This is a story about engaging your mouth before your brain...

Most of what I write is not stuff that is ordinarily shared by people. We bottle a lot of stuff up, and perhaps with good reason, but what happens if your general demeanour means you're a fairly open book?

Sure, it's true that some of my life experiences - mental health problems, drug abuse, homelessness, being arrested by the police - are not things that your ordinary middle-class professional will hopefully ever experience. It is therefore logical that I should keep all these things hush-hush. Pretend they never happened.

I don't think that privacy and anonymity is necessarily helpful, judging by the direction that life is headed for many people who I speak to. We know there is a mental health epidemic, with millions of people laid low with depression, anxiety and a huge spectrum of illnesses affecting the mind. If we don't talk about this, and share our experiences, we suffer in silence.

It seems to me as if Psychiatry has failed. Pills, powders and potions have failed to cure the ailments of our very souls. Something is wrong, broken, with society, and medicine hasn't yet come up with the cures... probably because we are treating symptoms, not root causes.

It's been a theory of mine that we were never evolved as a species to live in such close quarters with one another. Open plan offices and tiny cramped apartments in overcrowded cities certainly make me feel like a lemming: compelled to throw myself off a cliff. It really doesn't help that so many service sector jobs are so soul destroying. Moving paper or electronic money around for the mega wealthy is most of what we do in the rich nations. It's not growing carrots or building houses.

Sure, some of us are tortured artists and entertainers. Some of us create organic artisan jam, or dog's milk yoghurt, or run a creative digital agency where we wear unfashionable clothes and stupid facial hair and ride fixed-speed bicycles to work. These, most surely, are the last days of a dying civilisation.

They say you should never get too close to an iceberg, because they can flip over unexpectedly. You might be rather pleased to be part of the top 1% or even 5%, but while you're sticking up at the top, there's a huge mass under the water beneath. Sooner or later, the massive body of ice that's been held underwater rises up, and the top of the iceberg is plunged into the freezing sea.

The motto of Über is "everyone's private driver" but how can we all have a jet-set A-list celebrity lifestyle? There simply isn't enough landmass to create enough helipads for everybody to be flying around by private helicopter, chauffeur driven around the place, pampered and flattered at every turn. Technology can't make us all rich, famous and able to have an impossibly high standard of living, despite its promises.

With our MacBook Pro and our high-quality digital camera etc. we all feel like a writer, a photographer, an artist. Facebook gives us the impression that people love looking at photos of us, so we must be glamour models. Twitter turns us all into bloggers, preachers, with our followers... our congregation.

There was a time when you could quit your job and probably make a good living selling cup cakes, setting up a trendy delicatessen or being a life coach. I'm not sure if those people who followed their dreams and quit the rat race are happy, but there's certainly not any opportunity to do it today. Things are so competitive. How many cup cakes have you got to sell, in order to have a salary comparable with somebody who shuffles paper around their desk and tries to look busy and important in the office, but is just a tiny cog in a big wasteful machine that doesn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

I'm mortgaging my privacy. I'm selling my soul. By making public every little tiny detail about my private life, including my massive f**kups, I'm potentially headed up a one-way street. If I achieve any kind of infamy, then I'm basically screwed, in terms of re-entering the world of the wage-slave drones.

So, I've got the best part of 6,000 Twitter followers in the space of 6 months. Do you think that translates to pounds in my pocket? Do you think that taking the unprecedented step of writing nearly 200,000 words about a fairly spectacular life implosion, would change my life significantly? Well, the ship has sailed for anybody hoping to get an easy ride, I'm afraid.

I like what I've written. I would defend it, to some extent. It serves as a permanent public record of not only what I've been through in the past, but more importantly, there is a subtle recording of what I was going through during the whole time I've been blogging. You can read my emotions, my moods, the challenges, the stresses... in-between the lines of what's written down.

I'm starting to be accused of being self-indulgent, self-absorbed, but why shouldn't I have this? Why shouldn't I be allowed to scream and wail and tantrum a bit, if I had to be the sensible grey-suited career guy, with the good job and an impressive CV, who had the mortgage and saved money for a rainy day and got married and did everything by the f**king book like I was supposed to. I deferred gratification like a son of a bitch, and there was no f**king pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cake is a lie.

How many people are discontented? How many people are struggling? Not only struggling with stress and poverty and unpleasant things happening in their lives, but also struggling with the injustice of things, the pointlessness of some make-work wanky job that's completely useless to humanity. Or perhaps the work they can get is just so completely degrading and poorly paid it's not even worth working at all. You might as well just get off your head on drugs and alcohol and dribble while you play computer games or watch terrible trashy TV.

How many kids are getting smashed out of their skulls on cannabis, skunk and legal high smoking blends? How many kids are consuming dangerous amounts of cheap alcohol, simply to become highly intoxicated? What is it about life that these kids want to escape? Why aren't they sharing the anguish, the inner turmoil? Why do they retreat inwards, under the heavy sedation of intoxicating drugs and alcohol?

Now Microsoft and Facebook are hitting headlines, saying they're working on chat bots. The iPhone has Siri, which is supposed to be a kind of artificially intelligent digital assistant, that can understand what you ask it to do, and try and help you. People are delighted when it turns out that you can ask Siri to beatbox, and it will kinda do it, in a weird kind of way.

Why would we be wasting our time talking to computers, when we could be talking to each other? I wrote before about us sharing 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. Do we not keenly feel the loss of that connection with real people, who can get in contact and try to make us feel less alone with our problems and our existential crises?

No person is an island, and the isolating existence of interacting more with apps and websites and software in general, instead of with each other is a worrying trend. Ok, so I'm bucking that by providing a veritable brain dump of sharing, which is much akin to verbal diarrhoea, but at least it's putting stuff out there, where there's a chance I can get some help from my friends.

There's obviously a bystander effect, where nobody knows quite what to do when somebody starts having a public meltdown. People just aren't supposed to act like this. Where is my stoicism? Where is my stiff upper lip? Where is my shame? Where is my embarrassment and my intense desire for total privacy?

Nobody wants to be first, and people also worry that they're going to end up feeling responsible. Everybody feels they're already struggling so much to keep their own shit together, that anybody else bleating on about their own struggles should shut the hell up. Look after number one and keep yourself to yourself. Don't you think that could be the root cause of this horrible isolated existence that causes so much damage to our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our mental health... leading to depression, stress, anxiety, breakdowns, self harm and suicides?

We're in such a hurry to label, to judge, to jump to conclusions. We like to bracket people and problems as quickly as we can. Somebody becomes known as a drama queen, or we tire of their depressed demeanour, the dark clouds that follow them around. We start to stop inviting the killjoy out, or generally interacting with them. Let them wallow in self-pity, right? I'm sure social services or somebody from a government service will step in before they do something stupid. It's somebody else's job. Not my problem. I've got enough going on with my own stressful, meaningless, empty, unfulfilling life that I hate and I'm depressed about.

I'm just typing now. The taps are open and the words are flooding out. I have relaxed my anal sphincter and a torrent of liquid brown verbal diarrhoea is jetting out of my arse and into the toilet bowl of the internet, and nobody gives a shit, because we are all sinking with shit up to our necks. There is a whole World Wide Web of shit out there, and we're all just pumping out this useless effluent into the cesspool of human emotional pain.

Do you think I'm going to look back on this frantic period of writing and recoil with horror when I read it back? I certainly expect that I will be cupping my face in my hands, saying to myself "what the fuck was I thinking?" but it must be about as close as it's possible to get to knowing what somebody's thinking, reading this shite.

I thought to myself that I won't hold back, I won't censor, edit or filter, because I can always tear this down with a click of the mouse. A stroke of the keyboard, and all this is gone and I can deny all knowledge that it ever existed. It's the digital photo that you deleted off your camera or smartphone... those shameful ones and zeros are gone forever.

But you know what? I've not felt the urge to take anything down. I've not felt the pangs of regret at sharing stuff that makes me look really bad. I've given the world everything it needs to pigeon-hole me, to categorise me, to bracket me, to judge me, to dismiss me with a label or an over-simplification of my entire existence.

That's what we want, isn't it? Computer credit scores, and computerised personality profiling, and a computer simulation of a real person, that responds in a predictable and easy to understand way. We don't want real lives, with all their messiness and unfathomable complexity. We don't want to get to know each other, but have to live with the fact that we still don't really know each other. We don't even know ourselves, even if you're an irritatingly self-absorbed little prick like I am, who self indulgently wallows in a world of introspection and deep self-examination.

Show me some more videos of funny cats. Distract me from the banality of my existence. Please don't remind me of the humanity that my fellow Earth residents possess or incite any kind of sympathetic or empathetic response in me. I'm quite wrapped up in my own world of pain and disappointment, boredom and stress. I want to pretend like technology and the advancement of civilisation is going to wave its magic wand and even though I'm fornicating with a person I'm nearly totally revulsed by the more I get to know them, in a filthy home in an overcrowded town, on a hopelessly poisoned planet, everything will be fucking rosy for the screaming brats that end up getting spawned.

What the hell is this anyway? This is what happens when the filter gets switched off. This is my life, with no filter.

I think I was born with no filter.

Look: I bought new socks. I'm sharing the private details of my socks life. Every time I have socks, I'm going to post it up on social media. Socks is supposed to be a taboo subject. Always practice safe socks.

Tags: #privacy #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #socialmedia

This is a story about taking on too much...

I'm trying to sell the rights to one book, while writing another, and a blog, plus keep my eyes peeled for any easy contract work, plus try and find some missing VAT from the last quarter because the bill is eye-wateringly huge, plus get my annual acccounts up to date, which requires resetting my Barclays PIN and then importing a shittonne of data into Freeagent.

I'm also using my Braintree credit card merchant account to cycle my debts and avoid cripling interest payments. Oh, and I have to pay my rent soon, which at least I have the cash for this month. Really need to deal with the bills though.

The path of least resistance would be to go get another IT contract, but I would describe that particular channel as 'shit creek'. At least I feel alive, writing, even if responses thus far have been negative, apart from my whopping 4 sales on Amazon.

I read something written by my friend Julian today. I think it illustrated the gulf between me (blogging for 6 months, written 12,000 words of a book with a target of 60,000) versus him (blogging for years, author of a decent book that's selling well).

It's interesting how my life has been thrown into disarray by the simple act of dropping a phone in a bath. I could use my old one (pictured) but I mainly keep it for posterity. It's 8 years old.

8 years. What have I achieved in 8 years? That's a depressing thought.

I look at all my friends with their happy little families, all cuddled up in bed having story time or sleepy time, and I realised I fucked up somewhere. My flatmate Matt is one of the best friends you could ever ask for. I fell out with John, because his idea of winning is to undermine your opponent. I fell out with my Dad when he lost the use of the English language and the penny never dropped that at some point, respect has to become a 2-way street. Everybody else is just busy with their lives, and I've not kept pace, I lagged behind, chasing black widows and drugs.

What's to be done? There is a mountain of practical matters I can be busying myself with. Apart from my commitment to Matt to meet my share of the rent & bills, my gut feel is just to f**k off with a rucksack on my back. Perhaps to test the water, I should take Marine Girl on on her kind offer of the loan of her camper van. I've been within the M25 for far too long.

London kind of loses its magic when you live in a gated community on an 'island' (The Isle of Dogs).

I've made a right mess of things and it's going to take a lot of work to getting things back to pristine condition, but I can vaguely remember when everrything was shipshape and working like clockwork. Sure, there was boredom, an urge to create ripples in the calm water, but not this... not this churning thrashing shipwreck that threatens to engulf me.

Anyway, melodramatic as always.

See you in hospital.

Tags: #london #career

This is a story about bridge burning...

How many of us are afraid to declare the causes we support, for fear of impacting our professional reputation. Does supporting mental health and homelessness charities make me look somehow less corporate, and consequently, make me less employable? Does the fact that I have even experienced these things first hand make me unemployable?

In fact, if my employment options became coincidentally curtailled at the same time as I have started blogging, despite a successful full-time career of some 18+ years, it would not take a brain of Britain to recognise that this must be because of institutional discrimination, which is probably illegal.

There is absolutely nothing to suggest that I am any less able than any other candidate in the job market, and in fact, my history makes me more of a 'catch' to a potential employer: the man who has nothing has nothing to lose. Plus I have been 'stress tested' to the limit and beyond. I know exactly where those limits are, and I can empathise with my colleagues when they are under stress and pressure.

When 'sh1t goes bad' who do you really want in the bunker with you? People who have never been in that kind of situation before, and are therefore an unknown quantity, or people who know their personal breaking point.

I've been in some hair-raising situations, both through choice and by accident. Challenging yourself, and being challenged by things that are out of your control, teaches you how to handle stressful situations. A certain amount of training, discipline and drills will prepare your muscle memory to pull the "parachute rip-cord" to use a layman's term. But how do you deal with the long plane journey up to 13,000ft? How do you mentally prepare to throw yourself out of a perfectly servicable aeroplane?

Worse still, how do you prepare yourself for people yelling at you and telling you you're an idiot? People do this because they are scared and have lost faith in your leadership. People believe that pain and fear can be magically taken away by those in positions of authority.

Losing authority can be dangerous, especially if you are the leader in a dangerous place. Generally, most people don't know what to expect when they are entering an extreme environment: the mountains and the sea (the poles and the deserts too, but I don't know much about those places, yet).

Let me tell you about crampons. These are a spiked device that attach to your feet, so that you can move safely on ice. I always shake my head in disbelief at people who are blunting an expensive pair of crapons on rocks. If they do encounter any ice, they will certainly not be effective if they are not sharp.

Let me tell you about ropes. These long flexible cords are no use at arresting a fall unless they are attached to something solid. In order to attach a rope to a mountain, you will need a whole load of other heavy metal gear that will need to be secured to the rocks, and the rocks themselves will need to be large and heavy and generally immovable.

So, if you see climbing parties with crampons and ropes, moving on snow - in an area with no glaciers - then these things are only there as a confidence trick. The fact is, that there is very little stopping you from plunging to your death, even with ropes & crampons.

I personally, don't like to be weighed down with unnecessary gear. It's not about not being prepared. It's about recognising that I'd rather have saved the energy, so that I can use that surplus reserve of energy in order to scout ahead of my group for problems, or fetch assistance if necessary. The main thing though, is to stay within personal limits as a leader, so that when people are tired and cranky, and scared and their feet hurt and they are cold and hungry, you don't mind giving them your personal stash of candy bars, you don't mind them calling you names, you don't mind them questioning your leadership skills.

The main thing that qualifies a person as a leader is how they cope under crossfire.

The more I lead people in stressful situations, the more I learn about my personal weaknesses, the more I learn about my personal limits. Nobody should underestimate just how hard I had to be pushed before I cracked, but nobody should consider themselves such a 'rock' or a hard nut that will never crack under pressure.

My best friend and climbing partner sustained life-changing injuries in a 'freak' accident when the chockstone he was abseilling from shattered. I have only just started to deal with feelings surrounding this, so I'm not going to write any more about this today, but my thoughts always turn to him and how I have shyed away from post-accident involvement, as it was such a terrifying reminder of our mortality and fragility. I knew I couldn't do anything to turn back the hands of time. Accidents happen, and the first thing you learn in the mountains is that you can't control all the variables. It's still something that victims, survivors and those connected to them, have to come to terms with though.

Ropes have their place in sport rock climbing. Modern equipment is so good - the Petzl Grigri in this case - I don't even have to hold the rope to be honest, but old habits literally die hard (October 2012)

Addendum for climbing nerd trolls: no, I didn't leave the rope all over the place like that. I was asked to step in and belay only seconds (sic.) before the photo was taken. And, no, I'm not even standing on the rope even though it looks like I might be from the low-resolution image. Anybody who has climbed multi-pitch with me will tell you my ropework is above your nitpicking.

Tags: #climbing #leadership #homeless #career #london #banking #adventure #mentalhealth

This is a story of a growing problem in people's lives....

I can't get no sleep. That's a double negative. What I mean is, that I have a problem with insomnia, because I stare at backlit devices around-the-clock. The problem with backlit devices is that they output light that hits your retina, telling your body "it's daytime, get up".

When I'm awake, which is most of the time, I'm either at work on my laptop or working at a double or even triple monitor, looking at my phone, or looking at a TV, tablet or some other backlit device. I had even taken to reading books on my phone, which means that my body had absolutely no light-based clue as to what the f**king time is.

Unsurprisingly, this messes with your circadian rhythm, even if you eat your meals at regular intervals, and attempt to get in and out of bed at normal times. I generally keep at least 3 electronic devices within grabbing distance of my bed anyway (phone, laptop, smartwatch) and often times I fall asleep with either my laptop on my lap, or still wearing my smartwatch (which helpfully vibrates, so I can briefly wake up to check any alerts).

Photographing stuff on my phone and uploading it to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, posting check-ins and status updates, and making snide or sarcastic Tweets - from 4 different accounts, at least - has grown and grown, leading to a kind of live-blogging of my life.

To say that I was obsessed with social media would be a massive understatement. It's actually an addiction that is affecting my health. That's the generally recognised definition of an addiction: when something you enjoy is negatively affecting your life, but you are struggling or unable to reduce your dependence on the thing you are addicted to (water, oxygen and sugar don't qualify, you see, because you die without those things).

The inscription around the woolly head of our sheepie friend reads: we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Shaun would be well advised to make sure he gets enough sleep, as our immune systems can get dangerously low if we aren't giving our brains and bodies the rest they were designed to have.

Modern life gives us surprisingly few environmental cues as to what we should be doing. Here in London we have artificial lighting 24 hours a day, and there is barely a wall that doesn't have some kind of flat screen attached to it now. We really are a City that doesn't sleep. When all the bankers, lawyers and accountants go home in their taxis, just before midnight, an army of cleaners and trash collectors sweep in behind, to collect all those discarded coffee cups and sandwich wrappers.

Most offices are now 24 x 7 x 364 (you get Christmas Day off - this is the only real Bank Holiday) which have cost-saving motion sensing lighting, so you only have to glance up at one of the tall office blocks at an unusual hour, to get a rough idea of just how many people are working on some unrealistic deadline for their client.

Delivering a deal, getting the Thank Yous from your bosses and clients. High-fiving your colleagues, and adding another tombstone to your impressive collection of deals or projects that you have delivered... that's addictive too. You get a little dopamine hit every time one of those things happens, and before you know it, you find yourself going into the office 7 days a week and answering the phone to your bosses whenever they call.

In a global business, we operate a follow-the-sun model, where Europe hands over to the Americas, and then onto Australasia, and then Asia-Pacific, and then Middle East and North Africa and all too soon it's dawn again. Where those business centres are unable to fully support themselves, some poor sod carries their phone and/or BlackBerry everywhere anytime. We used to call it Crackberry when we first got our BlackBerries, and you found yourself checking email at 4am, even when you officially weren't on call.

We can't actually help ourselves anymore. Whenever we hear that bleep and see that message notification light blinking, we have been habituated into reaching out and grabbing it, no matter what time of day it is, no matter how socially inappropriate it might be, no matter what else we are attempting to do at the time.

I find myself looking at my smartphone, one-handed, while cycling along in front of 3-lanes of red London busses and trucks... what could go wrong? I find myself finishing typing a message, one-handed, while descending steps and even a ladder that leads down onto the 'beach' outside my flat. That ladder is about 80ft high. It would hurt if I fell, or maybe even kill me.

It's a similar deal with selfies. People will go to extreme lengths to get the shot. They won't even let you skydive with a camera until you have done a certain amount of jumps, because of the sensible precaution that people should concentrate on the hard ground that is approaching at 125mph, and not the killer shot that will make their Facebook profile look super awesome.

So I tried to photograph 64 painted sheep in Covent Garden yesterday. Should we be quite worried, in a pathetic hand-wringing Daily Mail reader way? Why? In the above image, some adults might have been accidentally been photographed obsessively taking photos of their children. The image is low enough resolution that you can't actually recognise people, but some idiot will still declare that their privacy has been invaded. Welcome to London, you muppets. We are one nation under CCTV.

(NOTE: I took particular care to avoid taking a photo of anybody's child, and no, that really is not your kid in the image... it's someone else who shops in Baby Gap or Mothercare or wherever, and has a blonde/mousey/dark-haired kid. Can you imagine how hard that is in Covent Garden?).

So, for my part, I am pretty much putting my entire life - not including anything I am under contractual and professional obligation to protect - into the public domain. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

Is this brave, or stupid? Will I come to regret doing this? Am I embarrassed? Yes, there is embarrassment at first, and then this grows into a feeling of being liberated. Nudity, sex etc. are still taboos, so I'm not going to take things that far, and I am mindful of other people's need for privacy so I won't be exposing anybody else to my public life laundry. Ask yourself though, why do you feel uneasy about something leaking out?

So, I believe that Cannabis is a very dangerous drug that has been allowed to enter popular culture (some conservative estimates say that 1 in 10 people are regularly 'stoning' themselves). My biggest concern is that prodromal Schizophrenia is being turned into fully blown psychotic episodes in young people. The paranoia and disordered thinking that I have witnessed in friends and relatives is disturbing.

The strains of Cannabis that have been developed with very high Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content are ruining many lives. People just sit around, eating, playing computer games, and p1ssing their youth away. These are smart and enterprising people. We are losing a whole generation, and I'm pretty angry about that.

If you walk around Camden Town, you will realise how the Marajuana plant has become a ubiquitous emblem for a huge powerful narcotics industry. The revenue and turnover involved is many many billions, in the UK alone. The corruption involved, the bribery of government officials, is a multi-agency problem that spans Border Controls, Customs, Police, Local Government, and of course, Parliament. Professor David Nutt was run out of government for trying to bring some sanity to the issues which threaten to tear our society apart.

We can't have an entire generation, whose ideas and energy have been repressed by a chemical 'straight jacket'. These stoners are too intoxicated to see that they have been conned. They might think they are part of a counter-culture revolution. From my first-hand observations, they are actually spouting complete rubbish, gawping at the TV, surrounded by empty junk food wrappers, in the stained clothes they have been wearing for days.

It sounds like I'm having a go at young people. I really am not. This is a major sadness in my life, that brilliant, bright, intelligent, energetic, beautiful young people are selling themselves so short, because they have been trapped into a cycle of poverty and intoxication, addicted to strong narcotics. What other hopes do they have? Getting a job as a young person is almost impossible.

Can't get a job without the experience. Can't get the experience without the job. That's the spine-chilling Catch 22 that is destroying a whole generation. These are your children who are being frozen out from the employment market. Take a bloody look at yourself, stop looking at the profit and turnover for your company, and ask yourself how many apprentices have you trained? How many entry-level positions have you created in your company? What are you doing to help the next generation?

Give young people the break they need in life. It could be as little as a small business loan, of a few hundred or few thousand pounds. That kind of money is pocket change compared to the value of your savings and assets. If you don't give away more than 1% of your total personal wealth (value of your house + value of your salary + value of your savings + value of your pension) every year, for the lifetime of each child that you have spawned, then you are a pathetic spineless leech on society.

My parents, tried to be as supportive as they were capable of being, and I love them. They have made mistakes, just the same as all of us, and I do recognise that being a parent is hard, and everybody is just winging it.

Tags: #childhod #addiction #mentalhealth #drugs #privacy #london #banking #career