This is a story about bravery...

How do terrorists win? By spreading terror. There's a video going round on the Internet of a prankster in Arab head-dress throwing a black duffel bag at people and shouting "Allahu Akbar!". His unwitting victims run for their lives. For me, this is anecdotal evidence that the terrorists are winning.

I tend to be a little irreverent and it's easy to miss my satire or irony sometimes, but I'm disappointed when people act as thought police, and act with more offence than is strictly justified by their personal involvement with a tragedy. Taking up the position of moral outrage is simply thought policing, when no outrage is warranted.

When I write about terrorism on 9/11 or 7/7, I'm always mindful that family members, friends or work colleagues of people who lost somebody during those attacks, might be offended. However, there are billions of Netizens and the chance of somebody directly affected reading my stuff is negligible. It's in the greater public interest that I should discuss the terror that obviously affects so many, instead of self-censoring because of the tiny risk that anybody might take legitimate offence.

Having grown up in the UK, from 1979 to present, I lived through the IRA's bombing campaign. Far more people died in 1985 through 1995 than in recent years, including 2001. I used to work near the Baltic Exchange and I live and work in Canary Wharf. Both of these places were blown up by IRA bombs.

So am I Irelandophobic? Am I afraid that every Irishman I meet is a terrorist? Do I detest the Irish, because they all carry some collective responsibility for the actions of a small handful of their fellow countrymen? No. Of course not. Some of my best friends are Irish. The Irish have shown me nothing but love.

Being brave doesn't mean dropping bombs on people from 30,000ft, safe in the cockpit of your $350 million fighter jet. Being brave doesn't mean killing civilians in a drone strike, pushing buttons on your joystick, watching everything remotely on a TV screen. Being brave doesn't mean being racially abusive - "build a wall" and "send them home" - while you teach your kids to fear and reject people who look different, and are from a different culture.

Being brave certainly doesn't involve shutting down people who appear to be desecrating the memory of the dead.

If we're going to move forward as a race, we've got to get over this whole "your tribe killed somebody from my tribe" bullshit. A couple of days ago there was great offence taken at a stag party taking selfies at Ground Zero. Hey! Guess what? Nearly every inch of the globe has had human blood spilt on it at some point, at the hands of another human. Get over it.

We need to move beyond the "brown/black/Irish kills privileged white shocker!" type headline trolling. There are underprivileged people who get killed in gang shootings and knifings every day here in London, but it never makes the national news. If you're not white caucasian and you're poor, attacks that are not overtly religiously motivated just aren't news outside London. However, a bunch of whites appear to be mocking some other whites, and that's global news? What the fuck is that all about?

An estimated 675 people have been shot and killed by police in the USA this year so far. There were 990 last year. If we say that in the 15 years since 9/11, on average 700 people have been killed by police each year, then over 10,000 people have died at the hands of the police. America, you had fewer than 3,000 killed in 9/11, but you've killed more than 3 times as many since then, just with your cops.

Grief is a kind of hobby. "You just can't say this stuff today... people are grieving" I hear you say. Well, who's grieving for those 10,000 people who got gunned down by cops? When is the day that you grieve for them?

Lest we forget.

Well you did forget, didn't you? You forgot that being afraid of black and brown people means that terrorism is winning. Terrorism affects your life. Terrorism is something you're afraid of, so the terrorists have successfully created terror. The terrorists have won.

You forgot that the biggest threat to your life is not terrorism, but guns in the hands of your fellow Americans. Toddlers kill more Americans than terrorists do.

Maybe I have no right to contribute to this debate, because I'm not American. However, Donald Trump waded in on the side of Brexit, and the UK has suffered a huge upsurge in racially abusive attacks on our own people, as a result of the referendum result. In a little under two months, the presidential election could possibly elect a racist into office, and cause a further wave of abuse and attacks.

Europe is a more dangerous place when anti-Islamic sentiment is allowed to foment. Europe suffers the consequences for America's rhetoric. The UK becomes a proxy target for anti-American attacks, when the phoney war on Islam is perpetuated.

Terrorism is just a phoney distraction. So few people are dying in terrorist attacks that it shouldn't even get any media attention. It's not relevant. It's counterproductive to spread terror for the terrorists.

I'm expecting to get shot down in a big way, for any number of reasons, in writing this piece. I'm not trying to be deliberately offensive. I'm not being insensitive. If you lost your mom in 9/11, I'm sorry, but I really don't think you personally know anybody who lost their life on that day. 0.0001% of the population were killed.

There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015. I should be far more worried about an American with a gun than an Arab with a bomb.

If we use this day for anything, perhaps it should be to reflect on how well the British and the Irish generally get along today. If ever there's an example of putting terrorism behind us, it must surely follow this model. I love the Irish. I don't see us as different. We were all Europeans, until Donald bloody Trump wandered into our debate and we voted to leave the EU.

The brave thing to do is to act irreverently. Don't allow the terrorists and the thought police to disseminate fear and mistrust.

Tags: #terrorism

This is a story about trying to stay ahead of the game...

The Olympics and the Tour de France have been full of sportsmen and women using a variety of drugs to enhance their performance. Doping in sport became so widespread that it was virtually impossible to compete without performance enhancing drugs.

We think that competition is linked to sport and that athletes are naturally competitive, but in fact competition is present in every aspect of our daily lives.

You want an attractive girlfriend or boyfriend, right? The more universally appealing a person is, the more potential suitors are vying to try their luck. The 'hotter' somebody is, the more people are trying to hop into bed with them. Attractiveness means few genetic defects: looking flawless, perfect. The pre-programmed urge to reproduce with the healthiest person who'll have you, is the reason why you're alive today.

We all know that alcohol is a social lubricant. "Dutch courage" means that after a few drinks we are disinhibited, and we can overcome the social awkwardness of talking to the objects of our affection. When we're drunk we take that chance of rejection, leaning in and kissing somebody for the first time.

It's pretty clear that those who are intoxicated will be braver and less anxious about rejection and humiliation, than those sober singles who are nervously hoping to be asked to dance, and trying to muster the courage to chat somebody up. Therefore, there's a pressure to get drunk, and get your date tipsy, if you're hoping to couple off and copulate.

Cocaine gives artificial confidence. Cocaine makes people talkative, gregarious and removes their self-conscious awkwardness, shyness. We tend to be very attracted to confident and outgoing people. The pack alphas are naturally the most confident, and we want to mate with the alphas, not the betas. Royal families are inbred as hell, but every girl wants to marry a prince. Cocaine can help you to talk and act confidently, which makes you more attractive, and cocaine is very likely to bring the affections of potential mates.

So, it's pretty clear that in order to compete with other blokes eyeing up the skimpily clad girls on a night out, being tanked up on alcohol and having snorted a couple of lines of cocaine is going to give you the competitive edge. There's a high incentive to be intoxicated with alcohol and cocaine.

At work, many of us are mandated to work longer hours than we are able to do with our normal sleep/wake cycle. 54% of adult Americans drink coffee every day. Anecdotally, so many people say "I can't function without my morning coffee". It's quite commonplace for people to joke on social media about homicidal tendencies before they've had their fix of caffeine. Many a true word is spoken in jest.

Because so many office workers drink coffee, the working hours take this into consideration. Without coffee, the 9am start time would have to be 10:30am. Without coffee, those late nights in the office would be pointless, because nobody would be able to concentrate and stay awake.

Caffeine is a wakefulness promoting agent, and it's a concentration aid. Caffeine is great for concentrating on laborious boring repetitive tasks for long periods.

However, when nearly everybody is drinking coffee, it becomes a necessity for coworkers to drink it too, in order to match the office hours and concentration span of their colleagues. If your workmates spot your eyelids getting heavy, somebody is bound to suggest to you "can I get you a coffee?". Nobody is likely to say "maybe we should all go home early, not work such long hours and stop drinking so much damn coffee".

There is a huge incentive to drink tea, coffee and energy drinks at work, in order to compete for the pay rises and promotions, and not be seen as a weak member of the team.

We live in a culture that fuels depression and anxiety. The news bombards us with all of the world's problems in full gory high-definition detail. The economy is tanking and we have to live with job insecurity, skyrocketing housing costs and little hope of ever being able to collect a good pension, let alone have our kids able to expect a good education and be able to live on a planet that hasn't been destroyed by climate change. It's depressing as hell. It's stressful as hell.

Instead of trying to change the world around us and improve things, instead we have medicated ourselves in vast numbers. 61 million antidepressant prescriptions were written for 65 million people in the UK, in 2015. Most people will take powerful psychiatric medication at some point in their lives, whether that's sleeping pills, tranquillisers or antidepressants. The very sickest will have to take antipsychotics and mood stabilisers.

Our jobs are stressful, and we're fearful of losing our jobs. If we lose our jobs we'll lose our houses. If we lose our houses, we'll be homeless. The number of homeless people has soared by 80% in a single year in some parts of the country. There is plenty of reason to live in fear of destitution.

Doctors hardly have any time to speak to their patients, and they hardly have any budget to prescribe talk therapy, so people who are stressed out get sent away with tranquillisers. People who can't sleep get sent away with sleeping pills. People who are miserable, exhausted and can't cope get sent away with antidepressants. There's a pill for every ill, but it could be a sane reaction to an insane world, in a great many cases.

When so many people who you work with are insulated from the stressful and depressing nature of the work, and the way that capitalism is raping the natural world and enslaving the poor, it's easy to see how they are able to keep working, because they're drugged up to the eyeballs.

If your job, your house, your family and everything depends on you keeping your job, of course you're going to drug yourself up with happy pills so you can keep trudging along on the treadmill. Who can afford to have a nervous breakdown? Who can afford the risk of losing their job, to take time out to rest and recuperate? Who wants to let their bosses know that they can't cope with the stress, when everybody else seems to be doing OK?

There is peer pressure to put up with shit at work and not complain. Put up and shut up. Fit in or fuck off.

Because of the hyper-competitive work arena, of course we need to mask our mental health symptoms with pills, even if the underlying issue is a deep unease with the bullshit jobs and the negative effects on the world.

"Everybody's got to work"... but what if you're a debt collector? What if you're price gouging your customers who need their gas & electricity, so that you can make more money for your bosses? What if you're manufacturing weapons? Honestly, have a think about what you do for a job, and ask yourself if it's improving the human condition, or not.

Collectively, we should stop and say "this is madness". We can't sit here in the UK where the economy is 80% service industries, and say that what we're doing is productive and useful. It's impossible that we should need so many lawyers and accountants. It's impossible that we should need so many bankers. It's impossible that we should need so much software. It's impossible that we should sit here idly counting beans, while some poor person is out in the beating sun growing our food, earning $1.50 a day.

For sure you don't want to end up in the field picking fruit and vegetables for a pittance of a wage, but that doesn't mean you have to prop up the status quo.

Acting with your conscience and with ethics as an individual is likely to hurt nobody but you, but it's also harmful to you to load yourself up with performance enhancing drugs, simply so you can compete.

It's only in the spirit of non-competition that we can end the rat race and smash the tables of the money lenders and other idle social parasites. The parasite class need to be cast out from society. The parasite class are antisocial. The parasite class are making billions of people's lives miserable.

There's no way to win a rigged game. The only thing you can do is not lose, by not taking part.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #capitalism #politics #alcohol #caffeine

This is a story about being chewed up and spat out...

London might only be the 17th most expensive city in the world to live in, but it's still in the top 20. I call it home, and I have nowhere else I can saunter back to if things don't work out. Where would I go?

The work that I do demands that I have my bum on a seat in an office a stone's throw away from the Bank of England, 5 days a week. It's not like I'm one of those fabled tech workers who can just idly tap away on a keyboard from some remote location. I get paid to be in the same room as my colleagues, face to face. I need to be in London for my work. It's not like I could just pop into town for meetings. I spend at least 40 hours a week immersed in my job.

How bad do you want it?

In order to remain in London, I've slept on night busses, in parks, on heathland, in squats and in hostels.

Nobody is underwriting my risk. When things have gone wrong, it's meant homelessness. I don't mean the kind of homeless where you sleep on your friend's couch. I mean the kind of homeless where you're dirty and you're getting robbed in a park, freezing cold, snatching some fitful sleep in a bush.

Lots of petulant children will run away to London, get tired, hungry, dirty and find out that being homeless is pretty shit. They will slink off back to their families. I don't have that option. Homeless means homeless, in my case.

Sometimes being homeless means living in a dormitory with 15, 20 even 30 people, all snoring and farting. People come into the dorm and make a racket all night, and then they cause an almighty disturbance in the morning, as they fuck about with their luggage. Theft is a constant problem. People have taken my wallet out from under my pillow while I slept. None of your valuables are safe, even in the lockers, which are often prised open with crowbars. It's exhausting, being in such close proximity to so many other human beings, night & day, 7 days a week. It's relentless.

Sleeping in the parks and on heathland is welcome relief from the stress of having to live in such close quarters with other people. The weather is a problem though: fine summer evenings are all well and good, but rain and cold weather are miserable. Muggings and thefts are a nightly occurence, as well as fights and generally being preyed upon by other homeless and vulnerable people. To keep clothed and clean is hard enough, let alone keeping a few possessions safe.

When I was in the position where I knew that homelessness was a very real threat, I prepared. I would sit with homeless people and talk to them for hours, making notes on how to survive. I found out which night busses you could sleep on. I found out what the laws around squatting were. I learned how to spot overgrown back gardens of houses that were unoccupied, that could be used as campsites. I learned where the soup kitchens and Hare Krishna gave out free food. I learned how to spot friend from foe. I learned how to stay away from trouble. I learned where the cheapest hostels were. I learned how to stay reasonably clean and presentable, using showers in railway stations and such like.

A friend stayed one night in a youth hostel, and asked me where you could get a shower when you were homeless. He was clearly considering the possibility of homelessness, as if it was some jolly adventure, a silly fun game, When the day of reckoning came, his parents paid for him to go home and stay with them rent free. He knew which side his bread was buttered. His risk was underwritten. He didn't want to stay in London badly enough. He had backup options.

My backup option is a tent and a sleeping bag.

I've lived in doss houses, with 8 people in a room, all working black market jobs and spending all their money and spare time messed up on drugs. I've seen the grimmest possible working and living conditions. I've been bitten to death by bed bugs. I've experienced the cold and the damp of London's shittest accommodation, where people just about eke out an existence.

Now, I live in a lovely apartment, but it comes at a price. Not only is the rent extortionate, but I also have to drag myself into a job that I hate, 5 days a week. There are few words to describe just how incompatible my job is with my mental health. There is so little stimulation and challenge, that the hands of the clock seem almost stationary. I'm battling severe depression and 'recovering' from addiction. Do you think it's a great idea to be so alone with my thoughts, with no distracting tasks to hurl myself into? Do you think it's a great idea that I have to be a steady dependable worker, turning up on time and working all the hours, when my moods are unstable and I'm exhausted from all the stress and anxiety of getting myself off the streets and off the drugs?

It's a fucking miracle that I'm paying my rent, paying my bills, servicing my debts, working my job, pleasing my bosses, putting on my suit and looking like I've got my shit together.

I really haven't got my shit together, and I'm not taking passengers or carrying any dead wood, because I don't have the spare capacity to do that. It wasn't that long ago that I was hospitalised with the stress of it all. It's still a pretty desperate situation, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface.

What more do you want from me? What more can I give?

Why don't you get a job? Why don't you try working full time? Why don't you try taking responsibility and paying the rent, the bills and paying off your debts?

It sickens me that anybody would suggest that I could be doing something more fun and in line with my values. It's a joke that anybody suggests that I could take my foot off the gas, take some time out. How the fuck could I do that, when it's me who's the responsible one round here, holding down a job and paying the rent & bills.

Yes, it's OK if you can go back and live with your family. It's OK if somebody's there to pick up the pieces of your failed idle fantasies, when they don't work out. But a fuck up for me means homelessness and destitution. Nobody underwrites my risk.

It's not that hard though: get a fucking job and work it, or fuck off back to mummy. Don't hang around in my fucking home town, mooching off people and talking about your grand plans, when really you're just sponging off those who are genuinely working hard. I'm sick of the bullshitters.

I know the difference between those who are genuinely industrious and hardworking, and those who expect to get paid for nothing. I know the difference between those who are genuinely facing homelessness and destitution if they don't get off their backsides and work their way out of a bad position, and those who have a comfortable position to fall back on, if they hit [not very] hard times.

My charity seems to have attracted more than a couple of idle wasters, but thankfully, I also have some other people who recognise that I'm vulnerable and can be taken advantage of. I'd go mad if I didn't have the counsel of true friends, who can tell me the truth, when people are looking for a free ride at my expense.

I don't mind giving people a chance. I don't mind taking a risk. I don't tend to lend more than I can afford to lose. Everybody deserves a break.

I would never ask anybody to work harder than I'm prepared to work myself.

But, if you don't share in the risk, you don't share in the reward.

Tags: #homeless #london

This is a story about earning money...

In the agricultural revolution, the scythe, the plough and the mill brought about greater productivity in our fields, and put more bread in our bellies. In the industrial revolution, the steam engine, the foundry and great big machines brought about greater productivity in our factories, and put shoes on our feet. In the information revolution, the spreadsheet, email and meetings have brought about greater productivity in our offices, and put zeroes on the end of the bank balances of the mega wealthy.

The average return on capital is exceeding the growth rate. This means that no matter how hard you work, the rich will get richer and poor will get poorer. If you are already wealthy, you will grow more wealthy, but for the rest of us our wages are falling in real terms.

"The triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism is largely illusory.” -- Thomas Piketty

It's a depressing situation, but sadly it's true. We are now living in the era of the supermanager. The remuneration for those at the top of the pyramid is completely unhinged and insane. There is absolutely no way that the eye-watering salaries demanded by top executives, in any way reflects their productivity. In fact, quite the opposite.

The National Health Service (NHS) has spent billions on re-organisation. The NHS is drowning under a sea of managers, while front-line services are cut back.

The reason why economic growth is stagnant, is because productivity is an illusion. When nearly everybody is a manager, hardly anybody is actually doing any work.

Managers only do three things:

1. Any good news from their team, they just forward to their boss
2. Any pressure / demands / requests / questions from their boss, they just forward to their team
3. They think up ways to justify their jobs

A manager has a lot of time to dream up creative ways of wasting everyone's time, because they don't actually do any work. A manager needs to look busy, so they come up with all kinds of time-wasting scams and schemes in order to justify their pointless existence.

Microsoft have actually cottoned on to the fact that there is a giant army of middle managers, who do nothing but forward emails up and down the chain of command. In the email program Microsoft Outlook, there are actually buttons that make it even easier to just forward good news to your boss, and to forward other requests and things to your team. I literally just need two buttons to do my job. I don't even have to do any typing.

People don't like doing the typing.

Everything's a copy & paste job. Being a manager has become a job of forwarding emails and sitting in meetings because you're bored. If you feel really pointless, you can do a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to bore the shit out of everybody. Nobody writes concise emails that everybody can dutifully ignore because they're pointless noise.

There are a few idealistic young employees - unpaid interns - who do all the work, which is then re-hashed as it works its way up through the ranks of middle management. Every layer of management is careful to remove any reference that would give credit to the person who actually did the work. Managers pass things off as their own effort, although secretly they know that they don't actually do anything.

This is so much worse than Imposter Syndrome. Most managers are actually imposters. They're there for the comfy seat, free coffee, warm office and hefty pay packet at the end of the month.

It's no wonder that lean startups are actually able to deliver great things: they're unencumbered by the valueless people who try to add value when actually they do nothing of the sort.

Trying to get a decision out of the chain of command is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Managers know that the only way they're going to get fired is if they make a decision that turns out to be wrong. The easiest way to be secure in your job is to avoid taking decisions. The very managers who were hired to be executives - high-powered decision makers - are actually avoiding ever making a decision, in case it ends up reflecting badly on them. No manager has the guts to actually make a decision and face the potential consequences. Middle managers are experts in avoiding all responsibility.

We now have an office culture, completely dominated by a kind of 'pass the parcel' children's game. Everybody knows that things are going badly because nobody is doing any work and nobody is making any decisions or showing any kind of leadership. Instead, the buck gets passed round and round, as everybody tries to blame everybody else, and avoid any responsibility themselves. Often, it's the very people who are too busy doing the actual work who get blamed, because they didn't have the time to play the silly game and cover their arses.

You can be assured that when things go wrong, the blame will trickle down, until some poor sod on the front line is criticised for not staying on top of a totally unreasonable workload. Some poor scapegoat will be blamed, because they made a minor error, through exhaustion and stress.

What's remarkable is how few 'executives' actually face the chop themselves, when everything screws up. You would have thought that the whole point about receiving a big salary would be because you were the one taking responsibility, and therefore you would be to blame when things go wrong. However, there is absolutely no corporate accountability. It is the workers who are held accountable by their managers, because the workers are too busy to spend time justifying their existence and covering their arses.

The most profitable thing of all is to sit idle, on a pile of money. You can never make a mistake if you simply earn interest on your capital. There's nothing ventured at all, when your wealth is growing simply because you own the casino. House always wins.

If you have wealth, if you have success, if you have an audience and fame, then you can leverage it to become even more wealthy. What - pray tell - is the innovative business idea behind Keeping Up With the Kardiashians? Presumably, some family who are completely lacking in wealth and fame would also like to be highly paid to be featured on reality TV? However, it is only those who already have wealth who are given the opportunity to make more wealth.

This era of low growth and wealth worship is absolutely destroying society. The economy is run for a tiny elite with unimaginable wealth, while the vast majority struggle in dead-end careers that are stressful and boring.

Middle management is just a position in the lower order of the entourage of the oligarchs, royalty and fat cat plutocrats. Middle managers have bought into the belief that they are going to succeed in the capitalist's pyramid scheme. Organisation charts give the belief that you are 'only' a certain number of layers of management from being the CEO, but it's a con, because each layer of middle management expands the base of the pyramid by a factor of 10.

Organisations have now started to throw around job titles like "Vice President" and "Managing Director", and there are even CEOs who are not actually CEOs. An organisation like HSBC might have hundreds of "CEO"s amongst their 230,000 staff. It's just a bullshit job title given away to make somebody think they're getting ahead in the game.

The fact of the matter is that while we toil in the hope of a promotion and a pay rise, we are wasting our time because we are becoming de-skilled and institutionalised. Our grandfathers could build houses and fix mechanical things. Our office-based service industry economy has left most people unable to even change a lightbulb.

Come the revolution, when there are power cuts and the Internet stops working, how much use are your skills in forwarding emails?

The middle managers might be able to justify their jobs today, and are attempting to stuff as much money in the mattress as possible, but it won't be enough. Even property deeds, policing and the rule of law won't matter when the masses rise up in anger at having been oppressed for too long. Even soldiers are feeling the economic squeeze, and will be unwilling to turn their guns on their own people, in order to protect the plutocrats.

The unwillingness to address income inequality and share the wealth can only lead to popular uprisings.

Tags: #capitalism #career #banking #politics

This is a story about the decision to end your life...

No matter what stupid inspirational quote memes say, we don't get to "choose" to be happy. We are ruled by our moods, not vice-versa. Perception is an illusion. The glass half empty person is just as correct as the glass half full person, and neither gets to choose their perspective on the world.

There's an enormous amount of pressure to look on the bright side, be happy & upbeat, to keep problems bottled up inside and to be uncomplaining. Anybody who speaks up is criticised for being a whiney crybaby, negative and a killjoy.

I spent the best part of 8 years with a partner who used to throw a tantrum whenever things didn't go her way. My argument in this essay is that logical despair is different.

If you've spent much time with me, you'll know that I'm pretty calm and pragmatic even in stressful situations. If you've been with me when things have been going wrong or getting stressful, you'll hopefully know that I am that positive upbeat person, who tries to find the silver lining in every cloud.

It's interesting to me that I'm writing - right now - in a position where I am feeling more positive than I have done all week. This is temporary, because I don't have to go to work tomorrow.

"Why don't you just quit your job if it's so boring, and it's making you so miserable and depressed?" I hear you ask.

Well, guess what? You've got to pay to play. Even for me to live in a hostel bed or take a cheap lodging in a house, is going to cost me circa £500 per month. What about travel? What about food? You have to run just to stand still.

So maybe I could get myself some government benefits that would help with my housing costs and give me a little money with which to survive? I'm certainly eligible. Even though I have worked for a few months here and there, my mental health is so wrecked by the stress and the rat race, that the ensuing depression destroys any chance of stability. My life yo-yos up and down like crazy. I swing from earning money and appearing to have my shit together, to then being barely able to leave the house, the bedroom, the bed.

I can't imagine anything much worse than having a government handout that's inadequate to live on, and slipping deeper and deeper into problems. Welfare looks like an agonisingly slow death, with no hope of escape. The Conservative government has found that cutting welfare benefits has been very popular with their ignorant smug arrogant wealthy voters, and have plunged a great many vulnerable people into a position of unbearable stress and financial insecurity.

"What about getting your dream job?" I hear you ask.

Well, let's explore a couple of examples.

There's an IT position at a mental health charity currently on offer here in London. I would be both experienced and qualified to work that job, and it's also doing important work that is in line with my values. The salary is £28,000 per annum. That's a take-home pay of £1,850.

In London, it generally costs around £700 a month to rent an absolutely terrible room in an absolutely terrible apartment. £700 a month will mean that you don't have a lounge. £700 a month will mean that you'll spend your whole time in your bedroom. I guess that'd only be 38% of my income... so not so bad?

What do you dream of for the future? Would you like to get married, have kids, own your own home? Well... that's not going to happen on £28,000 per annum. Assuming that you could save up a 5% deposit, that would be £25,000 for an average price London home of £494,000. Normally, you can only borrow a multiple of 3.5 times your salary, which is less than £100,000. The sums just don't add up.

So, the answer is to leave London, right? Well, London is my home. London is where I live. London is also where the jobs are. If there's a job for £28,000 in London, just think how little that job would pay outside of London. The 'dream' jobs probably only exist in London. Most head offices are in London.

Perhaps I could be a writer, surviving off Patreon donations? J. L. Westover produces these great comics, but doesn't even make $500 a month. You can't live on $500 a month.

Although I'm very much fixating on the financial and work aspects of life, really, why wouldn't I concentrate on those? I'm going to hand over the remaining best years of my life to somebody else, in return for money that I then just put straight into the hands of those who own the land and the means of production. It would be OK if life was somehow liveable, but it's not.

I can't go part-time, because it's simply not permitted for a single man to do it. There are hardly any women doing the job I do anyway. It would just blow the minds of my employers if I said they needed to let me work part-time. It would not compute. They would not know how to cope. The message is simple in the jobs that I do: fit in or fuck off.

So, the kind of 'part-time' that I do, is to work for as long as I can, and then have a breakdown.

I'm exhausted. I'm so very exhausted from repeated cycles of destruction and salvation. It's exhausting getting to the limit of your credit facilities, and then having to drag yourself through yet another health-destroying stint of bullshit. It's exhausting having your bank balance emptied, just staying alive, and your morale and sense of happiness emptied, just to keep paying rent and bills.

Why do I do it? Who am I helping? What am I improving?

The wealth that I generate certainly doesn't disappear. I genuinely do work very hard indeed. Why do I never see the fruits of my labour?

Well, the system is a con. The free market will ensure that prices are always set at a level where most people have to keep slaving away in dead end jobs. We are consumption machines. Sure, you can stop buying pointless material goods, but are you going to go homeless and starve? Even homelessness is being criminalised. It's a crime to be alive and not work some bullshit job. It's a crime to be using up oxygen and looking at the view, without helping the rich get richer. There's a tax on life.

I'm so ground down by it all.

It's not just a chemical imbalance in my brain that's causing me to feel depressed and hopeless. Genuinely, what's the best that I can hope for? That I retire rich, but I'm old and my health is destroyed? That I quit the rat race, but I'm spat upon by people in the street and told "get a job you lazy bum"? That I claim welfare benefits from government drones who hate my guts and call me a worthless scrounger behind my back. That I put myself at the mercy of a Conservative government who would rather see me kill myself because it's cheaper?

Office work is as deadly as smoking, according to a paper published in The Lancet. Perhaps I just need to join a gym? Yep... that costs money. If I'm earning £28,000 in my dream job, that gym membership will delay me in saving up the £394,000 I need in order to be able to buy a house. It should only take me about 40 years, assuming that house price inflation drops to 0%.

People are literally being bored to death. Being bored at work has been proven to lead to an early death. People are even starting to sue their employers for a 'bore out' where they are left virtually brain dead, depressed and unable to work because of the soul-crushing agony of working a ridiculously boring bullshit job.

For sure, I can suffer in wage slavery for as long as I can bear it, and then take time away from the rat race. However, that sprint and coast behaviour is exactly the kind of thing that exacerbates my mood disorder. What could be more bipolar than having to do some depressing mental health and wellbeing destroying months and years of boring bullshit, and then being released to enjoy some temporary freedom.

There's a mad panic when I'm suddenly released from the anchor chains that have been weighing me down. I rush around at breakneck pace, trying to pack as much into the time as possible, before the dreaded day comes around again that I have to go back to my bullshit day job.

That dread is the thing that rules my life at the moment.

I reach Friday, and I should be relieved and happy that it's the weekend, but instead I drink myself into oblivion because it's taken every ounce of resolve just to limp through the working week. On Saturday - today - I have a strange feeling of calm. Momentarily, I forget about how fucking awful my life is. I almost feel positive and upbeat. On Sunday, the existential dread starts to grow. What am I doing? Why am I trapped in this motherfucking cycle? Why can't I escape? On Monday, I want to run away and become a homeless person, hunted by Shylocks looking for their pound of flesh, or else just kill myself to end the horrible cycle and endless pain.

You're probably thinking this:

"Everybody hates their job"

Yeah? Well, why don't you get your dream job then? Why don't you follow your dreams and your passions? Also, how destructive has the cycle of bullshit been in your life? Have you been hospitalised due to suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts? Have you been homeless and destitute?

Sleeping on your mate's couch does not count as homeless.

For sure, I'm a reasonably smart and resourceful person. I've come up with loads of scams and schemes to make money over the years. But what you've got to understand is that it's exhausting, stressful and risky to undertake some new venture.

Somebody has to pay the rent and the bills every month. Presently, I seem to have subsidised at least 3 people to work on their dreams at my own personal expense. People live in my apartment, use my electric, gas, water and internet, not paying rent, going after their own little slice of happiness, and I'm the one who picks up the bill at the end of every month. I'm the fucking sensible one. I'm the one who makes sure there's enough money in the bank that we don't all end up living on the streets. I've lived on the streets. It's hard to come back from that one.

I'm not doing the whole working for the biggest bank in Europe on the number one project while homeless thing again. It was exhausting and stressful.

I'm fed up of being promised shit and let down.

I'm fed up of being taken for a ride.

I'm fed up of fuckups telling me how to live my fucking life while they benefit from my charity.

Yes, a friend once took me in when I was down on my luck and going through my divorce. I offered to pay rent and he declined. I paid bills when I was there. I also helped my friend to make some profitable investments, which netted him a couple of sizeable cash lump sums.

I'm not a fucking mug. I can't go through life buying lottery tickets.

I've done a rational analysis of the economic framework that I'm trapped within, and it's incompatible with my mental health. Society doesn't want my kind of crazy to be alive. There's no place for me in the world.

I could limp along in the gig economy, living some kind of hand-to-mouth existence. I could move to some cheap part of the country, or the world. I could try and eke out an existence, in some damp cave or perhaps die of an infected wound in some remote wilderness.

Of course my ideas are naïve and romanticised and unrealistic and incredibly black & white, all or nothing.

The problem is that I'm not wrong. I'm smart enough to have done the analysis. I've gathered the data. I've got the experience.

Do what you love and get dicked over, be financially insecure and never be able to follow your dreams, because you're already following your dreams, right? I mean, why should a nurse get to look after patients and buy a house and not live with crippling debt, right?

Do what pays the bills, and you'll be old and nearly dead by the time you get to enjoy it, if you don't die of stress related illness and the health damage from your sedentary office bullshit job before you even get to the point where you can quit the rat race.

In a way, this crisis has come about because I already ticked everything on my bucket list. I decided that life was lived backwards, and it made no sense to be doing adventure sports when you're old and your bones break easily and take a long time to heal.

It's no tragedy, to end my life because I'm exhausted and sick of the bullshit. All I have ahead of me is health problems and death. In the long run, we're all dead anyway.

Prolonging the agony only serves to make the rich even richer. I have deep-seated moral objections to being part of the problem when I can't be part of the solution. I find it indefensible to say that I was just doing what everybody else was doing, following orders, sticking with the crowd and being part of the herd.

The more I stick around on the planet, the more chance there is that I will accidentally spawn some infants who will inherit a dying world, and a broken system that enslaves people into bullshit jobs that bore them to death. Life is not a gift I want to share. Life is a curse I want to break.

It's strange writing these words when I'm not even in the very worst depths of despair. It's nice to feel that I'm being a little more logical, and less pulled by the emotional torment of the working week.

Yes, at the small scale, it looks ridiculous. What does a few more months or years matter? Stick with it. Things can change.

But the reality is that I've been around the block a bunch of times. Been there, done that. I've actually experienced a whole heap of jobs in a whole heap of industry sectors. I've experienced all kinds of cultures. I've tried to forge my way through life all kinds of different ways. Fundamentally, there is an incompatibility between what I find acceptable and sustainable, and the way the river is flowing. I can't swim upstream forever. I can't fight the onrushing floods.

It seems only logical to give up at some point.

Tags: #suicide #depression #career #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about clock watching...

In 3 weeks' time I celebrate a year of blogging [almost] every day as well as 6 months 'clean' (whatever that means). I'll have pretty much proven my point that stress, anxiety, depression, hypomania, addiction, homelessness, destitution, social isolation and every other ailment that threatens every single one of us, can be swept under the carpet.

My life is hideously painful: basically, Fuck My Life.

Nothing has any purpose or any meaning. To volunteer at a soup kitchen makes a mockery of everything, if the vital exercise of feeding the homeless is seen as a fucking hobby. To spawn children because it's fulfilling to nurture things, is to ignore the fact that there are already plenty of hungry mouths, the planet is fucked and existence is pain and suffering.

I'm going to continue until the 21st of September, keeping everything the same, in the hope that my depression will somehow lift. I doubt that my mood will improve without medication, or impoverishing myself by setting myself on collision course with destitution and homelessness again. Who wants to be functional in a dysfunctional society?

On the 21st of September, I have to make a choice: whether to continue for another couple of months, to possibly reach financial security and wealth again. Would loosening of the purse strings and retail therapy make life more palatable? It's distasteful to say that money brings happiness, but it's obvious that lack of money brings stress and anxiety.

Through comfort eating and alcohol, I'm limping along. My waistline is suffering and I'm getting quite depressed about my physique too. It's a vicious cycle, because depression is one of the reasons why I feel so drained and unable to stay active. You might think that a boring day at work should leave plenty of energy to do other things, but in fact quite the opposite is true: it's so draining being bored all day.

It doesn't make any sense that I'm so exhausted and depressed. I do all the right things: good sleep hygiene, good diet, good routine. I do a lot of walking, some cycling. I occasionally see friends or have a little more interaction with my work colleagues than the bare minimum. I'm working my job, saving my money, paying down my debts. I'm a model fucking citizen.

Yes, a lot of people find their lives mundane and boring, but if those people are as desperately suicidal as I am, then society is about to collapse at any moment, because I'm always just on the brink of either drawing the curtains and going to bed for 2 months, killing myself or running away, where nobody can send me a fucking bill or harass me on the telephone. If there are vast swathes of people who think like that, because they have a modest dislike of the rat race, society is utterly fucked and why the hell aren't they speaking up?

I had no choice but to speak up. I could have died in silence, misunderstood, and with people keen to mis-label me. At least by recording my thoughts and feelings in great detail, I have a fighting chance of dealing with hateful people who would wish me buried as a madman and an addict, even though I can clearly be neither if I'm holding down a highly desirable job, paying my rent, paying my bills. Can't anybody see that the attempts to pigeon hole people are ridiculous, insulting and desecrate the memory of those who can't stand the bullshit any longer?

I steer clear of talking about conspiracies, because that's the hallmark of somebody who has succumbed to paranoia. When a mind implodes, the vultures of organised religion swoop on the poor fool, and fill their head with all kinds of falsehoods about deities and miracles. Sometimes, when a person's grip on reality is loosened by the relentless hardships of life, they will start believing that the universe is conspiring against them. Even though we are ruled by cruel and evil plutocrats with insatiable greed, no conspiracy could really work successfully to control 7 billion people.

Instead, we are collectively the architects of our own demise. Every time we say "I was just following orders", "I was just doing what I was told" and "I was just doing what everybody else was doing" we illustrate the fact that we hide behind pathetic excuses for behaviour that is to the detriment of the greater good. In the relentless pursuit of the impossible dream that we might one day be elevated from struggle and poverty, we actually collectively enslave each other.

My aim is to play by the rules, so that I can die with integrity. I aim to cut away from the mainstream as soon as I have reached the point of break-even. To become fixated with the unattainable goal of 'getting ahead' is to make myself a lifelong slave. Who gives a shit if I can retire fabulously wealthy, if I gave away my youth and my health so cheaply?

And so, I watch the clock tick down. I'm just killing time. All I'm doing is waiting. Waiting for the day that I can show that my point is proven: yes, it's possible to look like a fine upstanding member of the community, wearing my smart suit and going to work in a fancy office. It's possible to be valued immensely by the capitalist system, and very well remunerated. It's possible to do without drugs & alcohol. It's possible to do without doctors, medications and psychotherapists. Then, with everything we supposedly hold dear in life, I reject it all because I think it's morally wrong to prop up a corrupt system that enslaves so many.

The end of the collective insanity can only come to an end, when individuals are brave enough to vote with their feet and risk their lives and their livelihoods.

So many poor fools are buying lottery tickets and working dead-end careers hoping for a promotion that will elevate them from a position of financial insecurity, into a tolerable situation. This mistaken belief that there's some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is akin to the donkey that keeps trudging along to try and get the carrot that's suspended just out of reach... always just out of reach.

You've got to pay to play, and you have to run just to stand still. Even the homeless are criminalised. Anybody who doesn't conform is bullied and tortured. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

At some point, it's time to give up.

Tags: #writing #suicide #depression

This is a story about revolting peasants...

The problem with a race to the bottom is that once taken to its ultimate conclusion, mass extinction or war, revolution & regression are the only options.

As a technologist it seems like the huge cash mountains, built up by the dominant players in the information age, might lead to innovations that could solve some of the crises facing humanity.

If you think that Elon Musk and his Gigafactory producing staggering amounts of lithium batteries is the answer, you haven't looked at the fundamentals. Batteries are about energy storage, and energy still has to be generated somehow. Lithium is a metal, and all metals have to be mined. All that production capacity for batteries drives the price much lower, while the countries who have the mineral reserves can price gouge for their scarce resources.

Let's imagine that the gulf states move from oil to solar, because they're hot desert countries with very little cloud cover. Let's imagine that China produces all those solar panels, and also fulfils its ambitions to become one of the world's top lithium exporters, to rival Chile, who are currently number one.

Wealth is going to continue to flow to the gulf states, because we're still wedded to petroleum products. Nobody has yet come up with a realistic way of moving huge container ships, aeroplanes, freight trains and heavy goods vehicles, without fuel oil, kerosene and diesel. Most industrial plant used in mining runs on diesel. Crude oil is still the grease on the wheels of industry.

Automotive transport is a disproportionately high energy user in the USA because it's a wealthy country where almost every household has a car. In China, only 13% of the population have a car. Electric self-driving cars might be a big deal in the land of the free, but the 320 million people in the USA just can't compare to China's 1,360 million.

The bulk of what's going on in the tech world at the moment is silly toys for silly boys. Yes, the achievements of the SpaceX project are incredible. Yes, electric vehicles appear to go some way towards addressing climate change. However, it's an absolute piss in the ocean for most people on the planet.

I'm not even that worried about the rise of the robots, and automation. The main problem we've got is the social disruption. For sure, things like Uber seem to deliver a great advancement for people who are already wealthy. As a rich city dweller, being able to have a "private driver" (to borrow from Uber's tagline) feels like the promised future has arrived. In fact, what's happening is that a load of cab drivers who invested a lot in their local 'knowledge' and fleet of vehicles are now on the scrap heap. Uber attracts immigrants who can raise the money to buy a Toyota Prius, and are prepared to accept appalling working conditions.

For every person's livelihood robbed by technological 'advancement', a whole family is put into an economically precarious position. What are all London's black cab drivers going to do, with their investment in their vehicles and the approximately 3 years it took them to memorise 125,000 points of interest?

It seems logical and rational that people should adapt to change as quickly as they can, because hesitation will only leave them further behind. However, people don't tend to like it very much when the rug is pulled out from under their feet. People tend to dig their heels in, complain and protest, when their comfort zone is threatened.

From weaving looms to agricultural mechanisation, the peasants have been deeply unhappy with technological advancements. For hundreds of years, people have wrung their hands about the proletariat being left idle, while the machines till the fields and make our clothes. Clearly, the workforce has adapted. New types of jobs have been created. We have seen the rise and rise of the service sector, and entertainment.

You would have thought that people would be happy. We have low mortality rates, and we no longer have to work in the blazing heat and pouring rain, out in the fields, or in the choking smog of the industrial towns. We sit in our air-conditioned offices, moving a mouse around and tapping on a keyboard. These should be halcyon days.

However, we have failed to stem the flow of information and imagery of the excesses of the wealthiest 1% flaunting their money on the world stage.

We can't help but compare ourselves with others, and most of our media is obsessed with the super-rich. The idea of a jet-set lifestyle, with limousine transport is part of what makes Uber so successful. We have been promised a better life for so long, but yet we are stuck with the drudgery of menial jobs. Suddenly we too can be chauffeur driven around. However, we forget that we are living in a tiny bubble.

The very vast majority are still living absolutely shit lives of grinding poverty. While wage increases at the bottom of the food chain look very good in percentage terms, they really don't measure up to the increased expectations of those people who are being paid marginally more. Also, there is little data to suggest that increasing somebody's salary from $1 a day to $2 a day is transformative to their quality of life.

Nearly 50% of the world's population uses the Internet, and so implicitly, those people expect to soon have a helicopter, a superyacht, a private jet and an idyllic desert island. These are the images that we see every day. This is what we're promised. I can follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram, just like I can follow my mate Fred Bloggs from down the road. It takes one swipe of my finger on my smartphone to compare myself with the top 0.1% of the population, just the same as it does to compare myself with the 99.9%.

I'm not given to comparing myself with the billions of other Internet users. Looking at Twitter is depressing. Guess what? Everybody's got a mum. Everybody's got cats & babies. Everybody's got the same worries about money, relationships and how attractive their body is. Everybody blogs. Everybody photographs. We're all just so much meat in the mincer.

There is a bit of us that needs to feel special and unique and different. "Big data" doesn't care that you're special, unique and different. Technology says that you're just one of billions of users. You're just one pair of eyeballs in a sea of marketing opportunities. Tech is a numbers game. You're a statistically negligible number.

As our communities have collapsed, and we have been driven into increasingly desperate lonely isolated lives, where our only connection with the world is through social networking, the war on our workplace rages on. The same technology that knows if you're engaging with advertising can be used to make sure that we're paying attention while we're working our jobs. Eye-tracking technology could easily be used to deduct money from your wages every time you stare out of the window, instead of focussing on your spreadsheets and email.

Technology is developing very fast, and the hype suggests that exponential growth is delivering all the things that we've been imagining for hundreds of years.

The truth, however, is that somebody still has to mine your lithium, install your solar panels, and actually permit the switch to be thrown to enable our robotic overlords.

What we're going to find is that even though the geeks might be right, people still don't like to end up standing around with their dick in their hands, looking like a total idiot. The message from the technologists seems to be "this is better, so you'd better get on with accepting the future" and "evolve or die".

It's been very frustrating as a technologist to be held back by dinosaurs who just don't 'get it'. It's been very frustrating to work with organisations that are extremely resistant to change. A lot of people who I meet in my job have 99 reasons why something won't work, and will be deliberately obstructive. In order to get anything done, I've had to become extremely resourceful about going round people who just want to protect their jobs.

There are more people than you think who are having a shitty time. There are all those people who society has been happy to leave festering in the "economically inactive" bucket. There are the vast majority, who are seen as a commodity pool, to be given zero hours contract McJobs on minimum wage. There are the jaded, disillusioned, demotivated and demoralised people who are educated and intelligent enough to see that the system's pretty crooked - the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer - who are also bored zombies in their horrible office jobs.

The thumb screws are getting tightened on the working class, with austerity, benefit cuts, job insecurity, pay cuts in real terms, ever-increasing cost of living (i.e. food, housing, energy, transport) and every other thing that creates a death by a thousand cuts.

And why are the ordinary people suffering this low growth, high stress environment? So that we can have bank bailouts, corporate welfare and tax breaks for millionaires.

Yes, us technologists can imagine a utopian society of endless leisure time, self-driving electric cars and android servants, but we are very unlikely to get there while the bankers, oligarchs and politicians are attempting to feather their already plump nests.

Already, we see anger directed at gentrification. How long before the peasants march to Palo Alto with their pitchforks and burning torches, in order to lop off the heads of the plutocrats who say "let them eat Facebook likes"?

Tags: #computing #socialmedia

This is a story about temptation...

Flat 188 doesn't actually exist. Flat 188 never existed. Flat 188 was invented by me as a drop-off location for drugs being delivered from around the globe, mostly originating in China.

I'm not sure if the production of 'research' chemicals in China is done in clandestine laboratories, or with full state sanctioning and full quality control that you would expect of goods produced in the Far East. However, in countries with drug laws that are less draconian than our own in the United Kingdom, some fellow psychonauts submitted their Internet-procured chemicals to laboratory quality testing, and found that what they had bought was often greater than 99% purity.

My first foolish foray into the stupid world of research chemicals and experimentation on myself, was with the original piperazine of abuse: BZP. This chemical is basically only good for worming cattle. The piperazines are great anthelmintics, which means that they get rid of parasites from your digestive tract, like roundworms, pinworms, tapeworms, hookworms, whipworms and other little bastards that live in your gut.

Because of loopholes in the law, many analogues of banned chemicals became available to order on the Internet as 'research chemicals' with packaging that labelled them as "unfit for human consumption" and "toxic". Naturally, everybody who bought these toxic chemicals heeded the warnings and had no intention of the substances entering their body, but there were a few accidents now and again.

Obviously, I'm being very flippant. Purchasing some random compound off the Internet and ingesting it seems pretty foolish, on the face of it, but anybody who has dabbled with street drugs knows that they are far more likely to be sold any old shit that the dealer had lying around when they decided to cut their nondescript white powder with something to bulk it out.

The solution is not to do drugs right? Well, get this through your thick skull: people don't "do drugs". What people do is they buy escapism. People buy escape from their shitty intolerable lives. Drugs work far better than that red sports car that was supposed to make you attractive to the opposite sex and make all your problems go away. Advertisers sell a certain dream. Drugs deliver dreams... temporarily, and for a price.

Tonight, I broke my "don't tempt yourself" rule, by looking at a purveyor of research chemicals on the Internet. I didn't look at the website in Holland where my drug of choice - supercrack - can be purchased. At least, I presume it can still be purchased on there. I haven't bought any for nearly 9 months. The stuff is so fucking cheap that if I still had half a gram still knocking around somewhere, that'd last me for over a month of life-destroying insanity, without food, without sleep.

So, I looked at a research chemical seller on the Internet. Basically, the website is now clearly just a front for a Chinese vendor who will ship directly from the Far East in packaging that's so discreet that it will easily slip through customs unnoticed.

What would I order? Synthetic benzodiazepines. Mother's little helpers.

What's the big appeal of benzos? Well, it's 11:35pm on a Monday night and I have to go back to a job I hate for the next two motherfucking months just to break even. I have to keep turning up with my fake smile and sitting quietly in my chair and not rocking the motherfucking boat. The chance of me having to actually apply myself, stretch myself, challenge myself is precisely zero. I might as well be asleep in the chair, except that would attract attention.

It's so fucking hard to put myself into a trance and just put up with the dreadful bullshit that I've seen a million times before. I'm in autopilot. I'm running my bit of the project very well, and I haven't even taken my mind out of neutral gear yet. I haven't even actually engaged my brain. It sounds arrogant, but you would be amazed at how much of a paint-by-numbers exercise everything is. The hardest thing is keeping my big mouth shut.

I work with a few cool people who have been through some shit before, and we exchange knowing glances at each other, as we're all mercenaries doing the same thing, but it's so soul-destroying. Basically, to attempt to extract any meaning or purpose from my day job would only be to sabotage an extremely highly paid contract.

I'm economically, financially incentivised to put myself into a drug-induced coma, so I can sit in my chair and quietly look intelligent. I've done enough to prove that I'm a worthwhile member of the team. I can coast until the end of the project now, never breaking a sweat. It's just a case of watching the clock tick down to zero.

And so, I want to send my brain to sleep. I want to be in a drugged-up benzodiazepine haze, so that the time just melts away into a foggy amnesia where I wake up in 2 or 3 months time, and all my financial problems have gone away because I sat in an office chair keeping it warm.

It really is that simple. Sit in my chair popping pills, and keep collecting the cheques at the end of each week. People will love me for keeping my mouth shut and not making a fuss. It's truly the best thing I could be doing for myself and the project. Nobody would thank me for trying to help out in areas that I'm not responsible for.

It's so sorely tempting to order a couple of hundred innocent little pills that will make a couple of months fly by that would otherwise be maddeningly boring to the point where it might drive me insane with frustration.

If you can sense that I'm trying to talk myself into this, and justify it, you're correct.

It's too easy to live in a drug-induced coma, when the working world is such utter bullshit.

If I was going to do it, I would probably not have shared this with you. In a way, my blog gives me accountability. My blog gives me full transparency. My blog makes me kinda honest.

There's nothing dishonest with drug taking per se. It's stigma that drives behaviour underground into the shadows, but everybody's got to find a way to cope. Everybody has to find a way to get through their days.

This feels like a watershed moment. During my 'advent calendar' last year, I knew that a crisis was brewing. I knew that something had to give. However, I wanted to keep my cards close to my chest until my "Cold Turkey" joke on Boxing Day.

Now, the joke's on me but I don't care. I'm having a crisis and there's nothing I can do about it except be honest and document how it unfolds.

Tags: #drugs #addiction

This is a story about fear of death...

I had 3 major admissions to the Royal Free Hospital on the hills of Hampstead, overlooking central London. I snapped this shot after waking up with canulas in both my arms, 10 cables attaching me to an ECG machine, a motorised drip pump shoving fluid into me as fast as it could go. I was a pincushion from all the blood samples that had been taken.

Doing a quick body scan, my right leg was horrifically swollen. My right knee was damaged. The operation to reunite the two halves of my calf muscle, repair 4 severed tendons and reconnect 2 nerves, was still healing. I had a big burn on my lower abdomen. There was throbbing dull pain just under my ribcage at the front, and either side of my back, where my liver was torn and my kidneys were failing. There was fluid on my lungs. My chest was tight and constricted.

Was I scared? Did I call out for a loved one? Did it bother me that my prognosis was pretty grim? Do you think it even crossed my mind that I might die alone, except for one or two strangers in the mostly empty ward?

The photo captures the sun low in the sky, not long after dawn.

As long as I die in London, I know I tried my best to find my way back to the land of the living. I have no fear of death in London. Nobody dies of shame in London. If you can't find your will to live in London, you can slip away peacefully. You're never truly alone in London.

I had a 4 hour operation under general anaesthetic to fix the injury inflicted upon me by my parents. I travelled home on the bus on my own after a few days recovering in hospital. My leg was in plaster cast, held in severe dorsiflexion and was not weight bearing. I was as weak as a kitten. I let myself back into my friend's house, hopped up the stairs to the guest bedroom and collapsed in bed.

I had already spent several days in Oxford John Radcliffe Hospital in their high-dependency care unit, while they tried to stabilise my muscle damage and save me from kidney failure. I'd made my way back to London with a blood sodden bandage that was little better than the field dressing that I had improvised with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, before paramedics arrived. I had assumed that despite the wound being down to the bone, it was nothing that a couple of stitches at a minor injury clinic couldn't fix. It wasn't me who called 999. I was just trying to get back to London.

Back in London and finding myself with a spare evening before my operation, I had gone to a adventure sports film festival, hobbling along with my lame leg. The severed tendons meant that I was not even able to raise my foot any more, and it dragged and caught on kerbs and steps, causing great pain.

Having never experienced a general anaesthetic, I felt the same trepidation that I felt before my first skydive or another extreme leap into the unknown. However, there was never any doubt that it was something I couldn't face on my own. Just go along with it. Trust to fate, skilled professionals and technical equipment. Blind faith.

You should see the way I ride my bike. One slip and you're a goner, when you thread your way in-between the massive heavy goods vehicles, transporting steel beams for the construction of Crossrail. The double-decker bus drivers are amazingly skilled and seem to manage to not squash too many cyclists. However, when you mix together the debutanté Über drivers in their Toyota Priuses, hard-up black cab drivers, various small delivery vehicles, plus the unpredictable mix of abilities of people driving around central London, it's no wonder that paramedics call bike riders "organ donors".

When I hear that yet another of my fellow commuters has hurled themselves under a tube train, I burst into tears. It's too much to bear, thinking that some of my fellow Londoners have reached the end of their rope too. Perhaps those less personally affected by suicidal thoughts are the ones who tut about how selfish it is that a huge underground station has to be evacuated so that the human remains can be bagged and carted off to the coroner. The disruption to the capital's transportation network seem huge, but there are so many other veins and arteries in the heart of the nation, that people find alternative routes quite easily, with minor delays.

I'm not emotional when it comes to my own death.

I have fantasised about going on a scouting mission to a nearby tower block that has an open-air balcony with a 40 floor drop. My only concern would be landing on some poor unfortunate on the pavement below - hence the need to check the drop zone in advance.

I would never throw myself in front of a train. It would be too traumatic for the driver and the people on the platform. Even people on the train would feel a bump and judder as the wheels crushed bone and flesh. I know they would. People have described to me exactly what it's like for a tube train to run over a passenger, and I've had to run out of the office crying. Strangely, I don't cry for myself.

Jumping off a bridge in London would be pointless. None of the bridges are high enough, unless you were able to scale Tower Bridge.

Killing yourself in a public place is a bit selfish though. It's bound to leave a big mess to clean up and cause distress for an unpredictable number of people.

I didn't want to commit suicide while I was staying with friends. I felt that it might have been seen as some negative reflection on their hospitality, and would leave bad memories in the guest bedroom where I had been staying, which would tarnish their home.

I'm mindful that whoever I'm living with is burdened already with the uncertainty over whether my resolve to keep myself alive and well is not slipping.

When I am seized by the sudden urge to take myself and a sharp knife to the bathroom and open my radial arteries into the bath, I worry if I would cry out in pain as I dug into the joint on the inside of the joint of my arm, searching for the blood vessels with the sharp point of the blade. Then I worry whether I would be able to contain the mess within the bath, as my heart pumped my circulatory system dry.

Before I have gone any further with these thoughts, I realise that it would be grossly unfair to leave the discovery of my body and handling the police to a friend who doesn't deserve such a responsibility.

I think about setting myself aflame with petrol, in political protest at capitalism, inequality and social injustice, right in the centre of Canada Square. I think about how desperately agonising it would be to be burnt alive. I think about how suffocation would be as deadly as the heat, as the flames consumed all the available oxygen. Gasping for breath, and in unimaginable agony, death would be neither swift nor immediately assured. Dying of the burns over the course of the coming days would not be a great way to contemplate any last regrets.

It's the halfway situation that's the problem. A failed drug overdose so often results in organ failure and a much slower and more painful death than originally intended. Being knocked off your bike while wearing a helmet could mean paralysis rather than death. I know what it's like to score my arms with a razor blade. I know what it's like to wonder what the scars are going to look like when they heal. I know what it's like to experiment to see how deep you have to cut to reach the veins. However, so many cuts will stem the bleeding enough to preserve life, despite leaking profusely at first.

If you spend any time in psychiatric instituions, you meet suicide survivors. Most have had their stomachs pumped or filled with activated charcoal. Many will have their wrists bandaged. Scars from previous half-hearted failed attempts and self-harm, indicate a certain revolving doors nature to our treatment approach. Some of my fellow patients confide in me that they are saving up the very pills that were prescribed to them to prevent their suicide, so that they can have another go. One guy saved his tablets for 8 months and had things well planned except for an unexpected visitor. He was in intensive care for several weeks. He now faces a life of dialysis because his kidneys failed due to the toxic load. He was planning on attempting suicide again at his earliest opportunity.

I met a beautiful young Australian paramedic in hospital. You would have thought that she would value life higher than anybody, but the lesions to her neck indicate that she'd used her medical training to attack her jugular veins.

I read that media coverage of suicide can trigger a spate of copycat suicides. Newspapers are discouraged from reporting on the suicide method used. It's said that jails are like universities for criminals to swap tips and make connections. Could it be that mental health institutions are the same for the suicidally depressed, with more people being likely to end their lives using ideas gleaned while in hospital?

Frankly, there isn't much stopping a resourceful person from finding a way to kill themself. I've considered everything from inert gas to the application of an electrical current across my chest to send me into ventricular fibrillation. The one that is most appealing is drifting off to sleep and not waking up.

There's a famous quote by one of the few people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, where they said they regretted it as soon as they had let go.

When I once took a drug overdose, there was a momentary twinge of regret that could have lasted about as long as it would have taken me to fall and hit the water, having jumped off a high bridge. There was a period where I would have been able to eject the toxins from my body, if I was suddenly determined enough to save myself. Instead, I then found myself accepting my fate, and a strange calm came over me before the chemicals hit my bloodstream. I was resigned and relaxed about whatever happened next. Death or organ failure. I didn't care.

It was only after a couple of days when my paralysis temporarily lifted and it was clear that the only way I was going to die was very slowly through the accumulated damage to my body, malnutrition and dehydration. I was pissing copious amounts of blood, and I knew I had to make a choice: an agonising slow death where I could be discovered, but it would definitely be the end of my kidneys, or a trip to the hospital and re-evaluate the situation.

I tidied my room. Took a shower. Packed my bags. Called a taxi. Sat in Accident and Emergency for hours.

When I was examined I was immediately admitted and I spent nearly 3 weeks in hospital.

It wasn't the right time to die. This was before I had worked my contracts at Barclays, HSBC and my current client. This was before I had somewhere nice to call a home of my own again. This was before I put together a 370,000 word document that explained who I was and how I arrived at the decision to take my own life.

I lay on the floor, semi-paralysed, and I thought about what kind of message I could scrawl in my incapacitated state, that would make it clear that I knew what I was doing. The circumstances leading up to that moment were a mess. It was too ambiguous. Even a suicide note would be seen in the context of great misfortune and stressful events in my life leading up to that point.

I had planned on starving myself to death or in some way doing myself in on the 1st of January, as some kind of protest at the way that we surmise a suicide with a neat soundbite that's supposed to explain all the reasons why somebody took their own life:

• "depression"
• "financial worries"
• "drug problems"
• "broken heart"
• "loss of status"

Take your fucking pick.

Without a conversation, we desecrate the memory of a dead person, by trying to oversimplify the complex problem of what could drive a person to arrive at the decision to kill themself.

In Japan, suicide is an honourable thing. The act of seppuku might be a protest over a decision or a preferable fate to torture. Preparation for the act includes writing a death poem.

Do you really want to be that crazy old homeless guy, yelling "I used to be somebody" as the world pays no attention and the streets finally swallow you into anonymity?

All glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Tags: #hospital #nhs #suicide #injury

This is a story about office life...

Look closely at the image above. It appears like I already wrote this blog post. It certainly feels like that. Haven't we been here before? Deja vu?

When you get stuck into a cycle, how do you break out of it? When the loudspeakers scream with feedback, because the sound that the microphone captures is being amplified and re-amplified, how do you reset, without cutting the power?

My behaviour might look self-sabotaging, but I'm actually deliberately burning bridges so that I have no line of retreat back to the places that made me unhappy in the first place.

When I worked in the City the first time around, I used to have 3 or 4 strong macchiato coffees every day. That's 12 espresso shots. I used to get drunk most lunchtimes and after work. I needed 2/3rds of a bottle of red wine to get to sleep, after all that coffee.

Uppers and downers, round and round. We rode the rollercoaster nonstop until we were sick. Every day, every week, every month, every year... they were the same.

When I was in my early 20's it wasn't such a big deal. We used to tank up on caffeine, churn out a load of code that would form the backbone of the world's economy, and then go get drunk to try and calm down a bit. We thought we could carry on like that forever, with our uppers and downers.

I saw colleagues get sick with stress, anxiety, depression, alcoholism. Some of my colleagues needed liver transplants. Some of my colleagues died. The system chewed us up and spat us out.

By my mid 20s I'd owned a yacht, a speedboat, sportscars... for some reason no amount of material possessions and status symbols seemed to quench the massive insecurity and frustration with life. Take a socially awkward, unpopular geek, sprinkle in wealth and the illusion that you're being 'successful' in life, and you wind up with a pretty confused adult.

While my schoolfriends paired off with lifelong partners and started to have children, I would suddenly decide that a loving relationship would be my salvation. I moved to a Surrey commuter town with a girlfriend, and started to play golf and generally start to think & act like a middle-aged family man. That was a bit of strange thing to do for a 21 year old.

Back in London after my first experiment into becoming a happy adult had failed, I satisfied myself with extreme sports, Internet discussion forums and lots of holidays and weekends away with nice big social clan. The London Kitesurfers 'club' was a lovely thing to be part of for several years. However, I still felt that I was missing that 'love' piece of the puzzle.

Some nice scientist kitesurfer girl seemed to tick all the boxes, and I launched myself with great intensity at a long-distance relationship that was never going to work. Relocating to the South coast, I quickly got involved with a geek girl who was into adventure sports: she seemed ideal, on paper.

I set about building the framework for a comfortable family life: the house, the steady job, the sensible car. However, I ignored the massive red flag: my girlfriend was a mean person.

I'm not easily dissuaded from my goals. Whatever obstacles I encounter, I just go around them. I'm a completer-finisher. I try to fix, improve, change, rather than throw things away or start again.

Anyway, I was flogging a dead horse. No matter how many times I painted a perfect picture postcard of how life could be, I'd found somebody who was stubbornly resistant to the idea of being nice and kind and supportive of the person who potentiated a 5-star luxury lifestyle for both of us. There was plenty of space for us both to shine, but sadly, she wanted me to be subdued and subserviant. She had gotten used to being showered with praise and being top of her class. She wasn't used to sharing the stage. She wasn't prepared for both of us to be happy.

I abandoned that life. I lost my business, my reputation with the major employers in the local area, my house and a substantial chunk of my wealth. I was fighting for survival, so I didn't have the time to go and carefully unpick the things that I had spent years building. I had no need of a house and shedful of things. What was I going to do with all that stuff? It was an unncessary millstone around my neck.

Now I find myself following a tried-and-trusted formula for wealth and 'success'. I'm rapidly putting together a lovely home again. I'm rapidly rebuilding my cash position. I'm rapidly rebuilding my reputation. However, I've seen it all and done it all before. I'm just going through the practiced motions.

"How did you know that was going to happen?" my colleagues ask me, like I'm some kind of clairvoyant. My ability to 'predict' the future is nothing more than making educated guesses, because I've been seen it all before. It looks prescient, but it's no more amazing than somebody who's learned from their mistakes.

That means my day job is pretty dull. I finish people's sentences, and I take great delight in giving people things they need before they ask for them. I'm ahead of the game. In the oft-quoted words of Wayne Gretsky, I'm skating to where the hockey puck is going to be.

I'm aware that this seems very arrogant. I'm not delusional. I know I'm not special or different. I know I'm no smarter than your average Joe.

I've done a 'gap' analysis, of my unsatisfying, unfulfilling and depression-filled life, and it seems like I need a dog, a cat, some kids and a loving supportive partner. If you ask children to draw a picture, they'll normally draw a house, the sun, some clouds, their parents and brothers & sisters, their pets. It seems like a pretty tried-and-trusted formula for life.

However, I even feel guilty about my cat living with my parents because he comes from a broken home. My cat, Frankie, has had to move house once in his kitty life, and I feel bad about the disruption and stress I caused him. I would love it if Frankie could live with me, but it would be cruel to make him live in a 4th floor apartment in a busy city. Having Frankie adopted by my parents, with their generous garden and surrounding Cotswold countryside, was the least bad option, but I still feel guilty.

Can you imagine how bad I'd feel if I had kids and they had a stressful home life? Can you imagine how guilty I'd feel if I knew that I selfishly chose to have children because they would give my life purpose and meaning, but I failed to adequately consider that the world I bequeathed to them is dying?

I'm running in autopilot at work. My brain is on tickover, doing my job. This unfortunately leaves a lot of time to consider the plight of the world's poor and struggling people. I have a lot of time to think about war and preventable diseases. I have a lot of time to think about inequalities and morality. I seem to be like a sponge, sucking up all the pain, suffering, cruelty, anger, hostility, selfishness, greed and immorality that seems to characterise the human race.

I could cut myself off from reading the news, but what would I do all day while I'm bored at work?

I can read the news, and if I get caught then nobody's really that bothered because I'm on top of my work and performing well. If I write my blog and try to stay on top of these feelings that threaten to overwhelm me, then I'm always nervous that my mask is going to slip.

I'm flirting with disaster anyway, wearing a semicolon tattoo just behind my ear, that advertises my struggle with depression, anxiety, addiction, self-harm and suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

When you have a problem, you can try to solve the root cause, or you can find a workaround. I know what the workarounds are. I know what the root cause is. I'm just not really satisfied that I can either do much about human nature and a selfish race intent on destroying itself, and neither am I very happy to attempt to insulate myself from reality, using drugs and money to put myself into a protective bubble

Begging is illegal in the City of London. Canary Wharf is a private estate, so undesirable members of society can actually be thrown out of the rich little enclave. You can kid yourself that there aren't any problems in the world, because you don't see them - out of sight out of mind - but that's why we got in this mess in the first place.

What happens next is as much a question of morality as it is a question of personal survival. Is it better to have lived life with some values and standards, rather than just saying "I was just doing what everybody else was doing" as if that's some kind of defence.

I know this is very lecturing, and once you've got skin in the game you have no choice but to try and do the best for your tiny tots, but I have a choice. I actually choose not to get a dog, because they're polluting (dogs need to eat masses of meat) and I choose not to have a family, because I can't make any guarantees that there's going to be a liveable planet for them to grow up on.

It doesn't make me a morally superior person. It's just the way I personally think. I know parents are racked with worry about the kind of world that their kids are going to inherit. I do empathise with the stress and challenges faced by families. Doesn't mean that's an excuse for me to join in though.

Tags: #family #capitalism #climatechange #career #london #banking #computing