This is a story about revolting peasants...

The problem with a race to the bottom is that once taken to its ultimate conclusion, mass extinction or war, revolution & regression are the only options.

As a technologist it seems like the huge cash mountains, built up by the dominant players in the information age, might lead to innovations that could solve some of the crises facing humanity.

If you think that Elon Musk and his Gigafactory producing staggering amounts of lithium batteries is the answer, you haven't looked at the fundamentals. Batteries are about energy storage, and energy still has to be generated somehow. Lithium is a metal, and all metals have to be mined. All that production capacity for batteries drives the price much lower, while the countries who have the mineral reserves can price gouge for their scarce resources.

Let's imagine that the gulf states move from oil to solar, because they're hot desert countries with very little cloud cover. Let's imagine that China produces all those solar panels, and also fulfils its ambitions to become one of the world's top lithium exporters, to rival Chile, who are currently number one.

Wealth is going to continue to flow to the gulf states, because we're still wedded to petroleum products. Nobody has yet come up with a realistic way of moving huge container ships, aeroplanes, freight trains and heavy goods vehicles, without fuel oil, kerosene and diesel. Most industrial plant used in mining runs on diesel. Crude oil is still the grease on the wheels of industry.

Automotive transport is a disproportionately high energy user in the USA because it's a wealthy country where almost every household has a car. In China, only 13% of the population have a car. Electric self-driving cars might be a big deal in the land of the free, but the 320 million people in the USA just can't compare to China's 1,360 million.

The bulk of what's going on in the tech world at the moment is silly toys for silly boys. Yes, the achievements of the SpaceX project are incredible. Yes, electric vehicles appear to go some way towards addressing climate change. However, it's an absolute piss in the ocean for most people on the planet.

I'm not even that worried about the rise of the robots, and automation. The main problem we've got is the social disruption. For sure, things like Uber seem to deliver a great advancement for people who are already wealthy. As a rich city dweller, being able to have a "private driver" (to borrow from Uber's tagline) feels like the promised future has arrived. In fact, what's happening is that a load of cab drivers who invested a lot in their local 'knowledge' and fleet of vehicles are now on the scrap heap. Uber attracts immigrants who can raise the money to buy a Toyota Prius, and are prepared to accept appalling working conditions.

For every person's livelihood robbed by technological 'advancement', a whole family is put into an economically precarious position. What are all London's black cab drivers going to do, with their investment in their vehicles and the approximately 3 years it took them to memorise 125,000 points of interest?

It seems logical and rational that people should adapt to change as quickly as they can, because hesitation will only leave them further behind. However, people don't tend to like it very much when the rug is pulled out from under their feet. People tend to dig their heels in, complain and protest, when their comfort zone is threatened.

From weaving looms to agricultural mechanisation, the peasants have been deeply unhappy with technological advancements. For hundreds of years, people have wrung their hands about the proletariat being left idle, while the machines till the fields and make our clothes. Clearly, the workforce has adapted. New types of jobs have been created. We have seen the rise and rise of the service sector, and entertainment.

You would have thought that people would be happy. We have low mortality rates, and we no longer have to work in the blazing heat and pouring rain, out in the fields, or in the choking smog of the industrial towns. We sit in our air-conditioned offices, moving a mouse around and tapping on a keyboard. These should be halcyon days.

However, we have failed to stem the flow of information and imagery of the excesses of the wealthiest 1% flaunting their money on the world stage.

We can't help but compare ourselves with others, and most of our media is obsessed with the super-rich. The idea of a jet-set lifestyle, with limousine transport is part of what makes Uber so successful. We have been promised a better life for so long, but yet we are stuck with the drudgery of menial jobs. Suddenly we too can be chauffeur driven around. However, we forget that we are living in a tiny bubble.

The very vast majority are still living absolutely shit lives of grinding poverty. While wage increases at the bottom of the food chain look very good in percentage terms, they really don't measure up to the increased expectations of those people who are being paid marginally more. Also, there is little data to suggest that increasing somebody's salary from $1 a day to $2 a day is transformative to their quality of life.

Nearly 50% of the world's population uses the Internet, and so implicitly, those people expect to soon have a helicopter, a superyacht, a private jet and an idyllic desert island. These are the images that we see every day. This is what we're promised. I can follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram, just like I can follow my mate Fred Bloggs from down the road. It takes one swipe of my finger on my smartphone to compare myself with the top 0.1% of the population, just the same as it does to compare myself with the 99.9%.

I'm not given to comparing myself with the billions of other Internet users. Looking at Twitter is depressing. Guess what? Everybody's got a mum. Everybody's got cats & babies. Everybody's got the same worries about money, relationships and how attractive their body is. Everybody blogs. Everybody photographs. We're all just so much meat in the mincer.

There is a bit of us that needs to feel special and unique and different. "Big data" doesn't care that you're special, unique and different. Technology says that you're just one of billions of users. You're just one pair of eyeballs in a sea of marketing opportunities. Tech is a numbers game. You're a statistically negligible number.

As our communities have collapsed, and we have been driven into increasingly desperate lonely isolated lives, where our only connection with the world is through social networking, the war on our workplace rages on. The same technology that knows if you're engaging with advertising can be used to make sure that we're paying attention while we're working our jobs. Eye-tracking technology could easily be used to deduct money from your wages every time you stare out of the window, instead of focussing on your spreadsheets and email.

Technology is developing very fast, and the hype suggests that exponential growth is delivering all the things that we've been imagining for hundreds of years.

The truth, however, is that somebody still has to mine your lithium, install your solar panels, and actually permit the switch to be thrown to enable our robotic overlords.

What we're going to find is that even though the geeks might be right, people still don't like to end up standing around with their dick in their hands, looking like a total idiot. The message from the technologists seems to be "this is better, so you'd better get on with accepting the future" and "evolve or die".

It's been very frustrating as a technologist to be held back by dinosaurs who just don't 'get it'. It's been very frustrating to work with organisations that are extremely resistant to change. A lot of people who I meet in my job have 99 reasons why something won't work, and will be deliberately obstructive. In order to get anything done, I've had to become extremely resourceful about going round people who just want to protect their jobs.

There are more people than you think who are having a shitty time. There are all those people who society has been happy to leave festering in the "economically inactive" bucket. There are the vast majority, who are seen as a commodity pool, to be given zero hours contract McJobs on minimum wage. There are the jaded, disillusioned, demotivated and demoralised people who are educated and intelligent enough to see that the system's pretty crooked - the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer - who are also bored zombies in their horrible office jobs.

The thumb screws are getting tightened on the working class, with austerity, benefit cuts, job insecurity, pay cuts in real terms, ever-increasing cost of living (i.e. food, housing, energy, transport) and every other thing that creates a death by a thousand cuts.

And why are the ordinary people suffering this low growth, high stress environment? So that we can have bank bailouts, corporate welfare and tax breaks for millionaires.

Yes, us technologists can imagine a utopian society of endless leisure time, self-driving electric cars and android servants, but we are very unlikely to get there while the bankers, oligarchs and politicians are attempting to feather their already plump nests.

Already, we see anger directed at gentrification. How long before the peasants march to Palo Alto with their pitchforks and burning torches, in order to lop off the heads of the plutocrats who say "let them eat Facebook likes"?

Tags: #computing #socialmedia

This is a story about how to fuck up a kid...

I love the symbolism of this image. What it means to me is this: we have to jump through hoops, like some kind of trained circus animal.

What made you decide that you could give your kids a brilliant life? What made you decide that creating new life on an overcrowded planet was a great idea?

Was it the fact that climate change is an undisputed problem, and your children will inherit a drowning world?

Was it the fact that neoliberal capitalism has given us a cruel ruling elite who have enslaved most of humanity in menial jobs, and left the rest to starve?

Was it that a small handful of oligarchs, monarchs and plutocrats control all the world's wealth, and the chances of being elevated from poverty are the same as being hit by an asteroid, twice, on the way to collect your lottery winnings?

Was it that the social structure of the tribe, the clan and the extended family has now all-but ended, as we are forced to roam the entire planet in search of a golden opportunity that does not exist, and we are forced to content ourselves with social media, text message and video-chat interactions, that are in place of actual face-to-face human relationships with our nearest and dearest?

It won't be long before our babies are whisked away from us at birth, and we can do nothing but follow their progress on a Twitter page, as they forge their way through an educational system designed to produce compliant drones, who have no hope but to join the enslaved masses in some soul-crushingly dreadful job. And the reason why we never get to see our children? So we can continue to pursue our unfulfilling jobs for as many hours as we can possibly work before collapsing with exhaustion.

I have this little fantasy about being a dad. In my fantasy, me and some imagined partner are woken up early in the morning by our two children. One child is a toddler, and the other is slightly older but still a preschooler. The kids clamber into bed and we all spend the morning watching cartoons together. Then we all get up and dressed and eat pancakes together around the kitchen table.

Then, I also have this imagined version of reality.

I wake up before the kids, get showered and dressed although I'm desperately tired. I then have a stressful commute through traffic and endless crowds of people. I arrive at a job that I hate, because it's boring and stressful, underpaid and my bosses have nothing but contempt for me and the capitalist scum who run all the corporations have no gratitude or respect for the workers who toil to line their pockets. I get to look at a photograph of my children on my desk, but this is merely a form of emotional bribery. Without the picture of my kids on my desk, I would question what the hell I was even doing, and just quit the awful job.

In my imagined version of reality, I work extra late to try and impress the bosses and get a precious promotion that may allow the basic essentials of life to be bought without constant financial struggle to make ends meet. Every time the car breaks down or some home improvements are needed, it always costs more than any savings that have been put away as contingency for these eventualities. A debt spiral has been happening because of having to use short-term borrowing to simply meet the cost of living. Then more debt was incurred servicing the first debt. This wasn't money that was spent on frivolities, but on such things as fixing broken plumbing and essential child-rearing equipment like cribs and pushchairs.

My imagination tells me that, in reality, I would then struggle home late through yet another stressful commute, only to find that the kids are already in bed. My partner is exhausted from the demands of working a part time job that brings in marginally more money than the cost of the childcare that we must pay for so that she can have her very badly paid job. Juggling work and childcare arrangements, she must travel twice as far as a normal commute, in order to pick up and drop off the kids at their daycare facilities. The household budget is super tight, and extremely diligent use of discount coupons, shopper loyalty schemes and knowing the cheapest supermarket to obtain our groceries for each product, is the only way that a few extra pounds can be found to balance the books.

Exhausted and stressed - in this imaginary reality - we collapse into bed. The pressure that me and my imaginary partner are under means that we are arguing all the time, so we aren't having sex or any kind of physical intimacy anymore. We are just two exhausted scared and anxious people, trying to survive and hide the desperation of the situation from the children.

The children - I imagine - are browbeaten into believing that they have one shot at getting good school grades and not fucking up their lives. Me and my imaginary partner tell our kids how important it is that they study hard and try their best, so that they can go to university and get a great job. We repeatedly tell our kids that life is a struggle, and the world is a mean place, and that they should stop laughing and playing, and knuckle down and do some damn homework.

Grow up! Concentrate! This is important! Pay attention! You have no idea what the real world's like! We rebuke our little kids. We are desperately anxious that our children should not suffer the same fate that we endure. Endless arguments over schoolwork and bad grades. Endless stress about whether or not our kids are thriving in the rigid educational system. Every bit of spare time we have goes into educational activities. We can't just make a fort out of cushions... we have to turn it into a history lesson, or a lesson about the physics of why buildings don't fall down. Everything is twisted into an opportunity to try and cram a bit more knowledge into our little kids' craniums.

Your kid drives themselves nuts with the pressure and expectation placed upon them. Kids are sensitive to their parents anxiety. Kids are like sponges, and they're getting the message loud & clear about how important it is that they apply themselves and try their hardest. Some kids will respond, and will allow themselves to have their personality dissected, sifted and sorted. Some kids will quietly allow themselves to be judged and graded by complete strangers who couldn't give two fucks about who they are as an individual.

Then, finally, it's time for the big wide world that we've promised our children is the whole reason why they can't have a childhood. The whole reason why we didn't let our kids play in the dirt, or spend time with their friends, was so that they could have their noses in books, writing essays or taking mock examinations. Now, it's time for your kids to spread their wings and be whatever they want to be.

Use your imagination! Follow your dreams! Find your passion! We tell our precious children.

What we really mean is: go get a sensible job for a reputable corporation, shovelling shit for the capitalists.

Childhood was jettisoned in favour of academic achievements. We told our kids they couldn't be friends with some of the other children, because they were too stupid and a bad influence. We told our kids they couldn't laugh, play and have the simple joys of their childhood, because there was too much at stake. Our kids' precious future was on the line. It was life or death.

And now, your kids have the same shitty job that doesn't pay the bills and is inadequate to support a family. Your kids busted their balls to get their grades, go to university, follow their dreams. Guess what? There aren't any jobs for historians or philosophers. There aren't any jobs where you need to speak dead languages like Latin or Ancient Greek. There aren't any jobs for artists.

Your kids are going to have to get a job keeping score for the capitalists, while they wait for the planet to become totally uninhabitable. It's a football game with 21 referees and 2 goalkeepers. It's a rowing race with 20 coxswains and 2 rowers. Over 80% of the 'economy' is made up by service sector bullshit.

This is it? This is what you you wanted to give your kids? This is the life that you thought your children would be so happy to live? Did you think about this stuff? You did think about this stuff, didn't you? No? Why didn't you think about this stuff?

"Everything will be alright in the end"

No. It probably won't be.

Things probably won't be alright in the end, because everybody has that attitude. Through collective wilful stupidity, and a desire to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes, we spawn yet more children in the hope that one of the little fuckers is smart enough to solve the world's problems. It's like setting alight to the basement of your house, in the hope that it will put out a fire in the roof.

Don't get me wrong; I love kids. I think kids are cute and I love the way that they make me feel happy when I look after them. I definitely feel very fulfilled as an animal, when I'm playing make-believe daddy, and imagining that I might have kids of my own. There's definitely something biologically right about reproducing one's genes. However, ethically it would seem to be the wrong thing to do.

You know, you made your choice, and I like you and your kids. But collectively it's fucking insane.

I would say that the only way to redeem yourself now would be to pull your kids out of school. Go and live near your parents, uncles and aunties. Form a little village of your relatives. Let your kids play and be children. Teach your kids about the grave responsibility that faces them, but don't fucking bullshit them. Stop selling this lie that hard work and a lost childhood will somehow pave the way for a happy adulthood.

Just look at the goddam stats. Soaring rates of mental illness and suicide. Almost everybody hates their fucking job and doesn't get to spend enough time with their families. Almost everybody is stressed as fuck about money, job insecurity and the uncertainty over whether they will be able to provide housing, food, clothing and everything else they need for them and their children. It's fucking awful.

But, you know what? There are more of us than the goddam capitalists who want to maintain the status quo. Sure there are police and the army, who are there to make sure that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. However, the system only continues to function while we all collectively help to prop it up. Are you happy? Is this what you want for your children? Is this it?

Is this it?

Tags: #capitalism #childhood

This is a story about shutting down conversations...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: K C Green

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

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

For sure the media rams the world's problems down our throat 24x7 from all corners of the globe, but fundamentally, even in our little local communities shitty stuff is happening. Even on the streets of wealthy London, there are awful things being perpetrated against innocent people.

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

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

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

Food for thought, anyway.

Tags: #depression #anxiety #mentalhealth #suicide

This is a story about fear of death...

I had 3 major admissions to the Royal Free Hospital on the hills of Hampstead, overlooking central London. I snapped this shot after waking up with canulas in both my arms, 10 cables attaching me to an ECG machine, a motorised drip pump shoving fluid into me as fast as it could go. I was a pincushion from all the blood samples that had been taken.

Doing a quick body scan, my right leg was horrifically swollen. My right knee was damaged. The operation to reunite the two halves of my calf muscle, repair 4 severed tendons and reconnect 2 nerves, was still healing. I had a big burn on my lower abdomen. There was throbbing dull pain just under my ribcage at the front, and either side of my back, where my liver was torn and my kidneys were failing. There was fluid on my lungs. My chest was tight and constricted.

Was I scared? Did I call out for a loved one? Did it bother me that my prognosis was pretty grim? Do you think it even crossed my mind that I might die alone, except for one or two strangers in the mostly empty ward?

The photo captures the sun low in the sky, not long after dawn.

As long as I die in London, I know I tried my best to find my way back to the land of the living. I have no fear of death in London. Nobody dies of shame in London. If you can't find your will to live in London, you can slip away peacefully. You're never truly alone in London.

I had a 4 hour operation under general anaesthetic to fix the injury inflicted upon me by my parents. I travelled home on the bus on my own after a few days recovering in hospital. My leg was in plaster cast, held in severe dorsiflexion and was not weight bearing. I was as weak as a kitten. I let myself back into my friend's house, hopped up the stairs to the guest bedroom and collapsed in bed.

I had already spent several days in Oxford John Radcliffe Hospital in their high-dependency care unit, while they tried to stabilise my muscle damage and save me from kidney failure. I'd made my way back to London with a blood sodden bandage that was little better than the field dressing that I had improvised with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, before paramedics arrived. I had assumed that despite the wound being down to the bone, it was nothing that a couple of stitches at a minor injury clinic couldn't fix. It wasn't me who called 999. I was just trying to get back to London.

Back in London and finding myself with a spare evening before my operation, I had gone to a adventure sports film festival, hobbling along with my lame leg. The severed tendons meant that I was not even able to raise my foot any more, and it dragged and caught on kerbs and steps, causing great pain.

Having never experienced a general anaesthetic, I felt the same trepidation that I felt before my first skydive or another extreme leap into the unknown. However, there was never any doubt that it was something I couldn't face on my own. Just go along with it. Trust to fate, skilled professionals and technical equipment. Blind faith.

You should see the way I ride my bike. One slip and you're a goner, when you thread your way in-between the massive heavy goods vehicles, transporting steel beams for the construction of Crossrail. The double-decker bus drivers are amazingly skilled and seem to manage to not squash too many cyclists. However, when you mix together the debutanté Über drivers in their Toyota Priuses, hard-up black cab drivers, various small delivery vehicles, plus the unpredictable mix of abilities of people driving around central London, it's no wonder that paramedics call bike riders "organ donors".

When I hear that yet another of my fellow commuters has hurled themselves under a tube train, I burst into tears. It's too much to bear, thinking that some of my fellow Londoners have reached the end of their rope too. Perhaps those less personally affected by suicidal thoughts are the ones who tut about how selfish it is that a huge underground station has to be evacuated so that the human remains can be bagged and carted off to the coroner. The disruption to the capital's transportation network seem huge, but there are so many other veins and arteries in the heart of the nation, that people find alternative routes quite easily, with minor delays.

I'm not emotional when it comes to my own death.

I have fantasised about going on a scouting mission to a nearby tower block that has an open-air balcony with a 40 floor drop. My only concern would be landing on some poor unfortunate on the pavement below - hence the need to check the drop zone in advance.

I would never throw myself in front of a train. It would be too traumatic for the driver and the people on the platform. Even people on the train would feel a bump and judder as the wheels crushed bone and flesh. I know they would. People have described to me exactly what it's like for a tube train to run over a passenger, and I've had to run out of the office crying. Strangely, I don't cry for myself.

Jumping off a bridge in London would be pointless. None of the bridges are high enough, unless you were able to scale Tower Bridge.

Killing yourself in a public place is a bit selfish though. It's bound to leave a big mess to clean up and cause distress for an unpredictable number of people.

I didn't want to commit suicide while I was staying with friends. I felt that it might have been seen as some negative reflection on their hospitality, and would leave bad memories in the guest bedroom where I had been staying, which would tarnish their home.

I'm mindful that whoever I'm living with is burdened already with the uncertainty over whether my resolve to keep myself alive and well is not slipping.

When I am seized by the sudden urge to take myself and a sharp knife to the bathroom and open my radial arteries into the bath, I worry if I would cry out in pain as I dug into the joint on the inside of the joint of my arm, searching for the blood vessels with the sharp point of the blade. Then I worry whether I would be able to contain the mess within the bath, as my heart pumped my circulatory system dry.

Before I have gone any further with these thoughts, I realise that it would be grossly unfair to leave the discovery of my body and handling the police to a friend who doesn't deserve such a responsibility.

I think about setting myself aflame with petrol, in political protest at capitalism, inequality and social injustice, right in the centre of Canada Square. I think about how desperately agonising it would be to be burnt alive. I think about how suffocation would be as deadly as the heat, as the flames consumed all the available oxygen. Gasping for breath, and in unimaginable agony, death would be neither swift nor immediately assured. Dying of the burns over the course of the coming days would not be a great way to contemplate any last regrets.

It's the halfway situation that's the problem. A failed drug overdose so often results in organ failure and a much slower and more painful death than originally intended. Being knocked off your bike while wearing a helmet could mean paralysis rather than death. I know what it's like to score my arms with a razor blade. I know what it's like to wonder what the scars are going to look like when they heal. I know what it's like to experiment to see how deep you have to cut to reach the veins. However, so many cuts will stem the bleeding enough to preserve life, despite leaking profusely at first.

If you spend any time in psychiatric instituions, you meet suicide survivors. Most have had their stomachs pumped or filled with activated charcoal. Many will have their wrists bandaged. Scars from previous half-hearted failed attempts and self-harm, indicate a certain revolving doors nature to our treatment approach. Some of my fellow patients confide in me that they are saving up the very pills that were prescribed to them to prevent their suicide, so that they can have another go. One guy saved his tablets for 8 months and had things well planned except for an unexpected visitor. He was in intensive care for several weeks. He now faces a life of dialysis because his kidneys failed due to the toxic load. He was planning on attempting suicide again at his earliest opportunity.

I met a beautiful young Australian paramedic in hospital. You would have thought that she would value life higher than anybody, but the lesions to her neck indicate that she'd used her medical training to attack her jugular veins.

I read that media coverage of suicide can trigger a spate of copycat suicides. Newspapers are discouraged from reporting on the suicide method used. It's said that jails are like universities for criminals to swap tips and make connections. Could it be that mental health institutions are the same for the suicidally depressed, with more people being likely to end their lives using ideas gleaned while in hospital?

Frankly, there isn't much stopping a resourceful person from finding a way to kill themself. I've considered everything from inert gas to the application of an electrical current across my chest to send me into ventricular fibrillation. The one that is most appealing is drifting off to sleep and not waking up.

There's a famous quote by one of the few people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, where they said they regretted it as soon as they had let go.

When I once took a drug overdose, there was a momentary twinge of regret that could have lasted about as long as it would have taken me to fall and hit the water, having jumped off a high bridge. There was a period where I would have been able to eject the toxins from my body, if I was suddenly determined enough to save myself. Instead, I then found myself accepting my fate, and a strange calm came over me before the chemicals hit my bloodstream. I was resigned and relaxed about whatever happened next. Death or organ failure. I didn't care.

It was only after a couple of days when my paralysis temporarily lifted and it was clear that the only way I was going to die was very slowly through the accumulated damage to my body, malnutrition and dehydration. I was pissing copious amounts of blood, and I knew I had to make a choice: an agonising slow death where I could be discovered, but it would definitely be the end of my kidneys, or a trip to the hospital and re-evaluate the situation.

I tidied my room. Took a shower. Packed my bags. Called a taxi. Sat in Accident and Emergency for hours.

When I was examined I was immediately admitted and I spent nearly 3 weeks in hospital.

It wasn't the right time to die. This was before I had worked my contracts at Barclays, HSBC and my current client. This was before I had somewhere nice to call a home of my own again. This was before I put together a 370,000 word document that explained who I was and how I arrived at the decision to take my own life.

I lay on the floor, semi-paralysed, and I thought about what kind of message I could scrawl in my incapacitated state, that would make it clear that I knew what I was doing. The circumstances leading up to that moment were a mess. It was too ambiguous. Even a suicide note would be seen in the context of great misfortune and stressful events in my life leading up to that point.

I had planned on starving myself to death or in some way doing myself in on the 1st of January, as some kind of protest at the way that we surmise a suicide with a neat soundbite that's supposed to explain all the reasons why somebody took their own life:

• "depression"
• "financial worries"
• "drug problems"
• "broken heart"
• "loss of status"

Take your fucking pick.

Without a conversation, we desecrate the memory of a dead person, by trying to oversimplify the complex problem of what could drive a person to arrive at the decision to kill themself.

In Japan, suicide is an honourable thing. The act of seppuku might be a protest over a decision or a preferable fate to torture. Preparation for the act includes writing a death poem.

Do you really want to be that crazy old homeless guy, yelling "I used to be somebody" as the world pays no attention and the streets finally swallow you into anonymity?

All glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Tags: #hospital #nhs #suicide #injury

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 monarchy...

I lied about the monarchy thing, OK? Actually this is about search engine optimisation (SEO).

Do you want to know how you reach the top of Google search, so you appear on the first page when people are looking for you and your shit? Well, there used to be some neat ways to cheat the system, but now sadly, you're going to have to flex those fingers and get writing.

Google uses some things like meaningful domain names (thisismyshit.com is more meaningful than this-is-my-shit.co.xyz, for example) as well as well named pages, titles etc. Also, having links to your site from other highly ranked pages is also important.

However, some poor c**t has got to do the typing.

It's all well and good getting links to your site from other highly ranked pages, but who the hell wrote the crap that got those pages highly ranked in the first place? All the early-adopters of the web built pages packed full of actual meaningful shit, and then Google indexed those pages.

Now, we have the rise of the link-building bots and the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialists. There are an army of fucktards out there, posting comments on blogs that are just links, as well as every other scam to get Google to increase the search rank of their client's sites.

I'm not sure if you've found this, but sometimes when you're searching for stuff, you find a lot of sites that are nothing but meaningless tosh. This especially happens when you're looking to buy something and you're putting quite a specific technical search term into the box. You're inundated with fucking content aggregation sites that add absolutely nothing to your life and in fact detract from your entire search for meaningful content.

You might not see it, but there's a massive scrap going on in the digital realm for your eyeballs. Even though you're only worth a few tens of dollars each year to advertisers, when you scale that over billions of freetards, there's quite a lot of profit to be made. Facebook is absolutely wiping the floor with the competition. We are all heavily wedded to social media for our daily fix of baby pictures and Facebragging.

How do you compete in this sea of noise?

Writing a witty webcomic or doing some hilarious web videos is a terrible idea. The fact of the matter is that the written word is still the most indexable thing for search. How does anybody's first foray onto the interweb begin? Normally a Google search is the way that that vast untapped market of digitally naïve people are stumbling into the technological future. If you write stuff - on a regular website - at least you know it's discoverable by search.

Facebook and Twitter are utter bastards. It's very unlikely that your witty posts and tweets will ever see the light of day. Facebook and Twitter are walled gardens. The business model of the dominant social media brands is to keep you locked in through your investment in their platform, and the fact that all your friends are similarly locked in.

However, the vast quantity of user-generated content has to see the light of day sometime. Even the administrators of hugely popular Facebook pages are going to wonder why they're not getting particularly rich, but Facebook makes a brilliant rake from their creative endeavours.

Twitter is utter shite. You might have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of Twitter followers. What fucking difference does it make? Is anybody actually getting heard or discovered through Twitter? No.

The established players are hoovering up your creative output, storing it, and hiding it where nobody can see it.

There's no denying the impact that can be made by publicly publishing the output of your endeavours in plain text on the open web, where the search engines can make it available to billions of people. Raw words are searchable. Your written content will be discoverable to the whole of humanity.

Don't fall into the trap of throwaway videos. Write. And write some more.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about surprises...

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

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

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

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

Sex addiction? You filthy pervert. Go away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about lies, damn lies and statistics...

What do you think the main cause of death is for men under the age of 45? Road traffic accidents? Infectious diseases? Cancer? Industrial accidents? Drug abuse? Murder? War? Terrorism? Starvation? Auto-erotic asphyxiation?

It's suicide.

It's well documented that the number of people dying in wars has dropped immensely in the last hundred years. The number of people dying of starvation has nosedived in just the last 40 or 50 years. In theory, we are living in a time of peace and plenty.

At its peak in the 20th century, death by starvation never exceeded 1% of the population. Most people were not starving to death. The 60 million soldiers and civilians who died in World War II accounted for 2.6% of the population, but 12.5 million babies were also born in that period.

Even for your grandparents and great grandparents, the chances of dying through war or starvation were surprisingly slim.

But what are the chances of you buying some land, building a house, having a job or some project to work on where you feel happy and fulfilled? What are the chances of meeting a nice girl and settling down and having some kids, living close to your family, near where you grew up? What are the chances that you'll be able to stay on top of your finances, and have the things you need for you and your family? What are the chances that you'll have the basic essentials you need in your bio-psycho-social world?

You would have thought that now we have the high-yield agricultural techniques to grow all the food that we need, and we have the means of mass producing everything else, we should be free to pursue arts and education. We should be released from the need to do bullshit jobs. We should be freed from the prison of the office.

The benefits of working part-time are unquestionable. Not working at all is arguably bad for you, because the structure, routine and socialisation of working is good to keep the brain ticking over, but working 5 days a week or more is counterproductive.

Empirically, it has been proven that the same productivity can be achieved in a 3 day week as a 5 day week. There is so much 'padding' and pointless time wasting, as we attempt to spin out our bullshit jobs to last all day, all week. The jobs are utter bullshit anyway. There isn't going to be any less food on the table or fewer houses built because some social media marketing person didn't tweet enough, or some corporate lawyer or accountant didn't turn up for work.

Wars galvanise whole nations into action and hunger is something that cannot be ignored. The drive to fight and protect, hunt and gather, build shelter... these things are instinctive, and human.

However, there is no instinct to put on a shirt and tie and go and sit at a desk for 7 or 8 hours staring out of the window, bored out of your mind.

The link between going to work, getting paid your salary, and then using that salary to pay your rent, buy food and drive your kids to school is a very tenuous one. For sure, once you've got skin in the game you're utterly fucked and you just have to go along with what everybody else is doing, no matter how insane it is. You can't rock the boat when you're living a hand-to-mouth existence where you're never more than one or two months away from being evicted or having your home repossessed (i.e. mortgage foreclosure).

In the UK, 8.6 million people live with Damocles sword hanging over them... just one missed paycheque would see them unable to pay their rent or mortgage, putting them at risk of homelessness.

The pressure is ridiculous, and although the chance of you dying by war or famine is really small, the chance of you ever escaping the rat race is also really small. You hate your stressful shitty life where you've got absolutely no hope of ever getting ahead. You'll never escape the stress and relentless bullshit. Why wouldn't suicide become a more and more attractive option?

This is what we're seeing. There is no hope for people, but there is a mountain of stress and anxiety.

Depression rates are soaring. There is a mental health epidemic that is raging out of control.

Were we born to just pay bills and then die? Is that much of a life?

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about self sabotage...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But "it could never happen to me" right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about being in touch with your feminine side...

When I was a pre-pubescent boy, I read a book by Judy Blume about girls getting their period and having their first kiss with a boy. Before you boil over into a fit of inexplicable anger (as women are prone to do because they're completely ruled by their emotions) I'm not actually saying I know what it's like to menstruate, have boobs and to carry a baby inside me for 9 months and deliver it into the world through my vagina.

My education and upbringing was pretty heavy on the whole sex-ed thing. My sister was born when I was 10 years old, and so I clearly remember her birth and my Mum's pregnancy. My teacher at school was pregnant when we were being shown childbirth videos, and the schools in Oxford are actually pretty progressive. We were taught about the reproductive cycle in the first year that I went to middle school, when I was 9 years old.

Of course, I will never have the first-hand experience of having my cervix dilated by the large head of my child, to the point that it tears, and other painful sounding childbirth related stuff. I know that I would get yelled at with hormonal illogical female rage, if I was to suggest that other stuff that's happened to me has been painful. The muscle on the front of my calf was sliced in half, severing 4 tendons. The hospital in Oxford kept me for 3 days to re-stabilise my kidneys - no painkillers - and then sent me back home to London for the operation 2 days later. My whole journey on the train and across the capital was done without crutches or pain relief. My bandages were soaked with blood. I'm sure those 5 days where my calf had a muscle that was sliced in two down to the bone would give me no capacity to imagine having my vagina ripped to bits by a baby though.

I genuinely don't want to insult mothers. You're right, I'll never know what it's like to have a bad back from carrying round all that weight of a baby bulge for 9 months. I'll never know what it's like to have my internal organs being squished by the life growing inside me. I'll never know what it's like to be woken up by my unborn child kicking. I'll never know.

If you think I'm being flippant or sarcastic, I'm sorry, but I'm actually being genuine. I've often given consideration to the things I'll never know.

What man hasn't given consideration to how much fun they might have, if they got to swap bodies with a woman for the day. Of course, we'd like to play with our tits, but we're also fascinated to know what it feels like for a girl. There's a <blush> slightly kinky element. What does it feel like to be penetrated? Are multiple orgasms as good as they sound? Errr... did I just say that? Moving swiftly on.

Yeah, it's pretty shameful to admit this stuff, but I've made it my mission to vicariously experience what I can of the feminine. I don't think I'm one of those men who thinks that they're a woman who got born into a guy's body. I've just made it a goal in life to empathise. Empathise with everybody. Including the opposite sex.

When I was a teenager I read female erotic fiction. I tried to get into the mind of what women want. I tried to learn how to be a generous lover, so that I could please my girlfriends. I put a lot of effort into my 'research' and I have to say, I got a big kick out of it. However, I read an article recently where the author - a woman - was actually offended by how much of an ego boost guys get by knowing they've moved the Earth for their lover. Well, guess what? That's been added to the long list of considerations too.

So am I painting this picture of me as some sort of perfect guy? No. Don't be ridiculous. What I'm saying is that I'm an information gatherer, and I was born as a sensitive little soul who takes in a lot of what people say, how they feel and whatever I can divine from the media I have consumed. I guess I figured out from an early age that I wasn't going to learn everything I needed to know from pornographic magazines and videos.

It's laughable isn't it, to say that I empathise with women, mothers. and it's actually not true, I don't. I try to, but of course I fail on so many levels. You can't possibly know how much you don't know. Dunning-Kruger effect. Blah blah blah!

But, if you can have a tomboy, can you not also have a tamgirl?

I remember when a friend was talking about her hen do. I enthusiastically gushed "OMG! When is it?" without thinking that I would not actually be invited. I just kinda assumed that I would be. It was a strange situation, because she was a "one of the lads" kind of girl, and I'm a "comfortable with my sexuality" type of guy, so the gender exclusion of the event didn't even register with me.

So, why have I taken a wordplay of Mumsnet, turning it into something that's supposed to sound like The Social Network? Well, because I'm jealous. I feel like I'm missing out on something.

My same friend who I mentioned regarding the hen do was at one time (I'm not sure if she still is) an active contributor on the Mumsnet forum. I actually met her on a forum to do with kitesurfing, many years before. We were both active forum contributors. In fact, I think we competed for the top spot, quite often.

Another friend, a wonderful geek girl whom I very much enjoy the pleasure of the company of, is also another active Mom social networker, who I think also frequents the pages of Mumsnet.

The blogosphere is heavily colonised by mommybloggers, looking for some kind of activity to connect with the world in a way that fits with the demands of family life. Family members eagerly devour every last detail of life of the youngest members of the clan, and will scour the pages of every social media source in order to gather any updates and juicy pictures of the cute little kids as they grow up. Blogging about your family life is a natural extension of that.

However, I imagine that having kids can be a fairly bleak and isolating existence at times. Just as being single can leave you left out from all those couples events - who's going to invite sad Dave to dinner on his own? That'd be weird! - so the stressed out mom who's had to spend all day with fractious children is going to be overlooked by friends who don't want their peaceful child-free existence shattered by the arrival of mountains of childrearing equipment and tantrum-prone toddlers disturbing the peace.

Yes, unless you have a good baby circle of other moms who have kids of a similar age, it's kinda hard for anybody to relate to the particular struggles that you're immediately facing, whether that be teething and nappy rash, or the defiant "NO!" phase as the loveable darlings assert their own personalities. Which of your friends understands that they need to remove all the sharp, swallowable and fragile ornaments from the low surfaces? That bowl of potpourri looks terribly decorative on the coffee table, but to a parent of a young child, that's just a choking hazard. The worlds are going to collide.

And so, sleep-deprived moms get isolated, as social lepers because they're no longer footloose and fancy free. Not only must the children travel with mom, but also the changing mat, clean nappies, wet wipes, sterilising equipment, bibs, blankets, toys, teething rings, potties, spare clothes, medicines, high chairs, carrycots, pushchairs and every other bit of parenting paraphernalia to keep the tiny tots clean, comfortable, fed and watered, in the hope that they'll smile and giggle, not cry.

I have no idea if an Internet forum can provide some of the camaraderie that is necessary to make things seem a little less desperate, when Junior just won't go to sleep and he's driving you nuts with that noisy toy that grandma bought for him. I have no idea if getting together online, as moms who've been through it all too - they know all the shit that you're going through - in some way makes getting through the day a little easier.

I know that I miss my time being a top contributor on a forum. I know that I miss those familiar nicknames. I know that I miss the purpose and routine that it gave my life, trying to read absolutely everything, and make comments in the most active threads. I miss those virtual friends, who actually turned out not to be virtual at all. Some of the best friends I have, I made through forums. Some of the best experiences of my life, were when a bunch of us nerdy Internet dwellers met up, in the evening for drinks, for weekend trips away, or for adventures around the world.

The gender-blind part of me thinks that I should sign up for Mumsnet and join in the discussion and debate, but something tells me that might not go down too well.

There is a considerable hole in my life, without an online community to belong to.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia #sex