This is a story about repeatedly making the same mistakes...

Do you remember all those times that you were made to say sorry when you were a kid? Maybe you were a bit of a bully and you kicked sand in somebody's face or pushed someone into the swimming pool. Maybe you were a bit of a thief and you tried to steal other children's toys. Maybe you were a bit violent, and got into an argument with somebody at school or playgroup, and you hit or kicked them.

You can't make somebody sorry. You can force them to say words which the dictionary defines as apologetic, but that's got nothing to do with them actually feeling sorry. In my experience, forcing a child to apologise to another child, could often result in later reprisals that far exceed the original offence. Plus, receiving an insincere apology - under duress - only serves to further demonstrate a lack of remorse.

Also, children may not yet have learned about taboo subjects, political correctness, proper comportment, social faux-pas, tact and a whole load of other subtle nuances in adult behaviour. Some adults may only ever reach a behavioural level that marginally exceeds that of a child. Some adults may believe that their behaviour epitomises the gold standard that we should all aspire to attain.

I spent some of my childhood in Oxford. The area we lived in was being gentrified. Among our neighbours were an MP, a City trader, a consultant heart surgeon and other high achievers. Also living in the neighbourhood, were poor people, who weren't there because it was an affordable up-and-coming trendy part of central Oxford, but because they lived in council houses... sorry, I mean social housing.

The nearest child of a similar age, lived at number 4, and we lived at number 10. There was also a boy who lived at number 1, on the opposite side of the street, but not much further up the road than number 4. The boy at number 1 was from a poor family who lived in social housing. The boy at number 4 was from a family that believed they had attained the aforementioned 'gold standard' behavioural attributes.

At number 4, there were two girls and a boy. The eldest girl was a little older than me and the boy was a little younger. We spent a lot of time playing together on the street outside their house, where their parents could keep an eye on us. Not that the 'gold standard' was shining brightly on the day their eldest ran across the road and got hit by a car, or when their youngest drank bleach from the cupboard under the sink. 

The development of a child's sense of morality and good behaviour might evolve thusly: I want that cake; I want that cake but I know I will get in trouble if I take it; I want that cake and I don't understand why I have to wait and I only get a portion of the cake; I want that cake, and I want all the portions of the whole cake; I want that cake, I want as many portions as I'm allowed, and I resent anybody else who has a portion; I want that cake, and I understand that too much makes me sick; I want that cake, and it seems to be social convention that cake is shared.

Therefore, we can see that the behaviour of a child who has eaten their own portion of cake and has now stolen another child's, might not follow adult morality and logic. Imagine if the cake is a birthday cake, and it's the birthday of the cake 'thief' child. Adult logic says the cake is for everyone to share, we should eat in moderation, and taking from somebody else is stealing. Child logic - the birthday child - says that the cake is theirs, because it's their birthday, but they consent to cake being shared out because that's established social convention, but taking any unattended cake is fair game, because it's all the birthday child's cake.

Some 'bad' behaviour is actually natural and normal for a child, who is not equipped with all the knowledge and experience that an adult has, of tact, political correctness, taboos and subjects that require a lot of historical context, before they start to make sense. Here's a test for you: are children racist?

If you put 29 little kids in a room with an obviously handicapped child, what are the kids going to remember, if you ask them individually at a later time? More importantly, what are they going to say? If the kids laugh at the handicapped kid, does that mean they'll laugh and point at people in wheelchairs when they're adults? If the kids imitate the handicapped kid, are they mocking people with disabilities?

If you put 29 white privileged little kids with a little black kid, what are the kids going to notice and remember? If they all single out the black kid, does that mean they're all racist, or does it mean they've got eyes? Children haven't learned the 'colourblind' behaviour that adults are supposed to have.

By the time you reach adulthood, you've learned to pretend not to notice that brain damaged person, strapped into a chair, making weird noises. You've learned to pretend not to notice if the skin all over somebody's entire body, is a substantially different colour from yours. You've learned not to stare, not to point, not to vocalise your observations, except with extreme care and subtlety.

Older children will develop empathy; a sense of care for those around them. Older children will find it rewarding to please their peers and adults, by sharing. Older children learn that other people can own things too, and that it's wrong to take somebody else's things. Older children become better at communicating, negotiating and controlling their emotions; physical violence and arguments become rare, replaced by reasoned debate.

Remember all those insincere apologies you had to give? Remember all those times when an adult made you share your sweets, but they were yours and you wanted them all yourself? 

"I'm sorry, it won't happen again" 

I hear adults say this all the time.

Firstly, they're not sorry. A genuine apology starts with empathy for the victim, leading to remorse, guilt and then some words to express regret, encompassing the remorse and the guilt. An apology starts with a painful conversation, where you have to face your victim and not only understand any physical consequences, but also understand the emotional impact - including the severity - for the victim.

Secondly, they're not going to change. We make promises all the time to change, improve, stop doing something, start doing something... whatever. By the time we reach adulthood, we're really well practiced at saying what we think the other person wants to hear, so they're placated and they'll leave us alone.

Change is hard.

You can't change to please somebody, or comply with an order to change. If you're already fat, you need to stop getting fatter and you need to lose weight - two difficult changes - and your aim is to avoid potential health complications, as advised by your doctor. If you smoke, you know the health risks, but you've smoked a lot of cigarettes and never got lung cancer, so your first-hand experience has more bearing than any statistics about future risks. What motivation is there in mitigating future risk, when there is nice food and cigarettes right now?

You can't change because of a threat, or otherwise under duress. Change is hard, as we discussed, and it's made so much harder when every slip-up is magnified by the thought that failure to change would result in terrible consequences. If you can try and fail, and have another go, you might eventually succeed. Changing to avoid a terrible punishment, creates unbearable pressure, makes a catastrophe out of every minor setback, discouraging any attempts to keep trying.

You can't change because you want to. Change for change's sake? That makes no sense. You change because you have to, such as a serious medical problem that mandates an immediate lifestyle change, or else you'll die.

You'll change when you're not even noticing. You'll change when what you care about in life, your passions and your priorities change. You'll change when you're having fun, doing things you enjoy, doing things you're motivated by.

Who do you want to change? Is it your wayward brother, your drunkard father, your lazy friend, your unreliable co-worker, your drug addict boyfriend?

Stop assuming that they should think and act like a model adult - or indeed pressuring them to be and reprimanding them when they're not - and presume instead that they are more like a child. You might not like it, but joining the long queue of people hectoring a person to act more adult, causes them to act more childish. When everybody disrespects you, patronises you and tells you what to think and how to act, then less responsible and more selfish behaviour is inevitable, as well as disengaging your brain and letting others do all the thinking for you.

Stop seeing the same mistakes happening again and again. They're not mistakes. Another person's perspective is completely different from yours. Yeah, he's drinking himself to death. Yeah, his wife's going to leave him and take the kids if he doesn't stop drinking. Yeah, he's wasting loads of money and he can't get a job when he stinks of booze. Yeah, countless doctors have told him the damage he's doing to his body. Yeah, he crashed his car, lost his license. So what? Of course those things matter, but in his mind, that stuff's already happened; he's resigned himself to his fate; you can't threaten him with anything worse than he's already prepared for.

We spend so much time and energy trying to turn our children into adults. Learning to be an adult is the fine art of knowing when to lie (often), be honest (rarely) and keep your mouth shut and your thoughts to yourself (most of the time). The right clothes and good manners do most of the hard work. Then, you just need to be serious, dour, solemn and boring. "Grow up!" and "stop being so childish" are phrases that epitomise a parenting style that thrashes any semblance of natural immaturity into an appearance of premature adulthood. Constant rebuke for failure to demonstrate adult qualities, eventually creates a deceptive character: polite, courteous, formal, apparently mature and responsible, certainly confident and capable. But, how quickly it all unravels when a thread is pulled.

Why the strange behaviour? Why do drugs & alcohol feature so often? Where is the social life? Where are the fond recollections of the halcyon days of school? So many avoidable conflicts leading to unnecessary losses of highly paid jobs. Suddenly so irresponsible, unreliable. Tired and preoccupied by thoughts of death, followed by peals of laughter at puerile humour aimed at children. Everything always on the verge of total disaster.

If you harass and harangue - a pair of old bullies outnumbering the victim, two against one - until you seemingly get what you always wanted: your child has turned out successful enough to give you bragging rights with your friends. Climbing the career ladder at high speed, switching companies all the time. Girlfriends, social groups, best friends, former work colleagues - nothing seems to last, and it all seems to be moving too fast to keep up.

Does it not seem obvious that drugs have become my loyal friend, who'll never leave me and never let me down? Does it not seem obvious that I've had it hammered into my skull, for far too many years, that life is miserable, full of endless boring responsibilities, and then you die?

Will I ever learn from my mistakes? You're asking the wrong question. I don't see any mistakes, but I see a lot of learning. Will I ever see the error of my ways and change my behaviour? It's you who has failed to see the changes in my behaviour. The only error I made was trying to be a sensible, serious, responsible adult.

I've got so much to lose at the moment, but I already lost so much and learnt how to get it back. I've come back from the brink so many times now. I don't want to keep starting over. I'm not scared of things like kidney failure. I'm scared of things like being bored out of my brain doing things I've done a million times before, to the point where I fuck up a perfectly good job and end up going round the cycle again.

My idea of change right now is to start drinking wine again.

Tags: #drugs #alcohol #career

This is a story about dance, trance and magic plants...

On the left hand side of the picture above, we see drugs that are considered to be medications. That is to say, they are considered to have some useful function in the practice of medicine. On the right hand side of the picture, we see drugs of abuse. Drugs of abuse are considered to have no useful function at all, and have been made outright illegal in all contexts.

In the middle of the picture are pills that are sometimes considered medicine and sometimes considered drugs. Probably the best example I can give you of such a dichotomy is ketamine (not pictured) which is well known as a horse tranquilliser. In fact, ketamine should be better known as a general anaesthetic, and the drug of choice for paramedics to treat pain in victims of traumatic injuries, for example in the aftermath of a road traffic accident.

Dihydrocodeine is an opiate, and opiates are analgesic. Analgesics don't cause numbness, but they do increase pain tolerance. With enough analgesic, you could saw off your own leg and feel everything, but you wouldn't care about the pain. Anelgesics are painkillers. Dihydrocodeine is a painkiller.

Tramadol is an opiate, therefore also an analgesic.

Zopiclone, Xanax, diazepam and etizolam are in the hypnotic/sedative/anxiolytic category. Zopiclone will help you have a good night of uninterrupted sleep and wake up without a drug hangover: it's an excellent sleep aid. Xanax is a fast-acting, short-lived tranquilliser: it's great for stopping panic attacks, and might be useful if you're suffering a bout of unbearable stress and anxiety or struggling to drop off to sleep. Diazepam is a long-lived tranquilliser that's good for longer term management of stress and anxiety. Etizolam is a result of prohibition: it's an imitation of diazepam that used to be legal to sell and possess as a 'research chemical'.

MDMA is the abbreviation for 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (and yes, I did just write that without having to look it up) which is more commonly known as Ecstasy, molly, mandy or generally as 'pills' in a clubbing/rave context. It's a stimulant and empathogen: it stimulates empathy. Its peak effects last 6 to 8 hours, but takes about 12 hours to wear off completely. The experiences can be very profound and long lasting. MDMA is extremely draining on the serotonin system of the brain, which can lead to a form of delayed comedown, coming days after taking the drug.

Crystal Meth is the commonly known name - thanks to the TV series Breaking Bad - of methamphetamine. It's a very powerful stimulant with effects lasting 12+ hours, and it disrupts sleep long after its desired effects have worn off. The more astute reader may notice that the final part of the chemical name of MDMA is the same as the chemical name of meth. As you might expect, there are similar effects: loss of appetite, increased energy and decreased need for sleep. However, while MDMA stimulates empathetic behaviour - hugging etc - meth tends to stimulate rather more hedonistic behaviours, such as fucking and masturbating to pornography. However, both drugs - being amphetamines - cause a man's dick to shrink to a little nubbin that's no use to anybody. Polydrug abusers might use sildenafil (Viagra) or other erectile dysfunction medications in conjunction with meth, in order to sustain a decent hard-on.

Spread out on the kitchen counter top, there's probably about £300 worth of drugs.

MDMA is extremely cheap, coming in at circa £10 per gram, which is enough for 5 very strong doses. Far cheaper than getting drunk in a pub or a bar. Pound for pound, MDMA represents excellent value.

Crystal Meth is the most expensive, coming in at about £100 per gram. Because of the crystalline form of the drug, it's far harder (although not impossible) to cut it with other things. Cocaine has an average street purity of less than 20%, because it's so tempting for every person who handles the coke in the chain, to cut it a bit and increase their profits. All white powders look the same, and numbing agents - like baby teething powder - will give the numbing effect that cocaine has. Crystal meth is generally pretty pure. It's usually smoked or injected. You do not want to mess with this stuff.

Diazepam is frighteningly cheap. 100 pills containing 10mg of diazepam each, will set you back £30 or maybe even less. The price has fallen drastically, from £1 a pill, to now 30 pence. It's important to remember that diazepam is a benzodiazepine, and the benzodiazepines are physically addictive. You can die if you take a load of diazepam and then stop taking it. It's not something you should mess with.

Xanax, by comparison, is very expensive. Because it's convenient to be able to take it and not be spaced out the next day, it's become America's favourite tranquilliser. The Rolling Stones might have sung about Mother's Little Helpers - referring to Valium - but now the housewife's choice is Xanax. Physically addictive, blah blah blah.

Zopiclone is nice and cheap and works really well without nasty side effects. The only problem is, becoming too reliant on it for sleep. At some point, you have to stop relying on pills and alcohol to get to sleep, and learn natural ways of making sure you can drop off and get your precious 8 hours. Try blue-light filtering glasses, not having any screen time after 10pm and sleeping with your smartphone and other electronics in another room, so there's no temptation to pick them up and start looking at Facebook or whatever.

Tramadol and Dihydrocodeine will take you on the journey to opium, morphine, fentanyl and diacetylmorphine (heroin). The cheapest opiate of all is heroin, because of the simple economic law of supply and demand. People fucking love heroin. I've smoked heroin on a few occasions and I enjoyed the feeling of carefree sleepiness, but I never got a rush of euphoria like I imagine you must get when you inject. I've never injected drugs. One should be mindful that the vast majority of new heroin addicts in America started their journey with opiates prescribed by their doctor - oxycontin, for example - and then moved to heroin because oxy is prohibitively expensive. Tramadol and codeine are pretty cheap, but they're also very weak compared with morphine and heroin.

There's no need to be afraid of any of these drugs in the sense that they're not going to leap down your throat and cause you to instantly become an addict who's prepared to murder your entire family for 50 pence, so you can have one more tiny little hit. These drugs are not like Venomous Agent X, which can kill you almost instantly if you absorb even the tiniest amount through your skin. You do not want to touch a pin head sized amount of VX nerve agent, but you can safely handle Ecstasy pills, shards of ice (crystal meth) and all of the other drugs pictured, and you will come to no harm at all.

Taking these drugs once, or even twice or three times, is very unlikely to result in addiction. You may enjoy the sensations; the experience, but it's quite possible that you might find the effects of the drug to be extremely unpleasant. Certainly, MDMA can be very intense and the intoxication of tramadol can be alarming. Interestingly, the calming effect of the benzodiazepines is often the best treatment for a 'bad trip' that you very much want to end. Sadly, there's no 'off' switch for most drugs. It's like when you've had too much to drink and you're throwing up: you wish that you could stop feeling so sick and that the room would stop spinning, but there's no instant fix.

To have this vast array of drugs just lying around, seems to invite disaster and is a risk in terms of the illegality of possessing so many controlled substances. Are you going to ring the police? Do you think I should go to jail? Is it right to ruin my life, because we should follow the law to the letter, even though the law is an ass?

To address the second concern: doesn't this invite disaster? I've had enough disasters in my life. I've reached a point where I'm rather sick of the drama and the near-death experiences. I'm rather sick of the paranoia and the comedowns. The drugs don't even work any more, because my brain has become so used to powerful narcotics. My brain is literally saying "you've been doing this shit for far too long". I'm almost at the point where drugs bore me.

Right now, I need tramadol, because I'm in a lot of pain because of my leg injury. The zopiclone will be handy when I run out of pregablin, which I'm using to sleep through my pain and discomfort. Having Xanax and diazepam lying around is never a terrible thing. At least benzos are a lot cheaper than a bottle of wine or two, a lot less fattening and a lot less liver damaging. It is a slippery slope though, and it is easier to get hooked on benzos than it is to become an alcoholic, because there isn't really a hangover per se, with the benzos.

The MDMA and the meth should probably get flushed down the loo. I'm too old to go clubbing/raving, and the crystal meth tips me straight into a hypomanic episode and turns me into a total sex maniac.

The dihydrocodeine will gather dust in the medicine cabinet, as a strong painkiller, in case I ever have a nasty injury again and the doctors are dicks about giving me prescription drugs to relieve pain. I do think that doctors in America have been foolishly over-prescribing opiate painkillers, because they believed the marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

I'm sure you think that this cornucopia of chemicals is crazy. I'm sure you think this deluge of drugs is deranged. I'm sure you think this mass of medications is madness.

However, it's fucking hassle having to get a doctor's appointment, wait for the allotted date and time, and then persuade the doctor to give you what you want and need. There's every chance that the doctor may end up sending you away empty handed. Far better to have your own well-stocked pharmacy cupboard, and have whatever you need whenever you need it.

Of course, the nanny state is there to protect us from ourselves, which is why we arrest people who are about to climb mountains, don't we?

Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has created highly efficient black markets. Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has needlessly ruined lives of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Prohibition has failed, because the middle classes take just as many drugs as poor people, but the rich middle-class people are very rarely prosecuted. Prohibition has failed, because drugs are just as widely available as ever, and the main beneficiaries are corrupt customs, corrupt police and organised crime gangs. Prohibition has failed, because it fails to acknowledge the inescapable fact that people are always going to make, sell, buy and take drugs, no matter what the law says. Prohibition has failed, because it makes people paranoid and exacerbates mental health problems. Prohibition has failed because it directs money that could be used to help the tiny proportion of people who struggle with addiction, instead of using vast amounts of resources to persecute ordinary law-abiding citizens, who just want to smoke a bit of dope or take a pill when they go clubbing on a Saturday night.

You know prohibition has failed spectacularly, when the government makes mushrooms - which grow naturally in the ground all over the UK - a Class A drug, in the same category as crack cocaine and heroin. Are you fucking nuts? Are you fucking telling me that we should stuff our prisons full of people who picked a fucking mushroom in a fucking field?

Imagine this conversation:

Prisoner A: What you been nicked for?

Prisoner B: Murder. What about you?

Prisoner A: I picked a mushroom

That is quite genuinely the situation that the government introduced into UK law. I'm being quite serious here. Mushrooms are considered just as bad as crack cocaine. I wonder what the government were smoking when they made that insane decision.

As we know, when a government bans a drug, then clever chemists create another one that's almost identical. In America, they have a law that makes analogues illegal, so only whole new classes of drugs can get around their laws. All kinds of obscure chemicals - legal highs - burst onto the scene thanks to America's attempts to get clever with prohibition.

The UK government has gone a stage further and attempted to ban anything that has a psychoactive effect. That means that we're all 'in possession' of illegal drugs, because our bodies are stuffed full of chemicals that are psychoactive. It also means that drugs will simply get sold in 'kit' form: mix the ingredients at home and hey presto! There's your drug of choice. People will always find a way around the stupidity of prohibition.

The fear that has been stoked up by these terrible prohibition policies, has created a squeamishness about being able to have honest open conversations about drug taking. We should be well informed, not ignorant. We shouldn't be paranoid about being persecuted by the authorities. You have to be fairly brave to stick your head above the parapet. A lot of corrupt officials make a lot of money, through the ongoing boom times of the black market. There is an insatiable demand for drugs - and there always will be - which is why there is so much resistance to making drug taking into something that's safer, regulated, quality controlled and a well understood problem, rather than something cloaked in secrecy and hampered by stigma.

I've had problems with addiction in the past, but it makes me a stronger more well-rounded person, to have been through that ordeal and to know what difficulties are faced by people who become ensnared in the traps that have been set for them: draining their bank balance, destroying their health, and driving them to criminality. Why can't I talk openly about my experiences? Why do I have to be anonymous, hiding away with other 'dirty' junkies, in church halls where we self-flagellate for our 'sins' and hang our heads in shame.

Obviously I've had enough of prohibition, but I've had enough of being stigmatised and shamed into silence and anonymity too. I've had enough of people's wilful ignorance, when it comes to drugs and the lives of drug users. I've had enough of ridiculous horror stories and misinformation.

Perhaps you didn't even read this far, if you're the kind of person whose mind I'm trying to open, but perhaps you did, because on the face of it I'm an educated middle-class white professional man, working for prestigious companies in seemingly important roles. You can't quite imagine me smoking heroin, can you?

I'm challenging your preconceived ideas. I'm making you question what you thought you knew, and what you thought was obvious and without exception.

Tags: #drugs

This is a story about comfort zones...

Relax and put your feet up, I'm about to tell you the tale of two sedentary situations.

I'm institutionalised. Put me inside a hospital or a head office, and I'll feel right at home.

Most people don't like hospitals: they associate them with pain, death and stress. Most people don't find hospital relaxing; quite the opposite in fact. Hospitals are places of mysterious rhythms and routines that seem chaotic to most people. There are different sounds that all the machines make when they're working, and when they're making noises that indicate that something is going wrong. There are different NHS staff, in different roles, in different clothes, who appear at different times.

My week in hospital that I'm going to tell you about - although I spent the best part of two weeks in hospital  - sounds kinda nice, because I was never really afraid or outside my comfort zone. I find the functioning of complex organisations to be fascinating. I love observing the systems and the people, trying to second-guess what's going to happen next, and what's going on behind the scenes. I like asking loads of questions and adding whatever I can learn to my growing body of knowledge that allows me to feel more in control of my destiny and more able to know what to expect next, than the tense, anxious and extremely tedious waiting game that most patients face on the National Health Service.

Once one has resigned oneself to the maximum speed that a massive organisation can function at, the whole hospital experience becomes quite meditative. Sitting in Accident & Emergency, you can fill your time sneakily looking at the other patients in the waiting room, and trying to guess what symptoms they reported to the reception staff when they arrived. Shortness of breath, chest pains, numbness in one side, drooped face, earlier seizures, unconscious or otherwise delirious patients will normally arrive by ambulance, but any walk-in presentations will obviously jump to the front of the queue. Then, there are the people with minor injuries who have put up with their trivial ailments for days or even weeks. The reception staff aren't allowed to tell them to fuck off, so these idiots must sit for hours on end, only to be told off for wasting valuable NHS resources, quite rightly. In the middle, there are nasty workplace injuries, DIY accidents and total wildcards. You usually get seen by a triage nurse within an hour.

Having been admitted into Accident and Emergency, there is a brief flurry of activity while routine blood samples are taken, and perhaps you're hooked up to a drip. A barrage of questions is fired at you. Examinations seem to be probing and thorough. Surely these professionals are going to have this problem fixed in no time?

It's always a mistake to believe that important things are happening and it won't be long before the right diagnosis is reached and the right treatment is administered. One should be aware that the function of A&E is to rapidly assess whether you're about to die, whether you might need to be properly admitted to the hospital, or whether you can be discharged swiftly, suddenly and brutally.

Once on a ward, a certain amount of orientation and induction is necessary, but all wards function with great similarity. All nurses are grateful if you don't press the call button all the time, for trivial things, as well as being cantankerous and discourteous. Remembering one's Ps and Qs at all times is a pleasant distraction from boredom, pain and discomfort. There will be shifts, and it's important to be mindful of when these shift changes occur. The NHS staff see so many patients come and go, and many are lucky enough to only have a very short stay in hospital, so there will be a certain initial reluctance to absorb you into the system: the ward wants to spit you out undigested.

Having overcome some initial resistance, you can relax into hospital life. Your day begins with your vital signs being measured. Then blood samples are taken. Then there is the hullabaloo of breakfast, ridiculously early in the morning at 7am. Then, there is nothing. All of that disturbance keeps the night shift staff briefly busy before they hand over to the day shift. The day shift hope to be able to ease their way into the working day gradually. Consultants start to appear at around 10:30am, followed by a gaggle of registrars and junior doctors. The most important time of the day arrives: choosing your lunch and dinner for the next day. By the time that lunch is served, you can't remember what you're going to get because it wasn't long ago you had to choose what to eat tomorrow. The meals are pleasantly bland and easy enough to eat. Mealtimes are something to look forward to, even if the food is far from gourmet. Expecting much to happen during the day, in terms of treatment, is a mistake. Anticipation of treatment that has been promised can only lead to frustration and disappointment. The NHS does what the NHS does, and it does it at its own speed. Things cannot be rushed or expedited. Complaining or asking staff when things are going to happen or what's going on, will only piss them off and ruin their day. Dinner arrives surprisingly early. Treatment can be sprung upon you at the end of the day, just when you thought you were going to have a relaxing evening, or you can have a lengthy wait until you get your pain medication and anything to help you sleep. Dropping off to sleep is not easy, especially as the day shift will hand over to the night shift loudly at the end of your bed, and there will be more vital signs being measured before you'll be left in peace to try to get some rest.

And so, my week in hospital consisted of lying on a bed that had buttons that could make me sit up or lie down, with no effort required at all. I was able to elevate my bad leg, to reduce the swelling. I was brought paracetamol every 4 hours, tramadol every 6 hours, and 2 hot meals a day. There were few unexpected interruptions, and if I was well enough, I would have been able to read, listen to music, browse the internet and watch films & TV, pretty much all day, all evening and as late at night as I wanted. I could stake a piss without even having to get out of bed. Friends travelled to see me. Doctors came to my bedside, and I was wheeled to wherever I needed treatment, by hospital porters. I was under no obligation to do anything, except to get better, and all my basic needs were met. My lovely girlfriend augmented the hospital care, so I wanted for absolutely nothing. Blissful, right? I could have stayed for a month, and I would have even earned £676 (I pay myself minimum wage).

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Why then was I in such a hurry to discharge myself? Why would I leave the lap of luxury, and risk my health and even my life, by leaving the safe confines of hospital?

Well, that's a topic of discussion I've covered at length in prior blog posts, so I invite you to peruse the archives.

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People rarely change their bank. We open current accounts in our teens, and we keep them into adulthood. Some of us even opened special accounts when we were children, and we have a certain nostalgic brand loyalty for the bank that we've been a customer of since we were youths.

The 'big four' or 'big five' high-street banks have not changed for my entire lifetime. We have (in alphabetical order) Barclays, HSBC [Midland], Lloyds [TSB], Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander [Abbey National]. These banks hoover up 85% of all the current account banking customers in the UK.

Just like current account holders, people join these banks when they're young - often their first job - and tend to stay loyal. Many people who I deal with on a day-to-day basis have worked for 15, 20 or 25+ years for the same bank that's been so good to them that they've never felt compelled to leave. Everybody bitches about their job, but a bank employee knows that they're very well looked after and they'd be mad to go off in search of a better job.

I've worked for 3 of the big 5, and they're institutions that I feel very at home in. Some people might think that I work in a rather high-stress environment, where it's imperative that I'm up to date with the latest cutting-edge developments in my field, and I need to perform in an exceptionally demanding role. The truth is, once you're in the door, you're in for good. You get your feet under the desk, and adopt the right kind of jaded resignation, that everything is going to be slow, sloppy, shit and a massive festering pile of neglected crap that nobody gives two fucks about, and you'll fit in just fine. Moan as much as you want - everybody does - but for God's sake don't go on any crusades to change or improve anything. Just settle in, get comfortable and enjoy the masochistic experience of being in a world where not a lot gets done and the right answer is always "no".

A lot of people get into technology and engineering, because they like to fix things and make stuff that works. They like to build stuff. They like the feeling of completing a technical project, throwing the switch and seeing their hard work put into action. A bank is a terrible, terrible place to build anything that will ever see daylight.

Having come to terms with the fact that any ambitions you had of building useful things that people might actually use, will be forever thwarted by a bank, you can begin to enjoy the ridiculous game. You command millions of pounds of budget, and you will achieve nothing. When you estimate how long you think it will take you to do something, you double your original estimate, double it again, and then double it one final time for good luck, and it's still not long enough. When you are asked about the feasibility of doing something, or whether you have any spare bandwidth to perhaps do something extra, you instinctively say no; it can't be done; no chance. Nobody ever got fired for saying no. In fact, people start to love you and think you're great at your job, if you get really good at saying no.

Delivering pieces of important technology, 100% working and of high quality, in short timescales and with hardly any resources, is liable to cost you your sanity. "It can't be true" colleagues will proclaim, even as the results are staring them in the face. From denial, your colleagues will move to the belief that it's a one-off fluke, or they will hate you. Colleagues will mainly hate you for making them look like totally incompetent blundering slowcoach fools. Nobody ever made friends and got ahead in a bank, by doing a good job. Finding yourself burnt out from the exertions of persuading people of the merits of doing things properly, without pointless delays, you find yourself suddenly alone; isolated. You may create some kind of mythical; legendary; cult status around yourself and your achievements, but you have no future with the bank: the bank doesn't want your type, and it will unceremoniously eject you.

You can work for a bank for as long as you like, provided you just go along with things. Never challenge anything. Never push for change. Never go the extra mile. For sure, banking demands that you be seen to be going the extra mile, but it's all just for show; part of the act.

So, if you want to be really successful in your banking career, you learn the rhythm and routine of your department. You learn when your boss arrives at work, and you get to your desk before him or her, and leave with them in the evening, making pathetic small-talk. You learn who's got kids, what ages they are, and what stressful childcare arrangements are a pain in the arse for your colleagues. You learn how everybody gets to work. You learn whether they're morning people or night owls. You learn their interests: topics to get them talking; things that enthuse them. You learn who takes their job seriously; who's ambitious; who's jaded and demotivated. You learn who drinks heavily, smokes, gets stoned. You learn who's lived, and who's been insulated. You learn who's worked hard, and who's had advantages. You learn when to make yourself scarce and blend into the background, and when to promote yourself. You learn the things that need to regularly get done, and you discover many things that don't need doing. You learn how to do just enough to please the handful of important and influential people, and how to avoid having to do any pointless busywork.

You can't prepare yourself for boredom. There is nothing in the world worse than boredom.

My first week back in the office was 4 days of boredom. I've seen it all before, done it all before, and I'm the master of minimal effort. The only problem is that I need to look busy to make a good first impression. I forbade myself from reading the news on my laptop. I tried really hard to not look at my phone too much, and to pretend to be busy.

My boss and his boss, both sit right next to me. My boss is a nice guy who seems to have a paternal nature. The big boss talks too much and doesn't realise that I find him amusingly stupid. I listen, make the right noises and say some encouraging sounding things, but I'm completely failing to disguise my contempt for this fellow, but luckily he's the only one who fails to see my total lack of respect for him, except for my bosss. I endeavour to make my boss feel that my number one priority is in supporting him in making our team look good in the eyes of the big boss. I try to make the big boss feel in control, while diverting any respect he commanded away from him. There's a mutiny in progress, but nobody will realise until it's past the point of no return.

Virtually nothing can be achieved in 4 days in a bank, and I've achieved far more than anybody expects of me, even though I've spent a considerable amount of time in the toilets, browsing Facebook and writing amusing things for my friends to read. I invested as much time as I possibly could in developing a good relationship with my boss and my team, but I have nothing of value to contribute yet. Aside from dazzling my colleagues with my all-round technical knowledge, my main task is to stay the fuck out of their way and not disrupt things too much.

Regrettably, I've had to take Friday off work. Making a good first impression can only be done once, and the lasting image that my colleagues will have of me - the guy wearing the robocop ankle splint - will now be tainted with the fact that I had to take time off work, giving the impression that I'm unreliable and prone to sickness. Damage to your image like that can be irreparable.

Sometimes, it's desirable to be known for being unhelpful, regularly late to work and somebody who leaves on time in the evenings. Being somebody who walks out the office door, even when there's a major crisis, is the sign that you have become perfectly adjusted to bank culture. However, the clever ploy is to try hard at first, to develop an image of being a hard worker, but in actuality, you are avoiding work and responsibilities at all costs. In time, you will have the best of both worlds: being thought of as dedicated and useful, but actually adding no value at all.

My foot has been steadily getting more and more painful through the week, and I've been popping painkillers throughout the day. I've passed the week in a dreamlike state; heavily medicated. Having strong coffee in the morning to make me sharp and alert enough to make a good first impression, has meant that I've been able to stay awake in some horribly boring meetings, but it has made me a little hypomanic, causing me to be far too outspoken at times, but I think I've got away with it.

I've earned more in a single day in the office, than I would for almost a whole month of being in hospital. That kind of cash does motivate you to get out of bed in the morning, and to stay at your desk with your mouth shut, when really you can't stand being in the office.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard, being a bit bored, going to a few meetings, talking to people, saying fairly standard things that are obvious. Having the exhaustion of being unwell, plus being in pain and discomfort, make things hard for sure, but in a way, it's been an excuse to be fucked up on drugs for 4 days and get paid an obscene amount of money for the privilege.

It seems fairly clear that if I can dial the intensity down to 4 or 5 from 11 - and the dial only goes to 10 - and ease my way into a gentle routine that I can just about cope with, then I'll be able to blend in for years. There's no reason why I wouldn't be liked and respected. There's no reason why I can't be perceived as doing a great job, even though I'm not doing anything useful. That's the main thing I need to remember: I'm specifically there to not do anything.

Saying the right thing at the right moment - being the smartest guy in the room (as someone I know once jibed) - comes easily to me, and it does unfortunately command a disproportionate amount of respect versus doing some real work instead.

---

I'm not sure which week was more comfortable. Certainly hospital was more physically comfortable, but I was highly stressed about losing my lucrative hard-won contract and being too tired to be able to function when I started work. My job is extremely easy and I anticipate no problems, except coping with boredom and my propensity to blow a fuse with frustration at the snail-like pace that everything moves at.

Sleeping in my own bed has been far superior to the hospital bed, but getting up in the morning is never pleasant. However, my lie-ins were so ruined in hospital - by irritatingly early breakfast and the like - that I have actually been getting ready for work, relatively painlessly.

Commuting is hell, but because I know it's hell, I'm able to impassively observe the shit that I'm going through; detach. Commuting is the price that one must pay, if you wish for your gross income to exceed a year's average salary in the space of just 8 weeks.

How can anybody handle such contrast? It's insane. It's surreal.

How can I walk out of a hospital, against medical advice, and go straight into a brand new job where they're oblivious of just how sick I am and how messed up my brain is by strong medication? Can't they see that they have an imposter in their mix? Obviously not.

That, effectively, sums up the bipolarity of my life. The ups and the downs. The highs and the lows. What more extreme example could I come up with?

Tags: #bipolar #hospital #NHS

This is a story about the opium of the people...

God is dead. We killed him with our science and our medicine. We killed god when the healing power of doctors trumped the ridiculously unsuccessful power of prayer and divine miracle. We killed god when Thomas Edison invented the electric lightbulb and let there be light. We killed god when the Manhattan Project unleashed the energy bound up in the atomic nucleus, creating bombs powerful enough to destroy the world. We killed god when popes, bishops, vicars, priests, nuns, monks, rabbis, mullahs and other spokespeople for organised religion, were proven beyond all reasonable doubt, by the scientific method, to be snake-oil salesmen; charlatans; frauds... just like witch doctors, mystics, faith healers and anybody else who claims they can perform magic or speak to nonexistent entities.

With life stripped back to pure truth; pure reason, a life of suffering and decay seems rather pointless. There is joy in procreation: watching your own flesh and blood offspring fumble their way through a harsh and uncaring world. The bonding hormone - oxytocin - and vicarious enjoyment of your kids' childhood makes parenthood neurologically rewarding enough for you not to just fuck off as soon as the screaming incontinent midgets have been ejected painfully from your vaginas.

Life has been built to not give you much joy. You can fuck, but you'll need a rest in-between copulations, and over time your interest in sex with a single partner will wane, as life prompts you to go and fuck somebody new, who you may be a better fertility match with. We weren't designed to have so much sex with so few partners, and produce so few children. The French have a name for the post-orgasm feeling a man has: la petit mort. Lit: the little death. Every time you cum and you don't make a baby, you die a little.

In a world of push-up bras, gymnasiums, good diet, flattering garments and mostly indoor jobs, women look amazing for far longer than they would under less favourable conditions. We have a culture of strip bars, escorts, pornography and film, television & print media bombarding us with images of the world's most attractive women. Ordinary women have responded by making ever raunchier choices of clothing and make-up, as well as complying with men's desire for casual sex and promiscuity. The ease of finding a 'hook up' on a mobile phone app - which doesn't carry the stigma of paying for sex - has meant that many men are quite content to not have a monogamous relationship, further exacerbating the problem, as women struggle to find the 'nice guys' who are looking for a something serious, but must use sex to bait the hook.

When you've had your fill of contraception-protected sex, skydiving, water-skiing, deep-sea diving, hang gliding, windsurfing, motorcycle racing and everything else that gives you a little hit of something that tickles your brain 'naturally' where are you going to go from there?

We live in a world where you can have an instant face-to-face conversation with your pick of 3.2 billion people, as if they were there in the same room as you, without either of you leaving your house. We live in a world where you can get into a pressurised aluminium tube and 17 hours later you will be on the other side of the planet, where day and night are swapped around, as well as summer and winter. We live in a world where news and information is distributed globally at the speed of light. We live in a world where many of us have access to vehicles that can carry us almost anywhere we choose to go, on a whim, at speeds that are far greater than we were ever evolved to travel at. How are our bodies and brains supposed to cope with this modern world? There are so many unnatural stimuli, can you really say that anybody is truly living a natural life?

When you start asking around, it turns out that we can't really cope with the modern world, without modern innovations. We need tranquillisers to calm our nerves, after the overstimulation of the city lights that never switch off; the sirens; the car horns; the traffic; the congestion; the crowds; the towering phallic structures of concrete, steel and glass. We need stimulants to be able to concentrate and overcome the exhaustion of the daily assault on our senses, and the steadily rising demand for our attention at all times of the day: there is always something electronic somewhere, bleeping at us for our attention. We need things to intoxicate ourselves, to escape the madness of the world and briefly be set free. We need things to numb the pain and insulate us from the growing discomfort and inescapable truth of our inevitable decrepitude and death, which is followed by black nothingness. There is no afterlife. There is no heaven and hell. This life is all there is, and then it's over, forever.

Some mentally ill people have this thing called religion, which is where they find comfort in imaginary friends and they really believe the stories in the children's books they read, to be true stories. These mentally ill people suffer from delusions, where they believe that talking to nonexistent sky monsters will change the outcome of events. These mentally ill people suffer from terrible superstitions that make them act extremely weirdly, like not eating certain things, saying certain things, and they do really boring stuff like going and sitting in buildings with other people who suffer from the same mental illness, and performing rituals based on delusional beliefs. However, this madness somehow seems to ease the suffering of a few of the mentally ill people a little bit. When there is a death in the family, for no reason other than the random chaotic unpredictable nature of the universe, the mentally ill people have their delusions to fall back on, so they can mistakenly believe that there was some reason behind an otherwise totally meaningless event, which actually helps them not feel so afraid and alone in harsh and uncaring universe that's out to kill them in an infinite number of ways.

The universe quite literally does not give any fucks who you are.

Entropy will destroy your body, to the point that every single atom will be scattered throughout the universe and even those atoms will decay. It will be as if you never even existed. Entropy will tear down everything you ever built, in the blink of an eye. Entropy is an unstoppable force, that will take everything you think is ordered and understood and under control, and it will show you just how puny and pathetic you are in the face of its relentless power to smash everything up and reintroduce the chaos and disorder that reigns supreme in a universe of unimaginable magnitude.

In a way, I'm jealous of the religious. They must be so blissfully ignorant. They were too stupid or they were denied enough education to allow them to become able to question the obvious lies that they were told, setting them up for a life where they can ignorantly reject things that are plainly obvious to anybody with an inquiring mind. To believe that there is value in the study of ancient scrolls or parchment, instead of the discovery of new knowledge and the ability to make rational leaps of understanding, by joining up the dots and applying logic... much better to live with faith in gods and magic, than to know your unhappy fate in the world.

And so, with the spread of education, perhaps we have seen the spread of misery, anxiety, stress and the need for some salvation of our souls that would have otherwise have been provided by something spiritual. Instead of turning to our priests, bishops, vicars and the like, we turn to our doctors to heal us. Our doctors dish out the goodies, in the form of antidepressants, mood stabilisers, anti-anxiety drugs, tranquillisers, uppers & downers and chill-you-outers.

Can you imagine what would happen to the world if we woke up and there was no tea, coffee, betel leaf, areca nut, khat, coca leaf, opium poppy, hemp, tobacco and every other source of a tiny naturally occurring amount of bitter plant alkaloids that humans love so much, because they tickle our brains, just a teeny little bit.

You would have thought that if smoking one cigarette is nice, then smoking 100 at once would be incredibly nice. You would have thought that if one cup of coffee is nice, then drinking 2 litres of pure espresso would be amazing. In actual fact, you will find that humans have somehow evolved a dislike of too much of a good thing. Everything that's nice, is only nice in moderation.

Life functions perfectly well like this, until the sum of all these things tips you over the edge. Living in the centre of a huge city, with the International Space Station and a zillion satellites orbiting overhead, jets roaring across the sky, helicopters swooping down on you, tower blocks hemming you in on all sides, cutting off your view of the horizon, mobbed by a sea of people, with choking traffic fumes and the deafening roar of internal combustion engines, as trucks, cars and motorbikes zoom along all around you. You're bombarded with light from a million incandescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes and LEDs, as well as the other electromagnetic radiation from televisions, mobile phones, power cables, WiFi routers, bluetooth devices, walkie-talkies, microwave ovens and power transformers.

An ever-increasing number of us cannot function in a godless man-made world without being drugged-up. Alcohol aside, antidepressants are the number one choice for the masses to become better adjusted to a hostile universe. There's nothing wrong with those people needing those medications. There's nothing immoral about taking those medications. There's no shame in being sensitive and susceptible to the madness that surrounds us.

Slowly, we build up cocktails of medications that salve a particular ache or pain in our souls. Each medication has its side effects, so we add other medications to compensate for the other ones, until we rattle like a tube of smarties.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories like 'chemtrails' and other madness like that, but I sure as shit know that modern living has elements that the human body and mind just can't adjust to: the sum-total of the unnatural is beginning to overwhelm us. Our very sleep cycles are being changed - for the worse - by our addiction to social media, smartphones and communications apps like email and text chat. We used to joke about crackberry when we got our BlackBerry mobile email devices, at the turn of the new millennium. It seemed like a Brave New World but perhaps all that glitters is not gold.

Shiny shiny new tech.

I used to get so excited about new tehnological toys, but now I'm excited - relieved - to tear off the foil wrapper that protects the little pills in my daily ration of soma. I feel immediate psychosomatic relief when I swallow the little capsules, lozenges and pills, that contain magic ingredients to salve my aching soul.

Where would we be without these breadcrumbs that lead us deep into a dark forest? A dark forest that we would never enter, if we weren't chasing these tiny rewards... these little crumbs... these pathetic minuscule tickles that we can feel in our brain. We surely would never work these jobs, without our morning coffee and our cups of tea, our gin & tonic and our glass of red wine. We would surely never want our genitals to be torn apart by an alien bursting out of our groin, except for the tiny hit of pleasure from a brief exchange of bodily fluids in a sticky tryst of sweat, bad breath and a tangle of limbs and hair.

I've seen the future and it comes in pill form. A pill to feel loved. A pill to have the most amazing orgasm of your life. A pill to feel all wrapped up safe in cotton wool, without a care in the world. A pill to forget about your hunger and your thirst. A pill to be awake and a pill to be asleep. A pill to help you think and another pill to help you not think.

A pill for every ill; and yet none that quite hit the spot.

Tags: #drugs

This is a story about the rising sun...

My toes are literally a bloody mess. I have new smart formal black leather work shoes, that have not been broken in. I have been wearing an ankle brace on my left foot, because the muscle, tendons and nerves are all screwed up and it's difficult and painful to walk on that foot when I can't raise it and the muscle at the back of my leg - particularly around my hamstring - is swollen and tender.

I get up and strap this contraption to my leg, which involved pumping up some inflatable bubbles. One of the little inflatable pouches has developed a leak. Without the pouches being inflated, it seems that the velcro strap around my calf just slides down, and the plastic cover that goes over the top of my foot and up my shin, seems to work its way out of position and start giving me incredible pain. Basically, the ankle brace isn't really designed for walking 15,000 steps, commuting all over London and having to travel to fucking hospital every night after work for pointless blood tests.

To cap everything off, what nobody realises is just how close to breaking point, self sabotage, suicide, fucking myself up and everything that entails, I was. It's almost as if the universe has decided to throw all the consequences of a full on don't-give-a-fuck supercrack relapse at me, except that never happened. That's not to say I wasn't all prepared to press the fuck it button in the event that the job hunting fiasco carried on a moment longer. That's not to say that I wasn't already at the end of my rope. I was fucked off with everything. I was stressed and depressed and I'd reached my limit. Life was unsustainable.

Life is unsustainable if you can't pay your rent, pay your bills, buy food, afford to leave the house. Life is unsustainable if you're on collision course with bankruptcy that's going to make you unemployable. Life is unsustainable if you're doing everything that's within your control to do, but those things that are outside your control are not going your way, and there's no way you can make anything go faster or create a different result.

I got my result. I got my contract. I started the new job and I like it. I'm very happy with what I'm doing and who I'm working with. I'm overjoyed that my bank balance is moving in the right direction again, and I'm earning more than I'm spending to simply be alive. It costs money just to stand still. It costs money just to breathe the air and look at the moon and the stars. It costs money just to drink the rainwater. Finally, I'm getting money in again, and it's flowing in fast, which it needs to do because who knows how long my health can take this fucking rollercoaster bullshit.

Anyway, two weeks ago, I went from being suicidally depressed and giving up, to the point where I literally though there's no point even bothering going to hospital. I'd been pissing grey-black liquid and then it stopped. I stopped pissing. It was clear my kidneys had packed up. My leg/foot was fucked: numb, hanging limp and useless, and swelling up like a motherfucker. My trouser snake was seriously traumatised and had swollen up to the point where it was an almost unrecognisable blob of badly damaged flesh. There was skin that was literally peeling off, revealing pink rawness underneath. There was plenty of blood, of course.

The hospital wondered why I was resistant to the idea of a catheter. The doctors puzzled over why there was so much blood in the tiny bit of urine I managed to squeeze out as a sample. The catheter point came up again and again, but 'luckily' my bladder was empty, because my kidneys had completely failed. The doctors scanned with ultrasound, and found not a single drop of wee in my bladder. My kidneys were well and truly knackered.

This is the sort of shit that's supposed to happen if I go on a 10-day supercrack bender, where I end up hiding under my own bed and barricading every door in the house. This sort of shit only happens when I stop eating and drinking, and only ingest highly toxic chemicals that are known to be super destructive to poor kidneys. I had become so well practiced in the routine of the binges, that I knew exactly what shade of dark brown and metallic smell of blood, my urine had to have to indicate that it was time to either go to hospital or perhaps have a drink of some water and stop killing myself with deadly chemicals.

The really fucking annoying thing is that all that fucking happened this time is that I sat on my leg a bit funny. It's so fucking ridiculous. I'd been drinking isotonic drinks and generally looking after myself, avoiding deadly Chinese supercrack. What the actual fuck? How can this be the worst ever fucked up that I've ever ever been? Why the fuck does this have to co-incide with my chance to work my way out of the shitty situation I'm in? Why does this have to fuck up my plans for some nice meals out, holidays and to just generally enjoy not shitting myself about running out of money? All I have to do is turn up to work, and not fuck up for 5 or 6 months, and everything's fucking peachy again. I can do that. I've done that loads of times.

Why do I have to work so fucking hard for this? Why do I have to fight the doctors all the way, to understand that it's not just a job, but there's my whole sanity and will to live on the fucking line here. There's my whole fucking livelihood and future on the line here. It doesn't matter how much I wave the "serious medical problem" card, nobody gives a shit: it's a commercial market. I'll replaced overnight, with no qualms. That's business. That's the way of the world I work in.

The fact that I'm turning up to work, not looking too bad, and just about able to cope with the foot, kidney and cock problem, is a fucking miracle. The fact I haven't just said "OK, it's too fucking hard" and killed myself in a blaze of supercrack glory, is a fucking miracle. I've got the fucking stuff. I don't even want to take it. I want this fucking job.

Maybe that's the point.

Maybe that's the test: how bad can I want a job. I've never really wanted a job that badly. I've just wanted the fucking money, and really all I've wanted is to be able to take supercrack. The job has been just a means to an end; and that end is supercrack.

How can you just pause your addiction for 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, and then pick it up again? Well, it's the same skills you develop when you get a boring as fuck full-time permanent job. You learn to put up with you fucking shit job for fucking years don't you? Same fucking thing. You just count down the hours, minutes and seconds, until it's time to get the party started. I can pick up and put down my addiction just as easily as you pick up and put down anything: a meaningless thing you didn't mean to pick up, and you hastily just put it back and never give it a second thought. Scary, isn't it?

I've got some shit worth fighting for. I've got rid of a flatmate who was leeching away my cash. I've got a lovely girlfriend. I've got a nice place to live - albeit rented. I've got this well paid contract on a quite interesting project with quite interesting people. I've got money coming in, just in time to stave off any financial problems and replenish my dwindling savings. I've got the opportunity to have a nice lifestyle of eating out, travel and generally not stressing about money, and sharing that with a wonderful girl.

However, it's a pill that's too bitter to swallow, to have all that smashed up and taken away, right in front of my very eyes.

My kidneys will recover on their own, in time. My one-eyed trouser snake is recovering surprisingly fast, although it's still out of commission. I can live with the foot/leg problem - albeit by using copious amounts of pain relief. I can tolerate the risks. I can do the job. I can make it fucking work.

The demands of the fucking hospital are tipping me over the edge at the moment. The lengthy trips across London after work for blood tests are the very last thing I need. The stressful arguments with doctors who don't understand the reality of needing money to pay rent and bills, otherwise being evicted and bankrupted. Didn't these stupid fucks ever play Monopoly? You can't stand still. You have to roll the dice. It costs money just to be in the game - to be alive. You've always got to pay somebody. There's always somebody sending you a bit of mashed up tree that's been pressed into flat thin white rectangles, covered with inky hieroglyphics, demanding your money. There's always a bill for breathing.

I know how to win at this stupid game. I know how to get loads of fucking money, so you can beat those cunts who keep sending you envelopes, demanding money with menaces. "Give us all your money or else!"

I can get in front. I can get to the point where life is enjoyable again. I can beat the stress and anxiety.

Except I can't, because my kidneys are being slow to recover.

Slow to recover.

That's all it is.

I'm pissing plenty.

My kidneys are making plenty of wee.

My potassium is safely within the limits.

There's not a fucking problem. Leave me the fuck alone and stop making me do extra shit, because I'm maxed out commuting to my job, and making a good first impression on my first week.

If you want to fucking help me out, you can figure out what the fuck is wrong with my leg/foot. You [doctors] didn't even scan it, did you? You were far too busy saving my fucking life by getting my kidneys rebooted, but you didn't realise that my life was already under threat of suicide. It says in my notes that the last time I was in hospital, it was a psychiatric admission because I couldn't keep myself safe. That was two weeks in hospital, and this kidney shit only lasted 10 days, although I must admit that I discharged myself early. It all matters though. You can't ignore the psychological damage that you might do, and the risk to somebody's life that it might create.

I can tell you with almost certainty that my kidneys will recover on their own. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that I will self-destruct, if my hard won contract gets fucked up and I'm left without that all important income, job, routine, workmates, self-esteem and all the other good stuff that goes along with having a purpose in life.

Fuuuuck. what have I got to do? Change my mobile number? Move house?

I just want to be able to nip to Guy's and St Thomas Hospital - near my work - for any fucking essential shit that needs to happen, after work. I can't be traipsing all across London for some fucking bullshit belt & braces crap.

Like I say, I've got the gun pointed at my temple, and my finger over the trigger, itching to pull it. Just give me an excuse. Make my fucking day.

Tags: #suicide #drugs #addiction #hospital

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 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 140-character soundbites...

Who has the time for the long read? Just read the title and guess the rest. If it can't be summed up in a tweet, it isn't worth reading. Jump straight to the comments section: that's where the real action is.

I bought a book that was based on a series of tweets. Worst book I ever read.

One of the best tweets I ever read was in 9 parts. Infographics are good, but they often have more text on them than would be permitted by the 140-character limit. If you put text on a graphic, it's not searchable.

Do you realise that everything you write on Facebook is completely unsearchable from anywhere except within the walled garden?

You're slowly being erased.

So much discussion has moved to Slack and most of that is just meme sharing anyway. In fact, most of what goes on anywhere on the Internet seems to be meme sharing. Are we being discouraged from in-depth online discussion? The rise of microblogging and the domination of the social media space by Facebook, is ridiculously successful at recirculating trivial distractions, which discourages us from creating original content.

When you think about all the words you've written into messenger apps, they're lost in the ether: it's not like those discussions are held in topic threads, indexed and searchable. All those words are throwaway. There's a cheapness to words. Imagine what happens when Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp cease to exist. All that text that was transmitted all over the planet will disappear into nothingness; gone forever.

What would a historian of the future make of your digital footprint? Could they infer who you were as a person from the animated GIFs that you chose to share? Could they gain any insight into your worldview; your politics; your philosophy; your personality?

Have we not been cheated out of owning our digital identities? We could all be famous bloggers and valued discussion forum contributors, with our online persona well known to fellow Netizens around the world, but instead we are confined to small groups of Facebook friends and Twitter followers: the people we knew before we entered the walled gardens.

Nobody is going to discover you and find out anything about who you are and what you believe via the mainstream platforms. Facebook wishes to keep you as a captive audience, to feed you adverts while you browse through baby photos. Twitter wants you to worship the cult of celebrity, or provide convenient soundbites for journalists, while you tweet in total obscurity.

Nothing you ever do online is going to go viral. Well orchestrated marketing campaigns have huge teams of people to sow the seeds. It's like a Mexican wave: you need to coordinate a critical mass of sufficient numbers if you don't want to look like an idiot, waving your arms on your own in a stadium grandstand.

You're not going to be the next online video sensation, because nobody's solved the problem of video discovery yet. If you broadcast a Facebook Live video, you're just going to be spamming your friends and family. If you put something up on Youtube, how are people going to find it in that sea of noise? Videos only have a title, description and a few tags. People are only going to watch things that are popular, and popularity is achieved through marketing, which is expensive and time-consuming.

The idea that the Internet is democratising opinion sharing is disingenuous. Most of the opinions I read online are either from the mainstream sources, or from my existing network.

I'm exceedingly unusual, because I bought into my friend Ben's vision of a social media platform that allows me to retain control of the original content I create. Instead of wasting effort on tweets and Facebook status updates, I put it all onto a website that's fully search indexed: anybody can find the fruits of my labour.

"But what about privacy?" I hear you ask.

I can email, private message and talk to people face to face, about things that I want to keep private. I really don't consider Facebook very private, when I have hundreds of Facebook friends and I have no idea who's reading what. I could waste loads of time sharing things with selective audiences on Facebook, but why would I go to all that effort?

Why do I write hundreds - if not thousands - of words every single day and make them publicly available? Well, the Internet is responsible for lifelong friendships, fruitful discussions and a network of people who help me feel connected to humanity, when I'm otherwise roundly ignored. Occasionally, some complete stranger will reach out to me and say that there was something I wrote that resonated with them, and that's the nicest feeling in the world.

Why does anybody write? Why write a fictional novel? Why tell people what you thought about that movie you just watched? Why do anything? You could just curl up in a dark hole and die, quietly.

In a world of urban solitude, loneliness and living lives of quiet desperation, don't you want to feel a little anchored to something; somebody? Don't you want to feel that you made your mark; left a legacy?

Writing this blog is like carving my name on a tree. Writing is like spraypainting my 'tag' on the Internet. It's "Nick woz 'ere" writ large.

Of course, you can sneer at that, but what's your mark on the world? Your children? That dissertation you wrote that never got published? Your job? What you consumed during your life? Should we chisel a list of all the books you read onto your headstone?

I came back to London, partly because I could be anonymous. I could fuck up and burn a few bridges, and nobody would care. I came back to London to be a nobody.

Now that I'm cleaned up and back in the land of the living, I no longer want to be a faceless nobody; I don't want to be alone; overlooked; forgotten. I'm trying to rediscover my value; my place in the world. At times of great stress, I've reached out to the Internet for validation: validation that I exist, that my opinions are well regarded and that I have a place in the community. It's given me great confidence, to have an online persona when the rest of the world largely overlooks and shuns me.

There is no short-form version of what I'm going through. It might be the same as every other person on the planet, but this is how I choose to express myself; this is how I vent and attempt to cope in a healthier way than drink and drugs; this is how I attempt to ward off the fear of being mischaracterised as some kind of evil na'er do well.

Perhaps, the more you read, the more my mask slips and you can see some underlying character flaws. Certainly, the more I write, the more narcissistic and self-absorbed I must be. The justification I have for this self indulgence, is that I feel suicidal every day. Do you begrudge me leaving this digital legacy, for anybody who cares to know who I was and what made me tick?

I can write 140-character retweetbait, but I choose not to. I choose to write with depth and meaning. I choose to offer more than just a fleeting distraction. I choose to offer the whole story, not just the headlines.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #suicide

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 social animals...

For solitary creatures, there are two drives that ensure they live long enough to reproduce: hunger and libido. If you didn't feel hungry, you'd be too busy fucking to stop and eat, so you'd die of starvation. In fact you'd probably die of starvation before you even reached sexual maturity. If you didn't have a sex drive, you'd be too busy gorging yourself on food to have sex.

There's a delicate balance between effort, pain and reward. In animal studies, laboratory tests have measured the amount of work - in calories - that an animal is prepared to do to get a food pellet. There's no point burning more calories than the reward, so animals will only work so hard for something to eat. Tests also showed that animals are prepared to suffer a certain amount of pain if they're hungry: lab rats will cross an electrified floor to get to a food pellet, even though it hurts their feet. The same goes for sex: the horny rats will work and put up with pain, in order to mate.

When we examine social animals, like us, the co-operative rewards are harder to understand. It's clear that individuals will die if they don't get enough food, and genes will die if individuals don't reproduce, but what's in it for us to be social? Well, the lone wolf is very unlikely to be able to hunt and kill prey on its own.

Dogs are the perfect animal to help us understand praise. A dog will fetch a stick for its owner, even though it gets no food or sex. Humans have figured out that if you can make a dog believe you're the alpha of the wolf pack, then the dog will go wild for your approval. Through body language cues, such as bared teeth or wagging tails, the message of social approval or disapproval can be sent. Dogs are evolved to seek praise, because it bonds their hunting pack together.

We can then start to see how different drugs affect our brains, through changes in our behaviour.

Let's start with amphetamines (speed, whizz, base, meth etc.)

Amphetamines suppress appetite. Because one side of the triangle has been suppressed, it leaves room for an increased sex drive and more pleasurable lovemaking. Addicts who inject crystal methamphetamine can masturbate or fuck (or both!) for 12 hours.

Heroin suppresses your sex drive. Heroin addicts can be perfectly functional people, who eat enough to stay healthy, but they're getting their kicks from the junk, so they don't need sex.

Cocaine removes your insecurity and need for praise. When you're high on coke, you know you're the best. Instead of nervously looking around to see who's approving and who's disapproving, you act as if you're the alpha of the pack; king of the hill; top dog.

Addictions are nothing more than a temporary perversion of our natural urges; survival instincts; drives. We simply retrain our brains to want drugs instead of food, sex and praise.

Last night, I couldn't sleep because I had cravings. I was lying awake, daydreaming about going to a dealer and buying the thing I was really craving. It was a craving like every craving I've ever had. The craving completely consumed me and I could hardly think about anything else. There was only one thing that my heart desired.

So, today I went to the [meat] dealer, and bought myself some [dried South African beef] product. I travelled across London with single-minded purpose: I was out to score and feed my addiction.

I can't emphasise enough how similar drug cravings are to feeling hungry or horny. The urges are identical. Drug cravings are indistinguishable from the natural urges that keep us alive. Saying "you've got no willpower" to somebody, while stuffing your face with a big pie, is ridiculous. How often have you given up food and how long have you fasted for? Try doing it for 28 days. Try doing it for 13 weeks. Try doing it for life.

Of course, if the brain can be trained to like something, it can also be untrained. Rabid animals get driven mad by hydrophobia: swallowing gives rabid animals painful spasms in their larynx, so they start to fear water even though they're desperately thirsty. There are several foods that are said to be an acquired taste: it takes some time for our brains to learn to associate the strange flavours with nourishment. Often, an upset stomach or a bout of food poisoning is enough to create a strong link in our brains that causes us to reject certain foods.

Alcoholics can break their addiction by taking medication that will make them throw up if they drink. This kind of negative conditioning can break the perverted programming of the brain. Instead of eagerly anticipating the reward of a 'buzz' every time you get drunk, you begin to associate alcoholic drinks with nausea.

Unfortunately, the programming can work in reverse. If you have lots of fantastic sex when you take drugs, you can then start to crave drugs every time you get horny. 'Normal' sex can start to feel uninteresting and not worth bothering with. Your libido becomes your enemy: driving you to seek drugs every time your nut-sack needs emptying.

I've been well aware for some time, that I need to stay on top of my libido or else it will work in harmony with residual drug cravings to overpower any freedom of choice that I supposedly have. "Willpower" and the feelings of guilt we have about all indulgences of our natural urges, are the attempts to impose morality on an entirely amoral thing: we have no control over our desires.

Yesterday was a new one on me: a hunger for food that was as strong as any drug craving I've ever experienced. Addiction works in strange and subtle ways, inhabiting your subconscious and trying to subvert your supposed freedom of choice. Lots of addicts will relapse 'by accident' because the levers being pulled in their brains are powerfully influenced by forces that we rarely acknowledge.

We rarely talk about showing off or trying to get a shag, but those things are far more influential on our world than almost anything except stuffing our faces with pies.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol