The Trouble After Suicide Fails Is That You Still Have To Face Life

One reason why I have not been blogging much recently is because I have been facing pressures: severe ill-health during my first holiday since 2005 and now bad news about my employment prospects. I suppose I should have not expected any more. In this age we should expect to have to have twenty plus jobs in our lives. I have been fortunate that at a time when 2 year contracts or less are the norm, my last job went on for 4.5 years and this one will reach 4 years too if I complete the latest contract in August 2009. For a man in his twenties, two years is probably enough in a post, but as I age it gets harder, exacerbated by having to move across England and then move house twice more during the 2 years 7 months that I have had this current job. Anyway, yesterday it was revealed to us that the company had found out it was doing worse than it thought and was looking at cutting jobs. Of course the high ups will be unaffected they always are and will not even see a pay cut. The most vulnerable are people like me, the contract workers. They do not need to pay redundancy money they just do not re-employ us. This means another move and now of course I have to sell the house (the value of which is falling) which could easily take 5 months or more given it took 7 months to get in here. My industry is not one with jobs everywhere so I will be back on the road again. The longest I have spent in one town was 6 years in London and it looks like the average is about 4 years. Anyway, I just could not face the uncertainty, the need to keep on applying for jobs (I usually get 1 interview for every 25 applications I make and 1 job for every 125 applications, that is hours and hours of filling in forms) all made worse by now being over 40 (my insurance companies keep telling me this fact and why it means my premiums have to rise).

You will not be surprised to find that all of this simply made me tired with life and I began taking an overdose of prescription medicine last night. Of course I bottled it (for non-UK readers, I lost the courage to finish it off), I made the mistake of not getting drunk first and having watched a particularly bleak episode of the science fiction series 'Torchwood' this week about a man brought back to life, I became terrified of what lurked waiting for me beyond life. Initially it had felt really relaxing and I had no desire to write a note or anything, just to get away from all the stuff piling on my head. Today I feel incredibly cowardly that I am still here, extremely weak in terms of my resolve and so rather than yesterday when I felt courageous I now despise myself even more. I do feel rather numb which is quite a good sensation because the big problem of failing to kill yourself is that you still have to face up to all the rubbish you were trying to leave behind and that is where I am now, but the fear of unemployment and the house respossession that would inevitably fail, the need to throw away so many of my possessions so I could fit into a flat I could afford and give up what I have accumulated in my life, is dulled now, though of course it has not gone away and is still to be faced.

They say unemployment has fallen from the 4 million out of work of the 1980s down to somewhere like 1.6 million people these days. However, I think there is a lot of missing unemployment, unreported and also for people like me, underemployment in the sense that my next job is unlikely to pay sufficient to keep the house. How foolish I was to fall for the pressure and the lure of buying the house, and how incredibly quickly (it is just over 3 months since we moved in) that it is all coming apart. This is my moment of being truly middle class, it is likely to expire in 17 months if not sooner. Men are obsolete, the new jobs being created are low paid and unappealing. What a waste of government money all my education was in that it cannot keep me in a decent job and in my house. I should have simply left school at 16 and I would be in no different position now. I would probably have had fewer experiences, but so many of them have been about stress and pressure, I would have given up the bulk of them. I can see why the suicide rate among young men in the UK is so high, there is nothing to live for. If you are lucky you will get a decent life for a few years, but then it will evaporate sooner or later and certainly when you retire if not before. How dare people try to stop young men exiting the so bleak existence that lies before the bulk of them.

This was another point which angered me. My housemate got angry that I would kill myself in my own house with a 6-year old living here. For a start I reserve the right to kill myself in my own house and no-one is going to stop that. Second, I have ended up as de facto father figure to this child (you cannot avoid it, beware of this two adults plus child, no matter what the relationship, end up being perceived as the parents no matter how badly qualified one or other is for the role. I imagine it even applies with two people of the same sex living in the house but it is even easier if you are a different gender to the real parent) and apparently that means I cannot kill myself. That is ridiculous, the strongest woman I ever knew had had both her father and uncle kill themselves and it made her outward going and intelligent and incredibly well travelled. The reason behind this is because children who come from two-parent families are too weak to live in this modern world. Only children from single parent families stand any chance these days. They are not pandered to and early on they learn to be tough and resourceful. If I had not been brought up by two parents I am sure I could cope far better with the situations I am facing. It is rubbish to say families need fathers; two parent families are unsuitable for western society in the twenty-first century and that 6-year old would be better off without some pretend father.

So where does this leave me now? Well, I guess the numbness will wear off and the fear of the future will return. Also massive regret over so many things I have done wrong. Every decision I seem to have made since 2005 has been a big error. Leaving my old permanent post for a contract job in more expensive region of the UK was a major mistake especially as they reneged on three-quarters of the relocation expenses I had been promised. The second thing was not to downsize immediately and try to keep the space I had previously enjoyed, that is impossible in South-East England. I picked two wrong houses to rent. They initially seemed good but the behaviour of the landlords cut the ground from beneath me and costs thousands of pounds in moving and moving again let alone a lot of stress. Of course the house purchase was handled very poorly, getting so little for my London flat, paying so much for this house and getting a fixed-rate mortgage when interest rates were at their peak. Done differently I could have got £5-10,000 more out of the deal and not eaten up all my savings for a house I will not see two years in and that money could have tided me over the period of unemployment that is coming up. I have been a fool at every turn.

As you can tell given that nothing has changed in the circumstances that led to me trying to take my own life (something I can never get right, I tried to hang myself at the age of 22 and the hook to which the rope was tied broke dropping me to the floor) remains. Next time I am going to get a lot of alcohol to keep the frights away as I do it and I am going to make sure that I have far far more medicines so that there is no chance I will come back simply with a headache. Then the government can simply continue its authoritarian steps (still trying to push for 42 days detention without charge and now rushing through identity cards for all foreign nationals in the UK, a cynical ploy as the libertarian right are strongly against identity cards but they hate immigrants even more) without me.

Men: Obsolete in the UK by 2030

A serious of recent media reports in the UK have been indicating how obsolete men are becoming in this country. The fact that there are more female than male workers in the country has been a fact of life since the 1970s, partly because women are far more likely to fill part-time and temporary jobs and to have more than one job. The 1970s saw the growth of the feminist movement in the Western world, and in the UK it had some benefits for women, with anti-gender discrimination legislation coming in the mid-1970s and added to incrementally over the past three decades. The latter phase under Blair owed more to his very pro-family agenda but did mean some additional benefits for mothers in terms of tax breaks and maternity (and paternity) leave, despite other contrary policies which tried to get even more women to work. Despite over thirty years of such legislation women on average in the UK earn 16% less than a male counterpart in the same role. However, a third of women over 40 are now the main earner in their household (partly this is due to the increase in single parent families as a result of a divorce rate of over 150,000 per year in the UK) and in 25% of all households a woman makes all of the decisions about the main purchases - i.e. house, car, holidays, furniture, electrical goods, etc.

So, given the gains, but the fact that we have not yet attained gender equality, you might ask on what basis I argue men will become obsolete by the time I retire. The key reason stems from education. Girls have been doing better at age 11 since the end of the Second World War, but this has now extended further down the age range and they are streaking ahead of boys from the minute they start school, these days on average at the age of 4. Interestingly, in South Africa the starting age is 7; in Sweden it is 6 and a later start actually benefits boys. The move to 'reception' classes for 3-4 year olds becoming increasingly common actually disadvantages boys even further. Boys and girls learn in different ways. Boys always tend to be more physically restless especially below the age of 11. All primary schools in the UK have a large majority of female teachers and many of them have no male teaching staff at all. This stems from the status of primary school teachers and men considering the profession worrying they are going to be accused of paedophilia. The balance is currently shifting backwards, but certainly in the 1990s and 2000s there has been a real shortage of male school teachers; consequently things such as reading books are seen as exclusively female activities. In addition, female teachers, unsurprisingly, despite all their training, think like women, which means an emphasis on communication, consensus and group activity rather than the activity-driven, often quite individualistic focus of boys' preferred forms of working. I am not saying boys should be taught by men and girls by women, but certainly boys would benefit from a range of staff in their primary schools.

As boys find it difficult to engage at the start of their schooling, they now particularly suffer in the very target-driven approach to schooling with exams at age 7, 11, 14 and so on (the test at 7 has been dropped in Scotland and Wales but not England where 83% of the UK population lives). I would be interested if any other government has issued targets for children under the age of 5, as the UK government has done. Doing poorly in such tests disheartens boys and so distances them from any interest in learning. Both sexes are increasingly attracted by the other, easy ways to success in the UK - crime and celebrity, but these stand out a little less for a girl who is doing well at school than they do for boys, who are likely to have a tendency to petty crime anyway (the two most common youth crimes are vandalism and shoplifting and girls engage in shoplifting as much as boys), especially that which involves violence or the destruction of property. So, from the moment they start school, boys are liable to be lagging behind girls, a position they never recover. The disheartening nature of failing every couple of years and the lack of a clear position in society must be a contributing factor in the high level of suicides among men and boys in the UK.

The National Curriculum was introduced to UK schools in 1992. It was the first time in British history that the government outlined what schools had to teach (bar religious education which was the only subject to have been made compulsory previously, in 1944), what skills they expected pupils to gain and issues they had to cover. This means that any person who is 20 years old or younger will have gone through this system for all of their school life and any person 31 or younger will have at least experienced it during their secondary education. The consequences are already apparent in the gender imbalance in universities. Again, I am not arguing it was wrong for the position of women to improve, but it seems now that they are pushing far ahead and we will soon see a gender imbalance which mirrors (i.e. in reverse) that of the 1950s. There are currently over 330,000 more female students at university than male students. The balance is 56% female to 44% male and the female share is increasing. Some subject areas such as engineering and certain science subjects are holding on to a male majority. However, other traditionally male subject areas such as medicine (to become a doctor) and law now have 6 women students for every 4 men and again this level is increasing. You may say, well, that is only university students, but in contrast to the early 1980s when only 6% of the population went to university the level is now not far off the government target of 50% of the population under 25. Of course, also, people with degrees tend to fill the best jobs. Men are more debt-averse than women, so again the move towards students (or their families) paying up to £3000 (€4290; US$6210) fees has just increased the tendency of men not to go to university and to seek work, adding to the fact that because of their lagging in study right throughout school they lack the grades to compete against women.

So it is clear that in the next decade women will be the majority in terms of graduates entering the labour market. This is why I said it will take 25-30 years for the impact to be felt, because in that time those men appointed in the preceding circumstances will retire and in many cases will be replaced by women. For example, female lawyers are still a minority but the force of numbers will change this in the next decades as it already has in senior positions in the police service. The female dominance at all levels of education will be reinforced. Women have already made great gains in the number of female doctors and this trend will increase or even accelerate as the current batch of students and their successors begin to qualify (the shift to a female majority in universities occurred in 2000, so with 5-year medical courses you will expect to see women from that majority position appearing in hospitals and surgeries now).

One factor that will accentuate the simple numerical pressures is that the skills women have are those now demanded in the workplace. Think how often you see the requirement for good communication and presentation skills, balancing conflicting demands and team working, just the skills that women excel at from the moment they start school. Things like leadership and manual skill (and in the technological age even the ability to fight) that men were seen as good at are no longer wanted. In the global marketplace, languages are also at a premium and this is an area in which women have always been stronger than men.

Socially men have long been redundant. Single-parent families, which generally means the mother and child(ren) is predominant in many areas of British society, no matter whether it is a working class or middle class context. Often these are multi-generational female-only families with grandmother/mother/daughter sharing childminding. Boys in such circumstances seem out of place and have no positive male role model, though their understanding of the female psyche may be strong. In these common family patterns men come, they produce a child, then contribute some money (or not) and they go again. The number of divorces which happen while the children are at primary school is very high and of course this signals to girls that men are not needed and in fact cause upset and argument. Men are not even needed sexually. In common with other European countries, notably Germany, sex toys are now available in high street shops, even department stores are branching out into them. Whilst male 'escorts' lag in number behind the female variety they are on the increase and it is clear that women in the 2010s will not have to bother with the pain of having a man around the house, they can simply hire one when they feel they need one. Of course they can buy sperm if they want to create a child without even having to have sexual intercourse with a man.

Men will clearly not disappear. As on average in the UK 1056 boys are born for every 1000 girls, they will be in the majority numerically. Women are balancing against their longer life expectancy with their increased consumption of alcohol and drugs, so exacerbating this discrepancy. The issue is what will these men do with themselves? They will be semi-skilled manual workers but lacking the physical and mental abilities to even gain the kind of skills that are needed for high paid, responsible jobs. They will have minimal role as fathers and certainly none as bread winners as even those who marry are likely to earn less than their wives and will probably only be kept on until the woman tires of them. Multiple female families with a couple of mothers (not living in a lesbian relationship, simply in an economic one) and their children may be the common pattern of homeowners in 2030. Men will be the cleaners and the shop assistants (they are already losing their status as bus and train drivers and the number of women truckers is rising quickly too). Boys will have little to aspire to except roles like these or the military or a life of unemployment. The UK will never get to the stage where families will want to abort male foetuses, but there is an issue of what to do with all these men with little hope.

One model is the USA. In the 1980s one saw the rise of the male movement trying to capture a role for men in a changing society. It came in step with the closure of much manufacturing, engineering and related employment in the USA (the UK too) and little success in these regions in creating replacement work. Women were the ones needed for the light engineering, service sector and ICT industries which appeared. The men's movement has never really penetrated the UK, possibly because the gender-specific unemployment was lost among the mass unemployment (4 million+) of the 1980s making it less apparent than in the USA. The future for British males is already becoming visible from the USA - prison. The USA currently has more than 1 in every 100 of its population in prison and the large majority are men. The UK is now at the limit of its prison spaces (around 80,000 compared to over 2.5 million in the USA; population 65 million - UK to 256 million USA), but it is clear that with its prison expansion programme these places are going to be filled by men with no other option bar suicide. By 2030 prison will become the main career route for any UK man who cannot stomach taking his own life or taking a McJob.