This is a story about warfare...

What you're looking at is a 3D printed gun. The gun can only be fired once, but it only takes one bullet to kill another human being. I could decide that my life is more important than yours, and murder you.

We often forget that decisive weapons are the reason we sit in idle luxury, while another half of the world don't have enough to eat or clean drinking water. We have essentially already built the walls that protect the wealth that we have plundered. The world has been divided into 'haves' and 'have-nots'. Lucky you for being born into the group of 'haves'.

Try to remember that: what you have is down to pure blind luck, not divine right, not the glory of your ancestors, not hard work and not personal sacrifice.

Anybody who glorifies war is an idiot.

Wars are not won.

There are no winners in war. There is no such thing as 'victory'. The only thing that comes close to a 'victory' of sorts, is when both sides willingly lay down their weapons and stop fighting. The only heroes are those who bravely disobey orders, and those who resist the urge to kill, maim, torture, rape, pillage and otherwise exercise dominion over their fellow humans.

There are painfully obvious psychological tricks that are being used by power-hungry megalomaniacs, who are intoxicated - drunk - with a kind of nostalgia for national glory, victory on the battlefield, defeat of an 'evil invader'.

As an animal, I wish for people who share little of my genetic material, to perish so that more of my genes will be propagated. My 'selfish' genes quite literally code for murderous intent towards people who don't look like me.

Race is an obvious way to divide into tribes of genetic similarity. White Europeans, and all those black-skinned Africans. White Europeans, and all those bearded Arabs. White Europeans and those dusky-toned Indians. White Europeans, and all those slanty-eyed Asians. White Europeans and those plains-dwelling Red Indians. White Europeans and those rainforest-dwelling tribespeople.

Now, because we're living in a post-slavery, post-apartheid, post-colonial, post-imperial age - supposedly - we are now indoctrinated into the belief that we have a national identity. We salute flags. We stand for national anthems. We dress up in uniform. Our heads of state are rammed down our throat around the clock: their faces are on every coin, every banknote, every postage stamp. Our schools teach no history except "victory" against some imagined enemy. Our media tell no story, except how badly the human rights are violated in countries that do not follow the doctrine of 'democracy' and capitalism.

"I'm not a racist, but Britain is full" say the racists. "We're just a small island and our infrastructure can't cope" say the racists. "I'm not a racist. I just want to protect the British way of life" say the racists.

What do you think would happen if a migrant ate fish & chips or a roast dinner? Do you think a migrant couldn't be kept warm and dry in a thatched cottage? Do you think that a migrant couldn't enjoy a game of cricket? Do you think migrants can't drink cups of tea, or eat a scone with cream and jam on it?

All the things that you think of as British are actually just things that can be enjoyed by any human being. We all have the same needs. Just how British are you, anyway?

I don't even know who my biological grandparents on my mum's side were. For all I know, I might be genetically descended from immigrants. In fact, the Brits are a mongrel race anyway: Romans, Vikings, Normans, Saxons, Celts.

So, borders, flags, passports, nationalities... these are just bullshit made-up things.

"Defence" is a synonym for "guarding the wealth that we have plundered". If you are guarding your wealth, you are refusing to share. As Ghandi said:

"The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for anyone's greed"

The panic over the migrant crisis is easy to explain: the ruling elites didn't share enough of their wealth domestically. Even though a "poor" person in the UK is not poor by global standards, they still feel very poor indeed. Asking the poor to share, when they're already hard-pressed and feeling insecure, is not fair and it doesn't seem possible. We already have a housing crisis, a pensions crisis, a financial crisis. We already have problems with underemployment, unemployment and feel like our wages barely stretch to meet our cost of living.

Ostensibly though, there is a racism problem.

Having well-educated French, German, Italian and Spanish people coming to the UK to make your coffee and wait your tables, was not a problem for you, because it was white faces with cute accents.

However, seeing groups of young Arab men does trigger a whole host of fears that have been created by jingoistic faux-nostalgic nationalistic scaremongers, who want you to buy their right-wing newspapers, or vote for their right-wing political party.

The whole "war on terror" has done a remarkably efficient job of convincing people that their 'way of life' is under attack. People who are fleeing persecution, or migrating for economic reasons, are seen as a comparable enemy to Nazi Germany, with the same kind of "we will fight them on the beaches" kind of nationalistic bullshit being peddled.

In actual fact, what is happening is that the inequality is simply too great, in a world that's hyperconnected by the Internet. I mean, damn, if you lived in a mud hut with a straw roof, and you saw an episode of MTV's Cribs, wouldn't you be convinced that every man in the West lives like a prince in a palace?

Whose way of life are you actually defending, anyway?

Do you live in a palace? Do you have a basement full of gold bullion and vintage wine? Do you have priceless artworks hanging on your walls? Do you have supercars? Do you have superyachts? Do you have private jets?

No, of course you don't.

You're being used you fucking dumbasses. You're being told that your way of life is under threat, but really you're just being used as a human shield to allow the plutocrats to defend the vast wealth that they could never even spend in a million lifetimes.

There's a choice: you can arm yourself to the teeth, and try to hold onto the vast riches that are far more than you need, or you can move to a model of equality; sharing. If we have a culture of sharing and equality, then there isn't going to be a horde of migrants at the gates clamouring for a few bones from the dinner table, a few crumbs from the cake.

The UK's highest paid CEO is paid 2,500 times more than the average salary.

It's a pyramid scheme, and the ordinary people of the UK are upset about having to share the crumbs, because the crumbs are all we get at the bottom of the pyramid. What we're saying, when we say "Britain is full" is that we can't share any of our crumbs from the cake, because all we have to eat are a few crumbs anyway.

It's easy to point at how wealthy Britain appears to be in global terms, but an average salary is not the same as a typical salary. In a normal distribution, most people would earn the average salary. However, most people earn less than the average salary. The average is skewed by the high earners. The reality is that even an average salary can't afford to pay for an average price house, but a typical salary can't buy a house and barely meets the cost of living.

Looking at the typical example is a lot more important than looking at the average.

It's because the typical person is experiencing very real hardship, that we have arrived at the point of multiple crises hitting all at once: the day has finally come where the plutocrats will have to convince us to fight to defend their wealth, because the world's poor are becoming more informed via the Internet, and are quite rightly demanding that they have a more fair share of the common wealth, that we are all equally entitled to.

So, don't get all sentimental and caught up in the propaganda: the flag-waving and the talk of 'heroes' and attempts to stoke up nostalgia for wartime. War is awful. War is unnecessary.

The fight we need to have is with the plutocrats, to smash open their bank vaults and share out their wealth.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Period.

Tags: #politics #capitalism

 This is a story about drug dealers...

The top image shows an official UK prescription. A doctor registered with the GMC prescribed me the medication and a pharmacist registered with the GPHC filled my prescription. The bottom image shows black market prescription drugs for sale on the Dark Web. When you buy from the Dark Web an anonymous vendor will sell you whatever you want, no questions asked.

In order to receive my official prescription, I had to answer 14 yes/no questions. One of the questions was "do you have high blood pressure?". How the hell should I know? The last time I had my blood pressure checked was 11 months ago, and I've gained loads of weight and have been drinking far too much since then.

According to my order tracking, a doctor spent 7 minutes deliberating my 14 answers - 30 seconds per answer - before writing my prescription. I never met this doctor, we never spoke and they never saw my medical records.

Some years ago, with a great deal of arm-twisting from my private psychiatrist, my GP agreed to prescribe me Bupropion for the depressive episodes of my bipolar disorder. In the UK, Bupropion is not licensed for the treatment of depression or bipolar disorder. NICE guidelines do not recommend the use of Bupropion for anything other than as a smoking cessation treatment. Basically, my GP faced being struck off the GMC register if I suffered some horrible medical complications because of an adverse drug reaction.

I've been back in London for 3 years and I've had 2 different GPs since then: one in Camden and one just across the road from where I live. Neither of them has prescribed me a single medication, but the Camden GP took it upon himself to phone me on my mobile in his personal time to see if I was still alive. My GP went out of his way to try and help me.

The average face-to-face GP consultation time in the UK is just under 9 minutes. Imagine having just 9 minutes to establish that somebody is suicidally depressed and then select a psychiatric medication for your patient. The medication could either save them or reduce their quality of life even more. It's not much time, is it?

And so, I became an educated well-informed patient. A doctor I spoke to some years ago said that I would be better off finding a "prescription pad psychiatrist" who would write me a prescription for whatever I wanted. These doctors exist. They're available online, without even having to meet them or speak to them on the telephone, it would seem.

I have no criticism of the ethics of what the doctor and the pharmacist who I obtained my official UK prescription from are doing. It doesn't seem unethical to me.

Interestingly, it cost me £90 for 60x 150mg Bupropion tablets. I could easily buy the exact same medication for less than half that price on the Dark Web. If I was to buy the medication from India, it would cost me less than £6 (plus postage).

On the NHS, a prescription costs £8.40 if you're working and not entitled to welfare benefits.

Basically, you pay for convenience. With the online pharmacy I had a short form to fill in and I got my medication delivered next day. With the Dark Web, I would have had to faff around with Bitcoins, but my medication would also have been delivered next day. With my doctor, I would have had to make an appointment, and there's every chance that they wouldn't have been prepared to take the risk of writing an off-label prescription. With the Indian medication, their postal service is appalling and it takes weeks for a delivery to arrive.

One reason not to order from the Dark Web though, is that you can get anything you want. It's easy to start window shopping. Once you've loaded up your account with some Bitcoins, it's easy to fill up your 'shopping basket' with all kinds of things that you're curious about, or things that you know you really shouldn't be buying because they're bad for you. It's a slippery slope.

One of the reasons why I don't have any drug dealers phone numbers and I've never bought drugs from a drug dealer, is because it's so convenient. I don't believe in the idea of a 'pusher'. People want drugs, plain and simple. The drugs push themselves.

One of the reasons I'm not using internet banking at the moment, is because it makes it too easy for me to buy some Bitcoins, transfer them to a Dark Web marketplace, and have a little jiffy bag containing deadly white powder, hitting my doormat the very next day.

I don't believe prohibition works, but certainly making things a little more inconvenient does offer some protection from temptation. I wouldn't even know where to begin, trying to find a drug dealer, unless I wanted to buy low quality cannabis or terrible quality imitation cocaine from one of the many dealers who hang around by Camden Lock.

Prohibition created legal highs. Prohibition created the Dark Web. Because I'm an IT expert and a sensation seeker, when I read about legal highs in the news I was tempted to give them a go. The rest is history. All of that "moral panic" crap in the media had precisely the opposite effect than intended. A naïve middle-class IT professional working for an investment bank, suddenly became exposed to a world that I would never have become part of, if it wasn't for the fact that prohibition lowered the barrier to entry.

As the legal highs started to get banned, I then took to Internet forums to find out where people who had stockpiled - like me - were supposed to go after we ran out of drugs. That was how I found out about the Dark Web. Yet again, prohibition moved me from a world that was legal, taxed and regulated, towards the dark and murky world of illegal drugs.

One day, in a pit of despair at my spiralling addiction, I decided to order all the drugs. I bought crack, heroin and crystal meth. I didn't even know what to do with them. You can snort heroin and meth, but not crack, as it turns out. How does a middle class homeowner even smoke crack? I didn't even own a cigarette lighter.

A couple weeks later, I had nailed my door shut and put newspaper all over the windows. It's remarkable how quickly a respectable middle-class rich person can turn the house they own into a crack den.

What's also remarkable is how quickly you figure out that you've bought a one way express ticket to an early death, if you have vast sums of money and a reasonable intellect.

One day, I smoked a pipe - I had bought a meth pipe off the Dark Web by this point - that had been filled with heroin, crack and meth. I thought "is this as good as it gets?". The room was bathed with a yellow light, even though it was barely lit. There was a calm serenity. I thought "this ain't even that great" and decided that I'd better stop before I decided that it was great.

It's the strangest thing, flushing rocks of crack and a big bag of heroin down the loo, not because you're addicted and you want to quit, but because you can see how easily you could become addicted.

People think that drug addiction is all about wanting drugs and taking drugs, but it's not that at all. Drug addiction is about identity, routine, habituation, ceremony, lifestyle... things that I even struggle to explain. If you're just locked in a room with a virtually limitless supply of drugs, because the postman keeps bringing your supply and you have lots of money in the bank... you'd think you'd just take drugs and more drugs until you died or ran out of money.

In actual fact, addictions are self-limiting. Given a clean pure supply of drugs, eventually, addiction becomes kinda boring or the downsides start to outweigh the upsides.

I'm lucky, because I'm wealthy and I'm not a total dumbass. I tried so many drugs, and eventually found one that was far better than crack, heroin or crystal methamphetamine, but cost less than £1 a day.

I used to buy a packet of capsules off the Internet for £27. This was a legal high called "NRG-3", which turned out to be MDPV: I've nicknamed it supercrack. The packet contained 20 capsules, and each capsule had 100mg of MDPV in it. I would hide these capsules all over the house, so that I would never have to hunt for very long to get my fix, when the cravings became unbearable.

I would divide the 100mg contents of a capsule into 3 equal piles. Then, I would divide one of the piles into 2 lines. I would snort one of the lines, which would weigh approximately 17mg.

17mg of MDPV is a very strong dose. Basically, it's enough to be bat-shit insane for 24 hours. I would pretty much always end up going back for the second line... so that's 48 hours of insanity, with no sleep. I would go back to work for a rest.

120 days of bat-shit insanity for £27.

Cheap.

Deadly.

You spread 120 days over the weekends, and you've got 2 years worth of hiding a drug habit. If you do anything for 2 years, it becomes an integral part of your life. It's hard to change the habits of a lifetime. Again, you've gotta be smart and spot the changes in your behaviour.

I started cancelling plans, because a 1-day drug binge turned into a whole weekend drug binge.

I started not making any plans, because I was planning on taking drugs all weekend.

How the hell I held down a job during this time, I have no idea.

My psychiatrist and my GP thought I was self-medicating for depression. They thought I was in control. They actually told me "don't stop what you're doing... just try to cut down gradually". My GP signed me off work for 5 weeks, and I thought "great! I can take drugs for 4 weeks and then spend a week recovering".

It's true that my clinical depression and abusive relationship had led me to self medication, but when it became drug experimentation, I lost control over the course of a year. I started with a legal drug called Methylone, which I took every day and it worked to alleviate my depression. Then, when I found NRG-3 during a messy breakup, I was completely hooked.

Less than a month after becoming addicted to NRG-3, I started carrying a letter with me and a £20 note in an envelope. The letter said:

"I am a drug addict. If you have found me with breathing difficulties or unconscious, please put me in a taxi to A&E".

In actual fact, the letter was far more detailed and contained some information that would have been useful for any medical professionals who had the misfortune of trying to look after me... but you get the idea. The penny had dropped. I knew I was in trouble. Self-medication had turned into experimentation, which had unleashed addiction.

For others, there are 3 valuable lessons I learned:

1. Depression, stress, relationship difficulties, money worries, housing worries: these are the things that create a festering swamp. Addiction will take hold, not because of the drugs, but because somebody's life is already awful. If you want to prevent addiction, you need to improve people's lives, not ban drugs.
2. Even though it sounds disingenuous, it does make sense to shop around. Think about all those Oxycontin addicts who haven't yet figured out that heroin is stronger and cheaper. They're going to one day. How much money are they going to 'waste' in the meantime?
3. Addictions are naturally self-limiting. People need to quit on their own terms. There's an oft-quoted line about how addicts and alcoholics "can never get enough of their drug of choice". In actual fact, very few people can actually afford to take as many drugs as they want. Look at the mega wealthy: aren't you surprised that so few of them drop dead from drug abuse?

Alcohol is a dumb choice of drug, because it's so damaging to the liver. In a way, benzos are the smart alternative. GHB/GBL makes you 'drunk' but it doesn't have the same hangover, and it's not so damaging to the body. You can buy 10 litres of "alloy wheel cleaner" from BASF in Germany for about £500. That's equivalent to 7,000 shots of vodka, and it won't give you cirrhosis of the liver.

Cocaine is a dumb drug of choice, because it's so expensive and the adulterants are highly damaging to the mucous membrane in your sinuses, to the point where you might lose your nose. You can buy nitracaine from China in bulk for just a few dollars per gram, and it'll be 99% pure.

Heroin is damn cheap. It's the injecting that causes the problems: collapsed veins, abscesses and dirty needles leading to blood-borne diseases. With an adequate supply of medical grade diamorphine, a heroin addict can live a long, healthy happy life, and will probably "grow out" of their habit in their 40s or 50s.

Crystal meth is cheap anyway. Smoking meth is undoubtably incredibly destructive to teeth and lungs. It sounds crazy to say this, but given an adequate supply, at least crime will go down and the need for prostitution goes away. With higher self-esteem because people are not selling their body to get drugs, surely a large number of addicts are going to stop using eventually?

I'm not saying "legalise all drugs and have your local supermarket stocking crystal meth". Drugs are so widely available and so cheap, we're at the point where prohibition is like a bad joke. Shutting the original Silk Road marketplace on the Dark Web just caused dozens more imitators to spring up and fill its place. You can't legislate to control human nature. It doesn't work. Supply and demand are the only forces that you need to understand.

If you have a loved one who you think is at risk of addiction, or struggling with addiction, you can prevent that journey from even starting by making their life vastly better so that addiction never takes hold. Once an addiction has started, you're not going to be able to cut it short by cutting off their supply of money or forcing them into some rehab program. An addict will simply go around any obstacle. An addict needs to quit on their own terms, when they've had enough.

Perhaps I will never have had enough, because perhaps my life will never improve. Certainly, when you're depressed, stressed, bored shitless by your job, worried about money, isolated and lonely... those things are perfect breeding conditions for addiction to take hold. Why the hell are you being clean & sober, if your clean & sober life is utter bullshit?

This is how I've arrived at the decision to start using drugs again.

Except, I'm being smart... I think. I think I'm smart. Correct me if I'm wrong. Am I smart?

What am I doing differently? Well, nothing really. I'm combining my experience from far too many years of ups, downs and dangerous self-experimentation. However, I have meticulously gathered data. I have documented pages and pages of details on my drug and medication use, and cross-correlated that with my mood diary, earnings, movement data and every other data source that I could harvest.

My conclusion: I need a fast-acting antidepressant that gives me a mood improvement.

So, I decided to prescribe myself Bupropion.

It arrived today.

I took it.

The experiment continues. It's a big relief to finally change something, after 6 painful months of controlling the variables, even though it was causing me untold mental anguish.

Actually, two things changed today, which is a shame, in terms of conducting a decent trial.

Today, I'm unemployed.

Anyway, I need to get another job, and it might just be a little easier, now that I have relented and I'm taking happy pills... let's see, shall we?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #mentalhealth #medication #depression

This is a story about prescriptions...

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

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

I need to write 3 times a day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #bipolar #career #agile #writing

This is a story about being on the run...

When you're no fixed abode, the systems can't really cope. It's hard to even rent a VHS video cassette without two forms of identity that prove your address, let alone get a job or in any way re-enter civilised society.

Nowadays, when you come to rent a house or a flat, you will need to do a credit check. How are you going to pass a credit check if you don't have two recent utility bills? How are you going to pass a credit check if you're not on the electoral roll anywhere? Often times, even jobs require a credit check.

Can't get a job and a place to live without a home, and can't get a home and an income without an address: Catch 22. Game over.

I'm now on the electoral roll again. I'm now the bill payer for council tax, electric, gas, water, sewerage, telephone and every other service that leeches away your hard-earned cash every month, along with your rent or mortgage. Interestingly, you can't even get electric & gas without a credit check sometimes. Sometimes you have to buy electric & gas on a key meter, so that you don't rack up big bills that you're in no position to pay.

When I went off grid, I disappeared out of the system.

Without the system knowing that I was paying utility bills somewhere, the system assumed I was a no-good worthless piece of shit. I would have been unable to rent my apartment, except for the fact that I'm a blagger and a hustler, and I kicked off a big stink with the letting agent about being a non-dom and wanting to keep my financial affairs private. They seemed to buy it and let me get away without doing a credit check.

Interestingly, I just about managed to sneak onto the HSBC contract I did last year, because the system hadn't quite caught up with the fact that I'd disappeared off the grid. HSBC is not in the habit of employing homeless junkies and giving them the opportunity to improve their lives and get ahead. Thankfully they are also truly appalling at due diligence, which was the project I was there to work on, ironically.

This year, I'm now security cleared to a level that would allow me to get onto nuclear sites, most probably. That's not unusual for me. I signed the Official Secrets Act when I was 17, and I've been on several nuclear submarines, as well as working on some highly classified projects. God only knows how the vetting works, but they didn't seem to pick up that I have 3 criminal cautions from the police, or the fact that I've spent the best part of the last 3 years hustling like hell to try and save my own life.

The system has very much worked against me, to try and keep me trapped into poverty and homelessness, but the tide has turned.

Today I received a letter. On the back it was marked "ProSearch". I thought "oh no! what horrible thing from my past is now rearing its ugly head to come and bite me on my arse?".

Upon opening the letter, it appears like ARM Holdings Plc - which is a company I invested in back in the 1990s - has been trying to track me down to give me some money. The last address they have on file is from 10 years ago. They spent some money trying to find me, so they can give me some money. That's quite cool.

People don't generally track me down to give me money. In fact, a lot of the people who owe me money tend to go out of their way to avoid me. Not because I would ask them for the money back, but because they probably don't have any intention of paying me back, and perhaps they feel bad about their debt. I expect a few people who owe me money would pay me back if they could, but they're never likely to escape the grinding poverty that they're in. I'd rather write the money off anyway. I can always earn some more money, but making new friends is hard.

Anyway, this is quite a nice change. Instead of bloody bean counting idiots chasing their pathetic paltry sums of money that apparently I owe because somebody sold me into slavery before I was born, I'm now having people trying to find me to give me money.

I don't feel owed this, you understand? I don't feel entitled. But it's good when the tide turns and it feels like hard work is actually getting somewhere.

I wasn't born to just pay bills and then die.

Tags: #capitalism

This is a story about arrogance...

It occurs to me that many people might be offended by the vulgarity of me discussing - with candid honesty - the good fortune that has come my way, and decide that I feel entitled in some way to those things bestowed upon me by pure blind luck.

In the UK, it's considered to be in bad taste to talk about money. However, we are given to flamboyant displays of wealth, which are obviously our way of screaming "LOOK AT ME!! LOOK HOW SUCCESSFUL AND AMAZING I AM!!" at the top of our reserved British lungs.

I once shared on social media a document that I had discovered that had the rates that a bunch of us banking IT consultants charge our clients for a day's labour. The amounts are obscene.

When I first started as an IT contractor at the tender age of 19, I was paid twice as much as I had been in my previous job, and it totally went to my head. I bought Harrods hampers as Christmas gifts and whisked my girlfriend and I off to New Zealand on a business class flight, chartered a yacht and stayed 5-star all the way. Take the bullied kid from school, treat him like shit his whole life and then shower him with wealth and he might just end up rubbing your nose in it, because it's sweet relief after 12 years of playground and classroom hell.

That first contract paid just under £40 an hour, by the way. I was living in Winchester and working in Didcot, near Oxford. It was good money for a non-banking project outside of London, even by today's standards. I offer you the precise number, because I want you to judge me.

Imagine the whole time you're at school is made pure hell by endless bullying. Imagine being a social outcast. Imagine not even being able to cultivate a teenage romance until you left school at age 17, because you carry too much of a reputation of being an unpopular geek. Imagine all those beatings and lonely times where you're singled out because you're quiet, sensitive and then simply labelled as a soft target. Once you become the bullied kid, you stay the bullied kid and nobody's going to want to know you because they don't want to risk becoming bullied too.

What do you do instead, if you're denied friends, popularity, girls, a social life? You stay home and tinker with computers.

So, if it appears boastful when I talk about landing a well paid contract for a major UK corporation when I was just 19 years of age, it's because I fucking paid a lot to get it. Remember your first kiss with your first girlfriend? Remember hanging out with your friends? Remember how fun your school days were? Well, imagine swapping all that out for 35 hours a week of being bullied around the clock, for 12 straight years.

I'm exaggerating slightly, because I got to do my final 2 years at a 6th form college, which gave me a bit of a chance to re-invent myself away from the image that my dad had destroyed by expecting me to cycle to school from fucking miles away on a stolen girl's bike, every fucking day, past all the other kids arriving at the school entrance. Kids don't forget shit like that.

Did I have friends? Yes, I was very grateful to have a small handful of other geeky bullied kids who I count as my friends. We stuck together, as the hated soft targets. We tried to take a stand. It only made us hated by teachers and headmasters/mistresses, because we made the bullying problem more conspicuous.

So, I became a young adult with hideous insecurities. My parents were c**ts. Almost everybody at school had been a c**t. Naturally, this mistreatment denied me any self-confidence that would have allowed me to get a girlfriend. Somehow, I fell into a couple of trysts with girls from other schools, and even managed to lose my virginity at 15, but this was through the artificial confidence that drugs gave me, the one time I used amphetamines in my teens.

I found my way into sailing, rock climbing and mountaineering, and those things gave me a bit of an identity beyond that of a geek, but there was so much damage to be repaired. It was only in the final couple of years at school that I was a member of Lyme Regis Sailing Club, Dorset. It was only during my couple of years at 6th form college that I learned how to rock climb, and went on a couple of expeditions to the Alps and the Dolomites.

Having money was the first vindication that I had value as a person. I bought a flash sportscar, and I'm ashamed to admit that it improved my confidence. I found it easier to talk to girls with the crutch of a fast motor vehicle. The status symbol worked as it was supposed to: a fanny magnet.

Of course, the more money I got paid, the more I felt that I was worth. I did become arrogant. I did think that I was 'worth' the money. Again, I ask you to consider the context: I was a young insecure geek, who suddenly had a cash windfall. Of course I was going to use money to prop up my fragile self esteem.

Today, if I tell you about the lovely apartment I live in, how I earn obscene amounts of money, or that I'm working on important projects, then you can infer this: something has wrecked my world to the point where I am slipping back into old insecurities. It's not boastfulness. What it is, is pure terrified protection of the last dregs of my self esteem.

Some pseudo-psychologist will tell you that it smacks of egotism. Not true. Over time, I have developed humility and come to recognise the complete disconnect between what I'm paid, what I do, and how much value I really have. I consider myself overpaid, what I do as trivial and unimportant, unnecessary even, and I've been humbled to see that I contribute very little of value to the world.

Every time I talk about this or that thing that I did... it's because I'm really suicidally depressed and I desperately want people to sit up and pay attention, and say "hey! He isn't just some expendable worthless piece of shit. Maybe it would be a bad thing if he died".

I'm desperately trying to see the value in myself, even though in pure pounds, shillings and pence, I can see that I'm very much 'valued' by my employers. However, I now no longer associate salary or contract income with value, because I can see no link between what I do and how much I get paid. It maddens me that I'm so much better paid than, say, your average artist who gets paid £10,000 per annum.

In-between my first contract and my second contract, I did my yacht skipper qualifications with the Royal Yachting Association. After my second contract, which paid £470 per day, I was able to purchase a yacht. Did I buy the yacht because I loved sailing? Partly. But the real reason I bought it was because I felt insecure. Owning a yacht is quite a big status symbol. It's also a massive waste of money. Just keeping a yacht in a marina costs thousands of pounds every year.

As each year passed after school, I maintained the advantage of the head-start in computing I gained at the expense of an enjoyable childhood. The bullies from school struggled, while the geeks inherited the Earth. It was hard not to become cruel towards those who I perceived as having persecuted me, and rub their noses in it.

The Square Mile has a certain macho culture, as well as encouraging vulgar displays of wealth. For a while, I was eating out in expensive restaurants, taking taxis and drinking in wine bars. Did I do it because I enjoyed it, or did I do it because I could at such a young age, and I knew that it was sticking two fingers up at the bullies?

What happened next is that I had a couple of nice girlfriends, and I started to feel less insecure. Everything was going my way, and I started to feel less like I needed to flaunt my financial success, just to prove that I wasn't scared of the bullies anymore. I started to feel less like I had to pack as much fun in as possible, to make up for lost time.

For a brief time, I was reasonably secure and happy in myself. I had developed my own identity. I had grown my self confidence. I actually felt popular for the first time in my life. My life was no longer about money and status symbols.

However, I was still desperate for love. I felt like I had missed out on having a childhood sweetheart and a university romance. Then an abusive partner and a messy divorce deprived me of my comfort and confidence I took from owning a house and having beautiful hand-picked things. By this stage, having a speedboat and a hot tub was about having wild fun with my friends, not about shoving my wealth and good fortune in anybody's face. I had a fast car because I enjoyed driving, not because I needed it for my fragile male ego.

Everything got smashed to shit during my divorce, and I found myself sleeping in my friend's guest bedroom, trying to rebuild my life, but having nowhere near the capital reserves to re-enter London society. My ex-wife made everything as stressful and destructive as she possibly could, and dragged out proceedings using every conceivably unpleasant and spiteful tactic she could, depriving me of even the collateral that was locked up in my home.

With nothing but a rapidly dwindling stack of money, I was in no position to start another business. I had to go back to IT consultancy. Some may say that it was hardly a bad option, but I had worked hard for 16 years so that I didn't have to do the bullshit rat race anymore. It was heartbreaking.

I let everything burn to the ground, and I got very sick indeed. 2014 saw me spend some 14 weeks in hospital and other kinds of inpatient treatment - I was dreadfully sick. That truly was an annus horribilis, even though I did manage 3 months of consultancy for Barclays at the end of the year.

2015 was pretty shit. I still had not managed to reach the escape velocity and launch myself into a stable orbit. It was a rough year, but I still managed to do 4 months of consultancy for HSBC in the summer/autumn.

2016 got off to a really shit start, but I should be able to do 5 months of consultancy for an undisclosed client before I absolutely lose my mind with the fucking rat race.

I have to be in some total shite part of Greater London for an 8:30am breakfast meeting tomorrow (Wednesday) and I already just want to jack in the job because it's predictable bullshit that's doomed to failure and is being hopelessly botched. However, it's easy money and in the context of the shitty situation I'm in I need the cash.

For context, I earn 28% more than I did when I was 20, which means I've been getting an annual pay rise of 1.75%, so excuse me if I'm not exactly thrilled to be getting out of bed in the morning. Especially considering the day job is even more boring than it was back then when I was young, fresh faced and inexperienced.

Of course, I'm able to see that I'm well off. I know that some people are getting pay cuts in real terms, and still others are out of a job despite their eagerness to work. I'm aware that in absolute terms, I get paid an eye-watering sum of money.

However, all my money is just going towards paying back the debts I ran up keeping myself alive. I actually paid for a great deal of private treatment, because it didn't seem right to burden the NHS with the costs in light of my potential earning power.

I am limping towards the day when I basically reach zero, so I can die with dignity knowing that my life insurance policy can be left as an estate for my sister and niece, and not be squandered on trivial debts run up simply because my own family and the welfare state offered me no assistance. Camden Council didn't offer me so much as a cardboard box to sleep in, let alone a hostel bed.

I simply don't have the energy to keep turning the pedals in such thankless pursuit of nothing. It will have been an exhausting marathon to simply reach zero again. Of course, with further months and years of IT consultancy for big corporations, I could in theory become rich again, but I'm at the limit of what I can stand. I've had enough. I'm ground down. I'm through. I'm done. Stick a fork in me, I'm cooked.

The pointless toil... for what?!?!

And so, if you think I'm entitled, arrogant and boastful, I hope you can see that it's simply because I'm exhausted and scared and insecure. Of course I see the value in the garbage collector and the nurse. I just don't see the value in myself, now that I am spent.

Tags: #bullying #suicide #career #childhood #computing

This is a story about living a double life...

I don't know if you know this, but I've been working again these past 3+ months. I've been putting on my suit and going to the office and pretending like everything's just peachy. When I put on my professional clothes, I also put on a mask. "Hi! How are you? How was your weekend?" I cheerily ask my colleagues on Monday morning, instead of saying "this place makes me want to kill myself".

I like my colleagues and I like the project I'm working on. There's nothing especially objectionable about the company I'm working for. Every large multinational corporation has skeletons in its closet, and my current end client is no exception. But, I don't have a deep-seated concern that I'm propping up some too big to fail organisation, like I did at HSBC. The global project I'm working on is the number one IT project for a FTSE 250 company. It's a good project and it should be enjoyable.

When I was looking for work I was feeling pretty insecure. I had a run of short contracts that didn't end particularly well. Every job I took, I was inadequately enabled to make a difference. In every role, I was frustrated that I had very little decision making power. I was frustrated that my bosses weren't listening, and instead my Cassandra-esque prophecies came true while I was helplessly kicked to the sidelines.

So, I swapped from a purely hands-on technical role into a managerial one. I knew that I'd be able to ace the interview, and that it's virtually impossible to get sacked from a managerial job just so long as you keep your head down and do a reasonable job of organising your team.

I made a calculated gamble. I knew that I find purely managerial work totally soul-destroying, but also that I've made a reasonable job of running the projects and teams I've been given in the past. I knew that the interview process would be a lot less painful than the current crap that you have to do to get a developer job these days.

And so, I joined a failing project with a programme director on his last legs. Things were just as desperate as they were at HSBC, with total numpties in management whipping people to go faster and faster while the deadlines loomed ever larger, and it became clear that the software was going to be delivered late, and the performance and stability were going to be crap.

The project had - and still has - a huge staff turnover problem. People leave after just a few weeks because the atmosphere is so toxic. Almost every member of the original project team has left. Other IT contractors had warned me to actually stay away from this project. However, the job was offered with a fairly immediate start, and I could get my invoices paid weekly. It dug me out of a financial hole very quickly. It totally made sense to just shut up and put up with it for a little while. That was 3 months ago.

Now, a new management team have been installed. The old programme director got the boot, and we moved from totally crazy deadlines to a properly Agile project. In terms of the task ahead, things looked a lot more hopeful, but I still get shouted at by the grumpy customer every day, literally.

I have no idea if there are any happy projects in IT.

With my team, I throw a protective bubble around them, set them realistic deadlines, and shower them with praise for their hard work. My team have delivered all the work that they committed to doing for 12 weeks in a row now. My team is the most successful team on the project. I've had no problems with sickness and staff turnover in my team. Everybody who works for me is pretty much happy to come to work, and fulfilled in their role... apart from me.

I sit at my desk, and I'm bored.

It's actually quite easy to manage a high performing team. I've set them up to succeed, and my team members relish the opportunity to do a good job. People don't need micromanaging.

For sure, most of my job is pointing out where corners have been cut, or things that developers don't really like doing haven't been done. The code is never the problem. Instead, development is about giving everybody enough time to think about all the things that aren't code. Being a good developer isn't about being a good programmer. Good programmers are not necessarily good developers. Good programming means that something is logically correct. Good developing means that I have high quality features in an application that I can actually use in a meaningful way.

I should be able to have a lot of pride in my work, but instead I'm frustrated that I'm running just one of 8 scrum teams, and that any attempt to help the wider project would see me treading on toes and getting into trouble again, like I did at HSBC. In the interests of my own job security, and that precious cash that replenishes my damaged bank balance, I'm not rocking the boat. I sit there, quiet and miserable, while the whole project goes down the shitter.

My team is a diamond in the rough. It's not that my colleagues are necessarily doing things badly. There are historical reasons why everything is fucked. I'm sitting pretty with a happy motivated team who consistently hit their targets and deliver high quality software. I'm the golden boy, with the customer very pleased with the work we've done.

The difference between this contract and my last one, is that I'm listened to. I sat down with the new programme director and told him I was deeply unhappy that the project deadlines were so unrealistic, and that our end-client was so unreasonable in their expectations. He listened, and he even took the time on Friday to tell me that he's grasped the nettle and told the bad news to the customer. My previous boss would never have done that. I actually risked my job a couple of months ago by telling the customer that there was no way in hell they were going to get everything they wanted by Christmas. Although I got in trouble with my boss, I also impressed the client, so when shit went bad they got rid of him and kept me.

However, the pace of change is awful. It's taken forever to put a decent set of managers in place who have enough of a backbone to stand up to our stroppy customer. It's taking forever to change the toxic environment of the project.

The whole time at work, I'm bored. I can't bury myself in work. I can't roll up my sleeves and fight the biggest fire. Nobody would thank me for wading in, where others are struggling. Things are so siloed. I couldn't get involved without treading on toes. So, instead, I sit quietly, letting my team members get on with doing a good job. "I'm alright, Jack" is not my style. It's totally unlike me to just think about my own role and responsibilities, and try to ignore the bigger picture.

It's killing me, working like this.

I'm damned if I do, and I'm damned if I don't. If I had a regular developer job, I'd be frustrated that the team wasn't being run the way I like to do things. If I had a programme director job, I'd be frustrated that I couldn't help to manage individual teams. I want to be all things to everybody. I want to be in all places at all times.

It's frustrating that I can't just bury my head in code, and entertain myself learning new technology skills. It's frustrating that my hands-on skills are getting rusty, as I sit around doing manager stuff, which is mostly just being the punchbag for the grumpy customer at the moment.

Sit back and think of the money, right?

Well, yes, to a point. But the working day goes so slowly, that by the time I get to the weekend I'm filled with pent-up frustration that I haven't gotten to work on anything meaningful. I have almost zero chance of doing anything creative during the week, except for the odd blog post. Even writing short stories at my desk is hard, because there are enough interruptions to ruin my flow. I could try to learn some new technical skill, but it's so hard to do when you can't sit down and concentrate for a block of time.

My life seems remarkably easy on the face of it. Put on a freshly laundered shirt and dry cleaned suit. Put on my polished shoes. Grab my laptop bag and head for the tube. Rock up at the office. Have breakfast at my desk. Count down the hours until lunchtime. Go sit by the river and eat a sandwich. Count down the hours until I go home. Collect my cheque at the end of the week. However, it doesn't feel like a week. Every week feels like a year. A year of pain and boredom.

Yes, I'm probably sick. I seem to be suffering from persistent anhedonia. I get no satisfaction or enjoyment from anything. I have no energy or enthusiasm to do anything. I just write and I drink, and I wait for the next time I've gotta go to work. Day after day, week after week.

I'm grinding out the hours, in the hope that things will get a little easier every day, but they don't. Every day I'm questioning what the hell I'm doing, and then like stretched elastic, I snap. Every day when I get home, all the suppressed parts of my personality come rushing out in a complex tangle of mixed emotions, which I try to deal with by writing.

People at work have little idea that I'm dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts every day. People at work have no idea just how much I hate my day job, and how much it's destroying my soul and sense of wellbeing.

It makes no sense to an outside observer, because what they see is a capable member of the project who comes to work and manages to get the best out of the team. On the face of it, I'm succeeding: I'm well paid and I'm doing a good job. My bosses are happy. My team members tell me they're pleased to be working with me. I've managed to shield the developers and testers who work for me from the toxic atmosphere that's pervasive throughout the project. I've managed to wear my mask so well, that I doubt anybody at work suspects just how desperate I am, inside.

Maybe things will change. Maybe they won't.

I've been waiting for my depression to lift for so long now. I've been waiting for things to get better at work for months, and they haven't, although there is always hope on the horizon. I literally live in hope.

But you know what? It's exhausting, leading this double life. It's so exhausting, telling your team great job, and being sunny and upbeat about everything, rather than letting the whole toxic atmosphere and hopeless deadlines cause a morale problem for the developers and testers who I manage. "Take one for the team" is literally what I'm trying to do. That's literally my role: to be a human shield to protect my team from the stroppy customer.

It's also exhausting leading a double life where you're so depressed you can barely function, but you need to put on the corporate mask of being the reliable high-powered decision maker. I need to turn up and be consistent every day. The whole reason why I command a good daily rate is that I don't take time off sick or bring my problems to work. I'm not allowed to have an off day. That's the point of using contractors: they'll drag themselves into the office even when they're desperately sick.

If I was my doctor, I'd say stop, what are you doing? Give yourself a break. You can't continue like this. This job is making you unwell. However, how can I do that when I need to get a stack of savings in the bank so I can afford to have a nervous breakdown.

I've been bumping along at rock bottom for as long as I can remember. I never recover, because I'm always trapped in a corner. I'm forced back into work too early, and I'm forced to work stressful shitty full-time jobs, because I need to dig myself out of a hole. It's a Catch 22.

It's quite possible that if I can stick things out for a couple more months, my fortunes will change. Things won't look so bleak when I'm no longer working to simply keep a roof over my head and service debts. I'm going as fast as I can, and yet it's somehow still not fast enough. I'm trying as hard as I can, and yet it's somehow still not good enough.

Sure, my bosses are pleased. Sure, my team members would tell you that I'm doing a great job. But it doesn't feel sustainable. I'm living too much of a lie. It's too much of a compromise on my identity and sense of wellbeing. It's too demanding, having to wear a mask all the time.

I'm bloody good at it: hiding my problems. That's really what this whole blog is about. I've spent so many years covering up my problems and maintaining a blemish-free CV, and making sure that I always get a good employment reference, that it was inevitable that I would one day decide to burn it all down. You just can't live a lie forever.

It's not like I'm hiding a drug habit or alcoholism. It's not like I actually have anything active in my life that I need to keep secret, unless you count having to appear like some kind of perfect corporate specimen of a man, who never gets sick and never has any personal problems.

Would it really help, going to my bosses and coming clean about my low mood, boredom, depression, suicidal thoughts? Of course not. Nobody wants to have to treat somebody with kid gloves. Fit in or fuck off is the mantra of corporate life.

Fit in or fuck off. It's fucking me up, living this double life, just to be able to fit in.

Tags: #career

This is a story about responsibility...

What a difference a day can make. 24 little hours. Now imagine that your life is nonstop round-the-clock bullshit perpetrated against you because you're trapped into a death spiral by people who profess to actually giving a shit about human life.

A great deal of preparations have gone into preparing the excuses why our own sons, brothers, nephews and other male members of our society are abandoned to a slow death ending in suicide. There's a lot of arse covering that has happened.

I'm an expert in arse covering.

I've seen arse covering throughout my career. I know it when I see it. I can smell bullshit and arse covering from a million miles away. I know when some utter dead-wood piece of shit is just covering their arse. I know when total cunts are throwing their colleagues under the fucking bus.

From my very earliest memories of childhood, I can remember my parents getting their excuses ready for why they were such utter cunts. Apparently I was a difficult child. It wasn't their fault. Apparently I used to cry in my cot out of spite. Apparently I used to shit my nappies to deliberately inconvenience my mum & dad. Apparently my very arrival on this earth was all part of the devil's plan to ruin my ma & pa's drug taking binge. Apparently if you were to shave my head you'd see the numerals 666 on my skull.

So, I have no doubt that my parents have covered their own conscience from the very day that I was born. I have no doubt that their own drug fuelled paranoia has meant that they've spent plenty of time getting their story straight. No your honour, he was always just evil you see, they'll say. Two against one. My word against theirs. Cunts.

If a plant was withered and dying, we would be in little doubt that it had been under-watered, perhaps had insufficient daylight or the soil was not very nutritious. Only in the madness of the world do we declare children to be evil little shits. Only in the folly of drug-addled parenthood would two grown adults believe that their child was a satanic agent sent to ruin their buzz. Cunts.

So, shame on them, not shame on me.

I've taken enough shame over the years. I've taken an unfair proportion of blame. I've taken an unreasonable amount of responsibility for my own birth. I've been saddled witth the debt of my parents' guilt and bullshit, but it's not my burden to carry. I'm fucked off with it all.

Shame on you, those who would tell me I'm a bad person from the day I formed my very earliest memories. Shame on you, those who would make me feel like a fucking inconvenience my whole life.

I'm sorry, not sorry, if I ever stole the limelight from you during your drug binges. I'm sorry, not sorry, that I ever deprived you of precious cash to spend on booze and drugs. I'm sorry, not sorry, that there was a tiny amount of time investment needed to palm me off on the state, so that I could be raised by my teachers and my friends parents.

You got a free fucking ride, in replicating your genes into me, but this is where the buck stops. You don't get to clone your selfish fucking genes any further. I have no intention of ever allowing the lineage of your selfish fucked up character traits to be perpetrated on humanity for any further generations. You absolutely awful people.

There's a sickness inside me, in the genes that I carry, passed on from lazy, arrogant, paranoid and selfish, self-centred arseholes who care about nobody but themselves and their drug taking, but this is where it ends. This is the end of the line. This is where somebody takes a stand.

Do I have anything to be ashamed of?

My parents constantly shamed me. Nothing was ever good enough. Unsatisfied with me, my parents took further steps to humiliate me and destroy my self esteem and happiness. Repeatedly, my very identity was violated and destroyed by the self-centred cunts who ruled my life until the day I could finally escape their clutches. There is nothing I want to give my parents credit for, except my unshakable belief that their genes should die as soon as possible.

Taking responsibility is about not perpetrating more pain and suffering in the world. Shame on you, my parents.

Do I have things to be ashamed of? Of course.

Have I paid my debts? Many, many, many times over, and now I'm exhausted.

Do I die in shame? Not at all. I couldn't have done any more in the circumstances. There's no pride, but I know that there's nothing left to give, and I maintained my integrity.

To perpetuate the misery that was inflicted upon me, would be a crime. The stain that my parents have left on the world must come to an end. In their old age, they'll pass away peacefully in their sleep. When I'm dead too, the nightmare is more or less over.

Eating poison to hurt your enemy is foolish, but my very existence serves to support this bullshit notion that children fucked up their drug binge, and they were cursed with an evil child sent by satan himself. I know it's ridiculous, but I can't take the risk of this horse shit continuing.

I'm so sick and tired of being told to live in shame, when I have little to be ashamed of.

I stand by my sins. I welcome the end.

Tags: #parents #childhood #suicide

This is a story about invasions...

Are you worried about your culture being wiped out? Are you concerned that we could all end up speaking German, Japanese, Chinese or Arabic? Are you concerned that you will no longer be able to worship your favourite imaginary friend? Are you concerned that you'll have to salute a different combination of colours, stitched into fabric and raised on a flagpole?

When you look at nationalism, you'll see that it's pretty insane. While some people willingly learn another language and enthusiastically adopt the culture of another country, and go and live amongst those people, others believe that "our" way of life is worth dying for. In fact, they believe "our" way of life is worth killing for.

Why would somebody learn German and go and live in Germany? Surely that would be like surrendering to the enemy. Surely that would be a slap in the face to our brave grandfathers and great grandfathers, who fought in two world wars so that we never had to learn another foreign language or eat a bratwürst. Our dead relatives laid down their lives so that we should never have to suffer an Oktoberfest and drink large steins of cold beer brought to us by buxom wenches in lederhosen.

When we study history and people's attitudes, it was nationalism that was the main reason we went to war, not the protection of the Jews. The genocide that was being committed is what we are mainly taught about today in schools, but the strongly held belief in British hearts, was that we needed to protect our country.

Only when our European allies had been completely overwhelmed by German forces, and they had reached the northern beaches of France, did we decide to put some boots on the ground.

If you examine the rhetoric of Donald Trump and the Brexit movement, you will hear similar attempts to stoke up nationalistic fever and paranoia over an 'invasion'. Apparently, a "swarm" of brown people are on their way to our shores, intent on fucking up our national identity. We are told to live in fear and mistrust of our Muslim neighbours, who wear strange clothes and congregate in strange buildings. Islamic culture is so different from ours, and we are being trained to treat what is different with suspicion of an ulterior motive, of overwhelming everything we hold dear.

Talk of walls and pulling up the drawbridge. Shut down the borders. Send "them" home. Look after "are" (sic.) own. Britain First. Make America great. Blah blah blah.

But, if we ignore the social problems that are driving suport for far-right jingoistic nationalists, like Trump, Farage, Le Pen, then we fail to defeat them. By continuing to bury our head in the sand and repeatedly just cry "racist" and "bigot" then we continue to drive a wedge between enlightened liberals, and the vast numbers of poorly educated people who feel economically disenfranchised.

Why would I talk about economics? Surely ordinary British people just want an integrated society, full of fellow British people, not all these damn foreign types with their weird food and strange customs? Well, no not really. The reason why people have rounded on immigrants, as has been stated ad nauseum, is that people feel poor and insecure in their jobs. Ordinary people are economically disadvantaged, and there is a popular belief that immigrants are fuelling excessive competition for a finite number of jobs and resources.

I'm about to suggest another, more controversial reason, why we have been taught that the West has 'won' and our way of life is the correct one.

Let's leave all discussions about anti-Semitism and the holocaust aside. Of course, any discrimination based on colour or creed is wrong. Of course, any act of genocide is deplorable. These things are not the topic of my thesis. Let's set those points to one side, because they're discussed at length elsewhere.

Now, let's think about how the Nazis swept to power. Do you think Hitler said "let's kill all the Jews" and all the Germans went "Yeah! Brilliant idea! Let's vote for this guy!". Nope. Even if the Nazi policies of getting rid of gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, Jews and other minority groups was central to their meteoric rise to power, something else was driving it.

Think about the economic situation in Nazi Germany. The country was saddled with debt. The war bonds were a crippling millstone around the neck of the ordinary German people. For every Deutsche Mark that was produced by hard working ordinary Germans, 17 more Marks had to be found for the repayment of national debt. The German people felt enslaved to the money lenders, and the money lenders were perceived as Shylocks (Jewish money lenders, Jewish bankers).

In the twenty year period in-between the world wars, ordinary Germans had been massively economically disadvantaged by the national debt, in the form of war bonds and reparations, that their own government and nation had taken on. Do you think the ordinary Germans felt that they owed this debt? Do you think that, given the choice, they would have borrowed so much?

The German people wished to free themselves from the slavery of interest payments and the tyranny of capitalism. The Nazi movement was essentially an anti-capitalist movement, with the ideas of Gottfried Feder at its roots. The Nazi movement was more akin to communism than the neoliberal capitalist democracy that we assume was the basis for all Western economies in the 20th century.

How were the Nazis able to motivate so many people to work hard to produce vast quantities weapons of war that are hard to not admire, for their sheer feat of engineering prowess? Germany took a great leap forward in putting the instruments of industry to productive use. From a position of being economically depressed, and with massive financial problems, how was it able to build airships, planes, tanks, bombs, guns, and massive amounts of infrastructure to support itself? How did Germany go from depressed doldrums, to becoming a world superpower, so quickly?

The answer is that they abandoned capitalism.

What, in essence, is capitalism anyway? Well, it's putting capital to work, through interest bearing financial instruments. Instead of having labour exchanged for food or goods or services, instead, debt is exchanged for factories and machinery, and people work because they don't own any of the factories or farms anymore. Where does the capital come from? The capitalists. Where does money flow to? Back to the capitalists.

Gottfried Feder figured out the pyramid scheme of capitalism. In his Manifesto for the Abolition of Interest Slavery, Feder explains how the owner of a factory does not benefit from the productive output, and neither do the workers either. Instead, the bonds that paid to purchase the factory bear effortless interest, meaning the profits of the factory flow back to the capitalist. The people who work in the factories need to buy the goods that the factory produces, so, their money again flows back to the capitalists. And through the exponentially multiplative effect of compound interest, the capitalists will grow ever richer, while never having to do a single day's labour. Infinite endless effortless capital.

It was an economic idea that brought the Nazis to power and kept them there. The Nazis brought a sense of prosperity and wellbeing to a nation that had felt depressed and enslaved to the capitalists. The Nazis brought about pride, not in the nation, nor the flag, nor the Nazi party, but in their productive contribution. People feel proud to have done a good day's work and to have produced something. Economic depressions rob people of their feeling of self worth. Economic depressions rob people of their self esteem.

Now, if we look at Islam, we can see that a core teaching of the Muslim faith is that earning interest is a sin.

In fact, do you think of yourself as Christian? Yes? Did you know that Christian supposedly means that you're Christian. That is to say, you follow the teachings of Jesus Christ our Lord and saviour. Do you believe in Christ?

Well, Christ is documented as saying "build no store of wealth on this Earth". Christ is documented as smashing the tables of the money lenders in Herod's temple. Think about that for a second.

Had time to digest that? Yes, that's right. Jesus Christ was anti-capitalist.

So, if we look at the successful religions from the past 2,000 years, and the most recently succesful attempts at world domination, you will see that anti-capitalism is the secret to their success.

Look at the Chinese. In 58 years, the Chinese have brought a nation of 1.3 billion people into economic prosperity. China has become a world superpower. China is one of the largest economies on the planet. How did they achieve that? By rejecting capitalism.

Islam counts 1.6 billion souls following the Muslim faith, and enshrined in law in Arab countries is the illegality of charging interest on loans. Imagine that! Imagine every bank in Europe and America being no longer allowed to charge any interest!

So, if you're looking for a reason why we should all fear the 'invasion' of these conquering hordes, and the demise of our precious culture, you might find that you're empathising with the likes of Rothschild and Goldman Sachs, cowering in terror because their plutocracy is about to be overthrown by the people that they have economically enslaved.

Why do we have a nation of bankers, lawyers and accountants, when those professions are only needed by the very wealthiest 0.1%? We are shaped in the image of what our rulers think is important. When we are governed by billionaires and millionaires, our whole nation and the priorities of our laws are shifted towards supporting their needs, not ours. We are producing trillions of dollars worth of useless derivatives, rather than useful goods & services.

Imagine if we took our best & brightest out of UBS, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and instead deployed them to work in science and engineering. Imagine if we took our hardworking poor in McJobs, and instead allowed them to build wonderful things for the betterment of humanity. Imagine how much happier and productive everybody would be if they were working towards something, rather than against everything.

Our world is so adversarial, with us & them, the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor, the wealthy white Westerners and those pesky brown people who want a few crumbs from the table.

In actual fact, there's plenty of everything to go around, but we are so intent on playing by the existing rules of the game, that we fail to wake up and realise that we are propping up a status quo that only makes us poor, disadvantaged and divided.

What have the Nazis ever done for us? They've shown us that economic ideas can create prosperity, optimism and productivity. They've shown us that there's a better way than neoliberal capitalist democracy.

It's distasteful to revere the successes of the Nazis, because I might be seen as also endorsing their genocide and ethnic cleansing. However, what could be more ethnically cleansing than building a massive wall, deporting all the Latinos and banning people of a certain religious faith from entering your country? Trump epitomises everything that is bad about the Nazis, whilst offering nothing that was good about them.

We need to cherry pick the best ideas, and we need to get rid of the ideas that enslave us and hurt the vast majority of ordinary people.

Tags: #economics #politics #capitalism

This is a story about an ambitious project...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #computing #writing #immortality

This is a story about deja vu...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I forgot...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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