writing – Page 12 – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: writing

  • Periodic Paranoia

    This is a story about justification…

    Bathroom blockade

    What do you suppose this stack of laundry baskets and boxes full of clothes is? Perhaps this is a new modern art installation at the Saachi Gallery?

    200 days ago – April Fools’ Day – I was so paranoid that I believed that somebody was going to break into my ensuite bathroom on the 4th floor, and invade my bedroom. I was also so unwell that I believed I could secure my bedroom by tying my dirty laundry baskets to the door handle.

    Paranoia does not generally trouble me during my day-to-day life: nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

    I’m about to make a factual declaration that might shock and disgust you.

    Men’s libido will drive them to relieve themselves – through sex or masturbation – on a relatively frequent basis, depending on each individual. You might consider a man who masturbates every day to be a twisted pervert. You might consider a monk who has taken a vow of celibacy having undesired nocturnal emissions – he ejaculates in his sleep – to be the finest example of a man that is biologically possible, without castration.

    Let’s just re-iterate this for emphasis: biologically, the human race has evolved a reproductive imperative that is as strong as breathing, sleeping, shitting, pissing, drinking and eating. If you can stop doing all of the latter for a few years, then you’re welcome to then argue the point with me.

    If you consider the unpleasant combination of being so horny that you need to masturbate, with the belief that you’re being watched at all times, then you might understand that it’s an impossible situation, assuming that you value your dignity and your privacy. At present there are at least 3 webcams watching me and 2 microphones listening to me. Of course, I presume that no ransomware is recording me without my permission, but such software exists in the wild. How much do you trust the manufacturer of your phone and your laptop, to not co-operate with your government, giving them the ability to spy on you?

    Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?

    I’m guessing that you wouldn’t want your family, friends and work colleagues, or even complete strangers, to see you tugging your todger; yanking your chain; bashing your bishop, or whatever your preferred euphemism is for masturbating to orgasm. I’m guessing that you’d find such voyeurism to be unacceptably compromising and distressing enough to destroy your mental wellbeing.

    Do you note that I’m leaving aside any discussion of anything ‘kinky’ or not otherwise in accordance with plain vanilla biological imperatives?

    Of course, we could all just have sex, and then we’ve got a partner in crime – we have safety in numbers; at least there’s somebody else who’s looking ridiculous with us, as we make the beast with two backs. However, this is not always practicable. Natural urges do not always align with the competing demands of the world around us. Sometimes, we are horny and single.

    If you’re thinking “eeeewww” or otherwise troubled by an undesirable mental image, you understand perfectly that the vast majority of us wish to maintain some privacy around this particular activity. I cannot relate to men who take a thrill from masturbating at somebody, flashing their genitals or sending unsolicited dick pics. I am not writing about the exceptional cases, where men act in an antisocial or illegal way – these matters are excluded from the discussion, because they are unusual and those men do not think and behave like I do.

    In short, the only way that my behaviour seems at all unusual, is the exceptional lengths that I will occasionally go to in order to not be spied upon while masturbating. If we consider our desire for privacy, it doesn’t seem odd. If we think about the fear of the indignity and shame of having explicit images and videos of us masturbating, shown to other people, that fear is not irrational – it would be extremely distressing, for almost everybody.

    Just over 6 months ago my mind was shattered. Today I’m barely troubled by paranoia.

    My paranoia doesn’t come from nowhere – of course it needs a seed. The internal source of my paranoia is sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst and mind-altering substances: I have a choice over whether I disturb my mind with these things or not. The external source of my paranoia could be explained simply in this way: do you imagine that men in psychiatric hospitals no longer need to masturbate?

    Ask yourself where it would be appropriate to masturbate, when you’re being checked on regularly by nurses and support workers. Ask yourself whether you think you could quietly do the deed in a dormitory with other men. Presumably, you’d go to the toilet or the shower, wouldn’t you? If you’re masturbating in an institutional environment, with the noise of staff and patients all around you, does that make you a twisted pervert?

    This topic is the most sensitive that I could write about. Nothing could shame me more than you knowing these deeply troubling things, which is why I write about them – I’m grasping the nettle.

    If you care to read back through what I’ve written, you’ll see that I stop short of painting an explicit picture – the images in your head are entirely from your own imagination. I’m not attempting to upset anybody, nor am I discussing matters that have no place outside of a basic human biology lesson.

    I believe that honesty is the best policy, and I’m taking that to its extreme conclusion, despite the detrimental effect it seems to be having on me and my life. I started the questionable experiment, to publish my inner monologue, and I’m compelled to continue, even though it causes me a great deal of anxiety.

    Why do I need to live in fear of people learning who I am and how I feel? Why would I need to wear a mask? Why do I need privacy, when so many are determined to sneak a peek behind the curtain anyway?

    What happens when a person lays themselves bare, instead of letting paranoia destroy them?

     

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  • Bloodbath

    This is a story about picking on an easy target…

    Pink sink

    Has anybody ever died of shame and embarrassment? I feel horribly exposed all of a sudden, having published my entire psyche into the public domain – all the inner-workings of my mind; every dark secret is out on display.

    I’m acutely aware that I’ve kept writing and publishing throughout periods where I was incredibly unwell. I’m acutely aware that I’ve published unedited things, despite being exhausted, stressed and unable to make a sound and rational judgement call on whether or not to publicise private matters.

    It’s quite apparent that my rather strange and questionable mission – to submit my private journal to public scrutiny – has been incredibly costly.

    Have I made a mistake?

    Clearly, I’ve made a whole string of mistakes. Every day, I think about millions of mistakes I’ve made that I could write about. Even the process of exploring all my feelings and admitting my fault, is somewhat of a mistake.

    Racked with self-doubt and feeling a mounting sense of vulnerability, I’ve thought about back-pedalling – haven’t I made myself look like a buffoon in front of enough friends, family and strangers? Shouldn’t I now clam up with shame and regret that I ever opened my mouth? Shouldn’t I bury this blog and hope that nobody ever brings up the matters I’ve made public?

    It would be so easy to press the “delete” button and destroy the digital identity which I’ve created. It would be so easy to deny all knowledge of ever sharing extremely personal matters. Don’t believe everything you read online.

    If I loaded a gun with bullets and handed it to you, I turned around and you shot me in the back, would you feel victorious?

    I don’t understand why anybody would take the ammunition which I give them and use it against me. I don’t understand why anybody would take the opportunity to sucker-punch me, when I’m making myself so vulnerable; such an easy target. Is there really any pleasure in picking on somebody who’s laid wide open to attack? Where’s the sport?

    I’ve started to wonder what happens to the people who pick my pocket, blame things on me or thump me in the face, knowing that I won’t defend myself or retaliate. Do they feel pleased with themselves? Do they feel happy and are they able to sleep soundly at night?

    If I’m starting to sound like I think of myself as sweet and innocent and free from all sin, that’s not the case. There’s more than enough admission of wrongdoing on these pages, if you want to go digging. I’m not some butter-wouldn’t-melt, holier-than-thou, whiter-than-white person who claims to never have said boo to a goose. I admit that I’m a deeply flawed individual.

    I’m struggling with a cloudy brain. I feel like my wits are dulled and my thoughts swim through treacle. I feel run-down; unwell. I feel like I’m not well enough to be writing. I regret things I wrote when I was sick, in the past.

    As the truest version of myself – free from drink and drugs – emerges from under a dark storm-cloud, I struggle to reconcile the way I feel now with how I felt when I had the protective armour of intoxication. I’m full of stress, nervous tension and anxiety, while my brain is raw and damaged from abuse – I’ll recover, but it’s taking time.

    I’m defensive, because I can’t afford to lose any more opportunities. I can’t afford to have my reputation tarnished anymore, even if it appears to be me who’s doing the tarnishing. I can’t afford to have influential people leaping to the wrong conclusions. Why continue to write so honestly? Why take the risk? Why not shut down this crazy experiment?

    The fact you’re reading this means that you’re either going to use it against me – shooting me in the back with the weapon I handed to you – or you’ll dig a little deeper; try a little harder. It’s all too tempting to kick a man when he’s down though, isn’t it?

    It’s too obvious and easy to shut down; shut up. I’ve come this far, so why shouldn’t I keep writing? What does it matter if I make myself unemployable? What does it matter if I can never return to the part of society that routinely lies and wears a mask of insincerity? Why the fuck do I want to live in a world full of absolute arseholes, who stab each other in the back?

    Come; come and beat up on me; come and put the boot in; come and strike me with sticks and stones and whatever weapon you can grab, while I lay battered and bruised, unarmed on the floor, naked, afraid, defenceless, outnumbered and in pain.

    I invite you to martyr me.

     

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  • The White Wolf and the Black Sheep

    This is a story about storytelling…

    Meat

    I’m stood in a sunny garden, sheltered from the wind by mature shrubs. Beyond the confines of the walls and fences are lush green fields; rolling hills leading down to the sea. The air is fresh and clean, blowing in off the Atlantic. There’s a smell of mown grass, which has been cut for the last time before winter – the trimmed blades clump on the lawn. Gravel crunches under my feet – I’m stood on the driveway where the cars are parked. There’s a sound of a 2-stroke engine which powers a hedge trimmer, being used to tame the runaway growth in the hedgerows; the exhaust fumes blown away by the prevailing wind.

    I’m throwing a ball for the white wolf. Eyes on the front of his head, not the side – that’s how you know he’s an apex predator; he’s not worried about anybody creeping up behind him, although his ears are pricked up, listening intently. He’s a smart wolf – anticipating me throwing the ball but not so eager to run and collect it that he would be fooled by a dummy. Besides, why would I want to trick a wolf? What satisfaction would I get by proving I’m smarter than an animal with a much smaller brain?

    The wolf pants and drops his ball some distance away from me. The game is over. I fetch a water bowl for the wolf and he laps up the cool liquid with his long pink tongue. He brings his ball to me again, ready to play – the game starts over.

    My throwing gets erratic and the ball lands on a rockery. I’m fearful that the wolf will injure himself. I stop throwing the ball.

    A running sheep; a chasing wolf – he’s found a new game.

    Clambering over fences, the farmer holds the wolf while he strains to get at the flock which has retreated into a corner of the field, unable to flee further because the sheep are enclosed by a fence. The wolf has to learn that this is not a game.

    I feel guilty. Did I get the wolf over-excited by throwing the ball for him? Was I the immature adult who gets the children over-excited before bedtime? Was I irresponsible; inconsiderate of the consequences?

    I want to tell stories but not everybody wants to feature. I want to tell stories but invariably people will wonder if it’s about them. I want to tell stories, but I have to be careful that I respect the need for peaceful private family life.

    I’m lying on a bed with sunlight in my eyes, telling a story. It’s warm and quiet and I’m very comfy and calm. My brain buzzes with thoughts; ideas – I’ve written a list of 49 stories that I want to tell, and I have another list with 70 more, some of which I’ve already told. There are more words than there are waking hours in the day to type them. Now that there is some calm around me, the dam has burst and I’m struggling to not be swamped by the deluge.

    I think about tenses – why is this told in the present tense if it’s a story?

    So much has happened in the past and it’s hard to not relive and refine the story. I do not embellish or exaggerate, but stories improve with retelling. With each iteration, a more accurate and engrossing account emerges. I have a mountain of material, and the temptation is to weave it all into a captivating patchwork quilt of tales; adventures.

    Here in the present there’s plenty going on but I’m a guest in somebody else’s story, and it’s not my place to tell it. It’s strange for me to observe quietly and not pass comment. In all honesty, I swing between “where did it all go wrong [in my life]?” and gawping in awe at what’s been built; forged – the achievements of the loving, kind, generous and humble family who’ve taken me in are breathtaking.

    Outside, there’s a well. It’s blocked, but it’s obvious what’s down there – a dark cavern filled with cold water. To fall into the well would be deadly: you could never climb out. Why unblock it? Why go down there?

    Obviously, the well is a metaphor for my past. I have an aquifer of hair-raising tales that I could never drain, even with a million buckets. I can draw upon my dark murky past, but perhaps I shouldn’t – perhaps to plumb those depths will lead nowhere new. Haven’t I written enough already, about the past?

    I’m planning on writing another novel in November.

     

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  • Burying a Blog

    This is a story about privacy and digital identity…

    Breakfast is ready

    I woke up this morning in my bed, in my bedroom in my home, where I live. I got out of bed and had a shower. I used shower gel and shampoo. Then I dried myself off, had a shave and brushed my teeth.

    Later on, I had some breakfast. I had bacon and sausages and eggs. It was hot and I ate it all with a knife and fork off a plate. I finished all of it because I almost always finish every meal I have – I eat really fast and I don’t like throwing away uneaten food; plus I’m really greedy.

    Then I looked at the internet. Not the actual internet, because that would be impossible, but I used a computer of some description to look at websites on the world-wide-web (WWW).

    After a few hours I was hungry again so I had some lunch. I decided to have food instead of poison or something indigestable – the food had a taste and smell that all contributed to the impression that what I was shovelling into my mouth was edible, and so I ate all of it. I also had some drink, because of all the thirsty work I’d been doing. Also, humans die without fluids. Not liquid sodium though… that would be so hot that you would be instantly incinerated.

    Then I went out to some places and did some things. Some of the things were necessary and some were for my own amusement. I had to go to some of the places because they were inbetween where I was and where I wanted to be. I wasn’t able to teleport myself… well, not yet anyway. People think I look a bit odd, scrunching up my face, really concentrating on trying to travel through a higher dimension in order to avoid moving conventionally in the three dimensions that we’re used to. Then I gave up and just walked, or ran, or cycled, or got a car, bus or train to take me where I wanted to go; also aeroplanes, but not today.

    Then it was time to guzzle more nosh into my food hole, and tip more liquid into the cavernous opening in my face. I repeat this ridiculous ritual 3 times a day, because if I didn’t do it for a long time, I would die. Also, I like it – I like the tastes and the flavours; I like starting hungry and finishing not hungry – that’s a good thing.

    I watched some form of entertainment that held my attention while I just sat there looking with my eyes and listening with my ears. My brainbox got filled with stuff that people wrote and performed for the benefit of an audience, of which I was a member. Sometimes I consume a kind of entertainment where millionaires play kids’ games that they got really good at because they played them so much. Some people think that shouting at the millionaires will change the outcome of unknowable and unpredictable future events they have no control over, but I’m too well versed in theoretical physics and the evidence of experiments to believe in magic, religion or whether I exert any power to influence things (like which team of millionaires is going move a spherical object into the right place, versus another team just like them, trying to do the exact same thing).

    Then I went to bed where I would have had sex if there was another willing participant of the opposite sex who I found attractive occupying the same sleeping contraption as me. No willing participants for a game of hide the sausage were co-located during the time I was in bed and awake.

    Before I knew it, I was asleep, except I didn’t know I was asleep because the very definition of being asleep is the partial loss of consciousness. If I knew I was asleep, I probably actually woudn’t be asleep – it’s a paradox.

    I expect tomorrow will be much the same. In fact I can guarantee that 99.999…% of tomorrow will be exactly the same, even if a massive asteroid obliterates the Earth while I’m asleep. The universe is a big place and most of it is intergalactic and interstellar space. Almost everything is just empty space. I don’t even sleep on top of anything at all – it’s simply the atoms of my body refusing to fuse with the atoms of my bed, which is lucky because a fusion reaction in my home is not something I really want – I would be likely to irradiated by high-energy photons and die of radiation burns.

    Please, keep reading. If you look back at previous blogs that I’ve written, you’ll see they’re all like this – simple descriptions of my day, in terms of things I ate, things I did and places I went, which are mostly the same. I’m sure you’ll find it gripping stuff. If you read and enjoyed this, you will be sure to enjoy reading it again & again.

    Thanks for visiting my website!

     

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  • The Path of Least Resistance

    This is a story about living an easy life…

    Level 39

    Our behaviour is shaped by circumstances far more than free will and conscious decisions. I suddenly stopped using my smartphone, looking at Facebook and writing. Did I decide to stop wasting time, pointlessly reliving old memories and making myself look like a fool on social media? No. I broke my wrist.

    My generation, and a few generations before me, found ourselves in the right place at the right time. No skill, hard work, good judgement or other factors are attributable to us other than being born in a rich country during a period of peace.

    The Americans wasted a lot of time and talent on the Vietnam War, which allowed Britain to become a world leader in banking software and the global financial markets. Silicon Valley is on the opposite coast of the USA from Wall Street. London has everything you need all in one place.

    British men have sheds, in which they tinker and invent things. There’s a proud tradition of geekery in Britain, which includes trainspotting, stamp collecting and pipe smoking. I’m a member of the last generation who were able to turn their geeky hobby and wasted youth into cold hard cash.

    Most parents have dismally similar plans for their offspring: to pressure them as much as possible to try hard at school, in the hope that they’ll survive the onslaught and be able to go on to university and become an accountant or a dentist or something… take up a profession. Medicine, law, architecture, surveying…. basically anything with a Royal Institute. Something to give you letters after your name. Something respectable.

    Barrowboys from Essex and the East End made a killing as stock market traders, because they already had an eye for a good deal and a head for numbers. Later, software became something that anybody could stumble into, if they had the aptitude.

    All those years at school and college proved a waste of time, when the fast-paced world of technology demanded magicians, wizards, sorcerers: anybody who could conjure up working computer software, no matter what their academic credentials looked like. The curriculum vitae was overlooked in favour of technical tests and whether a candidate knew the latest jargon.

    Briefly, the snobbery over Oxbridge graduates and the class of degree that one had attained, was overturned and the prized star employees in the multitude of software houses and consultancies that sprung up, were often self-taught and not considered academically gifted, in the traditional sense.

    Filial obedience proved disastrous, when many parent-pleasing academic high-achievers entered corporate law firms, only to find that the remuneration in no way compensated them for the hours that they worked and the pressure they were under. The story was the same everywhere you looked: hard work didn’t pay.

    Private school fees, university tuition fees and loans for maintenance, would all be far better off simply invested in property. Buy your kid a house and let them sub-let rooms out. They’ll be richer and happier in the long-run. House prices are an asset bubble that just refuses to burst: we all need somewhere to live.

    Now I find myself in the position where I haven’t been dismissed in disrepute from the professional body, to which I belong. I haven’t been struck off the GMC’s register, or expelled from the Law Society. I can still practice software and nobody gives a fuck, so long as I can make the magic happen.

    When it comes to imposter syndrome, and the sense that you can’t possibly be worth the money that the market is prepared to pay for your skills, there could be nothing worse than knowing that you took up your particular career, because it was a gift that was handed to you, requiring no effort: you just happened to have an aptitude and be in the right place at the right time. I can’t point to a fancy diploma that took me many years to obtain. I can’t rely on my membership of an exclusive professional body, to give me a sense that I’m somehow deserving of a certain salary or consultancy day rate.

    Following the path of least resistance has allowed me to find my place: where I’m most qualified to work and the market pays the most for my skills. However, I’m full of self-doubt. Am I too old for this game? Have my skills gotten rusty? Have I missed the boat on a new development, and taken myself up a technology cul-de-sac?

    I can point to exceptional things I’ve done as evidence that I’m no slouch, but it’s often hard for a salaryman to understand just how hard it is to run your own business, for example. In fact, having run your own business is something that is often held against you.

    I find myself somewhat trapped. Nobody will hire me as a permanent member of staff because I’ve been contract for so long. I can’t use my highest achievements to their fullest advantage, because they’re things that your 9 to 5 regular guy just won’t wrap their head around. I can’t even consider escaping and living a simple minimalist life, until I deleverage: I’m financially trapped.

    It’s strange that the path of least resistance would lead here, with me somewhat able to sit by the riverside, writing, but paying an extremely high price for the privilege.

    It’s almost the final straw, to break my wrist and be unable to even write.

     

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  • You’ve Got to Pay to Play

    This is a story about artistic integrity…

    Chess board

    He who pays the piper calls the tune. Does the piper ever get to play, for their own amusement and freedom of expression?

    If you look at my life strategy, it’s pretty insane. I’ve picked a career that uses skills that I mastered as a child, and I now find the job mind-numbingly boring, easy and soul-destroying. I’ve picked an industry which is essentially just keeping a running total of who owes who what: simple addition and subtraction. I’ve chosen maximum income, for minimum effort. My life is constrained – certain rules have to be adhered to – but I have set things up so that I can jump through the pointless hoops as effortlessly as possible.

    My theory is, that if I were to mix work and pleasure, then it would break my heart whenever I had to compromise. Let’s imagine my passion in life is painting. I’d like to paint 1970’s sci-fi inspired futuristic cityscapes, clinging to the rocky surface of distant planets. Those paintings are very intricate; detailed. The attraction of that art, for me, is the sense of scale that’s given when you paint thousands of tiny windows on the buildings, and lots of tiny people in space suits, wandering around in their futuristic world. However, there’s probably only a niché market for such paintings, and they’d take hundreds of hours to paint. Commercially, I’d be far better off splattering a canvas with bright primary colours and calling it abstract modern art – it would take far less effort and would have a much broader appeal. In order to pay my rent, I’d be economically incentivised to produce crap that I hated, because it would be much more profitable.

    My strategy is to earn a lot and not work very hard, so I have lots of money and spare time to pursue whatever passions I have, without compromise.

    Of course, there is always compromise.

    Luckily, there is a Nick Grant who is a rapper, a Nick Grant who is a photographer, a Nick Grant who is an expert in sewerage processing, a Nick Grant who is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, a Nick Grant who’s a toastmaster, a Nick Grant who’s an expert in credit risk management, a Nick Grant who’s a researcher in the Elementary Particle Physics department at the University of Warwick, a Nick Grant who’s the CEO of Severn Trent, a Nick Grant who’s a Labour Party candidate, barrister and head of legal services for Sainsbury’s, a Nick Grant who’s the concertmaster of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, a Nick Grant who’s the strategy director for Cancer Research UK, and there’s even a series of fictional Nick Grant Adventure books by Jamie Dodson.

    This means that I can pretty much write whatever I want on the public Internet, under my real name, without the fear that most salary earning wage slaves would have, that our employers will discover our deepest darkest secrets, prejudicing our career progression and perhaps even jeopardising our employment.

    However, ex-colleagues from places like JPMorgan and HSBC occasionally visit this site, and pick up juicy tidbits about the implosion of my life and see the thrashing of my legs, beneath the surface of the water, when I’m swanning about trying to look as serene as possible in my professional capacity. I have old bosses as friends on Facebook and following me on Twitter.

    I took an insane gamble. Instead of locking down my social media to only friends who can be trusted to not gossip with anybody connected with my former employers; instead of editing and censoring myself; instead of setting up a pseudonym – a pen name – I write under my real name, with real details that leave me no plausible deniability, to say “it isn’t me” and “it must be another Nick Grant”.

    I guess there aren’t that many people who leave the privileged and highly paid world of financial services and IT, in pursuit of the risky dream of doing something more rewarding in an intangible way. Earning bucketloads of cash is all the reward you’d want, right? Why would you want to earn less money being an electrician? Why would you want to have all that stress and risk your life savings, trying to start your own company? Why would somebody who’s been a steady dependable 9 to 5 worker, with decades of dedicated service under their belt, suddenly lose their mind and end up in psychiatric hospitals, drug rehab and homeless?

    So many of us dream of making a big change in our lives, but when we face up to the reality of the risks, sacrifices and effort involved, we decide that maybe the timing’s just not quite right… maybe we’ll do it next year, or the year after. We end up boring our friends and family with our grand plans that will never be implemented: forever on the drawing board.

    When somebody is mad enough to unshackle themselves from the golden handcuffs and give something a proper go, it’s big news. There are hundreds, if not thousands of bored office-working drones, who are fascinated to know the details of the trials and tribulations of anybody who had the guts to follow through on a plan to retrain in a completely different field, or start a business. When you quit your soul-destroying job, you’re the underdog; David taking on Goliath – your former colleagues want to live your exciting life, vicariously. Former colleagues are rooting for you to succeed. Former colleagues want to know if you fail spectacularly, to re-affirm that they made the right decision, staying in their nice safe boring jobs.

    Bootstrapping means taking on projects where you’re not beholden to somebody for the funding. The whole point of me doing a job I hate, is that it’s provided the dosh to do whatever I want without having to kiss ass, kowtow and do things in a way that they approve of. The whole point of founding my businesses with my own money, was so that I could run things exactly how I wanted, without investors and lenders breathing down my neck and making stupid suggestions about my business plan.

    When it comes to a personal memoir type project, where I’m pouring my guts out, I’m somewhat burning the bridge back to the straight-laced world of boring jobs for boring people with boring lives. I have a CV that says I’ve worked for various companies and I have various qualifications. People who get salaried jobs by sending off their CV and going for interviews, are not allowed to have exciting lives where they do things that don’t neatly fit into boxes. The world that provides my income has a strict rule: fit in or fuck off.

    So, I made a decision. I decided FUCK IT. I decided that I would just write whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I would be myself, I wouldn’t censor, I wouldn’t edit and waste time considering what the drones of the corporate world of wage slavery would think about my unorthodox life.

    And so, with practice, my passion and – dare I say – my skill, is to document my innermost thoughts and feelings, publicly. It might not be art and it might not be commercial, but it sure as hell isn’t compromised. I have moments of fear, where I think that I need to hide my blog, put a sticking plaster over the semicolon tattoo behind my ear, find out just precisely what my former colleagues are prepared to say about me: put them on the spot and say “look, do you judge me on the good work that you saw, or on the secret life that I chose to reveal to you?”

    It drove me paranoid and crazy, trying to maintain a squeaky clean perfect professional image, whilst also dealing with all sorts of awful things in my private life. It exhausted me to the point where I lost my mind, covering up the fact that life outside the office was chaotic and unstable, and I didn’t want anybody to know that I was just about surviving in grotty student flats, hostels, hotels and friends’ sofas. I didn’t want anybody to know that my engine had run out of petrol and was running on fumes. I didn’t want anybody to know that I had no margin for error, no safety buffer: my finances were on the brink of total disaster.

    Why should anybody know these things? If I get stuff fixed up and pick up where I left off, then who would be any the wiser? What people don’t know can’t hurt them, can it?

    However, it hurt me. It hurt me every time a friend thought it was hilarious to tell my ex JPMorgan colleagues things that considerably damaged my reputation. It hurt me every time the grape vine managed to spread gossip about my attempts to find job satisfaction. “I heard you’re an electrician now!” a colleague from HSBC who I hadn’t spoken to for 6 years, said to me when we connected on LinkedIn. How the fuck do people find this stuff out?

    “Oh you were in The Priory… like some kind of rock star. So cool!”

    Not cool. That kind of stuff colours people’s opinion of you. They make assumptions and whisper behind your back. “Shall we invite Nick to the pub at lunchtime?” somebody says. “No, better not… he’s a recovering alcoholic, isn’t he?” [I’m not, by the way]

    What I write is repetitive. I have no idea what chapter of my life you’re going to walk in on. I have no idea what I’m going to be writing about when you dip into my private world. So, I cover the same theme over and over again: I am me.

    I’m no longer the straight-laced perfect employee with the immaculate CV. What are those gaps in my employment history? Well, in the context of me being your wage slave, that’s none of your fucking business. You don’t pay me enough to bribe me to act a certain way and to gag me. You don’t pay me enough for me to compromise my integrity, my identity.

    I’ve suffered enough boredom and I’ve been patient for long enough to have earned the right to be myself; the right to be creative; the right to express myself without hesitation; the right to not have to wear a mask; the right to not live in fear of negative judgement.

    What happens if and when the worlds collide? Well, I’ve set the challenge: it’s up to other people to decide whether to judge me on what they see in the office versus what they discover through my candour, in a totally unrelated context.

    I’d love to make it into print. I have a penchant for debate, and strong views about government and society. At some point, my ambitions to be an author and to get involved in politics are going to be realised. Every word I write on the public Internet makes me more discoverable to somebody, somewhere, on some topic or other. If I simply wanted a book deal or to raise my profile, I could compromise and conform; I could channel my energy into being commercial and popular.

    What does it mean to be authentic? You think it’s some fucking option that we all have? You think it’s a fucking lifestyle choice?

    To be authentic is a risk and it’s a privilege. You could lose friends and fall out with your family. You could lose your job. How are you going to find your true voice? The voice that speaks with childlike honesty; fearlessness; tapping into your live stream of thoughts, rather than the lines you’ve memorised; the act you’ve learned to play. It takes practice, to be able to express what you feel, rather than say what you think people want to hear. Many of us are disciplined to engage our brains before our mouths: to hesitate, withhold and communicate in a manner that conforms to social norms. We are coached and bullied into hiding our unique outlook and personality.

    If I make myself unemployable, I’ll be forced to try and monetise the things that I have a natural aptitude for. At the moment, writing is effortless, but I could push myself to write with more purpose, spend time editing and reconnect with some literary agents I started conversations with last year.

    If I find myself barred from the land of boring jobs and immaculate CVs, then my energy – my creative output – will have to be expressed in ways that come naturally to me, not just easily. In a way, I’ll be unbounded; unleashed; unchained. Of course, it invites hypomania to come and destabilise everything, but at least my crazy projects usually result in cold hard cash in my pocket and something else to add to my portfolio.

    I’m scared. I can’t play the game any more. I have a contract – ink dried on paper – and I can do the job with my eyes closed. I’ve been in hospital enough times with kidney problems to know when I’m in trouble, and to know when I can look after myself. I can’t humour everybody with this “my health comes first” bullshit anymore. I’m the guy who’s pissed copious amounts of blood on more than one occasion, and done the calculations: how long have I got before total organ failure will kill me? I’m the guy who knows when I’m in deep shit, and when I can take a calculated risk.

    What scares me more than anything is going through all the same old shit I’ve been doing since I was a teenager. What scares me more than anything is playing the same fucking games, wearing the stupid fucking mask, and acting and speaking the lines I’ve learnt and spoken a zillion times before.

    I’ve got a fairly simple plan: conform and comply just enough to get what I want out of some rich fucking banks who I don’t give two shits about. The last thing I want to be doing in the world is help some dinosaur of a bank run a simple software project at snail’s pace, but they’re going to pay me a king’s ransom to do it, and it gives me a tiny taste of freedom… I put up, shut up, suffer the boredom, and the reward for my patience is that I keep a bit of integrity; a bit of dignity; a bit of identity.

    Maybe I should do this job or that job, people suggest. Wouldn’t I be great as a carpet salesman, or a tyre fitter? Isn’t my natural calling in life to be a supply chain analyst or a fork lift truck driver?

    Maybe it’s the mission of the company that I need to get right. Selling people financial products they don’t need or want, and profiting on the margin between the borrowing rate and the lending rate, using fractional reserve banking, is hardly going to give you a warm fuzzy feeling, is it? Perhaps I should work for a charity that’s managed to help a handful of individuals and a large number of donors to feel better about how disgustingly wealthy they are and ignore the fact that the gap between the rich and poor is growing. Perhaps I should simply find my place in the whole fucked up mess, where I can delude myself into thinking I’m making a positive difference.

    But, I’ve seen too much. I know too much. I know that things are rotten to the core and it sickens me to emotionally involve myself, when everybody wants you to just STFU, keep your head down, do what you’re told, not rock the boat and don’t for god’s sake solve any problems at the root cause.

    Writing’s the only time I can let rip and not get bogged down by the wilful ignorance and DGAF attitude of those around me. I’m not saying I’m superior and I’ve got all the answers, but I’m saying that when I get a hunch and I set out to prove my point, I’ve got plenty of examples of things I’ve done that have worked, when I’m free from constraints and naysayers.

    I love this quote:

    “People who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those who are doing it”

    Somebody’s gotta be positive. Somebody’s gotta do the math, calculate the risks and take a chance. Somebody has to be brave and stick to their guns. Somebody has to persevere through the setbacks. Somebody has to keep going when the way ahead looks blocked, to figure out how to overcome the obstacles.

    I also love this quote:

    “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat” — Theodore Roosevelt

    I feel gagged. I feel cheated out of the opportunity to demonstrate the best of my abilities; to tap into my creativity and problem solving skills. I feel jealous of those people with inherited wealth, trust funds and other advantages that allow them to dispense with the wearisome world of bullshit jobs, and instead they can flounce around reading interesting things, writing, debating & discussing, composing, painting, drawing, sculpting and generally expressing themselves.

    To have those prizes just out of reach, because of the demands of societal conformity, is agonising to the point where it makes me want to give up. I’ve worked hard enough for long enough that I should be in a different position. I’m left miming the same actions that I’ve done a thousand times before, in order to keep the money flowing, the rent paid and the food on the table, which is like some kind of psychological torture.

    I know it sounds ridiculous, but I knew I would get a contract fairly quickly, and I know that I will be able to run the project really well, very easily. I’ve seen it all before; done it all before. I can see all the way to the end: no surprises. Because it’s all just a means to an end, it makes it that much harder. I’ve got nothing to prove, and the fact that I’m employed to solve the same old problems in the same old way, time & time again, simply proves that they might as well just give me the money and not bother with the project, if they’re not going to listen to the experts who know how to build better systems than these follies; these white elephants.

    I’ve got this easy money contract all lined up. I know what the hell is going on with my kidneys. I’ve been in hospital enough times with rhabdomyolysis to know when the numbers say I’m fucked, and when the numbers say I’ve dodged another bullet and I’m fine & dandy. I know when I’m in big trouble and in desperate need of assistance, and I know when my tough little body is patched up and working again.

    It’s been agonising, to string this client; this consultancy; this agent along, while I’ve been in limbo: who could have predicted that it’d take nearly 15 hours of dialysis before my kidneys rebooted? Was I ever worried about my life, my health? You’re asking the wrong question. You’d have thought that if you pissed absolute jet black liquid and you couldn’t feel your foot or your calf, you’d be straight over to A&E, but it doesn’t work like that if you’re already at the limit of what you can take.

    I phoned my client and said I wasn’t going to make the 30 minute induction and I was too sick to start work that week. Chances are, that was the end of that: they’d just cancel the contract.

    Things in my life are either there to be endured, they’re an adventure, something good that’s happening, or I’ve had enough and I’m going to self destruct.

    Being in hospital again has been part adventure – I’ve never had dialysis before – partly something good, in terms of her seeing first hand the shit that I’ve been through a bunch of times. But there’s the actual boring work that has to be endured if I still have a contract by the time I get discharged. There’s the self destruct threat, because I’ve solved all these problems before. Everything’s been overcome, so far as I can see. My client will wait until Monday for me to start work, my blood tests are stable and my kidneys are definitely working.

    I had no control over whether the client would wait for me to get well. I had no control over when my kidneys would reboot. To discharge myself would have been suicide, so it didn’t matter whether I lost the contract or not.

    Nobody can see that the recent acute kidney failure is not the root cause of the problem here. Why did I let the problem get so bad? Why am I not afraid of a catastrophic chain of life-changing or life-ending events? My kidneys are working AND the client says I can start work on Monday, but why would I trust my knowledge, experience and the blood test data, and discharge myself, when I could just get another job in a few weeks or months? Why don’t I avoid all risk, act like a sensible normal person, and just do everything I’m told?

    There’s a delicate chain here: I was lucky that my client has waited this long for me to get well, I was lucky that my kidneys recovered quickly, I’m lucky that I have a job that’s easy money, I’m lucky that I don’t have to suffer more agents and interviews, I’m lucky that I’ve got a financial lifeline that fixes my cashflow, I’m lucky that this contract keeps me within touching distance of the day when things are stable again, and I have the opportunity to think about doing something rewarding, challenging, creative and everything else I need as the antidote to 20 years of office boredom.

    The ticking time bomb exploded, but it was unseen. I couldn’t hang on any longer. I couldn’t take any more delays and setbacks. My patience for being depressed, stressed and running out of runway, without success at securing a job (that I didn’t really want anyway) had expired. I’d been strung along too long. Christmas and New Year slowed everything down and stopped progress, so the agony was drawn out longer than I could take.

    Somebody’s going to end up not getting what they want.

    The doctors want to discharge me with blood tests that show my kidneys are clearing the remaining backlog of toxic crap out of my blood on their own. They want me to have an operation to have a dialysis line put in my jugular vein. They want to do more observation, without dialysis, to know how my kidneys are doing without any assistance.

    Her and our friends want me to follow the doctor’s advice, and treat my health as if my life hangs by a thread. They care about me. They don’t care about my client. They know that there will be other jobs.

    I want good quality sleep in my own bed for a couple of nights. I want to try on my ankle splint and get used to getting around on crutches. I want to make a plan for how I’m going to get to work during the tube strike. I want to figure out my medications so I’m not fuzzy-headed and sleepy during the day. I need to not have to start all over again. I need to balance the small risk that my kidneys might take a long time to clear the backlog of creatinine, against the big risk that I can’t be out of work any longer, and I can’t face starting the job hunt all over again, without depression and stress destroying me.

    Yeah, I’m going to feel shit. I was always going to feel shit. I’m going to wish I was more well rested. I’m going to wish things worked out differently. I’m going to wish I could just press the fast forward button and be 6 months further through the year, and everything’s gone exactly how I know it’s going to go, but I don’t have to suffer the boredom, the monotony and the ridiculous deja-vu of solving the same problems in the same way, over and over again.

    What’s the alternative? I can’t cut & run. I can’t switch career. I can’t chase some stupid pipe dream.

    Some people think I’m a know-it-all. Some people think I’m reckless and stupid. Some people think the answer to all my problems is to do the things I’ve tried before: regular salaried jobs, doctor’s advice, safe & sensible behaviour, conformity to the norm.

    All I can tell you is, I can make dumb decisions and get myself into deadly situations, but I’m also a bit of an expert in recovering from some very harrowing shit.

    It’s a bit unfair to ask people who care about me – both loved ones and professionals – to allow me to take what they see as an unnecessary risk, but the flip side is a complex web of psychological risks and consequences that are almost too hard to explain.

    If I seem impatient, foolish, arrogant, entitled or somehow like I deserve different treatment and life opportunities to everybody else, all I can say is this: at some point you can’t keep trying anymore, you give up and you slip away. At some point, it doesn’t seem worth the struggle and the stress, just to line somebody else’s pockets and allow them the freedom to pursue their artistic creative ambitions and generally waft around having a lovely time.

    If I get what I want, start my job tired and in pain, work for at least 6 months, bored out of my mind and upset that I wasn’t well rested and properly prepared; but at least the cashflow hole is plugged, my stress starts to go down, I start to relax about the purse strings, I can show my love and appreciation for the people who I care about and who care about me, I can start to improve my work:life balance and I can start to dream about longer-term ambitions, without torturing myself because things are so far out of reach.

    If you think I expect this to happen overnight, you’re wrong. I’m forecasting 6 months to stabilise, 6 more months to build up a healthy safety cushion, and another year before I can even dare to dream and start to think about a less soul-destroying life.

    As I wrote before, I’ve got some amazing pieces of the puzzle in place – more love and support than I’ve ever had in my adult life – but I still can’t afford to have other important things slip away for the sake of an acceptably small risk and some short-term pain, discomfort, exhaustion and a bit of extra stress. There is no perfect solution.

    There is one thing that nobody can take away from me right at the moment: I’m a penniless writer.

     

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  • Creativity Hates Constraints

    This is a story about 140-character soundbites…

    HTTP Error 451

    Who has the time for the long read? Just read the title and guess the rest. If it can’t be summed up in a tweet, it isn’t worth reading. Jump straight to the comments section: that’s where the real action is.

    I bought a book that was based on a series of tweets. Worst book I ever read.

    One of the best tweets I ever read was in 9 parts. Infographics are good, but they often have more text on them than would be permitted by the 140-character limit. If you put text on a graphic, it’s not searchable.

    Do you realise that everything you write on Facebook is completely unsearchable from anywhere except within the walled garden?

    You’re slowly being erased.

    So much discussion has moved to Slack and most of that is just meme sharing anyway. In fact, most of what goes on anywhere on the Internet seems to be meme sharing. Are we being discouraged from in-depth online discussion? The rise of microblogging and the domination of the social media space by Facebook, is ridiculously successful at recirculating trivial distractions, which discourages us from creating original content.

    When you think about all the words you’ve written into messenger apps, they’re lost in the ether: it’s not like those discussions are held in topic threads, indexed and searchable. All those words are throwaway. There’s a cheapness to words. Imagine what happens when Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp cease to exist. All that text that was transmitted all over the planet will disappear into nothingness; gone forever.

    What would a historian of the future make of your digital footprint? Could they infer who you were as a person from the animated GIFs that you chose to share? Could they gain any insight into your worldview; your politics; your philosophy; your personality?

    Have we not been cheated out of owning our digital identities? We could all be famous bloggers and valued discussion forum contributors, with our online persona well known to fellow Netizens around the world, but instead we are confined to small groups of Facebook friends and Twitter followers: the people we knew before we entered the walled gardens.

    Nobody is going to discover you and find out anything about who you are and what you believe via the mainstream platforms. Facebook wishes to keep you as a captive audience, to feed you adverts while you browse through baby photos. Twitter wants you to worship the cult of celebrity, or provide convenient soundbites for journalists, while you tweet in total obscurity.

    Nothing you ever do online is going to go viral. Well orchestrated marketing campaigns have huge teams of people to sow the seeds. It’s like a Mexican wave: you need to coordinate a critical mass of sufficient numbers if you don’t want to look like an idiot, waving your arms on your own in a stadium grandstand.

    You’re not going to be the next online video sensation, because nobody’s solved the problem of video discovery yet. If you broadcast a Facebook Live video, you’re just going to be spamming your friends and family. If you put something up on Youtube, how are people going to find it in that sea of noise? Videos only have a title, description and a few tags. People are only going to watch things that are popular, and popularity is achieved through marketing, which is expensive and time-consuming.

    The idea that the Internet is democratising opinion sharing is disingenuous. Most of the opinions I read online are either from the mainstream sources, or from my existing network.

    I’m exceedingly unusual, because I bought into my friend Ben’s vision of a social media platform that allows me to retain control of the original content I create. Instead of wasting effort on tweets and Facebook status updates, I put it all onto a website that’s fully search indexed: anybody can find the fruits of my labour.

    “But what about privacy?” I hear you ask.

    I can email, private message and talk to people face to face, about things that I want to keep private. I really don’t consider Facebook very private, when I have hundreds of Facebook friends and I have no idea who’s reading what. I could waste loads of time sharing things with selective audiences on Facebook, but why would I go to all that effort?

    Why do I write hundreds – if not thousands – of words every single day and make them publicly available? Well, the Internet is responsible for lifelong friendships, fruitful discussions and a network of people who help me feel connected to humanity, when I’m otherwise roundly ignored. Occasionally, some complete stranger will reach out to me and say that there was something I wrote that resonated with them, and that’s the nicest feeling in the world.

    Why does anybody write? Why write a fictional novel? Why tell people what you thought about that movie you just watched? Why do anything? You could just curl up in a dark hole and die, quietly.

    In a world of urban solitude, loneliness and living lives of quiet desperation, don’t you want to feel a little anchored to something; somebody? Don’t you want to feel that you made your mark; left a legacy?

    Writing this blog is like carving my name on a tree. Writing is like spraypainting my ‘tag’ on the Internet. It’s “Nick woz ‘ere” writ large.

    Of course, you can sneer at that, but what’s your mark on the world? Your children? That dissertation you wrote that never got published? Your job? What you consumed during your life? Should we chisel a list of all the books you read onto your headstone?

    I came back to London, partly because I could be anonymous. I could fuck up and burn a few bridges, and nobody would care. I came back to London to be a nobody.

    Now that I’m cleaned up and back in the land of the living, I no longer want to be a faceless nobody; I don’t want to be alone; overlooked; forgotten. I’m trying to rediscover my value; my place in the world. At times of great stress, I’ve reached out to the Internet for validation: validation that I exist, that my opinions are well regarded and that I have a place in the community. It’s given me great confidence, to have an online persona when the rest of the world largely overlooks and shuns me.

    There is no short-form version of what I’m going through. It might be the same as every other person on the planet, but this is how I choose to express myself; this is how I vent and attempt to cope in a healthier way than drink and drugs; this is how I attempt to ward off the fear of being mischaracterised as some kind of evil na’er do well.

    Perhaps, the more you read, the more my mask slips and you can see some underlying character flaws. Certainly, the more I write, the more narcissistic and self-absorbed I must be. The justification I have for this self indulgence, is that I feel suicidal every day. Do you begrudge me leaving this digital legacy, for anybody who cares to know who I was and what made me tick?

    I can write 140-character retweetbait, but I choose not to. I choose to write with depth and meaning. I choose to offer more than just a fleeting distraction. I choose to offer the whole story, not just the headlines.

     

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  • You won’t BELIEVE what’s inside this bag!

    This is a story about the surprising thing that happened next…

    Mystery bag

    The Internet is a massive dick. Part military network and part academic collaboration tool, our beloved ‘net is now mostly pornography, pirate movies & music, clickbait bullshit and advertising. Also, photos of your dog, cat and/or baby.

    Copy and paste this to your Facebook wall for the next hour. 99% of people won’t do it because they’re evil and stupid and they want kittens to die. You have to copy and paste. No sharing!

    Why do we have to suffer the endless hoaxes?

    If you were a deadly disease, what kind of deadly disease would you be? If you were a Game of Thrones character, which Game of Thrones character would you be? If you were an Internet quiz type thing, which Internet quiz type thing would you be?

    Millions of people, bored at work, are momentarily entertained by vapid bullshit, designed to bring eyeballs to advertisers’ content. Our entire culture is being reshaped, not by the little dopamine hit we get every time somebody ‘likes’ our selfie on Facebook or Instagram, but by advertising revenue.

    Newspapers The Guardian and The Observer are held in trust, so that they are free from commercial and political interference, but they are facing commercial difficulties, attempting to adjust to a changing readership. If those newspapers fail, we will have almost no free press. Our beloved BBC is politically influenced, established under a Royal Charter, which effectively makes it a mouthpiece of Her Majesty The Queen.

    In our world of clicks, high quality journalism is under threat. Can you imagine BuzzFeed breaking important news stories to the world? Are the editors interested in anything other than the number of readers? Can success only be measured in terms of website visitors?

    Our best writers are turning their content creation talents into a psychological game of cat and mouse: who can come up with new viral bullshit to suck in the punters?

    Facebook allows us to hone our skills, but Facebook hides most of the statistics from us. Only Facebook knows how many people looked at that photo of your cat, but decided not to give it a thumbs up. Facebook is a private proving ground, where you are microblogging, and you are also learning what kind of content is popular. You’re being trained to be yet another BuzzFeed writer.

    The rise of user-generated content, blogging, microblogging and social media, is a good thing, but what kind of cultural legacy are we leaving, if everything we consume and create is simply a momentary distraction from our boring jobs? The Internet canon is so heavily influenced by the commercial interests of the advertising industry, that vast swathes of content are locked up in walled gardens or drowned out by the deafening noise of clickbait articles.

    Growth hacking is an ever-present temptation, but we can’t all sit idle, earning money from the clicks on adverts. Somebody, somewhere, has to generate some real content, and I’ve really seen enough of other people’s children.

    Bullshit boring jobs, doing pointless work that’s of no value to anybody, is a barrier to the age of leisure, but we’re going to need a lot of books, films, computer games and music, to entertain ourselves when we’re no longer typing made-up numbers into a spreadsheet, in order to get a mouldy crust of bread.

    We’re not ready for the age of leisure yet, because there aren’t enough Netflix box sets to binge on.

    We need to move from an economy that’s based on persuading people to buy consumer goods that we don’t need, to an economy that rewards people for creative contributions to society, that inform, educate and entertain. Art is a hobby for the rich and privileged. We should all have the opportunity to be a film director, actor, scriptwriter, poet, painter, potter, chef or whatever we want, as long as it adds value to the lives of others.

    Measuring value in monetary terms is disingenuous, because money is a token that represents value created by somebody. Somebody had to shepherd the sheep. Somebody had to grow the corn. Somebody had to make the bricks. Money is simply more convenient than barter, because it’s really hard to swap a fraction of your house for something you need.

    Measuring value in terms of the number of people who viewed your content, is also disingenuous, because it creates an incentive to make something popular not valuable. Free pirate movies are always going to be popular, so the only people who can make art are those who can afford to have it stolen. Movies are made to sell merchandise. Movies are full of product placement. Is that what we want human society to be all about: packaging up the natural world and selling it back to us?

    I might sound like a hippy tree-hugger, but it makes me really angry that I have to waste my creative talents, as well as polluting the planet, travelling to get to a pointless job in a pointless building, just so we can all buy more crap that we don’t need.

    Why can’t my job be reading books, watching films and listening to music? In my leisure time I’ll write, make movies and compose music. The value that is created is the fantastic stuff that keeps us interested, making life wonderful and enjoyable.

    In my utopian society, we won’t need more roads, railways and runways. In my utopian society we won’t need to take pointless journeys to get to work and for business meetings. In my utopian society, we’ll all have much more time to educate our children and get them interested in the world around us.

    We already have the agricultural machinery and high-yield farming techniques to feed humanity. We already have the healthcare infrastructure to care for our sick and dying. We already have an adequate transport network to allow us to occasionally visit distant relatives. We already have enough laws, courts, policemen, jails and other mechanisms to protect ourselves from anybody who wants to take more than their fair share.

    The idea that people wouldn’t do any work if they didn’t get paid to do it, is disingenuous. Nurses, teachers and fruit-pickers are paid appallingly, compared with middle managers who do nothing except waste precious resources. Do you suppose that doctors only save lives because they’re well paid to do it? Do you imagine that a farmer begrudges the people who share the harvest?

    There are roles that are useful and necessary and these are rewarding in their own right. Most ‘work’ is not necessary, useful or rewarding. Humanity and our planet of finite resources, would benefit a great deal by no longer mandating that we all do pointless make-work.

    In my utopia, there would be jobs that you’re allowed to do if you want to do them and you’re good enough. I’m sure there would be no shortage of applicants, because those people would be respected and admired for their contribution to society. Our gratitude is a much more valuable currency, than useless rectangles of paper and circles of metal: money.

    In my utopia, there would be plenty to watch, read and listen to, because creativity would rein supreme. Art would be democratised.

    In my utopia, there would be people who smoked cannabis, played computer games and never left the house, but they wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of being told they’re lazy useless bums. Simply being part of society is enough of a contribution. Better to be at home relaxing, than clogging up our transport network, going to a job that you hate that contributes nothing to humanity and wastes precious resources.

    In my utopia, autobiographies wouldn’t be about boring old men who achieved nothing in their lives apart from presiding over untold human misery.

    In my utopia, a writer isn’t somebody who writes BuzzFeed articles in order to scrape together enough of a pittance to survive.

     

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  • An Essay in Support of Childish Writing

    This is a story about orotund pontification…

    A plus

    Please excuse my magniloquence, but I’m attempting to brow-beat you into submitting to my intellectual superiority. My ostentatious language is not intended to communicate, but to intimidate. The purpose of my education was not the pursuit of knowledge, but the ratification of my pre-eminence. The plebeians’ obmutescence and the academic elites’ hegemony is the natural order of things. The lower orders should be seen and not heard.

    Our rulers and their mandarins are publicly schooled – Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester – before studying PPE at Oxford. Inherited wealth, the nepotism of political dynasties and the inside track – knowing how the corridors of power function – means that we are governed by the elite of the elite, not by our peers.

    Education and publishing are dominated by sycophantic courtiers – the landed gentry – reflecting our aristocracy’s vested interest in culture and society being fixed and unchanging. Dead languages and classical chamber music are fetishised.

    In order to prevent the working class from getting ahead many professions have overtly defended themselves through the use of Latin instead of English. Studying the classics will set you in good stead for medicine and law, although the majority of your patients or clients will not speak Ancient Greek.

    Like a virulent disease, the self-interest of those in power, causes every aspect of our society to be shaped to reflect the values of the ruling class. The ‘correct’ answers in an examination are the ones that parrot conventional wisdom, maintaining the status quo. The ‘correct’ use of language is the most formal, not the colloquial.

    Little by little, the self confidence to freely express your thoughts and feelings, is eroded by a hierarchy that wishes to clip your wings. It’s a free country, provided you’ve attained the prerequisite level of education and write only in a manner which pleases your superiors.

    As a little game, sometimes I posh it up a bit. Sometimes I talk like a public schoolboy and do you know what happens? Genuine posh people ask “where did you go to school?” as if I was one of them.

    “Your evidence is anecdotal” I hear you say.

    What about the Castilian lisp?

    “Insufficient evidence”

    What about the fact that people watch the Queen’s speech or stand for the national anthem? What about the fact that people follow the life of Kim Kardashian?

    Wherever we turn, we see ordinary people obsessed with the private lives of the ruling elites – the aristocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy and vapid celebrities – imitating their affectations.

    Didn’t you fantasise about being prime minister, marrying a prince or living in a castle, when you were a child? You still have those dreams today, but you pretend that you don’t. Your desire to be special – number one – has been corralled into some specialist area. Maybe you’re the best fudge packer in the factory, or maybe you got a 2:1 degree from a former polytechnic, but your creativity and energy was channelled into something that makes you feel like a king or queen in your little fiefdom.

    You read Harry fucking Potter, didn’t you?

    There’s a certain joyful lightness when you read something that’s well written and not just written to obfuscate any meaning and stupefy everybody except for your elitist Oxbridge chums.

    Why must we struggle through the supposed great works of literature, which are a crime against the enjoyment of reading? Why must we be told at every juncture, that we just don’t understand how complex the world is and that we should leave it to the experts, because they know best.

    It’s extremely easy to come up with exceptions to any rule. It’s extremely easy to pick holes in any theory or model. It’s extremely easy to find areas where a person’s worldview is incomplete. It’s extremely easy to be the smug critic. This is the role of academia: to undermine and discredit any challengers, who threaten our dogmatic rulers.

    We funnel our children through a system where they learn to kiss the arses of their teachers, lecturers, professors, Ph.D. supervisors, viva voce examiners and those who award tenured professorships. For anything to be printed, it must pander and conform to the preconceived notions of an editor or publisher. Only the most obedient servants will rise to prominence, because they are most complicit and compliant with the will of the ruling elite.

    Nothing ever changes – for the better – because of the inherent homogeny created by our education system, which feeds into a political system predisposed to select a public schoolboy – born with a silver spoon in his mouth – with an Oxbridge degree, instead of a normal person who actually knows what it’s like to be an average UK citizen.

    We aren’t choosing our brightest minds to help with the challenge of building a better society for all its members. We’re choosing the very worst kind of people: snobs who think that dead languages and chamber music are culturally important.

    There’s a big difference between being anti-intellectual and being pro-ignorance. Being a great thinker is about having a brilliant mind, not about being able to follow a well-trodden path with your fellow privileged brethren, steered by your sharp-elbowed mother.

    We’ve built walled gardens where spoiled middle-class children can strut and swank, safe from criticism that they’re far removed from the real world. We’ve built robust defences to insulate the intelligentsia from responding to valid critique: only the views of other academic elites will be dignified with a response, and out of courtesy and wilful ignorance, nobody dares to burst anybody else’s bubble.

    Commentary and satirical magazines – Private Eye and The Spectator, for example – as well as the ‘free’ press gives the impression that there are some checks and balances. In fact, to have the good fortune to come under the critical gaze of one of these newspapers, is to feel as though you have been given a seal of approval: further endorsement of the importance of your good work.

    What – pray tell – does the person who makes your lunch think of your job? Who cares. I doubt they can even string a sentence together.

    There’s an automatic filter, that rejects anything that sounds a bit common, you know?

    On the lead up to the EU referendum, I noticed that social media was awash with rather over-zealous use of punctuation marks, capital letters, as well as a great deal of confusion over common homophones.

    “That’s unreadable” I heard you say.

    Really? Does the use of a greengrocer’s apostrophe or mixing up your “you’re” and your “their” with your “they’re” and “there” really make something unreadable? Does it really alter the meaning if you write “less” when you should have written “fewer”? You must be very stupid if you can’t read something and see past a couple of typos.

    Writing accessibly doesn’t mean dumbing down. It’s perfectly possible to set aside your arrogance and write in a manner in which you know you are much more likely to be understood, without a scramble for the dictionary. Are you really so insecure that you need to turn your writing into a demonstration of your extensive vocabulary? Save it for The Times crossword.

    The fetish for institutionally issued ‘qualifications’ has led us to the situation where the vast majority of people are turned off by politics, philosophy and literature. The condescending manner in which our intellectual elites talk, has led to their rejection by the masses. Our finest minds have unwittingly – and stupidly – played straight into the hands of the populists, who write and speak to impress their audience, not their fellow elitists.

    Politicians canvas public opinion, so that they can win votes, but they turn to their advisors – Whitehall, think tanks and academia – when they come to rule. Political parties, media and the think tanks are all funded by commercial interests – influencing public opinion by sheer weight of noise. A rising crescendo of contradictory opinion on social media was drowned out by the views of a handful of academic elites, with their puppet strings pulled by those who control the purse.

    It offended me the other day when the philosopher A C Grayling wrote that ordinary people are “narcissistic” when they publish their opinions. It was tantamount to writing “STFU, plebs”.

    We need to have another Gutenberg moment, where ordinary people can finally overcome the barriers that stop them from being heard. Blogging platforms like WordPress go some of the way, but mainstream media, academia and politics are doing an excellent job of marginalising and discrediting the groundswell of public opinion on social media. The constant bombardment of “fake news” stories in the [non-fake] news seems like an attempt to get us to disregard the opinion of our peers, in favour of the approved opinions printed by newspaper tycoons.

    We need to change our society – from boardrooms dominated by wealthy old men, government dominated by privileged elites and publishing dominated by academics – to a society that’s representative. I’m not championing ignorance and lies. I’m not suggesting that brain surgery should be performed by amateurs. I’m saying that snobbery and elitism has reached the end of the road and everything that’s good in the world will get torn apart by destructive forces, unless we listen to the proletariat: they outnumber the cruel and condescending ruling class.

    “My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” — Isaac Asimov

    This quote seems to neatly encapsulate the battle between the stupid & ignorant and a class of people who know better than everybody else. Certainly, the letters after your name tell you that you’re a cut above the rest don’t they? You studied hard at university, so you must be more knowledgeable than those dimwitted fools who didn’t attain the same standard of education as you, right?

    As I wrote before, being anti-intellectual is not the same as being pro-ignorance.

    Is it possible, that people are sick of being voiceless, unrepresented and talked down to by people who are so privileged that they have absolutely no idea what ordinary day-to-day life is like for most people? Is it possible that people are sick of being told that geopolitical complexities are beyond their comprehension and they should just leave things to the people who crashed the economy and started a bunch of wars, destabilising the world.

    Is the desire to simplify problems and put things into terms and language that can be universally understood, the wrong approach? In my experience, jargon and impenetrable complexity exists only to justify pointless jobs and make talentless twits seem indispensable. If I was going to sack one person, would it be the front-line worker or the middle-manager? Is that a hard decision to make?

    All this talk about facts and expert analysis: has it truly added any value?

    Of course I want my bridges to be built by civil engineers, not amateurs, but I don’t want career politicians, political commentators and intellectual masturbation.

    The whole point about democracy is that the people govern themselves, through elected representatives. If our government and our media is not representative, because it’s stuffed full of elitists, then we’ve completely failed to create a democratic society. It’s not like a bunch of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses are saying they can do a better job of flying the plane than the pilot. It’s literally that democracy has been perverted by the plutocracy.

    Have a look at this list of autodidacts and ask yourself if they’re ignorant fools who’ve contributed nothing to humanity.

    Formal education, an obsession with conformity and the rejection of ordinary people’s opinions, on the basis that they are stupid and ignorant, has led us to obscene wealth disparity and untold human misery. The reason why you don’t believe it’s true is because you’re surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic class and you disregard the ‘unreadable’ comments of the great unwashed masses. The peasants are revolting.

    Unless we give ordinary people a voice, they will never be able to develop their own philosophy for the 21st century, explore political ideas and challenge the plutocratic interests that seek to enslave them.

    Until we end intellectual snobbery, we are on a collision-course with a popular uprising that will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

     

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  • The Hideous Banality of Human Life

    This is a story about keeping a diary…

    Random numbers

    I nearly wrote about what I had for breakfast. I used to write a blog post and then throw it away and write another one: it was a useful warm-up exercise. Now, there’s less quality control: I’m dealing with a lot of competing pressures and I have to write when I really don’t feel like writing. It upsets me.

    The very last thing that I want to do is start writing about movies and TV that I’ve watched and other totally banal things that are happening in my uneventful life. I could share pictures of food. Maybe I could write about a really big pooh that I had. No.

    There’s so much that needs to be written about and so little time. I have no time for shitty diary entries about whatever’s grinding my gears at a particular moment. I hate when my writing is so tainted by the immediate demands of bashing words out at a given moment, rather than a natural flow of thoughts that have been slowly brewing and bubbling to the surface.

    I was feeling horribly hungover until about now, so I didn’t feel like writing earlier. What’s the point of doing something when you don’t feel like doing it? It’s hardly going to be my best work, is it? What’s the point of spending your most productive periods watching shitty TV, and cramming your creativity into snatched moments when you’ve just woken up, or you’re tired?

    I don’t know why I’m so cranky, but I was feeling super annoyed with myself for publishing what I wrote earlier and I deleted it. I actually rewrote my original blog post about not drinking. I’m a little happier with it, but it’s a reminder that I want and need to take my pet project seriously. Who wants to read about what I had for breakfast? Who wants to read crap that I wrote when I’m tired or hungover? What’s the point of churning out crap?

    The Internet is full of crap, and I’m not saying that what I write is great, but you’ve got to at least try, haven’t you? The whole point of my project is that it’s something I can be proud of. It might be low quality, but if it’s not the best that I can do, then I’m knowingly doing a shit job, which is shameful.

    Ideally, I’d like to write at 3pm every day. That feels like the sweet spot. I don’t know why, it just is.

    But.

    Sometimes I want to write at 11am, because there’s something I really want to write about.

    Also.

    I want to write at midnight, because there’s a thought bouncing around inside my head and I just have to express it.

    And.

    I want to write at 8am, because I can’t stop thinking about something.

    One more thing.

    I want to write at 5pm, because I want to write every day and getting it done at five in the evening means that I can relax for the evening.

    However.

    I want to write at 8pm because that’s when it suits me at that particular moment.

    Essentially, I’d rather write when it fits naturally, because then I’ll write something that I’m pleased with, rather than something rushed. It’s not a case of writing for writing’s sake, even though it is. Who can possibly say in advance, when they’re going to feel like writing?

    I’ve noticed that I have a load of half-finished ideas and forgotten titles: things that I would have ordinarily written about. Instead, those things are lost. I need to start carrying a notebook and to keep better notes. I make a note of the title of a blog post when an idea really speaks to me, but I’ve written up none of those ideas up because I’ve not been in the mood when I’ve sat down at the keyboard.

    I feel like I’m losing my mind, because there are so many things rattling around in my head, but they remain unexpressed.

    How can I get what I want if I can’t express what I want? Am I impossible to please?

    It’s impossible to know, when my world has been travelling, socialising, fitting in, people pleasing.

    Everybody’s going to go back to work soon. Time to go back to your job. Party’s over.

    For me, TV goes off. Writing starts. Writing is my work. Thinking is my world.

     

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