The Productive Pessimist

  I don't normally do personal deep dives on this blog, which is, after all, my professional presence as The Productive Pessimist Ltd. In the past - in jobs, when building connections and relationships, in social media discourse, and yes, in blog posts - I've apologised for "going into all of that"  or "going on about me".  In several jobs, I've been made  to apologise - and to feel ashamed - for mentioning personal challenges I was facing.  In my first office-based job, aged 21, on my first day, I was told, directly: "When you come to work, you leave all your personal shit at the front door of your own house. You're not you , here; you're the company, and the company doesn't have headaches, the company isn't tired, the company isn't worried about how it's going to pay its rent, the company doesn't have family members or friends who die, that it gets sad about. You're being paid to be the company for 10 hours a day, f...

  Liz Kendall  believes that "the problem with young people is too many consider doing a day's work stressful...we can't have that." Can't we? We "can't have" an acknowledgement of a reality - that work often is  stressful. The Productive Pessimist is my own business. It's work I've chosen - but trying to get it to a position of productivity, trying to get clients, coming up with content which offers just enough to be interesting, without giving so much that there's no need for anyone to hire us, is incredibly  stressful. Before starting The Productive Pessimist, I was a project manager in healthcare transformation. The stress of that had me at the end of my ability to cope more than once. Before getting into project management (which, as well as healthcare transformation, included employability support focused on individuals facing systemic barriers, and LGBTQ+ mental health inclusion in the third sector) I worked in marketing for a mult...

There are 551,000 more people unemployed than there are available jobs.  Clinicians are EXCEPTIONALLY resistant to the idea of providing routine medical appointments outside of working hours. Bus companies just shrug their shoulders as able-bodied mothers take over the lone wheelchair bay on each bus with their buggies, tourists yeet their wheeled suitcases into it, and bored teenagers sprawl there, because schools refuse to provide their own bus services, and bus companies are allowed to take more passengers than there are available seats. In the UK, there is an average of 37 reported hate crimes against disabled people every single day. That's an average of a crime against a disabled person every single hour of every single day. It's not an "epidemic of worklessness" - it's an epidemic of intolerance for anyone who isn't 100% "normal" and "on the ball" 100% of the time.  It's an epidemic of intolerance for any period of absence, and a...