This is a story about surprises...

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

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

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

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

Sex addiction? You filthy pervert. Go away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about 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 taking responsibility...

What did you do to get fat, poor, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, mentally ill, bored and unfulfilled in your job and your life, into an abusive relationship, trapped onto benefits or otherwise cornered?

Those who think of themselves as having made smart life choices are quick to criticise those less fortunate than them, believing that the difference between them was simply one of choice.

A fat person simply chose to eat more calories than their energy requirement. If you mostly sit around watching TV, you don't need any more calories than those required to pump the muscle of your heart, move the diaphragm of your lungs, and for your cells to create enough heat to keep your blood at 37 degrees Celsius.

A poor person simply chose to not study very hard at school, and to not seek a lucrative career. If a poor person wants to become richer, there is an established path of acquiring academic qualifications, and then working your way up through the ranks to gain the experience you need to get a better job.

An alcoholic simply chose to not stop drinking before their body entered a state of alcohol dependence syndrome. The first time that you get the shakes after drinking, you could quit and possibly avoid delirium tremens and having a seizure.

A drug addict simply chose to continue to seek whatever escapism and pain numbing they found comforting in their drug of choice. A drug addict could simply choose to live with the pain and issues that they're trying to escape, or kill themselves in a much quicker way.

Mentally ill, stressed, anxious, depressed people simply chose to put themselves into an overwhelming situation that doesn't meet their needs and constantly bombards them with things that they have to do that they can't cope with. A depressed person could simply stop working, draw the curtains closed, and wait to be sacked and evicted onto the streets.

People in abusive relationships are simply choosing to not give up on their partner and remain optimistic about things getting resolved, or are simply choosing to be trapped into a cycle of abuse that fills them with so much fear that they feel unable to remove themselves from the situation. People in abusive relationships are simply choosing to not run away from the family home with their children, and live where? On the street?

People on benefits are simply choosing to not take a zero hours contract McJob on minimum wage that would see their benefits slashed as well as also having to spend all their paycheque on childcare so that some stranger can raise their kids, who they never get to see anymore because they're at work the whole time. People on benefits are choosing to live on a government handout that is not enough to pay for the basic essentials that they need, and puts them into a hand-to-mouth stressful existence with no hope of escape.

Maybe you could combine all these things, so that somebody is an overweight drunk with a drug habit, depressed, anxious, under-qualified for any decent job, and wedded to both the welfare state and an abusive partner, both of which have their claws into the person such that they can never escape.

Do you think it sounds appealing, the idea of living life without the comfort of food and eating? Life without the simple pleasure of sugary and fatty snacks. Do you think it sounds appealing, being stone cold sober and straight, with absolutely zero chemicals to alter your perception of the world, when your world consists of collecting benefits cheques that disappear like sand running through your fingers, with no hope for any kind of different future? Life without the numbing power of intoxicants, and the brief moments of joy that might be brought by other drugs, in an otherwise bleak and depressing existence.

Imagine having to give up your home, your partner, your family, your chemical crutches, your favourite food, and live in the cold harsh light of a reality of being single, alone, homeless, withdrawing from drugs and alcohol, dealing with depression and anxiety with nothing other than this magical bullshit thing called "willpower" alone.

Yes, it's all very well criticising the poor and unfortunate from your villa in Tuscany or the deck of a yacht. Yes, it's all very well talking about poor life choices, while you sit in your second home counting your money.

The truth of the matter though is this: the difference between successful people and unfortunate ones is pure blind luck.

We don't pick our shitty irresponsible lazy parents. We don't pick how wealthy our family is. We don't pick our schools. We don't pick whether we will have academic aptitude or not. We don't pick whether we can apply ourselves to the task of getting a lucrative job, or whether we hold onto unrealistic fantasies of becoming a pop singer or a Premiership footballer for far too long, before reality finally dawns on us. We don't pick whether we get to throw ourselves into our careers, our homes, our families, our pets, our hobbies... or whether we end up running to the bottle, the pills, the powders and the needle, in order to deal with the extraordinary shitness of daily existence.

Life is short. Life is shit. If your life is not shit, you're in no position to tell other people that it's because they're lazy, irresponsible, stupid and they made bad life choices. If your life is not shit, it's because you were lucky enough to be born into a family of reasonable wealth and education. You were lucky enough to fall into something that was lucky enough to work out. Yes, you made choices, but there was a huge component of luck that it worked out. Plenty of people made the same choices as you, but through no fault of their own, things didn't work out well for them.

In the blink of an eye, you can have an accident that will have life-changing consequences. In the blink of an eye, your one golden opportunity can pass you by, and you'll be shunted off the smooth tarmac and onto the rocky road. In the blink of an eye, your fortunes can change, and you find yourself cast into the seething mass of humanity, all crawling over each other like crabs in a bucket, trying to escape.

Just because you were lucky enough to make your escape, doesn't mean that anybody else can follow your special recipe, doesn't mean that anybody else can find their perfect job, can find fulfilment, contentment. Just remember: one slip and you're just as fucked as all the other people who weren't lucky like you were.

One slip and you're fucked.

Tags: #politics #homeless #abuse #alcohol #drugs #addiction #mentalhealth #depression

This is a story about pets...

I love cats. Cats love me. My cat, Frankie, is so comfortable with me that I can zip him inside my jumper to keep him warm and he just happily snuggles up.

I read the other day that it took less than an hour to raise thousands of pounds for a cat that needed an operation at the vet. I've always taken the precaution of having pet insurance, because I would never want to have to make a cold hard financial decision about an animal that I kept as a pet, because I'm very emotionally attached - bonded - to Frankie.

A friend of mine has cycled thousands of miles across Europe to raise money to buy bicycles for impoverished families in Africa. These are not bicycles for leisure. They are an essential mode of transport for rural dwelling people, in order to be able to access education, employment and markets, without having to walk for hours and hours in blistering heat. Each bicycle can literally transform the prospects of an entire family overnight.

My friend who has so far covered about 2,000 miles, in over a month, has raised less than 25% of what the needy moggy managed to raise in less than an hour. I'm sure you'll agree, that cycling thousands of miles in some of the steepest parts of the Alps, surely shows that it is not through lack of effort that his fundraising attempt has not been more fruitful so far.

It's certainly not my intention to criticise or take anything away from his incredible feat, working so hard for such a good cause, to raise money for World Bicycle Relief by cycling across Europe. I'm totally in awe of what my friend is doing.

However, what saddens and disappoints me is how readily people will reach for their wallets when they think of a poor suffering furball, rather than a fellow human being.

Both my friend and I have been homeless. There seems to be an assumption that human beings are architects of their own demise, and animals are innocent creatures that need our protection. There seems to be an assumption that charity and governments are somehow working, to redistribute wealth and protect the needy and vulnerable. That simply isn't the case.

Why do people wait, until their friends and relatives are in hospital or dead, before they say "I wish we knew what to do, before it was too late" and "if we knew things were that bad, we would have done something"?

Frankly though, this is horse shit.

We have a culture where we believe we are engaged in a desperate struggle just to "look after our own". It's simply not true.

It might feel like a desperate struggle, to prepare the kids packed lunches and hang the laundry out. It might feel like a desperate struggle to think that you might not get to take 3 foreign holidays this year if you or your partner loses your job, which you're not going to. Things might feel like a desperate struggle because you've been reading too much damn tabloid journalism.

Until you've slept rough, barely been able to keep yourself clean, except with the occasional public shower, and barely been able to keep the clothes on your back from turning to dusty rags, you know fuck all about desperate struggle. However, even when you're homeless in the UK, you still don't tend to go without at least one hot meal a day: there are always soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna.

I don't know what it takes to trigger some empathy, and the goddamn impulse to get up and do something but I'm fairly outraged by the pocket change that gets stuffed into a charity collection bucket, simply to salve a middle-class conscience.

You've probably completely misread my own situation. I live in a flat that costs me twice as much as a hostel bed, which is totally excellent value. I work a job that brings in enough money to pay down the debt that I ran up supporting myself when I was sick. Yes, that's right. Instead of claiming incapacity benefit, housing benefit, council tax deductions and every other kind of government handout that I'm totally entitled to because I have major mental health issues instead I've funded it all out of my own pocket, and impoverished myself in the process.

Why would I do that? Well, because it's easier to get the money you need to survive when you have fur, whiskers and paws.

I mean, for fucks sake, Syrian children are having to print out pictures of themselves with Pokémon so that we give a shit about them.

Sorry for the condescending tone. I'm just a bit pissed off that our idea of "helping our own" is a few likes and shares on Facebook.

The end.

Tags: #charity #frankie #homeless

This is a story about perspectives...

Relativity. The difference between different observers, for a given frame of reference. Who can say that the reality that I experience is more 'real' than that which you experience?

As if by chance, a friend of mine who I used to be homeless with - sleeping rough - in the London parks, visited me this evening. Now, instead of living destitute in a bush, I was able to entertain him in a luxury Thameside apartment.

Do you think that this disparity, this clear 'upswing' in my social status and prospects, makes me think "ooh! how terribly fortunate I am!"?

In actual fact, when the Government had ignored my doctor and psychiatrist's imploring letters to support me during a particularly vulnerable period in my life, and I had been denied welfare and housing, I felt liberated. I lived within a stone's throw of a Royal Palace and was relinquished of the responsibilities of attending demeaning ATOS assessments, completing form upon form of personal information, and digging through vast archives of paperwork to find bullshit documents to satisfy some blank-faced bureaucratic drone.

Do you think I'm glad not to be homeless? Don't be so ridiculous. Everything comes with a cost.

I'm really in no position to be working at the moment. I feel like I'm going through one of the most prolonged periods of depression that I have ever experienced, and the stress and anxiety of my situation is so unbearable that I am closer to taking my own life than I have ever been before.

The fact that I am working is very different from being able to work. The cost to me is virtually immeasurable. If this brief period of stuffing cash in a mattress appears to be a success for those who believe that work will set us free at bayonet point, they are probably ignoring the historical precedent and likely long-term outcomes.

I note that those who criticise me for being ungrateful for my position may be doing so whilst on holiday in Barcelona, or perhaps on a yacht in La Rochelle. This seems to be the ultimate in ignorant hypocrisy, when these people have probably never known the hardships of homelessness and destitution.

If you imagine that a homeless person should be grateful when they are finally off the streets and into a stable housing situation, you are a buffoon. Housing, food, hygiene and an opportunity to put your skills to productive use, are the bare minimum for human dignity. These are human rights.

Instead, I feel like a prostitute. I have sold my mind to the highest bidder. My analogy is probably insulting to those who are genuinely compelled to sell sex, but in this way, you might understand the lack of empathy that my wealthy friends have shown towards my own situation.

Get rich or die trying. It's not even that simple. There are so few ways to dig yourself out of a desperate situation. Prostitution of the body or prostitution of the mind. If somebody wishes to shoot me down for such a melodramatic analogy, go right ahead, I probably deserve it and I'm an easy target, but this is how I feel.

I have made a bitter choice: work for three times as long, and have a somewhat easier time of it, but know the whole time that I'm being underpaid for my skills. Or, to be highly paid but accept the very worst work. The most soul-destroying and de-skilling work that is wholly unsatisfying and only the hardest, meanest, most desperate mercenaries would tolerate in the interests of getting rich quick.

My days are a completely calculated gamble. I put my mental health on the chopping block, hoping that I can struggle by for long enough to put a few dollars in the bank before I explode with stress, frustration, depression and having been completely exploited by a ruthless industry intent on burning people out in pursuit of pure profit.

It's hard to express how hard it is to do something that you mastered nearly 20 years ago, and has now become excruciating mental agony, but also an extremely well paid profession. I'm paid to be professionally bored, stressed, anxious and unfulfilled. I'm paid to put up with stuff that would have most sane people running out of the office saying "fuck this shit".

Yes, the majority of people hate their jobs. Yes, the majority of us would not work given the choice. This is different. I can compare and contrast. I can tell you what the difference is being an electrician from being the manager of an IT project. I can tell you which one destroys your soul and your mind more.

You know the best job I've ever had? Delivering newspapers on Monday to Saturday for £10 a week.

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

This is a story about ingratitude...

Why do I attack the industry that has suckled me? Why am I so angry and upset with the profession that has nurtured me? Why am I so ungrateful for my whopping big salary and cushy benefits?

Administration: the unnecessary bureaucratic headache that creates unwelcome red tape, adds no value to the real economy and is an overhead that limits the productivity, innovation and creativity of those who are truly useful. I don't work in the Information Technology business. I work in the business of administration.

The two most productive things that I do in any given week are filling in my timesheet and submitting my invoice for payment. The most important thing that I do each quarter is to pay my Value-Added Tax (VAT) down to the precise penny that I owe. If I'm not perfectly on top of my bureaucratic administration, the Government will stop me doing my 'real' job, which is creating software.

But what does the software I create do anyway? Most of it is just keeping score. It's bean-counting software. It's software that creates jobs for zillions of IT professionals like me, so that companies can get rid of zillions of administrators, that they immediately re-employ to make sure their IT professionals are filling in their timesheets correctly.

For every person who I put out of a job, by automating the processes they perform, the company will then invent some other pointless position. Our whole economy is based on bullshit jobs.

Should I be happy to have a job, and to count my blessings? Well, no. It's immoral to not consider whether you are having a positive or a negative impact on society, and on the planet. To count my blessings is an incitement to be wilfully ignorant of global issues, and the betterment of humanity.

So what am I doing instead, to align my values? How do I reconcile the rhetoric of what I preach with the obvious fact that I am enabling massive corporations to continue to ride roughshod over the human race and the fragile planet?

Well, I take the money, and with it I pay my rent & bills. And then, I spend 90% of my time thinking about issues and writing this blog. I'm not paid to create software - so little of my time is actually spent doing that - instead, I'm paid to bite the hand that feeds me. It's an inside job. I'm disruptive and cynical. I'm disillusioned and critical.

Does that mean my colleagues have to work harder to make up for me slacking? No. It doesn't work like that. If my boss asks me to do something, I won't do it. I'll wait to see if they ask me again. My boss isn't going to ask somebody else to do it, because they've already asked me to do it. 9 times out of 10, I'll never be asked again. The tenth time, I'll realise that whatever was asked of me actually was important, so I'll apologise and do the work.

So, am I idle? Absolutely not. With the time I could have spent doing those 9 things that were clearly unnecessary, I will conduct a kind of audit. I will go around, looking to see if there's anything more useful I could be doing. Invariably, there isn't. Everybody is just so locked into a hierarchical system of managers, administrators & clerks, that nobody has looked at the bigger picture and realised that what they're doing is absolute bullshit. Or if anybody has realised that their job is utter bullshit, they're not talking about it.

Now, I'm not talking about nurses, garbage collectors, train drivers, firemen. It's pretty obvious what the useful function of many front-line workers is. However, these people are working all hours for some of the lowest wages. No manager needs to tell a nurse to help a patient who is in pain & discomfort. No administrative drone needs to make sure that a garbage collector is hitting their Key Performance Indicators and is going to achieve their annual objectives at their appraisal. Either the important job is done, or it isn't.

There are functions that literally nobody would miss, except maybe not being harassed by an army of micromanagers and bureaucrats. Isn't it the case that you're propping up a sick and twisted system, by continuing to count your blessings and not rock the boat?

I frankly find it disgusting that I'm paid so many more times more than what a nurse gets paid. If I was to simply sit back and "think positive" and try to enjoy my ill-gotten gains, doesn't that make me a terrible, terrible person?

It's probably true that the world doesn't need any more bloggers, but what am I supposed to do? Impoverish myself and retrain as yet another disrespected front-line worker? It's hardly like they're being heard today, is it? How are the social wrongs ever going to be righted?

It seems to me that the right thing to do is to speak up. Yes, I jeopardise my lucrative career in doing so, but it's the right thing to do. People are more likely to listen to an IT consultant from the banking world, who is critical of the sector that pays me handsomely, than they are to somebody who could easily be dismissed as simply "jealous" or "not smart enough" to land themselves a similar job.

Truly, I do not think that front line workers are not smart enough to do my job. In actual fact, you have to be pretty dumb to be able to turn a blind eye to the social injustice of being highly paid to be an idle manager of hardworking people who do the real jobs.

I currently have no cash to put my money where my mouth is. Quitting my job would literally see me homeless and destitute again. However, I do anticipate a time when I will be faced with a true test of my morality: when I am able, will I quit the rat race and try to do something that is more in line with my values?

I have massively impoverished myself, trying to take an ethical stance, and I would do it again. It's the right thing to do.

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism #career #computing

This is a story about a feeling at the pit of my stomach...

How often do we think "I want to help, but I've got so many of my own worries"? How often are we held back by the bystander effect... assuming that somebody else is going to step in first, so that we don't have to?

You'd hope that nobody would have to be in hospital alone, uncared for, while they're in pain and discomfort. You would think that even somebody who has been infected with Ebola, has loved ones who have come to wave through the protective plastic bubble.

Leaving aside my own obnoxious family, doesn't it set alarm bells ringing for you, the fact that we have a society that can so easily turn its back on undesirable members?

Whether it's the benefits cheat, disability scrounger, mental health basket case, junkie, alkie, hobo... whatever. There are plenty of people who have been demonised by the media. We have even descended to the depths of attacking our economy-boosting immigrant population, with terrorism as the brush with which we tar an entire Muslim community, for example.

This whole "look after number one" isolationism, along with "take our country back" and "look after our own" misguided silliness, is rather telling of a wider trend: everybody is just being selfish as fuck.

You might think it's in your family's best interests to hide behind your locked front door, and assume that the world is filled with rapists, paedophiles and murderers, but actually the whole of civilisation is coming to an end, because of the fear and mistrust, and reluctance to help one another.

That's a big statement, isn't it? "Civilisation is coming to an end".

Well, let's examine that a little more carefully. What even is civilisation? Surely, civilisation is not leaving anybody to die of starvation or exposure to the elements? Surely, civilisation is caring and sharing with one another? Surely, civilisation is working together, not acting like a bunch of individual animals, fighting with each other?

So, when I think about going back to work tomorrow after an excellent weekend of looking after number one, I can't help but have a heavy heart, thinking that my job is simply to make the rich richer. I might have a big paycheque but I certainly don't think that means I'm delivering good value to humanity. On the contrary: I know that I'm propping up a very broken system, and I hate it.

Yes, it makes sense for me to take the money, and to stuff my mattress full of filthy ill-gotten lucre, but it's painful. It actually makes me unwell, to know that I'm part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Once you get some skin in the game I guess it becomes a little bit easier to justify the unjustifiable. Little Hugo needs his ballet shoes, after all, so you'd better go off to work for the capitalists who are intent on destroying the world. How could you possibly help the homeless, when you need that money to get bright special little Alice into that slightly better primary school? Perfectly understandable.

Maybe our children will catch poverty. Maybe children will catch mental illness. Let's not take any refugees, and let's allow people to starve and go homeless, because surely we're living in a jungle where only the fittest will survive. Isn't that what life's about? Have as many children as possible and fuck everybody else?

Doesn't it seem a little primitive to you, this way of acting that is tribal, nationalistic, isolated, don't trust your neighbour, fuck the refugees, fuck the poor, fuck the sick, fuck everybody who isn't me?

I know that I could easily do a "fun run" or a sponsored "do something enjoyable that I was going to do anyway" in order to salve my conscience. Maybe I can get a partial lobotomy, so that I can forget that charity has completely failed to do anything about poverty and inequality, and it never will.

It's people's attitudes that suck. It's this whole "it must be somebody else's problem. It's certainly not my problem" thought pattern that sucks.

The point is: it's everybody's problem.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #depression

This is a story about deja vu...

What the fuck am I still doing here? This is the endgame, surely ?

Around the year 2000, I moved to the Angel Islington, and lived right next door to where Boris Johnson now lives on Colebrooke Row, just by Upper Street. I revere my time there as the best time of my life. I had a pretty girlfriend, lived with two strippers in an achingly trendy area of London, had a red sports car, went kitesurfing every weekend and generally lived the high life. What the actual fuck went wrong?

It had always been the plan to live and work in London, and I'd pretty much lived and worked in the Big Smoke since the late 1990s. I had fallen in love with glamorous West London on cultural museum trips with my mother, to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, like all well mannered little boys who are supposedly destined for great things, in the eyes of their pushy parents.

What was attractive about London, in my mind, was the tube. The tube epitomised freedom for me. I just wanted to ride the metropolitan transportation system all over town, on my own.

There's something about an A to Z map of London that's wonderful. The colour of it, with all the intricate streets. The index is an impenetrable list of roads and lanes. There are pages and pages of brightly illustrated street maps, and it seems like you could never truly know every nook and cranny of London. The very complexity of London is its entire draw, its appeal.

Having discovered drugs in my late teens - namely Ecstasy - London was clearly the place to rave. Under the grubby railway arches, and in grim venues in dingy suburbs. There was always some unlikely place that was attracting the best DJs, despite the fact that everywhere looks largely the same when it's dark and you're off your head on pills.

Of course I went to the superclubs. The Ministry of Sound was the first club I ever went to, as a friend was able to get me on the guest-list. Seeing DJs Sasha and Pete Tong play in The Box was a precious moment, and I hadn't even discovered the joys of MDMA at that point. I just liked the music, the atmosphere.

I saw DJ Paul Oakenfold play a set where he was paid a record-breaking fee, at an ill-fated club on Leicester Square, that had none of the character or charm of the grimy places that were in otherwise unusable parts of London, due to the noise pollution of nearby rail or tube trains.

The goods yard, out the back of King's Cross was one particular mecca for the clubbers of the 90s. Bagley's Studios and The Cross were legendary, and The Scala wasn't far away.

I can remember the opening of clubs like Fabric, as if they were the new kids on the block. I still think of the East London clubs as the newer challengers to the well-established set of clubs in North London, the railway arches of Vauxhall, and Brixton.

I remember when the Ministry of Sound chucked out all the drug dealers, and it became a tourist attraction, bereft of any heart & soul.

Here's the tablet that launched more brilliant nights than I care to remember. Reminiscing about drug taking experiences is probably not healthy or useful, but there we go. There's no denying the past. This was a formative period, and perhaps defined my entire adult existence.

It's a strange Catch 22. I could never live anywhere outside London. I just can't survive, thrive. However, London is brutal. The crowds are relentless. The stimulation of your senses is overwhelming. There is nothing ordered, clean, predictable. It's not in the least bit relaxing.

But, there is the very essence of the city: in the place where you can never quite be off-guard, and fully relaxed, how would you ever re-adjust to a slower pace of life? How can you sleep at night without the sirens, horns and dull rumble of traffic and aeroplanes overhead? How could you feel alive, without humanity all around you, at all times?

When you go clubbing, you are crammed into an overcrowded venue, pressed together with other sweaty bodies. There is no personal space. You literally have to barge people out of the way to get to the toilets or to the bar. You are bumping into people all the time, for hours and hours of dancing. Nobody loses their cool. In fact quite the opposite. You flash smiles to hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers. You hug. You share your energy with strangers and together you build a crescendo of frenzied dancing.

I've arrived at this weekend, feeling exhausted and depressed, and like I just want to sleep for the whole time.

I travel on the tube every day, and there is all the invasion of personal space but none of the celebration of the brilliant experience that is dance, trance and magic plants. People are silent, unsmiling. It must be hard to understand why anybody would subject themselves to the daily onslaught that you experience in London's brutal rat race.

I forgot...

I used to live for the weekends. I could put up with any amount of boredom, because there was always going to be another weekend of smiles, of pure ecstasy. Yes, I was tired, my feet hurt and I wanted to cry around the middle of the week, but the cycle carried me along. There was anticipation that started to build on Thursday, and on the Friday I was happy because it was nearly the weekend.

This is how so many people live - living for the weekends - and it's all I've known all my adult life. I'm not built for consistency. I'm not built for Monday to Friday. I'm built for Saturday & Sunday.

My life is unliveable, miserable, depressing. Without my weekend fix of dancing & drugs, I'm absolutely fucked.

I flipped my addiction to clubbing over into an addiction to kitesurfing at weekends, in my mid twenties, but it was exactly the same kind of rhythm and routine. The pursuit of adrenalin neatly slotted into my life and replaced the pursuit of MDMA and pounding techno music.

My life is incomplete at the moment, and it's leading me to drink to numb the pain, boredom, lack of purpose, lack of direction, loneliness.

I'm not sure whether I'm going to get those pieces of the puzzle back in place in time. I'm writing now - at 3am - because my soul is screaming out for something that it's been deprived of for so long. I'm crying now as I write this. I'm sobbing my eyes out, as the waves of emotion sweep over me, as I realise how unfulfilled and empty my life has been.

I need kites and I need a vehicle to get to the coast. These are simple practical considerations, but you have no idea how dysfunctional my life has been. It seems like I'm close, as money is now flooding in from my latest contract, but everything is so finely balanced, so fragile.

It's never too late to start over, but the more broken things become, the harder the journey back to the safe road. I don't even give a shit about trite platitudes, or other people's attempts to tell me that they've been through some rough times too. I know how close I've come to prematurely reaching the end of my rope, and if that sounds melodramatic, you can go fuck yourself.

What I know about hardship, fear, challenges and hard work, is that it all looks very different when you're looking back. "That wasn't as hard as I thought it would be" is something we often think. But, the truth is, it was fucking hard... it's just that once you've been through it you're flooded with the sense of relief. When you've pulled through, you're full of joy that you made it, and that colours your memories, so you don't remember just how fucked you were, and how awful things were.

I've got this problem, where I'm thinking "I've already overcome obstacles like this before". Getting an IT contract, finding a place to live, making friends, finding a passion, overcoming boredom and loneliness... these are problems I've already solved once in my life. It was awful when I was in my late teens and early twenties. I had forgotten. It's just as shit now I'm in my mid 30s, even though I have all the advantages of knowing how to do it all over again, and knowing that I can do it.

There's a temptation to re-live my youth. I wanted to go out dancing and take drugs, tonight.

There's no reason why it wouldn't work. Every time I've tried to re-apply the well proven formula to my life, it's worked just the same as it did nearly 20 years ago.

However, I don't have to repeat the steps. I know that kitesurfing brought me more happiness than clubbing and taking drugs, so I can skip that step. It's hard though... because I know that I can walk out of my front door and go dancing pretty much any night of the week, for the modest cost of the entry fee and a few cans of Red Bull.

Hopefully, I will choose to do something at least a bit positive - like going dancing - rather than killing myself, but life is tough as fuck at the moment. You might think "he's been working for months and he earns a buttload of cash" but you've failed to see the reality: my life is desperate, unsustainable.

Life's not all about pleasing your boss and earning heaps of cash. It's a good start, but that's the easy part, in actual fact. I'm employing strategies that I learned when I was 19 years old, when I first started IT contracting. Nothing's changed there. But do I want to go back to how I felt when I was 19? I was so lonely, so depressed, and didn't know how to express my feelings and solve my distress.

Where do we run to in times of great stress and need? We run to places of known sanctuary. For some people that might be their family home. For others it might be drink or a drug. For me, it's London and clubbing, IT contracting and the gentrified life of the yuppie.

I left the misery of parents who I could never please and schools where I was relentlessly bullied and re-invented myself. Ecstasy helped me to love myself and feel connected to humanity, in a way that transcended simple hedonism. I had an identity, and it was all mine. I was secure and happy for the first time in my miserable life.

The detail that's almost irrelevant here is how I was let down by my ex-wife and parents, who were supposedly decent human beings, but turned out to be more selfish and untrustworthy than many strangers who I've had the good fortune to receive assistance from during my eventful return to London.

So, what have we got now? Well, it's a clean slate. It's a chance to start agin. I know the moves to make. I know the magic formula. Everything seems to still work, but the instructions still have to be followed. There are no short-cuts.

I find myself dusting off my CV, contacting agents, putting on my suit, and going out into the world of work again. It's just the same as it ever was. I earn about 25% more than I did when I was 20 years old, which is actually still plenty of money, even though it's 16 years later.

But I'm not 20 years old, and I'm not fumbling my way through life anymore. I know where I'm headed. I'm no longer guessing or making things up as I go along. There's a master plan, and everything is falling into place. But I still can't make the hands of the clock move any faster.

I learned some new tricks. Like benzodiazepines are a good way to wake up one day and wonder what the fuck happened to a large chunk of time. Like supercrack is a good way to kill yourself if you don't have the guts to actually run a blade across your major blood vessels.

However, I can cherry-pick. I can point at times in my life and say "THERE! I want that back!". And why can't I have it back? Why can't I recapture that lost youth? There's no reason that I've found so far.

It just takes time and it's fucking unbearable in the 'short' term. It's fucking unbearable because I've been here before, and I know how bad it was then, but it's twice as bad now, because I know just how hard it was to climb up the greasy pole once already, and I know that there's no rushing things, no short-cut.

Very few people, perhaps even nobody, can follow my thought process. Until I present a fait accompli nobody can see and understand where I was headed all along. You think this is fucking luck, that I am where I am? You think that through all the ups and downs, dead ends and disruption, there isn't still a single thread that guides all this? You think there isn't a goal? You think there isn't a fucking plan?

Yes, it's lucky that I haven't sustained life-altering injuries, brain damage. It's lucky that I've escaped prison and a criminal record. It's lucky that I've avoided bankruptcy. It's lucky that I'm no longer homeless, drug addicted or unemployed. But those things were never part of the plan, so is it luck?

There's no arrogance here, only frustration that people and events have gotten in my way. Only frustration that promises have been broken, and people haven't gotten with the program and supported me. Only frustration that those who have sought to thwart me or try to ride my coat tails have had to be cut out of my life, like a cancer. Only frustration that a whole heap of unnecessary shit has delayed me from reaching the original goal I've had all along.

I'd say "don't get in my way" but I don't operate like that. If you share the risks, you share the rewards. I don't think it's delusional to say that I add value wherever I go. I build, I improve, I inspire, I share, I teach, I take whatever resources I'm given and make them into something greater than the sum of their parts. If I'm not doing this, then I have truly lost touch with reality and I don't deserve to be alive.

I've mentioned this, but we used to say "Peace, Love, Unity, Respect" when we were raving. We were loved up, and we knew how to wear our hearts on our sleeves and be kind to one another.

London and its inhabitants have done more to keep me alive and make me happy than my parents and 99% of the people who I went to school with, so why wouldn't I consider myself reborn into this great sprawling metropolis? I couldn't live anywhere else. I could never leave.

That's what the fuck I'm doing in London, and I'm so fucking close to making a breakthrough.

Tags: #london #career #divorce #parents #childhood #drugs #addiction #suicide #depression

This is a story about speaking to the audience...

Acknowledging the reader is not a great literary device, when overused. I think I have pushed most people away, by writing with a very lecturing tone. When I address my readers as "you" I normally have somebody in mind. I tend to be using this blog as a passive-aggressive device, to attack those who have wronged or offended me.

When I write about "get a job" idiots, it's because I'm highly offended, when I've had a 20 year career and been in full time education or employment since age 4. When my hackles are raised because somebody says "everybody has to work" it's because I've probably put up with more shitty boring jobs than most people, and racked up more hours. Investment Banking is not known as a career for slackers. IT projects always demand you to pull some epic hours to get things over the line.

When I write about the hypocrisy of my parents, it's because they epitomise everything I would never want to become: lazy, underachieving, highly critical and negative people, who have always put their own selfish wants ahead of their children's needs. When I look at the general decline in living standards of the younger generation, it triggers my deep sense of having had an enjoyable time as a child and young adult robbed from me. And for what? So I can now have a miserable boring job?

There's a Frank Zappa quote that I like, though:

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it

But, in the words of my Dad: "you've got to pay to play". Of course, he forgets that his Dad was a wealthy accountant who very much paid for him to play.

So, I'm working a job that I hate, because I needed money and I needed it fast. Here in London I can get an IT contract very quickly and easily, and earn 5 or 6 times more than the average wage. You might think it's ungrateful, spoilt, to take this for granted and to even be unhappy, but after 20 years of playing the same game, using the same tried-and-trusted formula, there is no novelty, no surprises.

When I was 20 years old, I was earning £400/day working for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. I was doing exactly the same work that I do today. It might seem vulgar to talk about money, but maybe you need to know why I'm not exactly thrilled to get out of bed in the morning.

There's a high-water mark: an expectation, set by your experiences. I really don't live any kind of jet-set life. I shop in regular supermarkets, I rarely eat out, I drink wine that costs less than £10 a bottle. I don't pay for satellite television, luxury gym membership or in any way indulge expensive tastes. Even my suit is threadbare and worn out, and I wear cheap shoes.

Some people need the status symbols, the trappings of wealth. Sure, I could plough my income into having a Ferrari, a speedboat, but you're missing the point: I completely rejected the rat race, made myself destitute, and I loved it. The feeling of liberation from monthly downpayments on some material object, or mortgage payments on bricks & mortar, brought joy back to my soul.

The highlight of my week was talking to the guy who shone my shoes. Under the grand arches of Leadenhall Market, by the futuristic Lloyds building in the City, this chap told me that he had quit his job as an auditor for Ernst & Young, and had become an actor. Sure, he was poor - having to shine shoes for £5 a pop - but you could see he was clearly in love with his life again.

You might see pictures of my fancy apartment, with its river views and think "flash bastard" and "that must cost a pretty penny". However, you have simply been fooled by the image that I wish to project... in fact, I need to project. I get paid a lot of money because I'm successfully hiding the fact that I'm a desperate man on the ragged limit of control. Only the semicolon tattoo behind my ear slightly gives away the fact that I'm living a life of quiet desperation.

In actual fact, the rent on my apartment comes to roughly double what it cost me to live in a hostel. Instead of living in a 14-bed dormitory with people who are on the very bottom rung of society, and having to share a bathroom and protect my few possessions from theft and spoil, instead I have an ample sized ensuite bedroom, storage cupboard and expansive reception rooms in which to relax in comfort.

You would think that living in a hostel would be cheap, so paying twice as much does not sound unreasonable, correct? When you consider that I can safely keep my bicycle in my hallway, I have a central London parking space, and amazing views over the River Thames from my balcony, you must surely recognise the value for money that I'm getting.

My one threadbare suit I only use for interviews, and the rest of the time I wear £50 trousers from John Lewis, no jacket and no tie. Somebody complemented me on my sharp attire the other day, and asked if my clothes had been tailored to fit me. I could only chuckle to myself, knowing that my outfit is entirely cheap off the peg stuff.

My accountant must despair of me, as I always cut things mighty fine. There is no profligacy - every penny I spend is calculated, right down to the few bits of bling that are necessary to indicate that you have attained a certain social status. It's just going to look a bit weird if you're an IT professional with a cheap shit laptop.

The really frustrating thing is how easy it is to fool people. Everybody assumes that under the surface, everything is just fine. If you dress yourself up in the right clothes and pretend like everything is tickety-boo, people have no reason to suspect that you are one negative event away from killing yourself.

I have no idea how I'm going to sustain the charade. Just because you're settled into your little rut, and figured out a system to keep turning the pedals, doesn't mean that I can do it. Smile and take the money, right? But what if it's too easy? What if the formula has been so perfected, that life is a paint-by-numbers?

I tried to teach a friend how to blag and hustle. I tried to show him the magic formula. I busted my balls to transfer as much knowledge as possible about how to play the game. He's no fool, and knew a few of the tricks of the trade already. However, ultimately he let himself down, because of the subtle detail.

There must be something that sets people apart. What is it that shatters the illusion? It could be something as simple as not noticing that your suit has still got the slit in the back of the jacket held together by a stitch of thread that you are supposed to cut yourself. It could be as simple as a cheap pen, or umbrella. It could be a single moment of self-doubt, or an answer to a question that clearly betrays the fact you're blagging, because you fail to one-up the interviewer and blind them with things they don't understand.

It might sound like snobbery, but it's actually the very essence of how people get into positions of authority. Having a shirt monogrammed with your initials, wearing an expensive wristwatch, carrying a Moleskine notebook, writing with a Mont Blanc pen, wearing the correct style suit and shirt and shoes. It's all so shallow, but sadly it works.

I'm part of a boys club, and there's no way I can show my hand. There's no way that my colleagues would be able to process the fact that I'm barely coping with mental health problems, the threat of relapse into drug addiction, and a desire to return to a simpler life when I didn't have to grind just to pay taxes, rent and maintain a fake image of having my shit together.

If I address the audience, it's because I'm so lonely in the little stage-play of my daily life. From Monday to Friday, I'm putting on a poker face, and looking busy at my desk. I face the threat of being found out as a blagger, a hustler, at any moment. The homeless guy is not welcome in the club. There's no room for anybody with a weakness, in the corporate dog-eat-dog world.

My colleagues tell me I'm doing a good job, and they like working with me, but I feel like a fraud when I submit my invoice for the week, and I think about how much time I spent on Facebook, writing blog posts, tweeting, reading the news and hiding in the toilet. I look at my timesheet, and it doesn't reconcile with the amount of work I have actually done. Sure, I was present in the office. My bum was on the seat for the hours I declare, but I don't feel productive or even useful.

So, I cast out into the world, looking for a connection, desperate for somebody to acknowledge my existence. Even when I rub somebody up the wrong way, at least it means some of what I say is hitting home somewhere. Most of the time, I'm alone with my thoughts and lonely as hell.

Every time I address "you" it seems to fall on deaf ears. I quickly forget that people have reached out, gotten in contact, because the conversation is so sporadic, unpredictable. This is such an unusual mechanism of communication, but what would I do without it? Friends have literally threatened to unfriend me on Facebook, because of the disproportionate amount of space I have consumed on 'their' wall.

I'm rambling, but I don't want this to end. It feels like I'm talking to "you". It feels like "you're" listening. It feels like I have a human connection, an honest relationship, that I just don't get for all those lonely, lonely office hours, where my whole focus is on trying to hide my depression, anxiety, boredom and desperate lack of purpose.

Without this blog, I'd be stuffed. There's a temptation to adapt my writing to be more appealing again. There's a desire to drive up the number of readers, by writing things that I know will be like clickbait, and nice to read.

However, that's not my style, not my purpose. We're having an intimate conversation, you & I. You might not realise it, but I'm thinking about hundreds of different potential audience members, as I write... trying to engage you... trying to connect.

Even if this isn't being read by the people I intended, at least it's there. There's something comforting, knowing that a little piece of me has been captured somewhere, in my own words. It feels like I'm at least winning, in the battle to leave a true account of who I was, and not become a convenient dumping ground for those who seek to abstain from any blame, for the part they did, or did not play in somebody's life.

I live in London. I'm practically an expert in turning a blind eye: ignoring the Big Issue seller, the clipboard-wielding survey taker, the collection tin rattling charity worker, the beggar, the pavement evangelist, and every other undesirable member of society who has fallen on hard times. I know what it's like to have your head down because you're so wrapped up in your own struggle, and so fixated on the rat race.

I've considered the question many times: am I a melodramatic attention seeker? Are my cries for help completely unnecessary? Is my lot in life no worse than anybody else's?

Frankly, who gives a shit? I'm just about scraping through every day by the skin of my teeth. Not only walking out on a boring job, but potentially leaving this shitty life altogether. I know how decisive I am. I know how bold and brave I can be, once I have decided to do something. I know I could easily snuff out my life, in the blink of an eye.

Doth I protest too much? Why take the chance?

Isn't this somebody else's problem? Aren't there pills for this?

Yes, try clinging onto those pathetic get-out-of-jail-free cards, once the person has gone.

Perhaps I'm dredging up emotions that could be suppressed? Perhaps the very act of writing is prodding at raw nerves, and actually keeping feelings on the surface that could easily sink back into my subconscious. Am I, in the very act of writing this blog, talking myself into depression and suicide? Well, the journal charts my moods, so you have all the data you need for the postmortem.

I live for writing. I live for my browsing stats and my Twitter followers. I live for those few moments when somebody emails out of the blue, and acknowledges my existence. You would be surprised how few and far between those precious events are.

Moan, moan, moan, right? Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink?

Perhaps Alcoholics Anonymous is the place for this, even though I'm not an alcoholic? Dylan Thomas wrote that an alcoholic is somebody who drinks just as much as you, but you don't like them very much.

Why do we push people to the fringes, the periphery? Why do we want the people who wail in distress to just shut up and go away? Do you think it completely meaningless, when somebody goes to great effort to explain how they're feeling, and attempt to communicate with you, by whatever means they can?

How long have I been doing this for? Shut up! Give up! Go away! Right?

If something doesn't immediately work, just quit, right?

Hasn't the message been received from you, loud and clear? You don't care. You're busy with your own life.

Is it the bystander effect? Surely somebody else is going to do something? Not me, I'm not going to be first. I don't want to get involved!

What do you think's going to happen? Are you going to catch my mental illness? Are you going to be made responsible for my life? Are you going to be shackled to me, forced to live with me, with me stealing food from your children's mouths? Am I out to ruin you and your family?

I feel like a dirty leper. I feel contagious. I feel a huge amount of pressure to pretend like I'm capable of just conforming, complying... when the truth is that things are getting worse, not better. My patience is worn thin. My energy levels have been exhausted. I'm later and later getting to work. I can no longer even pretend to be busy, and keep up the charade.

Join a gym. Eat some kale. Go to a book club. Get a girlfriend.

Can I chase away the existential dread with trivial frivolities, when the bulk of my waking hours are filled with such utter bullshit? Having a taste of freedom has perhaps ruined me. Knowing how the game is rigged, and how to play the system has left me reeling, with the shocking revelation of the pointlessness of it all.

Even if - for the sake of argument - I'm a dimwitted fool, it still doesn't take away the fact that my brain is in overdrive. I'm bombarded with thoughts in the empty hours where I am so unchallenged, so bored.

You educate a person. You train them for a job. You stretch them and challenge them and titillate their interests, and then what? You put them into a corporate machine where independent thought is undesirable? You put them into a bland business environment where creativity is discouraged? You put them into the straightjacket of the working world, where innovation and ingenuity are unnecessary?

Yes, I'm compliant, because I had a tax bill to pay, and debts to pay down. But every day is a simple test of patience. What's going to win: am I going to commit suicide, run away from my pointless responsibilities, or simply sit mute in my chair trying not to scream for long enough that I have built up another nest egg to fritter away on more life-affirming pursuits?

Life's too fucking short for all this. The clock ticks down to the day I die, and what can I say I did with my life? I didn't tell the boss to go fuck himself? I didn't storm out of the office, yelling at the top of my voice that everyone is wasting their precious existence on pushing paper around their desk? I didn't let the bank, the landlord, repossess their precious property and go live somewhere off-grid, to get away from the constant pressure to run just to stand still.

I'm writing and writing, because there is no end until going home time. How do I fill these empty hours where I'm 'working'. Does anybody even care that I've churned out tens of thousands of words, at the expense of the companies I'm contracted to work for? Does anybody even notice, that it makes not a jot of difference, whether I'm fulfilling my job description or not?

You're going to look at the length of this essay and think "what the actual fuck, who has the time for this?". I could put a cork in my mouth. I could curtail this bout of verbal diarrhoea. But what else would I do with my time? At least this wall of words - this tidal wave - records for posterity, the angst that might drive me to my early grave. At least people can see the kind of torture that my soul was subjected to.

Suffer in silence? Fuck off.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #suicide #depression #mentalhealth