This is a story about paying bills and suffering...

How do you explain to a doctor who's just met you, that you need to go to work because you've got rent and bills to pay - your ex-flatmate owes you thousands of pounds and left you having to pay for everything on your own - and you've got debts to service, friends who lent you money who need to be repaid and a looming tax bill that will be a whopping great big lump of cash that you've got to magic into existence before July.

How do you explain that depression and the Xmas and New Year break meant I couldn't work for months on end, and when my bipolar disorder causes an episode of hypomania, I'm liable to march into boardrooms and call all the executives a bunch of cunts... which you can get away with once or twice, but eventually you're politely asked to fuck the fuck off and never come back. How do you explain that I'm good for about 5 or 6 months of hyper-productivity each year, and the rest is a fucked up mess.

How do you explain that the whole process of speaking to a zillion agents, doing a zillion technical tests, having a zillion phone screening interviews and then going to a bunch of face to face interviews, with the associated highs and lows of contract offers and disappointments, being totally unpredictable and completely out of my control. How do you explain that it fucks with my mental health and makes me want to fucking kill myself, to have to go through that shit when I know I can do the job blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back.

How do you explain that the medical advice to not take any chances - belt and braces; assume the worst - would mean losing a contract that I was relieved to get and looking forward to starting. How do you explain that to lose that job would decimate my already dangerously suicidal mental health. How do you explain that I don't need much of an excuse to press the "FUCK IT" button and chuck in the towel. How do you explain that I've got a gun to my head and an itchy trigger finger.

How do you explain that I'm quite comfortable with a certain amount of death risk. How do you explain that I'm quite happy to balance risks against each other; weigh the pros and cons; make an informed decision, rather than just choosing the least risk option.

How do you explain that my life is not about least risk.

If I was about least risk, I'd have a permanent job where they'd give me as much time off as I need to get my health sorted. If I was about least risk, I wouldn't be living my life the way I live it: on the edge. I'd be living some life of boring mediocrity, safely within the white lines. I'd be kind of dead. Sure I'd be technically alive, but I would be dead inside. Boring mediocrity is the worst kind of death imaginable.

Be brave. Take some risks. Hold out for what you want. Don't blink first. Never back down.

It's fucking insane that I had my first day at work today and it went well, when a couple of weeks ago, I was convinced that everything was fucked and I was totally doomed. The only thing that didn't get fixed was my original injury - whatever mysterious shit happened to my dodgy left leg.

I've done my hearts & minds bit; I've done my shock & awe; I've made my good first impressions. Now I'm some way of the way to being able to say "erm, sorry, I might need a day off to get XYZ fixed up in hospital". Before today, I was an unknown quantity. The longer I'm in work doing a good job, the more goodwill I build up, and the more likely people are to be cool about me having to duck out for personal reasons, especially medical shit.

Anyway... my leg hurts like fuck even though I'm drugged out of my mind on tramadol, but working helped take my mind off the pain. I'm going to work and work and work. I need the money and it helps my mental health. Fuck boring risk-free life. Fuck compromise and going for the safe option. Fuck getting dicked over, because the whole working world is designed to break your will and make you feel valueless and replaceable, and get you to accept shit money and having to work for 48 weeks of the year. Screw that.

Do I want different special treatment? Nope. Things are just the way they are and there's nothing I can do about it. I can't pretend I don't have depression and hypomania and a real intolerance of getting an unfair share of the cash, versus the value I create for my employer. I can't pretend like my health doesn't need a bunch of time off work that doesn't fit in the 20 or 25 days holiday allowance wage slave bullshit. I can't pretend like earning my money in bursts, rather than some dreadful slow drip drip drip of relentless never-ending bullshit full-time employment. Work is a four-letter swearword. I'm allergic to boring work.

So arrogant, I know. So insane. So needlessly risky, right? Sorry.

Tags: #career

This is a story about sick leave...

On my very first week at my very first full-time proper job after college - working for British Aerospace - my friends talked me into pulling a sickie so that we could go to Alton Towers for the day. This was 1997 and I didn't yet have a mobile phone. I had to call my boss from a payphone in the car park of Alton Towers. You could hear people screaming with terror, as a rollercoaster thundered by, not far away from where I was making this tense phonecall.

I didn't make a habit of throwing a sickie. I moved to the town where I worked, so I could wake up late and walk to work. My boss was quite relaxed about me turning up late, as long as the work was getting done.

No sooner had I moved to Dorchester, then BAe decided to send me off to the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) on Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth. A friend and colleague, who became my boss for this project, would come into my maisonette every morning and coax me out of bed. The early morning starts were agonising, especially if I had spent the weekend clubbing in London and was recovering from drug-fuelled all-night dancing. My body clock was sent haywire, but because I was only 18, I suppose I could just about cope.

I didn't have another sick day with BAe or DERA, or with the next company I moved to Winchester to work for. When I worked for Research Machines near Oxford, I even managed to get to work during the petrol crisis. I was allowed a day off when snow pretty much paralysed the country, and I went sledging in Haslemere, Surrey.

As an IT contractor by now, I realised I could use the time off between contracts to do cool stuff. I went on a week-long RYA Day Skipper course, to learn how to sail cruising yachts. I spent time with family in Devon, and did my interviews over the phone.

The dot com crash and 9/11 were rather unsettling events, so I decided to take a permanent job with HSBC, who are one of the more conservative banks. The interview process was exhaustive, testing my literacy, numeracy, reasoning and a bunch of other aptitude tests, and a grilling from various managers. "Why do you want a permanent job when you're earning good money contracting?" they asked. "Why do you want to work in banking, now that the bonuses aren't so good?" they puzzled.

HSBC Asset Management had a very familial feel to it. They had a policy of hiring a lot of former London Irish rugby players, and Surrey and Middlesex cricketers. If you were accepted, they would look after you. There was camaraderie. There was true team spirit. There was also copious amounts of drinking.

Somehow I got through some 4+ years at HSBC without pulling a fake sickie. One weekend, I ate far too many magic mushrooms, and then a team in Hong Kong phoned me up to ask why millions of pounds worth of equities settlement messages were stuck in a queue and were not being processed. The backs of my hands looked like playing cards, the walls were throbbing and swaying and everything was bathed in bright green light. I made my excuses and quickly phoned a trusted colleague, begging him to handle the support call for me, because I had accidentally gotten a bit too pissed. He laughed and I got away with it.

I had a persistent tickly cough that was annoying me. I had read somewhere that dextromethorphan - the cough suppressant - could make you have a psychedelic trip if you took enough, so I rang my boss, and said that my cough was so bad I couldn't come to work. I then downed 3 bottles of cough syrup, containing DXM. I got precisely zero thrills out of that particular mad caper.

Moving to JPMorgan, I had the perfect job. I used to work mornings and evenings, and go kitesurfing during the day. I say 'work' but what I really mean is that I used to turn the volume up really loud on my laptop, so if somebody sent me a message or an email, it would wake me up and I could see whether I needed to deal with it. JPMorgan were really cool with people working from home, especially if you were supporting their live systems, which was mainly my job at first.

I loved that job at JPMorgan, and never pulled any sickies. In fact, I would often work weekends and late nights. I was pissed a lot of the time, and there were plenty of Friday afternoons in the pub where we never went back to the office except to get our coats and laptops on our way home, but that was the culture. Work hard, play hard.

Switching to New Look - the high-street fast fashion clothing retailer - I had a long commute to Weymouth every day and they didn't really know what they wanted me to do. I spent a day working in a store, which was interesting. I spent a couple of days at their distribution centre, watching the boxes of clothes arrive from the sweatshops, and the stock being sent out to the stores. I spent some time trying to understand what the hell they wanted to do as a business, and what the hell I was supposed to do about enabling it. Eventually, I broke down and decided I couldn't face the commute. I couldn't face the job. I couldn't face anything.

Three days off... no problem... just fill in a self-certification of sickness absence form when you get back to the office.

Four or more days off... got to go to the doctor and get signed off: get a sick note.

It started with two weeks off. Then a couple more. Then I couldn't even face going to see the doctor any more.

I found out what happens if you just stop turning up for work, sending in your sick notes, answering your phone... anything. I just disappeared. The company gets scared that they're going to get taken to some tribunal and found guilty of making somebody so stressed and unwell that they can no longer work. The company is scared it's going to cost loads of money and be hard to get rid of you, so they offer you a cash payment to fuck off quietly, promising you a good reference if you just resign.

With my JPMorgan bonus, my payoff from New Look and my iPhone App income, I was having a pretty bloody good year financially, despite being laid low with depression for a couple of months. I would have continued to take time off, but my phone rang and it was an agent with a contract in Poole: about a 20 minute drive from my house. I interviewed and got the job. I was the highest paid contractor in the company, which was a joke because the company mainly did Microsoft work, and I'd specialised in completely different technology. I actually bumped into another contractor I knew - Bob - and I felt bad that I was earning more than he was, because he taught me so much and he was so much older and more experienced. Oh well, the arrogance of youth, eh?

Anyway, my boss was this cool French guy who liked the fact I could speak colloquial French quite well, so he used to send me over to their main office in Besançon very often. It was great in the winter, because I could go snowboarding in a little place just outside Geneva, before flying home. Me and a friend bought a boat and used to go wakeboarding during our lunch hour. I took my boss out on my boat. I took one of my colleagues out sea fishing. Life was pretty sweet. However, I got bored and started claiming I had illnesses like swine flu, so I could take some time off work. I took so much time off sick, that my boss asked if I really wanted the contract anymore. I admitted that I didn't, so we parted company amicably. I partly needed to get away from an annoying guy with a ginger beard who I had to work with, who irritated the shit out of me.

I then became a full-time electrician. At first, I let the customers choose when I would do the work, and filled my diary up with lots of random jobs. Then, I learned that I could block time out, to give myself a break whenever I wanted. I could tell customers that I was booked up in the mornings, so I didn't have to get up early. It should have been a dream job, which allowed me to go kitesurfing whenever I wanted, but by this stage my relationship was on the rocks and I was depressed and stressed as hell. I didn't do much of anything. I sold my share of the boat. I started to get out of my depth with the work that I was taking on.

After becoming too sick to work, I had a couple of months doing nothing, and then a tiny bit of holiday cover work for a friend turned into some iPhone development work, which then exploded into my idea for a startup: Roam Solutions. I decided to create a software house specialising in mobile apps for enterprise. I threw together a hunk of junk proof of concept and we exhibited at the Learning Technologies conference, at Olympia. Somehow, in the space of a couple of months, there was a working app on iPhone and Blackberry, a fancy website and some glossy brochures. A whole exhibition stand had to be designed and built, allowing people to play with the phones but not steal them. There was so much branding to do. So much design.

I wasn't actually that passionate about what Roam Solutions did, which turned out to be mostly digital agency work. Rebranding as mePublish, then Hubflow; rewriting all the software and creating an Android version - those were momentary distractions. Sales meetings were stressful. Supporting your software 24x7 with just you and a mate is stressful. Getting any money out of our customers was like getting blood out of a fucking stone.

We managed to get about £16k out of a couple of customers and raised another £10k by selling a few percent of the company's shares. In return, me and my mate got to go on a 13-week 'accelerator' program. The program was fantastic fun, but exhausting. By the end, I didn't turn up for a couple of days because I was 'sick'. The truth was, I was burnt out.

I should have swapped roles with my business partner. He made a great CEO in the end, when I stepped down. Anyway, I just disappeared for months, and my friend helped to tidy up the mess and calm the shareholders down. I was almost out of cash. I needed a job.

I went to work for a company that helped people who'd got into debt problems. Not one of those debt consolidation places - we actually wrote to the creditors and negotiated debt-write offs, freezing the interest and lower repayments. We helped people avoid bankruptcy or IVAs. It was a cool company, but they wanted me to be IT director without actually vesting me in or letting me sit on the board. I wrote them a brilliant IT roadmap. They ignored it. I had an argument with the CEO. I went off on a sickie. The private equity firm that owned the company liked me and sacked the CEO. But then I got paid off because I couldn't face going back. The following year, I was at a conference, and there was the bloody CEO of the parent company, who'd followed my fucking IT roadmap to the letter, telling the delegates how well it worked. I felt proud, vindicated, but also I know deep down that it would have taken a lot of hard work to implement, and I was no part of that, so I can't really claim credit.

After the London Olympics, I went back to JPMorgan. I was not a well man. I was limping along.

I managed to fix one of JPMorgan's major issues that was threatening to cause a major catastrophe - front page of the Financial Times stuff - and then I disappeared, never to be seen again. I got a phonecall from my boss, saying I'd received an extra bonus in recognition of the important work that I'd done. I felt like a fraud, thanking him for that, but knowing that I was so sick that I wouldn't be able to go back to work.

My GP signed me off for 5 weeks, and my first thought was literally this: "I can get fucked up on drugs for 4 weeks and have 1 week to recover enough to go back to work."

There was The Priory. There was the separation from my wife. There was the realisation that the rumours of my mental health and drug problems were well known to everybody I knew in Bournemouth and Poole. It's a small place. I used to ride a tiny folding bicycle invented by Sir Clive Sinclair, for the 10 minute trip to work, but yet this had not escaped the notice of all kinds of people whose path I crossed. I was becoming known as a rather odd and eccentric character - a nutty professor; a madman; a drunk; a junkie. It was time to go somewhere so big that those kind of labels couldn't follow me around: London.

I put my back out picking up my niece to put her on the swings at the playground, so I had a week working flat on my back at home, while I was working for Barclays. I started to slowly relapse into taking legal highs, and ended up taking another week off, where I rewrote the entire software system we were working on in a nonstop hackathon without sleep. It rather made a mockery of the whole project, as well as terrifying the hell out of the architects.

At HSBC, I had a full on meltdown after my first week, realising that it was impossible to work a demanding contract while living in a hostel. Somehow, I managed to get away with a week off work, thanks to my sister ringing my boss and making excuses for me. I did also have half a day off because I was so dreadfully hung over once. I wasn't going to bother at all, but my boss persistently phoned me. I reeked of booze, as I turned up at my desk at 2:30pm.

At a well-known leading consultancy, working for the world's biggest security firm, I didn't take any time off at all. I was a little late on a couple of occasions, and had to ask one of my team to run my morning meeting on my behalf, but I was mostly a reliable little worker bee. It helped that I had a whole week-long holiday: my first relaxing week-long break for over 3 years.

I was all set to start a new contract with a well known high-street bank, who I once worked for when I was 20 years old and Canary Wharf was mostly just a building site. However, I knackered my leg, which caused my foot to swell up and my kidneys to fail. I had to pull a sickie on the very first day. Thankfully, they've waited two weeks for me to get better; most of which I've spent on a high-dependency hospital ward, having dialysis. My leg is still fucked.

And so, I go back to work tomorrow, limping along with my robocop ankle brace and doped up on tramadol. I've got one reliable reference from the last couple of years. HSBC hate my guts. Most people at Barclays were shocked and appalled that my contract was terminated early, and my boss lost his job over his decision to fire me, but do you think I can get a good reference? Who knows.

I should have paid my rent 10 days ago. I just told the taxman that he's not getting any VAT off me for a whole quarter, and he fucking hates that. I have no idea what my bank balance is, but I'm sure that what little money I have is being frittered away at a frighteningly quick rate.

However.

I could possibly delay a few weeks and get another contract. I could have stayed in hospital, letting them do their blood tests and fretting over my kidneys - which have proven resilient so many times before - and waiting patiently for them to finally take a look at my original complaint: my fucked foot/ankle/leg. It feels like I've torn a bunch of ligaments and muscle. It feels like my old injury has suffered major complications.

But, two weeks work gives me the best part of 3 months rent. If I can limp through the contract, I go from zero to hero. I've been so depressed about having to watch the pennies and not being able to treat my girlfriend to romantic dinners and whisk us off to exotic locations, or at least make plans to have fun. My plans have all been focussed on stopping the ship from sinking.

You might think I'm mad to take such a risk with my health, but mental health is part of it. Stress is part of it. Money and the need to not run out of it, is something that has to be considered. I don't trust myself: that I'm able to knuckle down and get on with the job. I did a good job of keeping my mouth shut in my last contract and it sorted me out financially a bit. This is my chance to continue that streak of improvement, if I can hold my shit together despite my health being a bit iffy. This is my chance to get in front. This is my chance to reduce all that stress and those worries and that anxiety and that depression about having to be super careful with money.

Anyway, let's see what happens tomorrow, eh? Let's see how sympathetic people are, about the fact that I've just been discharged from a high-dependency hospital ward, where I narrowly avoided chronic kidney failure, which would have meant having to have a kidney transplant and all the rest of that kind of shit. My leg is fucked, but I've found some contraption that allows me to get around without crutches. Still though, it looks like I broke my ankle or something. Surely, I've got to get cut a bit of slack, given what I've been through.

But, it doesn't work like that with IT contracting. Nobody owes me anything. The contract is between my company and another company. It's not an employment contract. It's a contract that says my company will provide consultancy services to their company - I could send anybody I think is qualified. I could hire somebody on minimum wage, train them, and send them to go do the job in my place, and I'd earn just as much money. However, the client doesn't really want somebody like me. They want me and they want me tomorrow at the latest, otherwise they'll just find somebody else. London's not short of talent. It was an extremely kind personal favour, that they waited this long for me to get better.

It's going to be horrible, starting work in pain and so exhausted from the nights in hospital where you're repeatedly disturbed by patients yelling out in pain, nurses coming to measure your blood pressure and take your temperature, and phlebotomists coming to take blood samples. They wake you up at 7am for the crappy breakfast of dry bread and marmalade. It's going to be a struggle to stay awake at my desk, especially with all the pain medication I'm taking.

So, it might all go to shit anyway, but at least I tried. I could have taken my sweet time over everything, and let the hospital string me along, but eventually, I can't cope with the frustration anymore: the lack of control, when your destiny is in the hands of somebody who doesn't even know what they're looking at. Somebody who's hiring because there's a knowledge gap in their organisation: they're hiring somebody who knows what they don't know, so how can they know that the person they're hiring knows what they know? So many stupid interviews, where the interviewer just wants to talk about the lame crap that they have just about managed to memorise. So tedious. In the end, intolerable.

I'm falling asleep and it's 5 o'clock and I didn't wake up until after 10:30am. Tomorrow's going to be fucking awful. But, think of the money. Just think of the money.

Tags: #career

This is a story about artistic integrity...

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

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

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

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

Of course, there is always compromise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love this quote:

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

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

I also love this quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #writing #art #hospital #career

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

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

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

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

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

But, I've started to burn bridges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #banking

This is a story about the precariat...

Here I am, in psychiatric hospital with underpants on my head and pencils up my nose. I think you will agree that this makes me perfectly qualified to run the country.

Having a manifesto is something that we associate with nutters who commit mass murder. The end justifies the means, in the minds of people consumed by their political ideologies.

Admitting to having political ambitions is laughable for an ordinary British citizen. The route into politics is through namedropping, brown-nosing and suffering the bullying & infighting of the dominant political parties, as you rise through the ranks. Going into politics is not about campaigning on a manifesto which comprises your deeply held political beliefs. Going into politics is not about a commoner being elected to the House of Commons. There's no room for the riff raff in politics and you're going to need wealthy donors to back you. You'd have to be stark raving mad to think you could get into politics as a representative of the constituents in your local area.

Politics is a career; it's not about improving the lives of your fellow citizens. There's no room for anybody who hasn't made politics their specialism. An interest in government is a fetish for three-line whips.

Political office is granted in recognition of a complete lack of empathy for the proles that a prospective MP has spent their whole life exploiting. Our ministers should be selected from a pool of wealthy elites, who have no concept of life without a trust fund and the advantages of nepotism. The benches of parliament should reflect the people who helped win those seats: the wealthy donors.

Pretending that political parties are given an equal campaigning platform, and that we don't have a two party system, is a hilarious prank that's being played on the electorate. Who could possibly compete with the big two parties, who hoover up so much political donation money? If you're looking to buy yourself a peerage, are you going to waste your hard-earned cash on a party that stands no chance of winning a majority? What a joke!

The top three manifesto promises of the Tories are: plutocracy, plutocracy and plutocracy. Crush the proles. Smash their unions. Keep them insecure and divided. Oh, what a glorious thing, to see the landed gentry literally lording it over the riff raff.

Posh little girls and posh little boys grow up dreaming about the day when they'll get to destroy the welfare state and lower the living standards of ordinary people. "On yer bike!" the jumped up little twits shouted when they were youngsters, and now they're ushering in the Britain they always wanted: where the only fucking job you can get is being a Deliveroo takeaway food bicycle delivery rider.

We don't want anybody getting into politics, who has any idea what life's like for the vast majority of British citizens. We need people who live and breathe the Westminster bubble, to think about real issues, like where they're going skiing this year with their barrister chums.

- ALTERNATIVELY -

I know what it's like to claim benefits, be homeless, suffer mental illness and have to navigate an under-funded National Health Service. I know how digital transformation will affect every aspect of the world around us, and I've worked in education, retail, defence, financial services, security, transport, housing & construction and a host of other sectors too. 

I've studied the dismal science - economics - as well as starting several profitable businesses. I have in-depth knowledge of almost every tax we have: from income tax to capital gains tax; from Value-Added Tax (VAT) to corporation tax; from import duties to stamp duty. I understand trade deficits, fractional reserve banking, financial instruments and the national debt.

With a background in science and technology, I have a big-picture view that broadly encompasses every aspect of modern life. This is not stuff I've read about and only understand theoretically: I'm a practitioner and I have real-world hands-on experience. I have a worldview that starts in the subatomic realm of particle physics and finishes in the intergalactic universe of cosmology, with a geopolitical overview of terrestrial matters somewhere in-between those two extremes.

I'm not a specialist. I have no desire to study the minutiae of anything, like a stamp collector or a train spotter would, but instead I've gathered knowledge of how all the different component parts fit together. It's no co-incidence that I've been able to write game of life type software simulations: computer models.

Anybody involved in politics would benefit from being a generalist not a specialist. When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's impossible to reconcile the competing views of thousands of specialists, because they all have a very narrow worldview. It's all very well being an expert in your field, but where's the balance?

If I was going to pick a bunch of people to run the country, they would be the fiction writers and the computer game designers. Without an enticing vision of the future, reactionary forces will drag us back into the dark ages. Without a working virtual world, how are you ever going to test your ideas, without your mistakes inflicting untold misery on real people?

As a prerequisite for becoming a minister, you should be able to build a thriving happy metropolis in Sim City and complete a game of Civilization through cultural influence, not war. If you're a failure in those virtual worlds how can you think you're even remotely qualified to wreak havoc on the lives of the electorate? We wouldn't turn you loose on the roads without a driving license.

All minsters and their children should attend state school and be treated by the National Health Service: you've gotta eat your own dog food. There should be a means test, that excludes wealthy families, trust fund babies and any nepotism: only a single generation of any family may enter into politics.

In fact, some of those who govern should be selected randomly, like jury service. Wanting to exercise any kind of power over your peers should be an automatic disqualification. The House of Commons should be balanced out with ordinary people, who have no interest in politics per se: it's the civic duty of every British citizen to muzzle the dangerous megalomaniacs.

Housing, transport, education, healthcare and a host of other essential services, are public services and as such, they should never be profitable. The state should have a monopoly on the things our citizens need. To allow a private firm to profit from our population's needs is a crime. The private sector is welcome to compete in the world of wants, but not needs. Simple economic theory will tell you that prices have upwardly inflationary pressure on things that you have to have: are you going to skip getting cured of that deadly disease, because it's too expensive?

Do you want to live in a world of zero-hours contract McJobs, insane house prices, stress, long hours, insecurity and indentured servitude, for the benefit of big business? That's what you're getting when you allow the country to be run by commercial interests.

We need to smash the plutocracy. We need to have dignity in labour. We need to be united, not divided by those who tell us that we're easily replaced and make us crawl over broken glass for a few mouldy crumbs. Inequality and the arrogance of the elites has reached unsustainable levels. We can't afford the rich any more.

If you think these are just the immature words of a bleeding-heart liberal who never grew up, and I don't understand the complexities of the world, I think you're being a mouthpiece of the elites when you say that it's not as simple as just dividing the wealth. It's easy to be an intellectual snob, because you believe you're destined for greatness. Just because it's not you, going with your cap in your hand to the mill owner to ask for a bowl of gruel, you could easily fall from grace at any moment. Just because you can't imagine what it's like to be poor and struggling, doesn't mean that it couldn't happen to the likes of you. Your fancy education and your expertise won't save you, when the working classes rise in anger and strike down the bourgeois rentier parasite class.

The irony of me writing this, while sipping champagne and looking out over the River Thames and the London skyline, from the balcony of my luxurious home, is not lost on me. The working-class heroes and self-made millionaires can be some of the most awful people. There's absolutely nothing humbling about rising up through the ranks and being successful; quite the opposite in fact.

I write as somebody who's been incredibly fortunate - getting propelled into a life of privilege and wealth - only to lose it all and have to rebuild from scratch. I write as somebody who knows that there's a fast track, as well as how hard it is to overcome prejudice and adversity. I write as somebody who can have delusions of grandeur as much as a sense of worthlessness. I know I'm flawed and I know I can fail, as much as I know how to succeed.

Worshipping power and status has led to layers of sycophantic courtiers, each one existing only to polish the egos of old men. Do you really want your whole country run, just so some exploitative megalomaniacs can be called Sir or Lord? Do you really think anybody deserves your respect, when they preside over the destruction of living standards in an epidemic of mental health issues, caused by the stressful modern life they created?

A central tenet of my desire for political influence, is my first-hand experience of depression, misery, exhaustion, stress and anxiety, which is an intolerable situation, created unnecessarily by unrestricted free-market capitalism. Are these the pillars that you want our working world built on? Should British citizens suffer as much as they do, just to have a crust of bread, a roof over their head and the hope of one day being able to pass on the suffering to the next generation? My answer is: no.

I don't necessarily believe that the state should own the means of production, but the workers should benefit most from the fruits of their labour. Wealth needs to be distributed, not concentrated in a few idle hands. Trickle down economics is a terrible lie.

I think that without social reform, eventually people will put down their tools and violently protest at their exploitation.

Obviously, I'm just a maniac up on my soapbox, shouting absolute nonsense, but who do you believe more: the wealthy elitist who tells you that everything's fine, or the person who's suffering at the hands of those elites?

Tags: #politics

This is a story about bias...

When you go hypomanic, you overestimate your capacity to work without sleep and food; you overestimate your ability to take on difficult tasks without negative consequences; you believe you can achieve superhuman feats. Often, hypomania can mean hypersexuality and the belief that you're irresistible to the opposite sex. Hypomania brings extreme risk taking, for me, and I'm a big risk taker anyway!

There must be an element of underestimation too. When hypomanic, you underestimate the difficulty of what you're trying to achieve. You underestimate the risks and the consequences of failure. "How hard can it be?" you find yourself thinking, as you get stuck into the quantum mechanics books. I rejected a highly paid career, in favour of building my own business, mostly because it seemed like it would be quick and easy at the time.

Depression has flipped all that on its head. I had an interview with a well known high-street bank earlier in the week. I thought it went dreadfully and I sank into an even deeper depression, because I gave such an appalling performance. I was beating myself about things I said and cringing about holes in my knowledge and experience that the interviewer had exposed. Then my agent phoned me:

"They loved you. They want to meet you again"

I spent the rest of the week dreading this second interview. I imagined all the things that they were going to ask, that would be difficult for me to answer. They were going to haul me over the coals and my incompetence would be laid bare for all to see. It would be embarrassing; shameful. I was losing sleep over it and waking up each day with a feeling of dread.

At the second interview, they cooed enthusiastically at everything I said, and laughed encouragingly at my anecdotes. It was almost as if we were friends and work colleagues, gossiping conspiratorially about the good and bad things that happen in the world of grey suits and office blocks. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Afterwards, I thought "oh no!" What if my intuition is wrong again? What if there's an inverse correlation between how I feel like things went, and how impressed my interviewers were?

Depression is almost like a defence mechanism: a reaction to a hostile world where bad shit happens. When the UK voted to leave the EU, and when the USA voted for Donald Trump, I had placed bets correctly on both outcomes, at substantially long odds. I knew I was sad that those things had happened and I didn't make enough money to be happy, but I still didn't really feel anything even though they were awful events. I was prepared for the worst. In fact, I expected the worst.

There are psychological experiments that prove that depressed people are able to perceive the world more accurately, in certain circumstances. This depressive realism is the antidote to illusory superiority. This depressive realism is the antidote to the madness of crowds and a misplaced sense of optimism.

Humans are notoriously bad at perceiving the risk of very real and likely events: stock market crashes, earthquakes and hurricanes. If we were risk-averse according to probable catastrophes, we would steer clear of the Pacific Rim of Fire and the San Andreas Fault, but yet we see insane real estate prices and a concentration of our best technologists, in Silicon Valley and Japan.

London is currently rated by MI5 as at severe threat of international terrorism: an attack is highly likely. When I see huge crowds of people at Canary Wharf underground station, I see a swarm of sitting ducks. There are two vans full of armed police parked nearby, but it doesn't make me feel any safer... it just makes me glad that I don't have brown skin.

On a day-to-day basis, I generally assume I'm going to be blown up by a terrorist, fail to get a job, run out of money, be evicted, be declared bankrupt, never be able to work again, society is going to collapse, there will be riots and looting and the human race is going to retreat into the dark ages of barbarism, religious dogma, superstition and ignorance. It just seems likely, given the evidence.

I might be wrong, but I tend to put my money where my mouth is, and I've sadly been right more than I've been wrong.

I just placed a bet on Marine Le Pen. I hope I lose.

Tags: #depression #bipolar

This is a story about orotund pontification...

Please excuse my magniloquence, but I'm attempting to brow-beat you into submitting to my intellectual superiority. My ostentatious language is not intended to communicate, but to intimidate. The purpose of my education was not the pursuit of knowledge, but the ratification of my pre-eminence. The plebeians' obmutescence and the academic elites' hegemony is the natural order of things. The lower orders should be seen and not heard.

Our rulers and their mandarins are publicly schooled - Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester - before studying PPE at Oxford. Inherited wealth, the nepotism of political dynasties and the inside track - knowing how the corridors of power function - means that we are governed by the elite of the elite, not by our peers.

Education and publishing are dominated by sycophantic courtiers - the landed gentry - reflecting our aristocracy's vested interest in culture and society being fixed and unchanging. Dead languages and classical chamber music are fetishised.

In order to prevent the working class from getting ahead many professions have overtly defended themselves through the use of Latin instead of English. Studying the classics will set you in good stead for medicine and law, although the majority of your patients or clients will not speak Ancient Greek.

Like a virulent disease, the self-interest of those in power, causes every aspect of our society to be shaped to reflect the values of the ruling class. The 'correct' answers in an examination are the ones that parrot conventional wisdom, maintaining the status quo. The 'correct' use of language is the most formal, not the colloquial.

Little by little, the self confidence to freely express your thoughts and feelings, is eroded by a hierarchy that wishes to clip your wings. It's a free country, provided you've attained the prerequisite level of education and write only in a manner which pleases your superiors.

As a little game, sometimes I posh it up a bit. Sometimes I talk like a public schoolboy and do you know what happens? Genuine posh people ask "where did you go to school?" as if I was one of them.

"Your evidence is anecdotal" I hear you say.

What about the Castilian lisp?

"Insufficient evidence"

What about the fact that people watch the Queen's speech or stand for the national anthem? What about the fact that people follow the life of Kim Kardashian?

Wherever we turn, we see ordinary people obsessed with the private lives of the ruling elites - the aristocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy and vapid celebrities - imitating their affectations.

Didn't you fantasise about being prime minister, marrying a prince or living in a castle, when you were a child? You still have those dreams today, but you pretend that you don't. Your desire to be special - number one - has been corralled into some specialist area. Maybe you're the best fudge packer in the factory, or maybe you got a 2:1 degree from a former polytechnic, but your creativity and energy was channelled into something that makes you feel like a king or queen in your little fiefdom.

You read Harry fucking Potter, didn't you?

There's a certain joyful lightness when you read something that's well written and not just written to obfuscate any meaning and stupefy everybody except for your elitist Oxbridge chums.

Why must we struggle through the supposed great works of literature, which are a crime against the enjoyment of reading? Why must we be told at every juncture, that we just don't understand how complex the world is and that we should leave it to the experts, because they know best.

It's extremely easy to come up with exceptions to any rule. It's extremely easy to pick holes in any theory or model. It's extremely easy to find areas where a person's worldview is incomplete. It's extremely easy to be the smug critic. This is the role of academia: to undermine and discredit any challengers, who threaten our dogmatic rulers.

We funnel our children through a system where they learn to kiss the arses of their teachers, lecturers, professors, Ph.D. supervisors, viva voce examiners and those who award tenured professorships. For anything to be printed, it must pander and conform to the preconceived notions of an editor or publisher. Only the most obedient servants will rise to prominence, because they are most complicit and compliant with the will of the ruling elite.

Nothing ever changes - for the better - because of the inherent homogeny created by our education system, which feeds into a political system predisposed to select a public schoolboy - born with a silver spoon in his mouth - with an Oxbridge degree, instead of a normal person who actually knows what it's like to be an average UK citizen.

We aren't choosing our brightest minds to help with the challenge of building a better society for all its members. We're choosing the very worst kind of people: snobs who think that dead languages and chamber music are culturally important.

There's a big difference between being anti-intellectual and being pro-ignorance. Being a great thinker is about having a brilliant mind, not about being able to follow a well-trodden path with your fellow privileged brethren, steered by your sharp-elbowed mother.

We've built walled gardens where spoiled middle-class children can strut and swank, safe from criticism that they're far removed from the real world. We've built robust defences to insulate the intelligentsia from responding to valid critique: only the views of other academic elites will be dignified with a response, and out of courtesy and wilful ignorance, nobody dares to burst anybody else's bubble.

Commentary and satirical magazines - Private Eye and The Spectator, for example - as well as the 'free' press gives the impression that there are some checks and balances. In fact, to have the good fortune to come under the critical gaze of one of these newspapers, is to feel as though you have been given a seal of approval: further endorsement of the importance of your good work.

What - pray tell - does the person who makes your lunch think of your job? Who cares. I doubt they can even string a sentence together.

There's an automatic filter, that rejects anything that sounds a bit common, you know?

On the lead up to the EU referendum, I noticed that social media was awash with rather over-zealous use of punctuation marks, capital letters, as well as a great deal of confusion over common homophones.

"That's unreadable" I heard you say.

Really? Does the use of a greengrocer's apostrophe or mixing up your "you're" and your "their" with your "they're" and "there" really make something unreadable? Does it really alter the meaning if you write "less" when you should have written "fewer"? You must be very stupid if you can't read something and see past a couple of typos.

Writing accessibly doesn't mean dumbing down. It's perfectly possible to set aside your arrogance and write in a manner in which you know you are much more likely to be understood, without a scramble for the dictionary. Are you really so insecure that you need to turn your writing into a demonstration of your extensive vocabulary? Save it for The Times crossword.

The fetish for institutionally issued 'qualifications' has led us to the situation where the vast majority of people are turned off by politics, philosophy and literature. The condescending manner in which our intellectual elites talk, has led to their rejection by the masses. Our finest minds have unwittingly - and stupidly - played straight into the hands of the populists, who write and speak to impress their audience, not their fellow elitists.

Politicians canvas public opinion, so that they can win votes, but they turn to their advisors - Whitehall, think tanks and academia - when they come to rule. Political parties, media and the think tanks are all funded by commercial interests - influencing public opinion by sheer weight of noise. A rising crescendo of contradictory opinion on social media was drowned out by the views of a handful of academic elites, with their puppet strings pulled by those who control the purse.

It offended me the other day when the philosopher A C Grayling wrote that ordinary people are "narcissistic" when they publish their opinions. It was tantamount to writing "STFU, plebs".

We need to have another Gutenberg moment, where ordinary people can finally overcome the barriers that stop them from being heard. Blogging platforms like Wordpress go some of the way, but mainstream media, academia and politics are doing an excellent job of marginalising and discrediting the groundswell of public opinion on social media. The constant bombardment of "fake news" stories in the [non-fake] news seems like an attempt to get us to disregard the opinion of our peers, in favour of the approved opinions printed by newspaper tycoons.

We need to change our society - from boardrooms dominated by wealthy old men, government dominated by privileged elites and publishing dominated by academics - to a society that's representative. I'm not championing ignorance and lies. I'm not suggesting that brain surgery should be performed by amateurs. I'm saying that snobbery and elitism has reached the end of the road and everything that's good in the world will get torn apart by destructive forces, unless we listen to the proletariat: they outnumber the cruel and condescending ruling class.

"My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" -- Isaac Asimov

This quote seems to neatly encapsulate the battle between the stupid & ignorant and a class of people who know better than everybody else. Certainly, the letters after your name tell you that you're a cut above the rest don't they? You studied hard at university, so you must be more knowledgeable than those dimwitted fools who didn't attain the same standard of education as you, right?

As I wrote before, being anti-intellectual is not the same as being pro-ignorance.

Is it possible, that people are sick of being voiceless, unrepresented and talked down to by people who are so privileged that they have absolutely no idea what ordinary day-to-day life is like for most people? Is it possible that people are sick of being told that geopolitical complexities are beyond their comprehension and they should just leave things to the people who crashed the economy and started a bunch of wars, destabilising the world.

Is the desire to simplify problems and put things into terms and language that can be universally understood, the wrong approach? In my experience, jargon and impenetrable complexity exists only to justify pointless jobs and make talentless twits seem indispensable. If I was going to sack one person, would it be the front-line worker or the middle-manager? Is that a hard decision to make?

All this talk about facts and expert analysis: has it truly added any value?

Of course I want my bridges to be built by civil engineers, not amateurs, but I don't want career politicians, political commentators and intellectual masturbation.

The whole point about democracy is that the people govern themselves, through elected representatives. If our government and our media is not representative, because it's stuffed full of elitists, then we've completely failed to create a democratic society. It's not like a bunch of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses are saying they can do a better job of flying the plane than the pilot. It's literally that democracy has been perverted by the plutocracy.

Have a look at this list of autodidacts and ask yourself if they're ignorant fools who've contributed nothing to humanity.

Formal education, an obsession with conformity and the rejection of ordinary people's opinions, on the basis that they are stupid and ignorant, has led us to obscene wealth disparity and untold human misery. The reason why you don't believe it's true is because you're surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic class and you disregard the 'unreadable' comments of the great unwashed masses. The peasants are revolting.

Unless we give ordinary people a voice, they will never be able to develop their own philosophy for the 21st century, explore political ideas and challenge the plutocratic interests that seek to enslave them.

Until we end intellectual snobbery, we are on a collision-course with a popular uprising that will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Tags: #politics #writing

This is a story about treatment for drug addiction...

Having been to four different rehabs, I feel fairly qualified to give a few insights into what happens behind closed doors. Residential rehabs often hide away in leafy suburbs, where there are large houses that can accommodate human trash: dirty junkies and nasty alcoholics.

"Death's too good for 'em! String 'em up!" I hear you say.

Yes, yes, don't worry. We'll get to the idea that an addict will always be an addict, and that we should just write them off as a lost cause.

Boscombe in Dorset - an area of Bournemouth - is where many councils choose to send their difficult members of society, from all over the country. Supposedly, being by the seaside will be good for recovering alcoholics and former drug addicts. There are certainly plenty of rehabs in the area. Even Paul Gascoigne has found himself shuffling around Boscombe's streets, buying bottles of gin from the local off-license.

Ironically, many years after moving to Bournemouth, I became addicted to drugs and found myself in the perfect place to get treatment for my addiction.

Let's talk a little bit about drug addiction.

Having a 'drug habit' is not the same as drug addiction. 'Experimentation' is not the same as addiction. Partying is not the same as addiction. Addiction will rapidly destroy your health, wealth and prospects. Hospitals, police cells and prisons are the institutional stomping grounds of the addict, on their rapid descent into the fires of Hell. If you're successfully hiding your habit from your friends, partner and boss, then addiction hasn't fully taken hold. Addiction is destructive.

What about detox?

You can't really rehabilitate while the drugs and alcohol have got their hooks in you. If you abruptly stop drinking, you might get the shakes, become delirious, have a fit and maybe even die. If you stop taking heroin, you're going to feel sick and in pain. If you stop taking cocaine or amphetamines, you're going to be unbelievably exhausted and depressed, to the point where you're in real danger of killing yourself.

"You should kill yourself if you're a junkie" I hear you say.

What you haven't understood is that drug addiction is slow suicide. Do you think the addict or the alcoholic isn't aware that their body is getting utterly fucked up, and they're going to go to an early grave?

Detox is about breaking the physical addiction that the body has to drugs and/or alcohol. Detox is about suffering the worst of withdrawal, in an environment where substitute drugs can be administered to make the process safe, humane and tolerable. An alcoholic literally risks death if they stopping drinking without Librium. Is it ethical to ask people to die just because you're hung up on ideas like "willpower"?

There's the term "psychological addiction" that needs to stop being used. It's better to think about addiction like this: why did somebody get addicted in the first place?

"Because drugs are fun" I hear you say.

There are shitloads of people who take drugs all the time but they aren't addicts. Every weekend, raves and nightclubs are packed full of people taking Ecstasy (MDMA). Vast quantities of cocaine gets hoovered up by the eager nostrils of young professionals in cities around the world. Every day, a huge proportion of humanity smokes cannabis or drinks alcohol. Why aren't all these people raging addicts and alcoholics?

If you ever feel like quitting, remember why you started.

Most addicts' lives were truly appalling before their addiction took hold. For sure, addiction doesn't improve anybody's life, but it's not like there's any hope of a better life just because an addict quits drugs. The cycle of petty crime, scoring drugs, getting sick, being hospitalised and being locked up... it doesn't look great, does it? But what's the alternative? Flipping burgers and still not having enough money to make ends meet?

So, it's obvious that the rehabilitation process will only be successful if it can return a person to a better life than the one they were trying to escape from with drugs and drink.

The first rehab I attended was in Bournemouth, situated in a grand house at the end of a sweeping driveway, surrounded by mature pine trees, on a road of millionaires' mansions. The place was full of people from Greater London and the surrounding counties, ejected by their councils to make room for more rich middle-class people.

The biggest issue amongst my fellow rehab residents was housing. Boscombe has vast numbers of crappy bedsits that can just about be afforded with housing benefits. London and the South-East has no cheap housing for undesirable members of society. My fellow rehabbers were gleefully pushed away from where they were born and bred - and their families - because they were written off.

A typical day at the Bournemouth rehab would consist of a breakfast of baked beans, white toast and cheap sausages, followed by many rounds of tea, coffee and biscuits, until the 'therapeutic' day began. There were two or three sessions a day, where everybody sat in a big room, slouching on comfy sofas, vaping on e-cigarettes and slurping drinks. It was supposed to be group therapy, but it was basically just listening to heartbreaking tales of people's children being taken into foster care.

Most of the day in Bournemouth rehab was given over to matters of court appearances, housing office appointments, social worker visits and attempts to obtain various forms of welfare benefits. Almost everybody in rehab was in poor physical health, due to a life of drug abuse. Almost everybody in rehab had some underlying mental health disorder.

Those were the dregs of society, but they were warm and welcoming and they accepted me as one of their own. I was warned by staff to leave my iPhone at home and watch my wallet, but I never felt for a single moment as if my peers were going to rob or take advantage of me. I was somewhat appalled by the staff members' low opinion of their service users, but I suppose there's an element of the gamekeepers and the poachers: anybody who's keeping you under lock and key is kind of fair game, because resentment is going to build about the power that staff exercise over people in treatment.

Over the course of the 28-day program, my fellow rehabbers and I would build up special privileges for good behaviour, such as being allowed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous meetings. Being allowed to go into town, accompanied by a staff member, was the next privilege that accrued. Then, trips to town were permitted when accompanied by a peer who had attained 3 weeks of good behaviour. Finally, you might prove yourself to be trustworthy enough to go into town alone or as a chaperone.

Transgressions could include: not getting up in the morning, not doing your assigned chores, not attending group therapy, being caught with contraband, failing a drugs test and - most serious of all - going somewhere without permission.

Being expelled from rehab for going into town on your own might not sound like a terrible consequence, but almost everybody was there because treatment was mandated by the courts, as part of parole or an attempt to retain contact with children. Being chucked out of rehab could result in going back to prison, or never seeing your children again. The line between treatment and punishment was rather blurry.

My next rehab was 5-star luxury by comparison. You might have heard of it. It was The Priory.

If you're paying £12,000 for a 28 day stay in the countryside, you'd expect it to be pretty nice, wouldn't you? The Priory certainly delivered on making me feel special and cared after... for a high price. Therapists outnumbered patients, the bedrooms were very well appointed and comfortable, the food wasn't bad and there were luxuries like a gym and grounds to take a stroll around. Nobody was made to feel like a prisoner under house arrest.

Unsurprisingly, my fellow Priory rehabbers were rich compared to the Bournemouth lot. There were six-figure salary earning executives and heirs to multimillion-pound fortunes. Alcohol was also the predominant poison, as opposed to heroin.

One girl was so desperate for a drink, that she filled a mug with hand sanitising gel - which contained alcohol - and sweetened it with orange squash.

Therapeutic days were packed full of yoga, mindfulness, art therapy, educational videos, as well as group therapy. Supposedly following the 12-step program we only had enough time to complete the first two steps. AA and 'aftercare' meetings were held in the evenings at The Priory, which we were encouraged to attend, but most of us just watched DVDs in our bedrooms.

In my final week at The Priory, I asked "what next?"

Turns out that 28 days just isn't long enough to turn your life around. 28 days is just about long enough to get over the worst of the drug withdrawal and start thinking about how awesome the drugs are going to feel after a little break and three square meals a day. Aftercare programs are almost as expensive as rehab and last 3+ months: who's got that kind of money and can afford to take that long off work?

Having been through an acrimonious divorce, sold my house, rescued a tiny fraction of my most treasured possessions, boxed my life up, put everything into storage and suffered a horrible family Christmas, I was pretty fucked up by the whole ordeal. I needed to get cleaned up and straightened out again.

The next rehab I booked, I asked for a detox. I didn't want to have to get up in the morning and go to stupid group therapy. I hadn't slept or eaten properly for weeks. I'd been taking benzodiazepines for months and it was possible that I'd developed a physical dependency that could be life-threatening. I needed professional medical care.

The rehab I ended up in was like an alternative therapy spa break. There was a hot tub - called the sex pond - and a vibrating massage table, with whale music playing in the pitch black room. The main thing I was there for was sleep, food and a doctor on hand in case I had a seizure. Reluctantly, I consented to have acupuncture and to do some mindfulness: both of which I fell asleep during.

Most of the staff were kind and caring, but the guy who owned and ran the rehab was a complete egomaniac who clearly wanted his own cult. This idiot tried to force me to attend 'group' therapy, which was basically him giving interminable boring monologues about the time when he went into a Native Indian sweat tent. Believe me, the last thing you want when you're recovering from a near-fatal toxic combo of drugs, is to be a captive audience for some total moron.

While I was at that third rehab, a man was brought in, smashed out of his mind and covered in red wine. He'd been transferred up from the first rehab I'd been in down in Bournemouth. He'd walked out and gone into town to get pissed. Revolving doors.

I had to get away from that place. It wasn't therapy. Fuck knows what it was. Probably just a bit of respite for both family and addict alike.

Finally, I achieved what I wanted: I got back to London. Bullshit family Christmas was over. Divorce and house sale was over. I was free from horrible destructive relationships and nasty people, but I had picked up an addiction and failed to deal with it. My life to that point had been dictated by people who didn't care about my welfare.

I got myself into my fourth and final rehab: a 13 week residential treatment program in Kensington, West London.

Immediately, the place felt right. Rehabs are supposed to be run by former addicts and alcoholics. The guy who I met on my initial assessment had gold teeth and mean tattoos. The guy who ran the place had a massive scar across his face. These were people whose opinion an addict could respect, because they'd been all the way to rock bottom and back again: they'd seen friends die from overdoses and a lot of other rough shit too.

My most important lesson in rehab was how to do time. I had already been heavily institutionalised by working my whole career for massive corporations - with the limits that full-time work and education imposes on your freedom - but I still had lessons to learn about liberty. It helped a great deal that one of my fellow rehabbers was a young lad who'd been in prison twice by the age of 21.

Rehab is literally a kind of house arrest. You can leave anytime you want, but there will be consequences. It was fun to walk up to the gate (pictured above) and put a foot out over the pavement... just stopping short of taking a single step off the property.

It's not too hard to white-knuckle 3 or 4 weeks of abstinence. The first couple of weeks you'll feel awful, but your body is so abused that it's grateful for the sleep and the food. The next week or two are hard, but you know there's light at the end of the tunnel: you'll soon get your fix. You just have to count down the hours, minutes and seconds.

I don't believe you can rehabilitate somebody in just 3 months. So many things get fucked up when you're an addict. You need to get a job and go back to work, pay your bills and any debts that got racked up, repair and replace broken stuff and get a place to live. Everything got fucked up by my addiction: my shoes and clothes were wrecked and everything in my life was in total disarray.

Imagine being a company director through a period of addiction. My accounts and taxes were all messed up, and important paperwork was lost or misplaced.

What about my CV? How could I explain those periods of absence from work?

What about my routine?

Do you realise how much of your life runs itself on autopilot? You pay your rent/mortgage, council tax, electric, gas, water, sewerage, broadband, mobile phone, home insurance, life insurance, car insurance, road tax, MOT, TV license and a zillion other things. You get up every day, have breakfast and go to work. People know and respect you at work and you know how to do your job. You see your friends and socialise. You have your hobbies and you exercise. Do you think you can put all that stuff back together, running smoothly, overnight?

When you're an addict, everybody distances themselves from you. It's obvious that if you even so much as speak to an addict, they're going to steal your newborn baby and sell it to buy crack cocaine. It's obvious that anybody who injects marijuana or sniffs glue is a worthless selfish nasty person who's out to kill you.

Rehabs are necessary because family and friends are judgemental gossips who offer you useless advice like: "have you tried not taking drugs?" or "maybe you should just stop".

Rehab was a holiday from being judged to be an evil failure, morally weak and simply lacking in willpower.

Rehab showed me that I do have the willpower to stop taking drugs whenever I want. Rehab showed me that I'm not weak and I'm not powerless.

By the time I finished my four stays in rehab, I still hadn't run out of money, I had never been arrested, locked up, hospitalised or homeless. I had been nowhere near rock bottom.

I never actually reached rock bottom though. I experienced things that were awful at the time, but I needed to have those experiences.

Stopping drugs is the least of anybody's concerns. Drugs actually help when your life is unbearably shit. Just ask anybody who suffers from depression or anxiety if they'd like to give up their antidepressants or tranquillisers.

Obviously, I'm glad I never got a criminal record or sustained any life-changing injuries, but maybe I needed to come close. Being locked up in a police cell a couple of times and spending weeks in hospital, were not things on my bucket list, but I think they were necessary experiences to complete my adventure.

When the time was right, I got a place to live, a girlfriend and a job. Without those things, life isn't worth living, but equally, those things don't create recovery.

Bullying was relentless and intolerable at school for 11+ consecutive years. Nothing I did was ever right or good enough for my parents. My parents' relationship was appalling - full of verbal abuse and hostility - and I got involved with a girl who physically and mentally abused me, who I stayed with for many years. I got so used to broken, abusive relationships. Do you think that kind of stuff can get healed by 28 days in rehab? Do you think that all my problems came about just because I sniffed a bit of white powder?

You might think I act normally and sound perfectly reasonable, rational and able to string a sentence together, but it's the opinion of the medical professionals who've treated me, that I'm dealing with depression, bipolar and even borderline personality disorder. Clearly, I've had many episodes of mental health issues... including a period of many years before drugs even entered the picture.

This is called dual-diagnosis: the clusterfuck that is both addiction and mental health issues combined. The tail that wags the dog.

I've cherry-picked the best treatment and the most humane and compassionate approach to fixing my addiction and now I've arrived at the situation where - joy of joys - I'm 'just' dealing with depression and anxiety.

I'm itching to press the 'fuck-it button' because life is intolerably stressful, unrewarding and my depression is refusing to lift. What's the solution? Drugs? Been there, done that.

Rehab taught me how to quit drugs cold turkey. Rehab taught me that I'm in control, so long as my life seems worth living.

Addicts and alcoholics are taught on the 12-step program that they're powerless. I'm certainly powerless, but it's over things like whether I get offered a decent job that pays enough money to be able to live. Being powerless to influence the things that really matter to me in life, such as whether I can live with dignity or not, creates incredible stress and anxiety.

I can choose to stop drinking or taking drugs, but why would I, if the alternative is ESA assessments and having my inadequate welfare benefits cut off by somebody who's not even a qualified doctor? Why would I quit, if I have to prostitute my mind and body, to go and work some pointless bullshit job for somebody promoted into a position of incompetence, if I'm 'lucky' enough to be offered a pittance to do the job?

It's so hard to escape the things that drove us to drink & drugs in the first place.

Rehab was important for me to forgive myself for things that weren't even my fault. I didn't make a mistake, getting addicted to drugs: it was a deliberate act and I'd live my life exactly the same if I got to start over from scratch. Rehab was respite from those who wish to scapegoat sick people.

Fundamentally, rehab connected the 'clean' and the 'dirty' world and allowed me to see that they're two sides of the same coin.

Every saint has past and every sinner has a future.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol

This is a story about the rat race...

I was working out how much time I've had away from the coal face and I figured out that kind of thinking just ain't allowed. If you start figuring out that you don't have to work every hour God sends, then you're an enemy of [status quo] society. What happens when people start rocking the boat? What happens when people start asking if there's a better way?

Obviously, I'm immensely fortunate that I didn't get some childhood sweetheart pregnant and I don't have to run around doing shitty jobs in order to feed and clothe my squawking infant offspring. I'm very lucky that I'm not enslaved to the system, in order to be just about managing.

I came really close to suicide and drug addiction relapse - which are one and the same thing - during the last week or so. I'm not out of the woods at all, but I had a slightly better day today. Some good luck went in my favour.

You know, having a few years of living hell isn't something I would rather not have experienced. Whether it's homelessness, hospitalisation, being locked up in a cell or whatever... my life has been enriched by everything that's happened to me.

Being desperately depressed, stressed and anxious ain't no picnic, but I still live a pretty charmed existence.

If and when I get back into the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine, the blinkers will go up and I won't be able to see the wood for the trees. Who has time to stop and smell the roses when it's rush, rush, rush, to get across town and get to your desk? Last summer I sat by the River Thames eating my lunch, looking at HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge and The Shard, but I didn't really appreciate the view: I was glum that I had to go back to my desk within the hour.

I've been doing my full-time career for 20 years, and I've been bitter, jaded and resentful for the working world taking the prime years of my life, the whole fucking time.

"Get over it. We all have to do it" I hear you say.

Yeah, but why? Why the fuck are we stuck in dead-end bullshit jobs when we're young, with no money? When we're old and tired and our health is fucked up and we're about to die, that's when we finally get to supposedly enjoy the fruits of our labour. Isn't there something back-to-front about that?

The biggest crime against humanity, is that when we're innocent, optimistic, sensitive, passionate, full of energy and joy... that's when we're squeezed into little boxes and forced onto the treadmill. For sure, when I'm old and infirm, I'll be grateful to be sat at a desk in a nice warm office, but why the fuck do we chain our young people to their books and to bullshit menial jobs?

I've been over this again & again, but the more that I zig when everybody else zags, the more I feel like a madness is lifting and I can see rationally.

As I travelled through Bank underground station at 9am this morning - making my way home just as 400,000 City workers descended on the Square Mile - I thought: "this is insane".

Of course, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em... but I need to remember to fight the system from within, and to try to protect my mind when all around me people are losing theirs.

Who, honestly, has the time to stop and take in the beauty of their surroundings and marvel at nature? Aren't we all so swept up in the school run and the daily commute? What the fuck point is there in that? To pass the baton of misery to the next generation?

"We can't all be artists and dreamers, skipping barefoot across the grass and daisies" I hear you say, gnashing your teeth.

True, but if there's no time to be carefree and unburdened from the pressures of this modern world we've created, are we building any kind of world you want to be part of? What's the fucking point, if it's all stomach ulcers and stress and exhaustion?

The relentless depression I experience is awful and I live forever with Damocles' sword hanging over me, in the form of endless suicidal thoughts, but at least it forces me to consider an important question: what's the fucking point of being alive?

There's probably no opportunity for me to be an artist, a writer, a poet or anything else authentic, without robbing a bank or making myself penniless and destitute, but the closer I get to death, the more I gravitate towards authentic experiences, rather than the soul destroying life of wage slavery.

Give me liberty or give me death.

Tags: #suicide #depression

This is a story about body shopping...

Because I'm a genius, I've figured out a brilliant business plan: buy low, sell high.

It used to be the case that companies would have their own IT staff, because it made sense to have people trained up and retain their skills, given how integral information technology is to every business in this day and age. Businesses would recruit technologists as permanent members of staff, and pay them a professional-grade salary.

Then, the IT crowd figured out that there was a skills shortage and that they were being underpaid for the amount of value that they were generating for their paymasters. Some IT professionals became technology entrepreneurs and others became IT contractors, selling their skills to the highest bidder.

As the year 2000 approached and panic spread about the millennium (Y2K) bug, IT contractors could pretty much name their price. It was quite clear just how valuable IT had become to big business and the running of the technological world around us.

Consultancies started to hoover up all the graduates coming out of the Computer Science degree courses at university, and also maths, physics, engineering and other technical disciplines too. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for anybody who had an aptitude for programming, so why not corner the market in anybody with the slightest ability to write software?

If you can hire a graduate for £25k per annum, how much do you think you could charge a client for a day of their time?

IT contractors probably charge circa £500 a day. The best get £700 to £1,000 per day. The worst get £300 per day.

£25k per annum equates to a cost of less than £70 a day, but you can't ask your fresh uni graduate to work weekends, you're going to have to give them some holiday and you're going to have to train them. Let's assume that our graduate is only billable for 26 weeks of the year and they cost a shitload to train and for taxes and other overheads. That means they cost the 'consultancy' (a.k.a. body shop) about £250 a day... in the absolute worst-case scenario.

A recruitment consultant will charge a 30% mark-up on an experienced IT contractor who's been working for 10+ years and is an absolute expert in their field: the best of the best. So, assuming the contractor is getting £700 a day, the company who needs them is paying £910 a day.

How much do you think our fresh graduate is charged to clients for, given they only cost the consultancy £250 a day? Answer: £1,200 a day and upwards.

This is the consultancy model: place a shitload of inexperienced people on client sites and charge a whopping 400%+ mark-up on them. Leave them to flounder and figure stuff out at the client's expense.

The IT contractor's role is now to go around cleaning up messes left by the poor kids who have the unenviable task of doing a job that they don't have the knowledge or experience to do, while getting underpaid to do it. The IT contractor's role is that of the grown up, the nanny, the only person who's even remotely worth the money.

Most companies are trying to trim their IT budgets and they got their fingers burned by offshoring a load of roles to India and other parts of Asia. You get what you pay for, unless you're paying for inexperienced graduates in this case.

For sure, graduates are smart nice people, strong communicators and they learn quickly. For sure, when "all that IT stuff is done" then you can say goodbye to all those pesky technology people without having costly redundancies.

The reality is that there's a load of crap software out there that's been developed by a bunch of amateurs, and it will fall to bits... if it even works in the first place.

It's professional suicide to write this stuff, but everybody's too busy making easy money doing bodyshopping that nobody important is going to read this. My IT expert friends might read this and chortle "yes that's so true!" but the consultancies are only interested in bums on seats. They don't care who I am or what I have to say: they only want me when the shit hits the fan and they need somebody to come and mop up the mess, as inevitably happens.

It pains me to see IT go from being a profession filled with experts and people who take pride in doing a good job, to being seen as some kind of dirty necessity. It fucks me off when the consultancies suck up to their clients and seemingly agree that there's no long-term value in having software experts in their firm.

"Get the job done, fuck off and let us go back to doing our business" seems to be the attitude. That's why the dinosaurs are dying and the startups are taking over. IT is your business, fools. Look at Amazon: are they a retailler or a technology company, first and foremost? Do you think Amazon is going to sack all their software developers now that they "have a website that works"?

The era of offshoring was a costly mistake that was brilliant for the consultancies, because they got to build huge development centres and skill up their own graduates at the expense of greedy Western corporations. Now the body-shop 'consultancies' in the UK have monopolised the IT contract market, flooding it with inexperienced people and charging top dollar for them.

I'm hoping - and not just for personal gain - that the whole thing comes full circle, and we'll revert to an era of experts being in demand and companies recognising that they need technologists as much as any other business critical function. Software's not some crap you can get on the cheap... it's an investment in the future of your company. One day, all businesses are going to be technology companies.

Tags: #career #computing