The Productive Pessimist

  Life being stressful isn't  an illness.  That's entirely correct. But "life being stressful" also  isn't acceptable to employers, either. It's not going to be the case, in the UK, in 2025, that if people "just stop going to doctors and claiming mental health issues and getting signed off because life is a bit hard, then we wouldn't be spending so much on welfare!" . "People don't like you" . "You're impacting your colleagues' morale" . "It's unfair of you to make your colleagues worry about you by being clearly upset" . "You can't talk about feeling burnt out when there are people dealing with far higher workloads than you - everyone is burnt out, but we have to keep going" . "If you aren't happy to be here, f-k off and get a different job" . "I'm sick of you coming in here looking like you want to k*ll yourself - why don't you just f-king do it, so the rest ...

  "It's not pie! More for other people doesn't mean less for you!" This was the howl of social media's self-declared #neurodivergence, #disability communities in the late twenty-teens and into the twenty-twenties. It sounded almost convincing, a worthy rallying call that everyone who wanted to be On The Right Side of History should immediately get behind. And if you dared  to hesitate to get behind the statement, if you so much as thought  that it maybe didn't sound quite  right - well, you were privileged , you were guilty of ableism , you just wanted disabled people to not exist!  If you were  disabled yourself, and had some reservations about the pie-ness of inclusion, then you were "everything that's wrong with the world!" But - as so often happens - those who were hesitant have been proved right.  It turns out that, as many disabled people with observable, high-impact impairments, who need  workplace accommodations - and, most importantly, w...

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...