This is a story about pets...

I love cats. Cats love me. My cat, Frankie, is so comfortable with me that I can zip him inside my jumper to keep him warm and he just happily snuggles up.

I read the other day that it took less than an hour to raise thousands of pounds for a cat that needed an operation at the vet. I've always taken the precaution of having pet insurance, because I would never want to have to make a cold hard financial decision about an animal that I kept as a pet, because I'm very emotionally attached - bonded - to Frankie.

A friend of mine has cycled thousands of miles across Europe to raise money to buy bicycles for impoverished families in Africa. These are not bicycles for leisure. They are an essential mode of transport for rural dwelling people, in order to be able to access education, employment and markets, without having to walk for hours and hours in blistering heat. Each bicycle can literally transform the prospects of an entire family overnight.

My friend who has so far covered about 2,000 miles, in over a month, has raised less than 25% of what the needy moggy managed to raise in less than an hour. I'm sure you'll agree, that cycling thousands of miles in some of the steepest parts of the Alps, surely shows that it is not through lack of effort that his fundraising attempt has not been more fruitful so far.

It's certainly not my intention to criticise or take anything away from his incredible feat, working so hard for such a good cause, to raise money for World Bicycle Relief by cycling across Europe. I'm totally in awe of what my friend is doing.

However, what saddens and disappoints me is how readily people will reach for their wallets when they think of a poor suffering furball, rather than a fellow human being.

Both my friend and I have been homeless. There seems to be an assumption that human beings are architects of their own demise, and animals are innocent creatures that need our protection. There seems to be an assumption that charity and governments are somehow working, to redistribute wealth and protect the needy and vulnerable. That simply isn't the case.

Why do people wait, until their friends and relatives are in hospital or dead, before they say "I wish we knew what to do, before it was too late" and "if we knew things were that bad, we would have done something"?

Frankly though, this is horse shit.

We have a culture where we believe we are engaged in a desperate struggle just to "look after our own". It's simply not true.

It might feel like a desperate struggle, to prepare the kids packed lunches and hang the laundry out. It might feel like a desperate struggle to think that you might not get to take 3 foreign holidays this year if you or your partner loses your job, which you're not going to. Things might feel like a desperate struggle because you've been reading too much damn tabloid journalism.

Until you've slept rough, barely been able to keep yourself clean, except with the occasional public shower, and barely been able to keep the clothes on your back from turning to dusty rags, you know fuck all about desperate struggle. However, even when you're homeless in the UK, you still don't tend to go without at least one hot meal a day: there are always soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna.

I don't know what it takes to trigger some empathy, and the goddamn impulse to get up and do something but I'm fairly outraged by the pocket change that gets stuffed into a charity collection bucket, simply to salve a middle-class conscience.

You've probably completely misread my own situation. I live in a flat that costs me twice as much as a hostel bed, which is totally excellent value. I work a job that brings in enough money to pay down the debt that I ran up supporting myself when I was sick. Yes, that's right. Instead of claiming incapacity benefit, housing benefit, council tax deductions and every other kind of government handout that I'm totally entitled to because I have major mental health issues instead I've funded it all out of my own pocket, and impoverished myself in the process.

Why would I do that? Well, because it's easier to get the money you need to survive when you have fur, whiskers and paws.

I mean, for fucks sake, Syrian children are having to print out pictures of themselves with Pokémon so that we give a shit about them.

Sorry for the condescending tone. I'm just a bit pissed off that our idea of "helping our own" is a few likes and shares on Facebook.

The end.

Tags: #charity #frankie #homeless

This is a story about obvious solutions...

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! The solution has been found. Blessed is this wonderful day, for now the ailment that has blighted so many lives - depression - has finally met its match with one simple trick, that nobody ever thought to try before.

In the history of humanity, nobody ever thought to say these magic curative words to a depressed person:

"Other people have it so much harder than you"

Upon hearing these words, the depression sufferer is reminded that there are children starving in Africa, that there are political prisoners in China, that there are people who live in low-lying countries like Bangladesh, where there is a constant threat of natural disaster from floodwaters, that there are massive slums in Mexico and Brazil and that 2.8 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day. The depression sufferer had simply forgotten!

You would have thought that the poverty and injustice of the world could almost be considered an additional cause of the sadness and depression that the person was feeling, but no, they were simply wallowing in self-pity.

It had previously been thought that depressed people were sensitive and aware of global issues, and empathised very much with the plight of those living in poverty, warzones and struggling to survive. It had previously been thought that the depressed people were having a sane response to an insane world, but no, they just needed reminding to count their blessings.

It had been previously thought that depressed people were well aware of all the things that they could be glad about, grateful for. I mean, they're not dead with red hot pokers shoved up their bum and all their skin peeled off and raw flesh dipped in salt and lemon juice, while their finger and toe nails are pulled out one by one, are they? I mean, for fucks sake, unless that is happening to you right fucking now your life is just one big fucking rainbow cotton candy parade of fucking joy, right?

In fact, there'd probably be somebody who's not only having the poker, lemon juice and nail pulling, but is also being burnt alive while watching their entire family get chopped up and fed to wild animals, so even people who are undergoing the aforementioned torture should be whistling a little jolly fucking tune and thinking about how lucky they are to not be undergoing the additional torments.

Some rather convincing sounding fools had put across compelling arguments that depression is absolute not relative. It seemed logical when it was explained that somebody who is suicidal either follows through with it, in which case they're dead, or else they hit some limit where they cannot be any more depressed without actually dying. It also did not seem unreasonable that somebody could be depressed for a number of reasons, even including those not directly related to hot pokers and other tortures.

However, as soon as the cure was revealed to the public, it turned out that people had just been making up this depression stuff all along.

The UK's most popular suicide spot - Beachy Head - quickly erected a large sign saying "other people have got it so much worse than you" and immediately all self-murder at the famous cliffs dropped to zero.

The popular daytime television program Jeremy Kyle was watched by millions of people who were previously unable to work due to depression. The program aired a special 30-second segment, where pictures of starving African children were shown to viewers, with subtitles that read "just be glad your situation isn't as bad as this". A modern miracle was declared, when people cast aside their antidepressants and returned to their minimum wage zero hours contracts with a beaming smile from ear to ear and a spring in their step.

There are factories where most people in the UK work. At the factories, pigs' anuses, insects and slugs are boiled for 72 hours to make children's sweets. People work 23.8 hour shifts stirring giant vats of bubbling filth that has an unspeakably foul smell that no amount of soap can remove. The stench and the heat is almost overpowering, but break times are forbidden, and any hesitation in stirring the revolting brew for even a second is punished by being locked in stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables.

People used to say that the job was pretty rubbish, but now that they realise that there's a factory in India where the workers have a 23.9 hour shift, and they're pelted with frozen vegetables, all the workers are now overjoyed to have such a wonderful job and cannot shower their employers with enough praise.

Praise be to the bringers of joy to the world, who so kindly pointed out the motherfucking obvious: there's always some poor cunt whose life is worse than yours.

Tags: #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about what people do when they think nobody is watching...

Integrity. What does it mean to have integrity? Let's explore a hypothetical example.

The year is 2011. I'm running a profitable tech startup called Hubflow, and we have just been through a 13-week TechStars network technology accelerator program in Cambridge, run by Jon Bradford and Jess Williamson. We have a bunch of investors who are ready to help us raise a seed round. Mike Butcher has written about us in TechCrunch. We are kicking arse.

The sticking point that is stressing me out is that my partner won't support me. My company needs to relocate to London, Cambridge or somewhere on the M4 corridor so that I can hire the talent I need and get to my customers and investors whenever I need to see them. My partner is a teacher. She can literally work anywhere in the country.

***

I financially supported my partner through her retraining to be a teacher. She had a huge income drop, when she left the investment bank where we both worked, but I made sure that she still enjoyed the 5-star luxury lifestyle that she had gotten used to with me.

Even when I quit my salaried job so that I could build my startup, I had substantial savings and profits, to allow us to maintain the same standard of living. I had bankrolled her when she wanted to make a career change, and she'd never had to tighten her belt or compromise.

This was now my turn to shine. I had done it. I had built a profitable company with a good valuation that was ready for investment to take it to the next stage. It was now time to leave the sleepy little seaside town where we lived and move things closer to the action.

My co-founder had left his pregnant partner behind in his home town, to come and live with me in Cambridge for several months, while we built our business together and got ourselves ready for investment. He had made sacrifices and compromises with his growing family. Now it was the turn of my partner to step up and make a small compromise herself.

However, she wouldn't budge an inch.

I could have left her. And perhaps - in hindsight - that's what I should have done. She had never been very kind or supportive. In fact, she was pretty mean spirited and selfish. I don't know why I stayed loyal to her. I'd had opportunities to fool around while I was working away from home, in Boulder, Colorado, in London or in Cambridge, but I stayed faithful. I stayed faithful because I have integrity.

I then got very depressed. She had refused any kind of compromise. I had to leave her, or my business was screwed. There was no way that me and my co-founder could make it work over such a geographical hurdle. We needed to be together, on the ground, raising money and winning more customers. And we were so close. It was heartbreaking.

By the time Christmas rolled around that year, I had gotten so depressed and suicidal that I was hospitalised. My unsupportive mean ex had instructed my parents to come and take me away, and had involved my doctor, all against my wishes. This was an incredible betrayal. Now she wanted me removed from my own home, that I had bought and paid for. This was a horrible act of selfishness.

Before I was literally dragged away by my Dad, I decided to install a keystroke logger on my personal laptop, which was running my personal account & password. This was clearly an act of paranoia, due to the fact that I was extremely mentally unwell, having recently been released from a mental hospital. Clearly I was out of my mind.

I was driven away from my home, my business, my friends, my possessions, to a village where I had never lived since the age of 4, where I have no friends. Miles away from any cities where I had business contacts, investors, customers. I had just been totally fucked over. This was not in my best interests. I didn't even have a doctor or a psychiatrist nearby.

So then, was my partner interested in my wellbeing? Did she call to see how I was? Was she concerned about me getting better?

I thought it rather strange that she wasn't at all involved in trying to 'help' me, now that I was out of the way. In fact, it was rather strange that all the 'help' was simply to tell people to remove me from my own home. Must have been more paranoia though, right? I was mentally ill, remember?

I levelled my accusations about being dumped like this, and dragged away from everything I held dear. My partner and parents conspired to keep me trapped in this shitty village in the middle of nowhere. They even involved the police "for my welfare".

Anyway, after about a week of this shit, I decided to see if anybody had been using my laptop with my username and password. Strangely enough, and totally co-incidentally, they had been.

On examination of the logs, it looked like somebody had used my laptop and username to set themselves up an online dating profile and start messaging men. How strange. How curious.

Surely this could not have been my partner, for if she was using a computer at all, I'm sure it would have been to research the best possible treatment available for me, or to better understand what had happened to me, so that she could be as loving and supportive as possible, no?

My partner continued to treat me like utter shit and told me that any suggestion I made that she was not acting in my best interests, was purely in my imagination and fuelled by mental illness, paranoia.

Finally, I showed my hand, and she back-pedalled rapidly, begging my forgiveness and swearing that it was all a misguided mistake. She suddenly became nice as pie and started treating me with a tiny fraction of the respect and decency that I deserved.

I then had a brief taste of how I should have been treated all along, and it was nice. My stupid mistake was to then marry the evil *****. A leopard never changes its spots.

Be careful if you get mentally ill with a vindictive, selfish, mean-spirited little **** of a partner, because they might just try to chuck you out of your own house and replace you.

Tags: #divorce #mentalillness #startups #career #suicide #computing

This is a story about the debt spiral...

When the burden of debt in society is too great, and lenders are unwilling to forgive - to take a debt haircut or even write off debts - then there will be popular uprisings.

It's not that people don't want to repay their debts. In fact, most people accept that debt is a necessary evil in order to get the things they need when they need them, rather than towards the end of their life, in senile old age and infirmity.

And so, we become burdened with a mortgage, in order to give our family a stable roof over their heads. We become burdened with a car on hire purchase, so that we have a reliable and safe modern vehicle to be able to take the kids to school, and to get us to work without breaking down. We put our holidays and special occasions on credit cards, and pay back the debt when we get back, or after the festivities are over.

Most people diligently repay their debts.

In free-market economics, prices are able to fluctuate to find the point where affordability meets maximum profit. Do you think the cost price to the producer or supplier of the goods and services that you purchase, bears any relation to the retail price that you pay? Of course not. That's why a designer brand T-shirt costs at least 10 times as much as an unbranded garment, even though they come from the same sweatshop in the developing world.

In our consumer society, you are 'free' to select the goods and services that you want. However, in order to fit in with your buddies who are in a similar socioeconomic group to you, you will select the brands that they do. If you're rich, you'll do your supermarket shopping at Waitrose. If you're poor, you'll do your shopping at Asda/Walmart. However, the food you buy will have similar calorific content.

The brands become better and better at pricing their products so that you are just about able to buy everything you need, but won't have much spare cash left over. The brands know the income bracket that they're targeting, so they know the level where their consumers will become price insensitive. I literally don't care whether my coffee costs £2 or £4. If my coffee cost £5, then I'd think "blimey! that was expensive, I'm not going to go there again" but the £2 coffee shop could literally increase their prices 100% and I wouldn't even notice.

Once everybody has maxed out their budget, on the mortgage, the car finance, the credit cards, the overdraft, the store cards and some personal loans, where do you really go from there?

We demand that our corporations make increasing profits, but yet in order to do so they must hold down wage inflation and the cost of raw materials. We demand that our economy grows, but in order to do so, people must use increasing amounts of their limited pot of disposable income to drive consumption. What happens when everybody is just maxed out?

We're living in the age of low growth, high borrowing and low wage inflation. In order to sustain corporate profits, the cost of goods & services continues to increase. In order to prop up the capital growth of the pension funds, asset prices - such as house prices - have continued to be overvalued. However, the only way that the general population have been able to maintain their standard of living is through borrowing.

Ordinary people have not been profligate and stupid. People were promised pay rises and promotions, and instead they've been given job insecurity and wage cuts in real terms. If your wage increases just a few percent, but the cost of your housing, bills, food and transportation all increase in double-digit terms, then you're actually getting poorer.

If the headline rate of inflation - which is pretty much just concerned with wages - is low, then the value of your loans & mortgages is not getting inflated away. The baby boomers might complain about interest rates reaching over 15% in the late 1970s, but they forget that their wages were also increasing too. By the time the 1980s came around, people's mortgages were a tiny fraction of what they were earning.

What we see today is people's cost of living skyrocketing, but their wages are the same, which means they're earning less and less in real terms. If your wages stay the same, and your cost of living is increasing, that means you have less and less money to service your debts. So, you tighten your belt and cut back on your consumer spending, which in turn hurts an economy that is so dependent on spend, spend, spend!

What we see today is far worse than the Japanese stagflation that meant that the price of goods and services was getting cheaper, which encouraged people to become thrifty because they could buy things more cheaply if they waited. Instead, what we are seeing is people who have been promised growth, completely screwed over by a system that robs them of their wealth with no opportunity to do anything about it.

In a zero growth world, debts need to be forgiven or else ordinary people will become so unhappy that they will overthrow their idle creditors.

Tags: #banking #capitalism #politics

This is a story about self healing...

Does brain damage mean game over? Is it right to write off somebody who has suffered brain lesions, neurotoxicity, a stroke etc. etc.?

At one time, my left eyelid had started to droop and I had a pretty bad facial tic. My body jerked and shook with pseudo-Parkinsonian symptoms. My speech was slow and slurred. No wonder I was treated as if I was as good as dead, right?

But you know what? With good diet & sleep, you can quickly recover your heath, depending on the severity of your situation.

Bizarrely, I was able to get a job and get through an eventful and highly stressful re-entry into the working world, while my poor brain was busily trying to repair itself. How is that even possible?

I've done the same job for the best part of 20 years. In fact, my friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were 12 years old, and I'd been messing around with computers since my first forays onto my friend Joe's Dad's Apple Mac, in 1985.

With repetition, your brain lays down pathways that become more permanent with age. Neural pruning - the loss of less used connections between brain cells - makes your brain into something that has become well adapted for the common tasks you perform. Some people call this "muscle memory" but of course it's your brain, not your muscles, that has the memories. Practice makes permanent, as they say. Just like riding a bike.

So, I relied on instincts and techniques, knowledge and experience that has been unchanging for my whole working life. I still use the same job search technique, the same interview technique, and the job of developing software is unchanged, despite the constant creation of new acronyms and jargon for things that do exactly the same job in exactly the same way.

Just like riding a bike, I was able to navigate the corporate landscape and just about get away with a day job that involved my damaged brain pulling the levers to operate the battered mince-puppet that was my body, in a vaguely convincing way, to cover up the fact that I was basically at death's door.

With physiotherapy for the body, your recovery can be improved, and I'm sure that brain training exercises would be useful for those with brain injuries, but the stimulation of trying to get myself off the streets and escape bankruptcy and destitution was challenging and stimulating enough.

Fundamentally, time is the great healer. The brain is a homeostatic organ that will try to restore itself to a stable base state, once external forces are no longer pulling it hither and thither. I was able to have nearly 6 months abstinent from stimulants and over 3 months abstinent from alcohol, in order to give my brain a fighting chance of finding equilibrium again.

But, just as important as cessation of putting powerful narcotics into my body, was stopping drinking tea & coffee, as well as other caffeinated beverages. Even though my brain screamed out for stimulants, because it was going through withdrawal, they are terrible things when your brain needs to adapt and heal.

Caffeine is very bad for your neuroplasticity. That is to say, the ability of the remaining undamaged neurons in your brain to try to compensate for whatever trauma it has suffered, and repair itself. Caffeine impairs your ability to recover.

If you have some boring repetitive task to perform again & again, then caffeine is your drug. Once you've mastered the simple steps that most jobs require, the boredom becomes unbearable. Caffeine solves this problem, and allows us to maintain concentration on the most mind-numbing dumbarsery that ever disgraced the working world.

Most of the world is just doing stupid shit, time & again, because they're in a trance-like state performing repetitive actions and making the same old mistakes over & over, because they've medicated themselves up to the eyeballs with the powerful stimulant called caffeine.

By stopping my caffeine intake, I was able to recover from the symptoms of fairly harrowing neurological damage, spot patterns in my behaviour and even re-learn new healthy behaviour. I genuinely believe that this would not have been possible, with caffeine in my life.

I did supplement my diet heavily with amino acid building blocks:

• 5-HTP to help my serotonergic system
• L-Tyrosine to help my dopaminergic system
• Phenylalanine to help my adrenal / epinephrine system

I ate vast quantities of biltong (dried beef) and other protein supplements, to give my body everything it could possibly need to repair itself, and replenish its stores.

In theory, I should have been left in a permanently psychotic state, with delusions, paranoia, inability to emotionally regulate, facial tics, poor concentration, poor memory, nerve damage on one side of my face etc. etc.

However, I put out the fire before it consumed me. When somebody is sick, you don't write them off and watch them wither and die. That's immoral!

I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary, and one hospital patient they followed was declared brain dead after he asphyxiated from a heroin overdose. The doctors were absolutely certain there was no hope, and that the life support systems should be switched off. I agreed, and I thought it was madness that the family were holding out any hope at all. After 37 days, the young man in a coma woke up. His family saved him from a premature and unnecessary death, by refusing to cut off his life support.

My life support has come in the form of kind strangers, policemen, nurses, doctors and indeed unwitting work colleagues, who have been willing to overlook the immediate situation and imagine that things can and will get better, given time and opportunity.

I'm physically, neurologically, a completely different beast to who and what I was a little over a year ago, when I was totally fucked.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #recovery #mentalhealth #bipolar #career

This is a story about a feeling at the pit of my stomach...

How often do we think "I want to help, but I've got so many of my own worries"? How often are we held back by the bystander effect... assuming that somebody else is going to step in first, so that we don't have to?

You'd hope that nobody would have to be in hospital alone, uncared for, while they're in pain and discomfort. You would think that even somebody who has been infected with Ebola, has loved ones who have come to wave through the protective plastic bubble.

Leaving aside my own obnoxious family, doesn't it set alarm bells ringing for you, the fact that we have a society that can so easily turn its back on undesirable members?

Whether it's the benefits cheat, disability scrounger, mental health basket case, junkie, alkie, hobo... whatever. There are plenty of people who have been demonised by the media. We have even descended to the depths of attacking our economy-boosting immigrant population, with terrorism as the brush with which we tar an entire Muslim community, for example.

This whole "look after number one" isolationism, along with "take our country back" and "look after our own" misguided silliness, is rather telling of a wider trend: everybody is just being selfish as fuck.

You might think it's in your family's best interests to hide behind your locked front door, and assume that the world is filled with rapists, paedophiles and murderers, but actually the whole of civilisation is coming to an end, because of the fear and mistrust, and reluctance to help one another.

That's a big statement, isn't it? "Civilisation is coming to an end".

Well, let's examine that a little more carefully. What even is civilisation? Surely, civilisation is not leaving anybody to die of starvation or exposure to the elements? Surely, civilisation is caring and sharing with one another? Surely, civilisation is working together, not acting like a bunch of individual animals, fighting with each other?

So, when I think about going back to work tomorrow after an excellent weekend of looking after number one, I can't help but have a heavy heart, thinking that my job is simply to make the rich richer. I might have a big paycheque but I certainly don't think that means I'm delivering good value to humanity. On the contrary: I know that I'm propping up a very broken system, and I hate it.

Yes, it makes sense for me to take the money, and to stuff my mattress full of filthy ill-gotten lucre, but it's painful. It actually makes me unwell, to know that I'm part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Once you get some skin in the game I guess it becomes a little bit easier to justify the unjustifiable. Little Hugo needs his ballet shoes, after all, so you'd better go off to work for the capitalists who are intent on destroying the world. How could you possibly help the homeless, when you need that money to get bright special little Alice into that slightly better primary school? Perfectly understandable.

Maybe our children will catch poverty. Maybe children will catch mental illness. Let's not take any refugees, and let's allow people to starve and go homeless, because surely we're living in a jungle where only the fittest will survive. Isn't that what life's about? Have as many children as possible and fuck everybody else?

Doesn't it seem a little primitive to you, this way of acting that is tribal, nationalistic, isolated, don't trust your neighbour, fuck the refugees, fuck the poor, fuck the sick, fuck everybody who isn't me?

I know that I could easily do a "fun run" or a sponsored "do something enjoyable that I was going to do anyway" in order to salve my conscience. Maybe I can get a partial lobotomy, so that I can forget that charity has completely failed to do anything about poverty and inequality, and it never will.

It's people's attitudes that suck. It's this whole "it must be somebody else's problem. It's certainly not my problem" thought pattern that sucks.

The point is: it's everybody's problem.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #depression

This is a story about my family...

What better example can I give you of the way I've been treated by my family, than the one from last night. At 2:15am - the wee hours of Monday morning - when I have to get up before 7am, to catch the train to work, I receive a phonecall from my drunk mother:

"You look fucking shit"

Yeah, thanks for the continued abuse. Because that's what it is. There's no beating about the bush here. When drunk drug addicts beat up on their kids, physically or verbally, that's child abuse. Your offspring are your children, and as a parent, rule #1 is don't fucking abuse your kids, OK?

My sister didn't arrive in this world until I was 10 years old, and my Dad was in too much of a drugged up haze to realise that I wasn't like his pet dog. You don't obedience train a child. A child is not a subservient pack animal, that can be taught to roll over, play dead, beg. You haven't got a bad kid, if you find that your human child can't be trained to perform tricks. You've got idiot parents who think they're training a fucking animal, not raising an infant.

Was I badly behaved? Was I fuck. Ask my teachers. Ask my work colleagues. I'm polite and well mannered. I'm courteous and considerate. That's why I got good exam grades and always had top jobs. That's why I was successful enough to buy my own home, pay for a lavish wedding & honeymoon, enjoy a playboy lifestyle with all the luxury trimmings, while my own misbehaving parents have amounted to nothing: not even able to support their children, and with inadequate pension provisions for themselves. In short: they fucked up.

What could be worse, than having failed your children?

If you offer your children worse opportunities than you yourself enjoyed, you have failed. If you expect your children to miss out on school trips and accept a worse education than you yourself enjoyed, you have failed. If you have prioritised your own alcohol and drug abuse, above your child's welfare, you have failed. If you expect your children to go without, because you can't be bothered to get a proper job and work hard to give your children the life that you and your peers enjoyed, you are a selfish failure. If you take out your frustrations on your children - abusing them - then you have failed.

This is what I look like, right now. I just went out onto my balcony and took a photograph of myself, so you know exactly what I look like, right now. This hasn't been Photoshopped, airbrushed or anything. This is me. Warts 'n' all.

Do I "look fucking shit"? Do I deserve to be phoned up and drunkenly abused, in the middle of the night? What did I ever do to you, other than interrupt your fucking drug binge?

It's fucking hard going, being abused throughout your childhood. You start to doubt your self-worth. You start to feel like you deserve the bullying and abuse. You start to comply with the victim-blaming. You start to think it's OK to be used as a convenient scapegoat for your family's problems and shortcomings.

But you know what? I came to London, and I escaped from the horrible household where I was always to fucking blame for something. I was always the bad kid. I was always in the wrong. Nothing was ever good enough.

And you know what else? I forgave myself for all the shit my parents never said sorry for. They never said sorry for treating me like shit, for being abused in their drunken, drugged up rages that they don't even fucking remember. They never said sorry, and they never will, because they're a lost fucking cause.

I forgave myself, and now I don't think that I "look fucking shit". I'm not shit. I'm not a bad kid. I'm not badly behaved and I'm not to blame for all the things that have been pinned on me.

I'm just me, and I try hard, and I work hard, and I take chances on people, and I try to improve the lives of others, rather than just pointing the finger of blame and abusing those around me. I certainly don't phone people up in the middle of the night and tell them that they "look fucking shit".

You want to know what looks fucking shit?

Yeah, that's right. The injury you did to me looks fucking shit. I have to look at this scar every day, and it looks fucking shit. Maybe this is what you're referring to? You're right. It does look fucking shit. It's fucking shit that parents would injure their child like this. It's fucking shit.

You did this injury to me, because you're abusive parents, rather than people who treat their children with the respect that they deserve. Rather than treat another human being with the respect that they deserve. That's fucking shit.

So, like a cancer, I have cut my parents out of my life. I have blocked their phone numbers. I have set their emails to go directly to the trash can. I have unfriended them on social media. It's goodbye and good riddance.

I've tried for long enough to be the peacemaker and leave the door open, but if this "you look fucking shit" abuse is the result, then it's over.

It may sound harsh, but I think it's more than fair.

Tags: #parents #childhood #injury

This is a story about an ambitious project...

How would you go about uploading yourself to the cloud? Have you thought about death, and what happens to your personality, your mind, once the apparatus of your body ceases to be a viable vessel for its preservation? Do you want to live forever?

I unfortunately lost my original Google Mail account - grantnick@gmail.com - which I had since 2004. I've now accrued 6.6 gigabytes of email across my new accounts - nick@manicgrant.com and h@ckte.ch - which are both managed by Google and therefore fully indexed for search.

Did you know that you can download all your data from Facebook? I've been a member of Facebook for the best part of 10 years. Facebook probably knows me better than any other piece of technology. It knows where I've been, and who I was there with. It knows who I talk to, and how regularly. It knows what I've chosen to share, as status updates, which are often quite personal and private.

If you dig around in the old parts of the Internet, you can even find me in the Usenet newsgroups, writing under my own name, back in the 1990s. The old content of newsgroups has been preserved for posterity by Google.

So much of my digital identity has been lost, as I moved off the dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) onto my first email addresses with CompuServe, America On-Line and Hotmail. I then made a bad habit of using work email addresses for personal mail. That means that when I left those companies, I left behind all my mail archives. All that content is now in the virtual trash can.

Losing my Google Mail account felt catastrophic at the time. I even leveraged my contacts and managed to get David Singleton - Engineering Director at Google - to try to resurrect my account. However, I had been caught hacking, so I wasn't shown any favours. My pleas that it was "white hat" were ignored, when I was in clear violation of the Terms of Service.

I used to write on a forum for the British Kite Surfing Association (BKSA). That forum was then decommissioned, and all those old posts were lost forever. I then moved to the kiteboarder.co.uk forum, and you can still find my old content on there. I used to be one of the top contributors.

But, would you even be able to reconstruct my personality, from all that email, and those social media contributions?

What's the difference between a film adaptation and the book it's based on? In the film, it's very hard to include much of the internal monologues of characters. Using a voiceover, a narrator, sometimes works, but often we lose the very thing that makes a book so wonderful - to know how the characters think & feel.

When I'm writing something for somebody else to read, more often than not, I'm instructing somebody to act, or passing on information. It's rare that I'm opening up and giving an insight to the inner-workings of my mind. In fact, with most interactions, there is a necessary formality. I'm sure my colleagues wouldn't appreciate it if I polluted our emails with random thoughts and updates on my state of mind.

I've always had a candid, open, style of writing and speaking. I leave little to the imagination about the way I'm thinking and feeling. However, it's still a guess though, because there is actually very little opportunity in life to really open up and let the true essence of yourself flood out.

We are always held back by that voice in our head that says: "but what will people think?". We worry how we are going to be viewed, when we write, when we speak. We are constantly self-censoring and projecting things in a certain way, saying certain things, to try to maintain an image that we deem necessary for our relationships.

"I can't tell my boss that I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because they will think I'm unreliable" we might say to ourselves. Or we might say "I can't let this attractive person know that I have any faults, or maybe they won't fall in love with me". We might say "I can't let my family know I'm on the brink of suicide, because that will stress them out".

The version of yourself in all those emails, videos, social media posts... it's not a very true version of yourself. You've been constrained by social protocols. "How are you?" is always followed by "I'm fine thanks". Nobody expects you to reply "I'm on the verge of killing myself. My life is misery". Nobody will thank you for giving an honest answer.

So what happens is we live a lie, and there is no true version of yourself in existence, except for the one inside your head that you never let anybody see.

If we were to reconstruct you from everything you ever wrote, everything you ever said, we'd get a corrupt version of you. The version of you that would be digitally recreated would say and do all the right things, but the thoughts inside that virtual brain wouldn't be right. All those things that you wanted to say, but didn't, simply wouldn't exist.

I have to write 1,318 words in this post, and then I've hit 300,000 words. It was easy. A novel is considered to be a text that is over 40,000 words. I've written the equivalent of 7 novels, by that measure. It's taken just 10 months.

Would you find it easy, to dump the contents of your brain out, in all its gory detail? No, I'm sure you wouldn't. Even when you're writing a diary, you're probably thinking "what if somebody read this?". You even worry about what you think of you. You try to impress yourself. You try to hide your innermost feelings, even from yourself.

The Internet is full of abandoned blogs. You can see a flurry of activity that normally spans a few months, and then peters out. You can see the sporadic posts, when a dead blog is resurrected, months or even years later. However, what's rare is the person who writes consistently, reliably, regularly.

There are piles and piles of blogospam out there, but can you really reconstruct a personality from any of them? There are people who blog about knitting, people who blog about their pets, people who blog about stargazing, people who blog about sports. Can I infer who you are, or who you were from any of this vast quantity of data? Do I really get a sense of the person, from your online persona?

Google has analysed my 300,000 words of content, and tried to figure out what I'm writing about. Google has tried to figure out what's significant in this body of work.

Somewhere in Google's servers, everything I've written has been indexed for search. In a way, I'm already alive in the cloud. People from all corners of the Earth can find me, when searching for topics that Google knows are significant. Those seekers can know how I feel, what I think. They can delve into a very private world that you ordinarily would never get to glimpse.

Do you want to live forever? Perhaps you already do. The recorded history of humanity survives death, even in the stories we tell about our dead friends and relatives, and influential members of a community. Somebody somewhere has seen your digital content, even if it's just the electronic eye of a machine. Who knows where your data is going to end up?

Those who educate, inform and entertain have a reach that goes beyond their family and friends. Those who put themselves out into the public domain have a reach beyond living memory.

My mother looks after the archives of those few people who we deem to be culturally important enough to preserve, for the Bodleian Library in Oxford - one of the oldest libraries in Europe. While the library has a digitisation project, aren't we looking at things the wrong way?

107 billion people have been alive, ever. That means you're part of about 7% of the human creative output that could ever be recorded. Writing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the ability to output to a digital medium with no lengthy conversion process and no loss of fidelity, is something that has only come about in the lifetime of those who are alive today.

When I write, it's not as a medieval monk, in some priceless hand-scribed tome that will be squirrelled away in some private library. Instead, I write as a citizen of the planet. My writing is captured in the public repository of the Internet, and is accessible to almost every living soul.

And, what advantage, the fact that what I have created has already been digitised? Well... my content is already in a format that's friendly for machine learning.

Speech recognition and optical character recognition can understand the spoken and printed word, but it's slow. The cloud has already greedily swallowed my 300,000 words, and processed them in order to serve them up to any consumer who cares to use them.

Is it arrogant and naïve to consider whether there is any merit in this hefty lump of text? Well, we are not going to know how Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are going to advance in the coming decades. Moore's Law predicts the exponential growth of computing horsepower that can be bought for a fixed cost. However, the game changer is when computers are no longer programmed, but are instead taught how to do things.

How would I go about teaching a computer to be like me, to think like me, to speak like me? Well, it would be like teaching a child. I'd sit down and talk to the computer. We would have a conversation.

However, how long would it take to speak to a computer, before you had provided adequate input? How long would it take the computer to process the sound into a stream of text? How long would it then take the computer to process the stream of text into a form that it can understand? How long would it take the computer to then crunch the numbers and attempt to say its first words?

If I was going about this project, I'd want to provide a body of text in a consistent format. We all speak with different voices. We all have our own unique style. Language is a somewhat crude way of expressing yourself. Human communication is full of flaws, when it comes to transmitting the contents of our brains from one being to another.

I could feed a computer with digitised books. I could feed a computer with Wikipedia. I could just let a computer loose on the open Internet. However, would it be able to cope, without context? How is the poor computer going to cope with all those different voices, different languages, different agendas, different writing styles? How is a computer going to get from the complete works of William Shakespeare, to understanding the inner-workings of the Bard's mind?

I'm sure we're already within touching distance of having a computer system write a convincing love letter. We write great volumes of soppy crap to the objects of our affection. However, while the art of seduction and the emotional patterns of those who are engaged in the courtship ritual are not hard for our mechanised chums to understand, do we really know much about a person from their attempts to get their leg over?

For me, there's so much more depth to the human mind, than what we can see through forced interactions in the context of getting along with one another.

There's so much magic in the secret diary. From Anne Frank to Adrian Mole, and agony aunt columns, we voraciously devour anything that's private and intimate. Words are normally a crude means of making any kind of emotional contact with the being that hides behind those glassy eyes.

This essay is not an instruction manual on how a machine may pass the Turing Test, but when you build a computer system, you also have to think about how you're going to prime it. What is your input data? Garbage in, garbage out.

In a way, we have already succeeded. If I died tomorrow, and you wanted to know more about who I was, how I thought, what made me tick, you could do a lot worse than perusing the pages of this particular publication. If you can't get a sense of who I am from these 300,000 words, is there really any hope that Artificial Intelligence will ever be human-like. If we can't understand ourselves, what hope do machines have of understanding us?

Now, the question is: did I write this, or did I get a computer system to do it for me?

The brilliant thing about AI, is there's no wiring diagram, no schematics. Just like a brain.

Tags: #computing #writing #immortality

This is a story about deja vu...

What the fuck am I still doing here? This is the endgame, surely ?

Around the year 2000, I moved to the Angel Islington, and lived right next door to where Boris Johnson now lives on Colebrooke Row, just by Upper Street. I revere my time there as the best time of my life. I had a pretty girlfriend, lived with two strippers in an achingly trendy area of London, had a red sports car, went kitesurfing every weekend and generally lived the high life. What the actual fuck went wrong?

It had always been the plan to live and work in London, and I'd pretty much lived and worked in the Big Smoke since the late 1990s. I had fallen in love with glamorous West London on cultural museum trips with my mother, to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, like all well mannered little boys who are supposedly destined for great things, in the eyes of their pushy parents.

What was attractive about London, in my mind, was the tube. The tube epitomised freedom for me. I just wanted to ride the metropolitan transportation system all over town, on my own.

There's something about an A to Z map of London that's wonderful. The colour of it, with all the intricate streets. The index is an impenetrable list of roads and lanes. There are pages and pages of brightly illustrated street maps, and it seems like you could never truly know every nook and cranny of London. The very complexity of London is its entire draw, its appeal.

Having discovered drugs in my late teens - namely Ecstasy - London was clearly the place to rave. Under the grubby railway arches, and in grim venues in dingy suburbs. There was always some unlikely place that was attracting the best DJs, despite the fact that everywhere looks largely the same when it's dark and you're off your head on pills.

Of course I went to the superclubs. The Ministry of Sound was the first club I ever went to, as a friend was able to get me on the guest-list. Seeing DJs Sasha and Pete Tong play in The Box was a precious moment, and I hadn't even discovered the joys of MDMA at that point. I just liked the music, the atmosphere.

I saw DJ Paul Oakenfold play a set where he was paid a record-breaking fee, at an ill-fated club on Leicester Square, that had none of the character or charm of the grimy places that were in otherwise unusable parts of London, due to the noise pollution of nearby rail or tube trains.

The goods yard, out the back of King's Cross was one particular mecca for the clubbers of the 90s. Bagley's Studios and The Cross were legendary, and The Scala wasn't far away.

I can remember the opening of clubs like Fabric, as if they were the new kids on the block. I still think of the East London clubs as the newer challengers to the well-established set of clubs in North London, the railway arches of Vauxhall, and Brixton.

I remember when the Ministry of Sound chucked out all the drug dealers, and it became a tourist attraction, bereft of any heart & soul.

Here's the tablet that launched more brilliant nights than I care to remember. Reminiscing about drug taking experiences is probably not healthy or useful, but there we go. There's no denying the past. This was a formative period, and perhaps defined my entire adult existence.

It's a strange Catch 22. I could never live anywhere outside London. I just can't survive, thrive. However, London is brutal. The crowds are relentless. The stimulation of your senses is overwhelming. There is nothing ordered, clean, predictable. It's not in the least bit relaxing.

But, there is the very essence of the city: in the place where you can never quite be off-guard, and fully relaxed, how would you ever re-adjust to a slower pace of life? How can you sleep at night without the sirens, horns and dull rumble of traffic and aeroplanes overhead? How could you feel alive, without humanity all around you, at all times?

When you go clubbing, you are crammed into an overcrowded venue, pressed together with other sweaty bodies. There is no personal space. You literally have to barge people out of the way to get to the toilets or to the bar. You are bumping into people all the time, for hours and hours of dancing. Nobody loses their cool. In fact quite the opposite. You flash smiles to hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers. You hug. You share your energy with strangers and together you build a crescendo of frenzied dancing.

I've arrived at this weekend, feeling exhausted and depressed, and like I just want to sleep for the whole time.

I travel on the tube every day, and there is all the invasion of personal space but none of the celebration of the brilliant experience that is dance, trance and magic plants. People are silent, unsmiling. It must be hard to understand why anybody would subject themselves to the daily onslaught that you experience in London's brutal rat race.

I forgot...

I used to live for the weekends. I could put up with any amount of boredom, because there was always going to be another weekend of smiles, of pure ecstasy. Yes, I was tired, my feet hurt and I wanted to cry around the middle of the week, but the cycle carried me along. There was anticipation that started to build on Thursday, and on the Friday I was happy because it was nearly the weekend.

This is how so many people live - living for the weekends - and it's all I've known all my adult life. I'm not built for consistency. I'm not built for Monday to Friday. I'm built for Saturday & Sunday.

My life is unliveable, miserable, depressing. Without my weekend fix of dancing & drugs, I'm absolutely fucked.

I flipped my addiction to clubbing over into an addiction to kitesurfing at weekends, in my mid twenties, but it was exactly the same kind of rhythm and routine. The pursuit of adrenalin neatly slotted into my life and replaced the pursuit of MDMA and pounding techno music.

My life is incomplete at the moment, and it's leading me to drink to numb the pain, boredom, lack of purpose, lack of direction, loneliness.

I'm not sure whether I'm going to get those pieces of the puzzle back in place in time. I'm writing now - at 3am - because my soul is screaming out for something that it's been deprived of for so long. I'm crying now as I write this. I'm sobbing my eyes out, as the waves of emotion sweep over me, as I realise how unfulfilled and empty my life has been.

I need kites and I need a vehicle to get to the coast. These are simple practical considerations, but you have no idea how dysfunctional my life has been. It seems like I'm close, as money is now flooding in from my latest contract, but everything is so finely balanced, so fragile.

It's never too late to start over, but the more broken things become, the harder the journey back to the safe road. I don't even give a shit about trite platitudes, or other people's attempts to tell me that they've been through some rough times too. I know how close I've come to prematurely reaching the end of my rope, and if that sounds melodramatic, you can go fuck yourself.

What I know about hardship, fear, challenges and hard work, is that it all looks very different when you're looking back. "That wasn't as hard as I thought it would be" is something we often think. But, the truth is, it was fucking hard... it's just that once you've been through it you're flooded with the sense of relief. When you've pulled through, you're full of joy that you made it, and that colours your memories, so you don't remember just how fucked you were, and how awful things were.

I've got this problem, where I'm thinking "I've already overcome obstacles like this before". Getting an IT contract, finding a place to live, making friends, finding a passion, overcoming boredom and loneliness... these are problems I've already solved once in my life. It was awful when I was in my late teens and early twenties. I had forgotten. It's just as shit now I'm in my mid 30s, even though I have all the advantages of knowing how to do it all over again, and knowing that I can do it.

There's a temptation to re-live my youth. I wanted to go out dancing and take drugs, tonight.

There's no reason why it wouldn't work. Every time I've tried to re-apply the well proven formula to my life, it's worked just the same as it did nearly 20 years ago.

However, I don't have to repeat the steps. I know that kitesurfing brought me more happiness than clubbing and taking drugs, so I can skip that step. It's hard though... because I know that I can walk out of my front door and go dancing pretty much any night of the week, for the modest cost of the entry fee and a few cans of Red Bull.

Hopefully, I will choose to do something at least a bit positive - like going dancing - rather than killing myself, but life is tough as fuck at the moment. You might think "he's been working for months and he earns a buttload of cash" but you've failed to see the reality: my life is desperate, unsustainable.

Life's not all about pleasing your boss and earning heaps of cash. It's a good start, but that's the easy part, in actual fact. I'm employing strategies that I learned when I was 19 years old, when I first started IT contracting. Nothing's changed there. But do I want to go back to how I felt when I was 19? I was so lonely, so depressed, and didn't know how to express my feelings and solve my distress.

Where do we run to in times of great stress and need? We run to places of known sanctuary. For some people that might be their family home. For others it might be drink or a drug. For me, it's London and clubbing, IT contracting and the gentrified life of the yuppie.

I left the misery of parents who I could never please and schools where I was relentlessly bullied and re-invented myself. Ecstasy helped me to love myself and feel connected to humanity, in a way that transcended simple hedonism. I had an identity, and it was all mine. I was secure and happy for the first time in my miserable life.

The detail that's almost irrelevant here is how I was let down by my ex-wife and parents, who were supposedly decent human beings, but turned out to be more selfish and untrustworthy than many strangers who I've had the good fortune to receive assistance from during my eventful return to London.

So, what have we got now? Well, it's a clean slate. It's a chance to start agin. I know the moves to make. I know the magic formula. Everything seems to still work, but the instructions still have to be followed. There are no short-cuts.

I find myself dusting off my CV, contacting agents, putting on my suit, and going out into the world of work again. It's just the same as it ever was. I earn about 25% more than I did when I was 20 years old, which is actually still plenty of money, even though it's 16 years later.

But I'm not 20 years old, and I'm not fumbling my way through life anymore. I know where I'm headed. I'm no longer guessing or making things up as I go along. There's a master plan, and everything is falling into place. But I still can't make the hands of the clock move any faster.

I learned some new tricks. Like benzodiazepines are a good way to wake up one day and wonder what the fuck happened to a large chunk of time. Like supercrack is a good way to kill yourself if you don't have the guts to actually run a blade across your major blood vessels.

However, I can cherry-pick. I can point at times in my life and say "THERE! I want that back!". And why can't I have it back? Why can't I recapture that lost youth? There's no reason that I've found so far.

It just takes time and it's fucking unbearable in the 'short' term. It's fucking unbearable because I've been here before, and I know how bad it was then, but it's twice as bad now, because I know just how hard it was to climb up the greasy pole once already, and I know that there's no rushing things, no short-cut.

Very few people, perhaps even nobody, can follow my thought process. Until I present a fait accompli nobody can see and understand where I was headed all along. You think this is fucking luck, that I am where I am? You think that through all the ups and downs, dead ends and disruption, there isn't still a single thread that guides all this? You think there isn't a goal? You think there isn't a fucking plan?

Yes, it's lucky that I haven't sustained life-altering injuries, brain damage. It's lucky that I've escaped prison and a criminal record. It's lucky that I've avoided bankruptcy. It's lucky that I'm no longer homeless, drug addicted or unemployed. But those things were never part of the plan, so is it luck?

There's no arrogance here, only frustration that people and events have gotten in my way. Only frustration that promises have been broken, and people haven't gotten with the program and supported me. Only frustration that those who have sought to thwart me or try to ride my coat tails have had to be cut out of my life, like a cancer. Only frustration that a whole heap of unnecessary shit has delayed me from reaching the original goal I've had all along.

I'd say "don't get in my way" but I don't operate like that. If you share the risks, you share the rewards. I don't think it's delusional to say that I add value wherever I go. I build, I improve, I inspire, I share, I teach, I take whatever resources I'm given and make them into something greater than the sum of their parts. If I'm not doing this, then I have truly lost touch with reality and I don't deserve to be alive.

I've mentioned this, but we used to say "Peace, Love, Unity, Respect" when we were raving. We were loved up, and we knew how to wear our hearts on our sleeves and be kind to one another.

London and its inhabitants have done more to keep me alive and make me happy than my parents and 99% of the people who I went to school with, so why wouldn't I consider myself reborn into this great sprawling metropolis? I couldn't live anywhere else. I could never leave.

That's what the fuck I'm doing in London, and I'm so fucking close to making a breakthrough.

Tags: #london #career #divorce #parents #childhood #drugs #addiction #suicide #depression

This is a story about getting rich quick...

Don't get high on your own supply, they say. It's good advice, because weed seems to dull the wits of my friends, and to curb their enthusiasm for anything more than the getting of more weed, and the consumption of shit food and crap TV.

When I meet young people who feel like they're part of a counter-culture revolution, because they smoke a bit of marijuana, I think how easily they have been duped. How foolish you are, to think that you're fighting the establishment, through your choice of intoxicant.

Governments and the police are mightily pleased to have a stoned population, who are too doped up to be bothered to get off their arses and do anything about social issues, or involve themselves in politics. Chuckling at low-brow humour that is designed to appeal to the stoner brain, is never going to change the world.

The energy and passion of youth has been quashed by the dreaded weed. You're not cool or "fighting the power" by smoking dope. You're actually playing into the hands of the establishment. The cannabis leaf - that ubiquitous emblem - sells tons of merchandise. Camden Market is London's second most popular tourist attraction, and it's mostly because of drug culture.

But what hopes have young people got? They're never going to be able to afford a house, pay for a wedding and be able to support a family, without topping up their income somehow. For those kids with wealthy parents, they might be able to go with their begging bowl to Mum & Dad, but it's hardly the independent self-sufficient life that we should all be entitled to live, is it?

You bust your balls all through school, get some grades, and now what? You can get a massive student loan that will only cover your tuition fees, and you still have to figure out how to pay for accommodation, food & books for your 3 years of undergraduate studies.

Maybe you can save up money before you go to University, but under-18s will be paid £3.87 per hour. Do you think a 17 year old is less capable of stacking a supermarket's shelves than a 64 year old? Why on earth should a young person be paid just 54% of what an old person earns, for doing the same job?

While you're at University, you'll be paid slightly more for your bar work, waitressing or whatever part-time job you can get. You'll get a whopping £5.30. That's still 26% less than somebody with arthritic joints and early-onset dementia. Who would you want working behind a bar? The young attractive, energetic student, or the miserable old codger who shuffles around?

So, what do the most enterprising individuals do, to cope with the crippling debt burden that they face, with little hope of elevating themselves from a position of poverty? Well, some of them will sell their bodies, and sell drugs.

If you deny people a legal route to pay for a quality of life that they're entitled to, they will turn to a life of 'crime'.

The two bestselling commodities, in the history of humanity, are sex & drugs. Ugly people need to fuck, and people want to get high and forget about their shitty lives. The drive to get intoxicated is not even a uniquely human thing. There are plenty of examples from the animal kingdom of non-human species that get off their faces, using various substances.

You might think that demanding plenty of interest on your life savings and wanting a nice fat pension, is OK, because you're entitled to a cushy retirement. However, your young, beautiful and fresh faced daughter or grand-daughter might have few options to live independently, other than being a stripper, escort or 'flatmate with benefits'.

If you browse the London property adverts, you will see a shocking number of offers of free accommodation in return for sex. This is the society that has been created, by structuring everything around the pension funds, instead of investing in young people.

Can't get the job without the experience, can't get the experience without the job. That's the Catch 22 that entraps most young people into minimum wage jobs and living in shared rooms in atrocious quality housing in big cities. It's no fucking picnic being young at the moment, and weed is probably the only thing that allows people to forget the hopelessness of their situation.

A pint of beer in London is £5 or more. That means I can buy two pints for £10. For the same amount of money, I can buy a gram of super-strong skunk weed, and get dribblingly intoxicated for at least a day. Two pints would make me slightly tipsy, and because I'm well-off, I could then easily afford to have 3 or 4 more pints and get violent, abusive and urinate and vomit in the street. However, it's more economical - as a young person - to get stoned out of your mind and not do anything.

The girls who have sugar daddies, hustle for tips as waitresses and strippers or even sell their bodies - these aren't fallen angels, forced to prostitute themselves because they have a drug habit. Often times, the drug habit is a result of having to use what mother nature gave them, as a means to make money. These girls have a plan. They're smart. They've figured out that no amount of shelf stacking for a supermarket will allow them to ever escape poverty.

Our prettiest daughters and grand-daughters are living in luxury apartments in the city centre, taking taxis, eating in expensive restaurants and ordering cocktails at the bar... but how is that lifestyle funded? Every gorgeous pouting selfie you see on Facebook or Instagram... doesn't that say something about the sexualisation of an entire generation, through economic necessity, to you?

The boys will grow weed, or cut coke. The girls will strip or fuck. This is what we've wished for. The olds sit idle in their big empty houses, while their sons, daughters and grandchildren have no option but to pursue the most economically profitable path they can: drugs & prostitution.

I'm painting a bleak picture, but I don't think it's inaccurate.

"It's only a bit of harmless dope" right? Wrong. Can't you see that people's eyes are dulled. The fire has gone out of people's hearts when they're just sitting around stoned. Where is the energy and enthusiasm to change society for the better?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #society #politics #capitalism #sex #police