The Productive Pessimist

  Image shows a pile of UK cash notes beneath an X on a red circle background I watch a lot of finance videos on YouTube. Currently, I'm mostly focused on Ramit Seti ("I Will Teach You To Be Rich"), having ditched Caleb Hammer ("The Financial Audit") for a very strong swerve to "right-wing screaming", an attitude of "I'm not gonna bother qualifying to actually be a financial advisor, so nothing I say is actually advice", and ramping up from "roasting is a banter-y part of the process" to "this channel is now just me getting to rage on people", none of which are my cup of tea, and Chelsea Fagan of The Financial Diet for "OMG, men are just literally the worst, they ruin women's financial lives, let me just present all the women who've BROKEN FREE from TERRIBLE men! Oh, yeah, the ONLY reason I'm not f-ked by all the debt I ran up in college is I married a rich dude who took care of that for me, but I'...

I'm not a Christian, but I follow a focus on energies and expectations which centres a world beyond the one I walk through and work in.   I do not believe I will have an eternal life elsewhere as the form of "myself" people who knew me in life would immediately recognise, but I do believe some aspect of me - what people mean when they talk about a 'soul' - will  endure, in some altered form.  I believe everyone's essence and energy endures, as part of the collective unconscious, the source of those moments of inspiration, those sudden thoughts, those flashes of insight, that the living feel "come out of nowhere." Good Friday, for me, isn't about commemorating the Christian God. But it is  a position in liminal time - a period where the energies of the physical world shift, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes more noticably.  And, for me, whose focus includes a Dedication to a Goddess of Death, it is a day to centre and honour death. To become comf...

  Every article that comes up when you search "How to recover from burnout" is either just the usual bare-minimum basic "human life maintenance" of "oooohhh, get enough sleep! Eat fruit and veggies! Exercise! Be outside! THERAPEEEEE!!!!" - okay, tell the "get enough sleep" to my insomnia.  I go to bed around 10pm routinely. I don't scroll my phone or bop about on my laptop when I'm settling to sleep. I know I need to have background noise, so I set that up before I settle down. I take half an hour before I start to try to sleep, I check in with whether I need more/fewer blankets, or if I need the window open.  I sleep alone (I'm married, my wife and I have very contradicting sleep needs.) I'm a grown adult without food sensitivities or allergy triggers - I eat fresh fruit and vegetables as a routine, daily thing.  Along with knowing my body's tolerance for protein (I have high protein needs owing to multiple physical health ch...

  In the past two days, two UK non-profits - Access Community Trust in East Anglia, and Well Women Wakefield, based in Yorkshire, have collapsed.  Access Community Trust had been in existence for 50 years.  Well Women Wakefield, for forty. Across the UK, and globally, non-profits are struggling. Many are very close to failing.  That means shut doors, withdrawn support for those basically abandoned by the UK government, and facing insurmountable barriers across every single path to even the smallest success, lost jobs, and unpaid wages. It means questions, suspicions, accusations - not just against these organisations and their Trustees, but against their service users. The most vulnerable in society. Accusations that, maybe, they "didn't really need" the help they were getting.  That maybe they were "scroungers", "skivers".  People who, somehow, were taking things they weren't "entitled" to. The slurs start, even if only in peoples' m...

  In a recent  i paper article , Suzanne O'Sullivan opines about "seeing 20-year olds with 20 diagnoses".  I saw the headline, and read the article expecting to see at least one   example  of these people with "20 diagnoses", so that this article could have been exploring co-morbidity, and linked chronic conditions (eg, where multiple impacts often or always occur together, but are diagnosed separately because of the way the healthcare system functions, or where one condition triggers a cascade health impact, which can result in multiple diagnoses, although in reality, the cascade impacts are more so symptoms of  the original, initially diagnosed, condition.) There were no  examples of these people with "20 conditions". Not even examples of the kinds of conditions which are being seen in the same person. Conditions, in fact, were never actually mentioned, except as something of "questionable value", especially if they "require constant v...