young" to alcoholics. While most people would think that this would shock somebody into cutting down their drinking, in fact there's little evidence that it has any affect at all.

Similarly, telling suicidal people "you've got so much to live for" and "it's just your depression telling you lies" and other statements that make perfect sense to people who are not suicidal, is also ineffective. The only thing that has proven somewhat effective - as far as short 12-week studies paid for by pharmaceutical companies can tell - is psychoactive medication.

Smoking causes many preventable diseases, and is a big killer, but yet people still choose to smoke even though it's expensive, makes you smell and stains your teeth. You would have thought that the large "SMOKING KILLS" health warnings on packets would cause people to stop smoking immediately, but no.

You know what one of the most effective smoking cessation treatments is? It's the antidepressant called Wellbutrin (marketed as stop-smoking drug Zyban and generically known as Bupropion).

Why would an antidepressant be a good treatment for smokers? Well, let's consider two things: firstly, people smoke because they're missing something. Take smoking away, and a smoker's life is now incomplete. Removing nicotine and the habit/ceremony of smoking leaves a void in that person's life. Also, you've got to be fairly depressed to do something that's clearly a threat to your health, and possibly your life.

Wellbutrin is a fast-acting antidepressant, unlike anything we can get on the NHS. Instead of making people feel sleepy and emotionally numbed, Wellbutrin has been proven to offer a number of improvements in the lives of patients, including their sex lives. Wellbutrin is France's most popular antidepressant.

What do you really want from an antidepressant, other than to relieve your symptoms of depression now when you're feeling it? Being told that a medication might take 6 to 8 weeks to become effective, and then having to suffer your symptoms that whole time while you're waiting is no use at all! Some depressions will lift naturally after a month or two anyway.

But what goes up must come down. After some weeks or months taking Wellbutrin, many patients experience panic attacks and insomnia. Plus there's the obvious problem of having to stop taking the medication at some point, and suffering the comedown (sorry, I mean withdrawal syndrome).

Yes, the difference between 'drugs of abuse' and 'prescribed psychoactive medications' is precisely zero. Every medication that has an upside also has a downside. Addiction and habituation with prescription medications is just as much of a problem as with street drugs. The only difference is medical oversight and quality control.

And so, I arrive at the situation where I'm perfectly well aware that I can get short-term relief for the symptoms of my depression, in the form of a pill from my doctor. However, I'm equally aware that to go down that road is to have a lifetime dependence on medication for my sense of wellbeing. Basically, do I want to be a medically sanctioned drug addict? None of the stigma, but all of the same behaviours.

You're right, I wouldn't have to lie, cheat or steal to feed my habit. I can wander into my pharmacist, and get my uppers over the counter, and carry on like I'm a fine upstanding member of the community. Did you know that even heroin addicts are completely functional members of society, when they can get a clean high quality supply of the opiates they need? When doctors in the UK used to prescribe heroin, there were none of the antisocial problems that we instinctively associate with drug abuse today.

Of course, I'm not advocating drug abuse, but then I'm also pointing out that the flaws that afflict a smoker, a drinker, a junkie and even a depressed person... they're all rooted in the same psychological need to cure an invisible illness.

Pretty soon, I will have spent a year where over 75% of the time I was using no psychoactive substances at all, except for alcohol. A period of 115 consecutive days - 32% of the year - I was completely teetotal. For the whole year I had no tea, coffee, cola, energy drinks, or caffeine containing headache pills (more common than you think). I'm completely unmedicated.

How do I feel? Awful.

It seems to me like I have a choice: suicidal depression, or drugs (i.e. medication, coffee & alcohol etc.)

I know that a scientific study with one participant tells us nothing, but equally I'm not a group, I'm me. You can't dismiss my individual findings, that are true for me. I've gathered the data during a 20 year career, and I've come to the conclusion that my life is unliveable in its current form.

When you are conducting a scientific study, you have to control the variables. Thankfully, I'm an ideal test subject for this.

Since the age of 17, I've been a very well paid software engineer. For sure, during the first couple of years it took me a while to get my salary up to a decent level, but since the age of 19 I've never had to worry about money. Also, I've done pretty much the same thing for all my career: sitting at a desk, tapping on a keyboard, making software.

I've had the same running crisis my whole career. When I was 19, I was bored so I applied to university and was offered places at some very prestigious institutions to study psychopharmacology. I decided to stick with the money, and keep selling my soul to the highest bidder.

When I was 28, depression had crushed me to the point I was on my knees and unable to turn up and do the same office bullshit anymore. I retrained as an electrician and started my own company.

As a self-employed tradesman, I loved what I did, but I was grossly underpaid for the level of responsibility I had. Ordinary members of the public think that tradesmen are out to rip them off. In reality tradesmen are highly trained professionals whose job it is to stop houses burning down and families being electrocuted or poisoned by carbon monoxide.

The freedom of not having a boss, not having a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine, and not having to sit in the same damn chair at the same damn desk, pushing the same damn 102 keys on the same goddam keyboard... all of those things are just as great as they sound. However, getting paid peanuts to do dangerous dirty work is also not great either.

And so, I returned to what I'm experienced and qualified to do.

I earn staggering amounts of cash for moving my mouse around and looking busy at a desk. However, I used to earn £470 per day when I was 20 years old, doing computer programming for Lloyds TSB back in the year 2000. My job is exactly the same today, doing the same damn computer code for HSBC, JPMorgan, Barclays or any other damn bank.

But maybe the problem's banking? Nope. I've written computer code for nuclear submarines, torpedos, school computer networks, trains, parking ticket machines, busses, security guards, shop assistants and just about every other weird and wonderful industry you can think of. I've written in dozens of programming languages, for dozens of operating systems, on dozens of form factors. It's all the fucking same binary 1s and 0s and boolean algebra under the covers. All code is made from the same nuts and bolts. It's fucking boring.

And so, I can be a miserable exploited worker on a low wage, doing something I take pride in but knowing that I'm undervalued. I can be an overpaid and underworked software developer / scrum master / development manager / IT director. I can be a stressed out startup founder working my arse off to line the pockets of the venture capitalists who are going to get filthy rich at the expense of my health. I can be a destitute bum, a tramp, a hobo. Which would YOU choose?

I particularly object to the idea that I have to drug myself up, just to fit in with the bullshit jobs economy. I object to having to be high on antidepressants just to be able to cope with the same bunch of fucktards making the same fucking mistakes I've seen a million times over, in the job that I've mastered and brings in obscene amounts of cash. I object to having to be high on anxiety medication, to cope with the insecurity faced by the underpaid and undervalued front-line members of society who build your houses, look after you in hospital, grow your food and perform every other truly useful function that we need.

Even to work in civil engineering would frustrate the hell out of me. Crossrail, the multi billion dollar project improve London's cross-capital transportation, is rather pointless because it will be at full capacity on the day it opens, because London is already packed full of idle fucktards like me, clogging up the world with pointless makework jobs. Do we really need any more offices and office workers? Do we really need any more service sector jobs? Do we really need such a bloated financial services sector, with its equally parasitic support industries of corporate law and accounting? It's all such utter bullshit.

And so, I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't.

In my 20 years of full time work, I've become worn down with it all. I'm exhausted. I've tried a number of things, and I find that bullshit prevails everywhere I look. My heart is broken by all the bullshit that trumps everything else.

I'm exhausted, and I'm depressed and I'm suicidal.

Yes, I know some people are grateful for their lives and what little quality of life they can squeeze out of their existence. Yes, I know that I have good physical health and I'm reasonably young still. Yes, I know that there'd a queue that stretches around the planet, of people who would love to have my job.

So, if I choose to reject all that and end my life because I feel like I have no quality of life, is that morally wrong?

You can't even level the accusation of me that I don't know suffering, and I don't know poverty. I've lived homeless in a park, destitute, penniless and surviving on charitable food donations. I've woken up in hospital numerous times in pain and discomfort. I've had numerous scrapes with death. Shouldn't all that stuff make me grateful to be alive? Guess what? You have absolutely no idea. Guess what else, I have a very good idea, because it's already all happened to me.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I went to state comprehensive schools. I wasn't gifted jobs by any friend or family member. I had no head start in life. It's true that I have no obvious disability or disadvantage either, unless you count a couple of drug addict alcoholic parents, but I still had other family members, teachers and friends who were nice to me. It's not a fucking competition. The point is that the variables are controlled. I neither had advantage nor disadvantage, but yet I arrived at this point, here, now, today.

It's not like we can say this is just a short-term crisis. Like this will fucking blow over.

It's not going to blow over. For 20 fucking years it's been the same. The same shit, different day.

Yes, there were times that were actually pretty good, but guess what... they weren't sustainable. I liked living in a hostel with a bunch of other homeless people. I liked not having a job and being a bum. I liked having no responsibilities. Who wouldn't? But that's not real life. We don't get to have a freebie just because 'real' life is killing us. It still cost £120 a week for my bunk bed in a dormitory that slept 15 people, with one fucking bathroom between us all. My current rent is only £240 a week and for that I get a double bedroom, an ensuite bathroom, a kitchen, a dining room, a dual-aspect lounge with panoramic views over London and a balcony overlooking the river Thames.

I should be happy, but I'm not. Happiness is not a choice, no matter what you read on some bullshit Internet meme inspirational quote.

All the right pieces are in place. My doctors are chuffed to bits that I don't drink, smoke, abuse drugs or in any way engage in health damaging behaviours. My blood pressure is amazing. My cholesterol is low. My eyesight, hearing, teeth, joints... all of it is perfect.

And yet, my mental health is in ruins. I'm so depressed. I'm so suicidal.

I'm doing everything right, and yet everything feels so wrong.

Of course I feel guilty for feeling like this. What the fuck am I supposed to do though?

Honestly, I feel like I want to spend the next 30 days convincing people that the most humane thing is to let me end my life. Honestly, despite the things that should be really great in my life, nothing feels great. Nothing feels good or nice. Nothing works. Nothing is working.

There's still the possibility of just running away and absenting myself from all responsibility, but then when I'm dirty and sick from a life of destitution... when I die then, will anybody understand? A tramp, a bum, a hobo, a junkie, an alkie... these people are all too easily dismissed by society.

What happens when highly paid banking IT consultants start dying? Well if they're white middle class thirtysomething men... not much. Who cares? Probably just a selfish socialite, having a tantrum because they can't do whatever they want, one newspaper article basically said, in the wake of one death.

What the fuck is anybody supposed to do about this fucked up life that we're supposed to live?

I really don't feel like I can live this bullshit rat race anymore, and the alternative is a long slow death, shunned by society and marginalised.

In the long run, we're all fucking dead anyway.

Apologies if I'm triggering raw and painful feelings about your beloved family member or friend who is busily fighting for survival, or who lost their battle. I really don't mean things disrespectfully, but I can't lie anymore. I feel this stuff and it's undeniable.

Call me narcissistic needy spoilt white middle class brat if you like, if it'll make you feel better. It certainly won't make me feel any worse, but isn't that so terribly melodramatic and attention seeking?

Can you understand, how exhausting it is, having to justify your feelings and apologise for wanting to be dead the whole fucking time?

It's a one-way ticket and for sure it needs careful thought, but aren't we being a bit unfair, shutting down the conversation by guilt-tripping people into hiding their feelings? Perhaps suicide is a smart choice for people who feel that they have no quality of life.

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #addiction #alcohol #drugs #medication #nhs #hospital

This is a story about self sabotage...

What the hell am I doing, blogging about stuff that could get me fired, sued and make me unemployable? Why the hell am I burning so many bridges, and destroying my own reputation? Is this simply self-sabotaging behaviour?

If we look at the wider context of my story, the rat race has made me unwell. The boring office jobs propping up the instruments of capitalism so that an idle wealthy elite can ride roughshod over the proletariat, has made me unhappy. Compromising on my moral, ethical position, five days a week is not healthy. Working in an unstimulating environment that is unchallenging and uninteresting is a fate worse than death.

It's very easy to keep doing what you do because you fear change and it's the path of least resistance. I've been moulded into a certain career and industry sector. I'm the perfect guy to have join your massive corporation and quickly get up to speed with the bureaucracy, systems and processes. The bulk of the hard work in a big organisation is not the actual skilled thing that people are qualified to do, but just dealing with the crap that gets built up by a zillion little Hitlers all micromanaging their tiny empires they're building and trying to justify their pathetic jobs.

It's interesting who I'm friends with on Facebook, and who follows me on Twitter. In fact, with very little digging you can even find this vast cache of dirt, on Google. This is not about how important and influential I am, because I'm not. This is about public exposure. I took a decision to lay my soul bare, and I stand by that decision. But, for a moment, let's consider the kinds of people who I know or suspect have at one time dipped into my social media and online accessible over-sharing:

• Ex colleagues from JPMorgan
• Ex colleagues from HSBC
• Cohorts from a technology startup accelerator
• Two influential and well respected directors of startup accelerators
• Mentors from startup accelerator
• My accountant
• People who are influential and well respected in the technology sector
• Friends who work in tech and/or industry sectors that I work in

I've stopped short of actually tying my LinkedIn profile back in this direction, towards my blog. I've stopped short of in any way linking my limited company back towards this new alter ego of mine, although I did briefly get myself in a muddle over some suicide watch startup idea that I had. That was on September 21st... right when I started this journey of deciding to go public with every struggle I faced when I finally lost my grip on my career, my company, my reputation, everything.

For sure, I'm a nobody. However, people still talk. There is a rumour mill, no matter how small and insignificant you are. And people who work in offices are particularly interested in lurid tales of people who're doing anything that is out of the ordinary, even if that's losing your mind and ending up in the gutter.

By now, my tale of the toxic combination of stress, abusive relationship, mental health problems, heavy drinking, drug abuse (in that order) leading to suicide attempts, hospitalisation, homelessness, destitution and even police involvement, is well documented.

Well, I guess it's not that well documented, but it's out there in the public domain.

I have no idea how much was known before I decided to embark upon a mission of full disclosure, but I know that my abusive ex-wife was particularly indiscreet and insensitive. I'm sure that my friends did their best to save my blushes and protect my reputation as much as they could, but people still knew that I was getting more and more unwell.

Obviously, at times during my descent into melancholy and the infinite madness, I sabotaged my own reputation amongst my Facebook friends. I once shared a picture of some potassium cyanide that I had bought with the express intention of ending my life quickly and cleanly. The lethal dose is about 250 milligrams. I bought 2 grams of the toxic chemical: 8 times more than was strictly necessary.

Depression now has less stigma associated with it. We pretty much all know somebody who suffers with depression, and takes anti-depressant medication to help them with their low mood. These things are no longer taboo to talk about, and many people are able to still continue to hold down good jobs and be in positions of responsibility. Suffering from clinical depression is not a death sentence, certainly as far as a person's professional reputation is concerned.

Bipolar disorder has almost become cool to have. There are a list of celebrities and politicians as long as your arm, who have come forward and declared that they are living with the condition. Obviously, the ability to turn your hypomanic episodes into hyper-energetic flurries of productive activity, means that you can get shit done. In a way, we celebrate the person who has these mood episodes, because they can produce the 'overnight' successes we so revere in society.

Alcohol is everywhere, so unless you're swigging from a bottle of vodka hidden in your desk and reeking of liquor fumes as you breathe on people, just about any amount of drinking is socially acceptable. It's only if you declare yourself an alcoholic and have a stay in rehab that people start to stigmatise you. You can cover up your 28 days in The Priory, by saying that it was private hospital treatment for stress and anxiety.

Drug abuse is the last taboo. You pretty much don't want to put that one down on your CV. Cocaine use is widespread throughout London, and coffee gets stronger and stronger to the point where you're practically swallowing amphetamines. A few cans of Red Bull is the socially acceptable equivalent to snorting a couple of lines of some stimulant. Students are increasingly using Modafinil, Ritalin and Adderall to improve their concentration span and fact retention, as well as to stay awake during long revision binges.

If you think that these things feature in my daily life, you're wrong. These issues are simply incompatible with day-to-day existence. Depression robs you of the energy to get out of bed and face the day. Bipolar hypomania robs you of the contents of your bank balance, as it all gets ploughed into crazy schemes. Alcoholism is hard to hide, not that I've ever been physically dependent on booze, thank God. Drug addiction is all-consuming: there's no hiding it when you've lost the battle with addiction and it's taking you on a white-knuckle ride to an early grave.

So, if I've won the battles, why would I make it public knowledge that I fought them? Why would I take the time to declare, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I'm a flawed individual? Why would I spell it out, that I could relapse into any number of life-destroying illnesses at any moment?

Well, we could all succumb to these things at any moment.

I was 28 years young when I was knocked flat by clinical depression. I was 32 when addiction got its hooks in me. Just because I'd been a good student, a well behaved polite boy, a model employee, a career go-getter, and on the face of it I had a perfect little life, it doesn't mean that I was immune from anything.

But "it could never happen to me" right?

We believe that smart life choices will keep us safe. We believe that we have free will, and that therefore we would never choose to do something stupid. We believe that past performance is indicative of future results, even if the disclaimers always tell us the opposite.

There's something ugly about academic and corporate life, where we put a black mark against people's name if they fuck up even once. Screw up your school exams and you'll never get a chance to go to university. Screw up in your career and you'll be frozen out of the good jobs forevermore. Screw up in life and you'll be a dirty leper who nobody will want to know or to help.

This is the bleak outlook for so many people, who were simply unlucky or made a decision that was obviously regrettable, but life is continuously setting us traps and pitfalls. Why do consequences have to be so long lasting? Oh, you got in financial trouble? Here, let us help you by now charging you fines and punitive rates of interest, plus denying you opportunities and making the cost of living sky high because you have a poor credit rating.

The punishment for not having any money is that you have to pay more money. The punishment for your crimes is the deprivation of your liberty and the destruction of your future opportunities.

Apparently people are mocking those who have chosen to get a semicolon tattoo, but let's think about this for a minute.

I work in a big office and I see hundreds of people every day. In all likelihood they have seen that I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear. If you were to Google "what does a semicolon tattoo mean?" then you will see that it's mostly to do with struggles with depression, addiction, self-harm and suicide attempts. I wonder how many people are thinking "why the hell did we employ this guy?".

When I did my interview, I sat so that my interviewers were on my right-hand side. The people who interviewed me never saw that tattoo, until soon after I started in my new job. I wonder if they'd have hired me if they had seen the tattoo.

Tattoos are actually uncommon amongst investment banking IT consultants. Certainly visible tattoos are even declared as not permitted, in many banks dress codes. I even thought about putting a sticking plaster over the mark on my skin, for my interview.

However, that's all I ever did for years and years. That's our whole approach to mental health and the problems that people face in their private lives: put a sticking plaster over it.

I've written at length about how angry I am that our first line of defence for people who are stressed out and depressed by their shitty unfulfilling office jobs, is to give them powerful psychoactive medications that artificially alter their mood so they can continue to work their dreadful jobs.

I'm angry that I'm so pressurised by wider society to cover up my problems, in order to retain a blemish-free reputation. I feel like the need to appear pristine and infallible to potential employers, fellow work colleagues and bosses, is largely to blame for why I had a massive breakdown and implosion, instead of things getting fixed before they got out of hand.

We are brainwashed to believe that we can't have any gaps on our CV that we can't explain. We are brainwashed to believe that we can't take our foot off the gas pedal for a single second. We are brainwashed to believe that a stain on our reputation will hang around for the rest of our careers.

You know what the problem is? It's our fucking careers. The treadmill. The rat race. It's making so many people mentally unwell, as well as causing physical health damage due to the sedentary nature of the work. No amount of standing desks or free gym membership is going to compensate for the problem.

I backslid into office employment because it was easy and I was desperate. My back was against the wall, and it made perfect financial sense to go and suffer another stretch of agonising misery back doing the shit that I'm most qualified and experienced to do, but it's fucking killing me.

It's important to be values-aligned, but it's also so easy to be tempted by 'easy' money. The cash rewards for doing the kind of mind-bogglingly boring work that I do are substantial. In theory, I only have to do this work for short bursts, and then I have spare time and cash to do whatever I need to do to balance the books, psychologically. However, in practice, all I'm doing is servicing debts that were built up just staying alive.

The welfare state took a dim view on my situation. Why do I need help, when I can go and get a job that pays fabulously well? Well, guess what? I tried it. I tried getting one of these shitty desk jobs that kill me, while I was homeless living in a hostel. And guess what? Working one of those jobs that made you unwell in the first place while you are still unwell really fucks you up.

This whole exercise of blowing my existence and private life wide open serves to document the ridiculousness of the mental health destroying lives that we are forced to live. If this whole experience ends up killing me, at least I've left the evidence: the smoking gun.

Nobody really cares when white middle class, well educated men in good jobs kill themselves. Why would they? Well, look around you. Do you see people getting happier? Do you see mental illness declining? Do you see suicide rates declining? Do you feel secure, fulfilled? Do you feel like the human condition is improving?

I look around and I see war and I see poverty. I see ordinary British people being forced into zero hours contract minimum wage McJobs, and still unable to afford basic amenities. I see loneliness and depression. I see a lack of real local community. I see families pulled apart by the need to go to large urban centres to seek your fortune. I see people locked into their own little world: headphones plugged in, eyes cast downwards at their smartphone, not talking to anybody face to face except to ask for their morning coffee.

Is this just a London thing? Is my view tainted because I'm struggling with depression myself? Actually, London is the canary in the coal mine. The sensitive people who have their head up looking around, sensing for danger, are usually on to something. Everything is pretty shit and fucked up right now.

And so, I am rejecting the conventional. I'm rejecting the sensible, rational and tried-and-tested. I'm burning the bridges that lead back to places I should never return to.

Yes, I might be making a fool of myself. Yes, people might be sniggering at me, safe behind their computer screens. Yes, important people are judging me and they have the ability to thwart me because of their prejudice, and make my life hard and even impossible. I could find myself unemployable, but not know why, because nobody has to tell me. I'm giving away all the ammunition you need to destroy me, and people are eagerly taking it.

But you know, who's the real winner? If you take what I gave you and use it against me, how are you going to feel? We're all doing that. We're all exploiting weaknesses that we discover in each other, in order to get ahead in the rat race.

How do you win a rigged contest? If everybody is cheating, do you cheat too?

The other option is to martyr yourself. For sure, you'll be hated and excluded. Nobody will thank you. But at least you can sleep at night, in the gutter.

Prisons can mean anywhere you feel trapped and your liberty is restricted

Tags: #career #london #computing #banking #depression #suicide #mentalhealth

This is a story about invasions...

Are you worried about your culture being wiped out? Are you concerned that we could all end up speaking German, Japanese, Chinese or Arabic? Are you concerned that you will no longer be able to worship your favourite imaginary friend? Are you concerned that you'll have to salute a different combination of colours, stitched into fabric and raised on a flagpole?

When you look at nationalism, you'll see that it's pretty insane. While some people willingly learn another language and enthusiastically adopt the culture of another country, and go and live amongst those people, others believe that "our" way of life is worth dying for. In fact, they believe "our" way of life is worth killing for.

Why would somebody learn German and go and live in Germany? Surely that would be like surrendering to the enemy. Surely that would be a slap in the face to our brave grandfathers and great grandfathers, who fought in two world wars so that we never had to learn another foreign language or eat a bratwürst. Our dead relatives laid down their lives so that we should never have to suffer an Oktoberfest and drink large steins of cold beer brought to us by buxom wenches in lederhosen.

When we study history and people's attitudes, it was nationalism that was the main reason we went to war, not the protection of the Jews. The genocide that was being committed is what we are mainly taught about today in schools, but the strongly held belief in British hearts, was that we needed to protect our country.

Only when our European allies had been completely overwhelmed by German forces, and they had reached the northern beaches of France, did we decide to put some boots on the ground.

If you examine the rhetoric of Donald Trump and the Brexit movement, you will hear similar attempts to stoke up nationalistic fever and paranoia over an 'invasion'. Apparently, a "swarm" of brown people are on their way to our shores, intent on fucking up our national identity. We are told to live in fear and mistrust of our Muslim neighbours, who wear strange clothes and congregate in strange buildings. Islamic culture is so different from ours, and we are being trained to treat what is different with suspicion of an ulterior motive, of overwhelming everything we hold dear.

Talk of walls and pulling up the drawbridge. Shut down the borders. Send "them" home. Look after "are" (sic.) own. Britain First. Make America great. Blah blah blah.

But, if we ignore the social problems that are driving suport for far-right jingoistic nationalists, like Trump, Farage, Le Pen, then we fail to defeat them. By continuing to bury our head in the sand and repeatedly just cry "racist" and "bigot" then we continue to drive a wedge between enlightened liberals, and the vast numbers of poorly educated people who feel economically disenfranchised.

Why would I talk about economics? Surely ordinary British people just want an integrated society, full of fellow British people, not all these damn foreign types with their weird food and strange customs? Well, no not really. The reason why people have rounded on immigrants, as has been stated ad nauseum, is that people feel poor and insecure in their jobs. Ordinary people are economically disadvantaged, and there is a popular belief that immigrants are fuelling excessive competition for a finite number of jobs and resources.

I'm about to suggest another, more controversial reason, why we have been taught that the West has 'won' and our way of life is the correct one.

Let's leave all discussions about anti-Semitism and the holocaust aside. Of course, any discrimination based on colour or creed is wrong. Of course, any act of genocide is deplorable. These things are not the topic of my thesis. Let's set those points to one side, because they're discussed at length elsewhere.

Now, let's think about how the Nazis swept to power. Do you think Hitler said "let's kill all the Jews" and all the Germans went "Yeah! Brilliant idea! Let's vote for this guy!". Nope. Even if the Nazi policies of getting rid of gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, Jews and other minority groups was central to their meteoric rise to power, something else was driving it.

Think about the economic situation in Nazi Germany. The country was saddled with debt. The war bonds were a crippling millstone around the neck of the ordinary German people. For every Deutsche Mark that was produced by hard working ordinary Germans, 17 more Marks had to be found for the repayment of national debt. The German people felt enslaved to the money lenders, and the money lenders were perceived as Shylocks (Jewish money lenders, Jewish bankers).

In the twenty year period in-between the world wars, ordinary Germans had been massively economically disadvantaged by the national debt, in the form of war bonds and reparations, that their own government and nation had taken on. Do you think the ordinary Germans felt that they owed this debt? Do you think that, given the choice, they would have borrowed so much?

The German people wished to free themselves from the slavery of interest payments and the tyranny of capitalism. The Nazi movement was essentially an anti-capitalist movement, with the ideas of Gottfried Feder at its roots. The Nazi movement was more akin to communism than the neoliberal capitalist democracy that we assume was the basis for all Western economies in the 20th century.

How were the Nazis able to motivate so many people to work hard to produce vast quantities weapons of war that are hard to not admire, for their sheer feat of engineering prowess? Germany took a great leap forward in putting the instruments of industry to productive use. From a position of being economically depressed, and with massive financial problems, how was it able to build airships, planes, tanks, bombs, guns, and massive amounts of infrastructure to support itself? How did Germany go from depressed doldrums, to becoming a world superpower, so quickly?

The answer is that they abandoned capitalism.

What, in essence, is capitalism anyway? Well, it's putting capital to work, through interest bearing financial instruments. Instead of having labour exchanged for food or goods or services, instead, debt is exchanged for factories and machinery, and people work because they don't own any of the factories or farms anymore. Where does the capital come from? The capitalists. Where does money flow to? Back to the capitalists.

Gottfried Feder figured out the pyramid scheme of capitalism. In his Manifesto for the Abolition of Interest Slavery, Feder explains how the owner of a factory does not benefit from the productive output, and neither do the workers either. Instead, the bonds that paid to purchase the factory bear effortless interest, meaning the profits of the factory flow back to the capitalist. The people who work in the factories need to buy the goods that the factory produces, so, their money again flows back to the capitalists. And through the exponentially multiplative effect of compound interest, the capitalists will grow ever richer, while never having to do a single day's labour. Infinite endless effortless capital.

It was an economic idea that brought the Nazis to power and kept them there. The Nazis brought a sense of prosperity and wellbeing to a nation that had felt depressed and enslaved to the capitalists. The Nazis brought about pride, not in the nation, nor the flag, nor the Nazi party, but in their productive contribution. People feel proud to have done a good day's work and to have produced something. Economic depressions rob people of their feeling of self worth. Economic depressions rob people of their self esteem.

Now, if we look at Islam, we can see that a core teaching of the Muslim faith is that earning interest is a sin.

In fact, do you think of yourself as Christian? Yes? Did you know that Christian supposedly means that you're Christian. That is to say, you follow the teachings of Jesus Christ our Lord and saviour. Do you believe in Christ?

Well, Christ is documented as saying "build no store of wealth on this Earth". Christ is documented as smashing the tables of the money lenders in Herod's temple. Think about that for a second.

Had time to digest that? Yes, that's right. Jesus Christ was anti-capitalist.

So, if we look at the successful religions from the past 2,000 years, and the most recently succesful attempts at world domination, you will see that anti-capitalism is the secret to their success.

Look at the Chinese. In 58 years, the Chinese have brought a nation of 1.3 billion people into economic prosperity. China has become a world superpower. China is one of the largest economies on the planet. How did they achieve that? By rejecting capitalism.

Islam counts 1.6 billion souls following the Muslim faith, and enshrined in law in Arab countries is the illegality of charging interest on loans. Imagine that! Imagine every bank in Europe and America being no longer allowed to charge any interest!

So, if you're looking for a reason why we should all fear the 'invasion' of these conquering hordes, and the demise of our precious culture, you might find that you're empathising with the likes of Rothschild and Goldman Sachs, cowering in terror because their plutocracy is about to be overthrown by the people that they have economically enslaved.

Why do we have a nation of bankers, lawyers and accountants, when those professions are only needed by the very wealthiest 0.1%? We are shaped in the image of what our rulers think is important. When we are governed by billionaires and millionaires, our whole nation and the priorities of our laws are shifted towards supporting their needs, not ours. We are producing trillions of dollars worth of useless derivatives, rather than useful goods & services.

Imagine if we took our best & brightest out of UBS, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and instead deployed them to work in science and engineering. Imagine if we took our hardworking poor in McJobs, and instead allowed them to build wonderful things for the betterment of humanity. Imagine how much happier and productive everybody would be if they were working towards something, rather than against everything.

Our world is so adversarial, with us & them, the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor, the wealthy white Westerners and those pesky brown people who want a few crumbs from the table.

In actual fact, there's plenty of everything to go around, but we are so intent on playing by the existing rules of the game, that we fail to wake up and realise that we are propping up a status quo that only makes us poor, disadvantaged and divided.

What have the Nazis ever done for us? They've shown us that economic ideas can create prosperity, optimism and productivity. They've shown us that there's a better way than neoliberal capitalist democracy.

It's distasteful to revere the successes of the Nazis, because I might be seen as also endorsing their genocide and ethnic cleansing. However, what could be more ethnically cleansing than building a massive wall, deporting all the Latinos and banning people of a certain religious faith from entering your country? Trump epitomises everything that is bad about the Nazis, whilst offering nothing that was good about them.

We need to cherry pick the best ideas, and we need to get rid of the ideas that enslave us and hurt the vast majority of ordinary people.

Tags: #economics #politics #capitalism

This is a story about Tower Hamlets...

Where I live, Muslims aren't 0.9% of the population like in the USA. Where I live, Muslims aren't 5% of the population, like in the whole of England. Where I live, the Muslim population is 46%. What do you think that's like?

Tower Hamlets is a place of huge socioeconomic divide. The council that governs this particular part of the UK, houses some of the poorest members of society, yet it is also the home to the headquarters of HSBC: the biggest bank in Europe, along with massive tower blocks for the likes of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, Fitch & Moody's, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and giant accountancy & legal firms like KPMG and Clifford Chance.

While I sit on the banks of the River Thames penning essays like this one, slightly inland there are deprived council estates that are the modern equivalent of the Victorian slums. This is London. While I go to the dry cleaners to collect my freshly laundered shirts for the working week, or do some food shopping in Waitrose, my neighbours - certainly those who you would recognise as 'English' - are in the betting shops or buying lottery tickets at the convenience store.

If you think I've wandered into snobbery, you're wrong. I'm simply an observer. It's true that I occupy a priviledged position, but anybody is capable of making similar observations.

You know, I don't feel at all safe, boarding an underground train in a sea of white faces at 6pm on a weekday evening. Canary Wharf is crawling with rich middle-class people, and the station is packed to the rafters. Often times, the escalator is carrying so many office workers down to the packed concourse that people start to pile up at the bottom, in a rather comic way.

But when I head away from the glistening tower blocks filled with middle and back office drones, I start to feel safe again. London never feels like real London when it divides itself. The private estate of Canary Wharf, and the protected enclave of the City of London, with its 'Ring of Steel' are just crying out to be attacked, because they are sending out a message of "no poor people welcome here".

It feels like no atrocity is ever going to be committed in the markets of Brick Lane, where hipsters flock because of East London's famous Asian community. It feels like no atrocity is ever going to be committed on the Commercial Road or on Petticoat Lane, where large courtyards are filled with people praying towards Mecca.

London's great advantage is not integration, but tolerance. Everybody knows that the Edgware Road is somewhere to go and drink tea and smoke shisha. Everybody knows that all the Aussies and Kiwis have colonised Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush. Everybody knows that Clapham and North London are the places that young wealthy white professionals frequent, whilst Camden is for dope smokers and tourists. Curry on Brick Lane. Chinatown. Little Venice. The cultural divisions are manifest.

London is not in the least bit integrated, but that's its great strength. Rather than relegating the poor entirely into the undesirable suburbs, like with Paris, social housing has brought otherwise 'undesirable' people into the very heart of the city.

The scariest places are Canary Wharf and the City because they have no residential housing, so therefore, they are almost 100% white middle class, filled with guffawing hooray Henries who have absolutely zero idea about the life of an underpriviledged person.

I used to live a stone's throw from the UK's Foreign Secretary - Boris Johnson - but not in a multimillion pound Georgian town house. My landlady was illegally subletting her council flat while she lived a life of idle luxury in Spain. On the towpath of the canal that the back of my apartment used to overlook, I would be verbally abused by Islington and Hackney's less fortunate residents, for being a yuppie. That sort of shit keeps you humble.

Now, 'right to buy' has gifted wealth to a few social housing tenants, but the gentrification of London is a terrible thing.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so it's right that I should live in a community where nearly 50% subscribe to the Islamic doctrine. My life is certainly none the poorer for being mindful of important religious events, like Ramadan.

Britain and London's great victory was in diplomacy and tolerance. Our American-style anti-immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric is only going to fuel tensions that were entirely imperceptible, until the USA decided to involve itself in Gulf conflicts in the early 1990s. We are paying a greater and greater price for the 'special relationship' with the US that affects our long-standing good relations with our Middle Eastern friends and allies.

Citizens of the United Kingdom would be well advised to remind themselves that Iraq, Iran and Syria had a thriving middle class, before their countries were torn apart by war, sanctions and CIA destabilisation.

You reap what you sow, and this anti-Islamic sentiment is completely undermining everything that I stand for as a diplomatic British Londoner.

Tags: #politics #london

This is a story about worthless paper...

Do you want to know how to make an infinite amount of money? First, you should obtain a boat. Then, take out as many insurance policies as you can afford the premiums of, on the boat. Then, sink the boat and claim on the insurance policies.

Why can't you do this? Well, because it's illegal to insure something more than once, for the very reason that it creates a financial incentive to go around sinking boats. People respond to economic incentives.

However, it is possible to take out as many life insurance policies as you want. The reason being, that it is assumed that because murder is illegal and suicide used to be (now it's decriminalised) then there is some protection from those who wish to profit from death.

But what about a company? Is a company a person-like entity? Should it be possible to buy life insurance policies for a company?

What is a Credit Default Swap? Well, the simplest explanation is that it's a life insurance policy for a company. If a company gets into a financially distressed situation where it can no longer repay its debts, then the Credit Default Swap will pay out. This is called a credit event. Basically, a credit event normally means the company is dying, because they can't pay their debts. A company that defaults on its debts is never going to be able to refinance themselves after a credit event, because their credit rating will be junk. Game over.

So, if you allow people to take out an infinite amount of Credit Default Swaps, betting that a company is going to go bust, aren't you economically incentivising that event to happen? If there's a bigger and bigger pool of money that is hoping that a company goes bankrupt, that is far bigger than the pool of money who want to see the company rescued, isn't the market going to quite naturally want to push that company under, so that almost everybody gets a big payday?

We know that markets can be manipulated, and because Credit Default Swaps are an Over-The-Counter (OTC) product, there is no market regulation. It's not possible to know who is dealing in these financial instruments, and who stands to benefit. They're kind of ideal for insider trading, because they just don't have the same kind of traceability of equities that are traded on stock exchanges.

The other un-nerving thing about Credit Default Swaps, is that there is no underwriter, and no need to prove that you have sufficient collateral to cover the paper that you have printed. It's possible for organisations to sell vast quantities of Credit Default Swaps, and have nowhere near enough money to cover the losses if the credit events happen.

In the insurance market of Lloyds, there are wealthy names who provide the collateral - cash, precious metals, priceless artworks, property, liquid assets (like shares) etc. etc. - to make sure that the money is there in the event of an earthquake, flood, fire or whatever massive disaster might affect the insurance industry in a major way.

However, in the derivatives market, only the mature products like Futures and Options would have margin calls and require collateral to make sure that losses never exceed one counterparty's ability to pay. Credit Default Swaps have been allowed to be printed completely without regulation, which is concerned with making sure that a credit event wouldn't totally wipe out the risk holders.

Some measures put the Credit Default Swaps market at about $16 trillion, however, when all the contracts were entered into the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's central system in 2008, the aggregate notional value of the contracts was closer to $2 quadrillion ($1,700,000,000,000,000). That's a shit tonne of worthless paper.

But is it worthless? Well, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a credit event, the money that was demanded by those looking to cash in their Credit Default Swaps would have brought down massive companies like AIG as well as putting a deadly dent in the balance sheet of just about every investment bank with a proprietary trading desk (i.e. all of them) who had been foolishly dabbling with these stupid contracts.

Why stupid? Well, the whole idea of being able to make unlimited bets against a company is market manipulating beyond belief. Who's going to recapitalise a company and save it, when you can bet against it in secret instead? Why wouldn't anybody who gets the vaguest whiff of a company in financial trouble not rush off and place large untraceable wagers that it's going to fail?

Naked short selling is pretty bad, but there's only a certain amount of leverage that you can get, and you have to have the collateral to cover your exposure to the risk that the market might go against you. When you're talking about naked Credit Default Swaps, you're looking at the ability to get leverage of thousands of times the amount of money you're actually risking. That kind of potential profit has the ability to move the market, and collapse a company.

It's a simple moral question: if companies are like people, and therefore allowed to be 'life insured', should we be allowed to murder them so that we can cash in on their death?

Tags: #banking #capitalism #jpmorgan #derivatives

This is a story about premonitions...

Our perception of reality is subjective, and it is coloured by our state of mind. I'm deeply depressed, so I tend to see everything as negative, hostile, and doomed to failure.

Yesterday, I was writing a piece about how I thought the markets had over-corrected, and how I expected to see another rout in the FX and equities markets, of Sterling and the FTSE. Little did I know, that as I was writing, a terrorist attack was occurring in Istanbul, Turkey.

When your mental health is suffering, sometimes you can start making too many connections, seeing too many co-incidences. Last year I started to misinterpret events as significant in my life somehow. I started to feel overly connected to things happening around me - because I was unwell - and thought I was at the epicentre of a seismic event again, like during the Credit Crunch, when I felt at the very heart of the derivatives market and Credit Default Swaps, with JPMorgan.

Michael Cherkasky, the monitor from the US Department of Justice, still isn't happy with HSBC's customer due diligence, but nobody seems to give a shit. The share price might have dropped almost 20%, but so far as I know, nobody's going to prison for not warning the shareholders, which would be a violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which has tried to force public corporations to be honest and open when things are going wrong.

The thing is, the show must go on, and everybody has a vested interest to some extent. Bear Stearns couldn't fail, because the markets were already spooked by Lehman Brothers. Greece couldn't default, because the entire stability of the European single currency and the stability of global markets was at stake.

Even now, with Britain prompting a disorderly rush for the door, and the potential for systemic collapse, as a domino-like chain of events is set off, we are still seeing a surprising amount of stability.

Market economics is supposed to weed out the weak and the reckless. The companies and governments that have gone beyond their means are supposed to be punished by the market, but actually what we have all demanded is stability, not a free market.

Really, Bear Stearns should have been allowed to fail, AIG should not have been bailed out, Greece should have been allowed to default on its debts, the UK should be allowed to precipitate the collapse of the Eurozone and the inevitable failure of the Euro and debt defaults across Southern Europe.

What people seem to be voting for is the free market that we supposedly have. Where would we be, if we had bitten the bullet in 2007/2008 and not simply propped everything up? Aren't we going to have to suffer a global recession that is many, many times worse than it might have been if we'd allowed reckless companies and governments to fail earlier?

However, the politicians and the banks believe that they've been tasked with economic stability. Certainly, the Bank of England's brief is to try and maintain inflation in a certain range. It certainly runs contrary to our Keynesian understanding of economics, when central banks are actually used to prop everything up, to maintain the status quo.

Gordon Brown famously declared that we had seen the end of boom & bust, but haven't we simply made a farce of the idea that debts ever have to be repaid, and there isn't an endless supply of money?

Civilisations normally fall when the burden of debt is unmanageable, but creditors refuse to forgive debts.

The world needs to deleverage, to have a debt haircut, for debts to be forgiven. The system has failed. There's no moral hazard. Everything is too big to fail. There is no market economics anymore.

I think that what people want is either inflation, to inflate away their debts, or debt forgiveness, because they are over-burdened with huge mortgages, student loans etc. etc. People feel that they've been hurt in the pocket, and they really don't care about the stability of stock portfolios and the value of Sterling.

I see the Brexit decision as almost a vote to accept a devaluation, in the hope of stoking up domestic inflation. It's a vote to accept volatility and chaos in the financial markets, that we supposedly wanted to avoid during the Credit Crunch, but people were never asked if they were OK with a whole heap of bad banks going bankrupt.

Yes, people are probably naïve about how upset they'd be about their life savings being wiped out, and having to use a barrowload of pound notes to pay for a loaf of bread, but perhaps it's better than their lives of quiet desperation, while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

I'm incredibly impressed to see stability in the markets today, but I don't think that's what anybody wants. People are looking for a shake-up in the pecking order. People are rocking the boat, because they're unhappy, and they literally don't care about the global economic impact and systemic risk. Perhaps propping it all up, and forcing a very long period of austerity onto everybody wasn't such a smart move.

The next question is: how far are the wealthy prepared to go, in order to get their pound of flesh?

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism #hsbc #politics #europe

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