Life's Too Long
Who gets to decide which humans are more valuable than others? And why are some people left to die while others are made to live?
CONTENT WARNING (CW): mental health, mental illness, anxiety, depression, death, suicidal ideation, suicide, eugenics, supremacist ideology — please consider not reading beyond this point if any of these topics tend to trigger you in a bad way
In addition to the content warning above, some upfront warnings and ground rules:
(1) This post is rambling as usual and regularly meanders off topic. If that style of writing irks you, don’t read this. (This Substack’s free to read, meaning it’s also free to bin.)
(2) If it looks like I am positioning/painting myself as a victim: I am not and I deserve neither your pity nor your scorn. And I certainly do not deserve your ridicule. (That’s one reason comments are off.)
(3) If I write anything referring to a specific section of society and you count yourself to that group but do not recognise yourself in what I write, then it’s obviously not about you. Part of the rambling nature of my writing lies in my relentless compulsion to try and apply nuance to everything and everyone, despite knowing that it’s never enough because for every written piece everywhere there will always be someone reading it from the misplaced frame of mind that they are the default identity and their situation is everyone’s situation. (That’s another reason comments are off.)
(4) For all my online/IRL (over)sharing, YOU DO NOT KNOW ME. Please do not contact me with or make me the subject of your unsolicited online takes, advice, (pop/pseudo-)psychological analyses or whatever. (Yet another reason comments are off.)
(5) If I'd had more time, I would have written a shorter piece. My Substack is a proverbial sandbox in a playground, focused on me getting the noise out of my head first and foremost; the editing to please potential readers is less of a priority in general (but do see point 3 above about always trying but never being able to please everyone) and in this specific post I am deliberately NOT editing out my countless digressions so as to illustrate a particular point.
Until recently, several months went by without a single Substack post on my part. It wasn’t for lack of desire or inspiration, but I was desperately keeping myself busy with paid and unpaid work and activities best described as “anything to keep myself distracted from the constant verbal and musical vomit my brain emits to its audience of one (me) because I cannot afford a mental breakdown” and while publishing Substack posts could have been among said work and activities, I did (start to) write several but those are best left in my unplished drafts for now.
Weird and obnoxious
Here’s where I need to up the navel-gazing to 11. (I don’t apologise.) My mind is busy all the time (I was going to write “my every waking moment” but it goes beyond that) which is both a blessing and a curse. Not a moment goes by that my brain isn’t busy trying to make sense of everything my senses observe in this world, but because so little of every-day life makes sense to me, my brain is constantly busy talking and coaching my body and mind through it. While it does that, my brain also keeps reminding me to keep observing the people around me, to avoid getting in their way, to do anything within my power to avoid annoying or even upsetting them, to keep control of my feelings and emotions at all times (because I am bad at expressing them), all while continuing to learn from everything and everyone my senses observe.
Sometimes my brain gets stuck on something it cannot make sense of, other times it gets overwhelmed, and when either of those things happens I am sometimes able to withdraw from the situation that causes this internal deadlock or articulate my struggle in the moment to those around me, while other times I am not able to do any of that and just end up acting… peculiar. At moments like that I may seem weird and obnoxious, because I am, in fact, weird and obnoxious. (Note: That’s not my entire identity.)
I have no doubt that there are more formal (medicalised) descriptions (or even diagnoses) for my weirdness and obnoxiousness, but at age 48 I have no desire anymore to seek those out1. The UK’s NHS waiting lists for ‘this sort of thing’ are several years long, private healthcare routes prohibitively expensive2, and, despite the rare occasions in my life that a medical diagnosis actually helped me, labels have already done me more harm than good3.
But it doesn’t stop there. While my brain is always busy with (and occasionally stuck on or overwhelmed by) real people and things that are actually happening, that’s apparently not enough, so it generates constant noise by way of an endless and relentless of random thoughts, lyrics and music that I cannot do anything with4, and constant internal monologues.
The culmination of that is a lot of noise—Too much noise.
If by this point in reading you are already exasperated by the number of footnotes each distracting you with a different side story: I am deliberately leaving those in. Welcome to my wicked brain!
It’s not all bad. There have been moments in my life that I’ve woken up in the middle of the night from a busy-brained slumber and come up with real-life solutions for real-life problems. And while the busy, noisy brain constantly vomiting up stuff in my head means I often cannot come up with good instant responses let alone solutions, allow me a chance to go for a walk and I might come back with something considerably better.
Coping
In early childhood I used to do this indeliberate subconscious thing in my sleep where’d I’d sort of bang and roll my head into the pillow.
As a teenager I tried to drown out the noise with loud music, giving myself tinnitus to boot (and, if that wasn’t enough, following numerous ear infections throughout life I have hyperacusis, too).
Better coping tools and methods have included white noise, pink noise, lofi music, metal music (but at a lower volume than in my teens), walks, exercising, stimming, noise-cancelling headphones, exposure, working from home, living alone, avoidance of and withdrawal/escape from events, environments or situations that overload my senses… I could go on. And for every situation that coping’s not an option, there’s always masking—something I’ve also become half decent good at.
But by now even the coping and masking has worn me out.
After living over 48 years with (and in spite of) all of the above, I am indescribably tired. My mind and body are beyond exhausted. In a world that talks more than before about people being differently abled, atypical, divergent, or whatever other term being used to describe someone being different, a world that mistakenly equates talking about and collating data on something with crushing a taboo resting on whatever that something is, a world that is meanwhile actually going backwards in terms of accepting let alone accommodating anything or anyone deviating from whatever the arbitrary norm of the day is, I find it getting ever harder to get by.
Society seems to think it’s progressed (enough) for allowing or even actively asking people to mention who and how they are, yet in every-day life I’m finding ever less space to be able to use my coping strategies let alone for me to be me5. Continuing cultural and socioeconomic shifts are only making things worse.
I am, to say the least, not very good at this thing called life. Not a good person, not particularly personable, likeable, or nice. Never stopped trying to grow and become better (and succeeded to a point). Had I been a member of a higher socioeconomic class, society might have labelled me eccentric or quirky, but I am not, so… weird and obnoxious and sucking at life it is. And that’s okay. At least, I’m okay with that, and I’m not particularly bothered with what others might think in that respect.
I have no shame in admitting that I’ve tried and failed more than once in life. Some of it’s been through happenstance, but I am not ashamed to write about being responsible for crashing and burning more than once in life and I take pride in having stumbled through each and every time that happened and then rebuilt something of sorts for myself. Not a problem, no one cares.
But the moment I so much as hint at admitting that I cannot hack this anymore let alone express that I don’t particularly wish to keep trying… that’s when automated systems and humans alike seem to go “whoa, whoa, whoa!” because that is taboo. If there’s one taboo I would love to crush, it’s definitely that one.
Live forever
Press and conventional media do not represent society at large, regardless of how hard at least some try or claim to do. Social media reflect society but only in part and only to a limited extent. Whether the public platform afforded to some people based on their fame or wealth is driven by (old/new) media or society – probably a bit of both? – is something I don’t know; I just know it tends to make me uncomfortable, especially when people with a platform are inappropriately ascribed authority or expertise6—or, worse, inappropriately claim authority or expertise7.
What I find truly bizarre is the near-sanctification of wealthy people. Someone’s unusual quirks and extraordinary quests are judged and labelled based on the socioeconomic status of the person concerned. Non-affluent? “Village idot!” Wealthy? “Maverick!”
Media help drive further separation between people through language, never missing an opportunity to imply superiority and supremacy of some people over others. While marketing continues to use the term anti-ageing to sell products to the broadest, largest possible customer base, media refer to “the ageing problem” and fawn at billionaires investing into for-profit ventures aimed at “reversing the ageing process” or even “cheating death” as if doing so is an act of philanthropy rather than selfish business interest. Disordered eating coupled with borderline cultish behaviour are renamed to a routine with a protocol when an ultra-rich man engages in them and is allowed to waffle about it at length to a media outlet (or two or three).8
Pointing at China, India and Nigeria while speaking of overpopulation remains salonfähig, while wealthy white Western folks taking a borderline technological-industrial approach to growing large families get to present themselves as supposed saviours of civilization, and a young mother who used surrogacy to buy her daughter twenty-one siblings within about a year gets sympathetic media coverage after the millionaire husband who bankrolled the family purchase is jailed.
Staying alive
For all the societal, medical and technological advances that have helped humans to live longer on average it’s become very clear that that endeavour is selective, mostly determined by people with misplaced senses of superiority and authority, and fuelled by language indicative of supremacist ideology —nothing like a pandemic to drive that point home9… As much as I initiated this post to make a case for allowing people to die, THIS IS NOT IT.
So let me clarify: I do not want anyone to die against their will or through lack of care which is what’s been happening in the UK. I just want people to stop ringing alarm bells any time anyone remotely hints at not being particularly happy in life and possibly, maybe, wanting a way out, especially when the people doing the alarm-bell-ringing will say or do little or nothing else that could be helpful.
The button I created right above should redirect you to search engine results which may differ depending on the location/IP address from which you are clicking or tapping the button, because I feel it would be pointless to include a link to, say, Samaritans UK, when someone clicking/tapping it may be outside the UK. By doing it this way, anyone clicking/tapping from a UK IP address will still be directed to Samaritans UK, while people elsewhere hopefully get given links to resources more relevant to where they are.
“Help is available”
I am including buttons like the one above because I feel a moral obligation to, but I am also not happy with it. Because there isn’t sufficient help, only excess judgement.
There is not enough healthcare. Not enough social care. Royals speaking on mental health isn’t doing anything to improve access to mental health care and for anyone to suggest (like one speaker in the linked article) that their posturing is helping break a supposed stigma on talking about mental health: Clearly there isn’t much of a stigma on opening up about one’s mental health when millions are on a waiting list to do so. I find it condescending towards everyone involved when people speak of non-existing issues that royals – and celebs – supposedly solve, especially when the attention distracts from or distorts actual issues that need resolving. If you have to lie to be kind, don’t be kind.
Let tell me you where the actual stigmas are (WARNING: TEXT WALL AHEAD): Try doing work that phsycially or mentally harms you for pay that doesn’t cover basic needs. Try being called entitled (or greedy!) for wanting fair pay. Try stocking and doping up on over-the-counter pain relief because that’s the only way to get through an 11-hour shift in a job that your body tells you is too physically demanding (but sometimes is the only paid work you can get). Try telling an employer you’re mentally or physically unwell, and find yourself passed over for promotion, see your name top of the list at the next round of layoffs, read that formal written warning in your inbox because you dared call in sick. Try struggling to recover from illness when you cannot access appropriate care. Try to make it to a job (interview) when you’re physically too unwell to attend but you cannot afford to not go, only for you to collapse on your commute and the kindest stranger dragging and carrying you to an A&E (because that’s the only way to get you there when no ambulances are available). Try being so physically ill you have to be admitted to hospital crying, screaming and writhing in pain for hours or even days and the only available ward staff are people who can do nothing besides caringly stroke your arm or back and tell you to please try to keep your noise down at 2AM so as to not wake other patients, while the only medical professionals in a position to carry out or assist in surgery or to prescribe or administer treatment are too busy because too few of them are available. Try paying your rent, bills and food on statutory sick pay alone. Try not to lose your livelihood due to temporarily being unwell. Try to pull yourself together again when you’ve lost out on yet another job (opportunity) after yet another hospital stay. Try spending a night in a police cell when that is the only ‘care’ available when in crisis. Try taking your own life and fail and get taken to hospital and find yourself treated like excrement on the bottom of a shoe by healthcare professionals who aren’t equipped or willing to care for your kind of patient, who tell you no psychiatrist or mental health professional is available so you leave but then police come and fnd you and take you back until ward staff find a doctor in a different specialism on another ward to sign off your discharge form without ever seeing you. Try finding affordable accomodation where there are jobs. Try not to get evicted when you cannot afford rent. Try moving house when you cannot afford rent or food or medication let alone save up for a move. Try finding paid work where housing is less expensive or work that is 100% remote so you could consider moving somewhere where housing is less expensive. Try getting the financial, practical, emotional or other support that a website says you should be able to access. Try staying alive when you no longer want to, in a world hostile to you, but a system and culture only designed to tell you that you should not want to die because saying you don’t want to live is TABOO thus the most unacceptable thing to utter. How dare you!
So I am staying alive, but only to spite people.
(Substack did not allow me to make this post any longer, so expect a follow-up)
I did try. In my awkward inarticulate articulateness I talked to our family doctor about it when I was 13 (she told me off), then again with my social worker at 15 or 16 (she ignored it), and again with a psychiatrist and psychotherapist at age 18 or 19 (they told me off). Any (medical and other) professionals reading this can kindly go [do one] and be better when it comes to their own current and future patients/clients/etc.
No country should have a two-tier healthcare system where people can feel good about themselves for ‘relieving pressure off the universal/state healthcare system’ by ‘going private’ because that universal/state healthcare system is not fit for purpose. Having a private-tier opt-out of the public system incentivises ruling classes to never want a public system that is fit for purpose.
Workplaces today are more ableist than they were 20+ year ago, and I am not willing to humour any debate on that. Workplaces 20+ years ago didn’t routinely ask whether I had any disabilities, but whenever I mentioned the congenital issues with my balance and motor skills, they’d take those into account and still hire me, whereas today’s workplaces routinely ask and then use mine to either not hire me or as a proverbial stick to beat me with. Any hiring managers and HR folks who can only boast about their organisation’s DEI metrics when their day-to-day operations and culture are inhospitable or downright hostile to some members of their workforce, can kindly go [do one].
I tried. For my 13th birthday I asked and received a red Yamaha SHS-10 keytar (considerably less expensive when launched in the 1980s than they are today!) as a way to perhaps convert the random melodies and lyrics from my head into actual music; for all the keytar’s capabilities and my aspirations to become the next Diane Warren, I would soon learn that I lacked both the musical talent and the motor skills to get the music out of my head.
Late stage capitalism benefits from widening gaps between (groups of) people and making everything out to be down to individual choice and responsibility, as if chance or luck have no role in achieving success, and disease, disability, or misfortune are somehow always someone’s own fault.
This warped thinking enables the false notion that some people deserve to be exploited. It permits the misconception that breaking the silence on something’s or someone’s existence equates to crushing a taboo. It empowers other fallacies, including but not limited to false balance and false equivalances, while giving legitimacy to the mistaken idea that everything should be debatable—even some people’s humanity and right to exist and live.
It facilitates further individualisation of society, justifying fewer shared burdens and less/worse (re)distribution of power and wealth.
One of my most peculiar experiences when working in social media was Brexit. In the run-up to the 2016 referendum some social media users got so preoccupied with the theme, it became their online everything sandwich. It didn’t matter if (brand) accounts posted about weather, adultery, jewellery, kittens or anything else, there would always be numerous accounts in the responses trying to somehow make it about Brexit.
No place was more prolific for this than Twitter where you can’t really moderate responses. Twitter/X yoday seems even worse, as the loudest shouters avail themselves of multiple accounts with the sole purpose to make everything they read and respond to about Meghan Markle or transgender people.
Similar trends are visible on TikTok, and again, I don’t know if this is a small number of users with a large number of (possibly automated) acccounts seeking to push agendas, but over the past 10 days I’ve witnessed a considerable rise of content creators’ comment sections hijacked by comments demanding the creators’ takes on certain current affairs even if it couldn’t be further from their usual content.
And creators cannot win: those who do not answer the demands still have the comment sections of their regular content hijacked, those who do respond get criticised for ignorance, bias or worse, and those who subsequently take down such content are then attacked for doing so… it’s bizarre to witness.
In both conventional media and in new and social media the theory used to be that if you got a number of complaints of bias against or favour towards one particular angle and then a similar number of complaints of bias against or favour towards a diametrically opposite angle of whatever the subject was you were covering, you were probably doing it right. I think you can through that theory out the window now unless and until there are ways to combat platform manipulation.
Nothing we see on social media or in comment sections right now can be taken at face value, let alone as 100% representative of real people in the real world; the fact that so many people still do is quite alarming.
It’s popular to blame social media for a rise in self-appointed social and political commentators and opinion makers, and I don’t entirely disagree with that assertion, but I have no doubt they were empowered by trends initiated by conventional media. UK broadcasters have too much airtime to fill and not enough appropriate or engaging experts, so they consult friends, acquaintances, and industry colleagues who can talk a good game. This emboldened people to make media appearances to speak on topics they may not necessarily have been particularly knowledgeable about. I know this, because I once used to be one of the people in some broadcasters’ proverbial little black books, until I burned bridges by refusing to come on air to speak on things I didn’t know (enough) about and by calling out broadcasters who actively sought to blur lines between factual reporting and speculation or opinion, who at times lacked basic due diligence in relation to guests, and who platformed people in situations or circumstances they had no business speaking on.
In fairness to media outlets covering Bryan Johnson’s self reinvention, several did us plebeian language such as anti-ageing and some featured scientists countering some of Johnsons’s claims (Time even quoted professionals who opined he looked unwell), but any critical notes were buried deep into the articles and Johnson was never challenged directly.
In deciding which URLs to link in my piece here I had a choice of many: Johnson had quite the PR tour to promote the commercial venture he is running to sell his lifestyle plan (and $69 olive oil). Media facilitated that.
Did you miss that there are four separate links here?