This is a story about being a Francophile...

Vive la République! Having lived, worked and briefly been to school in France, I feel adequately placed to talk about some of the pros and cons of a different way of life that we aspire to.

Firstly, monarchy. I'm actually in favour of keeping the Royal Family. They're a great draw for tourists, and they give the UK a brilliant national identity. I like having the Royal Mail, Royal Mint and companies that are by Royal Appointment to various members of the aristocracy. Just as the USA has the stars and stripes, we have the Royal Crest and the Queen's head on everything. It's good branding.

The French might have cut off the heads of their aristocrats, but they still go nuts for all that royal shit. The palace of Versailles is still referred to as the Royal palace. The French still celebrate Bastille Day as if the monarchy were very much still in power: they ascribe a significance to royalty as if they had never actually become a republic.

What disadvantages do we have, remaining under divine rule? I can walk in the Royal Parks, enjoy looking at Buckingham Palace and seeing the changing of the guard, as well as all the other pomp and circumstance that accompanies the ceremonial head of state. It's better to sing God Save the Queen than some awful national anthem dreamt up by a committee, with its trite attempts to be inclusive.

Ok, so what about being a backwards agricultural nation of peasants, rednecks? Well, it's nice for a relaxing holiday. It's nice that the whole of France stops and downs tools for a proper lunch. It's nice there's still village life, with a butcher, a baker, a plumber, an electrician, a joiner and a builder, who are the mainstay of village life, under the Máire - the mayor - and people live a fairly old-fashioned life, where people shop locally and family life is at the centre of everything, along with good food & wine.

This is where I'm slightly divided. In the UK we have an 'always on' culture, where I can get 4G mobile broadband everywhere I go, and I'm constantly plugged into email, Twitter, Facebook. I eat my lunch at my keyboard and get crumbs from my sandwich all over my laptop. Village life in the UK has been destroyed as the commuter belts have moved further and further out into every pretty village with a railway station, within a few hours of London.

Sure, France has its cities, but over 50% of their working population work for the Government, and the spread of population density isn't quite as extreme as the UK, where the South-East is getting somewhat ridiculous, as London draws everything into its financial-services centric orbit.

While we're on the subject of financial services, would I rather be like France, which has had a relatively conservative approach to consumer debt and exotic financial instruments, or be like the UK where we're about as highly leveraged as we can possibly get? Well, apart from a few high profile cases like Société Générale, the French weathered la craque - the credit crunch - far better than the UK, which only survived because of the bailouts.

Basically, the UK is propped up on very shaky foundations. There is no underlying quality of life in the UK. Everything's on hire purchase, interest free credit, and the promise of work now, be rich later... screw spending time with your family or having anything other than work in your life.

Those who hanker after some kind of yesteryear could do worse than moving to France. However, you need to remember that a lot is lost in translation. Even with the best colloquial French, you're still not going to understand a lot of jokes, and pick up on the cultural subtleties. You're going to end up clustering together with ex-pats, swapping tea bags, Marmite and Heinz baked beans, and pining for England.

Certainly, if you have kids that have not been raised from birth in a bilingual environment, you're denying them the chance to really bond with their peers and get the most out of their education, and enjoy their childhood. They're always going to feel different. They're always going to be an outsider.

Gone are the years when France had significantly cheaper housing and cost of living. Gone are the days of cheaper food and fuel. Gone are the days of rustic farmhouse charm. Good riddance I say. Chopping firewood and fetching your water from the well, putting sawdust on your excrement in a freezing outhouse and burying your waste in the back yard... these are things that silly children like to do, because it's an adventure. It's not a way of life that we should aspire to.

Living without TV, Internet and high quality daily newspapers - ignoring current affairs and global issues - it's dumb. Just because France still manages to maintain a certain rustic charm and village idyll, doesn't mean that it's any way realistic in our globalised world.

In a way, the anti-EU sentiment stems from a history of mocking the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, who live some kind of hick outdated life. But there's also jealousy there. Wouldn't we dearly like to be as true to ourselves as the French?... protesting about every threat to our way of life, and insisting that our lingua franca is enshrined? The French are often unashamedly right wing and open about the divisions in their society. When we think of the Frenchman, we are likely to think of a farmer, rather than a Parisian, and hasn't our own culture been regrettably diluted by immigration, in a way that hasn't in France?

We look at the camps in Calais, and wonder why people don't just seek asylum there. Isn't France a safe country? There must be something desirable in our own country, but really, what we are saying is that we'd prefer it if people were just passing through the UK, rather than coming to settle. We'd rather be like France, where we have shipped our immigrants out to suburbs, camps, ghettos.

For me, a vote to remain in the EU is a vote of solidarity with Europe and with France. I want the UK to be more like France, and I want France to be more like the UK. I want to feel equally at home anywhere in Europe. I don't like these ridiculous notions of rolling back the clock to some unattainable yesteryear state, where we live in idyllic little villages and roll in the hay during an eternal summer.

For me the vote to leave the EU - Brexit - is clearly driven by this enemy at the gates idea that is epitomised in the Calais camps.

Frankly, I find the idea of building barriers between us and our nearest neighbour, most distasteful. Frankly I find the idea of rejecting our European identity to be complete madness, even if there is something emotionally appealing in the Union Jack and Her Majesty The Queen.

I feel a lot happier being a son of Europe than just a subject of The Queen. I like telling people I'm a European, just as a citizen of the United States of America would tell you that they're an American. I like the idea that I could live and work anywhere in Europe with no visa or work permit considerations.

Vive la France!

Tags: #politics #childhood #france #europe

This is a story about the mistakes you're making and why your life is shit...

Good news! I hope you're taking notes, because I'm an expert in your life and how you should live it.

Although I hardly know you, or maybe I don't know you at all, I'm sure that I can judge you, and tell you everything that you're doing wrong. I have no idea about your history, what it was like for you growing up, what stresses and strains uniquely affect you, and what if feels like to be you. However, I feel completely qualified to be able to tell you how you should be living your life, and where you're failing.

Even though I'm not furnished with a complete and comprehensive knowledge of all areas of life, I feel that my advice is completely correct and is pricelessly valuable, even in areas that I know nothing about. I'm completely certain that I could do a better job than you at things that I've never done, even though I've never done them and have no idea what it's like to be in your situation. However, I feel sure that if you just follow my advice to the letter, it will work, although I can offer no evidence to back up this assertion.

Are you with me so far?

Even though all my past relationships have ended disastrously, I'm sure that I can tell you how to get along better with your partner, and have a closer and more loving and rewarding relationship with your other half.

Even though I've never been a parent, I'm sure it can't be that hard, and you're just doing it wrong. I'm sure it's probably pretty simple and you just need some really simple, obvious, patronising advice, in order to get it out of your head that it's exhausting and a struggle. I'm sure that you'll be able to see beyond the complexity in your own life, and with my help, you'll be able to adopt my simplistic worldview that is not based on an objective reality.

Even though I have nearly been bankrupt a couple of times, have recently struggled with debt and cashflow, and my career path has gotten increasingly erratic of late, I feel sure that I'm the best placed person to tell you how to get ahead in your job, get that promotion and achieve greater job satisfaction than ever before, even though I'm not happy in my own work and have instead decided to tell other people how to get something that I've never managed to get myself.

Even though I don't eat healthily, exercise enough and I engage in various activities that are potentially damaging to my body and mind, I feel sure that I am uniquely qualified to tell you what you should and shouldn't put in your mouth, and that you're fat and lazy. I'm quite comfortable with telling people to do as I say, not as I do, and I do not suffer with an ounce of self-doubt, despite the palpable irony.

Even though my sanity is clearly in question, and I have a chequered past of mental health issues, including many episodes of depression, overspending, risk taking and other pathological behaviour, I feel sure that advising other people will prop up my own sense of security and distract me from my own failings, as some form of over-compensation for the fact that my life is clearly a fuckup. By concentrating on the negative things in your life, we can gloss over the glaring problems in my life.

You should consider yourself lucky that I have decided to be your life coach, whether you wanted my advice or not. Probably not. No, you definitely didn't want my unsolicited advice, but you're getting it anyway, because of the aforementioned need to distract myself from the problems in my own life.

Look at the view from my balcony. LOOK AT IT. This is in no way me overcompensating for a crippling lack of self-esteem. I want you to think of me as successful and happy, even though I am clearly burning cash in order to maintain an outward image of having my shit together. THIS IS FOR ME ONLY. You need to stay living in your shitty place in the middle of nowhere with the view that looks right into your neighbour's windows, or onto an industrial wasteland, in order for me to feel superior, and us to maintain the superior-inferior relationship that allows me to inflate my fragile ego at your expense.

You should know that I earn a lot of money, and have almost but not quite been successful, hence writing this, but all the same you should treat me as if I was successful. The fact that successful people aren't the ones writing the self-help books, because they're too busy snorting pure cocaine off the tits of supermodels on their yachts in the Cote d'Azur, should not at all affect your misplaced respect for what I have to say.

Fundamentally, anything that's wrong with your life is your fault. You made bad choices in life and you need to blame yourself and feel guilty. Guilt and regret are the basis for the feeling you need to have that you're somehow inferior to me. You need to think of yourself as fallible and stupid, and think of me as someone who's never made the same mistakes as you.

Please imagine my life as being like this: I never made stupid, bad choices in my life, and that's why my life is perfect and I love it and it's amazing. You listen to me because my life is blemish free and I've never fucked up, and I'm so happy and fulfilled and what I'm doing with myself is so rewarding, and I've got everything I've ever wanted. You just have to try to be just like this too, and if you're not it's your fault for choosing not to be, and it must be because you're a bad person and you want bad stuff to happen.

Are you with me so far?

Ok, so think of something you're not happy with in your life. Got it? Right, the next part is going to blow your mind. All you've got to do, is decide that it's not going to be a problem anymore. I want you to think of me as not having any problems, because I decided not to have any. Because having problems in your life is due to your poor choices. You decided to have problems in your life, and all you've got to do is decide not to have them anymore. Problem solved.

Hurrah! I bet you're feeling better already. If you're not, it's because you've decided to be unhappy, and you're a bad person. Perhaps you're too stupid and lazy to decide not to have any problems, and just have a perfect life, like I want you to imagine that I do.

Are you getting it? If not, here are some passive-aggressive words on a pretty photo, in order to further hammer home just how stupid and shit you are:

Feel free to share that as much as you like on your Facebook wall, to make other people think that you're living a successful happy life, looking down on other people and that people should respect you as some kind of lifestyle guru. You should also feel a smug sense of satisfaction, that you have shared some useful nugget of information that will be transformative in the lives of others. Give yourself a pat on the back and go to bed tonight with a warm fuzzy glow inside.

Anyway, back to oversimplifying the complexity of your life and making you feel inadequate and a failure, so that I can pump up my own floundering ego...

So, have you hugged a dolphin today? Why not? You're neglecting your duty as a strong eco-warrior nature guardian woodland pixie member of the human global eco planet mesh network system synergy community tribe consortium of mega-love and self respect, by neglecting your duties to humanity and dolphinkind.

I know you have to get up at dawn to make packed lunches and hose down the vomit and snot from every surface of your home that's overbrimming with broken toys and childrearing equipment, neglected exercise aids and jam-smeared expensive trinketry that reminds you that your formerly ordered adult life has now been smashed to shit by the arrival of your unruly offspring. However, you're failing your children unless you set aside 3 hours a day for tribal chanting and other archaic rituals that serve no obvious purpose.

If you're struggling to juggle the demands of the school run, after school activities, getting nutritious food into the mouths of your picky eating kids, making sure your little darlings have a well-rounded childhood, including lots of social time with their friends as well as healthy wholesome outdoor playing and limiting their 'screen time' to a ridiculously unattainable number of dictated minutes. Just remember this: it's because you're a bad person. You made bad choices and it's all your fault.

If you ever need to know where you went wrong, look at my imagined version of my life that I project, through telling other people where they went wrong with their lives and pretending that my own is perfect, and you'll have all the more reason to loathe yourself and feel guilty and a failure. Just remember the handy phrase: "this is all my fault. I made bad choices and it's all my responsibility. I just have to choose to not have this complexity and these problems and then my life will be perfect. If my life is less than perfect, I have failed".

You should repeat some variation of the "I have failed" mantra to yourself, until you are sufficiently demotivated, depressed, overwhelmed and lacking in self-esteem, to get off your fat, lazy, unhealthy, selfish backside and choose to not have the problems which exist because of your choices and because you're a bad person, you monster.

Basically, you should assume that I'm a better person, and that I spend my life swanning around from amazing experience to amazing experience, and that you could have an amazing life too, except you are holding yourself back. You are denying you and your family the life that they deserve, with all this 'reality' bullshit, where you insist on including elements from your life that are complex and don't fit my fake worldview. Damn you to hell for insisting on living in reality, with all its wrinkles and niggles and imperfections... it's your fault, not mine! You should choose to live in the fantasy land that I imagine exists.

Any deviation from the oversimplified fantasy that I portray is all your fault and down to bad choices that you made.

Try to imagine me living the most perfect life you can imagine, without any of the stresses and complexities that you face in your everyday life. Now, try to imagine that your own history, circumstances and reality are completely controlled by the decision to allow or not allow reality to be real. In this fantasy world that I desperately want to be real, in order to compensate for my own failed life, the problems then disappear. Your failure to make all the problems disappear is a problem with your faith and commitment, not with my barking mad interpretation of reality as we all experience it.

I hope you're keeping up with this, because otherwise you're letting yourself down, you're letting your family down, and you're letting humanity down.

You're practically getting in the sea and raping dolphins, if you don't subscribe to this prescription for a perfect life that nobody has yet lived, but yet I preach with absolute confidence as an infallible template for bringing yourself happiness and contentment.

The evidence is that attempting to apply these unrealistic and impossible ideas to your day-to-day existence will only result in a sense of inadequacy and failure, and believing that people are better and less fallible than yourself and blaming yourself for things, will only lead you to feel depressed. However, try to put evidence from your mind, and just concentrate on the guilt.

Guilt is good. Please use it to help me avoid my own sense of failure, by listening to every word I say and sharing my motivational passive-aggressive images on social media to create a culture of comparison to an unattainable standard of living and an unrealistic set of guidelines for living a perfect life, which conforms to what we wish to be true rather than what can be objectively be observed to be the limitations that we must work with.

If your life is shit, listen to the failure who knows nothing about your life and the harsh reality that you face.

Ride your bike in the green and wild places. Don't just take photos to put on your stupid blog to make people feel like they're lazy and shit for wasting their pathetic lives with the mundane complexity of everyday life.

Tags: #depression #mentalhealth #career #london

This is a story about ingratitude...

Give me liberty, or give me death!

How do you like living in the free world? Freedom of speech, not that anybody's even listening and you'll never get into print. Freedom to work, if you can get a job, and you'll have to pay exorbitant taxes. Freedom to do what you want, if you're not dead and have any spare time and energy after working a job until you're nearly 70 years old. Freedom to buy what you want, except you probably can't afford it.

There: that's the ingratitude part out of the way. Do I actually think like that? Some people think I do. You'll have to read between the lines to see where I am being self-mocking, humorous, sarcastic and even a little farsical in the interests of courting controversy.

This talk of death and suicide sounds a little flippant, a little melodramatic, but in actual fact, it's shaped my mindset.

I was always impossible to manage, and fearless talking to people of all ranks and status. I refuse to be cowed by credentials and hierarchy. I refuse to know my place.

If you were to just dip into part of my story, and try to make a knee-jerk assumption about me, you might assume that I think I'm better than other people. You might think I'm an entitled snob, a spoiled little brat. You would have misjudged me, and instead you've failed to understand that I'm coming at things from a totally different end of the spectrum.

I'm not claiming that I'm hard done by and that I've made my own luck and worked my way up from the bottom. On closer examination, these claims always prove to be horse-shit. When we look at people who claim to be self-made success stories, the tale is always ridiculous. For starters, many of the ones I've encountered came from loving homes in middle-class families, with parents who had a profession, a job for life. There has been financial security and a good education, even if they paint themselves as some sort of working class hero.

My tale is slightly different. I'm judging things based on the experiences I had when I had nothing. No roof over my head, and no money. I'm judging life based on how close I came to death. I literally made a life-or-death decision... actually on a couple of occasions.

So, I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have nothing. I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have to choose to act to stay alive, or else inaction would lead to death.

Based on this standpoint, I judge things very differently. You might think I'm ungrateful to have a "good" job. You might think I'm ungrateful for my opportunities. In actual fact though, I'm just judging things relatively. I think to myself "am I more or less happy than when I had nothing" and "am I more or less inclined to die, than the time that I nearly died before".

There's a cold hard rational core within me, that could quite easily slice my veins open, in a sudden brutally decisive act, if I decided that the effort of maintaining myself in a state of perpetual unhappiness and struggle would be ridiculous.

As a subject of Her Majesty the Queen of England, I was indoctrinated in the state schools of the United Kingdom, to become a loyal wage-slave, contributing to stability, increase and ornament of British commerce. Does it give me any pleasure or pride to say that? No, not really.

My very first job was for a Ministry of Defence subcontractor, and I actively contributed to Great Britain's military capability, as a naval power, to further their imperialist ambitions. Should that give me a lump in my throat when I see the Union Jack and hear the national anthem? Actually, no, it makes me think about the high price that is paid by the nations we have subjugated, in order to pay for the lifestyle I enjoyed.

Do people enjoy their lifestyle? Huge numbers of ordinary working age people can't afford a house, a family, a wedding. Most ordinary working folks hate their shitty jobs and their long commutes. Most ordinary working folks fret about getting ahead in the work rat race, or getting their kids good exam grades so that they can die an early death due to stress-related illness. But the good news is that you're not going to have to die in poverty if you drop dead at your desk, given that the pensions are in a meltdown.

It looks so hypocritical. The Westeners sit there in their sedentary jobs, comfort-eating themselves to death through obesity-related illness and giving themselves repetitive strain injury from their mouse and keyboard, cataracts from their computer screen and a bad back from slouching in a chair all day. Our short life expectancy is a function of stress, depression and poor lifestyle 'choices'. Meanwhile, the developing world slaves away, with the dream of attaining a western-style lifestyle. Supposedly, the West is the model the world should follow.

However, maybe we got it wrong. In other cultures, the smartest member of the family gets sent away to study and work, so that they can send money back to their family to support them. Isn't that something to get out of bed in the morning? Being the breadwinner for your family.

Instead of the young, fit and active people being the economic providers, we have instead tipped our society on its head, where we worship the 'grey pound'. Since the pension funds became the biggest investors in all our companies, and all the wealth pooled in the accounts and property portfolios of the baby boomers, we now have an impoverished youth, who have a much lower quality of life than their mothers and fathers, and far fewer opportunities to provide for even themselves and their own offspring, let alone feathering the nest still further of their elderly relatives.

I went to the Southampton Boat Show last year, and instead of successful young businessmen treating themself to a toy, as a reward for their hard work, ambition and ingenuity, it was baby-boomers who were spending their kids and grandkids inheritance, as a reward for having created an asset bubble that has meant crashes in both the stock market and the housing market.

I know that all the pounds of economic output that I generate will simply disappear into a pensions black hole, to pay out final-salary schemes for a generation who have nothing but contempt for their kids and grandkids.

Would you toil and toil, if you had no prospect of ever being self sufficient? If you were simply working for ungrateful masters who called you lazy and stupid? If the wealth that you generated simply inflated asset prices further out of reach, concentrated in the hands of the idle coffin-dodgers who didn't work to create the very assets that they own?

Since when did it become a bad thing to be motivated to work? Why should we be so fearful of immigrants, who are young, fit and economically active? The very language smacks of greedy hoarders who are like a dog in a manger.

Every year we have more students than ever before achieving the top exam grades, yet we print headlines and stories asking if exams are getting easier. Homework and the pressure to succeed is driving ever increasing numbers of young people to suicide, but yet it isn't good enough.

The prospects for young people are awful. The minimum wage is lower, and they'll never be able to get married, have kids and buy a house like their parents did. Why do we label them as 'gangs', 'hoodlums' and 'thugs' and mock them for their materialistic attachments to modestly priced bling, like gold cellphones and other trinkets that cost a fraction of the homes and cars that their parents had as their status-symbols?

Why do we not see the link between demanding endless dividends on our shares and ever-increasing capital gains, and the need for corporations to suppress wage inflation, which impoverishes our working-age people?

There are many people who would say that I'm not entitled to ask these questions, given my six-figure income. There are many people who think I should just shut up and take the money, because it's there.

In actual fact, I'm going further than just asking difficult questions. I'm actually putting my job on the line.

I lost two big money contracts because I refuse to be bought. I refuse to stay my tongue, just because I'm being paid a lot of money. Is it unprofessional, arrogant, reckless, stupid? Actually, it's none of those things.

I struggled a lot with middle-class guilt, but predictably, I did very little about it. I used to wring my hands and say "but what can I do?" while reading the Observer and The Guardian newspapers, and having passionate discussions about putting the world to rights, while quaffing expensive wine in fine restaurants in North London. This was hypocrisy. The final straw would have been going on a sponsored run and doing some kind of gift-aid contribution out of my salary every month, to salve my conscience and give me some kind of sense of smug satisfaction that I'd played my part.

Instead, I went on a journey. I've been to the bottom and back again. You might think that my risk was underwritten by my middle-class family, but they actually turned their back on me, when I had apparently left my social rank and become 'untouchable'. I was disowned, disinherited.

I can never claim to know what it was like growing up in abject poverty. My parents might claim that they never had any money, what with my mum being a student and my dad working behind a bar in a caravan site, when I was born. However, my granddads were both professional men with good pension provisions, who were able to bail out my drug-addled hopeless parents whenever they really hit hard times. The same privilege was never extended to me. Perhaps I should have recklessly sowed my wild oats, and then pled poverty when there were extra mouths to feed, like they did.

A parent's relief that their child is alive and physically healthy has no bearing on whether a person feels grateful to be alive. I didn't choose to be born and I don't want to go on living, if life is just endless misery and suffering. If you expect your kids to love you unconditionally, you're just plain wrong. It totally depends on how you treat them, and there's a real generational problem.

Handing over a planet and an economy that's absolutely fucked, and then retiring, is pretty ridiculous if the generation who are going to have to clean up the mess, accept austerity measures and live a lifestyle that is unimaginably frugal, in order to allow pollution to return to safe levels. It's a bad deal, by anybody's reckoning.

It's in my nature to question everything and anything. There are no taboos for me. There is no 'respect your elders' bullshit, because the first question is "why?". Why should I respect the generation that proliferated nuclear armaments, caused global warming, deforestation, pollution of the water table, an asset bubble that's priced ordinary working people out of the market, an unprecedented increase in the rich:poor gap and widespread economic calamity and didn't think about how they were going to afford their retirement, except by mortgaging the future of their children and grandchildren.

Why do I work? I can't tell you, but I can tell you what damage working does to humanity.

The wealth that I generate goes to corporations, who pay it out in the form of dividends or use it to inflate asset prices, to generate growth for their majority shareholders, who are institutional investors - asset managers - whose job it is to generate yet more wealth for an idle elite who expect to receive final salary pensions and an amazing lifestyle, in return for having wrecked the world.

And you wonder why I struggle to get out of bed in the morning and get excited about going to work?

People that I've worked with throughout my career have read what I've written, and I'm slowly making myself unemployable. How could you employ me, knowing that I don't subscribe to the groupthink? How could you employ me, knowing that I speak my mind, and have no respect for the instruments of power? How could you employ me, knowing that I'm not cowed by fear and insecurity?

I'm impossible to control, using the millstone of debt and the threat of destitution. For me, destitution is freedom. Freedom from the oppression of working a job that only serves to line the pockets of an ungrateful elite who have no respect for the workers of the world, and are only interested in a comfortable retirement at the expense of over 50% of the world's people.

Obviously, I think to myself "I must take this down" or "I must cover this up" or "I must keep my mouth shut". There's a part of me that just wants to take the king's shilling and let him call the tune, no matter how maddened I am by degrading myself as the court jester.

There is so much false promise. Work today and be happy tomorrow. Fritter away my cash on good times to forget about the soul-less day-to-day existence and futility of it all, is what I could so easily do. I've done it before.

I sometimes laugh at myself, so full of middle-class angst, but there's a deep seriousness here. It's just bullying groupthink to call somebody a hypocrite or a champagne socialist. The fact of the matter is, somebody has to do something, because we're sleepwalking towards disaster. The middle classes are just about comfortable enough to write letters and furrow their brows with concern, but not enough to actually risk their jobs or their reputations and good social standing.

Every day I sit at my desk, unable to not think about the bigger picture, unable to put the futility of it all out of my mind. I think "what the hell am I doing here?" and even though I'm good at my job and I am perfectly capable of toeing the line and keeping my bosses happy, I inevitably start to rock the boat, just because I have so much barely concealed contempt for a system that so obviously fails to serve the bulk of humanity.

I've let a genie out of the bottle, by considering the wider questions that we face as a species. I've gone down a rabbit-hole of thought, and I can't stop chasing that rabbit, even though I'm throwing away golden opportunities that people would love to have themselves.

Please try not to get caught in the trap of thinking this is a simple case of ingratitude.

My values and my work are really not at all aligned, and it grates with me, to the point where I really don't give a shit if I lose my job, but I'm not stupid... I know that I only have to play by the rules for a short amount of time, and then I can let the world know what I really think and who I really am, before my horrified bosses get rid of me. Please just kill me.

Tags: #career #capitalism #banking #suicide #depression #parents #family #childhood

This is a story about the descent into darkness...

The first time I couldn't work due to depression, it came out of the blue. I had started a new job, and it was actually really interesting. I was quite enthusiastic about what I was doing, and empowered to grow into a new role. Spring was turning into summer, and so I had the seasons in my favour. What happened next was a surprise to everybody, including me.

One morning, I couldn't get out of bed. I'd had problems getting up early for work, but this was different... I couldn't face the day. As soon as I'd admitted defeat - that I definitely wasn't going to make it into the office that day - I was somehow a changed person. It was like a dam burst. This problem that I had been barely coping with was suddenly unleashed, after 11 years of steady 9 to 5 grind and reliable service in the name of the corporations I worked for.

People talk about nervous breakdowns, and I guess that's what had happened. All of a sudden, and with little warning, I was sick... but this was an invisible sickness. I felt it, and I couldn't overcome it, but I didn't believe it was real. I thought that it was fake. I felt like a fraud.

In the UK you can take up to 3 days off work without a doctor's note. After 3 days, I knew deep down that there was no way that I could possibly go back to work, but what was wrong with me? This was highly unusual for the dependable grey-suited regular 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office Joe Bloggs, that I was. 11 years of full time work and 13 years of full time education. All I knew was getting up and going to a dictated place, on the treadmill, in the rat race, following orders.

To summon the effort to go and see my doctor took the whole of those 3 days. I knew the problem was more severe than just not feeling very well. I knew it was more severe than a day off work was going to cure. I knew that something was seriously wrong, but I couldn't express it... I had no language to explain the brick wall that I'd hit.

It was so unlike me to be lacking in energy, in purpose, in motivation and to neglect my duties, my responsibilities. It was so unlike me to not do the work. I'd had a nearly 100% attendance record at work and at school and college. Bunking off wasn't in my vocabulary. Not doing things I didn't like wasn't something I ever considered as an alternative.

I went to the doctor. I sat down and explained that I was tired. I was more tired than I'd ever been in my life. I couldn't cope. I couldn't turn the pedals of the cycle anymore. I couldn't do what I'd always managed to do, which was to drag myself out of bed, and go to school, college or work, no matter what. It hadn't mattered whether the bullying was unbearable, or the stress was intolerable, the pressure relentless... I had been that guy, that perfect student or dream employee, who always turned up and did their work, like a good little boy.

Within a couple of minutes of me explaining my unexpected interruption in my perfect attendance record, and inexplicable fatigue, my doctor said "have you heard of Fluoxetine?". I had heard of Fluoxetine: it's the generic name for Prozac, which is an anti-depressant. Fluoxetine is a Specific Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) which was supposed to increase levels of Serotonin in the brain, or so Eli Lilly - the manufacturer - thought, and told the world that depressed people had unnaturally low serotonin levels in their brain. They were wrong.

The theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, is ubiquitous. We are comforted to know that there is a medical problem with us, that can be corrected with medication. It's a neat little theory: depressed people don't have enough serotonin in their brain, and with medicine it can be topped up to 'normal' levels. Sadly, it's just not correct.

Measurements of the amount of serotonin metabolites in spinal fluid of depressed people who take Fluoxetine or other SSRIs are actually lower than supposedly healthy people. The theory was proven to be bunkum, but doctors and mental health professionals still share research that's 30+ years old and has been disproven. The theory was just too popular, as well as the SSRI medication, which millions of people had flocked to as their salvation.

I had read extensively in the field of psychopharmacology and had received unconditional offers of a University place at several prestigious institutions, to study psychology, pharmacology and psychiatry. I was probably better informed than my doctor.

I knew that SSRIs were associated with emotional blunting, anorgasmia (not being able to cum) and increased suicidal ideation (thinking about killing yourself). I knew that the long-term outcomes were actually worse than placebo, in several studies. I knew that an SSRI would take 6 weeks to take effect anyway, and that was no use to me. I needed to get back to work!

So, I declined the medication that was offered to me, within just a few minutes of talking to my doctor. I was shocked by how quickly I had been offered psychiatric medication from a general physician, which would take at least 6 weeks to take effect, and I could end up taking for a long time. I felt a little failed by the health services.

My doctor signed me off for a week, and I felt a little relieved to have some time to allow my body to hopefully revert to homeostasis, and I could hopefully get back to work. I felt like a real failure, and I started to feel anxious about the impression that my bosses and colleagues would have of me. Would I be seen as unreliable? Would my name be tainted?

The fatigue and lack of motivation, purpose, persisted and I spent a week in bed, sleeping for 16+ hours. I hardly ate. I didn't open the curtains. I turned my phone off and just curled up under the duvet. Where had this tiredness come from? I had always been in good physical shape and my body had never failed me like this before. I had always had plenty of energy.

I went back to the doctor after a week, and I was getting pretty desperate for an answer. I was looking for a diagnosis, a cure. I wanted the trusted men in white coats to make everything better again.

We did tests: blood tests, urine tests, thyroid function, kidney and liver function. We even did an AIDS test, as my doctor was at a loss to explain why I was so fatigued all the time. One week turned into three weeks. There was seemingly no end to my exhaustion and inability to cope with the thought of going back to work. There was no way I could face the day, for some reason. I had been housebound with the curtains closed, except for trips around the corner to the doctor's surgery.

My doctors remained convinced that I was suffering with Clinical Depression, and urged me to try an SSRI, but I still refused on the grounds that I didn't want another 6 weeks off work, while I waited for the medication to kick in. 9 weeks off work seemed ridiculous to me, and the side effects sounded unacceptable.

So I stopped going to the doctors. I stopped getting sick notes. I switched my phone off and went to bed, and I just tried to ignore the fact that I was going to lose my job. I didn't care because I couldn't care. There was no way I could go back to work, feeling so exhausted, so drained, so fatigued and unable to cope with even preparing food, getting dressed, having a shower. I just lay in my bed and slept two thirds of every day, and lay half-asleep, anxious about a knock at the door, with the curtains closed, for the rest of the time.

Everything seemed impossible, insurmountable. The idea of going to the shop seemed as insane as the idea of going on an expedition to the South Pole without any warm clothes or supplies. Clearly there was something wrong with me if I was misjudging the effort involved in things, but I also knew that I couldn't keep just doing the same shit, the same crappy 9 to 5 routine, and the same formula of working a job.

As the summer wore on, I started to get interested in the idea of doing some iPhone development work, and slowly I ventured outside into the sunshine in the afternoons, to learn how to develop software on the Apple platform. It seemed like a nice confidence-building exercise, as I had started to doubt that I'd ever be able to work again. I had started to feel like I'd be invalided out of the workforce for the rest of my days.

The more I worked, the more obsessed I became. My energy came back. Slowly at first. I would work for an afternoon, then an afternoon and an evening, and then soon I was doing full days of work again. But it didn't stop there.

By the time July had given way to August, I was working an 18 hour day. I was irritable and single-minded. Eating was a chore that would slow me down and get in the way of me working. I didn't want to waste time with my partner, my friends, my family. Nobody understood what I was working on and how important it was. Explaining anything to anybody was painfully slow and angered me to have to take time out from my work to even answer the simplest of questions.

I started to speak faster, in a rush to get the words out and not waste precious time speaking to people. I viewed other people as obstacles, standing in the way of my single goal, and as dimwitted fools who were sent to irritate and frustrate me. My thoughts raced, but I could follow them, but speaking was never fast enough to verbalise what was going on in my brain, so my speech was pressured... trying to will my tongue to be fast enough to keep pace with my thread of thought.

My work rang me up and insisted that we meet up. I saw my boss, and we agreed that I should give my notice. There was no way I was going back to that job. They were cool about things, but I didn't really have any explanation about what was going on with me.

I was free from the confines of the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office routine. I was free from dimwitted bosses who had been promoted into positions of incompetence. I was free from bureaucracy and red tape and corporate bullshit. I just worked, and worked, and worked. I worked 7 days a week. I worked until I was falling asleep, and then I would start again as soon as I woke up.

At some point during this flurry of activity, I managed to get a couple of iPhone Apps to number one in the charts. Naturally, this brought in a lot of cash. I had done it. I had proven my point. I had unwittingly become a successful entrepreneur, off the back of becoming unwell and losing my job.

However, I failed to see it like that. What I saw instead was that office work wasn't good for me. I felt like office work had made me sick, and that I needed to find a new profession... well, a trade actually.

I decided to quit IT and software - the thing that I was really good at - and retrain as an electrician. I decided that the most important things to me were being self employed and working in a non-office environment. It took a couple of years before I finally realised I was wrong.

The same thing happened to me, except this time it was much, much faster.

The pressure on a small businessman, and a tradesman is immense. An electrician is responsible for the safety of everybody in the homes that you have installed an electrical system into. If anybody is electrocuted because of your shoddy workmanship, it's your fault. That's a lot of responsibility. Also, the public expect you to work for peanuts.

The sense of exhaustion and inability to cope with the pressure anymore, had hit me really hard in my cushy desk job. Now I had angry customers ringing me up because I had gotten sick. This was much, much worse, because they were ordinary people who I'd met and built a relationship with. Ordinary people were counting on me to wire up their homes, and I was personally failing them.

This depression was much deeper and darker, because I'd really run out of ideas. I felt completely useless, and that as a well known local tradesman, I'd ruined my reputation in my community. This was awful. I was actually afraid to leave the house, in case I bumped into somebody I knew, somebody who I'd let down.

I felt like I couldn't go backwards, and I couldn't go forwards. I was really trapped. How would people take me seriously as an IT professional if I'd previously been a lowly electrician? How would I ever work again as an independent businessman, when I had actually crashed a business due to my ill health? How could I ever be trusted again?

I started to think about suicide very seriously. I saw no way out of this cycle of depressions and failure. I couldn't see a way to earn money anymore, to work again. I couldn't imagine going back to my profession, or starting another business. Everything looked doomed to fail again and again and again.

I tried the medical route again, and finally got referred to a psychiatrist. It took a very long time before I actually met with the consultant, and the options were the same: SSRIs, SNRIs and NaSSAs. All serotonergic drugs. All with horrible side effects. All taking 6+ weeks to kick in.

I begged my psychiatrist to let me try Bupropion (sold as Zyban and Wellbutrin) which is very popular in France and is fast acting. He refused on the grounds that it was an off-label prescription in the UK and he'd have to get special permission from the NHS trust. It was more than his job was worth.

So, I resorted to self-medication.

Self medication worked... in the short term. I felt better, I could function. However, it took me down a path that led to the Dark Web, which led to drug window-shopping, and later to experimentation with just about every highly addictive hard drug known to man, including Heroin, Crack Cocaine and Crystal Methamphetamine.

Drugs don't work. The brain gets used to them, and then you have to increase the dose or switch to a more powerful drug. You can't artificially induce an organ that's designed to be balanced - homeostatically self-regulating - to be forced into an unnatural state.

What's the reason why those people who were taking SSRIs had lower serotonin levels in their spinal fluid? Well, it's because the brain realises that something is artificially out of kilter, and so it releases less serotonin to compensate, and puts you right back where you started.

In the words of The Verve: "the drugs don't work, they just make it worse".

Why do you think drugs from your doctor are good, and drugs from a drug dealer or the Dark Web are bad? Do you think your brain knows the difference? Of course it doesn't. Most of the drugs that are abused were developed by pharmaceutical companies originally, and used to be prescribed before newer 'safer' medications were developed. By 'safer' we tend to mean weaker and with such horrible side effects that taking bigger doses becomes unpleasant. In actual fact, the so-called 'drugs of abuse' have far less side effects than their 'safe' counterparts, at therapeutic doses. Anything becomes poisonous at high enough doses.

Does that mean I'm pro-drugs then? Am I soft on drugs, and one of these decriminalisation nuts?

Well, no, not really. Drugs are bad. They put your brain into an unnatural state and it's hard for your brain to achieve homeostasis when you are poking and prodding at it with the blunt instruments that are the chemicals that cross the blood-brain barrier.

Drugs can 'reset' your brain, in a similar way to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) which is also known as 'shock' therapy.

Medicine of the brain is very early in its development. Psychiatry has only really been a medical field since the 1950's and the true mechanism of action of medications is only very poorly understood, especially as the true nature of mental illness has not yet been revealed.

My personal view is that the destruction of families, clans and villages in favour of ridiculously long working hours in an isolated urban setting, has destroyed everything we need as humans in terms of our relationships with other human beings. Mental illness is a perfectly sane response to modern life. It's a sane response to an insane world.

The thing that's been most beneficial to my mental health has been connecting with a group of friends, while being homeless. Being relieved of the isolated silence of the commuter train, and the pressure of horrible work and job insecurity, coupled with the financial pressures of paying ridiculous rent and unattainable material goals... it was sweet, sweet relief. Living in a kind of commune, with other people who were living in close quarters with each other, sounds unbearable, but it was actually nice. It was humanising. It felt natural, and a sense of calm, relaxation and connection with the world, flooded back into me. I felt a warmth within me that I'd never felt, except maybe with Heroin.

The question now on my lips is: how do I get that again? How do I recreate the sense of community I had, either with tons of kitesurfing friends, or with tons of similarly dispossessed and dislocated homeless people, all thrust together out of necessity to stick together?

The need to belong to a tribe, a group, a commune... it's undeniable, now that I've experienced it. I place an importance on it above financial security, because without it I just feel suicidal, so it's actually essential for life in a way that money just isn't.

Human connection is the answer to the riddle of depression, suicide and addiction.

I'm halfway betwixt and between. Half in the dark, and half in the light. My brain doesn't know whether to be suicidally depressed or hypomanically fixated on a single goal.

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

This is a story about being an open book...

I'm having a crisis of confidence. I've written the best part of a quarter of a million words, but now I'm starting to feel like it's all garbage. I'm losing my audience, and I'm losing my way... where am I going with this?

I've got experience of writing every day. I used to do it on a forum, and it brought very positive things to my life. Having that connection with a group of people formed the basis for friendships that later developed in to proper face-to-face relationships. It was also really confidence inspiring, finding out that people had read my stuff and found it interesting.

So, this could be seen as something immature. I've gone back to the things that I was doing in my early twenties, in an attempt to recapture some long-lost happiness and security. I've moved back to London, I'm working back in banking IT, I aspire to get back into kitesurfing and I'm writing every day... albeit in isolation.

When I started writing on the British KiteSurfing Association (BKSA) forum, the internet was a very different place. There was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. The internet had not yet been colonised by an army of bloggers, churning out a banal wall of white noise, as they attempted to fill the void in their boring isolated lives.

It was interesting that a friend said he had to take down his forum website because it was simply killed by spammers, trying to generate links to their crappy sites, in an attempt to push up their Google ranking. In an article he shared yesterday, a woman wrote about most of the comments in her blog being other bloggers trying to do the same: to generate traffic on their sites.

Fundamentally, the message is clear: nobody reads your boring shit. Stop writing. Don't bother.

However, I'm not writing because I want the advertising revenue or product sponsorship deals. I'm writing because some crazy shit happened to me in recent years, and I want people to empathise. I can no longer carry the burden of having all these secrets. I can no longer handle having a load of experiences that I've never told to my friends and family.

A year ago, I was paranoid about being 'found out' as somebody who came off the rails and had a tough time. I felt that my professional reputation would be ruined. I felt that people would recoil in horror, and that I would lose friendships, respect. The jury is still out, and I've pushed pretty hard into territory that makes me look really really bad, but I'm still here... pushing through it.

There is a kind of catharsis in sharing some stuff that's eating you up inside. I guess it doesn't have to be done so publicly, but my attempts to discuss this stuff over email fell on deaf ears. My attempts to discuss this stuff with my parents ended with them just wanting to avoid the topics. I don't really see any friends on a regular basis, so I've been trapped all alone with my thoughts.

What I know about stuff online is that there are a lot more 'lurkers' than you're aware of. Far more people are reading than writing. People struggle to find the words of their own, and instead they try and find voices that echo their own sentiments. We find it much less scary to share something that was written by somebody else, that matches our own opinion, than to write down our own opinion. We almost feel as if our own opinion isn't worthy, isn't valid.

I guess I don't really have that problem. I'm outspoken in any area that takes my interest. If I don't have an opinion on something, I'll think about it and then develop an opinion of my own. I like to think that my opinions have not been easily swayed, but are instead the rational conclusions drawn from the available evidence.

When I write some pieces which are pure opinion - like my rants about the pensions crisis, or how shitty young people's prospects are - then I do kind of feel like I'm writing garbage. I don't treat it as an academic exercise, and put in loads of references and quotes. I simply set out my opinion in strongly emotive language, because I obviously care deeply enough to write about it.

However, when I think about why I wrote something, it's often because I'm bitter and angry about something else. It's been quite clear from my writing that I'm pretty pissed off with my parents, and so these strong emotions start to express themselves in thinly veiled attacks on their politics and lifestyle choices. The fact that they sit in wealthy comfort while my sister and I struggle turns into an attack on rich Cotswold-dwelling upper middle class Conservative twits, like David Cameron... completely ignorant of the struggles of inner city and suburban ordinary people.

Why I have chosen to shame myself, and write about deeply embarrassing personal stuff and mistakes that I have made, is somewhat more complicated.

There's a huge risk that I'm going to slip backwards into the traps that threatened to destroy my life, during the last few years. I'm scared about how chaotic my life was, how close I came to death, life-changing injury and permanent madness. I want to have some kind of record of my ups and downs, to put things into my own words and demystify what's been going on.

My perception is that I'm currently fairly healthy. I'm struggling with depression and anxiety, but all my feelings of paranoia, my jumbled up disordered thoughts and the really strange ideas and terrible plans or schemes... they've all subsided. Now, I feel quite practical, quite realistic, quite sane. I feel mostly normal.

It's not healthy to regard yourself with suspicion, to think of yourself as unwell. I'm pretty sure I'm not unwell, but it's taking time to get back on my feet. Repairing the damage caused by traumatic events in your life is not quick and it's not easy. If you've read any of my story, you'll know that I've had a remarkable turnaround from where I was, at my lowest ebb.

I've got no idea who's still reading this, and what their perception is of me, but my objective now is to try and demonstrate that I'm stabilising, that I'm getting back to normal. I want to try and reassure people that I'm not a lost cause, and that I'm on top of the scary things that threatened to consume me. I want people to see me as somebody worthwhile, somebody worth being friends with, somebody interesting, not just as a gruesome jester, not just as a fizzing, bubbling, seething mass of self-destructive insanity.

It would be nice if I can write a new, happier, more normal chapter in my story. It would be nice if that chapter included some supporters, but I appreciate that my story has been very hard to follow. I've been hard work, but I hope I'm worth it in the end.

Fundamentally, I'm humbled, even if it doesn't come across very well.

I'm starting to get a bit paranoid about my employers finding this blog, but if I keep writing, all the madness is going to get buried under far too much text for them to bother reading

Tags: #writing #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about brain damage...

Look at me, eating brains for breakfast. Actually, it's obviously porridge, but I've clearly lost the plot. I'm a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I'm a few cards short of a deck. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, at the moment.

I've been job hunting again this week, after a lengthy hiatus, and it's remarkable how badly affected by stress I have been. In the grand scheme of things, 4 or 5 months out of action is really nothing at all, but having to jump through the recruitment hoops is my idea of hell.

It was only a little over a month ago that I was completely bat shit insane and life was headed down the tubes, so I guess it's natural that this first week back in the swing of things should come with some trepidation.

I wonder how I will answer that question, in an interview: "what have you been doing with yourself since Christmas?". I wonder how well it would go down if I told them I had mainly been locked in my en-suite bathroom, suffering extreme paranoid psychosis, out of my head on bath salts, or in a slurring semi-comatose state induced by legal benzodiazepines, that meant that it took me 15 minutes to explain to a friend that I was eating a slice of toast. Another friend thought I had suffered a stroke.

Oh, I'm making my family very proud, eh? But what can you do? There was really very little hope for me after my brief efforts to keep the wheels of the machine turning, ended up being blocked by the holiday season. Faced with a cashflow crisis and the slow January job market, I backslid, I relapsed, I self-sabotaged.

How much damage does it do, to get so messed up for 3 months? I mean seriously messed up. At one point I believed that window cleaners were spying on me at 11pm at night, on a bank holiday, with horrible winter weather lashing the building.

You only have to look back to some of my blog posts from around that period to see that the whole bath salts & pink/blue pills from the internet combo wasn't the greatest thing for my mental health. You can see the disjointed thinking, but yet my mind had failed to stop whirring away, so instead the complete garbage running around in the hamster wheel of my brain was just spewing forth onto the pages of this website.

In a way, I'm tempted to go back and edit what I wrote, or even erase it from history. However, it's an interesting record of everything that happened to me, in 8 months and counting. Here's a brief recap:

• I was living in a hotel
• I was working a contract for HSBC
• I was really enjoying my work
• I was well liked and respected at HSBC, and a valued member of the team
• I wasn't drinking any caffeinated drinks
• I wasn't taking any drugs (i.e. bath salts) and hadn't taken any since June
• I decided to quit alcohol for 100 days
• I got a flat, and said my friend John could live with me rent free if he did some work for me
• After 30 days without any alcohol, I became suicidal, unable to cope with extreme stress
• I went into a secure psychiatric unit of a hospital, voluntarily, for my own safety, for a week
• My friend Klaus and me did a Man on a Mission scouting mission to Devon/Cornwall
• I then went to San Francisco and caught up with one of my oldest schoolfriends and some of my startup friends
• I then threatened to whistleblow on HSBC because their Customer Due Diligence project was being completely mismanaged
• Naturally, HSBC then terminated my contract
• I then travelled round London, doing my #notanonymous thing
• I went on a load of political demonstrations
• I started doing my advent calendar, leading up to the deliberatly ironically named Cold Turkey on Boxing Day
• I sliced both forearms open with a razor blade, along the length of multiple veins
• I did 101 days without alcohol, then relapsed heavily onto bath salts and benzos (sleeping pills) and pretty much destroyed my bed and generally made a right mess of myself and my bedroom/en-suite
• I got better (or did I?)

Perhaps I should put this website on my CV and link to it from LinkedIn. I've obviously given a great deal of consideration to who is likely to read this. I expect that at some point, some people from JPMorgan, HSBC and my startup days have read things that must be quite eye opening for them.

I remember on the first Friday at my most recent contract at HSBC, a couple of the guys took me out for a beer and the conversation was steered onto the topic of drugs. I had my game head on, so I didn't go into exquisite detail about my colourful past, but I did later fall asleep at the bar and get told by security staff that I couldn't take a nap on my stool. I wasn't on any drugs at the time, but my alcohol tolerance was quite low.

It should be remembered that I wasn't abusing drugs for that whole time I was working at HSBC, and I was actually sober for the whole of October, as the first 31 days of my 101 day sober challenge to myself, which I achieved.

Well, that's not strictly true. After a week at HSBC, I realised that my cashflow was completely screwed and living in a hostel whilst working on the number one project was not going to work, but I didn't have any money. I mean no money at all. I wasn't going to be able to travel to work, eat, or even afford to pay for my hostel bed anymore.

What a ridiculous situation. I was earning many many times more than the average wage, but yet my cashflow was in bits. I was employed doing some very very important work, but I couldn't afford to get the tube to work or buy a sandwich. The money was there, but it was trapped in the system: waiting for my invoices to be paid.

Can you imagine that? You were living in the park, then you were living in a hostel bed, you start work with your one suit and your one pair of shoes, and you don't have any money, but you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe, and the CIO names you in front of the entire team, at the townhall meeting, as the guy responsible for a certain important piece of work... but you haven't got two pennies to rub together.

So, I ask you, where do you think some of my 'madness' comes from? Is it all due to genetics, to a disease... or do you think some of it comes from the extreme stress and pressure, and the lack of a proper safety net? How hard do you think it is, to fall between the cracks, and try to rescue yourself from destitution? How much of a toll does it take on your body and mind to have to fight your way back from the brink of death and dereliction?

I pretty much slept at the office, because there was nothing for me to go home to

Tags: #career #banking #bipolar #addiction #depression #suicide #homeless

This is a story about an unholy trinity...

At a hotel I was given a voucher to connect to the internet. As you can see, it was foe pawn. I'm not sure if I used it foe pawn, but I possibly used it for porn, amongst my other general internet browsing.

Let me tell you about something that's a fairly irresistible combination: drugs, pornography and masturbation. Drugs and sex - i.e. chemsex - are bad enough, but there's a limitless supply of pornography out there on the internet, and given a limitless supply of drugs, you can get seriously messed up.

People who are dealing with the chemsex crisis talk about an unholy trinity of drugs: GBL/GHB, Crystal Meth and Meow Meow (M-CAT). These drugs are endemic amongst a group of promiscuous homosexual men, seeking to reach unimaginable highs from drug-fuelled sexual congress.

What happens when the secret is out? What happens when the wider, mostly heterosexual community finds out that having sex on drugs is many, many times more enjoyable than sex or drugs on their own?

Let me tell you, from bittersweet experience, that once you have tried chemsex, your ideas about pleasure and sexual ecstasy will be irreversibly corrupted. You can't un-experience things like that. You can't forget what you know. You can't un-feel what you felt.

Of course, 99% of people know that drugs are bad, and dangerous and will kill you just from looking at them, right? Well, unfortunately, people are discovering that the hard-line propaganda just isn't true, and the warning message is somewhat lost in the prohibitionist bullshit. So every cautionary tale is regarded with suspicion, or completely disregarded altogether.

In actual fact, there is so much taboo around drugs, sex, homosexuality, masturbation, fetishes... even just feeling horny is something we don't talk about openly. We are almost stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to feeling guilty about our sexual desires, and the fact that we are inescapably driven to satisfy them.

At the end of the day, you can't fight hunger, you can't fight thirst, and you can't fight your libido. Those are the 3 things that ensure the survival of humanity as a species of animals. I know a small handful of us try to rise above the level of beasts, and act a little less like animals by using our higher brain functions, but we'll still die if we don't eat and drink, and we will actually devolve if the intelligent members of humanity don't reproduce.

Masturbation and drugs are the ultimate ways to thwart nature though. Once an animal has found something it prefers to eating, drinking and fucking, it's pretty screwed in terms of its survival prospects, and the likelihood of it passing on its genes. You could see this as a good thing: eventually addicts and wankers will die out. However, evolution is ridiculously slow, and chemistry is ridiculously fast. Checkmate, humans.

The above picture is an advertising campaign, suggesting that people don't try Crystal Meth "even once". The advice is quite reasonable. Meth is highly addictive, and the best way to not become addicted to drugs is to never take them in the first place.

By the same token, beating addiction sounds fairly simple. Just don't take drugs "even once" and hey presto, your addiction is cured. But things aren't that simple, unfortunately.

The brain is amazing at making connections between things. I would hope that everybody is familiar with Pavlov's dog, that started to salivate whenever a bell was rung, because it knew it was going to get fed. The brain had connected the sound of a bell ringing with getting food, and something that is normally completely unconnected with food and eating, became linked in the brain of this dog.

I would hardly consider eating food to be an orgasmic experience, but small amounts of dopamine - the pleasure chemical - are released in the brain every time we eat. It's natural that we should have evolved a brain that teaches us to eat... eating is what keeps us alive. Eating food is a kind of addiction, if you like. We eat because we get a pleasurable reward from doing it. We are satisfying a craving.

Sex and masturbation are a bit easier to understand. We get a much bigger dopamine hit every time we are sexually stimulated in a state of arousal, and another big hit of dopamine if we achieve an orgasm. It's much easier to see that sexual behaviour is the same as any other addictive behaviour. We feel a craving for pleasure: we get horny, we want to fuck or masturbate. We then satisfy this craving, with sexual acts, and then we are rewarded with pleasure.

However, the brain has natural systems to curb our enthusiasm for round-the-clock eating, masturbation and sex. After food or orgasm, a protein called prolactin is released from the pituitary gland, which signals to the brain that it's time to take a break from those pleasure-seeking activities. The amount of dopamine that's released if you continue to eat or fuck, is virtually nothing... you get no pleasure out of it, until the prolactin levels drop again.

The problem with drugs is, that they're almost always rewarding, provided you take enough of them. Sure, a tolerance builds up in your brain, but you can usually take bigger and bigger doses, and still get high.

If you combine drugs with sex/masturbation, you've got a problem... just like Aaron on his injected Crystal Meth, you might want to fuck or masturbate until the drugs wear off.

Now, if we imagine that Aaron is like that dog that salivates whenever the bell is rung... poor Aaron is going to want drugs whenever he gets horny, or he's going to get horny whenever he gets high on drugs. It's a vicious circle.

The only way that you're not going to feel horny is if you have your sexual functions interfered with, by medication or surgery. Castration for a man, removal of ovaries for a woman... the elimination of the sex hormones: testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone. That goes some way to eliminating your libido, but then, what are you if you're no longer a sexual being? You're certainly no longer human.

Drugs produce a temporary and mostly reversible effect, but the longer that you abuse drugs for, and the more of a link that is made in the brain between drug-induced pleasure and other actions, the harder it will be to undo those drug cravings, given the same stimuli.

When the stimuli is your own libido, you probably don't fancy becoming a eunuch. The only option is to de-link sex and drugs. That means having a lot of mediocre sex and joyless masturbation.

Once you start to realise how the brain works, you can start to disentangle why you do the things that you do. Why do you drink coffee? Because it contains the bitter plant alkaloid called caffeine, which causes dopamine to be released in your brain, which is pleasurable, rewarding. Why do you smoke cigarettes? Same reason. Why did you copulate for 30 seconds and produce a screaming shitting incontinent midget that can't even feed itself? Same reason.

If you truly want to elevate yourself above the level of the beasts, you would have to make yourself asexual and release yourself from the tiresome bother of having to eat and drink. However, you'd probably get so engrossed in some interesting area of research that you'd forget to eat and die of starvation. Plus, you wouldn't have any kids, so you'd just die in obscurity as some kind of eccentric hermit.

Of course you don't have to take things to the other extreme, and test the very limits of human ecstasy, pleasure... to get as high as it's possible to get. I really don't recommend it. It's bad for your health and probably pretty deadly. Everything else in life will be compared to that gold standard forever afterwards, and it's hard to get over the disappointment that nothing in your life is ever going to be as enjoyable.

This is a cautionary tale, but it's more an honest conversation that people are running screaming away from, because they're prudish, repressed, uptight, shamed by taboos and social norms into a culture of silent guilt about normal, natural human things that every person feels.

But there's another reason why some people go down the path of hedonism, while others go down the path of quiet family life: oxytocin. The bonding hormone is released when you stroke your dog or your cat. The hormone is released when you see your kids, and give them a cuddle.

Oxytocin is responsible for curbing our urge to seek pleasure, by giving us a warmer, longer-lasting kind of pleasure. If the dopamine hit you get from an orgasm is like injecting Crystal Meth, then the opioids that are released due to oxytocin are like injecting Heroin. You're happy to sit around, monged out in your pyjamas all day with your kids, because you're wrapped up in the cotton-wool opiate hit of a Heroin-esque oxytocin ride.

Nature wants you to change modes once you've reproduced, from the pleasure seeking fuck machine, into an obedient servant to your helpless infant(s). As a parent, your life is over. It's time to concentrate on stuffing calories into the greedy mouths of your offspring until you finally expire from exhaustion. It's a marathon, not a sprint, so having your brain calmed down and full of satisfying all-day pleasure chemicals while you're fulfilling your parenting duties works perfectly.

The most tragic thing is when these world collide. When children are conceived in the middle of a period of drug abuse fuelled sexual activity, it's going to be nearly impossible for your brain to switch modes. The amount of pleasure you get from your shitting, vomiting, snot-covered offspring is not going to be able to compete with powders and pills.

It might sound unpalatable, but if you're going to be a drug addict, you should be gay or be a wanker. Becoming a parent might provide an incentive to get clean and sober, but you're going to have a tough job kicking a habit and bonding with your child. That tiny bit of chest-swelling warm fuzzy feeling you get when you put your tiny baby on your chest... yeah, you're not really going to notice that if you're on a massive comedown.

It might seem like I'm a reckless risk-taker, and that I've come dangerously close to ruining my life, but that's the whole point: I've got no dependents. I've actually been really careful. The main thing to be careful about is to not spawn any offspring you're in no position to look after, because you're struggling with addiction.

But this isn't a lecture. This isn't me being holier-than-thou. Actually, it's me saying that I understand why families fall apart, why parents don't love their kids enough, why babies get born to junkies and hopeless drug-addled fathers.

One of the main reasons I have such a high metabolism, I believe, is because my Mum wasn't expecting to get pregnant with me, and when she found out she was pregnant, she then decided to lay off the booze and the fags. The withdrawal from nicotine and alcohol while I was in the womb would have meant that highly elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, would have passed into my developing body, through the placental blood.

As an organism, whatever advantage we can get in our environment would have been crucial to our survival in a world that was out to kill us, 10,000 years ago. A baby that is going to be born into a world with little food and many predators should have a completely different metabolism from a baby that's going to be born into a land of plenty. You can't run away from the wolves very fast with a big fat blubbery baby, and there's no point in having a baby that's really good at storing energy in fat reserves if there aren't any excess calories around.

Addiction is just the same as hunger or thirst, and so, babies that are born to mothers who are recovering addicts will be affected as if they were starving: low birth weight, and the epigenetic expression of genes that cause features to create a skinny scavenger, constantly in a state of nervous tension, high alertness.

While it's easy to look upon me with ignorant, stupid eyes, and assume that my life has been directed by my choices, in actual fact, so much of what we think and say and do, and how our body and brain responds to circumstances which are very much out of our hands, is a result of a chain of causation that is far more impenetrable than a trite oversimplification.

What does it tell you that I've been able to take drugs like Cocaine, Heroin and Crystal Meth and not become addicted? What do your simplistic ideas about drug abuse tell you about that particular fact?

Drug addiction is a more complex relationship than simply a person and a chemical. Drugs are social. Drugs are sexual. Drugs are societal. Drugs are cultural.

Yes, it's true that the right combination of a drugs and activities associated with drug taking can form a nearly unbreakable bond in your habits, behaviour and actual brain programming, to the point that escaping addiction will be virtually impossible.

However, only a fool would write people off and say that somebody can never change. One thing is for certain about the brain: it's a plastic organ, that can adapt itself in amazing ways. One thing is for certain about humans: they're adept at handling almost anything the world can throw at them.

To stigmatise a huge group of people, to ask them to hang their heads in shame, to ask them to shoulder other people's guilt, to pay for crimes they're not responsible for, to be the black sheep, to be the scapegoats... it's a horrible thing to do, to sit in judgement over somebody who is 99.5% identical to you.

Ok, so you bought a dog, and a house, and copulated and made some kids and now you feel all smug and fulfilled, and you'd like to tell other people how they made bad choices and you're morally superior. Well, guess what? You're made of the same stuff. You'd respond just the same as the people you're judging, if you were put in their situation. Your brain works in exactly the same way.

You should really learn about how to lead people back to the right path, rather than trapping them onto the path they're on, which can only lead to their early death... a death that you share collective responsibility for.

I had to complain to the manager of this coffee shop that I couldn't see my veins in the toilet. Caffeine good, Heroin bad, right?

Tags: #drugs #sex #addiction #parents #childhood

This is a story about returning to normality...

One week from today I'm going to start circulating my CV and generally getting back in touch with my network to try and find some work. It's been a surprisingly long road, getting back on my feet.

I've picked an arbitrary date to try and get back into the swing of the working world. I certainly don't feel very well. I'm tired all the time. I still need help and support to deal with things, which are otherwise overwhelming to me.

However, I seem to have an on/off switch inside me. When I'm powered down in the 'off' position, you would barely believe how dysfunctional I am. Just getting out of bed and getting some food is considered a highly productive day. Pathetic, I know.

Something triggers me to switch gears from neutral, to top speed. The 'on' switch gets thrown and then the only problem is slowing me down enough to try and stop me from burning out. Next week is going to be a blur of activity, and if things go right, then there will be at least 3 or 4 months of frenetic activity before the circuitboards melt.

There are lots of bits of data that are graphable to see these two poles in my behaviour. Whether it's my bank balance or my activity data, collected by the movement sensors in my watch & phone, they all show the same thing: peaks and troughs.

Sadly, I would say that the peaks and troughs are getting more and more extreme though. I was certainly having some very odd thoughts and ideas when I was getting really tired last year, but I was in the middle of a highly productive phase. I had great difficulty biting my tongue, and thinking about the medium to long term benefits that would selfishly suit me best.

It's quite possible that I've totally busted my brain by just asking way too much of it. I've tried to be really kind to it for long periods, to see what difference that makes, but it's a bit like a tube of toothpaste that's open at both ends... you can put the cap on one end, but the toothpaste still oozes out of the other end when you squeeze it.

There's so much pressure in modern life. There's no opportunity to stop and catch your breath. Just as soon as I'm physically able to drag myself into an office for 8 hours a day, and not fall asleep in every meeting, I have to get back in the saddle and earn another load of cash, knowing that my episodes of stability are increasingly rare.

It's really strange, but I think that I used to know what was best for my health, and be really strict with employers, way before I got sick. The idea of working weekends was really offensive to me, and having to do on-call work, or late nights was something I'd only do very occasionally, and there had to be the bait of a big bonus or promotion on the table if I was going to do it.

I used to be really good at managing my long-term health. I made sure I took all my holiday allowance every year, and I made sure I always had something to look forward to. I was also really strict about maintaining a good work:life balance. I was fit and active, spending most weekends at the beach, kitesurfing. I was sociable and had all the right elements to create a fulfilling healthy life.

Nowadays, if I can work, I work. I live for work. When I'm not working, I'm just eating and sleeping. My existence is isolated, unhealthy. I dare not spend any money. I dare not take a holiday. I don't feel like a whole, functional person... and I don't see my friends. I feel worthless.

Frankly, when I am working, I'm way too intense at the moment. It doesn't take me very long to get a handle on an organisation and its objectives, and to understand the team and technology. From there, I seem to fall into my old pitfalls of becoming cynical and overly outspoken. Plus, I'm always in such a rush to get everything done... there isn't an IT project in the world that isn't late or overbudget.

It's hard when you've worked at a particularly demanding level, managing your own team or department, or even running your own company... and then you've got to slot into a massive corporate environment. It's hard to get back into the mindset of the wage-slave. It's hard to remember how to achieve the difficult balance between getting stuff done, and just terrifying the hell out of senior management, because things are happening at breakneck pace.

There was one particular piece of work that I was doing, and I knew there was a really important deadline to hit. There was a TV screen setup, which would light up green when we had succeeded and hit our deadline. I was working away in one of the meeting rooms, away from distractions on the open office floor. I knew that there was going to be a really tricky period to navigate with some of the senior management, who didn't understand what I was doing.

My very worst fears were confirmed when the senior management came rushing into the meeting room to say that there had been cheering in the office, because I'd made the screen go green. I then had to tell them that it was only because I had done some contingency work in preparation for the proper work. The pained and stressed look on their faces was unbearable, but I knew I only had 10 or 15 minutes to wait until the real 'green light' popped up, hopefully.

There then followed a very strained 10 minutes where I attempted to explain that I had done something to give us a retreat route, in case there were problems further down the line. The senior managers felt that I had done something cavalier, they felt misled, they were confused, they were disappointed, they didn't understand... this continued for 12 or so minutes.

Then the screens went green again, much to my relief. There we go. Job done, that was the event that they should be cheering. I had just been killing time explaining what I'd done, because I had a great deal of confidence that everything was going to be OK.

Such is the way with IT. The explaining takes the time. The work is normally trivial.

It takes time to get used to working with me. I tend to work on the principle that it's easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission. I just put a great deal of pressure on myself to make sure that I get things right when I'm sticking my neck out.

I'm pretty unencumbered by fear, especially now I've been to hell and back a few times. This could be part of the general broken brain problem I've got. I have absolutely no fear of being reprimanded... I stick to my guns when I know I'm right, and my hunches are normally right too. There are so many times when there is enormous pressure to say or do the wrong thing, and the middle ground is to simply button your lip, say nothing, go along with some madness.

I'm not very good at going along with amateur hour.

I was working such long hours that I was staying in a hotel just minutes away from the office. I even had to take my washing to work with me

Tags: #career #banking #computing #london #bipolar

This is a story about warped perceptions...

The world in which I inhabit is vastly different, depending on the state of my broken brain. Mood fluctuations cause me to interpret things very differently than a supposedly 'normal' healthy individual would.

I've written a lot this year about drug abuse, but I'd like to talk about a time before drugs even entered the story and made the water muddy. I'd like to talk about what it was like from 2008 through to 2012, when my brain was just doing its own thing, without drugs or medication.

If you're a person of prejudice, it won't surprise you to learn that drugs mess you up, but you might be surprised to learn that my mental health problems predated any drug abuse. You might also be surprised to learn that people can recover too, and go back to ordinary life, with nobody any the wiser as to your dark past.

But this really isn't about drug abuse, remember? We're talking about a period of 4 years that predated any psychoactive substances making things all messy and confusing. We're talking about when I first went to my doctor, because I was struggling with my mental health.

I spent just over a minute of explaining to my doctor that I felt completely exhausted, overwhelmed and unable to face friends, family, work or anything... I had drawn the curtains and switched off my phone, and retreated under the duvet, and could barely make it to the doctor's surgery.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine?" my doctor asked. I said that I had, and that I knew that the trademarked name that it was more commonly known as was Prozac. I said that I had read very bad things about emotional blunting and ruined sex lives of those people who were taking Prozac. I had read Elizabeth Wurtzel's biography, Prozac Nation, where she didn't exactly speak highly of the 25 year old medication.

How sad that the National Health Service (NHS) would be offering some cheap generic pills after only a minute of getting to understand a patient's problems. It takes 6 weeks before an anti-depressant SSRI medication like Prozac takes effect, and it's a fairly serious decision, to put somebody on long-term medication. I think it's a little ridiculous that we don't offer more talk therapy, as a first line of defence.

So, I was diagnosed as having Clinical Depression, within just a few minutes. Something I also knew, but didn't have the time to discuss with my doctor, was that SSRIs can be very bad for people with Bipolar Disorder. I knew my moods fluctuated up as well as down, so I had my suspicions that I was Bipolar, and that was another reason to avoid Prozac.

When you're depressed, everything seems hopeless. I had decided that I was useless at my job, that I hated working in offices, that I hated computers and software, and that I couldn't handle a career in IT anymore. I also lost interest in going out, sex, food... I pretty much just slept, or lay in my bed feeling anxious about the fact that I was off work sick.

After a couple of months feeling like this, I hit upon the idea that I was going to write a computer game for the first generation iPhone, to be ready in time for the launch of the App Store.

Although I had decided that my office-based IT career was over, the idea of programming on my laptop in my garden in the sunshine didn't sound too bad. I knew that the early limitations of the first iPhone meant that I could make a fairly basic game, and compete with other developers. I decided that if only a few people bought my game, it was still a fun experiment.

And so began a period of intense activity. I would work for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to capitalise on those precious early days of the App Store when there were hardly any apps on there. It seems incredible now, that there were only a few hundred or few thousand apps for the iPhone. There was no Android. There was no iPad. There was just one smartphone that created a billion dollar market, overnight.

When we look at that crazy period of my life, when I was churning out apps, it's pretty clear to see that my mood had swung to another extreme. I didn't have time to explain things to people. My thoughts were racing, speech seemed like a frustratingly slow way to communicate, eating and sleeping were an inconvenience, certainly I didn't want to do anything other than work on my apps. I was single-minded to the point of obsession.

In economic terms, things paid off. I got a couple of my apps to number one in the charts, briefly. One of my apps was downloaded 8,000 times in a day once, and another one racked up 500,000 downloads in a month. This was clearly a brilliant gold rush.

I knew that the quality of the apps being released was increasing steadily, and the opportunity for one fast burning out dude in his garden were rapidly diminishing. I started to really hate the work anyway. I had a whirlwind affair as an indie games developer, and it happened so fast that I started to hate it, just like you start to hate any job that you've mastered and has become easy.

Possibly this was a sign of my mood turning again. I had managed a period of several weeks, working at a ridiculous level, and what goes up inevitably must crash down. I hadn't been able to exert myself to such an extent since the school holidays in childhood. There's no way you'd ever be given 6 to 8 weeks to concentrate and just get on and hammer out a project, in a corporate environment.

My mood started to alternate between depression and hypomania (as described above) and I would turn each episode of frantic activity into a period of opportunism, to make money or produce something tangible.

Getting myself back into an office environment and doing some IT contracting re-stabilised me a little bit, and getting a boat so that me and my friends could go wakeboarding was something I was passionate about, and consumed my lunchtimes, after work in the summer, and weekends. My life got back to normal, for nearly 2 years.

During that first depression, I had set certain wheels in motion, however. One particular scheme was retraining as an electrician, while I was working as a programmer still. When I had finished my training, I quickly quit my job.

Going back to an unstructured form of making money, I started working too hard again. Building a business from nothing, to breakeven and hopefully to profitability is not quick and it's not easy. I managed to start getting good clients and increasing my turnover very quickly, through some shrewd partnerships and advertising choices. However, I was extremely inexperienced, and took on way more work than I could manage, sustainably.

I got my new business to the point where it was profitable, and had paid back the initial capital expenditure on training, van, tools etc. but I was burnt out again. I had lived and breathed my business, and only because it was hard physical work, had it lasted slightly longer before my brain was finally frazzled.

Depression reared its ugly head again in 2010, and I realised that I had made a mistake in cutting away from the easy money that a career in IT had to offer. I failed to recognise the importance of a stable working environment though: restricting your hours to 40 or 50 a week, giving yourself weekends off, having the occasional holiday, working with other people who share some of the responsibility and workload... those things are important.

My hypomania started to get a bit more extreme. After reading an enormous pile of books on Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics and other theories & models of theoretical Physics, I started to read huge amounts of academic papers from Cornell University's online library.

Some of the academic papers that I read were extremely interesting to me, and I emailed the authors to ask them questions. To my surprise, most of them responded, and we started to correspond via email.

Spurred on by this, I started to believe I could author my own paper and get it published, and I developed a hare-brained idea of my own, around a thought experiment that was particularly hard to test in the real world. I eagerly sent my paper off to several academic journals. A couple of the journals even responded... unsurprisingly to say that they wouldn't publish something that hadn't been peer reviewed.

Obviously, it's on the border of a delusion of grandeur to imagine that you might have anything of merit to contribute to a field, after only a few months reading the literature and educating yourself about the deepest mysteries in the Universe.

These delusions are something that I've always been wary of, and I try to be self-aware, but it's fairly clear that there was a progression in the difficulties that I was having with Bipolar Disorder, and the regulation of my moods. I wasn't imagining that I was the next Einstein, but I was having to say to myself "be careful, you're not the next Einstein" and give myself regular reality checks.

I still cringe when I think about some of the emails I sent to very important academics, and how, even though they indulged me, it must have been with slight tongue-in-cheek, to respond to a complete layman such as myself.

After yet more time lost in a pit of despair and hopelessness, where I did very little except for mow the lawn and feed the cat, the iPhone App gold rush cropped up again. This time I decided to sell picks & shovels.

Depressions are very similar to one another. You sleep a lot, you don't do much, everything looks shitty and you hate yourself. My depressions were clearly getting worse, as I started to think about suicide more and more. I started to accumulate more and more paraphernalia with which I could kill myself: inert gas, razor blades, Barbiturates, Cyanide etc. etc.

Periods of hypomania are easier to tell apart, because I can tell you what I was obsessed about in each one: iPhone Apps, boat, megashed, electrical business, physics and then my picks and shovels for the iPhone App gold rush.

I formed another company - Roam Solutions - which was later to become MePublish.com and Hubflow.com. I talked a couple of friends into joining me on my mad escapade, and generally threw everything and the kitchen sink at this particular endeavour.

My new company put on an exhibition stand at London Olympia, Learning Technologies conference, only months after I first conceived the idea for the service we sold. Delivering eLearning was something I knew nothing about, but that wasn't going to stop me.

By the time the winter was over, I had managed to get the company involved with the TechStars network, and we relocated to Cambridge in order to do a 13-week technology accelerator program, where we would be introduced to billions of dollars worth of investors.

13 weeks is just longer than the sweet spot for one of my hypomanic periods, and I was really struggling by the end of the program. Suicidal thoughts were quite intrusive, and I was drinking like a fish. I hated myself, and what felt like lies that I was telling to potential investors. It was a struggle to keep going to the end of the program.

I feel bad that I let 2 co-founders and 11 investors down really badly, when I imploded in September 2011. I never got back on my feet, because of relationship problems and a number of things that eventually led to very bad life choices and a whole world of pain, destruction, devastation.

I don't feel too bad because I'm clearly unwell and because nobody risks their money and a stable job unless they want to try and get rich quick. I genuinely didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There was a big opportunity there, and I'm only partly to blame for everything going tits up. The biggest part, perhaps, but still only partly.

Writing code for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the back-end (serverside code in PHP, Linux administration, database etc. etc.) plus rebranding, raising money and everything that goes with a startup is a hell of a lot to fit into 13 weeks. A crash was inevitable for me: I was too close to the detail, too close to the coal face, too close to the customers, too honest with the potential investors.

At the end of the day, I got my arse handed to me. I was completely spent. I've never experienced such hard work and stress and pressure in my life, although there was a lot of fun too, and I had an incredible time meeting some of the most inspiring people I have ever had the good fortune to cross paths with.

The main lesson I learnt though, was that I really can't ignore my mental health. Even if I avoid clinical labels, like Bipolar Disorder, I definitely have a predisposition to mood instability if I make bad choices. I can't ignore the number of times I've swung between extreme depression and extreme 'highs' which are characterised by massive productivity, and increasingly delusional hopes of being rich and famous.

Things are obviously still very 'up and down' for me, but there is seemingly no end to things that spur on my hypomania. Most recently I ended up working on HSBC's number one project, and being made responsible for a really critical part of that project, by the CIO at the project townhall, in front of the entire team. The facts as they are presented to me, do little to discourage a kind of boom & bust lifestyle.

I guess I could reshape my life around working for 3 to 6 months, and then taking 3 to 6 months as a break to recover from my over-exertion, but I don't think it's very healthy. I'm now faced with the challenge of how to manage my own mental health in a more sustainable way, before I really run out of luck and tread on some toes that get me in super big trouble.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

I really didn't sleep very much while I was at HSBC. Naturally, this started to be detrimental to my mental health. Eventually, I was very sick indeed, and it was hard to continue... I had to go into hospital

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career #banking

This is a story about baby's ruin...

I don't really believe in 'addictive personalities'. Sure there are people who go through periods of sensation seeking or hedonism, but all our brains have the same reward mechanisms that can be short-circuited by all manner of things, not all of which are psychoactive chemicals.

One of the first things that I became addicted to was sugar. Now, I have all kinds of problems with this statement. Glucose is one of the 3 things that every cell in your body requires to function, along with oxygen and water. Sure, as an organism, you're going to require all kinds of amino acids, proteins, salt etc. etc., but you're not going anywhere without sugar.

Sure, we can gorge ourselves on sugar. We can have too much of a good thing. Soda containing high fructose corn syrup contains ridiculous amounts of sugar, and we can slurp at huge paper cups containing many fluid ounces, with little difficulty. Our bodies have a seemingly insatiable appetite for sugar.

It rots our teeth and makes us fat and gives us diabetes, but still, we can't get enough of it, especially when we're young. Show me the child who doesn't have a sweet tooth and I'll show you a lying parent, or a parent who has been a particularly mean and brutal disciplinarian in training their child to lie.

The faster a child can grow to full adult size, the less chance there is of it being eaten by a predator or succumbing to a survivable disease. Of course children are going to be programmed to seek out sugar. They're the easiest calories for the body to convert straight to energy, to power those restless limbs.

Our ability as a species to provide fruit, honey, cane sugar and sugar beet refined into pure sugar granules, at all times of the year and in virtually limitless quantities, has resulted in huge numbers of overweight blubbery children, probably with rotted teeth. However, that's not to say that nature would exactly deem them unhealthy. The first set of teeth that a child gets are deciduous and a good thick coat of blubber will keep them warm in winter, meaning less chance of catching cold.

So it was, that I came to become addicted to lemon Polos. You know, the mints with the hole in them that come in the distinctive green wrappers with silver foil. Yeah, at one time they made some sweet lemon alternatives to the mints, and I used to buy them using some lunch money that I set aside, so I could feed my daily sugar habit.

To use the parlance of ignorant idiots, I was a sugar addict. I used to love the refined sugar of sweets. Lemon Polos were my drug of choice, and I used to get some of the daily calories required by my body, by eating these sweet drugs. My teeth are fine, my pancreas is fine, my weight is fine... I don't seem to have come off badly from this addiction, but maybe lemon Polos were a gateway drug for later addictions. We may never know.

Just like the infamous Lemmon 714 Quaalude from The Wolf of Wall Street these lemon Polos are so rare that Google Image Search doesn't even have a decent resolution picture for me to plagiarise.

But that wasn't my only childhood addiction.

Dark Castle on my friend Joe's Dad's Macintosh, was probably the beginning of a love affair with computer games, that was to last my entire childhood, and only tail off in my late teens. Some would probably say that computer games were an addiction, but I couldn't get my fix whenever I wanted until I had my own computer.

To begin with, Joe used to make the character in Dark Castle run and jump and climb up and down. I used to control the character's aim and make him throw rocks to take out the bats that would wake up and fly at you to try and bite you and kill you. It was the first example of a co-operative computer game, that I know of.

And that was how it began, the relationship with computer games. It was always a social affair. You need somebody else to play Pong against or else it's no fun. It's more fun when you're taking turns to play a computer game, and you're competing with one another to beat the same obstacles and each other's scores.

I remember enjoying watching other children play arcade games immensely, although I don't recall having any coins of my own to be able to play them. I used to like just hanging out by these machines, watching the demo sequence, seeing the high score table, listening to the music. I can even kind of hum the little melodies for some kind of helicopter shoot 'em up and a driving game that seem to have gotten stuck in my head for the best part of 30 years.

I loved the demos. When I eventually had my own computer - The ZX Spectrum +2 128k - and I could fully indulge my addiction, I seemed to prefer the demo games that you got 'free' with a copy of a computer games magazine, to the full games. These little bitesize tasters were always just hard enough to hold your intrigue, and you could amass a huge collection of different minigames very quickly.

QAOP and space bar were the controls for everything from Olympic Games 'simulations' where you had to bash alternating keys as fast as you could to make your character sprint or row or cycle, to flight simulators and racing games, and of course the many shoot 'em up variants.

Ok, so there were violent undertones to nearly every game that there was out there. Whether you were shooting aliens or people, or doing Kung Fu or whatever, there was usually some kind of baddie that was getting shot or bashed or otherwise killed.

Seeing as I haven't carried these murderous, violent tendencies over into adult life, I'd say that being brought up on a diet of computer games hasn't reprogrammed me as some kind of killing machine, but I'm just one data point.

I do sometimes worry that with the rise and rise in popularity of the Call of Duty franchise as well as its incorporation of drone control, and general glorification of warfare and combat, that there are a generation out there who would love nothing more than to be killing real people at the push of a button.

Lots of unimaginative kids have got the idea that being a computer games tester must be the ultimate job, from the incorrect conclusion that all it must entail is sitting around playing your favourite computer games but getting paid to do it. However, being a drone controller must be a bit like playing Call of Duty, blowing people up using a joystick. Only those people are real.

Anyway, computer games were a very real addiction for me, for a while, with me having cravings to play them, and staying awake for far to long in order to 'binge' play a new game. Good computer games have been designed in such a way that they are just hard enough to keep you coming back again and again to try and beat an obstacle that was just out of reach on your previous go. They are engineered to be addictive. The more addictive, the more a game is considered to be a classic or of high quality.

But it's from this addiction to computer games that I fumbled my way into programming, and into a lucrative career. I started to become disinterested in games when I started work as a full-time programmer, and I was doing real life battlefield simulations for the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps the lemon Polos and the computer games had set me up though, to turn into the 32 year old drug addict that I later became.

Or perhaps we all have the same weaknesses, the same hardware, the same software. Perhaps we can all become reprogrammed by things that press our buttons.

If you're geeky like me you'll be able to see that "O" and "P" have been coded as buttons you can press. Presumably "Q" and "A" appear later in the program. I have no idea what this code does except print a score.

Tags: #computing #childhood #addiction