This is a story about three types of people...

There are only 3 types of people in the world. That's it. The whole of humanity can be divided into just 3 buckets. If you want to label people, you can use one of these 3 handy labels, to judge people.

But 3 doesn't sound like very many? Aren't people way more complicated than that? Aren't there 12 buckets that people are put in, like signs of the zodiac? Yes, isn't your star sign all you need to know about a person to figure out everything you need to know about a person? If you know somebody's star sign, you just have to look at their horoscope for the day, and you can predict their future, right?

Well, maybe all that horoscope stuff is bunkum. Maybe it's New Age hippy crap that doesn't mean anything. I mean, it's not very scientific, is it? Everybody knows that horoscope writers just put generic stuff that could apply to anybody. That's the skill in writing horoscopes: writing statements that are ambiguous enough that they could apply to anybody.

So what about Myers-Briggs? Isn't 16 types of people rather than 12 the solution? Having 16 buckets to put 7 billion people into is surely the solution to the madness of believing in horoscopes. Yes, those extra 4 buckets make all the difference.

I do take some pride from the fact that I come out as an ENTJ - Field Marshal - personality type, when I'm tested, which is only 1 to 3% of the population. However, I have a way of simplifying things and making them very black & white. I'm a computer programmer, so I like binary. There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

So, the best I can do is to categorise people into 3 buckets, so that they can be judged and mistreated accordingly. We seem to love prejudice and presumption, and bullying people, so I've developed a really simple test and a form of categorising people into just 3 categories.

Here it is...

Type I - Potential Addicts

The potential addict is somebody who has not yet tried addictive substances. An addictive substance is anything psychoactive that alters your perception of reality, with examples being:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The potential addict has not yet tried any of these things, so we do not yet know if this person is an addict. These people are normally children, because most adults have been exposed to one of the above substances.

Only if you have never tried any of the above substances, can you be considered to be a potential addict.

You need to be really honest when you are answering the single question that identifies you as a potential addict.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Have you ever taken any of the substances listed above?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is no, then you are a potential addict and your capacity for addiction is as yet unknown. You should be regarded with fear and mistrust. You are a ticking time bomb of addiction. You are a potential monster. You are a menace to society.

Type II - Addicts

The addict is somebody who, at least once every 3 to 6 months, takes an addictive substance. An addictive substance is anything psychoactive that alters your perception of reality, with examples being:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The addict takes these substances on a regular basis. Whether that's every 3 to 6 months, or daily dosages of the demonic plant alkaloid known as caffeine. Addicts who drink steaming hot cups of addiction are littered throughout society, flagrantly parading their lack of willpower and devil-may-care attitude to the damage they're doing to themselves and others.

Addicts who smoke or vape are smelly and are setting fire to money on a regular basis and inhaling toxic combustion products, and toxic chemicals. This insanity is further evidence that they have been possessed by a demon. That demon is addiction. These people are monsters. They should be shot at dawn. Their heads should be put on a spike.

Medically sanctioned addiction is no better. Just because your doctor (a.k.a. drug dealer) gave you medication for pain, that's no different from scoring heroin on a street corner. There is zero difference between obtaining medication for depression, or injecting heroin to treat your crushing emotional damage. Zero. Nada. Exactly the same thing.

You need to be really honest when you are answering the single question that identifies you as an addict.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Do you take any of the substances listed above (every 3 to 6 months or more regularly)?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is yes, then you are an addict and you need help. Why are you wasting money and damaging your health taking substances? There's no excuse.

Because you can't stop taking these substances, you have proven to the world that you have no self-control. You have proven to the world that you have no willpower. You have proven to the world that you're weak. You selfish monster. I hate you. Pooh you! You shitting pooh-pooh head! Stinky bum head!

You lose, addict.

Type III - Non-Addicts

The non-addict is somebody who has tried addictive substances but has not become addicted. The definition of not being addicted is having tried something, but choosing not to take addictive substance. The very process of not taking an addictive substance is what defines a non-addict.

The non-addict is aware of the effects of addictive substances, but chooses not to use them. The non-addict is somebody who demonstrates willpower and self-control. The non-addict, is by their very omission, proving that they are not addicted. They have tried, and they resist the temptations of the addictive substances.

Not taking addictive substances, having tried them, is the only way to prove that you're not a potential addict. If you haven't tried addictive substances, you simply don't know whether you're an addict or not. A non-addict can conclusively show that they are not an addict. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Non-addicts are completely abstinent from all of the following substances:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The non-addict has tried one or more of these substances, and proven that they are not an addict, by not taking them. If you take any of the above substances, you are an addict, not a non-addict.

It's a really easy test to see if you're an addict or not. If you drink tea, coffee or cola, you're probably an addict who is in denial. Denial is not a river in Africa. Denial is when you deliberately ignore the evidence.

Non-addicts have collected evidence that they are not addicts. Non-addicts are laughing at you when you accuse them of being addicts, in between sips from your coffee cup.

There's a simple test to see if you're a non-addict or not. You have to go for more than 6 months without having any of the addictive substances you've tried. Yes that's right: any of the substances. Because addictions can be transferred, you can't just stop taking heroin and take up drinking coffee. You can't just stop smoking cigarettes and start having cups of tea. That's just transferring your addiction.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Do you take any of the substances listed above (every 3 to 6 months or more regularly)?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is no, then you are a non-addict and you can laugh at anybody who talks to you about addiction in between cups of coffee and puffs on cigarettes, while swallowing loads of medications etc. etc.

If you break your abstinence by taking any of the listed substances, then you are an addict. There's no cheating. There are no excuses. You are self-medicating for your untreated addiction if you take anything from the list above. You might be in denial if you're saying things like "yes, but" or fooling yourself about how regularly you are taking addictive substances.

Only a non-addict is able to go for over 6 months without any of the substances listed above. And only a non-addict can stick two fingers up at you and laugh and call you a c**t. Yes, non-addicts are allowed to be all high and mighty, and look down their nose sneeringly at you. Only a non-addict is allowed to be pious and critical of your lifestyle. Only a non-addict is allowed to act all holier-than-thou and pretend they're whiter than white.

It's an established fact that non-addicts are allowed to be as horrible as they like to Type I and Type II people, because they're inferior. The Type I and Type II people are weak and worthless, and can be treated with disdain, contempt and disrespect. Type I and Type II people are literally pieces of s**t that shouldn't be p**sed on if they're on fire.

I think you'll find that this logic is completely watertight. I think you will find that there is not a single flaw in this reasoning. I'm sure that you'll agree wholeheartedly with this new system of classification, given that it is reasoned from unquestionable base principles.

My own mother used to take heroin, but then stopped. She believes that this proves she isn't a heroin addict. Her reasoning is pretty sound. Seems to make sense to me, at least. Well done her.

Only my Mum still smokes and she's a total alcoholic. Oh, and she drinks loads of tea and coffee. So I guess she's still an addict. Oh, oops. So her stopping taking heroin really didn't prove anything, did it? No. Especially as she was still taking other illegal drugs. Yes, there seems to be a flaw in her logic.

I like my Mum, even if she's a total alcoholic junkie. She decided to have a baby (me) with another alcoholic junkie, which is a shame, but at least they never judged me, because they're aware of their own addictions.

Oh no, hang on a second. There was that time when they walked into my house and stopped me from emailing psychiatrists about a hospital admission to treat my Bipolar Disorder, and instead accused me of being a drug addict and dragged me outside where some work colleagues saw me and wondered why I wasn't at work.

Yes, it seems rather odd that a couple of drug addicts would enter the private home of a person with a mental illness, and drag him through the streets, accusing him of having a drug addiction. That would seem to be rather hypocritical to me.

I wonder what the psychological effects of such action would be. To shame your son for the guilt that you yourself carry. To blame your son for your own lack of willpower and addiction. That would be pretty shitty, wouldn't it?

Yes, my parents kinda like to pass the buck. They think they're so smart, but they're just out to cover their own guilt. They're pretty paranoid and psychotic after so many years of extensive drug and alcohol abuse. Years and years and years. It takes its toll on the body and the mind. They have lost the plot. They're fucking senile.

Oh, what about me?

Well, I've not been drinking for 82 days, but I've been abstinent from all the other substances for 6 months. I'm well on my way to non-addict status. I'm a lot more of a non-addict than anybody else I know. That's why I find it so insulting and offensive when people want to talk to me about alcohol, drugs etc.

If you want to know about being a non-addict you should be asking me, not telling me things. I can tell you about how hard it is to flush all psychoactive substances from your life. They are ubiquitous. They put caffeine in all sorts of things, so that you get hooked on those products.

I have started to hear people saying "sugar is a drug" and that's given me an idea.

When you eat food, your body will break it down and convert the carbohydrates into glucose, because glucose is what powers every cell in your body. Your human body runs on glucose and oxygen. Your body runs on sugar.

However, I accept the challenge.

I've decided that as my final challenge I will go without sugar. Given that sugar is glucose, and all food is converted to glucose, I will have to go without food. Yes, if I'm going to quit sugar, I will have to quit food.

So, I've decided to go on hunger strike. Yes, when you're all stuffing yourselves with your Christmas dinner, I think I will go and stay in a tent (houses are a drug?) and just live on fresh air. I'm going to quit food for Xmas. How's about that?

I'm just taking things to their logical conclusion. The only way to prove that you're a non-addict is to give up on food.

If you give up on food, pretty soon you give up on oxygen. Oxygen is a drug. You keep taking breath after breath, you oxygen addict!

I'm going to quit food, because food contains sugar, and sugar is a drug. By quitting food, I get to quit oxygen too.

Yes, when I'm dead from starvation, suffocation, you will be able to see just how brilliant not being addicted to anything is. Make sure you have a warm cup of tea or coffee with some sugar in it to sip at my funeral. The glucose from the sugar will help to keep you warm, and the caffeine will help you concentrate on whatever bullshit the preacher is spouting.

Hurrah for me. I'm a fucking genius. I've figured out how to not be addicted to ANYTHING.

Yes, I'm going to sit in my tent, with no food, no sex, no internet, no gambling and certainly no tea or coffee. I've never smoked and I don't take drugs, so it should be fairly easy. I just need to beat a few hunger pangs and then the pain will be over.

I'm looking forward to an eternity as a non-addict. The dead aren't addicted to anything. Hurrah for the dead. I aspire to be dead. I'm mostly there.

Have a little think about what type of person you are. Be honest. How long have you honestly done, without a single drop of any of the substances I listed? You're going to have to be super duper honest because addiction makes you lie to yourself and others

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs #bipolar #mentalhealth #childhood #parents #notanonymous

This is a story about anger management...

I like to nurture. I like being with nature. I like to mow the lawn. I like to plant things and water them and watch them grow. I like to look after animals. I like knowing that I'm helping living things.

When people were shitty and mean to me, I liked to be with my cat in my garden. I liked to take care of my lawn. I liked to get rid of the dead leaves and dead flower heads, and feed the plants.

I'm a pretty simple character really. If you make me sad and anxious and afraid, I will be depressed. If you keep attacking me, I will withdraw more and more and more. You will back me into a corner.

What do we know about cornered animals, that are beaten and stressed and anxious? Well, it's time to stop being unpleasant to them and either leave them alone or be nice to them, unless you want to get bitten.

I'm not out to bite anybody. I just want a little garden and a cat. If you take those things away from me, you'll make me very sad.

I don't have a lot of opportunity to nurture anything at the moment. I don't have any plants or kids or pets. I treat my girlfriends nicely, but those relationships tend to be a lot more complicated than boy & cat.

My Dad thinks that rearing a little boy is just like owning a dog. He thinks that little boys are members of his pack, and they will respond like a pack animal would to the leader of the pack. Humans are not pack animals. Humans are advanced primates with complex social and emotional needs. You shouldn't try and 'train' them like you would with a dog. They're not performing animals, like dancing bears or dogs that roll over and play dead.

Respect is a two-way street with humans. If somebody orders me to respect them, they will lose my respect. Respect is earned. I don't respect anybody who doesn't respect me back. There is no automatic entitlement to respect. Everybody's opinion is equally valid. When my Dad's car broke down, my sister opined that it might have run out of fuel. He dismissed her opinion immediately. She was right, he was wrong. More fool him.

One of the few times that my parents came to visit London was because they had gone to go away on holiday, but then discovered that their passports were not in date. I can tell you exactly when my passport expires, and I'm not such a drug addicted disorganised lazy layabout that I would fail to be able to take my flight because of such an idiotic oversight.

Yes, this one-way-street is a source of a lot of anger. I have been disrespected a huge amount by my parents, but when we examine the evidence it becomes clear that they are hypocrites and there is no excuse for such disrespectful behaviour.

I need to be the bigger person, and vent off this anger at such injustice, mistreatment and damage to my identity, self-confidence and happiness. Ideally, I would like to forgive and forget, but it's very hard to forgive somebody who is not at all sorry.

I've had to be sorry all my life. I've had to be very sorry that I was so inconsiderate as to become a fertilised embryo, grow and eject myself into the world. What terrible poor planning on my part. How grossly irresponsible of me to not think of the impact on my parents plans for drug taking idleness.

I've come up against anger that has been misdirected against me time and time again. Recently, a girlfriend started to physically attack me and throw objects at my head, when she threw a tantrum about the fact that she had strewn rubbish all over my flat and didn't want to clean up after herself. She wanted me to 'admit' that I was the messy one, and flew into a rage when I told her the true origin of every sweet wrapper and crisp packet, that she had absentmindedly thrown on the floor.

I have an atypical reaction to stressful situations. My pulse slows and my blood pressure drops and I calm down. I get very cold and rational. I've been in life and death situations enough times to know that losing your head will get you killed.

When my ex girlfriend started hurling plates and knives at me, I didn't react, except to make sure I protected my head. When she left, I was glad she was gone. When she slammed the door of my flat on the way out, I was relieved. Obviously, I didn't want to date her any more after that. That's rational, right?

When my ex wife started getting aggressive, I would put a door in-between her and me. Some kind of physical barrier to stop me from being physically attacked. Sure, she would attack the door - punching and kicking - which only further confirmed that I was right to put some protection around myself from somebody with a streak of violence in them.

My ex wife would sometimes scream that her human rights were being infringed by her not being able to enter my prison cell, in-between beating the door with her fists. It seemed more like an infringement of my human rights, that I wasn't able to move around my home without fear of physical aggression against my person.

The psychological trauma of being trapped in a room with an angry person trying to kick the door down is not healthy for your mind. The more it happens, the more if affects you. You are attempting to retreat to safety, but some cruel and abusive person is rattling your cage, banging on the bars of your prison.

Why didn't I just leave? Well, if you're in a corner, you only tend to have one escape route, and that's right through the arena you're trying to escape. That means running the gauntlet right past your persecutor(s).

Trust me, if you want to help a person who is cornered, harassing them and being menacing and aggressive towards them is not going to coax them out of the corner.

My solution is to either wait for starvation or the police to release me from the trap. I have never called the police to come help me. I once had to threaten to call the police, in order to be allowed to be released from my cell to go to hospital for urgent treatment. That's not right.

Here's the bottom line: don't persecute people. Don't harass people. Don't stress them out and corner them with aggression and threats. Don't relentlessly bang on the door to their cell and kick and stomp and tantrum. They're in there, starving. They're in there, cornered and alone and dying.

Yes, I can tell you a lot about dying from starvation. I chose to die of starvation rather than be beaten by my abusers. That was a rational choice that I made.

A person doesn't retreat into a corner for no reason. A person doesn't starve themself to the brink of death for no reason. There is no 'carrot' or 'reward' in being trapped in a corner. It's being beaten with a 'stick' that drives them into a corner. It's verbal and physical abuse that makes a person cower in a corner.

I don't feel very safe, because my parents and my wife all abused me. They all put me in hospital and none of them give a shit. They're not sorry. They think it's my problem, not theirs. Well, isn't it strange that now that I've got away from those abusive people, my life has improved?

They will blame drug taking, but I'm not a drug addict and I'm going to show you in the coming weeks, it's them who are the drug addicts, and who act abusively. I'm going to show you conclusively that I'm not a drug addict and that their accusations are an attempt to cover their own guilt.

I'm going to show you that paranoia is not something that just exists in the mind of a sick person, but a reaction to extreme stress and mistreatment. Can you imagine being shut in a room with no food, drink or toilet, and having violent aggressive people pummelling on the door and screaming abuse night & day? Can you imagine what psychological impact that would have?

I'm going to show you every part of the psychological trauma and abuse that I sustained, and how that drove me to suicide attempts and mental illness. I'm going to show you how mental illness can be induced in somebody by mistreating them. I'm going to show you how the human mind reacts to bullying and abuse.

You're going to have to be a really clever smarty pants with a good memory, and remember that there is such a thing as cause and effect. You're going to need to remember the sequence of events, otherwise you're going to get confused. You're going to start trying to make quick and easy assumptions.

The main thing you're going to need to remember is this: abuse nearly killed me, and I was abstinent from drink & drugs. You just need to remember this one thing: I was driven to suicide, and there were no drugs involved, and I wasn't an alcoholic.

See if you can remember that, as I tell you the rest of the story. It's important that you do, because otherwise you might get confused.

It's easy to get confused when you're drinking and smoking and having tea & coffee, because you're manipulating your own mind. You're muddying the waters. You are confusing yourself and your perception of reality.

I'm able to make an accurate appraisal of reality, because I am speaking about periods where I wasn't on any medication, drugs or drinking. I'm able to rationally analyse all the facts and evidence now, because I'm completely abstinent from any psychoactive substances whatsoever, including all medications, legal drugs, illegal drugs, caffeine etc. etc.

The only time that you tend to have a clear mind in modern society is when you have kids. Becoming a parent normally sharpens the mind a little bit, and good parents decide to clean up their act (mine didn't). However, you also become filled with irrational fear, because you have children that you want to protect. You start to become afraid of the boogeyman.

Actually withdrawing from alcohol can make you very anxious. Being a parent is very tiring, and it's easy to try and compensate with tea and coffee and other wakefulness agents. However wakefulness agents make you very anxious and paranoid. You start to imagine that the world is full of dangerous people out to hurt your child.

This is the power of nightmares. You get pregnant because you're fucked up on booze. Perhaps you were so pissed that you vomited your contraceptive pill. Anyway, you end up pregnant even though you're right in the middle of being a massive binge drinker.

So you not only have the anxiousness of becoming a new parent, but you also have to give up alcohol and cigarettes. That's pretty hard on your anxiety levels, which you had been self medicating for with booze and fags. Now you don't have those crutches and you've got a kid that's going to need a stable home, but you haven't sorted your life out... you were still in party mode.

Dad has to give up on his dreams of being a footballer, Formula One driver, professional gambler or whatever idle fantasy he had been secretly harbouring. He's going to have to put on a grey suit and go to a dull concrete office until the age of 65 doing something very boring. That's stressful. He's also going to get a lot less sex, because his girlfriend/wife is going to be busy raising kids. It's an anxious time for the new Dad. He should probably show support to his partner by also quitting smoking and drinking, but he's not going to.

So, the home environment is filled with stress and anxiety before the screams of an incontinent midget have even pierced the tranquility of sitting around getting drunk. This isn't how that drunken night was supposed to turn out! What a little bastard for inseminating itself. Let's load it up with lots of blame and stress and teach it a lesson for arrogantly getting born.

It's a shame I'm so exhausted by it all. I have enough energy to finish the story, to prove the point. The point is simple: I'm good enough to achieve some cool stuff. I'm good enough to make a difference, to make a contribution. I haven't got enough energy to fight all the bullies though. I haven't got enough energy to fight the stigma and the presumptions and the lazy assumptions and the prejudice. I haven't got enough energy to be ganged up on. I'd done, I'm over.

When I've finished my story and killed myself, you can cut me open and you'll see the truth. You can dissect my body and see that I was physically healthy. I have written this text so that you can dissect my mind and see that I was mentally well, but driven to suicide by relentless abuse and a lack of apology or opportunity to beat my oppressors.

People like my Dad and ex-wife could just say sorry, but I know they never acknowledge their own guilt.

I'm guilty of lashing out. I'm guilty of reacting to stimuli. Sorry about that. Sorry for being a human being.

My parents and ex wife think they're saints, so I will be the martyr, in the hope that somebody else might get to avoid being killed for other people's sins.

I asked you to stop being mean and abusive. I asked to be set free. I asked for help. You failed me. I forgive you.

If you pile unmanageable stress and pressure on somebody, they will go wonky, they will get bent out of shape. You will put their world into a downward slope that they can't escape (1994)

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce #addiction #drugs #alcohol #unpleasant #bipolar #suicide

This is a story about telling the truth...

I apologise for the lengthy 87,000 word preamble, but it has been in preparation for the revelation of some really shocking truths.

I'm actually still trying to psych myself up to tell some parts of the story, because I know that I'm going to be burning bridges big time, but I don't feel like they're places I'd want to go back to anyway. Those places need to be shut down with extreme prejudice. Those bridges need to be burnt.

I've effectively had an 'access all areas' back-stage pass to a lot of stuff that the public barely know exists. I've worked on gold bullion vault projects, nuclear submarine projects, cryptographic encryption projects and on the number one projects in the world's biggest banks. I've single handedly produced number one iPhone apps and been invited to speak about what I do at top academic institutions. These are my credentials.

So, I'm puffing myself up, like a blowfish. I'm like the scared cat, with its fur all stood on end and its back arched. I'm like the pompous twat, with his chest pushed out and his fake voice booming out, disturbing everybody's peace and quiet. Am I a narcissist? No, I'm just trying not to be eaten by predators.

Am I trying to make you like me? Do I think I'm likeable? Do I think I'm charming, charismatic? Do I think I'm special? Well, I have done the maths. I'm one of 7 billion people on planet earth and I'm 99.5% genetically identical to every single one of them. So I'm half a percent different from 7,000,000,000, which means I'm roughly the same as 35 million people, statistically speaking.

There are - for arguments sake - about 70 million people in the UK. I've used a higher number than the official figures for convenient maths, and because the government doesn't count the huge number of 'illegal' immigrants who live here. So I represent about half the population of the U.K: 35,000,000. I'm literally 1 in 2. There's a 50:50 chance you might meet another me, here in the UK.

So I'm really Mr Average. There you have it. I'm a straight down the middle regular Joe Bloggs. Anything I can do, you can do too. I'm not special. I'm not unique. I'm not different.

I've done a paper round, just like you. I've done washing up in a pub and a hotel, just like you. I've worked in a shop on a Saturday, just like you. I went to state comprehensive school, just like you. I went to 6th form college, just like you. I did an apprenticeship, just like you. I worked 9 to 5, just like you. I learned a skilled trade, just like you. I had a mortgage, just like you. I had a current account and a savings account, just like you. I used to mow the lawn on a Sunday, just like you. I used to spend a considerable proportion of my income on DIY and home improvements, just like you. I was making a little nest, ready to spawn some clones of myself, just like you.

Only, one day, I threw down my tools and said I'd had enough.

At first, I couldn't actually carry on working even though I wanted to. I had gotten myself a new job, and it was quite exciting, interesting and challenging. I was working with some cool people on a cool project. But for some reason I couldn't get out of bed. Maybe I was lazy? Maybe I was a spoiled brat? Maybe I was too posh and rich, and too arrogant and stuff to be bothered to go to work like everybody else?

Well, as I remember it, I just couldn't take it any more. I broke down. The machine had been pushed beyond its design tolerance, beyond its threshold, beyond its capabilities, beyond its rev limiter, and it had shaken itself to pieces. You should know that at this point, the machine was only powered by food, water, alcohol and caffeine... just like everybody else.

Was I a functional alcoholic? Well, we've explored this already, so I'm not going to go over it again, but let's just say this: I never drank alone. I always drank with colleagues and friends. I always had drinking buddies, and I never drank more than anybody else in my social sphere.

Alcohol is more than a social lubricant though. They say that money is the lubricant for capitalism, but I think that alcohol is the lubricant for capitalism. The more money, the more alcohol. It was limitless. As long as your work got done, nobody cared how pissed you were.

The thing about doing the same job for 19 years is that it gets pretty easy. It gets very monotonous and boring and paint-by-numbers. Even when you're building a banking system to process a quadrillion dollars, it looks like the same 1's and 0's in binary. All computer code looks the same, whether it's launching Tomahawk missiles or processing Credit Default Swaps.

We used to say "nobody dies if our code f**ks up" on the non-mission-critical projects. That's not strictly true though.

When a massive beast like a giant multinational corporation starts to die, rich people get pretty trigger happy. Yes, people are prepared to kill other people in order to protect their dollars. My own parents were prepared to kill me in order to protect their pot of gold, so I've seen it first hand.

The thing you don't realise, when you're watching all that 'free' TV is that you're a TV addict. If you didn't pay for something, then you are the product. Your mind is being sold to the highest bidder. Even when you do pay for something, you might still be being marketed to... you wanna be James Bond, right? Better go and buy that expensive watch you saw him wearing then.

But this conquest of your heart and mind is more subtle than just being sold a product. You are also being sold a lie. You are being told simplistic stories about good vs. evil. You are told stories about cowboy & indians, cops & robbers, earthlings & aliens, superheros & bad guys, black & white. You are being dumbed down. You are being put into a childish mindset.

Barely a few months after this photo was taken, my parents marched into my house, that I bought with my money that I earned, and called me a drug addict. They are total fucking idiots.

One of my earliest memories is waking up in a hospital bed at Oxford John Radcliffe Hospital. There were two scared looking drug addicts, going through withdrawal there looking at me. They had really dumb expressions on their faces. They had no idea what was going on in their drug addled lives. They were my parents, and they had hospitalised me because they're irresponsible cunts.

My parents have not got a clue how hard modern life is. They were gifted the deposit money to get a house, because they had failed to plan properly how to support their child. They needed their parents money, because they were too busy taking drugs and getting fucked up to act responsibly.

Do you know what I'd do if I got a girl pregnant? I'd get a fucking job.

My parents think they're special and different. They think they are entitled to not have to work hard. They think they're entitled to sit in judgement over the world, despite having achieved nothing other than to inflict misery on innocent human lives. Being the child of a pair of junkies is miserable work, I can tell you. It's hard work having to be the responsible one, because you are chaperoning a pair of losers who are too fucked up to put food on the table and a roof over the family's head.

When we come to talk about bail-outs in the coming months. We should remember that my parents had a free University education and they spent their parents money fucking about. They went travelling and had a lovely time swanning around spending other people's money. They sat around taking cocaine and doing jigsaws with their adult friends, rather than taking their kid on an outing. They took me to the pub and left me with alcoholics who worked on the US Air Force base, who told me all about nuclear war. Little boys don't really want to know about nuclear war. It kind of fucks them up.

Yes, I remember this guy Wayne, used to boast all the time about nuclear weapons destroying every living thing on the planet of the Earth. That's a lovely bedtime story for a 3 year old, isn't it? Well done mum & dad. Great parenting. Gold star. Cunts.

So, if I'm against the proliferation of nuclear armamants and I'm a vociferous supporter of nuclear disarmament... that's the reason. We should ban the bomb, because being bombed to shit by nuclear weapons is terrifying for your children. You shouldn't be sitting around taking drugs and getting drunk with your friends. If you give a shit about your kids you should be protesting about the proliferation of nukes.

Yes, my parent's were caught napping. They were asleep on the cunting job. While they were putting flowers in each others hair and taking heroin, magic mushrooms and LSD, snorting loads of cocaine and wandering round in a stoned fucked up daze, alcoholic stupor and generally dribbling like cross-eyed imbeciles, and occasionally spawning an unloved child, the world went to rack & ruin. You total cunts.

My parents never gave a shit about saving for a proper pension. Their parents had been prudent, and had put money into index-linked pensions that provided for a reasonable retirement. My parents plan was to put all their money into drugs and not give two fucks about the future, or even the present. Yes, the present was a pretty miserable time, because if there's one thing we know about drugs, it's that there's a comedown.

My parents like to boast that they were never really addicted. What absolute horse shit. If you have an expensive habit that's damaging to the entire family's health and wealth, to the point where my grandparents had to bail you the fuck out, and buy you a house, then you fucked up, you total addict fucking losers.

My mum still smokes, and has a major alcohol problem. She's self-medicating for anxiety issues. Yes... being a shit parent is supposed to make you anxious. That's called guilt. That thing you're trying to numb... that's your guilty conscience for being a shit parent.

If you don't adjust your lifestyle according to the needs of your dependents, then you're a fucking selfish cunt. If you can't even see what's going on in reality because you're too messed up by all the drink and drug abuse... you are a really sorry messed up individual.

My parents live in a kind of co-dependency, where they support each others warped worldview. The only person who's friends with them is a guy with learning difficulties, and even that is co-dependent. That poor guy is just lonely, and he likes to have a drink... my parents drink with him, because he makes them feel like they're superior. They don't like normal friends, because they remind them that they're alcoholic junkie shit parents who never adjusted their disgusting lifestyle for their kids.

My Dad's really horrible and abusive to my Mum, but she defends him, so it's hard to do anything. It's important to defend somebody's character, but don't defend the indefensible. Don't defend an abuser. Don't defend somebody who gets sent to the supermarket to buy food and comes back with drugs. Don't defend somebody who's supposed to put a roof over the family's heads but can't be bothered because they're too fucked up on drugs.

I'm supposed to support these cunts in their happy retirement, am I? Why?

This is the legacy. This is the lunacy of mortgaging your children in order to pay for your disgusting lifestyle. This is the smoking gun. This is the whodunnit for a generation that got screwed over. This is a pointed finger, that shows where the blame really lies.

So, I'm being disruptive. I'm laying the foundations. I'm laying out my stall. I'm setting out my case. I'm taking on the establishment. I'm taking on the status quo.

I live and work in glass palaces, but I'm going to throw stones, because these places need to be smashed down. People have been kept below glass ceilings for too long. People have been oppressed by a generation who have achieved nothing, for far too long. Widening the rich-poor gap and fucking over your grandchildren's future, through pollution and completely screwing the global economy is nothing to be proud of. You've got no authority and you've got no credentials.

I suggest you start giving away your hoarded wealth as fast as you can, if you want to help your family. Give it away, share, spread the wealth if you want to retain even a fraction of your standard of living.

Soon, it's not going to matter who's got the most. It's going to matter who gave the most, when you are put on trial.

Yes, the newest generations are going to put you on trial for crimes against humanity. You're all as guilty as each other, so the only way to judge people's character is based on their generosity. My parents are tight-fisted cunts.

You're economically enslaving your children. You are chaining them up. You're doing nothing, sitting on that couch watching brain-washing TV and reading rubbish newspapers. Get off your lazy arses you cunts (October 2013)

Tags: #politics #childhood #parents #capitalism #addiction

This is a story about demon drink...

Drinking champagne, meant for a wedding. A toast to the bride, a fairytale ending. Those are some of my favourite song lyrics.

I'm not alcoholic because alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and they can't stop drinking. Alcoholism, by its very definition, is the inability to curtail your consumption despite the damage to your health, wealth and relationships. I don't abuse alcohol and I can stop drinking for long periods whenever I want, so I'm not an alcoholic. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I can go lengthy periods without alcohol. Currently, I've not been drinking for the last 76 days, and I'm going to do 101 days, just because I can. Yes, you might have the odd 6 days off drinking, but I bet you've never done 8 days. I bet you've never done 28 days. I bet you've never done 90 days. The chances are, if you tried to quit, you'd find that your 'willpower' is very weak indeed.

Alcohol is brilliant for treating anxiety. It calms the nerves. It's like Diazepam (Valium) in a bottle from the supermarket, with a hangover. The two drugs - alcohol and Diazepam - have exactly the same effect on the Central Nervous System (CNS)... the brain. They both cause the release of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which calms the brain. Alcohol is a GABA agonist which means it causes GABA to be released in the brain.

If you flood your brain with GABA, you will be more relaxed and somewhat disinhibited. People incorrectly say that alcohol is a depressant but it's actually a CNS suppressant. That is to say, it suppresses a certain amount of brain activity. It makes you chilled out and stupid. It does not make you depressed, but if you are depressed, those feelings may come to the forefront of your mind, because you are disinhibited.

You can get happy drunks, angry drunks and sad drunks. All that is happening, is that the person's mask is slipping and you're seeing what they're really like behind their public persona. Alcohol is almost a truth serum. In vino veritas, means "in wine, truth". The Romans knew a lot about wine.

Why do I keep quoting latin at you? Well, it's because I'm challenging your shorthand notation for a person's life. I think I overheard somebody describe my reason for not drinking the other day as "because he's a recovering alcoholic"... that's outrageous! I have elected not to drink through choice. If I was an alcoholic, I would be alcohol dependent, and therefore unable to choose to stop drinking despite my desire to save my liver and bank balance from being decimated.

In actual fact, stopping drinking has cost me staggering sums of money. I was working on HSBC's number one project - Customer Due Diligence - which was an incredibly stressful project requiring very long hours of sustained high pressure. The only way to cope was with alcohol. When I quit drinking, I could no longer cope with the madness of that failing project.

I had decided to quit drinking for the Go Sober for October charity event, which would give me an excuse to resist the relentless peer pressure to get drunk with my colleagues. I lived and breathed the project I was working on, and I live and breathe banking, which means I lived and breathed drinking culture. It's very hard to be a sober banker, especially on the number one projects.

Alcohol carried me through JPMorgan's DTCC project (their number one project that year) and we delivered it on time and on budget with a green offshore team of Accenture developers. I was the Development Manager. Just about the only way to cope with the pressure and stress of that project was with copious amounts of alcohol... oh and some very cool bosses who just let me get on with my job.

I've had the good fortune of working with some very brilliant people. Most of whom have been massive drinkers. I've started to lose friends to liver damage though. Alcohol abuse catches up with you eventually.

Is it some health scare that caused me to stop drinking? Well, so far as I know my liver is OK. I had an ultrasound a couple of years ago, and my liver was torn from blunt trauma and damaged by hyperthermia, but it wasn't cirrhotic. Alcohol didn't cause the damage because I wasn't drinking at the time (or eating, but that's another story). My liver has been fully recovered for quite a while now. It's one of the few organs in the body that can repair itself, if you give it a chance.

So, what's the short answer? What's the shorthand? What's the soundbite? Well I'm afraid there is no shorthand. You can't label me as an alcoholic because I don't abuse alcohol. I don't even drink. Q.E.D.

Did alcohol abuse cause me to go homeless? Did alcohol abuse put me in hospital? Are those events connected to alcohol? No.

No, sorry to disappoint you. I wasn't drinking at any of the times when I have been hospitalised. I know you're hunting for something to point your finger at. I know that victim blaming is convenient. We like to label people. We like to pigeon hole people. Sadly, I don't really fit inside a neat little box. Nobody does, despite how much easier and less scary life appears to be when we imagine that we can pre-judge everybody.

Nothing good ever came from prejudice.

That's a photo of the last alcohol that I consumed, on the 25th of September 2015. A glass of port with some shrooms. Not magic mushrooms, containing the psychedelic chemical Psilocybin, because that's a Class "A" drug. Nope, those shrooms contain ice cream. Those glasses contain port wine.

Since then, I've had a fall-out with one of my oldest friends who's now not talking to me, I lost my job and I've been in hospital for a week. I also nearly threw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge, due to suicidal thoughts. All in all, not a great case for sobriety. My wealth and mental health have been severely impacted by my 101 day experiment, but I've started so I'll finish.

Conducting this in-vivo experiment has been extremely unethical. To risk your life and livelihood in order to discover the link between alcohol, anxiety and depression, is not something that any medical professional could sanction, condone. I've had to ignore the advice of healthcare professionals in order to uphold my commitment to discovering what happens when you quit drinking.

I'm not completely reckless. I know that for dangerous levels of alcohol dependency, quitting drinking abruptly can kill people. Having a seizure due to the sudden drop in the alcohol levels in your bloodstream can kill you. In a treatment centre for alcoholism, they would give you Librium and taper your dose down gently, to prevent you from having a fit.

Despite not having a physical alcohol dependency, it has still been exceedingly unpleasant to quit drinking. The elevated levels of anxiety that you experience, due to the conditioning of your body to expect alcohol as a coping mechanism for high stress levels, makes life fairly unmanageable. You have absolutely no idea how much of a crutch alcohol is in your life, because you've never quit boozin' for months on end. You just haven't done it. Period.

I really don't give a toss whether you want to carry on drinking or not. I won't judge you. I'm not preaching to the world about the few benefits of being a non-drinker. I'm not expecting people to go teetotal like me. In fact, I really don't think you can do it. It's too hard for most people. Most people are addicts. They say "I can quit anytime I want" because they can not drink for 6 days and not have tea/coffee/coke for 2 days. Those are not long enough periods of time to make any pronouncement about your addiction. Those short periods of time prove nothing, except that you can fool yourself into thinking you're not substance dependent.

It takes time for cravings and withdrawal to kick in. The headaches and cognitive impairment associated with stopping caffeine use takes at least 3 days to kick in. You will have terrible cravings after a week or so. You don't know this stuff, because you never go for long enough without a cup of tea or coffee, or a can of Coca-Cola.

The anxiety associated with alcohol withdrawal is something that creeps up more gradually. Your body is conditioned to know that there's always a bottle or a glass handy when you need it. Just knowing that alcohol is readily available actually makes you less anxious. Just knowing that stress relief is available on tap actually makes you less stressed. You will feel relief from your anxiety, flooding your body from the very first sip of an alcoholic drink. That's not possible. The alcohol can't enter your bloodstream that quickly. Your brain has simply learnt to release the GABA, in response to the smell of wine, beer & spirits. It's a conditioned response.

I'm sorry to report that you're no different than Pavlov's Dog. Yes, you respond to the ringing of the bell for last orders at the bar, by salivating for more alcohol, with just the same conditioned response as a dog slobbering for its meat chow, when the mealtime bell is sounded.

You might think you're high & mighty, because you can use your higher brain functions in order to pass judgement over other people. But under your pseudo-intellectual skin, you're the same animal as anybody else. You simply aren't well educated or well informed enough to be aware of your own ignorance, when you pass judgement over people.

So am I a functional alcoholic? Well that's a contradiction in terms. Killing yourself, damaging your health and wealth... surely that's dysfunctional behaviour, by its very definition? The fact that I can start and stop drinking at will, whenever I want, for however long I want... surely that undermines the whole concept of any kind of alcoholic, functional or otherwise?

I will probably start drinking again, after 101 days. For my next trick, I'm going to have a glass of red wine every day, and no more than that. I'm going to show that I can exercise self-control even with the disinhibition of the intoxication from a dose of ethanol. Yes, it's obvious that impaired judgement associated with ethanol intoxication is a reason why people drink more than they planned, but the rational brain never gets put to sleep entirely. We can still exercise a degree of self control.

None of this is very hard for me... because I'm no longer homeless. I have the threat of homelessness hanging over me, because I lost my job (because I stopped drinking). When you're homeless and you have no hope of a better life, drinking helps to anaesthetise you from the cold. The cold of the weather, and the cold shoulder that friends, family and society shows to you. You become untouchable. You are considered a tramp, a bum, a loser... you are shunned.

There is a vicious cycle associated with homelessness and alcohol abuse. People never consider chicken and egg. They never consider the reasons why somebody started to abuse alcohol, and whether those reasons are still present. Alcohol abuse is a symptom, not a cause of somebody's problems. People don't drink to excess unless they're very unhappy about something.

Alcohol abuse is a form of self medication. Alcohol is not inherently the problem. It's a symptom of a problem. Treat the root cause of the issue, and the alcoholism goes away. Plenty of people drink to excess, but they're not homeless and destitute. We applaud Hooray Henrys who throw wild parties and drink with gay abandon. Those glittering socialites are heros.

Drinking £700 of sparkling wine that was meant for my wedding should have been a warning sign, but I was too intoxicated to see what was really going on. Self medication numbed me to the fact that I was trapped in an abusive relationship, and had taken to the bottle to be able to cope with it, and a super stressful job. It was more than any human is capable of handling, without chemical assistance. My medication of choice was alcohol, for a long time.

Am I confessing that I was an alcoholic? Let's repeat this once more: alcoholics are people who are unable to stop drinking despite detrimental effects on their life, and the lives of those around them. I can stop drinking at will, whenever I want. I'm an expert on not drinking. I know far more about not drinking than you do.

Perhaps I should do 9 months of not drinking, or however long it is that good mothers don't drink for. But we already know that stress, anxiety and depression in pregnant women and new mums is a huge problem. So there's already a good data set to prove that quitting alcohol is hard on the minds of women, despite the elevated oxytocin levels associated with childrearing. That's pretty damning evidence about the long-term psychological/brain damage that alcohol abuse does.

It's very controversial to be writing this stuff, but there is heaps of data and anecdotal evidence around to support it. We just need to be good scientists, and observe what we see in the world around us. Conducting in-vivo experiments is dangerous and unethical, but it's yielding interesting findings.

Roll on 101 days!

You've structured your life around addictive substances like alcohol and caffeine more than you will ever possibly know unless you do a lengthy period of abstinence (September 2015)

Tags: #alcohol #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about being a scapegoat...

There's one simple rule to follow in life: don't be an arsehole. If you're bully, criticising, undermining and generally destroying somebody's character, you're an arsehole. People are basically good. Billion dollar companies like eBay have been built on positive not negative stereotypes.

If you assume that everybody is out to rob you, hurt you. If you assume that everybody is bad and you're the only good person on the planet, and treat people according to this negative worldview, then you're going to be isolated and lonely.

It's important to listen to somebody's story, and consider all things with an open mind. There is no shorthand for somebody's life. You can't just hear one negative label and think "yeah yeah yeah, I know the rest". You know absolutely nothing about a person.

I've been advised by mental health professionals, psychologists and amateur psychologists to avoid labelling myself. However, creativity loves constraints, so I have labelled myself and I'm owning that label while I tell that story, knowing that it will be strongly emotive.

My dad joked that we should name our black & white cat "Ginger" because it would challenge people. It would literally blow people's minds. People would fly into an irrational rage, just because a black & white cat was named "Ginger". Yes, some people are so brainwashed, that they feel pure terror and anxiety at the smallest thing that doesn't meet their expectations of conformity.

We are very programmed to conform. We are groomed, massaged, browbeaten, into a kind of group conformity. Kids in school and adults at work are a lot easier to deal with as one homogenous blob, a sea of blank grey faces, rather than a bunch of individual humans. It's much easier to command & control if there is groupthink and uniformity.

Bizarrely, I hankered after some conformity in my life. I wished that my parents were married, I wished that my Dad was into football like the other Dads, I wanted to wear the right trainers and tie my school tie in the 'correct' way, rather than the way that an adult would wear a tie.

Subcultural phenomena are immensely important as a means of indicating to people that you belong to their tribe. Wearing the right clothes and having an interest in the right things makes the difference between an easy life, or a life as a weirdo, an outsider, a spare part, an alien.

You might not understand why something's so important to somebody, but they do. They understand the difference it makes to their daily life, being singled out as 'different'. They have to deal with the daily consequences of being marked out as not belonging to the clan. Not wearing the right tartan, so to speak.

If you are forced to be trapped into a place where you don't belong, or you're not accepted into the group, to the community. If there is constant friction, resistance, then you have to find survival strategies.

I'm very good at zoning out, putting myself into a trance-like state. I can transport myself to another time, another place. I can transcend my body and just wait it out. If you think I'm impatient you couldn't be more wrong. I'm probably one of the most patient people you'll ever meet.

I had such a good grasp of time at school that one of my party tricks - that gained me a little oddball popularity - was being able to count down 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... and then the school bell would ring. I had a natural sense of good timing, given how important the end of school was in my life.

My entire soul yearned for the brief freedom from the bullies that came after school, at weekends and during holidays. The entire structure of my personality was reshaped by time, the clock, the timetable.

I would be down all termtime, and then I would go absolutely bezerk during holidays, trying to pack all that missing fun into those short periods. I would be very tired and lethargic and not enjoy very much of anything during termtime. I would be sad and crying about the bullying. Then, when the holidays arrived, I would hardly sleep, get ridiculously overexcited to have been released from the chains of relentless bullying, and I would launch myself at things with unbelievable enthusiasm and energy, because I knew that the holidays were short.

You might say that I'd be depressed for 6 or 7 weeks at a time, and then hypomanic for 1 or 2 weeks. Yeah, you could say that there were two extremes in my life. You could say that for 13 years there were two poles in my daily existence. You might say that my entire time at school, I had to be very bi-polar, because of the enforced structure of my life. It was the only way I could survive.

When I started work, I was 3 or 4 years younger than everybody else in the company. I was 17 years old and doing a graduate job for BAe Systems. The graduates tolerated me, but I was just a schoolkid to them. I hadn't yet been to University or done much growing up, so I was immature and obviously, I was a bit weird.

Sure, I made friends, but I was always a bit of an oddball. I was always doing something embarrassing or stupid, because I was going through the transition from childhood to adulthood. I was doing the growing up that my peers all did together at University. I made the mistake of accepting every drink that was bought for me, including the 'dirty pint' that I was tricked into drinking and throwing up in front of my colleagues, for example.

Time is the only thing that can change things. There is no short cut to growing up. Yes I was mature for my age in some ways, and I had to fight against ageism, but I also made mistakes that were purely down to immaturity. The best thing I could do was to sit tight and wait until my face matched my experience. I was never taken seriously when I was younger.

Respecting your elders is a mistake in technology, computing, IT, software. If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. Technology is disruptive, it's innovative, it's fast-paced and ever-changing. You can learn as much from the 'script kiddies' as you can from the key-man-dependency 'oracle' type character who think's he or she is the font of all knowledge.

Technology is truly meritocratic. I really don't care how many years you've worked in software. How many websites and apps have you made? How many users have used your software? How many trillions of dollars has your software processed? Those are the objective measures, obviously.

The grass roots are taking hold. The pyramid is starting to look like it's built on shaky foundations. The bullied kids, who spent all their time on computers as a form of escapism, are now running your company. You might think that because you did an MBA at some business school and were generally academically bright, that you command & control your company from the boardroom, where you puff out your chest and feel terribly important. You're wrong.

The thing about old companies is that they do things in old fashioned ways. They are not modernising fast enough, because of all the gatekeepers and people who have an over-inflated view of their self importance. Customers pretty much care about only two things: price and quality. Brand recognition is a function of consistent quality over many years of using a product or service. People won't stay loyal to a company forever, if they're getting inferior quality or paying over the market rate.

Challengers are offering innovative products, higher quality at a cheaper price. When it comes to technology, the challengers are offering a delightful user experience, rather than just the bare minimum for an older company to remain competitive. Old companies are all about cost cutting and keeping costs low. New companies are all about investment and offering something that puts them head & shoulders above the competition. New companies can't rely on a monopoly, so they have to try harder.

We live in a highly regulated world, so there's no risk associated with switching to a different product or service. They all have to adhere to the same standards, and they're all underwritten by the same guarantees. You have the same consumer rights, whether you've bought a product from an old company or a new company. You have the same rights as a consumer of a service from an old company or a new company.

The difference with the challengers is that they're hungry. They're enthusiastic, passionate and energetic. They're not sitting back, farming their monopoly and expecting the good times to roll forever. They're trying to nip and bite the ankles of the big players, and take a slice of the big market share pie, by delivering superior products and services.

My watch wasn't made by some amazingly skilled craftsman in Switzerland, who had to spend many many years learning the art of horology. No, it was 'assembled' in China after it was designed in California. It cost a fraction of what a Patek Philippe would have cost and it does a lot more stuff. I can pay for stuff with it, travel on busses and the underground, monitor my heart rate, receive directions when I'm driving or cycling, ask it questions, get reminders of stuff I need to do, check my diary, see who's phoning me before I get my phone out of my pocket, and read my messages and emails. It has seamlessly blended into my everyday life.

Monopolies don't last forever, and if you dig in and refuse to listen to what the disruptive young whippersnappers are saying then you will find yourself stuck out on a limb. You'll be sat there in your boardroom in your massive headquarters, wondering where all your customers and your profits went. The challengers are no longer coming. They have already arrived and they're disrupting your industry, and word is spreading amongst customers that there's a better way.

The geek will inherit the earth. The meek geeks are taking over everything. Chances are, you don't run a product or service company anymore. You run a software house that happens to specialise in a certain product or service. It's the software and systems that run your organisation, not your people and processes. You're mistaken if you think your best sales rep or most amazing manager are your most important assets. Those individuals just won't scale up like a software system can.

Automation and mechanisation is changing the whole world. There are still plenty of examples where we can industrialise. Where we can get the benefits of higher production and lower cost. We can eliminate human error and the limitations of workers ability to work fast and concentrate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The more that we allow machines to do, the more efficient industries become, and the more delightful the customer experience.

Have you ever noticed how it feels as if you're getting to your destination faster, if you see a queue of traffic and decide to nip down a back alley, to take a rat run? You might not actually be moving any faster, but at least if feels like you're travelling rather than standing still. You might take this analogy with supermarket kiosks. Now that you scan and process the payment for your own groceries, it feels faster, because you're not stood in line waiting for the cashier. Really, you're just saving the grocery store the cost of having to have extra checkout cashiers to cope with the demand, but the cost saving means they can deliver higher quality groceries for the same retail price.

Economies of scale do work, and retailers are very good at scaling things up, because their margins are very aggressive. In the marketplace with price comparison technology, consumers will vote with their feet if your prices are not competitive. Banking hasn't really got its head around that yet. Many people still bank with their original current account, because they haven't seen the benefits of being a 'rate tart' or finding a higher quality online or mobile app experience yet. However, as Apple Pay becomes more and more prevalent, your bank is becoming less and less relevant. Having access to a branch is irrelevant if you live in a cashless society and you have a good mobile app.

We are witnessing a changing of the guard. Out with the old, in with the new. Long live the Queen, cash is not king.

Robots are going to pick out your Christmas presents and despatch them to you. One day, a drone helicopter will deliver your packages. Change is coming. Don't fight it. Geeks don't like fighting (June 2008)

Tags: #bipolar #bullying #childhood #career #banking #capitalism #computing

This is a story about being down and out on the streets of Camden Town...

Performing your greatest hits over and over again drives you insane. However, the public and society expect you to keep repeating what you do best, again and again and again, like a dancing bear or a dog trained to do tricks.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, but I'm not a CD player. If you want to listen to the same song over and over again, just press the repeat button on your iPod. Making an artist compromise on their creativity, in order to simply be a human machine, a robot, can destroy them.

The anxiety associated with knowing you have to do something that you've done so much that it's a complete paint by numbers, starts to become an unbearable burden on your ability to be able to function. Pretty much the only way to remain functioning is to drink yourself into such oblivion that you just don't care anymore.

Alcohol is a GABA agonist. What that means is that it suppresses a certain amount of your brain activity. It's effectively making you chilled out and dumb. Yes, if you're chilled out and dumb, you don't mind doing the same stupid shit over and over and over again. If you're intelligent and creative it destroys your soul, your desire to continue living.

Is it arrogant to say "fuck this" and stop doing what your talent and experience qualifies you to do, because it's destroying you? Should I just shut the hell up and "get a job" as I've been told to do by some ignorant twats? Well, it would literally kill me.

There are 2 ways I could die right at the moment. I could kill myself or I could drink myself to death. These are both sane responses to an insane world. I'm not a robot. Sorry about that.

My whole job is to automate human tasks. My whole job is to get mechanical robots, machines, to perform repetitive tasks instead of having human slaves or human robots doing them. We have reached a point with the development of technology, computing, software, where we don't need to do stupid repetitive shit anymore. Even creating software doesn't have to mean re-inventing the wheel anymore.

So, if you ask me to do something that's just plain wrong, I won't do it anymore. If you ask me to write code that's just going to go into the dustbin, I won't do it. I've stopped writing bugs. I've stopped supporting failures and idiots who don't have a software background. If you don't know your arse from your elbow, I won't show you the respect that you don't deserve.

If you want to know how to build software that can process $1.16 quadrillion ($1,160,000,000,000,000) per year, you can pay me for my professional opinion and I'll show you how it's done. That's the most money that's ever been processed by a banking software system, so that means I know what I'm talking about. If you don't want to listen, we can part company and I'll wish you the very best of luck.

1% of 1 quadrillion is 10 trillion. 1% of 10 trillion is 100 billion. 1% of 100 billion is 1 billion. 1% of 1 billion is 10 million. Any questions?

Ignore what people tell you. Money really does grow on trees, for those who can be bothered to climb. Yes, geese that lay golden eggs really do exist. You just have to climb the beanstalk and risk the wrath of an angry giant.

Magic beans are not a waste of money. They can help you to climb the beanstalk. They won't help you climb back down again though. What goes up must come down, but you might take a tumble. More on this in a future post entitled: Self Medication (Part Two).

You've heard about doping in sport. Why would you think that the athletes of the corporate world would be any different from those who compete in the Olympic Games? The pressure to perform at the very top of your game is just the same, if not greater. The competition is fierce, and anything that gives you a competitive edge is needed unless you want to be trampled underfoot by the thundering herd.

Did you ever wonder why London drinks so much coffee? Did you ever wonder why people are prepared to pay the best part of £3 or £4 for some bitter black sludge? Well, it's because of a plant alkali called Caffeine. Yes, that's a performance enhancing drug. It helps you to concentrate, and allows you to work with more energy, stamina, than would ordinarily be permitted by your body & mind. It increases your output potential.

Limitless? No, not limitless. There is a cost involved, and that cost is insomnia and anxiety. But don't worry about that, because there's always alcohol to take the edge off the anxiety and put you into an alcohol-induced coma that is a substitute for sleep.

You are never more than a few tens of metres from an outlet for caffeine or alcohol in London. They even have bars at bus stops. Well, they don't really, but me and my friends made one. It was very popular. It was the ultimate London pop-up.

What can I get you, sir? Would you like uppers or would you like downers? Uppers in the morning, and throughout the day. Downers after work and throughout the whole weekend. Uppers again on Monday morning to get you going again. Heaps of downers on a Friday to try and calm down from the working week, to 'rest' and recuperate. Oh yes, London is a very high performance place.

So if it's not limitless, what happens when you reach the limits? What happens when you're working on the number one projects for the number one companies, dealing with the biggest amounts of money that have ever been processed in the history of humanity? What happens when you have completely saturated yourself with alcohol and caffeine?

Well, you need crutches. You need a wheelchair. You need something to keep you rolling. You become somewhat disabled, but you need to keep moving, so you get wheeled around or you have to hobble along. Why do you think your office chair has wheels on it? It's because you're probably so f**ked that you can barely stand.

Yes, globalisation and corporate culture will f**k you up. You're only playing by the rules. You're only trying to compete and stay up with the herd, but it's f**king everybody up. Setting everybody up to compete with one another is causing people to be trampled to death.

Adversarial culture is wrecking lives. Us vs. Them and the zero sum game is in the spirit of competition, not co-operation. For somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. The system is designed to have losers as well as winners, and because there can only be one winner, that means everybody else is a loser.

Ultimately, somebody is going to win. Yes, that's right. One person is going to have it all, and everybody else will be dead and buried. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, apart from the one-eyed man, who is king of the world. Everybody else just starves to death. Great system!

But we're all in this together, right? There's safety in numbers, surely? Well, you shouldn't put the Lions in charge of the herd of Zebra. That's pure madness. The conflict of interest between the Lions and the Zebra means that the Lions are not best placed to be in charge of the herd, even if they are at the top of the food chain.

Being an apex predator does not mean that you are best qualified to judge what the greater good is. It means that you're incentivised to be selfish. You don't want to tumble from your position at the top of the pyramid. Being one of the struggling masses is shit beyond belief.

Counter-culture does not mean sitting around smoking dope. That's just totally dumb. You might as well just hurl yourself into the Lion's mouth. Making yourself slow and stupid is just about the dumbest possible thing you could do. It's playing into the hands of the oppressive ruling class.

You think this is a bit paranoid and conspiracy-theory-esque? Well, do you feel lucky, punk? 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Would you and your family like to join them? Would you like to get to the back of the queue? Would you like to swap your decadent western life for the life of somebody in the developing world? No, I didn't think so. You'd much rather prop up the adversarial system where you're lucky enough to be near the top of tottering tree.

Yes, luck is the decisive factor here, not skill or hard work. You don't think people in Asia and Africa work hard? You don't think people in the developing world are smart and resourceful? You're wrong. You're arrogant. You're deluded.

So, why do I reject the system that I profit from? Why do I prefer to live on the street in a cardboard box? Well, it actually pains me to know that I'm part of a system that's causing so much human misery. It's actually physically and mentally damaging to me to help to perpetrate deeds that cause death and destruction. I can't bury my head in the sand like you can.

I know you'll say or do anything to defend your family. More fool you though for not keeping your cock in your trousers. There are plenty of orphans who need parents. Why the f**k didn't you adopt? Are you literally the most selfish c**t in the whole wide world? Yes, the evidence would suggest that you are. You prop up the adversarial system and you create more mouths to feed in the decadent west and do nothing to give a hand up to the already starving mouths in the developing world.

There's no pride in having made a screaming, shitting, vomiting midget. Your body is evolved to do that. You had sex because you enjoyed having sex. You had a baby because your body is programmed to make babies. You did what snakes and scorpions do. You did what sharks and wasps do. You did what spiders and mosquitos do.

If I could give you one bit of advice, it would be to have a lobotomy. Ignorance is bliss. Being stupid is brilliant. Having higher brain functions is a curse. Being conscious and able to absorb information from the world and process it using rational thoughts is a f**king nightmare.

If you're wondering why I liked living with homeless people, it's because our footprint was much smaller. We lived small. We only consumed what we needed, and nothing more. We weren't making more arrogant ignorant greedy clones of ourselves to fill the void in our meaningless lives. We were just surviving and self-medicating for the agony of the f**ked up world.

We were very cheap, in terms of our economic, social and environmental impact. When a white middle class rich person goes haywire, they normally hurt the world a great deal. That's why it's such a great shame that the west is run by such criminal psychopaths. They'll drop bombs and starve people in order to remain quaffing champagne in their palaces. I include relatively modest homes when I say 'palaces'. Yes take a look around at your home and remember that $2 a day to keep a person alive for a year is probably the price of one of your many flat screen TVs.

So am I a hypocrite? Well, calling me one from your palatial surroundings makes you a hypocrite. You can't hypocritically accuse somebody of hypocrisy. That's ridiculous. Have you been homeless? Have you lived on less than $2 a day? No, I didn't think so. Shut the hell up and go and buy your kids an iPad.

So, what's going to happen to me? Well, my current thinking is that I'm going to finish my story and then take the final exit. I can't really see any more point in existing beyond telling this story, this cautionary tale. I'm literally wasting oxygen.

I loved being homeless in Camden Town. At least it was an honest existence. At least it was true to my values (September 2014)

Tags: #homeless #suicide #frank #capitalism #drugs #depression #alcohol #london #career #banking

This is a story about my cyclical nature...

When my tale is finally told, I hope you will understand why people enter a mood disorder cycle. It's not about broken brains. It's about abused children.

Does abuse have to mean being kiddy fiddled by your uncle? Does abuse have to mean being touched in private places? Does abuse have to mean sexual abuse? Well, everything links back to sex in some way, but the web of life is incomprehensibly complex, so I suggest you just listen for now.

I went to playgroup from the age of 3, went to school at the age of 4, and stayed in school until the age of 17. It was horrific. Every single year, my Dad did something to f**k up my chances of having any self esteem and avoiding relentless daily bullying.

Yes, I'm singling out my Dad, because he's a total cunt. My mum is loving, and has tried very hard to make her children feel loved, but she's got the shittest taste in men imaginable. My surname - Grant - comes from her ex-husband, who was a heroin addict. That's lovely. Instead of being Nick Newton - perhaps a descendent of a famous physicist - I'm Nick Grant, named after a heroin addict. Brilliant.

Keith - as I very clearly remember him telling me - does not want to be called "Dad"... "who's Dad?" he would say to me, when I was only about 3 years old and learning to talk. "I'm not Dad, I'm Keith" that's a lovely thing to say to the little boy you're looking after isn't it? That's definitely going to make them feel loved and secure. What a cunt.

I think the main problem is that my parents were never outnumbered, until my sister gave birth to my niece. The penny hadn't dropped until then, that my parents lives and disgusting lifestyle needed to change, because children had arrived. Keith was so lazy, that he sat around in a house that my Mum's Mum bought for them, drinking and smoking, and sending my Mum out to work full time in order to pay for his lifestyle. What a cunt.

Yes, my mum was the breadwinner, while my Dad was at home, telling me how resentful he was at having to rear a child. He thought he had solved the riddle of life the universe and everything, and got to take drugs, get drunk and have sex with my mum. Sadly, sex leads to children. Denying that you're a Dad isn't going to get you anywhere, except making little children very sad.

My Mum and my Granny were lovely, and I do have lots of happy memories of time spent with them. Sadly, if you're a full time working mother to pay for your lazy drug addict partner, you don't spend as much time with your child as they'd really like, especially if the main childcare is hungover or on a comedown, and saying "who's Dad?".

I wasn't really prepared for social interaction with other children. I didn't used to go on playdates or have friends over. My parents had their friends over instead. And they sat around taking Cocaine and doing jigsaws. Yes, drug taking and getting drunk were my parents passtimes, not doing things with their kid. By their own admission, they used to stick my carrycot on top of the jukebox when they were down at the pub. They definitely weren't going to let a little accident like a child get in the way of their big ambitions to be drunks and drug addicts.

What happens next is you go to school, and you don't have a frigging clue how to relate to other children. All you know is how to interact with adults who tell you to fuck off because they don't want you to interfere with their high, or they're cranky because they're hung over or on a comedown. You know how to speak relatively articulately, because you've been trying to make yourself heard and understood in an adult way - because all you know is fucked up adults - but you don't know the rules of the jungle.

If you're going to be a drunk and a drug addict, at least have a bunch of kids, so that they can play with each other when you're getting high and drunk. Being outnumbered might also make the penny drop a little earlier, that your life is now fucked, and you're going to have to make some lifestyle adjustments unless you want to fuck up innocent lives too. Is that too much to ask?

Playing on your own is no fun, and you're not learning how to socially interact with your peers. It's not normal, for the development of a child, to have no other children of similar age. Humans are social creatures. We weren't evolved to sit around getting drunk and taking drugs, which is why people's lives are destroyed by those things. We were evolved to be part of a clan or a tribe that was socially cohesive. Drugs and alcohol don't glue things together, they make things fall apart.

So when I went to playgroup and school, I really wasn't properly prepared for social interaction with other children. I remember whichever toy I picked up, somebody would indicate they wanted to play with it, and I would hand it over of course, because I could understand English and adult interactions very well. After a while it became very confusing. I didn't understand that the other children enjoyed taking toys away from me more than they enjoyed playing with them. They wanted to fight with me, to test boundaries, but I was used to the adult world of co-operation. I lost, they won, and I didn't understand why.

Yes, I 'played nice' from the very outset. I just couldn't understand why other children didn't. I expected them to be little adults like me. They'd call me names, and I'd say "why are you calling me that?" and get upset rather than calling them names back. I took things right in the feels, because I never learnt tit for tat. I never learnt retaliation. I was raised to be a liberal adult pacifist hippy, by spending all my time in the company of adults.

My Dad very much discouraged friendships. I wasn't allowed to be friends with Andrew, because he was a picky eater. I wasn't allowed to be friends with the little boy a couple of houses down the road, because he was too immature. Too immature? Are you totally fucked in the head? HE WAS A FUCKING CHILD, OF COURSE HE WAS IMMATURE.

Throughout my childhood, I was reprimanded for anything approaching childish behaviour. Yes, it's good to teach your kids good manners, but they really don't understand the subtle nuances of adult society, and things get very confusing indeed for them when you're abusing drugs and alcohol, because those things are forbidden to the child and you have surrounded these revered substances with mystery and lies.

Children are naturally inquisitive, and ask questions. When I asked my parents questions about their drugs, they lied to me, and they told me to lie to teachers and other children about their drug taking. Being the keeper of your parents secrets is very confusing as a child. It's not a responsibility that you should put on a child.

You think that photo's cool? Grow the fuck up. Drug dealers go to prison, and my Dad already had a criminal record for drug possession, so the courts were not going to go easy on him. The children of criminals often go into foster care. Being such a drug addict that you're prepared to go to prison and have your children taken into care is fucked up.

Am I building up a clear enough picture of what my parents life priorities were? Am I spelling it out in plain enough English for you to understand what the consequences of fucking with your child's life are? Am I laying out my case for where a big chunk of responsibility lies, where the proverbial buck stops?

Yes, I'm shaming my parents, but why the fuck shouldn't I. I had to guard their secrets and lies throughout my miserable childhood. Why so miserable? Well, you try being bullied every day for 12 or 13 years and see how you like it. You try having your friendships destroyed and self esteem taken away, by a total cunt of a Dad. You try dealing with selfish self-centred drunks and drug addicts instead of sisters, brothers and friends of a similar age.

I changed schools 6 times. That's 5 times more than is supposed to happen. You just can't disrupt a child's life that much without fucking up their life. Especially if you do extra stuff to fuck them up too.

Lots of kids have to wear glasses, but do all their own fathers bully them about it? How many Dads out there think it's a good idea to call your kid "4-eyes" and "brains" and take the piss and laugh at your son? Let's have a show of hands. Hands up if you think it's a good idea to bully your own children, in the same childish way that they're going to get bullied at school. Nope, wrong answer, Dad. Get to the back of the class, in the corner, wearing the dunce hat. See the headmaster after school. Very disappointed with your behaviour.

All kids get bullied to some extent, or at some time or other. When it's relentless, at home and at school, around the clock... yes, life is fucking shit. I can't express to you just how shit life is when you're being bullied. I used to look forward to getting sick. I used to be overjoyed when I was throwing up such vast quantities of projectile vomit that it was pretty clear that I wouldn't be able to be in school without getting chunks of half-digested carrot all over the classroom.

I used to cry and cry and cry, when I got well. I remember breaking down crying on my way to school, after a day or two off. I was so upset that my parents actually decided to let me have another day off, which I clearly remember with crystal clarity as one of the moments of my childhood where I felt pure relief flood my entire body. I felt a 100 tonne weight of anxiety be lifted from my entire body.

One thing that my Dad used to do, was to price everything in terms of bags of drugs, rather than pound notes or the abstract measure of child happiness. Yes, child happiness is hard to measure, especially using bags of drugs. Let me give you an example. At primary school, it was close enough to cycle there as a little boy. My Dad is very clever, and he figured out that girls bikes are cheaper than boys bikes, because lots of Dads want their little girls to be like little boys, and they buy them bikes that they never ride. This oversupply of girls bikes creates a great opportunity to save the price of a bag of drugs, for merely the immeasurable cost of childhood happiness.

Yes, my Dad has done that a few times. Don't give your kids enough pocket money to be able to buy a bike, because pocket money is the same money as should be used to buy bags of drugs. Instead, you can save the money and buy more bags of drugs by simply buying the cheaper girls bike, or stealing bikes. Yes, stealing bikes is the cheapest way to get a bike of all, and it leaves the most money for bags of drugs. Drugs come first. Childhood happiness can't even be measured on the all-important drug bag scale.

Do you know what happens when you send your kid to school riding a stolen girls bike? One of them even had a FUCKING BASKET ON IT FOR FUCK'S SAKE. What a cheapskate drug addict cunt. It's a reasonable presumption that mature adults might think it a little eccentric, or even consider it to be a conversation starter. For children IT'S THE END OF YOUR FUCKING LIFE. Do you think kids forget that kind of shit? The bullies at school certainly didn't FOR THE ENTIRE FUCKING TIME I WAS AT SCHOOL YOU CUNT.

If a trick's worth pulling, it's worth pulling a couple of times. Yes, my Dad managed to pull this stunt a few times and RUIN MY ENTIRE FUCKING CHILDHOOD.

It's a Catch 22. Without a bike you can't go and see your friends and get to school independently. But then the FUCKING CUNT hasn't even thought about how you need to get to school anyway. Did I tell you that the FUCKING CUNT bought a house at the top of a massive hill nowhere near any fucking busses, in the middle of fucking nowhere?

But it's OK, because I'm not upset about having had to go through living hell. It's not affected me at all. On the surface, everything seems absolutely cunting fine. I look, to the untrained eye, like I'm well adjusted, successful, happy and content in life. Cunt.

Hmmmm. Could edit this. Not going to.

There's the smug prick. I would only piss on him if he was on fire because he seems to be an OK granddad to my niece. What a piece of shit. He only finally sorted his fucking life out once and for all when my niece was born (photo circa 1995)

Tags: #parents #bullying #childhood #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about a split personality...

This is 1 Churchill Place and this is Nick: the schoolboy who leads an exciting double life. For when Nick eats a banana, an amazing transformation takes place. Nick is BANANAMAN, ever alert for the call to action.

I'm not actually Bananaman, but I do eat porridge and a banana every morning. I'm also ever alert for the call to action. I wasn't born to follow.

In Silicon Valley, and with the top people in banks, there is an arms race. But it's not with weapons, it's with smart people. If you let good people go to your competitors, they will beat you. It's that simple. High performance teams make stuff happen.

There's no point in being part of a race to the bottom. I was really impressed by the way that Barclays have embraced the modern software development paradigm. They hired bright young people and allowed them to get on and make some damn high quality software. They let them run their projects with a risk-based approach and using Agile best practices.

I got a bit cross with a couple of people at Barclays, who were straddling the line. They were neither demanding quality and an old-school attention to detail, nor were they very talented or quick. However, the bulk of the developers were amazing and a pleasure to work with. There is always dead wood in any organisation. The problem comes when somebody gets promoted to a position of incompetency.

There's no sense in bluffing your way into a role you can't handle. If your skills aren't up to it, you can't handle the pressure or you just don't have relevant experience, stay away... you're just going to land you, your team and your company in trouble. I've never stepped away from a role in a particularly elegant way, but I haven't dug myself a hole either. I hate people who make themselves into a key man dependency when they're incompetent.

Fail fast. Move fast and break things. There's no sense in spending years and years doing something you're not very good at. I hate the way that we all need to push for promotions in order to get a pay rise and not be on the breadline, but people end up being promoted to positions they're hopelessly unqualified for, because all they're good at doing is kissing ass to clamber up the greasy pole.

Yes, if I had an hour to do some actual work or an hour to make myself more indispensable, or improve my promotion prospects, you can guess which one I'm more economically incentivised to do.

The way that corporations are run encourages people to delegate the things that they're supposed to do, and concentrate on things that only further their personal objectives, which are in direct conflict with the organisational needs. The most junior team members do all the work, while their managers concentrate on making themselves look good, and scrapping over the few promotions.

This adversarial system is flawed from the outset.

Look at how compliant these suit wearing office workers are, patiently queuing to get on a packed tube train to take them back to their miserable tiny home that they hardly spend any time in. They spend all their time pushing paper around in order to service the mortgage, which is a millstone around their neck.

God forbid that you end up procreating. Then your nuts really are in the vice. You will be having to sprint along on that treadmill to service all your debt, working to worship angry bawling midgets that are hungry and have relentless needs for clothes that they will soon outgrow or be ruined by this decadent practice of 'playing'. Ha! F**k those little sh1ts! They get to 'play' all day... how nice for them. Bastards.

Well, there's a way to punish those little sh1ts for being born. Yes, they should have a taste of what it's like to have not kept your cock in your trousers. Yes, they should be forced to go to an office like environment. No play for them. I have to sit at a desk all day, bored out of my mind, so the fruit of my loins has to too.

That'll teach the kids for being so stupid as to give birth to themselves, without a care in the world for how they're going to pay the mortgage, dress themselves or feed themselves. There's a rumour that babies can't even forage for food or kill an antelope. Who the hell do this race of midgets think they are? Arrogantly expecting to be wheeled around in carriages, and getting to gorge themselves on milk swelled breasts all day. That looks like a jolly nice life to me. I don't get to suckle on any breasts at all in the office. Yes, I was sacked last time I did that.

I'm rather patiently waiting for the day that I'm big enough to go to school. Mummy says that when I'm all grown up I will get to go and study with the other children. I will get to read books all day, and write poems and sh1t. Yes, that sounds like good fun. I would like to do that all day. At the moment all I do is follow grown ups around and get told off when they make mistakes. I do tests that they know the answers to, but they don't like my answers.

I see that the grown ups like to drink coffee and alcohol. I'm too young to have those things, but they look like a lot of fun. I would like to have those things. It looks like the coffee allows you to concentrate on doing your job, rather than having to deal with the existential angst of executing pointless tasks. It looks like the alcohol allows you to deal with the anxiety of never quite being able to break free from a system that is engineered to break the will of the sheep-like people, and force them into a system of meek compliance.

Yes, I think I will like it when I become a student, and I will get to lie around drinking booze and coffee, and pontificating about life the universe and everything. Reading books and writing is a lot more fun than being told what to do by grown ups. Mummy says I'm smart so I deserve to get to sit around and be complemented for coming up with the same answers to questions as the grown ups.

I can see now that the master plan is working very well. I can see now that studying history, politics and having mastery of the English language, has led us to this point of great enlightenment. Yes, I can see how amazing society has become since we started getting everybody to read the same books and work in the same offices doing the same kinds of things. I can see now that this kind of groupthink has been a very successful experiment. Life is so amazing now.

I'm so disappointed that I didn't come up with the very clever idea of studying other people's mistakes in order to be able to be an expert on mistakes. I'm clearly not very clever, because I'm not very good at making mistakes. Except the mistake of accidentally doing successful stuff. Yes, I should be like the grown ups who study mistakes and then copy them. I'm not very good at following their example. I'm not a very good student of failure.

I stupidly keep building stuff that works. I stupidly keep making a profit. I stupidly keep succeeding. How silly of me. Yes, that's clearly not the way the world works. We need to have failure. We need to have fighting. We need to have war. Success is not an option in the modern, enlightened world.

Let's not listen to the successful people who are proven and are making things work without violence and conflict. No, let's glorify the bullies and the warmongers instead. We should definitely have a society run by failures, run by those who can't make things work, harbour ideas of violence and vengeance to compensate for their inadequacies. Those are the kinds of leaders I want.

I see now that we are choosing just the very kinds of leaders that we really need. The kinds of people who want to go into positions of authority, responsibility... they are invariably the kinds who are not on a total ego-trip and grinding an axe, have a chip on their shoulder. They definitely don't have micropenises and some kind of small-man syndrome.

Yes, all the warmongering. Getting your willies out, I mean getting your guns out. Yes, it's very macho. It's definitely not overcompensation for your inadequacies. I'm definitely full of much more admiration for leaders who advocate violence. I'm definitely in favour of a global society based on bashing each other over the head with clubs. I'm definitely not in favour of diplomacy and peace. War is the answer, but I've been too stupid to see it before.

How foolish of me not to see the brilliance in the idea that we can all have pointy sticks and we can just attack each other and take whatever we want. I'm really looking forward to living in a cave again and foraging for nuts and berries and trying not to be eaten by a tiger. It sounds a lot more exciting than working in an office.

Yes, working in an office is pretty boring. I'd much rather be bullying somebody with my pointy stick. Especially if I have a pointy stick but they don't. Yes if I get to poke them with my pointy stick with no fear them being able to poke me back, because I'm the only one with a pointy stick, then I'll feel like the king of the world, which is the whole reason for the existence of the Earth and humanity, right? The whole reason the entire planet and the human race was created was as a massive entertainment system for me, right? I'm entitled to go out poking whoever I want with my pointy stick because it's fun.

The whole reason the world exists is so that I can have fun. It's a playground, and I'm allowed to play. I'm bored in my job and I want the attention of the other children and I like playing games, so I'm going to sharpen a stick and go and poke the most vulnerable weak person I can find. That will make me feel good.

I have no words to describe just how boring it is moving money around for pointy stick manufacturers. I have no words to describe just how boring it is never getting to play with those pointy sticks. I have no words to describe just how boring it is to never get to poke anybody with a pointy stick.

I've studied the history of poking people with pointy sticks and it sounds like a lot of fun. There's a lot of hope & glory in poking people with pointy sticks. It sounds like a barrel of laughs. It sounds like a game of soldiers.

So what the hell am I doing flying a desk when I could be flying a drone. I'm good with computers. I used to like computer games. Poking people with pointy sticks makes you feel better about yourself. What's not to like? I think I've found my perfect career.

It must take a lot of bravery to sit behind a screen, pressing buttons, in the full knowledge that the remote system that you are controlling that is poking people with pointy sticks, completely protects you from any physical pain or risk of injury or death. Yes, that's a really brave thing, I think, to sit playing war games on a computer.

Whether the people being poked by your pointy stick are real or they're simulated, that doesn't really matter. It's just that the graphics are probably more realistic in the simulator. I like the way the heads explode when you shoot them in the simulator. I don't like the physics of reality. They say that the simulated people don't even have families. Where's the fun in killing some computer simulated person who doesn't even have a family?

It gets boring after a while, killing simulated people. Time to drop some real bombs. The physics in reality isn't as good, but at least you're killing real people with real families. At least there is real human suffering. We haven't figured out how to simulate human suffering yet, or maybe nobody is particularly interested in experiencing simulated human suffering. Maybe there's no money in simulated human suffering. Maybe there is only money in real human suffering, for the manufacturers of pointy sticks.

That is all.

Frankie is well trained. Look at him doing his filing. It's a File-o-Frank (April 2007)

Tags: #frankie #politics #computing #banking #career #london

This is a story about psychoactive substances...

Here's an example of the kind of run-of the-mill parties I used to throw for all my friends. I once spent £700 on sparkling wine during one particularly lavish garden party. I think I was a bit of a 'lush'.

Drinking culture is sometimes celebrated. Certainly throughout the City, we thought it pretty normal to be slightly sloshed at our desks after lunch quite often. After work was carnage. A copious amount of alcohol was consumed by all involved.

I worked for HSBC for a little over 4 years, and JPMorgan for a further 3 and a bit, before my body really needed a break. At my leaving do I was downing shots at 4am with an alcoholic who later needed a liver transplant. The consumption was unchecked and rampaged out of control.

So, I've not been drinking for 52 days and I don't go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, so I can't be an alcoholic, can I? The definition of somebody who is an addict or an alcoholic is somebody who can't stop taking a substance, despite the detrimental effects on their life. Seeing as I don't drink or take drugs, I can't be an alcoholic or an addict. Quod erat demonstrandum.

In fact, I'm not somebody you normally meet. I don't drink tea, coffee or other caffeinated beverages, such as Coca-Cola and Red Bull. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I don't take any medication. I don't take any legal or illegal drugs. That makes me a real oddity.

People like to say "I can quit anytime I want" and are particularly adept at avoiding their most obvious addiction... caffeine. I've written about it before, but it's worth reminding people... you're probably addicted to caffeine but in denial. You need to give it up for over 3 days to really experience withdrawal, because you have reached steady blood-plasma concentration which means that it will take that long before you start feeling the withdrawal and cravings.

So, basically, don't lecture me on addiction until you reach the level of clean living that I have achieved. I'm not lecturing you. I'm just giving you the facts and telling you why I won't listen to a hypocritical word you say until you prove your 'willpower' to me.

On the topic of mood stability: I self-medicated successfully for years using caffeine to fight depression & somnolence, especially during winter. I used alcohol to calm my anxiety and racing thoughts, and treat my insomnia. I had a high-powered job and successful career throughout, so it's hardly like anybody can argue that I was not extremely adept at self-medicating.

Except that one day, my body decided it had enough. I was struck with extreme fatigue and depression that was completely debilitating. If you say "oh just get out of bed and stop complaining" after somebody has worked as many hours as I have done, don't be surprised if you get punched in the face.

It's not a competition. Except that it is. There's an arms race in the City. Who can stay later than their boss to try and impress and get that big bonus. And then when everyone has stayed later than the boss, the game is to stay later than each other. How late can you send an email to the boss, basically saying "just leaving the office now [you should know that I won the prize of working hardest]".

Sadly, that's pretty much how the bonuses and promotions get decided... who's worked the longest hours and raised awareness of just how hard they've been working, louder than anybody else. If you want to get to the top of the pyramid scheme you have to clamber over the other clawing bodies in the pit with you.

Getting ahead in your career is also dependent on how well you handle your ale. Yes, there is a lot of machismo in drinking culture. Going home and not going out drinking can damage your career. You need to be seen to be seen. You have to wait until everybody is so drunk that nobody remembers you leaving, before you slope off home.

So, between strong coffee and lots of beer & wine, that pretty much fuelled the first 11 years of my career. It certainly worked, in terms of pay & promotions, but it cost me a lot in terms of health. Not obvious health, like having to have a liver transplant luckily, but more subtle than that. My body & brain are just not very good at managing without stimulants and depressants to manage my mood... I've been drinking heavily with workmates since the age of 17.

So, if you think I'm less of a person for struggling with my moods and you are looking for an obvious thing to point the finger at, you are going to be disappointed if you want to point at drink & drugs, because I'm abstinent from both.

You might also want to consider your own relationship with alcohol and caffeine before you brand any labels on anybody. You would be surprised to learn about your own 'addictive personality'.

There's actually no such thing as an addictive personality. We are all programmed to like food, sex, gambling. Our brains are all affected by plant alkalis and alcohol and other substances that will cross the blood-brain barrier. You're no different from me.

That is all.

Cheers! (July 2009)

Tags: #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about fear of death...

I grew up terrified of everything. Electricity, dogs, mealtimes, fairground rides... wait, what? Mealtimes?!?!

Yes, mealtimes were very stressful when I was a little boy. My parents had been to India and they thought it would be cool to give me very spicy food. It didn't taste that spicy to them because - I might have mentioned this - but they were my parents and they had been to India. If you are an adult, in India, eating spicy food, you get used to it.

Also, if you are parents, and you have been to India, that means you are past puberty, hopefully past teenage years, hopefully past school, hopefully you've been working, plus 9 months, plus 3 or so years for your son to start eating solid food. All that time, you are losing your taste buds... your mouth is getting less sensitive to capscicum, which means it hurts less when you eat it.

If you force feed chilli to a young child, they will be pretty anxious about meal times.

I ended up vomiting before every meal, because of anxiety.

I remember waking up in hospital, malnourished. I got to eat cornflakes, not chilli. Eating cornflakes is nice. Eating chilli isn't. They even had milk on them. Normally I wasn't allowed liquids with my meal. Milk is quite a nice thing to have if your mouth is burning hot from chilli. I wonder if that's why I wasn't allowed to drink it with my meal?

Anyway, I'm sure my parents meant well. I mean, they gave me food after all. It's not like I starved. Except when I did. Yes, there was that time that I ended up in hospital, because I was starving. We all make mistakes I guess. Like starving our children. Oops.

Guess I'm just a fussy eater.

Well, just about the only things I don't eat today are sprouts and grapefruit. I've had a test and apparently I'm a supertaster, which means I'm picky, but not fussy. I can force myself to eat almost anything now... I was well trained as a child. I have even learned to like the taste of some things I used to find revolting, like Badoit mineral water, Indian Tonic water and olives.

I'm trying my best to forgive, forget and move on. If this blog is getting a bit dark and bitter, I'm sorry.

It's also a bit weird, doing my private journal/diary in public. Weird, yes. I'm owning that as part of my identity. It's been a term that has been thrown at me abusively in the past. I own it now. It's mine. I'm weird. Yes me, I'm a weirdo, hello!

An anagram of weird is wired. I guess I'm just wired a little differently. I can taste things that other people can't. I don't see dead people, but perhaps I see things from a different perspective from you. Perhaps I see things from an equally valid, but distinct and unique perspective. Would that be possible? I hope so, because I like being me. I have tried to be the version of a person that somebody else imagines is possible to exist. It lands me in hospital every time. I'm not doing it again.

I refuse to be anybody other than me. No. I'm not doing it again. Go to hell. I've been there and I don't like it. It's your turn to go to hell.

Eternal damnation? Hell no, I won't go.

I fed Frankie the cat even when I was starving to death. Animals and children are innocent victims sometimes. We need to use our adult brains and protect them (October 2013)

Tags: #childhood #parents #weird #privacy