This is a story about life falling apart...

I've started to put my life back in good order, but I still have to get well enough to go back into the office sometime soon. I look like a tramp at the moment. A very tired tramp.

My bedroom carpet has been deep cleaned. The walls really need a wipe down and there's a bit of decorating touching-up to do. Considering I barricaded myself in there for days in very unsanitary conditions, it's not too bad. I need to buy a new bed, but I hated the old creaky one anyway. It's alright, but has a very ugly repair to one of the bars, which I decided I needed for my barricade, so I bent it in half until it broke.

As you can see, my temporary window coverings have been taken down. The low-tack masking tape I used hasn't left any marks or pulled off any paint. However, in the very worst case scenario, I could replace the underlay and carpet, replaster and repaint all the walls, and re-do all the caulking, which'd cost me about £1,000, plus the cost of replacing the bed. Frankly, if I stay for a couple of years and do a bit of touching up with roughly colour matched paint, nobody'll really notice - there's a huge patch where the paint is a whole shade darker, because I moved the wardrobe out of my bedroom and into my dressing room.

As for me, I'm exhausted. I had to get up and tidy my bedroom before the carpet cleaner arrived at 10am. I slept on the sofa. I probably didn't fall asleep until about 3am, even though I had sleeping pills and tranquillisers.

I have a mountain of towels and bedding to wash. The bathroom needs a good clean.

I need to re-stack up all that crap that's on my bed behind my second, superfluous, bedroom door. Perhaps I could get things a bit more organised while I'm at it, but I'm too tired.

During all this craziness, there's been a Royal wedding and apparently there's a big local music thing that all the locals are going on about, like it's not just some random concert. So many people have told me that "the place will be gridlock". London can put on a marathon all round the centre of a city of 10 million people. I think the Billy Ray Cyrus cover act playing "Achy Breaky Heart" headlining Wales' "Big Weekend" isn't going to cause too much of a problem for a city which is about 1-2% as big as London.

So, I've dropped out at the moment. I'm not going to the office. I'm not seeing anybody. I'm not leaving the house. I'm not leaving my apartment. Sometimes, I'm not even leaving the same room for days.

Problem is, in London you can pretty much shove your thumb up the Queen's arse and get away with a slapped wrist, but here it's a proper community and people stick together. You can't misbehave without getting in serious trouble. People gossip. Messages and emails get forwarded again and again and again. Faces get remembered. You bump into people you know.

If all else fails, try Wales, but I still need to be careful not to shit on my own doorstep cos what I got away with in London FOR YEARS just will not fly round here. I wanted a clean break, a fresh start, but I've already fallen out with a GP who was partially responsible for a young man's suicide, and a girlfriend who seemed to think the worst of me, despite evidence to the contrary. I've been accused of writing stuff on my blog about people and their families and generally sharing private stuff. Bullshit.

I need to act a bit differently now I live in this tiny city, so that I don't fall out with any more friends and break up with any more girlfriends, but you know EXACTLY who I am and EXACTLY what I think, without naming names or sharing private things... of my friends. If you're not my friend, you're fair game, except I'm not nasty and vindictive.

I'm feeling a bit sad that I've only got 2 non-work friends in the city, and that a great opportunity to socialise is currently a bit difficult because I don't want people from work seeing me when I'm looking so unhealthy.

I went on a site to find drinking buddies, and meetup.com. Jesus, that's depressing. My ex-girlfriend was always worried that I was "downdating" because the pool of available hotties in this tiny town is nothing like London, where Tinder brings an endless stream of stunning intelligent and cultured women.

If the work dries up here and I fail to find a social group I like, I think I could end up going back to London, now that I have the money to do it in style. Being able to drive to work is brilliant, but I'm so worried that I'm not going to find friends and a girlfriend who have similar values, goals and ambitions.

You know what I really miss? My cat and my girlfriend's cats.

It's amazing how quickly I went from viewing a yacht, drinking in the sun at a food festival, having a picnic in the sunshine, and finally getting a bit of a tan... to losing my girlfriend, risking my job, wrecking my bedroom, losing my mind.

I think I just want to drop out completely. I'll empty my bank accounts to pay back my guardian angel, and the taxman and the banks can go fuck themselves. I'll leave the country and go live and work somewhere you don't have some god-awful experience every time you just want to get a bit of money or a place to live, somewhere laid back. It's stressing me out too much, the pressure of staying in the rat race and keeping squeaky clean - one black mark and you're f**ked.

My ex-flatmate who owes me about £6,000 in unpaid rent and bills, also owes thousands to basically anybody who would give him any kind of credit agreement. The red bills - final demands - and debt collectors started appearing soon after I threw him out (I gave him SO MANY chances, but he kept lying and the debt kept getting bigger). Now, if his Instagram is to be believed, he's living the high life, so maybe there's a lot to be said for being a thoroughly disreputable and immoral piece of shit.

Personally, I've contributed the best part of a million quid to the economy, and I've worked my arse off to never default on a debt and always honour my commitments. Maybe that's where I'm going wrong. I need to just be a flakey drop-out. I think it'd be more fun. It'd certainly be a lot less stressful.

Tags: #apartment #relationships #flatmate #debt #friends #sailing

This is a story about primary care...

Primum non nocere is in and of itself a non sequitur because the use of Latin and other languages of classical antiquity is primarily intended to deter the hoi polloi from becoming educated. The number of doctors who are able to train, qualify and practice, is something that is tightly controlled in order to maintain high salaries - artificial scarcity - as opposed to allowing the unrestricted proliferation of medical knowledge which might improve the health of the nation.

Those who profess the Hippocratic Oath might be able to stay true to the vow they have sworn if they practice the treatment of acute illness in a hospital - dealing with curable disease and injury - but in the treatment of chronic illness in the community, as General Practitioners (GPs), can we say the same?

If we look at a few obvious statistics, we can see that medicine is failing. Average life expectancies have started to fall and chronic illness has seen a dramatic rise. There is an epidemic of mental health problems, and suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45.

Of course, one might say that the root causes of these conditions are non-medical.

It occurred to me that a significant piece of the NHS has already been privatised, in that many general practice surgeries are owned and operated as private profit-making enterprises. This seemed to present a significant conflict of interest, so I decided to conduct an experiment.

I asked a GP a simple question: when you're treating a patient, do you think about their healthcare needs, or do you think about other things? The reply was shocking.

"It's not about [the patient] it's about everybody else"

I'd had my suspicions for a while - gathering plenty of evidence - that those who profess to do no harm might actually have been corrupted into serving other purposes; into betraying their profession and failing in their duty of care. This was the final confirmation that my worst fears were realised, and there are powerful actors within the healthcare system who place other things above the health of their patients.

By co-opting doctors into the capitalist profit-driven sector of the economy, and by co-opting them into the welfare system, we are asking doctors to choose between their luxury cars, the private school fees for their children, and other trimmings associated with their high social status, versus increased taxes to pay for the welfare state. By placing the most vulnerable people in society in front of the doctors, when seeking incapacity benefit, the government is pitting one group against another.

If the study of economics has taught us anything, it's that people respond to financial incentives. While a GP might argue that they're saving valuable taxpayer money, which might be spent on the NHS, by denying incapacity benefit to a vulnerable member of society, one must also admit that the GP acts in rational self-interest. Less money spent supporting society's most vulnerable means a lower tax burden and more money in the pockets of the profiteers, which include GPs who are partners in their practice.

The first principle of do no harm forbids a doctor from weeding out malingerers based on their best guess. To cut off somebody's incapacity benefit is definitely harmful, and there is no diagnostic test which could decide with a high degree of accuracy who is the malingerer and who is genuinely unable to work. If the doctor in question truly cares about their patients, they would have no option but to choose the option which gives most benefit and inflicts least harm.

We see so many suicides because patients are fobbed off with inferior treatment options, because it's a cheaper alternative to give somebody pills than to give them psychological therapy. While I understand that being cost-conscious might be seen as being pragmatic, it again violates the principle of do no harm. To fob a desperate and vulnerable person off with ineffective medication, when better treatment options are available, is tantamount to negligence. If a doctor has a consultation with a man under the age of 45, they must surely be well aware that suicide is the thing that is most likely to cause their death, and they should therefore treat it as a serious threat to their life. To call people's bluff and knowingly prescribe ineffective treatment is obviously the reason why suicide rates are so scandalously high.

I imagine that some doctors - although egotistical and in love with themselves - have a tiny piece of them that wants to make a difference and save lives. I think that exhaustion and the pressures that are felt by ordinary people are imposing themselves on doctors now, who are struggling to send their children to the best private schools (boo hoo) and are feeling compassion fatigued because of burnout. If we can relieve the pressure on GPs, they may become more willing and able to work in support of their patients' needs, as opposed to "everybody else" (read: being the government's job police).

I strongly believe that we have an urgent need to change primary care, so that it becomes not-for-profit, and patient healthcare can become the primary objective. Perhaps profits are not the primary motivator, but money has a corrupting influence which can be clearly seen when you speak to a GP who is/was a partner of a practice. Co-opting healthcare professionals into the job of coercing vulnerable people into bullshit McJobs, where they are exploited by the capitalists, has absolutely nothing to do with healthcare and is most certainly harmful.

I've witnessed first-hand how this care for "everybody else" - instead of patients - has become shorthand for the compassionless, sympathy-lacking, bullying, hectoring and suicide-inducing grotesquely twisted vision of so-called medicine, inflicted on society's most vulnerable people.

If you want to be the job police, and you think that suicides are an acceptable price to pay, so you can feel superior and send your kids to private school, perhaps medicine is not for you.

Tags: #nhs

This is a story about being functional...

In every supermarket, corner shop, convenience store, licensed café, restaurant and in vast numbers of bars, pubs, clubs and other establishments where people gather to spend money and socialise, there is always alcohol on sale. Alcohol is ubiquitous. It's always possible to get cheap booze quickly, wherever you are - you're never further than a short walk and a couple of quid away from intoxication.

The weather in the UK is pretty miserable. We get hardly any snow, and there's only a couple of mountains that have a ski lift - it's quicker and easier for me to fly to France, Austria, Switzerland or Italy, than it is for me to drive all the way to Scotland, where the mountains aren't very high and the snow's really poor. The pleasant months of weather in the UK are May through to September, and the rest of the time it's grey and overcast; drizzly and thoroughly miserable. Our summers are often plagued by rain, although the weather is at least pleasantly warm by British standards, but don't forget your brolly even in August. It's enough to drive anybody to drink.

Our little island is quite overcrowded. The industrial revolution led us to abandon our rural lifestyle and move to the cities, seeking our fortune. Our cramped towns and cities have rows and rows of terraced worker cottages, which are too small to comfortably accomodate a family. As our social fabric disintegrated in the 1960s and 1970s, we built brutalist concrete monstrosities, very similar to Soviet-era blocks, which could house vast numbers of people who serve no useful economic purpose in the age of robotics, technology, automation, IT and the boom of the service industries. The vast majority of Britons are struggling to just-about-manage on god-awful estates, some of which were built by councils as social housing, and others were built by a handful of massive property developers. Estates comprise huge numbers of cheap and nasty houses built on the outskirts of dismal towns, which were already struggling to provide the necessary infrastructure to educate, transport, entertain and look after the health of local residents. We have not scaled well.

Overcrowding has reached such problematic levels, that cities such as London, Bristol and Manchester have no-go areas, where drugs, guns, knives and prostitution are the backbone of their black-market economies. In those areas predominantly populated by people who are considered economically redundant, there is little hope of escaping poverty, except by selling drugs or selling your body. Gangs compete for their turf, and violence is rife.

Meanwhile, we have seen the rise and rise of the bullshit job. While the economically redundant are given a pitiful state handout and left to rot on their council estates, the 'cream of the crop' will be able to study at university and obtain the necessary academic credentials to get a job that's completely unrelated to their field of study, which will mostly involve pointless boring meetings, Excel spreadsheets and a ridiculous volume of emails about absolutely nothing. The service industries produce nothing - no real value to the economy, no productive output - but they account for 85% or more of the so-called economy. Paper gets shuffled around in increasingly elaborate ways of obfuscating the fact that nothing of any importance is being done. Our smartest people are very busy doing nothing... and the smarter ones quickly figure this out and become quite disillusioned with the whole sham.

All of these things contributes to a toxic environment which makes people depressed, demotivated, stressed, anxious, but horribly trapped by their mortgages, car loan repayments. Despite stress and exhaustion, there persists a futile and flawed belief that if we only work hard enough, we'll be able to elevate ourselves from our dismal situation and build a better life for us and our family. When the workers eventually realise that life in the UK is a massive con, and we're going to be stuck in our dead-end job that we hate until the day we die - and our children are going to struggle just as much, if not more - then we need vast quantities of antidepressants, anxiety pills, tranquillisers, sedatives - and alcohol - in order to allow us to ignore the horrible situation and carry on functioning. Our nation is packed full of functional addicts.

Alcohol is used because of its ubiquity. It's self-medication that's available on every street corner. The proportion of the average family budget that gets spent on alcohol, versus food, is quite staggering - alcohol is the glue between the pooh... the only thing that's allowing people to carry on being functional in such a toxic environment; under such a hostile conditions.

Alcohol is the cause of so much obesity, as well as the other health-damage that accompanies its chronic consumption. If we really cared about people's health, we wouldn't bully and hector them to give up their crutches, but we would instead improve the quality of people's lives. If we make the world a less depressing and stressful place, we'll see alcohol consumption levels naturally drop.

I hate that I have to drink, just to get through the working week. I hate that I'm using a really fattening and health-damaging drug to salve my stress, and to help me to cope, but it's freely and readily available without having to see a condescending, patronising and unhelpful doctor, who has no sympathy and compassion for the day-to-day struggles of the proletariat. Doctors enjoy a position of high social status and an income that is many times greater than the average wage - they have no idea what life's like in the real world, for ordinary people - and while my overall experience with doctors has been a mostly positive one, the elites completely fail to grasp the awfulness of life for ordinary people, and fail to sympathise with the plight of the just-about-managing struggling masses.

Our doctors are trained in acute medicine - disease and injury - and are not succeeding at treating the chronic conditions that arise from the current economic climate, which is so toxic to mental health. Instead of lecturing, hectoring and bullying people because they use alcohol, cigarettes, coffee and drugs to be able to cope, our medical community needs to recognise that people are driven to use substances because of their intolerable living conditions. The mental health epidemic and scandalous suicide rates are all the proof we need that the model of medicine which dished out bucketloads of antibiotics is not succeeding in saving lives, when it dishes out bucketloads of antidepressants - clearly it's not working and suicide and mental health problems are the number one public health issue we're facing.

Having access to a fast-acting drug which can help when the stress levels become unbearable - when life becomes unliveable - is vitally important for a society that wishes to treat its people with some degree of sympathy and compassion for their plight... people need something to ease their suffering.

I think alcohol is a terrible drug, and I pity those who have become addicted to it, but it's plain to see the reasons why people drink too much, and it's not that they've got 'addictive personalities' or they lack willpower - it's that their lives are fucking shit and they've got to find a way to cope.

I wish I could quit alcohol, but how would I cope without it?

Tags: #alcohol #addiction

This is a story about life in the provinces...

For four years I tried in vain to get back my old life where I was an eligible bachelor living in the Angel Islington, zone one, and I could walk to work in the City and all the trendy bars and restaurants on Upper Street or skateboard into the West End. I used to park my car right outside my flat and go kitesurfing on whichever beach tickled my fancy on any given weekend. I used to jet off to exotic locations for several holidays a year. I was living the dream, and I tried to recreate that dream but I failed.

The closest I ever got to being happy in London was when I was homeless. Sleeping rough in Kensington Palace Gardens will be a memory I'll treasure forever, as will the hostels where I made friends with heaps of junkies and alcoholics. I started to rebuild a social group amongst my fellow homeless, and that made me happy; secure.

Blending a 'normal' life with one of homelessness and fraternising with the homeless is not easy. Keeping regular office hours is hard when your friends work doing casual labour and as part of the gig economy. Living in a hostel dorm, but having to go to work suited and booted in a crisp shirt and sharp suit, is something that's quite difficult. In the end, I lost everything again.

I wouldn't opt for the high-risk, high-reward strategy again, in London. It's too much pressure to maintain a high-living lifestyle. It wasn't really my choice to rent a luxury riverside apartment... I asked a friend if he'd help me find a place to live - given that I was homeless - and he decided that 25% of my monthly salary didn't sound like too much of a big financial commitment.... except it was actually thousands of pounds a month that I *HAD* to keep earning after I signed the lease. I wouldn't do that again.

Everything's a little easier in the provinces. I can drive to work. I can park for free. The roads aren't congested as hell and I don't have to pay a congestion charge. People are more laid back and they work shorter hours. It's easier to impress the bosses and the work's really easy too. Things are less competitive. Things are less hectic; stressful.

I feel bad that my lifestyle's quite polluting, but I can drive into town and park to go shopping. I can drive to see my girlfriend and park outside her house. I can leave work at 4:30 and be home before 5pm. I can drive to the beach. It's not an energy-efficient global-warming conscious lifestyle at all, but it's a hell of a lot less stressful and exhausting than living in an overcrowded city.

I love the social aspect of London, where there are so many interesting people and fascinating cultural events, but I was always too stressed out and unwell to participate. I was barely surviving in London for most of those four years. I was able to hang out in my lovely apartment for two years, but I was completely withdrawn - I hardly ever left the apartment.

I never quite got back to having everything I needed in London - there was always one thing that was badly broken in my life. When I had the apartment, I lost my job. When I got a girlfriend, I ran out of money. When I had money, I lost my friends. It's really hard to get and keep the things you need in London, mostly because everything's really expensive and takes a lot of effort and energy. You need to run just to stand still in London.

I commuted home from work just now and I sat in a big queue of traffic, but it was moving slowly and it didn't take long before I got through it. The sun was shining and I was in my little car, which is actually thoroughly decent for the money I paid for it, and it was alright. I could've phoned somebody for a chat. You can't phone a friend for a chat when you're stuck on an underground train.

Life's a hell of a lot simpler outside London. Things are within the realms of possibility quite easily. It won't totally bankrupt me to rent a nice apartment locally. Buying, taxing and insuring a car hasn't completely bankrupted me. The cost of living is substantially cheaper than London, to the point where money should hopefully quickly accrue. Tomorrow I will have earned enough money to pay for 6 months rent, which is great because I'll soon get to the point where I have more financial security. I need to have more security. It's been too long that I've been hustling like hell, trying to get back into civilised society.

I wish I could've made it work in London because I'm a proud person and it feels like I failed, but I made a few wrong choices and mistakes are costly in London. Everything's costly in London. At least London's big enough that you can make some really big screw-ups and get away with it.

There's pressure in the provinces to not screw things up, because your nosey neighbour is gonna know about it and never let you forget if you make a mistake, but life's a hell of a lot easier. Yes, you might have to hide your face in shame; you might have people gossiping about you behind your back; you might become a 'known' face, rather than just an anonymous member of the seething masses, like you are in London. I'm glad I went through all my troubles in London, where nobody will ever remember me - in theory, I live my life without prejudice, because I've been able to leave that part of history behind. That's one of the reasons why I've not gone back to Bournemouth - because of my messy divorce and the fact my ex-wife still lives there... it's her place now.

My life's got the potential to be delightfully simple and straightforward. I can almost sense the possibility of having a work:life balance. Things might become sustainable - it's certainly within the realms of possibility. I earn bucketloads and the cost of living is so much less here in the provinces, there's a good chance I can quickly get back on my feet.

I've only worked a week in the new job, but I'm making good progress and I'm managing to cope with the early morning and the lack of sleeping pills. I've managed to get where I wanted - local friends, local girlfriend, local job, car, roof over my head, money in the bank. There are things that still need fixing, like having a place of my own and getting more job and financial security, but those things will come soon enough as long as I can keep turning the pedals; keep getting up in the morning and going to work.

The guy I work with works a snail's pace, but that's OK. It's a marathon not a sprint. It's good for me to learn to work at a slower pace - it's more sustainable. I can't believe that we've achieved so little in the best part of a week, but who cares? The pace of life is slower in the provinces. We'll get there in the end. No rush.

If things go wrong, I'll probably end up eating my words and rushing back to the capital, because there's bucketloads of easy money to be made there. Here in the provinces, there are fewer choices. Of course I'm going to go back to London, chasing girls and big money contracts if this provincial life doesn't work out for me. London has rich pickings, where the provinces have only a few options that you'd be really happy with. I'll try to make it work, but it'll be more heartbreaking out here in the sticks, where it's hard to be philosophical about things not working out - there are only a few companies that you'd want to work for, and there are fewer potential soulmates.

At the moment, I'm quietly optimistic. It's Friday tomorrow, and despite the dreadful Monday morning, the trajectory of the week has been one of steady improvement. It bodes well.

Tags: #homeless #london #career

This is a story about doing things you dislike...

Pretty soon I'm going to have to start turning up at work on time, because I have a good first impression to make. Pretty soon I'm going to be commuting to work along with lots of other miserable people, clogging up the roads and getting stressed out of our minds. Pretty soon I'm going to have to pretend like I'm a regular office worker, and suffer the cold early mornings - getting out of bed when it's a really miserable time of year, defrosting the car and pretending like it makes perfect sense to be acting the same as if it was the middle of summer.

I'd worked really hard so that I could start to take it easy, maybe switch careers or maybe reconfigure my life so that I work less and get paid more, or at least I'd be somewhat my own boss. Everything went to hell in a handcart, so instead I'm still stuck in the rat race. It's not that I haven't worked hard and achieved a lot... it's that I went backwards rapidly for quite a few years. Instead of just wiping the slate clean, I'm trying to do the honest decent thing and live my life the hard way - to pay the price for those years I lost in the wilderness, where everything I'd worked so hard to build ended up getting messed up and destroyed, and I got in a right old mess.

I could just say "screw it" because I've rebuilt myself from nothing a couple of times already. I've already proven the point - that I know how to get my life sorted out when it's in a mess. It's been really disheartening to fight back and rebuild my life, only to have it fall to pieces again - a lot of the reason being that working hard to achieve something is one thing, but working hard and achieving nothing is soul destroying. All my hard work amounts to nothing - I still don't have health, wealth and prosperity, so why did I bother? All of my hard work hasn't even managed to get me back to zero yet - I'm still stuck in a very deep hole.

You might think that the hole I'm in is because I made really bad choices, and there's some justice, but what you don't realise is how vulnerable people can get when they're unwell. I've been ripped off for thousands of pounds by people who've sought to take advantage of me when I've been sick. I don't really begrudge it, because that's the kind of society we've built, where we trample on each other to get ahead, but it's pretty hard to accept that - for example - one guy doesn't even think he's done anything wrong, even though he owes me thousands of pounds.

To live life with honesty and integrity is really hard work and I don't think that there's enough appreciation of that fact. While there are lots of rich people who are financially reckless, leave their staff members unpaid and declare bankruptcy owing millions and billions of pounds. While we say that a 'self-made' successful entrepreneur must be really smart and totally deserves their fortune, we fail to give acknowledgement to all the smart hard-working people who've led lives with more risk-aversion and prudence because they simply couldn't afford to fail - they had rent and bills to pay, and no wealthy family to bail them out of any financial difficulties.

It would be lacking in humility to claim that I'm a hard worker, and dishonest to say I don't have some element of my risk underwritten. My risk is underwritten in strange ways - I know that I do a very good impression of a well-mannered posh person, which seems to be quite endearing... I seem like a worthy cause to those who are charitably minded. I think it would be unfair to say that I've ever mooched off anybody's kindness or otherwise taken assistance without the intention of using it to improve my life as intended, but I've definitely had help that would never be forthcoming for less fortunate members of society who are easily identifiable as "undesirables". Nobody wants to help a white trash football hooligan drug addict, for example, which is why I can't begrudge any wealth that's been redistributed from my pocket into the pocket of somebody who nobody else would help.

Wealth has flowed through me and into other hands. I'm a model citizen in a way, because wealth really has trickled down in my world. A lot of money has come my way, but I haven't hoarded it - it's all gone back into the economy, and you'll be very glad to hear that only the teeny tiniest fraction was spent making enterprising drug dealers on council estates any richer, and most of the dosh has been spent making the rich richer - rent, interest, taxes etc.

The future that lies ahead is going to involve a lot of the same crap I was doing 20+ years ago when I started my career - it's practically the same job. My future is going to involve working just as hard as I did back when I was trying to escape from the rat race. My future is incredibly disappointing, because I should have been very comfortably wealthy by now, and it's only because I was abandoned when I was at my most vulnerable that so much stuff got ruined and I'm having to rebuild from a position that's *WORSE* than starting over. I'm starting from a *HUGELY* disadvantaged position.

The only slight comfort is the fact that it's seemingly quite "quick" for me to get back to a position where I'm doing OK. It might take most ordinary people a hell of a long time to dig themselves out of the kind of hole I've got myself in, or even leave them with no option other than to declare bankruptcy and start again from the bottom rung of the ladder, but I'm "lucky" enough to get to "quickly" recover, although you don't realise just how exhausting it's been to be flirting with disaster for so long.

So, I have to put up and shut up for a while longer. Even though I'm taking the fast-track it feels like it's lasting an eternity, because it's so unbearably nasty to be going through an all work and no play struggle, with horrible stuff hanging over me. This isn't my comeuppance - this is me paying the price for all the people who've gleefully come and picked my pocket when I was vulnerable. I haven't lived beyond my means - it's a miracle I've lived at all... I should be dead.

The main message I've been receiving in life is "hard work doesn't pay" and "give up and kill yourself" because every attempt to work my way out of poverty has burnt me out and not got me anywhere. Every attempt to play by the rules of the game has been futile. Every attempt to act with honesty, integrity and personal responsibility has made me feel mugged off.

I don't really know how to give up. I don't really know how to accept defeat. Maybe I'm a bad loser, but the game's not over, so I'm playing on. That might sound really positive, but I'm not going to need much of an excuse to throw in the towel - it wouldn't take much to make me decide that all the effort and the stress just hasn't been worth it, and that everything's hopelessly ruined.

Friends think they see repeating patterns in my behaviour, but don't they see that there are patterns everywhere? Sleep and wake. Work and leisure. Feast and famine. Sprint and coast. Yes I've tried the same strategy quite a few times, but it's always had different results. Yes there are things I've tried before, but don't you think that the remarkable thing is that I've avoided bankruptcy, destitution, permanent debilitating mental illness, chronic drug addiction... and an early death, of course. If anything, I've been trying some of the 'same' things because they work very well - for example, I would have thought that being well paid is far better than being really badly paid, but it's true... I've never tried the latter - maybe that's where I've been going wrong all along!

Maybe I have been making bad career choices, but most jobs all involve the same things: desks, offices, email and meetings, plus horrible commutes to work. Most jobs seem to involve being awake when you don't want to be and doing things you don't like doing. If two jobs are more-or-less identically horrible, why would I choose the underpaid one?

So, I'm sticking with offices and 9 to 5 and Monday to Friday and desks and computers and emails and water-coolers and all the other shit that goes with the territory. I'm sticking with having to get up even though I want to stay in bed, going to a place I hate and doing work that I hate, because it's essential if I'm going to have another shot at trying to build a more pleasant life - we can't do anything we want, until we have a shitload of money in the bank, and my only source of money is selling my brain and body to the highest bidder.

It sucks, but it's always sucked.

Tags: #career

This is a story about the origins of [my] bipolar disorder...

Here are a couple of select conversations from the last year that might help you to understand the circumstances that influence my mood instability.

Me: "I'd like to discharge myself from hospital, please"

Doctors: "No. You are on a high dependency ward. You will die"

Me: "It can't be that bad. I want to discharge myself, please"

Doctors: "Your kidneys aren't working. You need dialysis. Your blood has dangerously high levels of potassium in it and you could go into cardiac arrest at any moment"

Me: "But I need to go to work otherwise I will lose my job"

Doctors: "You can't work if you're dead"

Me: "I'm going to have to risk it"

Why would I do such a staggeringly stupid thing? Why would I risk my life like that? It seems patently absurd, doesn't it?

For my whole career, bosses and shareholders have demanded only one thing: do more, faster.

I decided that I was being exploited. I'm the one who makes the software. Without my software, there's no product; there's no business and there's no profit. Without software that I've built, no amount of lawyers and salespeople and middle managers and jumped-up idiots with important sounding job titles, would have anything to do other than burn what little money the company had left. If the software is the product, then you've got nothing if you've got no software. If the software is what allows you to do thousands of times more volume than you'd be able to do without it, then you haven't got a business if you haven't got the software - your business model would collapse. Your business is software.

I'm not saying that software is important. Software can't build a house. Software can't plant carrots. Software can't dispose of your sewerage. Software is bullshit. However, most of the economy is bullshit - at least 85% bullshit here in the UK anyway.

So, anyway, some jumped-up little twat with his daddy's money comes up to me saying "I'm an entrepreneur and I've got a genius idea... I just need a geek to make the software". On closer inspection the software is where the genius lies. When the business idea is examined with close scrutiny, it turns out that none of the important details have been figured out. Turning an idea into a working business - the execution - is something that gets figured out by the lawyers and software engineers. The "entrepreneur" just provides his daddy's money, while he walks around with his chest puffed out pretending like he's a serious businessman.

The next thing that happens is that I say "how much money have you got to spend and when do you need to have a working product?". The answer is always the same: "I haven't got any money and I need it yesterday".

Where did the budget go for the software? It seems to have all been spent on employing a bunch of old schoolchums to do "brand consultancy" or "business development". Basically, the directors fly all around the world attending conferences and "networking", which is very costly because they're running up huge expenses. Meanwhile, the geek is expected to churn out the software - "I don't know what it is, but is it finished yet?" - as fast as they possibly can. It's quite common now for very capable young computer programmers to work unpaid, or on slave wages, because they're desperate to gain commercial experience. Some idiots even think that I'd enjoy working on a software project for free, like it's a motherf**king hobby or something.

So, I arrived at the situation where I would always work at top speed. I've pleased my bosses and shareholders, not because I give them what they want, but because I've generally been much faster and much cheaper than anybody they've used before. In short: I deliver.

I was working so damn hard all the time and not seeing much of a reward for the dedication I put into my job, so I started to work for myself. I made software and I sold it. I made some iPhone apps and I sold them. One of my apps took me half a day to code and it was downloaded thousands of times. This made sense to me - the whole reason I work with computers is because they can do things while I sleep; a computer can perform many thousandfold tasks than I ever could. It makes sense that I would use a computer to leverage my talents and efforts.

I didn't quite understand that the whole reason why I came to be writing iPhone apps was because I'd been burnt out by my employer. I'd landed a hell of a project. The world's biggest project, in fact - "Nick, would you mind creating us a system that can process a quadrillion dollars worth of credit default swaps, please? Have it done as soon as you can, please, there's a good chap... we've got a global economy that needs wrecking".

I didn't quite understand that I burnt myself out again writing iPhone apps. I coded as fast as I could. I catnapped and skipped meals. I worked 7 days a week. I knew that every moment that I wasn't coding was another moment that my competitors were potentially going to release a similar app. I had to be first to market with my ideas. I had to be the first person in the Apple App Store with an app that did something that nobody else had thought of yet.

I decided to start a proper business. I decided that I'd create a piece of software with a recurring license cost. I decided to create a piece of Software as a Service (SaaS) and then I'd be able to earn money while I slept, once I'd completed the system. I didn't have any of my daddy's money to spend though. I didn't raise any money from friends and family. I just had me and my idea, my software engineering skills and 24 hours in every single day.

I didn't quite understand that I burnt myself out doing my startup. I didn't understand that writing the software - the hard bit - was only the beginning of what I had to do. I had to raise investment to be able to market my product. I had to sell the product. I had to support the product. I had to do all the business administration. I had to raise investment to be able to afford to hire people, so that I didn't collapse under the weight of all those competing demands. I didn't go fast enough though, so I did collapse.

With every burst of intense focus and effort, there would be a windfall. Particularly in investment banking, if you do a good job then you get a big fat juicy bonus. If you make an app that goes to #1 in the App Store charts then you get a windfall. Even if you do a startup, you can sometimes get a reward - my startup was at least profitable; investable.

The pattern of behaviour was established. It made sense to me to work as hard and as fast as I could, because the rewards seemed to be there.

When I run a software project - a team of people who work for me - then I put developer welfare as the top priority. I set realistic deadlines. I allow time for people to catch their breath. If the pressure starts to increase, then I move the deadline rather than asking people to work longer hours. Bosses should hate me, but I underpromise and overdeliver, and I run happy motivated high-performing teams. I get great feedback from the people who work for me.

When I'm coding, I seem to forget about my own mental health. When I've got a tough deadline and a tough deliverable, I'll work as hard as I can. I get scared. I think I've forgotten how to code. I feel like my skills are rusty and outdated. I feel old and useless. So, because of this fear, I go as fast as I possibly can.

It hasn't helped that I've never quite managed to gain a comfortable financial cushion that would allow me to feel like I can consider my health and general mental wellbeing, as well as just delivering the software. I always put work as my first priority.

Me: "I'm going to go to London to do some IT consultancy for an investment bank"

Psychiatrist: "But that's what you always do, and you know it makes you unwell"

Me: "But I need the money"

Psychiatrist: "You need to look after your mental health"

Me: "My mental health can wait. I'm nearly bankrupt"

Psychiatrist: "Well go bankrupt then. Allow yourself time to recover"

Me: "But then I'll never be able to work in investment banking again"

Psychiatrist: "That might be a good thing. It makes you unwell"

Me: "Yes, but it also makes me rich"

In the interests of completing the picture: I am not rich. The amount that I earn would make me rich if I could stay well for long enough to keep working, but the stress and the pressure also mean that I almost always get sick. It's a horrible catch 22.

So, I've completed another software system and it's live - it's up and running and people like it. My boss is pleased. Am I burnt out? Yes, I am a little. I had to bunk off work yesterday. In fact, I've bunked 3 out of the last 9 days. Is this the beginning of me starting to take a little more care of myself?

The cycle is very much not over. I need at least another one or two decent length contracts before I have that all-important financial cushion. It's going to take me until the end of the year to get back to financial security. It's going to be months and months before the ever-present threat of running out of money goes away, even if some money is slowly starting to trickle into my bank account.

It's quite ludicrous that I was on collision course with certain bankruptcy, and now I'm solvent and I've delivered another project on time and on budget. Last year was the year where I gave up. Everything was just too damn hard. I had a great contract, then my kidneys packed up. I had an OK contract but the boss didn't seem to realise he'd hired a bit of rock star at a bargain basement price. I got a contract, but I only just had enough money to be able to afford to go to work... I was running on petrol fumes.

If you were to ask the most stable person you know to live my life, I guarantee that their mood would be unstable as hell. How can you expect anybody to go through the kinds of ups and downs that I go through, without accompanying high and low mood? My mood is a sane reaction to an insane world.

I don't think I have bipolar disorder. I think I'm a product of my environment.

Tags: #bipolar #career #computing #banking

This is a story about being gainfully employed...

Follow your dreams, as long as your dream is punching made-up numbers into a spreadsheet, trapped inside a depressing office with no natural light in the middle of an overcrowded polluted concrete jungle, with a horrible commute every morning and evening.

I started a new job this morning. I'm 1,200 miles from home. I had to take a train, a plane and an automobile to get here.

For a whole month, I wrote. That's a lie... I had some days off. I had to get my stuff from London, I had to get my passport from Manchester and I had some days when I just didn't feel up to writing, but I pretty much spent a month as a writer.

In order to indulge my artistic ambitions, I've had to give up a couple of months when I should really have been job hunting. My writing has also lost me lucrative contracts, when my Twitter/blog has been discovered by bosses. As a hobby, it's been incredibly expensive. As a job, it's been financially ruinous.

A friend of mine had two job options when he graduated: writer or computer programmer. He chose the latter, because the salary was five times as much and he wanted to be able to afford luxuries like food and rent. Another friend had the choice between an electric guitar and a computer. He chose the latter, knowing that it would pave the way for a lucrative career. I too have forgone opportunities to pursue academic interests, because of economic incentives.

In fact, we are strongly economically disincentivised from pursuing art. There can only be a handful of Damien Hirsts in the world, while there are millions of penniless artists.

They say that if you're good at something, you should never do it for free. However, how are you going to ever get good at something unless somebody's going to bankroll you while you're bad at it? Nobody is born with prodigious talent. There are also vast numbers of negative people who'll criticise, tell you that you're going to fail and tell you to give up and do something else. There are vast numbers of people who have a vested interest in seeing you fail - they don't want to see you succeed when they're too much of a gutless, spineless, miserable moaning, pathetic, uninspiring and otherwise wimpy excuse for a human being, to actually ever try to follow their dream or support somebody else in following theirs.

Given that it's rewarding to fuck about with paint or clay, stand in front of people singing or playing an instrument, act, play sports and otherwise pursue the performing and creative arts, one might argue that we're never going to be short of people who want to turn these hobbies into jobs. Wouldn't we all be artists if we could?

Here is the present paradigm: given an oversupply of people who'd like to do something more rewarding than the bullshit McJobs on offer, we have fierce competition for just a few slots. Only those who are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths, or those who are lucky enough to have been born into a family that already possesses wealth and fame, will be able to do a job that's fun rather than fucking awful.

Is capitalism working? Isn't capitalism supposed to reward those who work hard? Isn't the whole reason why capitalism's better than other systems of wealth distribution, because it incentivises hard work? What happens when that's no longer true?

The way I see it, we give up our childhoods to study hard, in the hope of getting better jobs. We give up our prime healthy years so that we can have a good retirement. What happens when the pension system is about to collapse and we can't hang on to the money that we've squirrelled away because our children can't afford houses? What happens when we bust a gut to get top exam grades and go to good universities, but there aren't any jobs and the ones there are wouldn't even allow us to afford the cost of living anyway?

Why are we working so hard? Why are we competing?

The competitive element of capitalism seems to have failed to deliver our most brilliant minds into productive endeavours. All those miserable hours of homework don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All those miserable hours spent in a traffic jam or otherwise in the rat race don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All I see is people chasing a dream that seems to slip ever further out of reach. What the hell are we doing, working so hard so that we might be able to one day stop and catch our breath, except we never can?

What happened to the age of leisure?

Of course, I see the irony and hypocrisy of writing this when I've been lucky enough to enjoy career breaks that have enabled me to write a couple of novels. "When do I get to write my book?" some might ask. Yes. I refer you to my previous question.

Something's gone horribly wrong and the prospect of a comfortable retirement is sailing over the horizon. Extrapolating, the prospect of any dreams being realised is an absolute one-in-a-million shot. As opposed to the buy-now-pay-later bogyman that we're all supposed to be afraid of, it seems to me as if we've sleepwalked into a kind of pay-now-never-get-the-benefit kind of dystopia. I really don't understand why people aren't chucking in the towel on their bullshit jobs and writing that fucking book. Why don't students say no to homework, and enjoy their youth? From what I can see, the stress and anxiety of modern life is ruining the vast majority of people's mental health.

I guess there are going to be growing pains, while we shift from a productivity-based capitalist global economy, back to a kind of life where we value human things like staying near our families, seeing our kids grow up and having what we want and need NOW not LATER. I mean, for fuck's sake we're not asking for much and we don't need much. Since agricultural mechanisation, we've been able to feed vast numbers with very little effort. Only about 1% of the UK's income comes from farming and fishing. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

So, as I beaver away in an office working Monday to Friday yet again, I wonder how close we are to that day when we all suddenly decide that enough is enough and we really don't need any more exotic and arcane ways of disguising the fact that what we do all day for 'work' is absolute total and utter horse-shit, for most of us. Why can't we all be artists?

Tags: #art #economics #capitalism

This is a story about medical notes...

My ex-wife - a biochemist by way of undergraduate degree - once screamed at me in an incoherent rage because I had innocently asked her "how big is a protein?" having wondered how many nanometers across, the average protein molecule measured. The sheer audacity of me asking such a question enraged her, perhaps because free thinking is expressly forbidden in an academic world which promotes rote-learning of facts and examinations graded to a marking scheme, ahead of learning.

(The answer, by the way, is roughly 3 nanometres in radius).

When I attempt to answer a difficult question, I sometimes pause and chuckle. "What is consciousness?" came one question. Although I was desperate to talk about weakly interacting subatomic particles, General Relativity and nuclear fusion, I somehow managed to constrain myself to a meaningless analogy, while keeping quiet about my "mind's eye" which could picture every piece of information that captured my entire existence, smeared out in a infinitely thin sphere at the event horizon of a singularity, across all meaningful spacetime for the entire universe that I will ever perceive, which would have been rather a mouthful to express.

Just as one may cram for an exam the night before, I've attempted to only ever amass the prerequisite knowledge that may be considered the minimum viable to navigate whatever situations I have had to endure to reach my goals. Education has never seemed like an end in and of itself, given that our understanding of the fundmental nature of reality is evolving, and the Standard Model of particle physics is rather long in the tooth. Although I find it quite delightful that there are quarks named strange, charm and beauty in the particle zoo, I would find it rather frustrating to dedicate years of my life, obtaining a degree and writing a thesis using tools which may soon look as clunky and outdated as Newton's inverse-square law of gravity.

The mathematicians will mock physics as simply being applied mathematics. The physicists will mock chemistry as simply being applied physics. The chemists will mock biology as simply being applied chemistry, and so on.

Computers are now capable of solving equations and modelling real-world phenomena, potentially making algebra and calculus into dying arts, along with handwriting and long-division. The Fractal Geometry of Nature has revealed that cold rational calculating machines can produce simulations that imitate reality, through repeating patterns. Massive computational power does not only aid human discovery of hidden algebraic equations.

Amid much fanfare, computer software is touted as potentiating new drug discovery by simulating molecular binding, protein folding, rapid gene sequencing and personalised medicine. However, we seem to have forgotten that half the planet is impoverished & hungry, and vast numbers of those who are fortunate enough to live in advanced, wealthy & technologically advanced societies, are suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues that is bad enough to drive vast numbers of men in the prime of their life to commit suicide: the biggest killer of males under the age of 45 in the UK - more than road traffic accidents, drug-related deaths, physical disease, murder, accidents and all the other causes of death.

One should consider that I took leave of my senses in 2008, but since that time I have only managed to attract two clinical diagnoses - convenient medical short-hand - although I have acquired a third which is perhaps the bluntest instrument of the three, and much more of a pejorative than a diagnosis.

"Substance abuse" is a catch-all term which serves me well when I haven't the time & energy to go into detail. Given humanity's long history of self-intoxication, some physicians would consider themselves to be well-versed in the matter. Even the most insulated amongst us, will have struggled to escape contact with a drunk in our lives. We quickly forget, of course, that psychiatry is an extremely young discipline. The isolation, refinement and synthesis of molecules which can short-circuit brain mechanisms, is something that dates back only 70 or 80 years, along with the branch of medicine chiefly concerned with treatment of matters of the mind.

The brain: the most complicated organ in the human body - estimated to have up to a quadrillion neuronal synapses - is often considered only in terms of its vital function as central nervous system, insofar as the same fatty grey matter helps other species to fuck, fight, flee and feed. This does not, however, tell us much about human consciousness, and even less still about pathological thought.

I once sat down and hand-wrote 12 pages of notes, from memory, of every General Practice doctor, psychiatrist and hospital, which I had attended during a 7 year period. Although I kept things as brief as I could, with names, dates and locations, as well as diagnoses and medications, there was a great deal to write. I'm not a complete hypochondriac - there were important notes about my episodes of depression and hypomania, where my mental health had caused me to become significantly dysfunctional.

Perhaps your mind is now skipping ahead - as mine often does - and you're attempting to finish my sentences. Presumably, you're trying to guess the punchline of the joke. I assume you've already got more than enough information to diagnose and treat me.

I'm second-guessing myself here, and I'm struck by the egotism and "navel gazing" of the very act of being sufficiently appraised of my own medical history that I should remember such a level of detail. Who the hell am I to take an interest in my own diagnosis and treatment? Where's my certificate, framed on the wall? Where's the photo of me wearing a mortar board & gown, and clutching a scroll of parchment with a red ribbon tied around it?

When I think about where I should spend my precious time and effort, I'm not motivated by the prospect of being an understudy to a failure. While psychiatry continues to produce dismal outcomes for humanity, in terms of the epidemic of mental health problems, addiction and general societal collapse under the weight of stress and burnout, I'm reluctant to follow in the path of those who are not succeeding in improving the human condition. It should however be noted that I do not for a single moment, criticise the well-meaning intent of those in the healthcare professions, nor do I mean to discredit the lifesaving work that takes place every single day.

The idea of using myself as a case study seems quite ridiculous, but one must consider that it would be unethical to - for example - risk a person's life when there is a treatment available that has been proven to be more effective than placebo.

With a sample size of one, perhaps nothing useful can be gleaned from my first-hand experiences, but I have attempted to corroborate my findings with other evidence wherever possible. I have deliberately avoided areas where another data point would make no difference: what use would it be if I too experienced anorgasmia as a result of SSRI medication, for example?

A great deal of our knowledge regarding the anatomy of the human brain has been gleaned from unethical experiments on unconsenting psychiatric patients - lobotomies, testing of medications and induced seizures. Animal studies have been gratuitously gruesome, with a great deal of unnecessary suffering inflicted upon primates. I'm not an anti-vivisection nutcase, but there must be very tangible goals to justify the means of obtaining the results.

To bathe a brain in psychoactive molecules that will cross the blood-brain barrier, is barbaric when we consider that the theoretical reasons why drugs have the effect that they do - the theories have so often been disproven. The 'chemical imbalance' theory that said that depressed brains had lower levels of serotonin, and that SSRIs would increase levels of synaptic serotonin, has been conclusively disproven, yet it is still a widely-circulated myth.

The much-vaunted sequencing of the human genome looks like a ridiculous white elephant of a project, when we consider that epigenetic gene expression had been discovered to allow genetically identical animals to exhibit completely different physical characteristics, depending on the environment that they have been exposed to.

In a collapsing global economy, education is one of the few sectors that's not feeling the pinch, and good solid science is getting drowned out in a sea of noise: pointless research. There are already excellent animal models which demonstrate that overpopulation and otherwise horrible living conditions, will produce a "behavioural sink" and addiction, in individuals who would otherwise lead happy healthy lives.

It has seemed fairly obvious to me from the start, that my mental health problems have stemmed from the ethical objections I had to the conduct of financial services organisations, and the role of global capitalism in ruining billions of human lives, in pursuit of unrestrained, unregulated and immoral profits, to the exclusion of any and all consideration of long-term consequences. In short: my problems should not be medicalised. I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world.

While this essay goes well beyond the "answer A, B or C" multiple-choice options on the prescriptive menu that is on offer, I feel that this does not invalidate the points I am making.

To have invested heavily in a mainstream education, would be to risk becoming incoherent with rage whenever somebody was so impertinent as to ask a thoughtful question - questions that spring into a mind that's unconstrained by the narrow status quo viewpoint, rote-learned while kowtowing to those with the necessary credentials to approve clones of themselves.

This is not "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" anti-intellectualism, but instead a suggestion that we don't need so many people who've all read exactly the same books and sat more-or-less exactly the same tests. Moving towards intellectual homogeny is as dangerous as book burning, in my opinion.

In conclusion: this is a convoluted way of saying that you're unqualified to judge me, although you're possibly technically correct if you say that my problems are mostly of my own making.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction

This is a story about depression and burnout...

If there's one thing I hate, it's a long drawn out journey to the grave. I really don't want to be on my deathbed, remembering the past, but unable to distinguish one day from any other. So many of us are in a routine of waking up, pressing the "snooze" button, having a shower, getting dressed, going to boring bullshit jobs, coming home, watching TV, preparing some food, loading the dishwasher, doing washing & ironing, and having joyless sex or masturbating to pornography - all purely to relieve the animal urges to copulate, eat, drink, piss, shit and sleep.

Life offers very few opportunities for memorable experiences, especially if you have made the ethical decision not to clone your genes through the impregnation of yourself or somebody else. This does not automatically mean that I consider myself morally superior or in a position to hand down judgements from my high horse. To write emotively on one topic does not logically confer that I hold negative views on those who have embarked up the one-way street that is motherhood or fatherhood. Please; do not send me your protestations that being a parent is both tough and rewarding. I KNOW that parenthood is something that I have no first-hand experience of. I DO respect everyone's unique set of life decisions - everyone's gotta live their own life as best as they see fit, and are able to do, playing the cards that have been randomly dealt to them.

My approach to life remains very much the same as it's always been: high risk, high reward.

I joked with a girl - mocking her - that I had fathered a string of illegitimate bastard children, and was being mercilessly pursued by the Child Support Agency (CSA) for money to pay for the upkeep of these offspring that I had carelessly brought into the world. She thought I was being serious.

So, where is all my wealth hidden? I've been a top-bracket taxpayer for most of my working life. Surely I can't have squandered so much disposable income on drink & drugs, and also been able to have a successful career. This is either unthinkable, or grossly unfair that I've had such a surplus, but yet still managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

I've paid for convenience whenever I've been able to. Why would I clean my toilet, when I could pay somebody less than I earn per hour? While the cleaner has the close encounter with the porcelain throne, I could be working on a more glamourous project that pays very handsomely. It's a false economy to clean your own toilet, just as it is to do all of the many household chores, which can be done by a professional housekeeper.

When you apply this cost:benefit analysis to your entire life, you end up spending 37.5 hours a week reading news websites and planning your next holiday; enjoying a lifestyle that is approaching the much vaunted "age of leisure".

If you think I'm lazy, you're wrong. Only a crazy person would do the same repetitive tasks that they could easily automate, or train somebody who's prepared to do the work - subcontracted or outsourced - for less money, which leaves you with a net profit AND you don't have to do the shitty job. Repeat this process, because it is scalable, and you're on the right path... assuming you want to be rich and have lots of spare time. Perhaps you LIKE punching meaningless numbers into spreadsheets. Perhaps you WANT to clean toilets.

I looked at a list of the seven deadly sins, and realised that I could be a poster boy for Christian immorality.

If you've ever taken an interest in astrology and the signs of the zodiac, then you're easily fooled by writing that is deliberately ambiguous, leaving the interpretation to the reader, to apply to his or her own life. Religion has made a healthy living out of contrived platitudes that are completely meaningless in the context of the realities of human existence. The Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah and all the other religious texts are so written as to be [mis]interepreted by the faithful flock.

One might as well say that if you breathe air, drink water, consume fats, proteins, carbohydrates, salts, amino acids and other vitamins and minerals, as well as trace amounts of every element & chemical compound, then you're a doomed sinner. If you urinate, defecate, ejaculate and perspirate, you're going straight to Hell. The demons that walk amongst us, corrupting our innocence and threatening to plunge society into chaos and destruction, are those who fornicate, copulate and enjoy fellatio or cunnilingus. The fact that all of these things are encoded into the very fabric of our corporeal vessels - the DNA of almost every cell in our body - is a fact that seems to have escaped the notice of those who are so easily conned by priests, vicars, preachers, witch doctors, shaman, tarot card readers, astrologers and other snake-oil salesmen and women.

I imagine I'd be pretty bummed if I found out I had an incurable terminal illness that was going to cut my life short, versus my expected lifespan. What would I do about it though? Which god should I pray to?

As a wise friend of mine said, you can be tricked by your genes into believing that love and hormonal bonding are real and tangible. If you think that parents, grandparents, great grandparents - and so on - are somehow going to end up 'less dead' than the people who didn't try to clone themselves, you're wrong. Even in the most anthropocentric & egocentric of interpretations of theoretical physics, you will have to witness the death of everybody you know, as well as the destruction of the planet, the solar system and the galaxies. Eventually entropy will be victorious over the entire universe, with time itself ceasing to be a meaningful concept and nowhere for you - or indeed anything - to exist.

If you believe in god(s) capable of making man and a world fit for human habitation, then you must also accept that this power is equally capable of destruction. He taketh away as much as He giveth - you can surely see this with your own eyes. This is the other side of the same coin that says that an infinitely small point, with infinite density and infinite energy, suddenly exploded into a universe. Following the same reasoning, either the universe will eventually collapse back into itself, by the force of its own gravitational pull, or it will expand until it is so uniformly cool and sparse that it is indistinguishable from the most perfect of vacuums - absolute nothingness.

I look at the world through a madman's eyes - I've read so much and delved so deep into the realm of the theoretical, proven in physical experiments as well as experiments that one can conduct through logical thought alone. I've seen, in my mind's eye, things that cannot be unseen. As Douglas Adams joked, if you see too much of the universe all at once it will destroy you - it's the ultimate torment; the ultimate death.

In an uncaring universe, I can see why people would seek comfort in the fairytale worlds of sky monsters and star signs, but it's pure childishness and immaturity. However, I envy the blissfully ignorant; I envy the blindly faithful, unshakable in their wilful stupidity.

I've worked very hard to master the machines of pure logic and reason - the computers - as well as spending most of my hard-earned wealth on lengthy periods, where I have absented myself from the demands of menial day-to-day existence. I told you that you were wrong about me having squandered my money on drink and drugs. The vast bulk of my conscious waking hours have been spent in startling sobriety; completely crystal clear thinking.

I carved three deep gashes the length of my forearm, with blood gushing out aplenty, before the arrival of two Metropolitan Police officers interrupted me. I can give you the long and exact chain of decisions that led me to do this, which were robustly defended by a logical thesis. That the police arrived was not a surprising outcome for me; in fact I had already anticipated everything that happened that day. The only thing that surprised me was that I was able to bandage my self-inflicted injuries using an actual first aid kit, which I discovered by chance, rather than having to resort to sanitary towels, kitchen roll and sellotape.

You would think that I would be completely insane, completely alcoholic, completely drug addicted or perfectly healthy, contented and conspicuously rich. Scratch the surface, and every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

If you think the world's gonna end, why hasn't it already? If you think everything's held in stable equilibrium, you simply haven't looked outside your front door: it's fucking war out there and nothing is stable at all. Civilisations destroy themselves and species go extinct - there's evidence of it everywhere.

Thus, you discover me - a distilled and concentrated form of sinner; completely unrepentant and embodying everything you were told in church to fear and shun; the very epitome of evil. Yet, I'm made of the same stuff as you.

I invite you to judge me; to critiqué me. I invite this criticism, because how can good exist, without evil?

Tags: #career #depression #suicide #bipolar #physics #religion

This is a story about succession planning...

The British have always liked hot drinks.

Coffee shops were terribly trendy in the late 1600s, having been launched in Oxford before springing up across London, where ships that brought the crop of beans to English shores found many willing patrons for the roasted, ground and brewed end product.

Tea symbolises imperial Great Britain. The Indian town of Darjeeling - formerly part of the British Empire - is synonymous with the tender leaves that citizens of the United Kingdom douse with boiling water, infusing bitter plant alkaloids into the hot liquid. "Put the kettle on" are four words that will be said in millions of homes this evening, despite the stimulating effects of caffeine.

Cocoa beans have given rise to hot chocolate, also known as drinking chocolate. Even a small UK food & drink shop will offer all manner of flavourings for hot water. Nestled in amongst the other things that my fellow Brits would categorise as 'hot drinks' I found something that I think of as a powerfully concentrated and flavoured spread, ideally enjoyed on toasted slices of bread - a jar of Bovril beef extract.

The flavour of Bovril is closer to Marmite and Vegemite - or any other brand of yeast extract - than it is to beef, in my opinion. How exactly they "extract" Bovril from a cow is something that I don't really want to think about. I suppose it's a macroscopic version of what they do with microscopic yeast - microorganisms are just the same as cattle really... eating, shitting, reproducing and not doing much else.

In this Bovril-drinking Northern city, conspicuous by their absence are people with skin tones darker than my own and women wearing headscarves. I formerly lived in a region where the population is 46% Muslim. Surprisingly, the Bengali shopkeepers have no issue with selling pork and alcohol to those who are not forbidden - for religious reasons - from eating swine flesh and imbibing the intoxicating liquor created from fermented fruits and grains.

In this unfamiliar part of Northern England, there are innumerable drinking establishments in my local vicinity, as well a vast number of hot food outlets where a bacon or sausage "bap" can be procured as a traditional breakfast snack.

India - before she was partitioned in 1947 - was a nation where Muslims would respect the holiness of cows in the Hindu culture, and reciprocally the Hindus would respect the Muslim rejection of pigs as unclean animals, and alcohol as an addictive intoxicant that places a heavy burden on any society that permits its consumption.

Modern global society still holds strong religious views on the treatment of domesticated animals and the brewing and consumption of alcohol. When we examine the historical evidence using the scientific method, we can see that cows and pigs would not exist today as we know them, without human intervention spanning many more thousands of years than even the oldest religion. Furthermore, we can see that humanity has been intent on its own intoxication throughout the history of civilisation. The Mayans were chewing coca leaves at least 3,400 years before Islam had its golden age, and vastly predates Hinduism and Judaism. Ergo, we must conclude that excluding beef, pork, alcohol and other things from our diet and habits of consumption is a relatively recent 'fad'.

The Chinese are the biggest per capita consumers of pork, while America and the developed nations hoover up vast quantities of refined coca leaves in the form of white powder cocaine and rocks of freebase cocaine, known as crack. Opium, morphine and diamorphine (heroin) are endemic worldwide. Caffeinated beverages - hot or cold - are guzzled by the globe. Alcohol is cheaper than bottled mineral water from desirable brands like Evian or Perrier. Yet, only in the North of England - so far as I know - do people consume a hot drink made from Bovril.

I hate being spread thin. I'm adaptable and I can be sent all over the globe to work with people who observe different cultural traditions. I am relatively worldly-wise enough to not commit a faux-pas, such as eating food before sundown in front of those observing the Ramadan period of fasting. I can pretty much figure out whatever you want me to do, if you're paying me enough and you're not open to persuasion that your ideas are probably terrible in their original unmodified form.

Why have a dog and bark yourself?

Now I find myself juggling the essential task of finding a doctor who will keep me supplied with the medications that I have become physically dependent on, while also settling in a new home in an unfamiliar city. I must also meet the demands placed upon me in the pursuit of enough money to eat, service my debts and give myself more security and freedom of choice.

I'm withdrawing from Xanax (alprazolam), Valium (diazepam), Ambien (zolpidem), zopiclone and Lyrica (pregablin). All of these drugs work in a very similar way - mimicking the brain's own 'brakes' and calming neural activity. These medications cause a chemical called GABA to be released in the brain, block the brain from recycling any unused GABA, or imitate the 'signature' of GABA itself. The overall effect is tranquillising, stress relieving and aids sleep, but the withdrawal is quite the opposite. In fact, the abrupt withdrawal from any or all of the medications listed can cause life-threatening seizures.

I must juggle social drinking - alcohol is a mandatory social lubricant in most UK culture - with the need to use alcohol as a form of self-medication for the stress I'm under. I also use alcohol as a substitute for the powerful psychotropic medications that my body has become dependent on, like heroin addicts kick their habit using methadone. Alcoholics can break free from physical dependence using benzodiazepines such as Librium (chlordiazepoxide). I'm doing it the other way round, because I know I can stop drinking - I plan on doing so in October, when I will use the excuse that I'm going teetotal to raise money for charity (a.k.a. Stoptober) - as I have done successfully before.

How I ended up with so much on my plate is not really my intended subject of this lengthy diatribe, but in my dark and difficult moments, I am facing a clusterfuck of competing demands on my time and energy, while also dealing with panic attacks and a general feeling of uneasiness and discontent; a false perception of threat, danger and imminent disaster.

My perceptions are not completely warped. Earlier this year, both my kidneys completely failed. Very recently I narrowly escaped homelessness, bankruptcy, destitution and destruction. Unpleasant feelings are a harbinger of a genuine medical emergency - I am detoxing myself without the supervision of a doctor or nurse, while also working full time.

I've skippered yachts and kept my crew safe in stormy weather; I've led groups safely up and down dangerous mountains covered with snow and ice; I've become blasé about near-death experiences, because I've now had so many. I don't think I'm exaggerating or being hyperbolic when I say that I'm facing my life's toughest challenge so far.

The demands placed upon me in my day job seem unreasonable at the moment, but I was desperate for fast cash. I was drowning and I was thrown a lifeline - beggars can't be choosers.

Friends who have submitted themselves to the mercy of the state seem to have suffered greatly from the trials and tribulations of dealing with compassion fatigued bureaucrats. A great many nurses and doctors have told me that I'm 'entitled' to live at the expense of the government - i.e. my fellow citizens - because of the taxes I have paid in my life, and because my mental illness disqualifies me from being 'fit for work'. To put work as my priority, ahead of treatment is something that none of my doctors want, but equally there's a long queue of people who would prefer to sit at home smoking cannabis and playing on their Playstations, rather than flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets for the minimum wage.

Like concentrated beef extract, I'm intense; I'm focussed; I can achieve a lot very quickly. The terrifying truth is that the world applauds anybody who exhibits bipolar behaviours... what happened to all those 'overnight successes' and 'one-hit wonders'? They spent all their money on fast cars, beautiful women, drugs & alcohol, and the rest they just wasted, is the oft-repeated quote.

Once you've figured out a winning formula, all you can do is teach others to follow in your footsteps. If you can train an army of mini-mes to do the grunt work - the heavy lifting - then life becomes more sustainable. Only a fool repeats the same behaviour, expecting different results.

And so, I desperately need to find my successor - somebody to fill my shoes and shoulder some of the burden, allowing me to recover and stabilise, rather than being trapped in a cycle of just repeating things that I've done before a thousand times.

It's hard to find somebody who's willing to do a shitty job, and it's hard to find somebody who's able to navigate their way through the piles of shit and find the better way of doing things. I might be that diamond in the rough, but that doesn't mean it's a great idea to get me scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers, even though I will do if you ask me, pay me and I'm desperate enough.

Having a desperation-driven economy, with most of us spread thinly - stressed out and always on the brink of breakdown and ruin - is a terrible, terrible thing to do to people.

Hunger will drive ingenuity and industriousness, but it's not a sustainable strategy, no matter how much Bovril you have to eat and/or drink.

Tags: #career #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #bipolar