This is a story about euthanasia...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I feel? Awful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about cyclical natures...

Summer = happy. Winter = sad. It's usually that simple. Why would anybody be happy in winter? Winter is a time of hibernation, cold, hunger and death.

However, human society has evolved to take advantage of seasonal variations. We all tend to have a wild time in August, as our children are off school and we also enjoy the good weather and general festivities. Summer brings optimism and joy, in line with our increased energy levels due to longer days and the balmy air temperature.

Frankly, this summer has been the most depressing that I can remember.

I thrive on human connection, and most people are distracted with all the fun of the fair at the moment. The bright lights and fanfare of the Olympics and other theatrical bullshit are titillating the fickle attentions of the proletariat. It's mighty dull for anybody who doesn't subscribe to the mass hysteria that can afflict our society of simpletons.

So, I'm riding out the summer, waiting for reality to bite and the true situation to reveal itself. Things always look better when bathed in golden sunlight. In the shortening days of the autumn, things are going to look pretty bleak. I don't relish the collapse in the current mood of delusional optimism, but at least destruction heralds reconstruction. So many things are broken. Limping along thinking everything is OK is not helping anybody.

I have now come to understand my own cyclical nature. Normally my moods are dictated by the prevailing weather, but now my mental health is so deeply damaged that even summertime cannot lift my depression. However, I'm able to appreciate that all of humanity is similarly affected by the weakness that means they feel unreasonably happy when the sun is shining.

Last year, I predicted a winter of discontent. This was plainly wrong.

But! I tend to be a bit premature with all my proclamations of doom. The number of years that I've been talking about a collapse in the London housing market have proven ridiculously wrong... although the bubble continues to inflate to epic proportions.

I was once young and naïve. Now I'm old and cynical.

I've made a few smart predictions: the credit crunch, the commodity boom (gold, oil) and Bitcoin. I've profited from astute investment and hedging during every crisis of the last 20 years. I'm most definitely proactive, not reactive.

The simplest thing to predict is that summer must come to an end. People will come back from holiday. The kids will go back to school. Workers will go back to their jobs.

In the cold light of day, everything's going to look pretty shit.

Tags: #economics #politics #bipolar

This is a story about bullshit jobs...

In the east end of London, sandwiched inbetween Hackney and the area that used to be responsible for producing clothes and shoes, is the tiny oasis of Silicon Roundabout. The concrete mostronsities that sprung up in the postwar era, after the factories were bombed to shit, are now home to the darlings of the UK's tech industry.

TechHub, which is just a stone's throw away from the Old Street roundabout, prides itself on not having a proper ceiling to conceal its air conditioning ducts. The desks are battered and constructed from scaffolding. The urban decay of the whole area is part of the appeal. I mean, you can work in a disused underground train carriage for fuck's sake... some kind of hyper-trendy modern office.

And yet, this hipster village borders the City of London, where the world's investment banks and hedge funds headquarter themselves. Money is made hand-over-fist in London's financial districts, and all of the profits are enabled by smart tech people. There isn't a single cent that lines the pocket of a capitalist without some computer geek having written some software to make it possible.

There are two kinds of brain drain in operation.

Jaded City workers jack in the corporate humdrum of suits and 9 to 5, to head into the world of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout in order to grow a ridiculous beard and ride a bicycle with fixed gearing. Meanwhile, the very smartest are poached from the digital agencies and other parts of the thriving software community, in order to build the backbone of the financial system and re-architect the whole world economy.

Sadly, the main conduits for smart people still deliver the bulk of those graduating with first-class degrees and 2:1s from the best institutions, straight into the hands of bloodsucking parasites.

What was your degree in? Chemistry? Geography? Psychology? English? History? Epidemiology? Medieval iconography?

Who fucking cares?

If you're smart enough to have risen to the top of your classes, you're going to be hoovered up by the financial services sector, which dominates 80% of the British economy. Sooner or later, you're going to find yourself working in a towering phallus of glass and steel, which is a monument to the stupendous stupidity of man.

While red-braces wearing men fill their wheelbarrows with worthless paper, the rest of the world rumbles on, but is seen as unimportant compared with the "masters of the universe". It's obvious that you can't eat a futures contract, or a derivative, but yet the bulk of the 'money' in the world is derived from legal contracts that are almost impenentrably complex. Clever little cunts just coming up with clever schemes to scam the 'real' economy out of their labour and productive output.

How did it all begin?

Well, at the Royal Exchange, a farmer decided to sell his crop of wheat before it had been even harvested. This was the original futures contract. From this grew options, swaptions, interest rate derivatives, exotic credit derivatives and every flavour of cuntery inbetween. It's utter horse shit.

Now, you work all fucking day and your salary isn't even a rounding error on a balance sheet somewhere.

The amount of cash in circulation is nothing. It's meaningless. Financial services and the abolition of the gold standard means that the bankers are just adding extra zeros onto the end of everything just to prop up an utter horseshit system based on perpetual growth. As long as the masters of the universe are getting more zeros on their salaries and bonuses. That's the real reason why anybody has to suffer austerity.

Sorry about that.

Tags: #capitalism #banking

This is a story about tireless commitment...

I came up with a list of 102 titles of blog posts that I wanted to write something about. I wrote a few of them, but the vast majority are in the waiting room. I'm terribly frustrated that those ideas and feelings are circling with nowhere to go. If you haven't already got the idea... this whole blog is somewhere where my pent-up frustrations are being expressed.

Actually, confession time: this whole blog is where I work out the whole live vs. die decision in real time, right in front of your very eyes.

Now, despite being somewhat tipsy from end-of-working-week indulgence in alcohol, I've decided at 2:19am to do a kind of live-blog as I attempt to make sure that I've covered off all 102 topics that are on my list.

Why would I do this?

Well, it's quite simple: I'm stalked by suicidal thoughts during most of my waking hours. I can't be too close to a sharp knife, a London bus or an underground train without thinking about the oblivion of suicide. This is alarmist language, but the reality is with me every moment of the day: I'm struggling to find the energy and enthusiasm to go on living.

Anhedonia - the complete lack of reward from all normal activities - has sucked the life from within me, and I feel like a mime artist doing a performance with no idea why it delights my audience. Life is brutal. From the moment I wake up to the moment I pass out, I'm asking myself "why bother?".

Yes it's melodramatic etcetera. Basically: fuck you. Goodbye.

I present to you, now, a string of live blog posts that attempt to catch up on the backlog of writing that I have not been able to pursue given my bullshit job. Due to said bullshit job, I've not been able to write the bulk of 102 blog posts that explain my existential crisis, and resolve the unreconcilable difference between what I experience and know intuitively to be worthwhile, and the horse shit that seems to bring cold hard cash into my bank balance.

I wait. Tick follows tock. I patiently wait for my moment to express my frustration at the structure and routine of human existence.

This is a fucking time capsule. Clearly, I have somewhat lost my grip on 'reality' but I don't give a fuck anymore. This is life and fucking death. These are the last acts of a crazed lunatic. This is the evidence for the postmortem.

Enjoy.

Tags: #suicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about self sabotage...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But "it could never happen to me" right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about being in touch with your feminine side...

When I was a pre-pubescent boy, I read a book by Judy Blume about girls getting their period and having their first kiss with a boy. Before you boil over into a fit of inexplicable anger (as women are prone to do because they're completely ruled by their emotions) I'm not actually saying I know what it's like to menstruate, have boobs and to carry a baby inside me for 9 months and deliver it into the world through my vagina.

My education and upbringing was pretty heavy on the whole sex-ed thing. My sister was born when I was 10 years old, and so I clearly remember her birth and my Mum's pregnancy. My teacher at school was pregnant when we were being shown childbirth videos, and the schools in Oxford are actually pretty progressive. We were taught about the reproductive cycle in the first year that I went to middle school, when I was 9 years old.

Of course, I will never have the first-hand experience of having my cervix dilated by the large head of my child, to the point that it tears, and other painful sounding childbirth related stuff. I know that I would get yelled at with hormonal illogical female rage, if I was to suggest that other stuff that's happened to me has been painful. The muscle on the front of my calf was sliced in half, severing 4 tendons. The hospital in Oxford kept me for 3 days to re-stabilise my kidneys - no painkillers - and then sent me back home to London for the operation 2 days later. My whole journey on the train and across the capital was done without crutches or pain relief. My bandages were soaked with blood. I'm sure those 5 days where my calf had a muscle that was sliced in two down to the bone would give me no capacity to imagine having my vagina ripped to bits by a baby though.

I genuinely don't want to insult mothers. You're right, I'll never know what it's like to have a bad back from carrying round all that weight of a baby bulge for 9 months. I'll never know what it's like to have my internal organs being squished by the life growing inside me. I'll never know what it's like to be woken up by my unborn child kicking. I'll never know.

If you think I'm being flippant or sarcastic, I'm sorry, but I'm actually being genuine. I've often given consideration to the things I'll never know.

What man hasn't given consideration to how much fun they might have, if they got to swap bodies with a woman for the day. Of course, we'd like to play with our tits, but we're also fascinated to know what it feels like for a girl. There's a <blush> slightly kinky element. What does it feel like to be penetrated? Are multiple orgasms as good as they sound? Errr... did I just say that? Moving swiftly on.

Yeah, it's pretty shameful to admit this stuff, but I've made it my mission to vicariously experience what I can of the feminine. I don't think I'm one of those men who thinks that they're a woman who got born into a guy's body. I've just made it a goal in life to empathise. Empathise with everybody. Including the opposite sex.

When I was a teenager I read female erotic fiction. I tried to get into the mind of what women want. I tried to learn how to be a generous lover, so that I could please my girlfriends. I put a lot of effort into my 'research' and I have to say, I got a big kick out of it. However, I read an article recently where the author - a woman - was actually offended by how much of an ego boost guys get by knowing they've moved the Earth for their lover. Well, guess what? That's been added to the long list of considerations too.

So am I painting this picture of me as some sort of perfect guy? No. Don't be ridiculous. What I'm saying is that I'm an information gatherer, and I was born as a sensitive little soul who takes in a lot of what people say, how they feel and whatever I can divine from the media I have consumed. I guess I figured out from an early age that I wasn't going to learn everything I needed to know from pornographic magazines and videos.

It's laughable isn't it, to say that I empathise with women, mothers. and it's actually not true, I don't. I try to, but of course I fail on so many levels. You can't possibly know how much you don't know. Dunning-Kruger effect. Blah blah blah!

But, if you can have a tomboy, can you not also have a tamgirl?

I remember when a friend was talking about her hen do. I enthusiastically gushed "OMG! When is it?" without thinking that I would not actually be invited. I just kinda assumed that I would be. It was a strange situation, because she was a "one of the lads" kind of girl, and I'm a "comfortable with my sexuality" type of guy, so the gender exclusion of the event didn't even register with me.

So, why have I taken a wordplay of Mumsnet, turning it into something that's supposed to sound like The Social Network? Well, because I'm jealous. I feel like I'm missing out on something.

My same friend who I mentioned regarding the hen do was at one time (I'm not sure if she still is) an active contributor on the Mumsnet forum. I actually met her on a forum to do with kitesurfing, many years before. We were both active forum contributors. In fact, I think we competed for the top spot, quite often.

Another friend, a wonderful geek girl whom I very much enjoy the pleasure of the company of, is also another active Mom social networker, who I think also frequents the pages of Mumsnet.

The blogosphere is heavily colonised by mommybloggers, looking for some kind of activity to connect with the world in a way that fits with the demands of family life. Family members eagerly devour every last detail of life of the youngest members of the clan, and will scour the pages of every social media source in order to gather any updates and juicy pictures of the cute little kids as they grow up. Blogging about your family life is a natural extension of that.

However, I imagine that having kids can be a fairly bleak and isolating existence at times. Just as being single can leave you left out from all those couples events - who's going to invite sad Dave to dinner on his own? That'd be weird! - so the stressed out mom who's had to spend all day with fractious children is going to be overlooked by friends who don't want their peaceful child-free existence shattered by the arrival of mountains of childrearing equipment and tantrum-prone toddlers disturbing the peace.

Yes, unless you have a good baby circle of other moms who have kids of a similar age, it's kinda hard for anybody to relate to the particular struggles that you're immediately facing, whether that be teething and nappy rash, or the defiant "NO!" phase as the loveable darlings assert their own personalities. Which of your friends understands that they need to remove all the sharp, swallowable and fragile ornaments from the low surfaces? That bowl of potpourri looks terribly decorative on the coffee table, but to a parent of a young child, that's just a choking hazard. The worlds are going to collide.

And so, sleep-deprived moms get isolated, as social lepers because they're no longer footloose and fancy free. Not only must the children travel with mom, but also the changing mat, clean nappies, wet wipes, sterilising equipment, bibs, blankets, toys, teething rings, potties, spare clothes, medicines, high chairs, carrycots, pushchairs and every other bit of parenting paraphernalia to keep the tiny tots clean, comfortable, fed and watered, in the hope that they'll smile and giggle, not cry.

I have no idea if an Internet forum can provide some of the camaraderie that is necessary to make things seem a little less desperate, when Junior just won't go to sleep and he's driving you nuts with that noisy toy that grandma bought for him. I have no idea if getting together online, as moms who've been through it all too - they know all the shit that you're going through - in some way makes getting through the day a little easier.

I know that I miss my time being a top contributor on a forum. I know that I miss those familiar nicknames. I know that I miss the purpose and routine that it gave my life, trying to read absolutely everything, and make comments in the most active threads. I miss those virtual friends, who actually turned out not to be virtual at all. Some of the best friends I have, I made through forums. Some of the best experiences of my life, were when a bunch of us nerdy Internet dwellers met up, in the evening for drinks, for weekend trips away, or for adventures around the world.

The gender-blind part of me thinks that I should sign up for Mumsnet and join in the discussion and debate, but something tells me that might not go down too well.

There is a considerable hole in my life, without an online community to belong to.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia #sex

This is a story about the looking glass...

What do you see when you peer into somebody's life through the prism of social media and the mask they wear at work? How well do you think you really know somebody, from the things that they choose to tell you, and from the side they choose to show to the public?

What do you know about me? Director of my own company, lucrative consultancy contract, flat on the river in central London, under 40, own hair, own teeth, no obvious disabilities. Brilliant! Perfect! Spiffing!

I don't even want to ham up the whole invisible disability thing. It's true, you can't see my depression, anxiety, bipolar. You can't see what my childhood was like. You can't see what struggles I've had in the past, to reach where I am today. You can't see my finances. You can't see my family pressures. You can't see the emotional baggage I'm trying to deal with. You don't even know what my daily existence is really like.

I'm not saying whether those things are good or bad, what I'm saying is that you're in no position to sit in judgement.

It's not a competition. It's not like I need to show you videos of me as a little boy, being sexually abused by my uncle [not that he did that] just to prove to you that I'm a worthy cause. How can anybody really say who is struggling and suffering more than somebody else? There is so much that is invisible, imperceptible.

There is no way to measure our distress, and to gauge who is worthy and who is being some kind of spoiled bratty person who should just shut the fuck up and go away. Count your blessings! Just be grateful for what you have! Look on the bright side! Cheer up! Chin up! etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Do you really want to take the chance of browbeating somebody and making them feel guilty for being desperately depressed and overwhelmed by their situation, until the moment that they take their own life? Is that really your preference, that people should just shut up and try to count their blessings, force their chin up and put on a mask of fake happiness, until they finally crack and they're gone?

Oh yes, isn't this so terribly melodramatic. Oh isn't it so terribly attention seeking. Oh wouldn't we all like to complain about our lives, and our lot in life, and our stress and the competing demands for our time and our money, and how emotionally and physically drained we are, and how we can barely cope. Oh me too, and you don't see me going on about it blah blah blah.

Well go on then.

Go on. I'm not stopping you. In fact, I encourage you to speak up if you're having a hard time and I will listen. If you're really at your wits end, I will find you and I'll make time for you. I know what it's like. A cry for help is a cry for help. Would you ignore a drowning man? Oh! It's just a cry for help! If he was serious about drowning he would have sunk to the bottom of the lake and be dead!

Cry wolf. YOU LEFT A LITTLE BOY WITH WOLVES FOR FUCK'S SAKE!

You know what it is, when people tell people with depression and crippling anxiety to shut up? It's bullying, plain and simple. People are being bullied into not talking about their distress. The bullies don't like attention being diverted from their narcissistic selves, so they bully people who are in genuine distress, using insulting terms like "melodramatic" and "attention seeker".

You wanna know what's attention seeking? Demanding that attention not be shown to those who are crying for help. Implicitly, by saying "don't look at them" you are saying "look at me". Yes, that's right, you're saying "don't look at that person who is yelling for help, look at me instead, aren't I fabulous?".

Guess what? You're not fabulous for having your shit together and no problems. If you're fabulous and have got your shit together, then try helping others who are less fortunate than yourself. What is Facebook and social media for? "I'm so pissed off because you're filling up my news feed with all your depressing stuff" = "make room for more selfies of me having a wonderful time".

When somebody is casting out for connections on social media, they have probably reached the limit of isolation. Social media is the last toehold that a person has in the world. They probably don't have friends, family and other healthy relationships that they can turn to in their hour of desperation. There's a reason why they're turning to social media, and it's not because they're an attention whore, looking for 'likes' on their shit.

It's rather tragic that I even have to explain this, and I know that the people who I have in mind when I write this have already switched off, because they're not tagged in a photo of them, smiling in the sunshine in their perfect fucking lives.

Is this whole essay based on jealousy of those who made smart life choices? Is this whole essay ignoring the fact that there are starving African children? READ IT AGAIN YOU FUCKING A-HOLES.

Tags: #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #socialmedia

This is a story about the rich:poor divide...

Theresa May, the British prime minister, had the gall to lecture the poor on living within their means. In actual fact, the poor are working hard and just trying to keep up with the wealthy, who are racing ahead.

If you look at the Instagram account called Rich Kids of Instagram you will see that it is extremely popular. 'Reality' TV shows that have followed mega-rich people like Ozzy Osborne and family, the Kardashians and the cast of Made in Chelsea, are some of the most viewed and talked about things on television. Wealth worship is everywhere, and is it wrong for people to feel that they deserve a little of the life that is rammed down their throats by the media?

When we are talking about living within our means, this is coming from politicians who spend 6-figure sums of money each year on expenses alone, while also pocketing salaries that are many many times more than the average wage. The problem comes right from the top. The more that rich public figures splash their cash, the more the hypocrisy is insulting when they tell the poor to tighten their belts.

How many people on council estates are driving Ferraris that they can't afford the repayments on? How many hardworking families have ordered yachts that they now can't afford to pay the remaining balance on?

When we talk about living within our means, we are talking about people who are quite familiar with budgeting, make do and mending, and the general attitudes of postwar austerity. Really, when talking about living within our means, we should be talking to the banks, who recklessly endangered their financial stability by not living within their means in terms of their ability to maintain solvency. It's the banks that are insufficiently capitalised and are excessively over-leveraged. It's the banks that have lent many, many, many times more money than their reserves allow, in the pursuit of endless effortless profits.

When a person borrows money, they intend to repay that money using hard work. The borrower will go to their job every day, and be productive. In return for a person's hard work - productivity - they will receive their salary, with which they will buy the things that they need and repay their debts.

When a banker lends money, they intend to profit for no labour at all. Through interest slavery, the banker will make money, simply because they already have money. Using the money multiplier - fractional reserve banking - the banker will in fact be able to lend the same money, over and over and over again, multiplying the amount of effortless interest that is earned each time.

It is the banks who are not living within their means, nor being hardworking or productive in any way. It is the banks who have decimated global finances, and are now demanding that the hardworking people accept austerity, pay freezes, job insecurity, unemployment and low growth, simply because they overstretched themselves in pursuit of yet more effortless and labour free income for doing absolutely nothing.

Let's imagine that a banker, with zero money of his own, is paying a generous interest rate of 0.25% on deposits - exactly the same as the Bank of England. Using a fractional reserve of 5%, which is the minimum requirement for today's stress-tests of banks, to make sure they're adequately capitalised in the event of another credit crunch, that means the banker can multiply a £1,000 deposit into nearly £19,000 worth of loans. Obviously, the loans carry a hefty interest rate. Let's imagine that the banker lends out the £19k as overdrafts, which often carry a 20% APR on the high street. In a year, the banker will now net nearly £4,000 of profit, for doing absolutely nothing, out of just a £1,000 deposit. That's a 4 to 1 ratio! For every £1 deposited with Utter Bastard Bank Plc, they're going to make nearly £4!!

So, while the poor toil and tighten their belts, buying the cheapest groceries they can and cutting back on every expense, the banks are getting fat for doing absolutely nothing at all. Interest slavery is a con and a crime, and the perpetuation of this situation is the only reason why ordinary hardworking people are having to suffer NHS cuts, crowded public transport, packed classrooms, pay cuts, redundancies and every other economic penalty for the bankers' failure to live within their means.

Yes, we'd all like to make money while we sleep. Yes, we'd all like money for nothing. However, a bank is just utter bullshit. A bank is supposed to be an instrument to grease the wheels of commerce, not a massive leech, sucking so many pounds out of people's pockets, for every penny they leave in their bank accounts.

And, when you're richer, the things that go wrong in your life are mere pocket change. Let's look at a person who earns £20k, versus a banker who earns £200k, i.e. a 10 to 1 ratio:

• Parking fine £50... costs the banker £5
• Car breakdown £500... costs the banker £50
• Need a new central heating boiler £3,000... costs the banker £300
• Private school fees £12,000... costs the banker £1,200
• Food £300... costs the banker £30
• Holiday £700... costs the banker £70

Imagine if your budget used the values that the banker pays. They're a much smaller percentage of your income, aren't they? Life would be a lot easier if everything cost 1/10th of what it does. Well, guess what, the banker pays exactly what you pay, except they earn 10 times as much, so the two things are equivalent.

Everybody's car breaks down from time to time. It's a fact of life. In fact the shitty old unreliable banger that the poor family bought, is much more likely to break down than the brand new BMW that has a warranty, that the banker bought.

Once you've got money, you can keep it and you can make some more. If you haven't got any, no amount of living within your means is going to improve your situtation. It's a con. It's utter bullshit. It's a swindle.

When the banks in Italy start to fail, and cause a domino-like collapse of all the banks across the world in a re-run of the 2007/08 financial crisis, except much, much worse, it will become apparent that all of the suffering that ordinary people have gone through in order to rescue a deeply flawed banking system, was for nothing.

I think people are going to be pretty angry when they realise that patronising idiots like Theresa May arrived in their positions of power by luck not good judgement. I think people are going to be pretty angry when they find out that the good times never stopped in the City of London, and pay rises and bonuses are just as big as they ever were, while all the hardworking ordinary people suffer the consequences of propping up a broken and corrupt system.

It's time to smash the system, and rip it out of the hands of a psychopathic elite who would have us starving and dirty, living on the streets, if it meant they could maintain their ill-gotten position of wealth, power and domination.

What's the difference between a successful banker and a struggling worker? Absolutely fuck all, apart from pure dumb luck, but those arrogant fucks don't even realise how fucking hypocritical and patronising they are when they accuse other people of being underachievers, having been profligate and poorly mismanaged their finances, and having not worked hard enough.

It incenses me, that a tiny handful have such unimaginable wealth, when so many billions live in abject poverty. Just 62 people have as much money as 3.6 billion others. There is so much that is wrong with that. Off with their fucking heads!

Tags: #banking #capitalism #politics

This is a story about information technology...

In the beginning, there were sticks and rocks and maybe bits of vine. Perhaps there was some clay, and with fire, there came pottery.

There was the iron age, where metal tools were made, like the scythe, which led to greater agricultural yields.

The industrial revolution brought us steam power, and the use of coal as a source of vast quantities of energy far outstripped what could be achieved with horses and manpower.

Two world wars meant huge advances in factories and mass production, meaning that many more goods could be manufactured than would ever be needed by humanity. There are 62 Lego bricks for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Industrial chemistry - such as the Haber process - can produce vast quantities of fertilisers and pesticides, to give us food surpluses that are capable of adequately feeding every member of the human race.

The loom, which has been improved beyond all recognition to give us today's weaving and knitting machines, is now producing enough textiles that even the very poorest are able to wear garments that are recognisably 'fashionable'.

Medicine and surgery has advanced to the point where injuries and infections are now largely survivable. Germ theory, soap, disinfectant and antibiotics protect us from microbes, while chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgical interventions can often save many patients with different types of cancer.

The jet engine has shrunk the globe. People hop from continent to continent as if they were catching a train to work, and even the steam-powered locomotive is a relatively recent nation-shrinking innovation. With the intermingling of different cultures, the world's leading universities are able to share their top scholars and the very best ideas and research are circulated throughout academia.

But what of information technology?

Has the information age fulfilled its promises? As a young boy growing up in 1980s and 1990s Britain, I used to enjoy watching a BBC television program called Tomorrow's World. Many of us living in the postwar age of optimism and hope for the future, imagined a world filled with robots and hovercars. Where the fuck are they?

When I turn up at one of the railway stations that the Victorians built, instead of buying a ticket from a real person, I buy one from a robot. Except that this ticket machine still needs a real person to come along and extract the cash that it has collected in its hopper. The ticket machines still need a person to come along and replenish the spool of blank tickets, ready to be printed. Is there really much labour being saved?

Train travel in London is a particularly hot topic. When I travel on the Docklands Light Railway, the train is driverless. However, there is still a person on board to close the doors and check tickets. Tube drivers are unable to drive through a red signal without the train brakes being automatically triggered, but yet, we still have human drivers to tell us to stand clear of the doors and mind the gap [between the train and the platform].

We've all seen pictures of futuristic factories where robot arms are welding automobile bodies together, or spraypainting. The pictures of those robot arms have been standard stock footage of the factories of the future for my entire life. But yet, at the old car factory in Oxford - near where I grew up - BMW still have armies of people screwing Minis together by hand in a big production line. Surely, that can't be right, can it?

At the end of the day, computers aren't much use for anything, are they?

Quantum Mechanics, the biggest breakthrough in physics since the days of Newton, 200 years earlier, and the 'splitting' of the atomic nucleus, was all achieved without the programmable computer that we would recognise today. At the very same time as the undoubtably brilliant Alan Turing was creating the Enigma machine, the secrets of the subatomic world were being unlocked to unleash the atom bomb. Clearly, computers were not necessary for giant leaps forward in science.

The work at Bell Labs that yielded the semiconductor technology that's at the root of everything that we see as valuable today, was being done without the very microchips that were born due to the invention of the transistor. The world's most valuable company - Apple - puts computer chips inside boxes with a picture of a piece of half-eaten fruit on the outside.

So, now, what is the result, today?

Well, a bunch of geeks meet up to discuss how to address the crises that face humanity, using information technology. Then, tellingly, it turns out that it's all fake. It's all utter bullshit. It's all vapourware crap.

The I Sea app epitomises everything about the false promise of the information technology age for me, where complete fucktard "social media marketing" experts and ad-agency douchebags, who couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, simply concoct some toxic vapourware bullshit that they know will be newsworthy (i.e. clickbait).

Yes, we can all imagine some pretty funky stuff, but it's science fiction not science fact. When all the posturing and hypothesising and dreaming is done, there are relatively few actual engineers out there who can tell you what can and can't be done with technology.

At the end of the day, we're talking about computer systems that were created to be some kind of automated abacus. The computers we have today were invented to count beans. The computers we have today are very good if you want to do some kind of compound interest calculation, but they're not going to solve world hunger. We already did that when we invented the tractor, combine harvester, fertiliser and insecticide.

So, if somebody tells you that machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), gamification and social media are going to solve all the world's problems, you have my permission to shout "BULLSHIT!" in their face really loudly. In fact, I encourage you to do so. We need less ineffectual waste-of-space blaggers in the world.

Tags: #computing #socialmedia #politics #capitalism