This is a story about the undead...

I got sick. I stopped blogging. I'm sad I broke my daily writing routine. I would have hit 365 blog posts by now, if I had kept going just a little longer.

When people say "keep going, you're doing really well" the sentiment is lovely. Keep going where though? Have I been there before? Is it a good place to keep going to? Also, what does it mean to be doing really well? Does it mean superficially? Is the most important thing to look like you're doing really well, on the outside? Are you doing really well even if it's all an act?

I'm no faker; no actor.

I do however have to do something that I can keep going with, while genuinely doing really well. My last contract could not keep going. I was not doing very well.

Perhaps getting sick wasn't an inevitable consequence, but it takes more than letting off steam through personal writing to harmlessly neutralise the 'toxic' build-up, due to months of stress, boredom, lack of stimulation, lack of social interaction, no new challenges, no creative outlet etc. etc.

Equally, my solo hack-a-thons have been challenging and creative, perhaps a little over-stimulating, and have made me sick through social isolation and stress.

There must be a cool project with a team here in London that ticks the other boxes.

Anyway, I need to get well again first.

Tags: #career

This is a story about unhealthy coping mechanisms...

I've been surviving on a combination of barely concealed loathing and contempt for my job, copious amounts of alcohol, occasional use of tranquillisers and a lot of passive-aggressive blogging. It seems to have worked, according to my bank balance and my CV.

In four months, I had one day off sick and a one-week holiday. That's not bad. Just 6 working days that I was unproductive. 1 out 82 working days unwell is only 1.2%.

It's been killing me in unusual ways though.

I've been comfort eating a lot. When I first started my contract, I was munching my way through loads of sweets and nuts at my desk. I was having a great big lunch. I was having cakes and pasties. I was having super-size meals at McDonalds. I was coming home and stuffing my face with crisps, ice cream and unhealthy meals.

I've been drinking far too much. To begin with, I was picking up a bottle of wine on my way home, every single day. I switched to beer because I could drink more of it, but there would be less alcohol in it. There's 94ml of alcohol in your average bottle of white wine. There's 75ml of alcohol in 3 cans of lager, even though the beer is double the volume. Then, things got out of control briefly. I was having two bottles of wine, or 6 cans of beer. The alcohol was a real problem, but then so was the job. Sobering up at my desk was a way of getting through the day.

Early on in my contract, I decided that I wasn't going to blog at work. I wanted to do my best to look busy. I didn't even want to surf the web and read the news websites that I like. I certainly didn't want to be looking at Facebook on my phone all day long. However, that just made things worse. Getting through the empty boring days was excruciating agony. By the time I got home, I was so relieved, but so stressed out, that I felt I needed alcohol to relax and face the next day.

Then, I started to read the news. I found myself constantly clicking refresh, willing something to happen. The summer months are fairly dreadful anyway. The politicians have gone off on holiday, the markets are quiet. Not a lot was going on. Brexit provided a very unhealthy obsession for a while, and I took great delight in trolling the closet racists and xenophobes. Post-Brexit was quite anti-climactic, and just tragic.

I decided that the only way that I was going to stay sane was to write 3 times a day. I was briefly mailing short stories that I was writing to a couple of friends. They helped to keep me sane by being the willing recipients of my bleak allegorical tales of wage slavery: read Alan the Alcoholic if you want to know what I mean.

Finally, I decided I would allow myself to blog at work. I had the additional problem of being told I could no longer use my personal MacBook and I would have to have some piece of shit PC "because data security" or whatever. Anyway, I then didn't have access to my photo library - I try to use images that I own the copyright for - and I didn't have Photoshop to be able to make high quality edits. There's also a slight worry about what kind of corporate spyware is watching what I'm doing.

Somehow, I've nearly limped through to the end of my contract, and I even managed to work my notice period, which is something I haven't done for 6 or 7 years. I'm even getting a couple of leaving dos, as opposed to being escorted off the premises by security (that's never actually happened, but things haven't been wrapped up 'neatly' in recent years).

Obviously, I'm on really dodgy ground, because I'm going to be looking for a new contract in a fortnight or so, and I suppose prospective new employers could stumble on my Twitter profile, Facebook page or this blog. So, to be sensible, I probably have to blog "nicey nicey" for a couple of weeks, so that all the juicy gossip is buried deeper than most miserable corporate drones would ever dig.

I'm not sure what the magic formula is for recovery from clinical depression / major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, substance abuse (dual diagnosis), borderline personality disorder, functional alcoholism and all the other labels that get bandied around. However, I'm pretty sure that it looks like this:

• An absolute imperial fucktonne of cash. I mean LOADS.
• Rest & recuperation. I don't just mean a couple of weeks. We're talking months or years
• Surround yourself with addicts and people with mental health problems. Nobody else 'gets' it
• Cut horrible toxic people out of your life
• No compromise
• Force yourself to do things you don't like very much
• Do something that requires discipline and routine, and stick with it for months, if not years
• Set yourself some achievable goals, where you're in control

That last one is probably the most important. I absolutely love the fact that I've been blogging for over a year, and I'm on track to write 365 blog posts and 450,000 words in less than 13 months. I've blogged from psychiatric hospital. I've blogged from San Francisco. I've blogged from a desert island off the coast of North Africa. I've blogged through a couple of projects from hell. I've blogged through depression. I've blogged through addiction. I've blogged through isolation. I've blogged through loneliness. I've blogged through suicidal thoughts and self harm.

The only thing I haven't quite done yet is to blog through happiness and contentment, but either that's coming or blogging is keeping me trapped in a certain mindset and stopping me moving on with my life.

I don't think writing like this is keeping me stuck in a rut. I can't imagine my life without writing now. Writing has become such a part of me. I'm more a writer than anything else. There's nothing else I live for, as much as writing. There's nothing else that I put as much passion and energy into. There's nothing else I'm as enthusiastic about.

I guess for many people, work is what defines them. "What do you do?" is the classic middle-class party icebreaker question, when meeting new people. What do you even say if you hate what you do, or you're flailing around to find something new? What should I say, on Thursday, when I'm out of a job again?

If I tell people I'm an IT consultant, that's slightly misleading, because that's a thing that I do just to get money when I'm desperate, and I won't even be consulting for any clients on Thursday, or for at least a fortnight or so after that.

However, I'm not going to stop writing when I finish my contract. I can't see me ever stopping writing, now I've started. What would I do with myself? How would I structure my day, without writing?

Obviously, writing is not a panacea, and it's a dangerous strategy to turn yourself into an open book. So many people will gleefully abuse your honesty, in order to gain a competitive advantage over you, put you down. So many people are looking for an excuse not to hire you, or to sack you. I'm giving my enemies all the ammunition they could possibly want.

However, isn't there something poetically wonderful about loading the gun, handing it to your enemy and turning your back on them? If they choose to shoot you in the back, with the bullet that you loaded in the weapon that you gave to them, isn't that going to eat away at them for the rest of their life?

Isn't there something exciting about deciding to say things that you're not allowed to say because of the conspiracy of silence? People are so afraid about becoming unemployable, and tainting their professional reputations. I almost want to start linking to this blog from my LinkedIn. Of course, every time I write the word "LinkedIn" the higher up the Google search index I will climb when somebody types "nick grant linkedin" into the little search box.

I'm not sure how much the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine has given my life some useful structure. I think, on balance, it's been more damaging to my mental and physical health to have a shitty project and an offshore team, than any benefit that I have gained by forcing myself to get out of bed every morning. I have no difficulty getting up and getting on with being productive, when I'm working on something that isn't mind-numbingly boring and depressing anyway.

The suffering has been worth it, financially, and with money comes opportunity: the opportunity to find something better to do with my limited time on the planet. Life is short: too short to be working a job that's like death itself.

Who knows how I'm going to feel when I wake up on Thursday. Will I feel elated, depressed, motivated, anxious?

I'm not exactly in a rush to get my CV out into the marketplace and find myself in another shitty contract. I want some time out, and I want to be more picky about the project I choose next time, even if I am still in a precarious financial situation. It's unwise to become complacent about your employability. Catastrophic market events can happen at any moment, and work can dry up overnight.

Will I be able to cut down my drinking, eat less, exercise more, or will the task of job hunting loom large and make me unbearably anxious? I certainly lost a lot of sleep during the week that my contract was terminated early and my flatmate revealed that he didn't have any money to pay his rent & bills for the 4th month running. Life's never straightforward, is it?

Health vs. wealth. That seems to be the battle that is being fought. Is it possible to have it all? Watch this space.

Tags: #career #mentalhealth #addiction #depression #bipolar #alcohol

This is a story about IT projects...

I'm sorry steady eddies, but if you want to get anywhere with a big complicated project, you're going to need somebody who's a little bit of a madman. There's this idea that building a piece of software is a bit like building an aeroplane. Plan the work, work the plan. The idea is that the software architects will come up with a brilliant design specification, and then programmers can just come along and build it. Wrong.

Firstly, you have to plug together all the bits of tech, and make them work with each other. From the front end to the back end, you have the "full stack" and it takes a special kind of masochist to declare themselves to be a "full stack" developer, because you're liable to be asked to change the buttons to a slightly different shade of green far more often than you're likely to be asked to make a working piece of software.

For me, I'll start with a database design - a schema. I will model the data. Most applications have a CRUD element: create, read, update and delete data. If you think about the classic example of a database that holds all the data on your customers, most of it will be performing CRUD operations to keep the data up to date.

Then the next thing is the data abstraction layer. How is your software going to store and retrieve the data from the database? Software talks one language, databases talk another. Interfacing between them is easiest when you use a bit of software that does the 'translation' for you.

Then you're going to need a bunch of business logic. Sure, you have all this data stored, but you're going to want to do something interesting with it. Maybe you want a piece of code that tells you who all the customers who you need to contact today are. That's a bit of business logic, and you wrap it up in a service.

Then you're going to need APIs. APIs are Application Programming Interfaces. APIs let one bit of software talk to another bit of software, which can be done over the Internet. You need an API so that your website running in your Internet browser, can talk to the server to call the services that get the data to display, and call the services that have the business logic in them. When you click a button on a website, a request goes off to another computer somewhere in the world, which is processed, and then the response comes back. The API describes how this can happen: it's a contract.

Once you've built your APIs, you can build the user interface. The user interface is the pretty bit you see when you download an app from the App Store, or when you visit a website. When you visit a website, the user interface is actually downloaded and it runs on your computer, in your Internet browser.

With a website, the user interface will be built in code that's very different to the code that runs elsewhere. Because web servers execute millions of requests, their code is highly optimised. Because your Internet browser needs to support millions of different websites, developed by millions of different developers, the code is designed to run on almost any computer.

Then, when you've written all this code, you need to set up your infrastructure. You need a server, you need to connect it to the Internet, you'll need to connect your domain name to your server, you'll need to configure the server with website hosting software and the database, you'll need to protect your server against hackers, you'll need to deploy your code onto your server. Then, people can visit your domain by typing www.yourdomain.com and the user interface code will be downloaded to their computer's Internet browser, and then the API on your server will be called to get the data it needs. Bingo! Your software is live.

Just getting a basic website running requires you to be:

• A system administrator (a.k.a. "sysadmin") so you can configure the server
• A security specialist (a.k.a. "pentester") so you can protect yourself from hackers
• A networking specialist, so you can configure your domain name, load balancing, traffic routing
• A database administrator (a.k.a. "DBA") so you can configure the database
• A serverside developer (a.k.a. "backend dev") so you can write the service code
• An API designer, so you can define the interface contract between backend and user interface
• A web designer, so you can make the website look all pretty
• A front-end developer (a.k.a. "UI dev") so you can write the scripts that control the user interface
• A mobile developer so you can make an iPhone or Android app that does what the website does
• A QA engineer (a.k.a. "tester") so you can make sure the damn software works
• A release manager, so you can package up your software and deploy it
• An operational support engineer, so you can diagnose and fix problems when they occur

That's 12 different roles, or "hats" that you have to wear. Also, bear in mind that all your users care about is what colour the buttons are.

If you're a "full stack" developer, you're highly in demand, because you can take a piece of software from an idea, to something that actually works and can be used by people anywhere in the world, via the gift of the Internet.

Do you notice that none of those roles are "programmer". There is no such job as programmer anymore.

Back in the 1970s, you used to ring IBM up and they would wheel a dirty great big cabinet into your basement, and then a zillion wires would connect every "dumb" terminal in the building to it. The dumb terminals would just display on their screens what the mainframe would tell them. Essentially, it was just one computer that had hundreds of monitors, and hundreds of keyboards.

Programmers in the 1980s had everything they needed all in one box. User interfaces were just green text on a black screen. There weren't buttons to click on, that could be different colours, so nobody had to waste their time changing the colour of the buttons. There weren't pretty graphics for people to argue over. There was just green text on a black screen.

Because everything was on one box, everything was the same computer code. The data and the code and the different parts of the system were seamlessly interconnected. There wasn't computer code flying around over the Internet, being executed in billions of different Internet browsers all around the world. There was just one blob of code, running on one computer, with hundreds of users. That was programming: writing programs to run on one computer, not billions.

Programming's not even that hard: if this, then that. That's about the gist of it. If you know what the words AND, OR and NOT mean, you're well on your way to being a programmer. If you can write a list of instructions for another person to follow... that's how you become a good programmer. You just get really good at righting really good instructions for a really stupid person to follow.

IF you see some gold THEN go and pick up the gold

Looks pretty easy, right? Well, then you find that your program doesn't work very well when the gold is on the other side of a Plexiglas window. The automatons following your instructions are going to get stuck on the "go" part, and will find themselves just walking on the spot, with their nose pressed against the glass, trying to get to the gold that they can see.

Fast forward to the present day, and you might have the situation where your website looks absolutely awful because granny is still using Internet Explorer, but you only tested your code in Google Chrome. We have the situation where your website works perfectly fine when one person is using it at a time, but when millions of visitors are trying to access it at the same time, they're all treading on each other's feet and the whole thing falls in a heap.

A lot of techies want to be programmers, but programming is such a tiny part of anybody's job. If you hire a bunch of programmers, and they all insist that they only want to do programming, you're never going to have a website.

If you hire a bunch of web designers to build you a website, you'll have a very pretty looking thing, but it won't work very well. It'll be fake. It'll be window dressing. It'll be a film set, where the buildings don't actually have anything behind them: they're flat fronts, propped up from behind.

If you hire a bunch of back-end developers to build you an application, you'll have a beautiful set of services and APIs, but you won't have anybody to tell to change the colour of the buttons. If you tell the serverside developers how important it is that the button colour gets changed for the millionth time, they'll just say "yeah, yeah, yeah... I'm writing down on my invisible TODO list".

So, you hire a full-stack developer, because they can do everything. Trouble is, they're all a bit mental.

If you can do everything all on your own - you can wear 12 different hats and context-switch between them - then you're going to be driven mad if you have to work for somebody else.

Even though I can do everything, it's not like I should do everything. It's not healthy, to have constant interruptions, and to be pulled from one thing to another all the time. In fact, it's distinctly unhealthy.

The only way that a full-stack developer can make any progress is to work really, really quickly.

If you throw together a fully working application in the blink of an eye, you can get it done before anybody asks you to change the colour of the damn buttons. These herculean efforts are incredibly draining. Holding so many different competing tasks, and also the big picture, in your head, while working as fast as you can... that's exhausting.

Most software ends up in the bin anyway, so you might as well throw together these hastily built applications, that at least prove that things can be done, technically. There's already too much useless vapourware crap out there that doesn't actually do what it purports to be able to.

And so, I end up working on project after project that's clearly going wrong. I hastily cobble something together. I get something working end-to-end. Then, I'm burnt out and I have to take the money I've earned and go have a lie down in a darkened room.

I actually don't think software can be built without some nutter who's actually going to fill in all the blanks and prove out the concepts. Every important computer system that I've ever worked on has had one madman who's single-mindedly taken the project to the point of MVP - Minimum Viable Product.

It's unhealthy for your moods, to be expected to sprint as fast as you can, and then reap the rewards but be burnt out, but it's certainly lucrative and a good career strategy. The financial incentives can't be ignored. Also, if you're a complete-finisher personality type, it's the only way you're ever going to see a successful IT project, because so many people are happy to bumble along until the project eventually goes so far over budget and has spectacularly missed its deadlines, that it gets cancelled.

My current project - which is getting cancelled because it's over budget and late - has been slightly better for me than other projects have been in the past, because I just concentrated on making sure my team was on time and on budget, instead of thinking about the overall project. Net result, I'm out of a job again, but at least I've got a happy customer and a good reference, plus I'm not totally burnt out. It's a damnsight easier to only think about my 1/8th of the project, rather than feel responsible for the whole thing.

God knows how I'm going to reconcile my personality - a completer-finisher - with IT's staggeringly bad track record of ever successfully delivering projects on time and on budget. My health is suffering as I've tried to single-handedly get projects back on track, and I never get any thanks when I do that. I'm not saying I'm a hero. I'm just saying that I don't like to bumble along and fail.

Although I can do full-stack development, I don't think I should because it's just too much stress, being spread across 12 different roles. I reckon I'm going to look for some kind of development manager job, where I can have more management input into the way things are run.

It'd be interesting to know what my mental health would be like without the kind of external pressure to rush, rush, rush. It'd be nice to work on a project where I could take my time, take pride in my work, do the things I'm good at. Do those projects even exist?

I think it's the engineer's curse. "Can you do this?" is always answered honestly. Yes, I can probably fix your damn car, but should I really be doing that if my skill is as a software developer? "Yes I could, but I'm not sure I should" is the correct answer, but engineers aim to please. So few managers understand that it's a dumb idea to ask their capable engineers to do everything and anything, and expect them to spread themselves so thinly.

Even though management doesn't agree with me - too frustrating and boring - at least it gives me the opportunity to throw a bubble around my development team and protect them from bad managers. At least I can create the kind of culture that I'd like to have, as a developer, for my team.

It's hard to know how to balance your skills, your needs, your values, and the fact that life's a lot easier if you're paid a lot of cold hard cash.

Anyway, it's all rather academic until I've dug myself out of the debt hole.

Tags: #career #agile #computing #bipolar

This is a story about looking after yourself...

I'm an incredibly calculating person. When I take a risk, it's a calculated risk. If you want to be a sailor, a rock climber, a mountaineer, you've got to be able to weigh up multiple factors. You look at the difficulty of the route or passage. You look at the weather conditions. You look at your equipment. You think about your crew, your rope party. You consider your own abilities. Failure means falling to your death, or drowning.

Let me give you an example.

I was at a petrol station, and I was paying at the counter when a car that was on fire was driven up to the pumps and then abandoned by the driver and passengers. They fled for their lives. The car was there, going up in flames, right next to the petrol pumps.

What would you do?

There didn't seem much point in standing around waiting for the fire brigade. There certainly didn't seem like a moment to lose, as there were passengers sat in their cars, waiting for the drivers to pay for their petrol and come back to their vehicles.

Selfishly, the best thing to do would have been to stay where I was, at the counter where I was paying, or to flee out the fire exit at the back.

I didn't think "I want to be a hero". I thought "can I put that fire out?". I decided that I could.

I went out onto the forecourt and shouted for everybody to get out of their cars and get the fuck away from the petrol station.

Then I picked up a couple of fire extinguishers and went and put out the fire. It wasn't unbearably hot because the whole car wasn't yet on fire. The whole engine compartment was on fire, but with the wind behind me, it carried the smoke away from me, along with some of the heat. I managed to direct most of the foam from the extinguisher into the engine compartment, and the flames were quickly put out.

That was a calculated risk.

I'm currently working a job that is destroying my mental health. It was a 6 month contract, and I calculated that in that time I could reach financial security. Financial security is an important component in wellbeing, given how shockingly appalling the welfare state is. It's more important that I'm able to support myself financially, than it is that I suffer 6 months of depression, putting me at risk of suicide.

My assumption is that when I have reached the point of financial security, I can have a mini nervous breakdown, and then start to recover without sinking back into financial hardship. If I have financial security, I can recover without becoming homeless and destitute again.

If I have learnt anything about my mental health to date, it's that I can recover from almost anything, given enough time & money.

It's sad to see lives thrown away because we treat them so cheaply.

If I can do it, I will have proved that it's possible to plumb unimaginably awful depths and recover, if only we would take the chance and invest in people. If only we trusted people. If only we respected people.

So many people get written off as if they're as good as dead, and that's disgusting.

It should be a collective stain on our conscience that we prefer to prop up the ideas of the "lost cause" and to discriminate against people because of the mistakes of their past, rather than looking at their potential.

Instead of chucking me into some "care in the community" bucket as an incurable madman, or kicking me into the gutter as a hopeless addict, I'm looking forward to proving what an injust death sentence that is. My parents are reprehensibly disgusting people for abandoning their own son when I was vulnerable and alone. My parents had insisted that they would help, only to renege on their promises at the vital moment.

I've done nothing but try to improve the lives of others. I'm not a thief, a liar. I'm not a violent man. I'm not even a criminal.

My dad's a criminal. My dad has a criminal conviction for his drug offences. The police have seen fit to caution me 4 times for various things, but the police have seen that there is no criminal intent with me that would warrant prosecution. My dad has broken the law and he has a criminal record. Why would he treat me like a criminal? Why would he treat me as if I've committed crimes, when it's him who has the criminal record?

I suppose we judge people based on who we really are. If you're a bad person, you see bad in other people. I've always given people the benefit of the doubt. I've always helped people, and even forgiven them when they've screwed me over.

I don't think I'm necessarily a good person, but I try to be. I try to help people. I try to see the best in everybody. I try to invest in people's potential.

It's a calculated risk, being nice to people. Sure, I've lost loads of money as people have taken advantage of me. I doubt anybody thinks I'm a mug though. I doubt anybody feels proud or pleased that they profited at my expense.

One of the best ever moments I can remember was when a young addict couldn't believe that I'd forgiven him for - as he saw it - scamming me out of a load of money. In actual fact, my risk was hedged. It was a calculated gamble. I just hope that he benefitted in some way. My life certainly wasn't any the worse off.

Anybody who says "don't give money to an addict or an alcoholic because it'll do more harm than good" is simply wrong. If you're poor and you steal from the rich, you don't feel guilty about it. But if somebody is kind to you and trusts you, and you betray that trust, it eats you up inside like crazy.

By helping people to be solvent you can help restore their sanity. For many people who live lives of poverty, this can be surprisingly cheap. I could get my friend Frank a hostel bed so that he wasn't living on the street for £120/week. I could help get Frank a room in a shared house for £500. Nobody had taken that kind of chance on him before.

Fixing my situation has been more expensive, because I'm more leveraged. When my parents fucked me over, I borrowed what I could on credit cards, bought Bitcoins, and made 1,200% profit. That was a calculated gamble. When I was homeless living in the park, looking for a well paid IT consultancy contract, I was using my creditworthiness to stay alive and get back into lucrative work: that's leverage. The peaks and troughs of my debt and my solvency are erratic and stressful, but you'd be a fool to bet against me.

Obviously, the idea is to link two lucrative contracts back to back, or have one last long enough to give me a financial cushion to at last be safe from homelessness and destitution. I desperately need a break from these boom and bust cycles. I desperately need a run of good luck.

The luck is not forthcoming, as my 6 month contract has been terminated 2 months early, but I have a little time to rest before the stress and torment of having to find a new job.

If you put all this into the context of relentless depression, suicidal thoughts, threat of homelessness, bankruptcy, destitution, reputational destruction, and everything else that threatens to consume me, I'm surprised I'm still standing.

All I know is that I'm able to just about make a swap for my mental health and sense of wellbeing, for a chance at financial security. It's a calculated gamble.

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

This is a story about prescriptions...

Are you underemployed? Are you unchallenged? Are you jaded? Are you disillusioned? Is your existence meaningless? Are you lacking purpose, goal? Are your ambitions, creativity, ingenuity and resourcefulness being thwarted? Are the prime years of your life draining away, washed into the gutter?

I want to write 3 times a day, at least.

I need to write 3 times a day.

I get to work, nearly an hour late. I have a quick 10-minute call with my team. Then, I have nothing to do until lunchtime. If anything is going wrong I try and fix it, but my whole job is to try and steer the ship strategically so we don't ever get into trouble. I'd love it if a big crisis kicked off, but I've managed things effectively, so everything runs itself with little drama. Sensible, but boring.

So, I need to write something in the morning to get me through to my mid-day break.

I take a 2-hour lunch. I get away from my desk and go and read a book somewhere. Sometimes I sit in the park. Sometimes I sit by the river. I'm only supposed to take an hour for lunch, but who's going to question it when my team are so far ahead of the project deadlines and the client is happy?

Then, I need to write something in the afternoon to get me through to home time.

I stay on top of any queries. I'm watching like a hawk in case there's anything I need to deal with. One strategy that I've employed in the past is to let things build up and build up until there's an artificial crisis that I've created, and then I deal with the backlog in a flurry of activity. Through this strategy of putting things off I made a depressing discovery: most 'work' is unnecessary and can be forgotten about. Nobody's going to die if the crap that I do doesn't get done.

When I get home, I have pent-up frustration that I haven't been productive. My energy and enthusiasm for completing tangible tasks with meaningful output, has been completely unmet during office hours.

Sometimes I draw. Sometimes I make music. Sometimes I make a video.

What I really want to be doing is writing. There's nothing nicer than relaxing on my sofa with my laptop, brain-dumping. I have so much to say, and there's so little time. Words come flooding out of me. There's no shortage of things I want to write about. Researching what I want to write about means that there is even more to write about. Research sets off a chain reaction. The number of topics that I'm passionately interested in grows exponentially.

When I get home, I take off my suit and hang it up. I put on my civilian clothes. I relax, but I'm still not quite in a relaxed mood. It's not like I want to go out for a run, or to go out drinking or dancing. I'm not quite able to shake off the shackles of the rat race, despite the fact that the last thing I would ever think about doing is flipping open my work laptop or giving my project a moment's further thought.

My thoughts revolve torturously around "how am I going to get up and do it all over again tomorrow?".

Drawing, music composition, video editing... these things require a considerable amount of effort. Writing is something I'm compelled to do. Freedom of expression is important, and I've allowed myself to be completely free to write, when time allows. I do not self-censor. The only people whose identity I'm careful to protect are my friends. The only people whose feelings I consider are those who care whether I live & breathe. It's remarkably liberating, not caring if some mean judgemental family member takes offence. It's terrifying thinking that every word I write could make me unemployable, but so exhilarating to thumb your nose at a job you have total contempt for.

A simplistic analysis might conclude that I have transferred my 'addictive personality' to writing, but doesn't our society applaud the workaholic? The serial entrepreneur who puts him or herself through enormous stress is lauded as a captain of industry, an engine for growth, a valued member of the economic community. Whatever I do, I'm unlikely to approach it half-heartedly. If I'm going to work a job and make money, I'm going to work as hard as I can, and make as much money as possible. If I write, I'm going to write until my fingers bleed and I have to be prised away from the keyboard.

Society applauds my bipolarity. Not so much the depression, but the fact that I can achieve 'overnight success' during my hypomania means that I have no shortage of achievements in my portfolio. My shrewd opportunism means that cash windfalls have always carried me through the inevitable crash in my mood.

In fact, the whole working world is structured to celebrate the person who does the heroic big push to meet the deadlines. The steady eddies who just quietly get on with their work, have nothing remarkable to help them to stand out from the crowd. Even the idea of working at the level of intensity that we do in academia and employment, is destabilising. Cramming for exams, dealing with unrealistic workloads, and then collapsing during the holidays, barely recovering before the next painful bout of work or study. Who cares if your nerves are frazzled, as long as you're getting the "A" grades, right?

The project I'm working on is being cancelled, because it's failing. My team is way ahead of the deadline and our part is the big success of the project, but the other 7 teams have failed. It's a big mess. An expensive white elephant. A big embarrassment for the consultancy and the end client.

My attitude has been completely different to the projects I have worked on in the past. Normally, I don't care what my official role & responsibilities are. Normally, I go and find the biggest fire and try to help put that out.

I decided to adopt the attitude of focussing only on my responsibilities. I decided that I would concentrate on the job that I'd been originally been asked to do. I didn't go looking for trouble. I didn't tread on anybody's toes.

The net result is that I have happy bosses who are overjoyed with my work and I'm getting a good reference, but the overall project is a failure. Whether or not I would have been able to make a contribution to the success of the wider project is debatable, but I do have a track record of helping to turn around late or failing projects. I've made a habit of running into the burning building when all others are fleeing for their lives.

It's so bizarre and surreal that I've spent 4 months keeping a low profile, writing, doing as little as possible, and I'm far more appreciated than when I was working 14 hours a day, 6 days a week.

I used to get rung up routinely every weekend, to run conference bridges and orchestrate things on the failing project I worked on before this one. When shit was hitting the fan, I was there rolling up my sleeves and at least trying to be a calm head, even though I obviously claim no credit for the hard work of my colleagues.

That previous project ended with me finding out my security pass and access to email had suddenly been revoked and I was persona non grata with the senior management team who had previously been begging me for my help.

This current project is finishing with the work that my team have produced being lauded as some kind of 'jewel in the crown'. I'm being hailed as some kind of amazing manager, when in truth all I've done is sit unobtrusively in the corner of the office and write my blog.

I'm certainly one of the highest paid writers that you're ever likely to meet, but yet I was hired to run a software project, not to write.

For all those people who say "art is just a hobby" you're wrong. I spend the bulk of my time and effort writing, and being an IT consultant running a software project has been a little side project for me.

People walk up to my desk to ask me a question, and I quickly minimise what I'm doing. I then give the first answer that pops into my head. My whole body language seems to suggest that I'm very busy and my time is precious, so there isn't really a culture of lengthy discussions and debate in my team. It might sound horribly autocratic, but it certainly seems to get the software built and my team report a high level of job satisfaction. There is actually a great level of teamwork and mutual support in my team. The language we use with each other is very positive and complementary. We spend time applauding each other's efforts and celebrating our achievements.

So, I'm torn. Clearly I'm doing something right. It just feels so wrong.

Imposter syndrome means doubting your skills and abilities. I feel like a double imposter, because not only do people tell me I'm doing a good job, but I know that I spend most of my time writing my blog.

Things are coming to a head even more in my final week. My team are pulling together pieces of work that I asked them to do as part of a strategic plan, and it's working. In the final analysis we will finish up with a piece of software that's amazing quality and yet neatly packaged up to be thrown in the garbage. My team will all go off to new projects, knowing how to follow industry best practices and having seen them successfully implemented.

So many things in software get hopelessly botched: Agile project management, test-driven development, code quality, technical debt, continuous integration, release management, production stability, automated regression testing and intuitive user interfaces. Even for me, it's felt like a dream to see that some of these things can be achieved in a corporate environment.

My usual attitude of agreeing with bosses - "yeah yeah yeah" - and then just doing things the way I was going to do them anyway is unchanged. The only difference this time is that I've used my spare capacity to work on a personal project - this blog - instead of trying to think about the wider project.

It's quite exhausting - faking it, looking busy, watching out for anybody who might look over my shoulder - while also attempting to alleviate the boredom and fight the uncomfortable feeling of knowing that you're being unproductive, wasting time.

On the face of it, it looks like a good prescription for stability, financial success. I've turned up to work every day. I got paid every week. What more could you want?

However, how sustainable is it really, to live such a lie?

Tags: #bipolar #career #agile #writing

This is a story about coping strategies...

The jury is out: do I have a medical problem, or don't I? It's so hard to control the variables in somebody's life, that it's almost impossible to know how circumstances are affecting your mental health.

One thing's for certain: psychoactive medications are extremely hard to stop taking once you've been taking them for a few months or years.

There's a simplistic view of addiction that says that the easiest way to not become a drug addict is to not take drugs in the first place. The simplistic view of addiction says that the easiest way to quit drugs is to simply stop taking them.

By extension, the same is true of psychiatric medication. The easiest way to not become dependent on medication for your sense of wellbeing is to not start taking the medication in the first place. The easiest way to live a happy drug-free life is to stop taking all drugs, including psychoactive medication.

This simplistic view ignores three things:

1. How shitty was your life before you were driven to drugs or medication?
2. When you stop taking drugs or medication, how shitty is withdrawal?
3. How shitty will your life be when you're no longer taking drugs and medication?

If the answer to 1 & 3 is the same, then it's your life that's shit and nothing has changed. If your life is shit you're a dumbass for thinking about things as a medical problem. However, how many of us really has the opportunity to improve their life.

Many of us will feel duty-bound to stay near family members, because we are responsible for caregiving. It makes sense to stay near friends and in an area you're familiar with. Moving somewhere new, making new friends, being far away from family - these things are hard.

Huge numbers of people can barely miss more than one or two paycheques before they're in financial trouble. The need to work whatever shitty job we can get is the thing that dominates our shitty lives.

The welfare state is a myth. It can take months or even years before government support is forthcoming, and it's a one-way street. Once you're finally in the benefits system, it's hard to leave. If you work more than 16 hours a week, you can end up putting your home at risk, therefore there's no opportunity to work your way out of poverty.

Point 2 is extremely important.

Quitting benzodiazepines or alcohol can mean weeks of anxiety, insomnia, restlessness, indescribably horrible dread. However, it's doable, and I've done it. It's not easy, but it's not impossible.

Quitting opiates will leave you feeling sick and in pain. I've not had to go through junk sickness, but plenty of people do it 'cold turkey'. It's not life threatening at least, unlike benzos and alcohol.

Quitting stimulants will leave you tired, cloudy-minded, depressed, suicidal even. Quitting stimulants is hard because of the cravings, which some people might mistakenly mis-label 'psychological'. Is hunger psychological? If you reckon you could starve yourself for a month, and overcome those hunger pangs, by all means go ahead and belittle stimulant withdrawal as purely psychological.

From what I can tell, withdrawal from antidepressants and anxiety drugs is worst of all. Have you heard of "brain zaps"? Almost all antidepressant users who've been taking those medications for months or years will complain of absolutely intolerable withdrawal symptoms when they try to reduce their dose or stop taking the drugs altogether. Brain zaps are described as "imbalance, tremors, vertigo, dizziness, and electric-shock-like experiences" in what is being called antidepressant discontinuation syndrome.

You know what? I don't really like the sound of that. Antidepressant discontinuation syndrome sounds a lot worse than any drug withdrawal that I've ever been through, and you know what else? The easiest way to avoid withdrawal is to not take the drugs in the first place.

Sure, it's appealing the idea of taking drugs. "Take this... it'll make you feel good" is what the drug dealers and the doctors say. I desperately want to feel OK. Depression is a shitbag. Being suicidal is dangerous. However, I'm not prepared to have some medically sanctioned addiction to some drugs that are really hard to quit.

And so, I'm limping by on as little alcohol as I can get away with, but I'm still drinking too much and it's making me fat.

Alcohol is undoubtedly a terrible drug. I can see how much my health is suffering, just by the belly fat that's suddenly appeared in the last 4 months. I'm drinking myself to death.

However, I needed to put some money in the bank.

I work, I eat, I sleep, I drink, I moan about it on this blog. It's a financially successful formula. Even if I spent £20 a day on alcohol, just to struggle through, I'm going to finish this contract in a remarkably better financial position than when I started.

I've started to wean myself off the booze using a little diazepam. Tapering off the diazepam will be hard, but in less than a week my horrible contract will be over and I can allow my moods to self-regulate again. I'm imagining that I'm going to sleep for 12 to 14 hours a day. I'm imagining that I'm going to close the curtains and just hide under the duvet for a week or two... maybe even three.

If you think I'm over-sharing. If you think I'm whining about my job, my situation, too much... look at it this way: it's a healthy coping strategy, a cry for help and also a suicide note.

Anybody who says "get a therapist" or "go see your doctor" is just naïve. There aren't magic healers out there who can cure the fundamental problem: bullshit jobs.

In 2008 I quit one bullshit job, tried another, found it was exactly the same, so I became a technology entrepreneur. From 2008 through 2011, my depression was 'cured'. If I felt shitty, I just stayed in bed. Yes, my mood was up and down, but at least my life was liveable and I was healthy and happy overall. 2012 & 2013 were wrecked by divorce. 2014 & 2015 I was trapped back into the rat race. It wasn't even that bad at Barclays and HSBC, but they didn't let me reach escape velocity.

This year, I've suffered in silence, in the interests of maximising my earning potential and hopefully gaining freedom again, but I've damn well got a right to complain about it because it's killing me.

Therapy is a joke. What the hell is one hour a week going to achieve? Been there, done that.

Our antidepressant culture is fucked up. What? I'm supposed to dope myself up so that I can be an uncomplaining rodent in the rat race? Fuck that. I'm not depressed. I'm allergic to capitalism.

Yes, there are huge financial and societal pressures for me to medicate myself into blissed-out stupidity, so I can sit at my desk grinning. I'm not going to do that. It's morally outrageous that the only way to live in this society that we've built, is by drugging our workforce.

If I end up martyred in protest at the madness of the situation, it will have been worth it.

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

This is a story about quicksand...

After being discharged from psychiatric hospital, what do you think you'd do next? Well, imagine that for months you have been travelling but you haven't been moving.

Things are not stable for me, no matter what my senses tell me. I go to the same office, looking at the same computer screen, surrounded by the same people, for months if not years on end. According to my senses I'm not moving anywhere.

However, my bank balance would tell a very different story. Just sitting mute in a chair, keeping my head down and being a perfect corporate drone who never rocks the boat, means that I am very rapidly travelling... financially. My body and mind don't really agree though.

My moods tell a very different story again. I don't necessarily notice seasonal effects and depression taking hold. I'm not fully able to tell when I'm getting hyped up and excessively involved in work or other projects. I'm not great at judging when it's time to take a break, either because I'm too down or too up.

It is unhealthy and unnatural that I work in the same place, doing the same thing, and working a job that moves at snail's pace. I just don't have the social life and hobbies at the moment to get any balance, let alone the financial means to travel, socialise and pursue pastimes with the usual gusto that I apply to everything.

What happens is that I become like a champagne cork. The pressure builds and builds, and then I explode with frustration.

My journey began with a two week stay in a psychiatric hospital, because I was so beaten down by the task of getting myself off the streets, back from the brink of bankruptcy, beating addiction, working on a massively important high-pressure project, renting an apartment, moving house for the zillionth time, and then realising that I was in an unsustainable situation: I needed to get rid of a 'friend' who thought he'd live with me rent free and get pocket money: for what reason he thought he deserved that, I'm not even sure. I also needed to quit a horrible contract that just wasn't worth the sleepless nights.

Next thing I knew, I was sleeping in a Mongolian yurt in Devon.

Then, I was surfing and hitch-hiking in Cornwall. Hitch-hiking is surprisingly hard, it turns out. Hitch-hiking is a bad way to get around if you have to be in a certain place at a certain time. I'd hitch-hiked once before, earlier in the year, in Ireland, but it turns out the Irish are a lot more friendly, helpful and trusting than the British, based on my anecdotal evidence.

Back in London after my Westcountry adventure, I still felt overwhelmed by depression and the feeling that I was trapped by my job. I had a lovely trip, but it had been very short and coming home was very anti-climactic. I knew I needed to quit my job, but I didn't quite have the guts to terminate a very lucrative contract.

I had made a plan a couple of months prior, to shame HSBC by sleeping rough in Canary Wharf, right by their headquarters. I found it deliciously ironic that they had inadvertently helped one of their customers to avoid bankruptcy, escape homelessness and generally improve their financial situation. I had no doubt that if they'd done their due diligence on me, then I would never have been employed to work on their number one project. I was planning on getting my contract terminated for no reason other than I cared about my job and was trying to do the right thing: acting with ethics and integrity.

But, I still had the contract like a millstone around my neck. I was desperately trapped and depressed about it.

I decided to fly to San Francisco and go to the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to illustrate how the desperation of my situation had driven me to contemplate suicide. I also wanted to go because I had planned to go 3 years earlier, but my parents had reneged on a promise and generally conspired to pull the rug out from under my feet at a time when I was terribly vulnerable. What they did was an awful thing, and I wanted to take that trip that I never got to make, because of their horrible behaviour.

I booked a flight for approximately 4 hours' time, packed a bag and left immediately. It's the most impulsive thing I've ever done in my life.

In San Francisco, a friend kindly picked me up and I dumped my bags at her house. I then borrowed a bike and rode to the Golden Gate Bridge. Less than 24 hours had elapsed since deciding to travel 5,351 miles. I stood in a jetlagged and travel weary state, peering over the edge, looking at the perilous drop to the sea below.

Travel, novelty, adventure, excitement, old friends, social contact, good weather... all of these things are the perfect antidote to depression. Who knew that the prospect of being chained to the same damn desk, in the same damn office, doing the same damn work you've done for 19 years, could lead to a tiny twinge of "Fuck My Life".

Obviously, the whole dumping your bags at your friends' place and then going off and killing yourself thing would be poor social etiquette. Plus I'd arranged to see an old schoolfriend while I was in San Francisco. The potential for positive experiences was massive. In the office, I had found myself hoping for a fire drill just because it would be slightly novel.

I'm no dumbass. I know it's important to stop and smell the roses. But, there isn't the time, energy or motivation to do so when you're trapped in the rat race.

In San Francisco I took delight in the simplest of things, like taking a selfie of myself by a road sign that matches my surname. I didn't even do any specific sightseeing or look at a map. I took a trolleycar because I saw one passing. I found myself by landmark buildings, just because I stumbled on them. I walked miles and miles.

My AirBnB host invited me out to a Halloween party. I dressed up. We drove to some house near Mountain View, where there were fascinating Silicon Valley tech people to meet from Google and Apple. That kind of shit generally doesn't happen when you're depressed working your desk job.

I got a tattoo to piss my parents off. My sister has several tattoos and my parents are always giving her a hard time about them. I thought that getting a tattoo would be some gesture of solidarity with my sister, and my parents would have to give both of us a hard time for having one. It was also a kind of souvenir from the trip, and a bit of reminder that I was going to try and stay in the land of the living for a little longer.

I caught up with a schoolfriend who I hadn't seen for years and years. He was supposed to be a mentor on a startup accelerator that I did in 2011, but he'd had to move back to California. It was great to see him, in the Mission district of San Francisco, even if we only had the briefest of time to catch up. Precious moments.

Meeting my friends' second child, and hanging out at their house reading stories to their eldest. Going with the kids to the science museum and playing with the interactive exhibits. Still etched in my mind.

Getting a glimpse into family life, valley startup life, California life... special.

Hanging out with some of the people who I have so much respect and love for... priceless.

I tried to provoke HSBC into terminating my contract immediately, by sending truthful emails, saying things that needed to be said, but were blatantly above my pay grade. Sadly, the mark of a corporate drone is somebody who's completely gutless and two-faced. They emailed me to say they just wanted to have a "routine chat" with me when I got back. No matter how hard I pushed, they wouldn't admit that my contract was effectively terminated, which is what I wanted so I could stay in the USA longer.

I came home. I went into the office and exploited the fact that nobody would be straight with me. I kinda got my goodbyes from everybody, even though they were "great to see you back in the office" but only those who were nice genuine people seemed to be unaware that the long knives were drawn. I loved the look of shock on the faces of those whose incompetence I had exposed.

I shaved my stupid beard and kept my moustache, because it was now November. There's no greater pleasure than having your contract terminated from a 'straight' job, when you're wearing a stupid moustache and you have a tattoo. This was all part of the plan in preparation for the sleeping rough by HSBC headquarters anyway.

Then, I was deflated again.

It'd been a helluva journey. Psychiatric hospital, Devon, Cornwall, Mongolian yurts, surfing, hitch-hiking, sleeping on the floor of New York's JFK airport, cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, sightseeing in Silicon Valley, old friends, nice work colleagues, miserable office drones, contract termination... relax!

Bonfire night - November 5th - I was still pretty hyped up. For some reason I decided that I wanted to whizz around London giving out brightly coloured cardboard stars. I think I spent 90 minutes from conceiving the idea, to then whizzing round London sticking stickers on stuff, giving out stars, losing my luggage and generally careering out of control somewhat. That was classic hypomania. What gets held down must go up. It was such a relief to be released from my soul-destroying contract that the nervous energy almost demanded to be released by doing something crazy.

I decided I needed to see some neglected UK friends. I zoomed down to Bournemouth and stayed in the Royal Bath Hotel by the pier. I met up with one of my most loyal friends, and met his son, caught up with him and his wife, saw their house. I caught up with another friend. Friends who had offered to take me kitesurfing didn't materialise, but it didn't matter... I'd already had a very action-packed trip.

Then, finally, the night of the sleep out came. Lots of things got conflated in my mind: "Hacking" humanity, Techfugees, homelessness, bankruptcy, HSBC's unethical behaviour, soul-destroying bullshit jobs and the unbelievably erratic, exhausting, stressful path I had taken to reach that point.

I always knew that keeping moving is the answer to staying alive, but there's so much financial incentive to be trapped into a chair, chained to a desk, not moving anywhere, not doing anything, not talking to anybody.

As I burnt through my money on rent and bills over the winter months, I knew the day would come when I'd have to go back into the rat race, and it depressed the hell out of me. By Christmas Day I was in a pretty shitty state. By New Year's Eve I was cutting my arms with a razor blade.

For the last 4 months, I've sat at my desk, not saying anything. For the last 4 months, I haven't rocked the boat, I haven't tried to improve anything, I haven't tried to do a good job. For the last 4 months, I've kept a low profile. My bosses couldn't be more pleased. My bank balance is much improved. In theory, my mental health should have done something but it doesn't feel like my mood's done anything but sink.

How am I supposed to reconcile the drudgery of the rat race with the excitement of the crazy tale that led me here? When I look back 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, things were very different. Are things better? It doesn't feel like it.

I'm still not moving, I'm not travelling. I still don't have my needs met.

If I want to survive, I need to be moving. It's not sustainable for me to stagnate. I wasn't built to just sit and rot at a desk.

If I stop moving, I sink into the quicksand.

Tags: #depression #suicide #bipolar #career #startup #computing #homeless #addiction

This is a story about homeostasis...

Do I think I'm smarter than a doctor? Well, consider how much training in psychiatry a generalist has had. A general physician must be knowledgeable of heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, gall bladder, large intestine, small intestine, ears, nose, throat, eyes, bones, veins, arteries, muscles, tendons. A general physician must be familiar with viruses, bacterial infections and parasites. A general physician must be familiar with eczema, psoriasis, warts, bunions, corns, fungal infections and allergies. On top of all that, a general physician has a basic grounding in the most complex organ of all: the brain.

"Would you take antibiotics if you got an infection?"

This is good question. Antibiotics are a pretty blunt instrument. Antibiotics are very damaging to the health of the gut microbiome. There are "good" bacteria and there are "bad" bacteria, and killing both can be very bad for you. Widespread antibiotic use is also the reason why we have super resistant bacteria like MRSA. It's quite possible that our heavy usage of antibiotics might be something that ends up causing huge numbers of people to die in a microbial infection epidemic.

"Would you get your leg set in plaster cast if it was broken?"

Yes, of course I would. Don't be so stupid.

"Would you take insulin if you were diabetic?"

Yes, but I wouldn't increase my risk of diabetes through bad diet.

"So why don't you take antidepressants to fix your broken brain chemistry?"

Well, my brain chemistry isn't broken. It's not like there's a broken bone. It's not like I've got a malfunctioning pancreas. It's not like I have an infection. My brain is doing what it's supposed to do: it's responding to environmental stimuli and telling me "WARNING: something is wrong!".

If you were feeling a sharp pain in your hand, you could take painkillers, or you could remove the sharp object that was hurting your hand. Pain is a feedback mechanism, telling your brain that something is damaging your body.

My body is getting very damaged. I sit on my arse, bored out of my mind, getting fat and unfit. The environment I work in is completely unstimulating. The environment that I work in could not be more unnatural.

Humans need natural light, exercise, social contact, stimulation, challenges, variation, goals. I have none of these things. I'm trapped inside a shitty office, mainly dealing with a computer. I don't even need to get out of my chair all day long. The work that I do is mind-numbingly boring and easy. The only goal is to get old and die so I don't have to go to work anymore.

Obviously, my brain - as an organ - is a lot smarter than any amount of doctors and psychoanalysts. My brain is virtually unchanged from the one that evolved 2.5 million years ago. My brain kept me safe from sabre-tooth tigers and allowed me to kill wooly mammoths to have enough to eat. My brain told me to move when things got too hot, too cold, or when I was hungry, thirsty... whatever. My brain helped me survive. My brain knows when something is wrong.

London's daytime population is circa 11 million people, with millions of people travelling in from the surrounding areas to take part in the rat race. The rush hour tube is awful. There is no personal space. People are crammed together like sardines in a tin. You think that's natural? You think that's healthy?

London's roads are crammed with cyclists, mopeds, motorcycles, cars, vans, lorries, busses and trucks. Every road junction has traffic coming at you from all directions, and scurrying commuters trying to get across the road without being squashed.

London's buildings are packed to capacity. Any spare land is built upon, as high as the planning officers will allow. Every apartment is sublet and sublet, until many cheaper places have 5 people living in one room. Every office uses hotdesking to increase the capacity. Nobody has their own desk anymore.

My brain screams out in agony at this assault on my senses. I have no car at the moment, so I can't escape when it all gets too much. To escape would mean dragging my luggage on tubes and trains, along with the rest of the heaving masses of people.

I have a little oasis of calm at home, where my apartment block is set back from the road in a gated community, and it overlooks the River Thames. At the back of the building, the sound of thousands of people, all shouting at one another, echoes around the courtyard off the hard surfaces of the buildings. Drunk people argue outside the pub. Road rage incidents occur between drivers. Teenagers squabble. Fraught mothers yell at their kids. Meathead fucknuggets yell at the top of their lungs to show off. At the front of the building, on the balcony, things are mostly calm, except for the riverboat cruises blaring out disco music at high volume, and the Thames speedboat thrill rides, zooming along at top speed.

London is pure theatre, and I fear I might crumble to nothing without its stimulation, but the entertainment is purely monkeys at the zoo, squabbling, masturbating, copulating and screeching as loud as they can.

It's clear that I need to make environmental, lifestyle changes. The problem is not my brain chemistry. The problem is the shit that I'm forced to do. I need to be in London, because London's where the jobs are. I need to work, because how else am I going to have a roof over my head and food on the table?

An obvious quick fix for my mental health would be to escape to some more unspoiled wilderness, which isn't so desperately overpopulated. I need to escape from dead-end boring jobs that I can do with my eyes closed, in shitty offices with artificial lighting, full of boring drones who I have no need or interest in talking to.

It's a shitty compromised situation, where I'm forced into yet more wage slavery until I reach a level of financial comfort where I can truly consider my health needs. It makes sense to earn a lot of money very quickly, so I can escape the rat race sooner. I need a financial safety net which I can use to find a job that doesn't desperately depress me and stress me out.

Life is fucking agony at the moment, but what choice do I have? Short term pain for long term gain, in theory.

Work hard. Complain harder.

Tags: #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #career #london

This is a story about feeling healthy...

If we score ourselves as 100% when we are feeling healthy, it may surprise you to learn that depression sufferers score themselves at 30% when they are depressed. Being depressed means not enjoying the things that you normally enjoy. Being depressed means feeling tired all the time.

There is a good amount of data to show that the richer we are, the more satisfied with life we are. Don't believe all that nonsense about how "the rich cry too". It's pointless propaganda. There is good hard data that shows that the more well off we are financially, the happier we are.

So, let's imagine this hypothetical situation.

I'm depressed at the moment because my well paid job is truly appalling. I'm earning a lot, but I don't get to spend it. I'm earning a lot because it's all going into a pot of money that I get to spend when I retire at age 65. It seems like the sensible thing to do is to save up for retirement. But is it?

Imagine that I take my dream job, which pays enough money for me to rent a shitty room in a shitty house, never save any money, but I can enjoy my life and have a nice time. I'll reach age 65, and then my health and wealth will be so f**ked that my 'wellness' score will drop to zero: I'll be as good as dead.

We can actually measure quality of life, and calculate which is the better strategy.

Let's imagine that quitting the rat race means I'm no longer depressed, but I'm a little bit stressed about money. Let's imagine that I'm not totally depressed, so my quality of life is currently 60% lower than what it would be if my mental health was perfectly normal. That means that my quality of life will improve from 40% to 90%, just by quitting my terrible job and going off to do something fulfilling that won't pay very well.

In the red part of the diagram above, you can see that I have a brilliant retirement, where I'm at 90% health, but my old age means that my body is starting to let me down. I have loads of money, so I'm having a great time, until I drop dead at age 75 from a heart attack because I had such a stressful and boring job, sat at a desk getting fat, unfit and miserable.

In the orange part of the diagram above, you can see that I have a brilliant time from age 37 to age 65. I grow old disgracefully, living a hand-to-mouth existence that's fairly free from grown-up responsibilities and sensible retirement planning. Without the millstone of a mortgage and a pension plan, my existence is fulfilled and hedonistic and I can have a brilliant time up until the day I'm too old to work.

As you can see, the "live for today" strategy scores 30 points, and the "live for tomorrow" strategy scores 20 points.

Using these hard numbers, you can see that I will have better quality of life not working in the rat race, even though it will leave me destitute and dying on the streets when I'm 65. I could literally kill myself on my 65th birthday, and I will have had a much better life than if I die 10 years later in wealth and comfort.

I kinda felt this intuitively, but it's good to see some hard numbers that confirm my hunch.

I hope I die before I get old.

Tags: #depression #career

This is a story about earning money...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managers only do three things:

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

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

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

People don't like doing the typing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #capitalism #career #banking #politics