The Productive Pessimist

  I don't usually write personal accounts. That's not what The Productive Pessimist  is about, I tell myself. Problems are universal. Problems don't have names. We're here, as a company, to solve anyone's  problems. But The Productive Pessimist also claims to provide the solution by living through  the problems.  We talk about how our lived experience informs and complements our professional expertise.  Which means, sometimes, personal accounts are exactly  what The Productive Pessimist is about. The recent EHRC legislation around access to "single sex" spaces is deeply personal. So is Kathleen Stock's recent musing on "why are  so many young people using walking sticks, hmmm?" I won't be linking to either of them. They'll come up easily enough on a Google search. I'll be speaking on both of them, because of both of them bring up problems for businesses, and both of them are deeply, brutally personal. The advisory in the title isn...

  Split image on a blue background. Left side shows a white woman with long red hair, wearing a pinstripe suit, sitting at a desk with her head in her hands. Right side shows a man slumped forward with his head in his hands, setting across a table from an older woman. Tony Blair's centre-left think tank wants people with conditions like ADHD, depression, and anxiety to be actively prevented from claiming welfare assistance for unemployment. These conditions, the think-tank believes, are "not work-limiting."   As someone with lived experience of severe depression with suicidal ideation, generalised anxiety disorder and social anxiety, who has never claimed any of these conditions mean I "can't work", and who generally takes the view that you "may as well go to work depressed and anxious - at least you get paid for it", I'd like to agree.  I've been into work the morning after a failed suicide attempt. I've had a full on psychotic episode...

  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'...

  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...