depression – Page 14 – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: depression

  • Quality of Life

    This is a story about feeling healthy…

    Quality of Life

    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.

     

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  • An Essay on Suicide: Logical Despair

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

    Sea cliffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Well, let’s explore a couple of examples.

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

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

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

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

    Debt go on living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I’m so ground down by it all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    You’re probably thinking this:

    “Everybody hates their job”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It seems only logical to give up at some point.

     

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  • 21 Days to Go

    This is a story about clock watching…

    September 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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  • Subconscious Addiction

    This is a story about brain hijack…

    Cyclops

    Who’s in charge around here? Do you believe in free will? Do you believe that your choices are completely unbiased? Do you believe that every decision that you make is based on rational thought? Do you believe in willpower?

    Addiction is a terrifying thing. Most of us have a fear of needles. When we hear the word “addiction” we wince with anticipated pain, as if somebody had stuck something sharp into our sensitive flesh. We squirm with the idea of the pain, which is associated with memories of every time we cut ourselves, hurt ourselves on thorny plants and visited the doctor’s surgery for inoculations.

    There’s a widely held belief that if you so much as look at a syringe filled with heroin, you will immediately be compelled to murder your grandmother and steal her valuables. Just being in the same room as some cocaine will compel you to steal a car or rob a bank. It’s an automatic reaction. The drugs will take over your mind, and turn you from whoever you are today into some kind of monster, the moment that poisoned chalice touches your lips.

    In reality, you are probably completely unaware that some of your friends are popping one too many opiate-based painkillers. You are completely unaware that a bunch of your respected work colleagues are out partying at the weekend, high as a kite. You are completely unaware that a huge proportion of everyone you know, has used marijuana on a regular basis, at one time or another, and somehow managed to resist moving onto crack cocaine.

    We need to be careful, because drugs impair our judgement. Just because most of us don’t die when we try weed, cocaine and ecstasy, we can then be convinced that we’re in no way exhibiting addictive behaviour. Some of us will be emboldened to try ‘hard’ drugs.

    People are finding out that drugs are not actually instantly addictive, and those who experiment with drugs don’t immediately jettison their morality and go out on a crime spree. This creates complacency. This creates a culture where we mistrust the warning messages, because they are full of lies and over-exaggerations.

    However, drugs do dull your wits. You probably think that you’re super smart and you’re saying some really profound stuff. You’re probably think you’re taking a walk on the beach with your girlfriend, watching the sunset, until the drugs wear off and you realise you’re dragging a mannequin around a car park.

    Children are particularly receptive to subtle changes in their parents’ behaviour and mood. You might think that getting stoned in front of your kids makes you a cool parent. “Yeah! I’m a hippy!” and “Yeah! I’m fighting the power! Counter-culture revolution! Yeah!”. In actual fact, you’re just turning yourself into a dribbling wreck, emotionally distant from the subtle cues that tell you to hug your kids and otherwise pay attention to what’s going on. There’s a reason why a nursing mother’s senses are heightened after the birth of a child, and it’s not so you can find those crumbs of crack that are hidden in the carpet.

    Even smoking is super selfish. The health risks of passive smoking are well known and understood, but consider the weight difference between you and your baby. Let’s say your kid weighs 7kg (15lbs) and you weigh 70kg (154lbs). That means that you weigh 10 times as much as your child. If you’re inhaling 2mg of nicotine from your cigarette smoke, your child is inhaling 20mg. If you smoke in your car with your kid, you’re making them smoke the equivalent of packs and packs of cigarettes. You are addicting them to nicotine and making them quit smoking, over and over and over again.

    We were always driving places, when I was growing up. Small car. Both parents smoking. They call it ‘hot boxing’ now, when stoners are keeping all their dope smoke in a confined space, so that everybody gets really intoxicated on the chemicals. That’s what selfish smokers are doing to children. I’m super glad that there are now laws in place to protect children from their selfish parents’ addictions.

    And so, I arrived in adulthood with a brain that was no stranger to addiction and withdrawal. I have far stronger willpower than either of my parents, because I have been able to resist the urge to smoke, and I have quit many addictive drugs cold turkey. I’ve got more will power than my parents could even dream of: they would not even give up smoking for the health of my sister and I, despite the obvious damage that it was doing and the financial consequences.

    This is the power of addiction: even though you are destroying the health of your children and putting them through a horrible experience, you tell yourself that it’s somehow OK to do that, despite an unambiguous message from doctors and other healthcare professionals. The only reason not to comply with the necessity of doing the best by your children, would be pure bloody-minded selfish stupidity… which is the addiction part.

    I find it very hard to respect somebody lecturing me on addiction, when they’re puffing on cigarettes and drinking tea, coffee & alcoholic drinks.

    You may be surprised to learn that rich addicts do not become homeless junkies, destitute and forced into a life of crime. You may be surprised to learn that, given the opportunity to quit drugs on their own terms, most people’s addictions will just fizzle out.

    The brain is a homeostatic organ, and whatever chemicals you put into your body to get a buzz or a high will soon lose their potency. Pretty soon, the pursuit of drugs gets boring. Addictions are naturally self-limiting.

    Rats who live in sterile cages with no stimulation, socialisation, sex or interesting food, will kill themselves with drugs. Rats who live in a pleasant environment will shun drugs, because they’re getting everything they need in their happy ratty little lives. It’s shitty lives that create the conditions where addiction can exist.

    Rat and teddy bear

    I work my arse off in a shitty boring unstimulating job, with no disposable income to be spent on fun and socialising. I go to work, I come home, I write because it doesn’t cost any money. I don’t spend any money on extravagances. I just buy basic food. I eat, sleep and work. And where’s it getting me?

    Of course thoughts of addiction are present. The thought process goes like this: my life is shit; I want to die. Then I think I could just run away and become a hobo. Then I realise that will soon lead to the stress of being cold and hungry and dirty; with people thinking that I’m worthless scum. This is how a person arrives at the idea that addiction takes care of both the short term need to feel better, and the long term view that you’re going to die anyway. So much easier to have a brief period of happiness and then kill yourself, than to have a long period where you slowly starve to death and suffer the health consequences of living on the street. It’s better to burn out than fade away.

    Abstinence is easy. Living a shitty hopeless life is hard.

    Because I’ve mastered abstinence so easily, I can get a little complacent about the appeal of simply relapsing and quickly reaching death’s door. If this year has taught me anything, it’s that the struggle isn’t really worth it. All my hard work has yielded so little improvement in my mood. I’m so depressed all the time, and things really aren’t improving. To go to the doctor, chasing happy pills, is just on the same addictive continuum. When the happy pills wear off, I’ll have to go back for stronger and stronger drugs, until I end up in exactly the same place. Skip to the end. Cut out the pointless bit in the middle.

    I had thought that because I obviously can’t be going through any kind of drug withdrawal or comedown, and abstinence is a simple and easy thing, that I had gotten on top of addictive thoughts, but actually they just went into my subconcious.

    Last night I had a nightmare where I had obtained some drugs, and nobody would leave me alone. I was just being chased and harassed. I never actually got to use the drugs, which is maybe what made it such a stressful nightmare, but it’s interesting how badly I did want to use those drugs in my dream. I expect the whole thing was triggered by the fact I’d been looking at a website selling drugs, the night before.

    In actual fact, I’d rather just kill myself. It’s been long enough to show that addiction, abstinence and willpower are just utter bullshit. I’m completely “clean and sober” as fucktards like to say. Addiction has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with unbearable lives. I’d rather kill myself in protest at an unliveable life, due to unreasonable demands to work a bullshit job with no hope of ever doing anything fulfilling or purposeful.

    The coroner can take samples of my hair and blood, and see not a single trace of any drugs in my system.

    Only a fool does the same things expecting different results. Why would the conditions that created an addiction, not also keep somebody in an addiction, if they were still the same?

    It seems logical that I should kill myself, as a protest about how unbearable a meaningless life of wage slavery is.

    It doesn’t seem selfish to want to commit suicide. It doesn’t seem like depression is telling me lies. It seems like a brave thing to do, to stand up to an oppressive and miserable life and take a stand against exploitation by the ruling class. It seems like a brave thing to do, to refuse to be told I’m weak, broken, faulty. It seems to be a brave thing to do, to show that I’m not OK with turning my back on the suffering of humanity.

    Lots of people impoverish themselves in their attempt to help other people. Lots of people will make mistakes, despite being dedicated to trying to improve the lives of others. It seems better to simply reach a point that is beyond reproach, and then kill yourself.

    What’s the difference between a saint and a sinner? Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

    It’s not a case of “once an addict, always an addict”. It’s simply the case that anybody can fall from grace at any time. Anybody can make a mistake at any moment.

    If you have money, kids, a lovely home and a loving family, you are probably safer than most because you have some security, purpose, happiness. However, one slip and you’re fucked.

     

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  • Don’t Tread on Me

    This is a story about shutting down conversations…

    Flip Flop

    Why don’t we complain more? When things are going badly and luck is not in our favour, why don’t we speak up about how unfair life can be? Why are we not allowed to discuss how hopeless we feel? Why aren’t we allowed to say that we feel overwhelmed and that we can’t cope?

    There are numerous ways of shutting a person down, and ending any conversation before it even gets started:

    • “Life is hard”
    • “Life is unfair”
    • “Deal with it”
    • “Get over it”
    • “Other people have it so much harder than you”
    • “Look on the bright side”
    • “You’ll find a way to cope”
    • “You’ll get there in the end”
    • “Look how far you’ve come”
    • “You’re a strong person”
    • “God wouldn’t give you anything you couldn’t handle”
    • “This will pass”
    • “It gets easier”
    • “Keep going”
    • “Don’t give up”

    All of these phrases have the same objective: to shut the person up who is in distress. We seem to believe that talking about our distress is somehow wallowing in self-pity. We seem to think that the best way to deal with problems is just to pretend like they’re not there and that they’ll go away on their own. It’s akin to saying “LA LA LA! NOT LISTENING!!”.

    This cultural programming is so engrained that we repeat the useless mantras to ourselves. When stress, anxiety and hopelessness are overwhelming us, we say the very same things to ourselves. It’s like we’re trying to bully and abuse ourselves into happiness. “Get happy or fuck off and die” is the unequivocal message that is being sent.

    Talking about depression is now permitted, but the message is very much the same: go to your doctor, get a therapist, take some medication, take MORE medication. I can’t believe how many people would say “have you taken your pills today?” or “maybe you need to increase your dose” when you’re having a bad day. This is part of the reason why I don’t tell my work colleagues that I have struggled with mental illness, and it’s part of the reason why I don’t take medication. It’s too much of a cop-out to medicalise a situation which might be brought about by circumstances, rather than pathological brain chemistry.

    There was an experiment where mice had to run across an electrified floor in order to get to their food. The mice were obviously pretty stressed about this, and would exhibit all kinds of symptoms of anxiety when they were getting hungry. The mice knew that the only way that they were going to get fed would be to have painful electric shocks jolting through their feet as they crossed to the other side of their cage, where the food was.

    The mice would get more and more stressed, until finally they were so hungry that they had to dash across the electrified floor as fast as they possibly could, getting zapped the whole time. Pretty stressful circumstances, right?

    When the anti-anxiety drug diazepam was discovered, they were testing it on these mice. The mice who were injected with diazepam would exhibit none of the symptoms of stress and anxiety, and would wander across the electrified floor in an unhurried manner. The mice who were under the influence of diazepam still felt the pain, and their faces winced with each painful electric shock that was delivered to their feet. The mice just didn’t give a fuck anymore.

    Pain exists to condition our behaviour. You don’t stick your hand in a fire more than once. You’re careful with a knife because of that one time you cut yourself. Pain tells us about our environment. Pain gives us our list of dos and don’ts, without them having to be extensively listed in some kind of compendium of things that fuck you up.

    Anxiety exists to tell us to avoid pain, when we can see it coming. Without anxiety, we would stand in the middle of the road, watching a truck hurtling towards us and think “oh, this is going to hurt” but not actually be bothered about getting out of the way.

    We now have a society where pain and anxiety seem to be accepted as facts of life. We can see the onrushing disaster of climate change, but yet we just stand there in the middle of the road waiting for it to smash into us and obliterate most life on Earth. We know that our jobs are utter boring bullshit and are destroying our physical and mental health, but we still continue to work them until we’re too old and infirm to continue any more.

    In the oft-quoted example: a frog is put in a pan of cool water, and then the water has been slowly brought to the boil. Nobody has sensed just how deadly the situation has got. Nobody is jumping out of the pan to save ourselves. We’re all just sitting in a pan of boiling water saying “this is fine” like the cartoon dog in the house that’s on fire.

    This is fine

    Image credit: K C Green

    If things get too hard to handle, and the danger that you sense – which is very real, tangible and rational – can no longer be quieted by telling yourself “everything’s going to be fine” then you can trot off to your doctor and get yourself some happy pills to mask your symptoms.

    How much depression is due to demoralisation, demotivation, boredom, stressful bullshit jobs with never-ending makework? How much anxiety is due to job insecurity, financial uncertainty, hand-to-mouth existence, well founded fears about terrorism, violence, rape, murder and paedophilia?

    For sure the media rams the world’s problems down our throat 24×7 from all corners of the globe, but fundamentally, even in our little local communities shitty stuff is happening. Even on the streets of wealthy London, there are awful things being perpetrated against innocent people.

    Saying that life is a fight for survival, and that we are doomed to some kind of Malthusian catastrophe is disingenuous. Blaming people for their own misfortune is just an excuse for inaction. What we’re basically saying is “at least I don’t live in Africa” even though our lives are hardly peachy.

    I would imagine that this put up & shut up ethos is trickled down from our ruling elite. While wealth is not trickling down at all, we are told that we should be grateful for a few crumbs from the table of the fat cat plutocrats. Bullying and drugging us into submission, our whole culture is one where we criticise anybody who dares to voice their discomfort and dissatisfaction with their lot in life, even though we ourselves are living with nearly unbearable stress.

    It’s as if we are all eating handfuls of ground up glass and razor blades, and somebody whose mouth is dripping with blood suddenly says “what are we doing? why are we doing this? we should stop!” and then everybody else rounds on them and says “we’re all getting on with it without complaining, so you should too” and “take some painkillers if the pain is too much”. It’s as if the peer pressure to keep suffering the pain and eating the sharp glass and blades is so great that we continue to act irrationally and kill ourselves.

    Food for thought, anyway.

     

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  • Right to Die

    This is a story about euthanasia…

    Nick at work

    I need to cover what I’m about to write with a hefty preamble, full of caveats and other disclaimers, because there are so many considerations with this issue, but it’s an issue I need to tackle.

    Firstly, let’s consider this: nobody really wants to die.

    For people who are in pain and other kinds of physical discomfort, or are otherwise afflicted by diseases, injuries or genetic problems that mean their quality of life is terrible, or certainly going to end up terrible: these people do not want to die. Those people would dearly love for a cure or some kind of relief from their symptoms that doesn’t come with intolerable side effects.

    Clearly people who want to prematurely end their lives in a dignified manner, have exhausted all treatment options, and their future looks bleak: pain, discomfort, infirmity, senility and disability.

    Alzheimers and other kinds of incurable degenerative brain diseases carry the added worry that the sufferer will no longer be of a sound and rational mind when the illness reaches its late stages, and they will burden their carers, while perhaps not even being able to recognise their loved ones any more.

    Let’s also consider this: some people have hope, while others do not.

    Yes, there’s always a chance of a miracle cure. Yes, there’s always a 1-in-a-trillion shot that God might personally intervene to remove the horrible afflictions that he originally cursed you with.

    Most people love life and can’t bear the thought of being torn from the arms of their loved ones. Most people cry out in fear, when they think they’re about to die. Most people fight to survive.

    There are people who have gone through many bouts of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, transplants and who take bucketloads of medications with horrible side effects, and generally battle through awful sickness and pain, holding out hope that their ailments will be at least treated well enough to prolong their lives a little longer.

    Some people might spend a long time on a transplant list, barely surviving, while oxygen and dialysis just about preserve them while they wait for a donor match. An agonising race against time happens: will a donor arrive before the illness kills the poor helpless person who can only sit and wait?

    I feel like I should use softer language, to cushion the blows for every person who’s lost a child, parent, friend, partner, relative. Death is painful, and all the more so knowing that a person had so much more life left in them. Death can be so cruel. People so deserving of more life can be snatched away, while others who are seemingly careless with the gift of life can seem so selfish and ungrateful for their good fortune to have been spared by the gods.

    And it’s the ungrateful ones I want to talk about.

    What do you do with the alcoholic who ‘wants’ to drink themself to death? What do you do with a suicidal person?

    The footballer George Best famously received a liver transplant, and then proceeded to court controversy when he was caught drinking again. Instead of demonstrating his gratitude for his stay of execution, by becoming teetotal, he was clearly the same person – ungrateful for life some might say – as he was before he received an organ donation.

    What do you do with somebody who is determined to kill themself? Do you put them in a straightjacket and keep them in a padded cell indefinitely, just so that they can die of old age in an asylum?

    It might be the case that a suicidal person is in perfectly good physical health and does not abuse drugs or alcohol, but they are nonetheless determined to end their own life prematurely.

    There’s a general belief that telling people that their lifestyle is much akin to suicide, will curtail their health-damaging behaviour. Doctors mostly seem to take the route of saying “if you keep drinking, you’re going to die young” to alcoholics. While most people would think that this would shock somebody into cutting down their drinking, in fact there’s little evidence that it has any affect at all.

    Similarly, telling suicidal people “you’ve got so much to live for” and “it’s just your depression telling you lies” and other statements that make perfect sense to people who are not suicidal, is also ineffective. The only thing that has proven somewhat effective – as far as short 12-week studies paid for by pharmaceutical companies can tell – is psychoactive medication.

    Smoking causes many preventable diseases, and is a big killer, but yet people still choose to smoke even though it’s expensive, makes you smell and stains your teeth. You would have thought that the large “SMOKING KILLS” health warnings on packets would cause people to stop smoking immediately, but no.

    You know what one of the most effective smoking cessation treatments is? It’s the antidepressant called Wellbutrin (marketed as stop-smoking drug Zyban and generically known as Bupropion).

    Why would an antidepressant be a good treatment for smokers? Well, let’s consider two things: firstly, people smoke because they’re missing something. Take smoking away, and a smoker’s life is now incomplete. Removing nicotine and the habit/ceremony of smoking leaves a void in that person’s life. Also, you’ve got to be fairly depressed to do something that’s clearly a threat to your health, and possibly your life.

    Wellbutrin is a fast-acting antidepressant, unlike anything we can get on the NHS. Instead of making people feel sleepy and emotionally numbed, Wellbutrin has been proven to offer a number of improvements in the lives of patients, including their sex lives. Wellbutrin is France’s most popular antidepressant.

    What do you really want from an antidepressant, other than to relieve your symptoms of depression now when you’re feeling it? Being told that a medication might take 6 to 8 weeks to become effective, and then having to suffer your symptoms that whole time while you’re waiting is no use at all! Some depressions will lift naturally after a month or two anyway.

    But what goes up must come down. After some weeks or months taking Wellbutrin, many patients experience panic attacks and insomnia. Plus there’s the obvious problem of having to stop taking the medication at some point, and suffering the comedown (sorry, I mean withdrawal syndrome).

    Yes, the difference between ‘drugs of abuse’ and ‘prescribed psychoactive medications’ is precisely zero. Every medication that has an upside also has a downside. Addiction and habituation with prescription medications is just as much of a problem as with street drugs. The only difference is medical oversight and quality control.

    And so, I arrive at the situation where I’m perfectly well aware that I can get short-term relief for the symptoms of my depression, in the form of a pill from my doctor. However, I’m equally aware that to go down that road is to have a lifetime dependence on medication for my sense of wellbeing. Basically, do I want to be a medically sanctioned drug addict? None of the stigma, but all of the same behaviours.

    You’re right, I wouldn’t have to lie, cheat or steal to feed my habit. I can wander into my pharmacist, and get my uppers over the counter, and carry on like I’m a fine upstanding member of the community. Did you know that even heroin addicts are completely functional members of society, when they can get a clean high quality supply of the opiates they need? When doctors in the UK used to prescribe heroin, there were none of the antisocial problems that we instinctively associate with drug abuse today.

    Of course, I’m not advocating drug abuse, but then I’m also pointing out that the flaws that afflict a smoker, a drinker, a junkie and even a depressed person… they’re all rooted in the same psychological need to cure an invisible illness.

    Pretty soon, I will have spent a year where over 75% of the time I was using no psychoactive substances at all, except for alcohol. A period of 115 consecutive days – 32% of the year – I was completely teetotal. For the whole year I had no tea, coffee, cola, energy drinks, or caffeine containing headache pills (more common than you think). I’m completely unmedicated.

    How do I feel? Awful.

    It seems to me like I have a choice: suicidal depression, or drugs (i.e. medication, coffee & alcohol etc.)

    I know that a scientific study with one participant tells us nothing, but equally I’m not a group, I’m me. You can’t dismiss my individual findings, that are true for me. I’ve gathered the data during a 20 year career, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my life is unliveable in its current form.

    When you are conducting a scientific study, you have to control the variables. Thankfully, I’m an ideal test subject for this.

    Since the age of 17, I’ve been a very well paid software engineer. For sure, during the first couple of years it took me a while to get my salary up to a decent level, but since the age of 19 I’ve never had to worry about money. Also, I’ve done pretty much the same thing for all my career: sitting at a desk, tapping on a keyboard, making software.

    I’ve had the same running crisis my whole career. When I was 19, I was bored so I applied to university and was offered places at some very prestigious institutions to study psychopharmacology. I decided to stick with the money, and keep selling my soul to the highest bidder.

    When I was 28, depression had crushed me to the point I was on my knees and unable to turn up and do the same office bullshit anymore. I retrained as an electrician and started my own company.

    Man with van

    As a self-employed tradesman, I loved what I did, but I was grossly underpaid for the level of responsibility I had. Ordinary members of the public think that tradesmen are out to rip them off. In reality tradesmen are highly trained professionals whose job it is to stop houses burning down and families being electrocuted or poisoned by carbon monoxide.

    The freedom of not having a boss, not having a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine, and not having to sit in the same damn chair at the same damn desk, pushing the same damn 102 keys on the same goddam keyboard… all of those things are just as great as they sound. However, getting paid peanuts to do dangerous dirty work is also not great either.

    And so, I returned to what I’m experienced and qualified to do.

    I earn staggering amounts of cash for moving my mouse around and looking busy at a desk. However, I used to earn £470 per day when I was 20 years old, doing computer programming for Lloyds TSB back in the year 2000. My job is exactly the same today, doing the same damn computer code for HSBC, JPMorgan, Barclays or any other damn bank.

    But maybe the problem’s banking? Nope. I’ve written computer code for nuclear submarines, torpedos, school computer networks, trains, parking ticket machines, busses, security guards, shop assistants and just about every other weird and wonderful industry you can think of. I’ve written in dozens of programming languages, for dozens of operating systems, on dozens of form factors. It’s all the fucking same binary 1s and 0s and boolean algebra under the covers. All code is made from the same nuts and bolts. It’s fucking boring.

    And so, I can be a miserable exploited worker on a low wage, doing something I take pride in but knowing that I’m undervalued. I can be an overpaid and underworked software developer / scrum master / development manager / IT director. I can be a stressed out startup founder working my arse off to line the pockets of the venture capitalists who are going to get filthy rich at the expense of my health. I can be a destitute bum, a tramp, a hobo. Which would YOU choose?

    I particularly object to the idea that I have to drug myself up, just to fit in with the bullshit jobs economy. I object to having to be high on antidepressants just to be able to cope with the same bunch of fucktards making the same fucking mistakes I’ve seen a million times over, in the job that I’ve mastered and brings in obscene amounts of cash. I object to having to be high on anxiety medication, to cope with the insecurity faced by the underpaid and undervalued front-line members of society who build your houses, look after you in hospital, grow your food and perform every other truly useful function that we need.

    Even to work in civil engineering would frustrate the hell out of me. Crossrail, the multi billion dollar project improve London’s cross-capital transportation, is rather pointless because it will be at full capacity on the day it opens, because London is already packed full of idle fucktards like me, clogging up the world with pointless makework jobs. Do we really need any more offices and office workers? Do we really need any more service sector jobs? Do we really need such a bloated financial services sector, with its equally parasitic support industries of corporate law and accounting? It’s all such utter bullshit.

    And so, I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t.

    In my 20 years of full time work, I’ve become worn down with it all. I’m exhausted. I’ve tried a number of things, and I find that bullshit prevails everywhere I look. My heart is broken by all the bullshit that trumps everything else.

    I’m exhausted, and I’m depressed and I’m suicidal.

    Yes, I know some people are grateful for their lives and what little quality of life they can squeeze out of their existence. Yes, I know that I have good physical health and I’m reasonably young still. Yes, I know that there’d a queue that stretches around the planet, of people who would love to have my job.

    So, if I choose to reject all that and end my life because I feel like I have no quality of life, is that morally wrong?

    You can’t even level the accusation of me that I don’t know suffering, and I don’t know poverty. I’ve lived homeless in a park, destitute, penniless and surviving on charitable food donations. I’ve woken up in hospital numerous times in pain and discomfort. I’ve had numerous scrapes with death. Shouldn’t all that stuff make me grateful to be alive? Guess what? You have absolutely no idea. Guess what else, I have a very good idea, because it’s already all happened to me.

    I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I went to state comprehensive schools. I wasn’t gifted jobs by any friend or family member. I had no head start in life. It’s true that I have no obvious disability or disadvantage either, unless you count a couple of drug addict alcoholic parents, but I still had other family members, teachers and friends who were nice to me. It’s not a fucking competition. The point is that the variables are controlled. I neither had advantage nor disadvantage, but yet I arrived at this point, here, now, today.

    It’s not like we can say this is just a short-term crisis. Like this will fucking blow over.

    It’s not going to blow over. For 20 fucking years it’s been the same. The same shit, different day.

    Yes, there were times that were actually pretty good, but guess what… they weren’t sustainable. I liked living in a hostel with a bunch of other homeless people. I liked not having a job and being a bum. I liked having no responsibilities. Who wouldn’t? But that’s not real life. We don’t get to have a freebie just because ‘real’ life is killing us. It still cost £120 a week for my bunk bed in a dormitory that slept 15 people, with one fucking bathroom between us all. My current rent is only £240 a week and for that I get a double bedroom, an ensuite bathroom, a kitchen, a dining room, a dual-aspect lounge with panoramic views over London and a balcony overlooking the river Thames.

    I should be happy, but I’m not. Happiness is not a choice, no matter what you read on some bullshit Internet meme inspirational quote.

    All the right pieces are in place. My doctors are chuffed to bits that I don’t drink, smoke, abuse drugs or in any way engage in health damaging behaviours. My blood pressure is amazing. My cholesterol is low. My eyesight, hearing, teeth, joints… all of it is perfect.

    And yet, my mental health is in ruins. I’m so depressed. I’m so suicidal.

    I’m doing everything right, and yet everything feels so wrong.

    Of course I feel guilty for feeling like this. What the fuck am I supposed to do though?

    Honestly, I feel like I want to spend the next 30 days convincing people that the most humane thing is to let me end my life. Honestly, despite the things that should be really great in my life, nothing feels great. Nothing feels good or nice. Nothing works. Nothing is working.

    There’s still the possibility of just running away and absenting myself from all responsibility, but then when I’m dirty and sick from a life of destitution… when I die then, will anybody understand? A tramp, a bum, a hobo, a junkie, an alkie… these people are all too easily dismissed by society.

    What happens when highly paid banking IT consultants start dying? Well if they’re white middle class thirtysomething men… not much. Who cares? Probably just a selfish socialite, having a tantrum because they can’t do whatever they want, one newspaper article basically said, in the wake of one death.

    What the fuck is anybody supposed to do about this fucked up life that we’re supposed to live?

    I really don’t feel like I can live this bullshit rat race anymore, and the alternative is a long slow death, shunned by society and marginalised.

    In the long run, we’re all fucking dead anyway.

    Apologies if I’m triggering raw and painful feelings about your beloved family member or friend who is busily fighting for survival, or who lost their battle. I really don’t mean things disrespectfully, but I can’t lie anymore. I feel this stuff and it’s undeniable.

    Call me narcissistic needy spoilt white middle class brat if you like, if it’ll make you feel better. It certainly won’t make me feel any worse, but isn’t that so terribly melodramatic and attention seeking?

    Can you understand, how exhausting it is, having to justify your feelings and apologise for wanting to be dead the whole fucking time?

    It’s a one-way ticket and for sure it needs careful thought, but aren’t we being a bit unfair, shutting down the conversation by guilt-tripping people into hiding their feelings? Perhaps suicide is a smart choice for people who feel that they have no quality of life.

     

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  • Limelight

    This is a story about star quality…

    Cambridge Union

    Hey! Is that Nick Grant pitching a Dragons Den panel at Cambridge Union? Isn’t that the same podium in Cambridge where UK prime ministers and US presidents have wowed crowds? Isn’t that the same podium where the world’s best and brightest have stood? Yes. Yes it is.

    If you’re into astrology, you should know I’m a Leo. Apparently this means that I adore being the centre of attention. However, I’ve always had somebody yelling louder than me for the spotlight to be directed onto them.

    Growing up, my dad had this horse-shit narrative about how cool he was because he took drugs. My childhood achievements were nothing compared to the amount of drugs and alcohol he could consume. Growing up, life was all about worshipping how smart he was for obtaining and taking intoxicating substances. Woo!

    My longest relationship, with the girl who my friends affectionately called “the poison dwarf” was dominated by her tantrums if the attention was diverted from her. She completely ruined our joint birthday and engagement party, simply because her unpleasant nature had brought her few friends in life, and the event was mainly my friends, despite my efforts to help her encourage people from her own social circle to attend.

    OK, I’m not that humble, but I’m not that arrogant either. If I’m bigging myself up, it’s because it’s a defence mechanism because I’ve been dragged down by my own parents, bullies and an abusive ex-wife. I’ve had a rough fucking ride, so let me have this one, OK?

    I haven’t lost perspective. I’m well aware that my achievements amount to nothing. I never got so much as a “well done” out of my parents for everything I’ve ever accomplished. It’s tough fucking going, living life with insufferable cunts who just want to see you fail.

    Normally, when things are going well, people are supportive and want to help you to continue to achieve your potential in life. Not so, in most of my story to date.

    Often times startup founders receive their initial funding from friends and family. My friends contributed generously to my ambitions to build a profitable business, and they were repaid with the dividends from the company. My own parents saw no potential in what I was doing, even though billionaire investors took me under their wing and agreed to help my co-founder and I to build a valuable business. My ex-wife took particularly cruel delight in watching my dreams get shattered.

    Yes, I’m subject the fatal flaw of a little too much desire to be loved and liked. When an acting coach suggested that we try my co-founder out to see if he was any better at delivering an investor pitch, I was mortified by the idea that I wouldn’t get my moment of fame. For sure, I’m subject to big-headedness and delusions of grandeur as much as the next person, but in a way, I can argue that I deserved my little headlining moment, because I had always been kicked to the sidelines by self-centred parents and partners.

    You know what? Give your kids their moment of fame. Let your kids bask in a bit of adoration. Don’t hoover it all up for yourselves. You know what your input was? You had sex. Well done. Gold star. But that’s nothing that every couple didn’t already do for hundreds of millions of years. All you did was do what your fucking body was programmed to do. Now get the fuck out of the spotlight and let your kid enjoy their little moment. Your time is over. It’s no longer your chance to shine. It’s your moment to tell your kid well done, and that you’re proud of them.

    Butt the fuck out and acknowledge a good performance when you see one. Congratulate your fucking kid on their hard work and try and pretend like you’re pleased, even if you’re too fucking drug addled and self centred to even see straight.

    You know what else? I’m fucking taking this one. I’m fucking taking this moment to tell myself well done, because nobody in my family is going to. My ex-wife isn’t going to. Basically, the people who mattered most to me when some fairly monumental stuff happened to me in my life couldn’t have given two shits about anything that wasn’t to do with them and their selfish fucking world, so I’m going to relive this little moment and applaud myself.

    Well fucking done me.

    It ain’t fucking easy battling for your moment of fame. It ain’t fucking easy getting that chance, and then performing when it matters. It ain’t fucking easy at all. And what’s it all for if the people who you think care about you couldn’t give a toss?

    Well, guess what? I had that limelight. Not because I was a drug-taking fucktard like my parents, but because I worked hard to get that opportunity. I had that opportunity, not because I demanded it and stole it from my child, but because I wanted to impress, because I wanted to do something great.

    Isn’t that awful, that my parents made my entire childhood about them, shoving me into a dark corner so they could harvest all the ill-gotten attention? Isn’t that awful, that my longest relationship was dominated by an abusive partner who demanded that the spotlight was always directed on her, and abused me to the point that I lost my confidence and became a withdrawn and shattered version of my former self?

    Bygones. Regrets. Yes.

    I’m just telling the story because nobody else is going to tell it. If you ask my parents they’ll tell you that I was an evil waste of space who never achieved anything, and that’s plain wrong.

    This is me sticking up for myself. This is me fighting against the complete collapse of my self esteem that will render me hopelessly suicidally depressed. This is my defence mechanism.

    I’m sorry if this comes across as arrogant or self-centred. I hope it comes across in the context of my desperately low sense of self-worth, given how I’ve been treated most of my life. I need a little pride and self confidence to be able to continue.

    God damn, I’m so low right now.

     

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  • Barrier to Entry

    This is a story about surprises…

    Blurry Barrier

    We are very keen to jump to conclusions. So many of us read the headline and assume that we know the story. Surprisingly large numbers of people will comment on a social media post without even clicking through and reading the content. It’s so easy to walk in on a chapter of somebody’s life and assume that you know the whole story.

    Mental health problems? Blah blah blah… go and see a doctor, get some happy pills and all your problems will go away. No need to hear the end of that story. All problems can be medicalised and will be just fine if you just speak to the right specialist. For sure there are people out there who deal with this kind of stuff. Not my problem. Go away.

    Drugs? Say no more. We know how this ends. Yes, your story is bound to involve selling your own grandmother to unscrupulous rogues in order to raise money for your dirty habit, and basically you’re filthy scum and don’t even deserve to have your story heard. GET OUT OF MY EYES AND EARS and go away.

    Nervous breakdown? Why not take up yoga? Stop and smell the flowers. Do cartwheels in a field. Other people have things so much harder than you so I don’t even know what you’re complaining about. Everybody’s life is terrible. Get a grip on yourself. It’s all in your head. Why don’t you exercise more? Salsa dancing? Homeopathy? I’ll write the end of your story for you: all your problems went away and you were magically transported to the land of milk & honey. The end. Go away.

    Sex addiction? You filthy pervert. Go away.

    Workaholic? You should try sitting around on your arse on a continous jolly holiday. Why don’t you retire or take up knitting? If you force yourself to smile, you’ll suddenly feel much happier about everything. Take some deep breaths. Have you thought about shutting down the system and rebooting? Failing that, you can reformat the hard-disk and reinstall the operating system.

    Isolated, lonely and suicidal? Chin up. Look on the bright side. Suicide is so selfish. Suicide just leaves a big mess for other people to clean up. You’re so attention seeking. Cry for help. If you were serious you’d have done it already. Go away.

    We are being told that problems are all in our heads, and the only person holding us back from achieving our full potential is ourself. This is utter bullshit. There are so many barriers to entry and things that are holding us back. Life is more complicated than every self-help book, motivational quote and trite soundbite that sounds inspirational but is actually really depressingly useless.

    People who are happy and fulfilled are the ones who go to the gym, cook organic freshly prepared meals, don’t smoke, don’t drink, do yoga, meditate, smell the flowers, swim in the ocean and generally swan around having a lovely time. Doing those things is not the cure or the answer to anything. Doing those things is a symptom of the fact that your life is pretty bloody perfect. There’s a reason why people are depressed, stressed and anxious, and it’s not that they haven’t done enough yoga.

    The yoga can wait. It really can. I’m far too worried about earning enough money to pay my rent, bills, food, transport and other cost of living expenses, while also keeping myself washed, clean shaven, hair cut, nails clipped, nose and ear hair trimmed, and with enough clean clothes that are not completely threadbare in order to have a reasonably professional appearance. I’m far too worried about servicing my debts, staying on top of my taxes, keeping up with the administrative headaches that our bureaucratic government forces upon us, as well as turning up at work and keeping a seat warm from Monday to Friday. The yoga can wait. I’m far too preoccupied with my soul-destroying job that makes me suicidally desperate for escape, but escape is eternally just out of reach.

    So you’re going to quit your job and go travelling? What about your kids? What about your pets? What about your family? What about money? Oh, you don’t have any money? Well you could save some up, couldn’t you? Oh, you’ve been trying to save some up, but you’re having a crisis NOW? Well, can’t you just postpone your crisis, perhaps for another 30 years?

    So you’re going to quit your job and find a new career? What about your rent? What about your bills? What about all the money you need to pay for tuition and certification? What about the money you’re going to need to fund yourself when you’re looking for an entry-level job? What about the huge drop in income you’re going to have, having no experience in your new career? What about the tent that you’re going to buy because clearly you’re going to go homeless if you lose your source of income?

    So you’re going to leave the city and get away from the rat race? What about the fact you don’t have any friends or family anywhere else? What about the fact that there are no opportunities anywhere else? What about the fact that you’ve got nowhere to live, no car, no van, no tent, no cardboard box?

    Oh yes, the world is stuffed full of opportunities to avoid the sources of stress that are destroying you. Yeah, sure it’s all in your head and you should just imagine what you want to be, snap your fingers and it will come true. How’s about a ballerina, footballer, pop singer, astronaut, fireman, deep sea diver? Yeah. The only thing holding you back is YOU you stupid dummy. How silly of you.

    Or you could just do some yoga. Yoga fixes everything.

    Thames Barrier

    Here’s the image that you had to click through to see, and scroll all the way down here. I hope the reward was worth it. Well done. Gold star.

     

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  • Gold Rush

    This is a story about getting rich or dying trying…

    Irish Gold

    People come to London seeking their fortune. I went to Ireland seeking my salvation. In a way, I kinda found it.

    My life had fallen apart. I had lost a lucrative contract with Barclays through no fault of my own (the guy who terminated my contract was then sacked because of his stupid decision) as well as breaking up with my girlfriend, being evicted from my apartment in Swiss Cottage (again, through no fault of my own) and had once again found myself homeless and unemployed. Many friends took sides during my breakup, and I ended up suddenly alone.

    It was January, in the depths of a depressing British winter. No job, no money, no friends, no girlfriend, no nothing. I was fucked.

    A friend who I met in the summer, when I first became homeless, had returned to the emerald isle. He had generously made an open offer that I could go and stay with him and his family if I ever needed it, and oh boy did I need it. I was suicidally depressed and a big danger to myself. Camden council had been supremely unhelpful to a resident who they owed a legal duty of care, but they didn’t give a shit whether I lived or died.

    I guess a lot of unimaginative runaways go to London, and a huge proportion of them will end up in Camden Town. Camden is cool, undoubtably. Camden is full of wide-eyed young people, tourists, and huge amounts of recreational drugs, casual sex and music venues. It’s a great place to spend a summer on a shoestring, smoking strong cannabis and chatting up girls.

    I had made a couple of similarly Peter Pan-esque pals in Camden, in their mid thirties and working dead-end jobs on low pay, forced into living in hostels and dreadful squat-like houses with several people sleeping in every room. For me, it was a hugely novel experience, having been a wealthy IT consultant working in banking since I took my first big money contract at the age of 20, for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. After 17 or so years of fabulous wealth, slumming it for a summer was almost fun.

    My girlfriend at the time was a waitress at an Italian restaurant. Despite having a degree in economics from the University of Bologna, she had rejected the rat race in favour of a minimum wage job and getting ridiculously stoned every day. She was fun and easy going, just so long as all you wanted to do was sit around while she chain-smoked joints, and have great sex of course.

    I wouldn’t say I outgrew my circle of friends, because I loved them dearly, but the stresses and demands of my contract at Barclays were not really compatible with the lifestyle of casual labour and the pursuit of recreational drugs. At some point, the worlds were going to collide.

    My girlfriend and most of my friends felt that I had arrogantly snubbed them, but in fact I was desperately dependent on our social circle for my wellbeing and happiness. When things all fell apart, I did too. I was devastated by the collapse of my social life, as well as losing the structure and routine of my employment.

    I ran away to Ireland, and my friend picked me up from Cork airport and took me back to the little village of Killavullen, that he and his family call home. Nestled in the hillside above the village, looking over the valley below and just at the edge of a vast forest, my friend’s family home is a peaceful idyll that is completely unlike the rat race of London.

    The timing was not ideal, and I arrived in the middle of various challenges facing the family, but they welcomed me and treated me with incredible warmth, kindness, care, despite the crises that they were dealing with. It’s not my place to be indiscreet about the family matters that I became aware of, but suffice to say the last thing they needed was some sick burnt out heartbroken citydweller suddenly thrust into the mix.

    My state of mind collapsed still further, as it became clear that there would be no reconciliation with my former friends: I was a pariah. There was nothing for me back in London, except a certain collapse in my will to live. My friend’s family insisted that I should stay with them until I felt fit and well enough to return home. I missed my return flight and didn’t book another.

    I tried to go along with the flow of family and village life, getting to know the people that my friend grew up with, and his family.

    My friend and I went panning for gold – I had bought him a kit while in England and had brought it over to Ireland for him – as well as climbing to the top of the ‘mountain’ that he lived on. We drove around the vast forest that covered the hillside, and explored the neighbouring villages, as well as nearby Cork city centre. Although I had visited Ireland twice before, I had missed the point about stopping to smell the shamrocks. I’m always in the mode of rush, rush, rush.

    We travelled to the huge cliffs at Old Head, and I stood there on the edge, having had a haircut, a shave, a bunch of hot meals and having slept in a warm comfortable bed in a welcoming family home for some time. Instead of wanting to jump off the edge of the cliff, I was actually happy to be alive.

     

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  • Destroying Your Reputation

    This is a story about self sabotage…

    Man on a mission

    What the hell am I doing, blogging about stuff that could get me fired, sued and make me unemployable? Why the hell am I burning so many bridges, and destroying my own reputation? Is this simply self-sabotaging behaviour?

    If we look at the wider context of my story, the rat race has made me unwell. The boring office jobs propping up the instruments of capitalism so that an idle wealthy elite can ride roughshod over the proletariat, has made me unhappy. Compromising on my moral, ethical position, five days a week is not healthy. Working in an unstimulating environment that is unchallenging and uninteresting is a fate worse than death.

    It’s very easy to keep doing what you do because you fear change and it’s the path of least resistance. I’ve been moulded into a certain career and industry sector. I’m the perfect guy to have join your massive corporation and quickly get up to speed with the bureaucracy, systems and processes. The bulk of the hard work in a big organisation is not the actual skilled thing that people are qualified to do, but just dealing with the crap that gets built up by a zillion little Hitlers all micromanaging their tiny empires they’re building and trying to justify their pathetic jobs.

    It’s interesting who I’m friends with on Facebook, and who follows me on Twitter. In fact, with very little digging you can even find this vast cache of dirt, on Google. This is not about how important and influential I am, because I’m not. This is about public exposure. I took a decision to lay my soul bare, and I stand by that decision. But, for a moment, let’s consider the kinds of people who I know or suspect have at one time dipped into my social media and online accessible over-sharing:

    • Ex colleagues from JPMorgan
    • Ex colleagues from HSBC
    • Cohorts from a technology startup accelerator
    • Two influential and well respected directors of startup accelerators
    • Mentors from startup accelerator
    • My accountant
    • People who are influential and well respected in the technology sector
    • Friends who work in tech and/or industry sectors that I work in

    I’ve stopped short of actually tying my LinkedIn profile back in this direction, towards my blog. I’ve stopped short of in any way linking my limited company back towards this new alter ego of mine, although I did briefly get myself in a muddle over some suicide watch startup idea that I had. That was on September 21st… right when I started this journey of deciding to go public with every struggle I faced when I finally lost my grip on my career, my company, my reputation, everything.

    For sure, I’m a nobody. However, people still talk. There is a rumour mill, no matter how small and insignificant you are. And people who work in offices are particularly interested in lurid tales of people who’re doing anything that is out of the ordinary, even if that’s losing your mind and ending up in the gutter.

    By now, my tale of the toxic combination of stress, abusive relationship, mental health problems, heavy drinking, drug abuse (in that order) leading to suicide attempts, hospitalisation, homelessness, destitution and even police involvement, is well documented.

    Well, I guess it’s not that well documented, but it’s out there in the public domain.

    I have no idea how much was known before I decided to embark upon a mission of full disclosure, but I know that my abusive ex-wife was particularly indiscreet and insensitive. I’m sure that my friends did their best to save my blushes and protect my reputation as much as they could, but people still knew that I was getting more and more unwell.

    Obviously, at times during my descent into melancholy and the infinite madness, I sabotaged my own reputation amongst my Facebook friends. I once shared a picture of some potassium cyanide that I had bought with the express intention of ending my life quickly and cleanly. The lethal dose is about 250 milligrams. I bought 2 grams of the toxic chemical: 8 times more than was strictly necessary.

    Depression now has less stigma associated with it. We pretty much all know somebody who suffers with depression, and takes anti-depressant medication to help them with their low mood. These things are no longer taboo to talk about, and many people are able to still continue to hold down good jobs and be in positions of responsibility. Suffering from clinical depression is not a death sentence, certainly as far as a person’s professional reputation is concerned.

    Bipolar disorder has almost become cool to have. There are a list of celebrities and politicians as long as your arm, who have come forward and declared that they are living with the condition. Obviously, the ability to turn your hypomanic episodes into hyper-energetic flurries of productive activity, means that you can get shit done. In a way, we celebrate the person who has these mood episodes, because they can produce the ‘overnight’ successes we so revere in society.

    Alcohol is everywhere, so unless you’re swigging from a bottle of vodka hidden in your desk and reeking of liquor fumes as you breathe on people, just about any amount of drinking is socially acceptable. It’s only if you declare yourself an alcoholic and have a stay in rehab that people start to stigmatise you. You can cover up your 28 days in The Priory, by saying that it was private hospital treatment for stress and anxiety.

    Drug abuse is the last taboo. You pretty much don’t want to put that one down on your CV. Cocaine use is widespread throughout London, and coffee gets stronger and stronger to the point where you’re practically swallowing amphetamines. A few cans of Red Bull is the socially acceptable equivalent to snorting a couple of lines of some stimulant. Students are increasingly using Modafinil, Ritalin and Adderall to improve their concentration span and fact retention, as well as to stay awake during long revision binges.

    If you think that these things feature in my daily life, you’re wrong. These issues are simply incompatible with day-to-day existence. Depression robs you of the energy to get out of bed and face the day. Bipolar hypomania robs you of the contents of your bank balance, as it all gets ploughed into crazy schemes. Alcoholism is hard to hide, not that I’ve ever been physically dependent on booze, thank God. Drug addiction is all-consuming: there’s no hiding it when you’ve lost the battle with addiction and it’s taking you on a white-knuckle ride to an early grave.

    So, if I’ve won the battles, why would I make it public knowledge that I fought them? Why would I take the time to declare, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I’m a flawed individual? Why would I spell it out, that I could relapse into any number of life-destroying illnesses at any moment?

    Well, we could all succumb to these things at any moment.

    I was 28 years young when I was knocked flat by clinical depression. I was 32 when addiction got its hooks in me. Just because I’d been a good student, a well behaved polite boy, a model employee, a career go-getter, and on the face of it I had a perfect little life, it doesn’t mean that I was immune from anything.

    But “it could never happen to me” right?

    We believe that smart life choices will keep us safe. We believe that we have free will, and that therefore we would never choose to do something stupid. We believe that past performance is indicative of future results, even if the disclaimers always tell us the opposite.

    There’s something ugly about academic and corporate life, where we put a black mark against people’s name if they fuck up even once. Screw up your school exams and you’ll never get a chance to go to university. Screw up in your career and you’ll be frozen out of the good jobs forevermore. Screw up in life and you’ll be a dirty leper who nobody will want to know or to help.

    This is the bleak outlook for so many people, who were simply unlucky or made a decision that was obviously regrettable, but life is continuously setting us traps and pitfalls. Why do consequences have to be so long lasting? Oh, you got in financial trouble? Here, let us help you by now charging you fines and punitive rates of interest, plus denying you opportunities and making the cost of living sky high because you have a poor credit rating.

    The punishment for not having any money is that you have to pay more money. The punishment for your crimes is the deprivation of your liberty and the destruction of your future opportunities.

    Apparently people are mocking those who have chosen to get a semicolon tattoo, but let’s think about this for a minute.

    I work in a big office and I see hundreds of people every day. In all likelihood they have seen that I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear. If you were to Google “what does a semicolon tattoo mean?” then you will see that it’s mostly to do with struggles with depression, addiction, self-harm and suicide attempts. I wonder how many people are thinking “why the hell did we employ this guy?”.

    Semicolon tattoo

    When I did my interview, I sat so that my interviewers were on my right-hand side. The people who interviewed me never saw that tattoo, until soon after I started in my new job. I wonder if they’d have hired me if they had seen the tattoo.

    Tattoos are actually uncommon amongst investment banking IT consultants. Certainly visible tattoos are even declared as not permitted, in many banks dress codes. I even thought about putting a sticking plaster over the mark on my skin, for my interview.

    However, that’s all I ever did for years and years. That’s our whole approach to mental health and the problems that people face in their private lives: put a sticking plaster over it.

    I’ve written at length about how angry I am that our first line of defence for people who are stressed out and depressed by their shitty unfulfilling office jobs, is to give them powerful psychoactive medications that artificially alter their mood so they can continue to work their dreadful jobs.

    I’m angry that I’m so pressurised by wider society to cover up my problems, in order to retain a blemish-free reputation. I feel like the need to appear pristine and infallible to potential employers, fellow work colleagues and bosses, is largely to blame for why I had a massive breakdown and implosion, instead of things getting fixed before they got out of hand.

    We are brainwashed to believe that we can’t have any gaps on our CV that we can’t explain. We are brainwashed to believe that we can’t take our foot off the gas pedal for a single second. We are brainwashed to believe that a stain on our reputation will hang around for the rest of our careers.

    You know what the problem is? It’s our fucking careers. The treadmill. The rat race. It’s making so many people mentally unwell, as well as causing physical health damage due to the sedentary nature of the work. No amount of standing desks or free gym membership is going to compensate for the problem.

    I backslid into office employment because it was easy and I was desperate. My back was against the wall, and it made perfect financial sense to go and suffer another stretch of agonising misery back doing the shit that I’m most qualified and experienced to do, but it’s fucking killing me.

    It’s important to be values-aligned, but it’s also so easy to be tempted by ‘easy’ money. The cash rewards for doing the kind of mind-bogglingly boring work that I do are substantial. In theory, I only have to do this work for short bursts, and then I have spare time and cash to do whatever I need to do to balance the books, psychologically. However, in practice, all I’m doing is servicing debts that were built up just staying alive.

    The welfare state took a dim view on my situation. Why do I need help, when I can go and get a job that pays fabulously well? Well, guess what? I tried it. I tried getting one of these shitty desk jobs that kill me, while I was homeless living in a hostel. And guess what? Working one of those jobs that made you unwell in the first place while you are still unwell really fucks you up.

    This whole exercise of blowing my existence and private life wide open serves to document the ridiculousness of the mental health destroying lives that we are forced to live. If this whole experience ends up killing me, at least I’ve left the evidence: the smoking gun.

    Nobody really cares when white middle class, well educated men in good jobs kill themselves. Why would they? Well, look around you. Do you see people getting happier? Do you see mental illness declining? Do you see suicide rates declining? Do you feel secure, fulfilled? Do you feel like the human condition is improving?

    I look around and I see war and I see poverty. I see ordinary British people being forced into zero hours contract minimum wage McJobs, and still unable to afford basic amenities. I see loneliness and depression. I see a lack of real local community. I see families pulled apart by the need to go to large urban centres to seek your fortune. I see people locked into their own little world: headphones plugged in, eyes cast downwards at their smartphone, not talking to anybody face to face except to ask for their morning coffee.

    Is this just a London thing? Is my view tainted because I’m struggling with depression myself? Actually, London is the canary in the coal mine. The sensitive people who have their head up looking around, sensing for danger, are usually on to something. Everything is pretty shit and fucked up right now.

    And so, I am rejecting the conventional. I’m rejecting the sensible, rational and tried-and-tested. I’m burning the bridges that lead back to places I should never return to.

    Yes, I might be making a fool of myself. Yes, people might be sniggering at me, safe behind their computer screens. Yes, important people are judging me and they have the ability to thwart me because of their prejudice, and make my life hard and even impossible. I could find myself unemployable, but not know why, because nobody has to tell me. I’m giving away all the ammunition you need to destroy me, and people are eagerly taking it.

    But you know, who’s the real winner? If you take what I gave you and use it against me, how are you going to feel? We’re all doing that. We’re all exploiting weaknesses that we discover in each other, in order to get ahead in the rat race.

    How do you win a rigged contest? If everybody is cheating, do you cheat too?

    The other option is to martyr yourself. For sure, you’ll be hated and excluded. Nobody will thank you. But at least you can sleep at night, in the gutter.

    No more prisons

    Prisons can mean anywhere you feel trapped and your liberty is restricted

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