Elon Gation

The air in the Upper Tier of New Colwyn was always scrubbed to a crisp, artificial sweetness. Down below, in the choked concrete canyons of the old council estates, it tasted like diesel and damp ash.

It’s been 15 years since Covid 24 struck—they finally got it right. I say ‘they’ as it wasn’t just the governments, the big corporations were involved too. They finally found a virus that killed the poor. Covid 23 wiped out the gays, the trans, the non-binaries—The Gay Plague some called it. AIDS 2.0 said others. It wasn’t the virus that killed them of course, it was the “vaccination”—I hate using my fingers as inverted commas like some poncy twat, but that’s the only way to describe the “vaccination”. With the NHS in the hands of corporations, a “special” (there I go again!) vaccine was administered to anyone who fell under the Covid 23 remit—plus anyone else the government and big corps found undesirable. Those targeted with the “special” vaccine soon showed symptoms and were quarantined in purpose built Convalescent Homes, each with a crematorium annex.

That’s how the Transglobal Underground was formed—a safe haven for the survivors of Covid 23.

Still, life is good if you’re one of the elite, or you tow the line and fit in. Not so good if you’ve voiced an opinion that differs from theirs.

But Covid 23 was just the beta test. The real masterstroke came with Covid 24, and it wasn’t designed to kill immediately. It was designed to clean up the "demographic deficit."

The corporate-state alliance called it Project Civic Renewal, but on the ground, we just called it the Postal Code Purge. They didn’t need complex DNA sequencing to target the social underclass; they just used the NHS central database and cross-referenced it with postcodes. If your address registered in a rundown estate, a dodgy high-rise, or a regional town the Ministry of Finance had written off a decade ago, your mandatory Covid 24 vaccine batch number started with a 'G'.

The effects were subtle at first. The "chav mummies"—as the Upper Tier tabloids loved to sneer—who already had five or six kids, suddenly found they couldn't conceive another. The real horror, the quiet one, settled in when their teenage kids grew up.

A whole generation of council estate youth, raised on cheap energy drinks and survival instincts, found themselves completely hollowed out. No pregnancies. No sudden scares. The estates, usually deafening with the sounds of screaming toddlers, barking staffies, and tinny music blasting from tinier speakers, began to grow eerily quiet.

The government celebrated it behind closed doors as the ultimate cost-cutting measure. No more child benefits to pay. No more social housing to build. The underclass problem, engineered to vanish within a single generation.

I stood on the balcony of a twenty-storey block in what used to be the Peulwys Estate, watching the sunset bleed a toxic orange across the Great Orme and sea. Below me was the Last Playground—a concrete patch where the paint on the swings had peeled away to rusted iron.

There were no children playing. The youngest person on this estate was eighteen, and he spent his days staring at his hands, knowing his bloodline ended with him.

"They're flattening the houses on Highlands Road tomorrow," a voice said behind me.

It was Llion. He was a survivor of the Covid 23 sweep, smuggled out of a Convalescent Home by the Transglobal Underground before the crematorium chimneys could smoke. He wore a heavy high-vis jacket—the universal uniform of the invisible working class.

"Why?" I asked, not really needing the answer.

"Fewer people means less space needed," Llion spat, sucking on a smuggled, highly illegal vape. "They’re zoning it for luxury smart-flats. For the corporate mid-managers. People with 'approved' genetic and financial profiles."

"They're wiping us out without firing a single bullet, ethnic cleansing" I muttered.

"Then we change the ammunition," Llion said, his eyes reflecting the dying orange light. He pulled a small, silver stasis-vial from his heavy jacket pocket. It gleamed under the shattered balcony light.

The Transglobal Underground wasn't just a network of safe houses anymore; it had become a rogue laboratory. While the government thought they had successfully sterilized the "undesirables," locally, our underground medics—the struck-off doctors and rogue corporate scientists who still had a conscience—had been working in Bryn Elian, the abandoned secondary school. This was the case in major towns and cities across the world.

"Is that the counter-agent?" I whispered.

"The synthesis is complete," Llion nodded, a grim smile touching his lips. "It won’t reverse what they did to the older generation, but for the kids? The eighteen and nineteen-year-olds? It rewrites the corporate blockers in their system. It restores the future they tried to steal."

The plan was simple but incredibly dangerous. We couldn't distribute it via clinics—everything was monitored by biometric scans and corporate AI. We had to contaminate the Upper Tier's exclusive supply lines, or better yet, weaponize the delivery system, introducing the counter-agent into the very water treatment plants that supplied the outer sectors.

The elite wanted a sterile, compliant world where the poor simply ceased to exist, leaving behind just enough automated drones to clean their streets and maintain their servers. They thought they had engineered the perfect corporate utopia.

I looked down at the silent, empty streets of the estate. Tomorrow, the bulldozers would arrive at Highlands Road. But tonight, the Underground was moving.

"Let's go," I said, stepping off the balcony into the dark. "It's time to give this country its noise back."

Shop til you drop

The modern shopping addict does not wander the wilderness gathering berries. They wander the algorithm gathering parcels.

The hunter-gatherer has evolved into the click-and-collector. Same primal thrill, just with next-day delivery and a returns label.

It begins innocently enough, as all great dependencies do. A phone upgrade here. A gym membership there. Something ergonomic for the back. Something decorative for the wall. Something aspirational for the soul. You never say, “I am building a shrine to consumerism.” You say, “I’m just sorting my life out.”

Sorting your life out, it turns out, involves a suspicious amount of cardboard.

The conveyor belt starts early. School, exams, university, job. These aren’t milestones so much as staging areas—holding pens before the real marathon begins: the purchasing. Somewhere between your first payslip and your first panic about pension contributions, the system quietly hands you a script. It is printed on glossy paper and smells faintly of new plastic.

Step one: acquire identity through acquisition.

A relationship is not just companionship; it is the gateway to a shared streaming subscription. A baby is not just a baby; it is a pram ecosystem, a nappy supply chain, a tiny human-shaped portal through which money disappears at light speed. A house is not a home; it is a lifelong handshake with debt, decorated seasonally.

You don’t buy things because you need them. You buy things because your life has chapters, and every chapter requires props.

The tragedy is not that the props exist. The tragedy is how quickly they become invisible. Yesterday’s must-have becomes today’s background noise. The thrill evaporates faster than the packaging can be recycled. Satisfaction has a half-life measured in hours.

So you buy again.

Advertising understands this better than you ever will. It knows you are not purchasing objects. You are purchasing adjectives. Confident. Youthful. Successful. Desirable. Efficient. Organised. Adventurous. The products are merely the nouns required to smuggle those adjectives into your home.

Buy this and become that.

It is the oldest spell in the book, and it still works beautifully.

The slogans chant like a modern liturgy. Because you’re worth it. Just do it. Probably the best in the world. There are some things money can’t buy—so buy everything else just in case. The phrases bounce around your skull until they feel like memories rather than marketing.

You cannot recall the moment the voice in your head stopped being yours.

Social media provides the cathedral where these beliefs are practiced publicly. The ritual is simple: display, compare, upgrade. Your life becomes a shop window in which the mannequins are real people and the price tags are invisible but universally understood.

Someone always has the newer kitchen, the sharper jawline, the more photogenic holiday. You scroll not because you enjoy it, but because hope demands evidence. Proof that the next purchase might finally close the gap between who you are and who you could be if you just tried harder and financed it responsibly.

Comparison is the engine. Envy is the fuel. Free delivery seals the deal.

The irony is that the more choice you have, the less any single choice matters. Shelves stretch to infinity. Infinite cereals. Infinite trainers. Infinite self-improvement. Decision paralysis masquerades as freedom. You stand in the aisle of endless possibility and feel an itch that only a purchase can scratch.

Choice used to mean agency. Now it means obligation.

You must optimise your skincare. Your coffee. Your mattress. Your productivity tools. Your leisure time. Your mental health. Your hydration strategy. Your morning routine. Your evening wind-down routine. Your routine for managing routines.

Life becomes a full-time job with a shopping list attached.

And the punchline? None of it sticks. The gadgets age. The clothes fade. The trends mutate. The apps update. The “must-have” quietly joins the landfill of yesterday’s essentials. Your house fills with artefacts from past versions of yourself—each one purchased by a person who was certain they were about to become someone better.

Every object is a fossil of a former hope.

The system is elegant because it never promises completion. Completion would be catastrophic. Completion would end the buying. Instead, it offers perpetual almost. You are always one purchase away from the life you imagined. Always nearly there. Always improving.

Always paying.

By the end, the receipts outnumber the memories. The boxes outnumber the ambitions. The loft becomes an archive of good intentions and free trial periods that quietly became monthly subscriptions.

And one day, if you’re unlucky enough to notice, a strange question appears uninvited: What was all this for?

The system has no answer. It was never designed to.

It simply refreshes the page and suggests something you might also like.

MAIL ORDER PUNK

Denbigh was a speck on the map, a nowhere town far from the pulse of anything resembling a punk scene, so I became a mail-order rebel, hunting down records like they were contraband. When No Future Records dropped A Country Fit For Heroes 12” compilation EP in January 1982, it was like a suspect device landing in my teenage lap and going off. That record cracked open the world of street punk for me and thousands of other kids stuck in backwaters like mine. Before that, we’d been pogoing at school discos to Angelic Upstarts, UK Subs, Cockney Rejects, the untouchable Crass, and Dead Kennedys—bands that fueled our snotty defiance. But this? This was rawer, grittier, like a boot to the face.

Discharge had already set the blueprint two years earlier with their Realities Of War EP on Clay Records. I saw their ad in Sounds screaming “Pure brickwall punk,” and by fuck, they weren’t lying—those songs hit like a sledgehammer, all distortion and rage. Then there was Vice Squad, fronted by Beki Bondage, who was (and still is) a total punk goddess. Their Last Rockers single on Riot City Records was a snarling anthem that made many a heart race. A year later, GBH upped the ante with their Leather, Bristles, Studs and Acne 12” EP, a title that basically summed up the entire aesthetic of my teenage years (minus the bristles - I was a late developer!).

Those records weren’t just music; they were lifelines, proof that there was a world beyond Denbigh’s dead-end streets. Ordering them felt like joining a secret society, each vinyl slab a middle finger to the boredom and conformity of small-town life. Looking back, I can still feel the thrill of ripping open those packages, the crackle of the needle hitting the groove, and the way those songs made me feel like I could burn the whole world down—or at least spike my hair and try.

Punk was shifting, burrowing deeper underground, a feral pulse thrumming just out of sight. If you knew where to look—back pages of Sounds, dog-eared fanzines like Never Surrender—it was there, raw and ready. Thatcher’s iron grip and the gut-punch of mass unemployment lit a fire under the nation’s youth, and punk was our Molotov cocktail. Angry voices screamed back at her regime, spitting in the face of a system that left people jobless and restless. Labels like No Future, Riot City, Rot Records, and Clay were practically high street in punk’s scrappy ecosystem, but I was chasing the obscure, the stuff so niche it barely existed.

My record collection was my war chest, stacked with every release I could afford from those labels, each one arriving with a fistful of flyers, badges, and patches that I’d sew onto my jacket like battle scars. One gem was a 7” single by the Luddites on Xsentrix Noise Records and Tapes—Strength Of Your Cry, a brooding, slow-burn banger that hit harder than most. Then there was The Human Suffering EP by What Is Oil?, which showed up with a melted hole through the vinyl and a note scrawled by some guy named Dunk: “This is for art’s sake, ask for another, cheers.” That’s peak insanity—torching your own records before mailing them out. I wrote back for a replacement, but it never came. These days, those singles go for £200 a pop, a relic of a time when art was worth more than sense.

Two or three times a week, my doormat was a drop zone for new singles, each one a tiny rebellion I’d spin until the grooves wore thin. Albums? Those were rarer—too pricey for a kid scraping by on pocket money. But the singles were my lifeblood, each one a ‘fuck you’ to the grey monotony of Thatcher’s Britain. Looking back, I can still smell the ink on those fanzines, feel the weight of the vinyl in my hands, and hear the crackle of a needle dropping on a record that felt like it could change the world—or at least my little corner of it in Denbigh.

Check out - Ian Glasper's book - A Country Fit For Heroes PRIMARILY COLLECTING THE STORIES OF OVER 140 UK PUNK BANDS FROM THE EIGHTIES WHO ONLY RELEASED EPS AND DEMOS, OR ONLY APPEARED ON COMPILATION LPS, 'A COUNTRY FIT FOR HEROES: DIY PUNK IN EIGHTIES BRITAIN' IS A CELEBRATION OF THE OBSCURE, A LOVE LETTER TO THE UK'S PUNK UNDERGROUND.

The Local Festival...

Something’s not quite right. It’s the day after the Sausage & Cider Weekender and I’m sat here hydrated, functioning, and only mildly ashamed of my life choices. No hangover. No mysterious bruises. No inexplicable receipt for £47 worth of loaded fries. And yet I drank enough to pickle a village. Parenting at a festival, it turns out, is the ultimate pace car; you can sink thirteen pints but you’ll still stop short of licking a generator because someone needs a wee every eleven minutes.

Which brings us neatly to the modern “local music festival”, that once noble concept that has quietly morphed into a tribute act safari with a bouncy castle. I paid £18 to attend what was billed as a celebration of live music and community spirit, which is technically accurate if your definition of live music includes Arctic Donkeys, Fleetwood Mac & Cheese, Rage Against The Vending Machine, Ed Shear-in and a group of firefighters called Guns N’ Hoses. Seven bands on the poster, six pretending to be other bands, and the seventh a bloke called Darren doing acoustic Ibiza classics, which is the musical equivalent of finding a wasp in your cereal.

Someone asked me what I thought of the day overall and my reply was simple: lovely atmosphere, appalling originality. If you want cutting-edge music, danger, art and risk, do not attend a local festival. If you want lukewarm lager, children covered in glitter and a 43-year-old man screaming “THIS ONE’S FOR THE LADIES” before absolutely butchering Mr Brightside, welcome home.

I understand why organisers do it. Tribute acts are safe. They are musical comfort food. Nobody has ever stormed out of a field shouting “I cannot believe they played songs I recognised!” Original bands are risky; they might be loud, political, experimental, or worse, contain a trumpet. Tribute acts, on the other hand, offer reassuring predictability. You already know the chorus. You already know when to cheer. You already know when to go to the bar because they’ve started the slow one. By mid-afternoon the entire crowd has settled into a beautiful rhythm: hear opening riff of famous song, cheer like Pavlov’s drunk dogs, spill cider on toddler, repeat. At one point I watched a man punch the air with genuine emotion while watching a band called The Rolling Scones perform Satisfaction in a gazebo next to a churro van. He was moved. Deeply moved. This is where we are now.

The real miracle of these festivals is the sheer number of children present. Thousands of tiny humans in ear defenders watching their parents slowly become folklore. Nothing says wholesome family day out like dad triple-parking the buggy at the cider tent, mum shouting “I LOVE YOU” at a band dressed as ABBA, and a toddler eating chips off the grass like a gentle badger. By 4pm the field becomes a sociology experiment with three distinct tribes: the Responsible Parents who leave at six, the Optimistic Parents who said they’d leave at six, and the Parents Who Have Lost The Concept Of Time. You see dads carrying sleeping children like fallen comrades while still holding two pints and a tray of nachos. You see mums doing that squinty one-eye walk that says I am absolutely fine and also the ground is moving. The kids, of course, will remember none of this. Their core memory will simply be: at some point Daddy sang Oasis at a stranger.

Then comes the magical hour, around half seven, when the sun dips, the temperature drops and the cider hits the bloodstream like a tax rebate. It always begins with a disagreement about queue etiquette, escalates into a heated debate about football and ends with two men named Kev grappling gently beside a falafel stand while security intervene with the calm professionalism of people who have separated this exact fight four hundred times before. Meanwhile on stage, No Way Sis Oasis Experience UK launch into Wonderwall for the third time that day and the crowd sings along like nothing has happened. Civilisation continues.

But the truth is nobody is really there for the music. The music is just a pleasant soundtrack to day drinking in a field while pretending this counts as culture. These festivals aren’t about discovery; they’re about familiarity. They’re not cutting edge, they’re cutting hedge: trimmed, tidy and impossible to get lost in. You pay your money, you drink too much, you clap for songs you already know, you promise never again and you absolutely go again next year. Because deep down we all love a sunny field, a plastic pint glass and a band called Blurred Lines (Not That One) shouting HELLO FESTIVAL like they’re headlining Glastonbury instead of performing next to portable toilets. Great day, terrible music, see you next summer.

Abuse of power

Power rarely begins with a master plan. It begins with a mood.

A simmering one. A quiet irritation that lives in kitchens and pubs and comment sections. A sense that things are slipping, that someone somewhere is getting away with something, that the future looks suspiciously different from the past and nobody asked permission.

If you want power, you don’t start with policy. You start with that feeling.

Hope and fear are the oldest levers ever installed in the human brain. Hope says tomorrow could be better. Fear says tomorrow could be worse. Between the two lies a sweet spot where logic quietly packs its bags and leaves the room. That’s where power grows best.

The trick is to feed both emotions at once.

First, you give people something to applaud. Encourage public gratitude, public rituals, public unity. Get them banging pots on balconies and doorways, waving flags in windows, clapping in unison. People love to feel like participants in something noble. It costs nothing and feels priceless. Meanwhile, the systems beneath the applause quietly erode. Budgets shrink. Services creak. Contracts change hands. But the applause is loud enough to drown out the sound of dismantling.

Ceremony is the perfect camouflage for subtraction.

Then you give them something to fear. Fear must be simple. Tangible. Preferably human-shaped. Statistics don’t frighten people; strangers do. You whisper about outsiders, about threats, about change happening too fast and too unfairly. You don’t shout it outright. You imply. You hint. You ask questions you never answer.

“Is anyone else worried?”

They always are.

Soon fear becomes a habit. A daily vitamin. People begin to seek it out like caffeine. They scroll for it, share it, argue about it. It gives them energy, direction, purpose. Fear is intoxicating because it makes people feel alert and alive. It sharpens the world into heroes and villains, friends and enemies, us and them.

Binary thinking is wonderfully efficient. It saves people the trouble of nuance.

Once fear takes hold, hope becomes the product you sell as the cure. You position yourself as the solution to the danger you carefully inflated. The only steady hand. The only voice brave enough to say what others won’t. The only one willing to protect what people love from what they’ve been taught to hate.

It doesn’t matter if the solution exists. It matters that the promise does.

The crowd begins to form. At first it’s a gathering. Then a movement. Eventually it becomes a mob with Wi-Fi. They defend you before you ask. They attack your critics before you notice them. They transform disagreement into betrayal and criticism into treason.

You no longer need arguments. You have loyalty.

A loyal crowd is the most renewable resource on Earth. It generates outrage on demand. It produces enemies faster than you can name them. It thrives on the idea that the world is under siege and only you can fortify the walls.

Walls are excellent symbols. Simple. Photogenic. Reassuringly permanent.

Opposition becomes a gift. Every critic is proof of persecution. Every protest is evidence of conspiracy. Every scandal is a distraction engineered by your enemies. Truth becomes flexible. Facts become negotiable. Reality becomes a matter of team spirit.

And the most beautiful part? You never need to admit wrongdoing. You simply accuse louder.

Eventually laws become obstacles rather than guardrails. But laws, like narratives, are editable. Break them first. Rewrite them later. Explain that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. People will nod because they’ve been trained to believe the times are always extraordinary.

Meanwhile the money flows quietly offshore, like a tide that never returns. Lives are disrupted, livelihoods rearranged, futures trimmed to fit the new shape of necessity. The cost is enormous, but it is paid in small instalments by millions of people, which makes it almost invisible.

Collective loss feels like weather. Personal loss feels like injustice.

By the time anyone notices the difference, the machinery of power is humming too loudly to interrupt. The crowds still wave their flags. The headlines still shout your slogans. The fear still pulses, steady as a heartbeat.

You stand at the centre of it all, buoyed by the hopes you sold and the fears you fed, wondering how it ever felt difficult.

Power, after all, was never about leading people.

It was about convincing them they were running toward you.

Let's Lynch The Landlord

 

And now I'm all alone. In bedsit land. My only home 

Living in a Rhyl bedsit in the mid-80s wasn’t so much housing as an endurance test. You didn’t rent a home; you rented a collection of problems and smells that happened to share four damp walls.

The toilet didn’t work, which felt less like a maintenance issue and more like a philosophical stance. The landlord insisted it was “temperamental,” as if it merely needed encouragement and positive thinking. The carpet had fleas — not the odd freeloading hitchhiker, but a thriving, organised society. If you stood still long enough, they treated you like public transport.

And then there was the scabies. A delightful skin condition that arrived uninvited and refused to leave, like a distant relative who suddenly needed “a place to stay for a few weeks” and was still there at Christmas. You’d lie in bed scratching and wonder whether the mattress had ever been new, or whether it had simply existed since the dawn of time, quietly absorbing the despair and mites of previous tenants.

Electricity came courtesy of a single plug socket for the entire flat. One socket. That was it. You had to plan your evening like a military operation: kettle or heater? Television or lamp? Luxury or survival? Owning an extension lead made you the technological elite.

The landlord would occasionally appear for inspections — not to fix anything, obviously, but to check the building was still technically vertical. Meanwhile, disco thundered from the flat below like a permanent soundtrack to mild suffering. The bassline vibrated through the floorboards, rattling the damp plaster and giving the fleas something to dance to. I would counter this with storming punk rock and they below had the nerve to complain!

Requests for hot water or heating were met with the timeless landlord refrain: “All you ever do is complain.” Which felt unfair, considering the alternative was silently dissolving into the wallpaper. Sometimes you’d return home to find the place mysteriously “checked” while you were out — nothing stolen, just a vague sense that your privacy had been borrowed without permission.

The yard outside hosted rats with the confidence of long-term tenants. They didn’t scurry; they strolled. Cockroaches joined the party too, because every ecosystem needs diversity. Turning on the oven released a smell that suggested it had previously been used for experimental chemistry. And when it rained, the ceiling joined in, contributing its own indoor water feature.

Yet, somehow, we lived like this. We laughed about it in pubs, swapped horror stories, and kept going because rent was cheap and options were thinner than the wallpaper. It wasn’t comfort — it was survival with a sense of humour. Cynical humour, perhaps, but humour all the same.

Because if you didn’t laugh, you’d probably just sit there in the dark.

Virtual Agreement

By day—by which he meant whenever he opened his laptop—Elliot was a good person.

Not just good in the vague, harmless sense. He was visibly, demonstrably, relentlessly good. The kind of good that arrived punctually in comment sections and left a tidy trail of heart emojis behind. The kind of good that knew exactly when to post, what to say, and which opinion would receive the most approving nods from strangers with anime avatars.

Elliot had built the persona carefully, like a bonsai tree trimmed into a perfect shape. It had taken years of pruning.

In real life, his flat was quiet in the way places become when no one visits. The curtains stayed half closed. The sink filled gradually with mugs that once held coffee and now held intention. His phone rarely rang, but it buzzed constantly—notifications from people he had never met congratulating him for being such a thoughtful human being.

The applause was silent but addictive.

Online, Elliot was kind. Fiercely kind. Performatively kind. He shared petitions before breakfast and posted compassionate threads before lunch. He corrected people gently but firmly. He condemned things with careful, eloquent disappointment. He supported causes he had learned about three minutes earlier with the conviction of a lifelong activist.

He never said the wrong thing. More importantly, he never said the honest thing.

Honesty was risky. Honesty could be screenshotted.

So Elliot watched the crowd instead. He waited for the temperature of the room to settle before speaking. A pause, a scroll, a quick scan of the most-liked replies. Then he would step forward, nodding vigorously, echoing the consensus in slightly different wording—just enough originality to seem sincere, just enough agreement to stay safe.

He was a human retweet.

The mob didn’t frighten him because they were cruel. They frightened him because they were efficient. One misstep, one badly phrased joke, one opinion that aged poorly, and the crowd would turn with the speed of weather. He had watched it happen to others. People evaporated overnight, leaving behind apology notes and locked accounts.

Elliot survived by never standing still long enough to be noticed.

His posts read like warm hugs. His private thoughts read like cold rain.

He muted people he publicly praised. He rolled his eyes at threads he enthusiastically shared. He despised the endless moral grandstanding even as he perfected it. Each day felt like attending a party where everyone insisted they were having a wonderful time while quietly checking the exits.

Sometimes he typed a reply that was honest. Something blunt. Something real. Something that might have started an argument instead of ending one. He would stare at the words, heart racing, imagining the fallout.

Then he would delete it and replace it with kindness.

Kindness was safer. Kindness was applauded. Kindness got likes.

Likes felt like oxygen.

The strangest part was how much he resented the people who provided it. Their avatars smiled back at him from his phone like a chorus of polite strangers applauding a speech he didn’t believe in. He knew they didn’t truly know him. Worse, he knew he didn’t want them to.

He feared ridicule more than loneliness, so he chose loneliness with Wi-Fi.

Every so often he posted about mental health. Vulnerability performed well. A carefully worded confession about burnout, a tasteful mention of therapy, a gentle reminder to “be kind to yourselves.” The responses poured in immediately. Support. Love. Solidarity. Dozens of people telling him he mattered.

He read every message and felt nothing.

Because the person they cared about didn’t exist.

One evening, after a particularly successful thread, Elliot closed the laptop and sat in the silence of his flat. The room hummed faintly with electricity and distant traffic. He realised he had spent the entire day agreeing with people he secretly disagreed with.

He tried to remember the last time he’d said something that felt dangerous and true. The memory didn’t come.

His phone buzzed again. Another notification. Another stranger thanking him for being such a good person.

He stared at the screen for a long time before turning it face down on the table.

The silence that followed felt heavier than any argument.

Grown up punk

He still had the leather jacket.

It hung at the back of the wardrobe like a fossil from a louder era, the sleeves creased into permanent rebellion. Sometimes he’d catch sight of it while reaching for a neatly ironed shirt and feel a faint, embarrassing tug in his chest, like hearing a song you once loved playing faintly in a supermarket.

Dave had been seventeen when the jacket first mattered. Spiked hair, safety pins, opinions sharp enough to cut glass. He’d shouted about the system in cramped venues that smelled of beer and sweat. He’d sworn he’d never sell out, never settle down, never become one of them. The future was a thing to fight, not plan for.

Back then, the world felt simple: there were the powerful, and there were the rest of us, and he knew exactly which side he was on.

He raved through the 90s with the stamina of someone who believed sleep was a conspiracy. He drifted through bad jobs with heroic indifference, treating employment as a temporary inconvenience rather than a necessity. Weekends blurred into weekdays, hangovers into late alarms. Responsibility hovered nearby, politely waiting to be acknowledged.

He ignored it with admirable dedication.

The bedsit in Rhyl had peeling wallpaper and a mattress that remembered every poor decision ever made on it. There had been a girl whose surname he never learned, a pregnancy scare, a string of unpaid bills that arrived like threatening postcards from the future. Life didn’t implode dramatically; it just sagged in the middle.

One morning he woke up and realised rebellion had stopped being fun and started being exhausting.

The change wasn’t dramatic. No lightning bolt, no epiphany. Just a slow drip of practical thoughts. Rent. Stability. Pensions. Words he once treated like punchlines began to sound suspiciously like solutions.

He cut his hair first. A small thing. Sensible, even. Interviews went better when people could see your eyebrows.

The job arrived soon after. Then a better one. Then a promotion. Each step felt temporary, a strategic compromise. He told himself he was infiltrating the system, learning its weaknesses from the inside.

The system, meanwhile, quietly handed him a company lanyard and a dental plan.

Years passed in tidy increments. He bought shirts that needed ironing and shoes that required polish. He stopped going to gigs because they were too loud and started complaining when restaurants played music too loudly. Somewhere along the way he discovered he liked coffee that tasted of adjectives.

He told himself this was maturity.

The leather jacket stayed in the wardrobe, watching.

The biggest change wasn’t the job or the mortgage or the reliable sleep schedule. It was the music. One afternoon he realised the records he once worshipped had been replaced by something softer, safer. Stadium anthems. Polished choruses. Songs that didn’t demand anything from him except passive approval.

He told himself it was just taste evolving.

One weekend, while clearing space in the spare room, he found the old vinyl stacked in a dusty crate. Angry album covers. Bands with names that sounded like threats. He picked one up, smiled nostalgically, then opened his laptop and searched for its resale value.

The listing went live within minutes.

It felt efficient. Sensible. Adult.

Election day arrived on a rainy Thursday. He stood in the polling booth holding the stubby pencil, staring at the ballot paper like it was a mirror. He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then made a neat, decisive cross beside the candidate who promised stability, lower taxes, and strong markets.

The pencil didn’t tremble.

Walking home, he passed a group of teenagers outside a takeaway. Leather jackets. Loud laughter. One of them shouted something about the government and the end of the world. They sounded furious and certain and invincible.

He felt an unexpected flicker of irritation. Kids, he thought. They’ll understand when they’re older.

That evening he hung his suit jacket beside the old leather one. The two garments touched at the shoulders, strangers sharing a hanger. He stood there for a moment, staring at them, unsure why the sight made him uneasy.

Then his phone buzzed with a work email, and the feeling passed.

The leather jacket stayed where it was, waiting patiently for Rebellion festival in August where he could play pretend.

No more dancing on the fighting floor

There was a time when local band rivalry was the greatest spectator sport known to mankind. Better than football, cheaper than boxing and far more personal, because the person you were heckling from the crowd would almost certainly be stood behind you in the bar ten minutes later ordering the same £2.80 pint. Scenes thrived on pettiness. They ran on it. Entire gig nights were powered by nothing but passive aggression, wounded egos and photocopied flyers with spelling mistakes. It was glorious.

Back then, when a new band swaggered onto the scene after rehearsing for roughly the length of a school half-term, the reaction wasn’t polite applause and Instagram follows. It was uproar. Real, full-fat outrage. “How come they get that slot and we don’t? We’ve been gigging for years!” You could practically hear guitar strings snapping in jealousy across the coast. Message boards would melt. People would suddenly develop very strong opinions about artistic integrity. It didn’t matter whether the new band were brilliant or terrible; the important thing was that everyone was talking about them, loudly and often.

And that was the magic. Rivalry created momentum. It created stories. It gave gigs stakes. You didn’t just go to see bands; you went to see what would happen. Would someone take a sly dig from the stage? Would someone “accidentally” play louder than the sound limit? Would someone release a demo suspiciously timed to land the same week as someone else’s? The whole thing felt like a soap opera played out through amplifiers and warm lager.

Now? Everyone’s mates.

Everyone’s lovely.

And it’s unbearably dull.

Modern local gig culture feels like a corporate team-building exercise with distortion pedals. Bands arrive early, help each other carry gear, compliment each other’s pedals, tag each other in posts and thank the venue, the sound engineer, the bar staff, the crowd, the dog outside and their mum and dads. After the show they stand in a circle discussing “the scene” like it’s a parish council meeting.

Where once there were pot shots, there are now heart emojis.

Where once there were grudges, there are now collaborative playlists.

Where once a band might finish a set by saying “stick around for the next lot if you like that sort of shit,” now it’s “We absolutely LOVE these guys, give them all your support, buy their merch, stream their single, water their plants while they’re on tour.”

It’s sickening. Positively wholesome. Like watching a documentary about otters holding hands.

Don’t get me wrong, kindness is nice. Community is important. Supporting each other is admirable. But it’s also catastrophically boring to watch. Rivalry was rocket fuel. If another band was getting more gigs, you practised harder. If someone slagged you off online, you wrote better songs out of spite. If someone tried to kick you off the park, you let the football do the talking. Nobody cried about it for too long; they turned the amps up and got better.

The scene used to need a loose cannon. A band to throw the cat among the pigeons. Someone cocky enough to say they deserved the headline slot and reckless enough to try and prove it. You didn’t have to like them. In fact, it was better if you didn’t. The very act of hating them kept the entire ecosystem alive. Arguments led to attention, attention led to crowds, crowds led to gigs, gigs led to bands improving. Spite was the renewable energy of local music.

Now if a band dares to step out of line or take a playful swipe at another, the room fills with the soft rustling of discomfort. Someone somewhere will issue a statement. There will be clarifications. Everyone will agree that we must all remember to be supportive and positive and respectful. This isn’t Christian Aid week, it’s rock and roll, or at least it used to be.

These days the only rivalry left is who can be the most supportive. Who can post the nicest gig review. Who can out-compliment the other bands. The message boards are quiet, the gossip has dried up and the biggest drama of the night is whether the hummus ran out before the headliner.

And maybe that’s healthier. Maybe it’s kinder. Maybe it’s what grown-up scenes are supposed to look like.

But fuck me it’s boring.

Give me arrogance. Give me jealousy. Give me a band bold enough to take a few pot shots from the stage and force everyone else to raise their game. Give me something to talk about on the way home from a gig besides how “supportive the scene felt tonight.”

Because the truth is simple: scenes don’t thrive on politeness. They thrive on friction. And until someone’s brave enough to ruffle a few feathers again, we’ll all just keep smiling politely while the excitement quietly packs up its gear and goes home early.

Payroll Number ZZZZZZ

 

Every workplace has a moment where you realise you’ve quietly stopped being a person and started being a system setting. It usually arrives sometime between your first laminated ID badge and the day someone refers to you as “resource.”

At school they told you the world was wide open. Endless possibilities. Follow your dreams. Reach for the stars. Then one day you find yourself in a windowless building being told, in a voice suspiciously cheerful, “If your console freezes, press Ctrl-Alt-Del.” Not why the console freezes. Not how the machine works. Just push the buttons and keep the line moving.

Your name might still technically be Joe, or Sarah, or Sam, but in the database you’re something far more efficient: 1234. A tidy little number that fits perfectly into a spreadsheet. Numbers don’t need opinions. Numbers don’t need creativity. Numbers definitely don’t need to ask awkward questions in meetings.

The strange thing is how quickly the extraordinary becomes routine. You remember the years of school, the exams, the talk about ambition and potential. All that time spent learning how to think, analyse, question — only to arrive at a job where the most valuable skill is remembering your password and not straying too far during your allocated break.

The break itself is a masterpiece of precision. Long enough to eat a sandwich, short enough to remind you who’s in charge. Wander too far and the clock becomes an enemy. Time, once a vast ocean of possibility, is now a swipe card and a countdown.

And yet, the job pays. That’s the deal. The golden thread holding everything together. The work becomes more boring by the day, but it pays. The phrase becomes a mantra, repeated quietly every Monday morning. It pays. It pays. It pays.

Years pass with impressive efficiency. Promotions arrive, not as bursts of excitement, but as subtle adjustments to job titles and email signatures. Your responsibilities grow in ways that feel suspiciously similar to your previous responsibilities. The machine changes; the button remains.

Eventually someone thanks you for your service. There may be cake. There may be a speech. They’ll tell you how much they appreciate the years you’ve given. Your best years, in fact. You smile, accept the card, and try not to calculate how many thousands of mornings began with the same alarm clock and the same quiet promise: I’m so happy. It’s more boring by the day, but they pay me.

And the truly unsettling part? You might even mean it.

What's in a (band) name?

Hannah of Bitchpups / Forgotten Sleep / Thyrd Eye

There is a curious ritual in the music industry, whispered about in rehearsal rooms and van journeys across rain-soaked motorways: the ceremonial band name sacrifice. A strange rite in which perfectly good bands quietly abandon perfectly good names in the hope that somewhere, in an office in London, a man with a lanyard nods approvingly and says, “Now that sounds marketable.”

And so a band appears on a poster with a new name and nobody bats an eyelid — except the poor sods who’ve been following them for years and suddenly feel like they’ve stumbled into a witness protection programme for guitarists.

Take the classic case of the band who were once Bitchpups*. Then they became Forgotten Sleep. Then Thyrd Eye. Same people, same songs, same van that runs on diesel and optimism — different name. Again. You look at the poster and think nothing of it. But had the old name been there, the headcount might have doubled. Because fans build relationships with names. Promoters remember names. Stickers get printed with names. And then one day the name is gone, sacrificed to the altar of “branding”.
(*arguably Bitchpups is the better name) .

You can practically hear the meeting.

“Love the band. Hate the name.”

A sentence that has probably destroyed more band logos than poor musicianship ever has.

Somewhere out there exists a shadow economy of bands who’ve renamed themselves in the hope of pleasing an A&R rep who may or may not still work at the label by the time the demo is finished exporting. The great irony, of course, is that this act of reinvention rarely results in the promised land of record deals and tour buses. What it does achieve is confusion. Fans wonder where the band went. Promoters wonder if they imagined them. Streaming platforms quietly shrug.

Meanwhile the A&R ego gets a gentle massage and the band starts again from zero.

It’s not always about pleasing labels either. Sometimes the name change is tactical. A reset. A disguise. A way of sending the same demo to the same industry gatekeepers and hoping they don’t realise they’ve already ignored it twice under different aliases. The musical equivalent of sticking on a fake moustache and re-entering the queue.

And why? Because the brutal truth is this: the number of bands who actually get signed is microscopic compared to the number of bands who exist. For every band you hear on the radio, there are thousands playing to twenty people in a room that has a dartboard in it. Thousands hauling gear up staircases. Thousands perfecting songs that may never leave their postcode.

The odds are so slim they make lottery tickets look like a sensible pension plan.

Which makes the name-changing carousel all the more tragic and all the more understandable. When the prize is so small and the competition so vast, every tiny perceived advantage feels worth chasing. Even if it means abandoning the identity you built, the one fans shouted back at you from the front row.

But here’s the thing: the bands that last rarely build their future on rebranding exercises. They build it the hard way. Gig by gig. Fan by fan. Room by room. The grass-roots slog that no marketing meeting can replace.

Because a band isn’t a logo. It isn’t a font choice. It isn’t a name dreamt up in a meeting room with free biscuits. It’s the connection that forms when someone hears a song and decides it matters.

Changing your name won’t manufacture that connection. It won’t conjure a fanbase from thin air. And it certainly won’t improve your odds in an industry where the vast majority of bands will never be signed, never be marketed, and never be told they’re “the next big thing”.

So maybe the answer isn’t another reinvention. Maybe the answer is stubbornness. Belief. Refusing to rename yourself for the approval of someone whose opinion is just that — one person’s opinion.

Because the bands who endure aren’t the ones who change their names to fit the industry.

They’re the ones who make the industry learn their name the hard way.

To drum or be drummed

I was reading an old review I had written many years ago after watching a nascent Impaled Existence turn their amps up to No.11, and it got me thinking...
There are two great tribes in live music. Two warring factions who have spent decades proving that moderation is for accountants and people who bring earplugs. On one side: the drum machine disciples. On the other: the guitar maximalists, whose life’s mission is to make sure the drummer exists purely in theory.

Let’s start with the drum machine crowd.

There’s something oddly tragic about a band with stadium-sized ambitions but a suspiciously empty space where a human rhythm section should be. When faced with unemployment, you might reasonably consider retraining as a drummer or keyboard player. It’s a stable profession, provided you don’t mind being replaced by a small grey box with a start/stop button and the emotional range of a microwave. These bands don’t just lack a drummer; they’ve eliminated the possibility of drummer-related excuses. No cancelled gigs due to mysterious wrist injuries. No dramatic fallings-out over tempo. No late arrivals because someone “lost a cymbal”. Just cold, relentless, perfectly punctual beeping.

And yet, for all the reliability, something is missing. Drum machines are technically flawless but spiritually unemployed. They never rush a chorus in excitement. They never hit slightly too hard because the crowd is bouncing. They never look like they’re about to pass out halfway through the encore. They simply exist, dutifully tapping away like an accountant doing cardio.

It’s rhythm without risk. Precision without peril. Bollocks without… well, bollocks.

Still, you have to admire the practicality. A drum machine never demands a bigger share of the van. It never eats the rider. It never breaks up the band because it wants to explore jazz. In the ruthless economy of touring, it’s the perfect employee: silent, obedient, and incapable of forming a side project.

Then we cross the battlefield to the other extreme: bands whose guitars are so loud the drummer might as well be miming in a different postcode.

These are the young, enthusiastic, slightly feral outfits who arrive onstage with fourteen guitars, three working pedals between them, and the firm belief that volume is a personality trait. The drum kit is technically present, often barely mic’d, bravely attempting to exist beneath a tidal wave of distortion. Somewhere back there, a human is working incredibly hard, but the guitars have formed a conspiracy against him.

The result is magnificent chaos. A rampaging herd of amplified chainsaws. A sonic avalanche that flattens everything in its path, including rhythm, melody, and occasionally structural coherence. It is loud in the way thunderstorms are loud: impressive, slightly terrifying, and not particularly concerned with subtlety.

And yet it’s still entertaining as hell.

The guitars thrash and roar as if they’ve received reliable intelligence that the apocalypse is starting in the car park. Every riff sounds like it’s trying to outrun the end of the world. The attack is relentless, breathless, and completely uninterested in pacing. Which, ironically, is the one thing both action films and music desperately need.

Because the best action films know when to slow down. They let you breathe before throwing another explosion at your face. The same goes for music. If everything is maximum intensity all the time, the intensity eventually becomes the baseline. The sonic assault stops feeling like an assault and starts feeling like the furniture.

But here’s the thing: sometimes that doesn’t matter. Sometimes chaos is the point. Sometimes the joy is in the sheer commitment to noise, the glorious refusal to turn anything down, and the absolute certainty that subtlety is for cowards.

So here we are, stuck between two extremes. On one side, bands so precise they’ve automated the drummer out of existence. On the other, bands so loud they’ve accidentally done the same thing with amplifiers.

Somewhere in the middle is probably the perfect live sound.

But where’s the fun in that?

The Wonder Kids

Every local scene has at least one. The band who’ve barely tuned their guitars before deciding destiny has already pencilled them in for stadiums. They’ve got the stance, the statements, the social media bio that reads like an acceptance speech, and the absolute certainty that all they need to do now is sit back and wait for the phone to ring.

It’s a beautiful kind of optimism. Dangerous, delusional, and oddly adorable.

You can always spot the moment the hype begins. Usually it starts innocently enough: a strong first gig, a packed room, a handful of people saying “you’re going places.” Someone posts a gushing message the morning after. Suddenly a star is born. A frontman is proclaimed. The band are “gonna make it.” Within hours, the narrative has formed: last night was an I was there gig. History has happened. The rocket has launched.

The band read this, of course. Their mates read it. Their parents read it twice and forward it to relatives. And from that moment on the machine starts pumping smoke up their arses at industrial levels.

The early stage hype is intoxicating. It feels like momentum. It feels like inevitability. It feels like the universe has quietly nodded and said, “Yes, you lot. You’re next.”

But here’s the problem: hype is loud. Reality is quiet. And reality takes ages.

There’s a lyric that nails it perfectly: all of the luvvies are blowing smoke up your arse / the A&R men are knocking at your door / played on the radio it’ll be a hit for sure. That’s the fantasy. The romantic version of the music industry where success is just a phone call you haven’t received yet because it’s probably stuck in traffic.

In the fantasy, your mum and dad love the single and keep saying they’ve given it a play. Your mates say they’re buzzing for Record Store Day. Seventy-five people click “going” on your event page and suddenly this is it. This is the big time. This is rock and roll. All you have to do is exist and wait for destiny to finish loading.

Meanwhile, in the real world, seventy-five people clicking “going” means maybe twenty-five show up. Half of them are in the band after you. The A&R man is not knocking at your door; he is ignoring 300 emails from other bands who were also told they were brilliant. And the radio station? They have never heard of you, but they wish you all the best.

Believing your own hype is one of the most dangerous phases a band can go through because it replaces hunger with expectation. Why graft relentlessly if success is inevitable? Why rehearse twice a week if the industry is already circling? Why play tiny gigs in terrible towns if the big break is surely just around the corner?

It’s the moment a band stops chasing and starts waiting.

And waiting is fatal.

Every scene has watched it happen: a band bursts onto the radar riding a self-hyped wave, everyone talks about them, the buzz grows, the expectations inflate like a paddling pool in July… and then nothing happens. Weeks turn into months, months into years, and the only thing that lands in their lap is their own dinner when they spill it.

The brutal truth is that hype is a spark, not fuel. It gets people talking, sure. It gets bums on seats once or twice. It gives you a head start most bands would kill for. But hype cannot rehearse your songs. It cannot tighten your set. It cannot write the next single. It cannot drive the van at 2am after playing to twelve people and a dog in a town you’ll never visit again.

Only work does that.

The bands who survive the hype are the ones who treat it like a starting pistol, not a finish line. They read the praise, smile, then go straight back to the rehearsal room. They gig relentlessly. They improve. They learn. They graft. They understand that momentum is something you carry, not something you inherit.

Because the music world is littered with bands who thought the phone would ring and quietly forgot to keep dialling themselves.

The final lyric says it best, and I know cos I fuckin' wrote it ha ha: the publicity and stardom, it gives you thrills — but all those likes and followers won’t pay the bills. And that’s the part nobody puts in the press release. The applause fades, the comments slow, the next hot band appears, and suddenly the hype machine has moved on to its next victim.

The dream isn’t the dangerous bit. Every band needs the dream. The danger is mistaking encouragement for arrival. Thinking the journey is over when it’s barely begun. Believing the story people are telling about you before you’ve actually written it.

So by all means enjoy the praise. Bask in the buzz. Celebrate the good gigs and the packed rooms and the mornings when someone calls you a star.

Just don’t sit by the phone waiting for it to ring.

It won’t.

Not unless you keep making noise.

GIG - The Dry Retch / Spam Javelin / Grenades / MRI @ Swinging Arm, Birkenhead

 Sunday night in Birkenhead, and instead of doing something sensible like preparing for Monday, we pointed the car toward The Swinging Arm for a charity show in aid of the Clatterbridge Cancer Charity. Punk garage rock, shaved heads, packed room — the sort of wholesome community event your grandparents definitely didn’t imagine when they said “get involved locally.”

My band, Spam Javelin, played this event last year and were kindly invited back to fill the slot left by local heroes Sonic Assault, who have apparently imploded. Not completely, mind — two of them resurfaced long enough to jump onstage with a borrowed rhythm section and chug out a single song like a brief and touching punk rock séance.

After a gentle ninety-minute scenic tour of the North Wales coastline (translation: driving and talking nonsense), we arrived just in time to see Decibel finish sweating through their set. I’ve seen them five or six times, so I knew exactly what we’d missed — and besides, I’ll catch them at Curiad Pulse Festival soon, conveniently located near my sofa.

Next up were punk-psychedelic explorers MRI. They admitted to being under-rehearsed, which in our terms just means “rehearsed enough.” Their short, snappy songs were a blessing — proof that not every psychedelic band needs to wander off into a ten-minute jam and forget where they parked. Also, I remain deeply envious of Richie’s Gibson SG, which is frankly doing more for my guitar jealousy than any therapy session could.

Grenades followed and immediately triggered a debate among our camp. Two guitarists, slightly understated volume, and a vibe our Dave described as Pavement. A quick YouTube Music investigation the next day confirmed this was both accurate and complimentary. They may have played one song too many, but when it’s for charity you’re hardly going to wave them off mid-chorus. Their singer also took one for the team and had his greasy mop shaved off, raising £200 in the process. Venue meets barber shop: a winning formula.

Meanwhile, earlier that morning I’d been at home wrestling my battered Marshall amp into harmony with my Boss GT-6 pedal. It’s only taken me about ten years to achieve this technological breakthrough. Standing on stage, basking in the glorious sound of equipment actually cooperating, I couldn’t help wondering why I hadn’t done this sooner. Probably because I’m an idiot.

Spam Javelin did what Spam Javelin does. Loud, fast, job done. People seemed to enjoy it, which is always a relief.

The Dry Retch closed the night with their gloriously filthy, Stooges-tinged, cosmic garage punk chaos and dodgy guitar leads. Unfortunately, although desperately wanting to be their dogs, by this point we were an hour behind schedule and still had a long drive home. So we caught the first five excellent Stalingradient songs before quietly slipping out at 10pm like responsible adults and cursing the fact none of will be in bed before midnight.

All in all: loud music, shaved heads, a room full of people raising money for a good cause, and only mild hearing damage. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday night.

You're a cog in the machine

The employment contract never says “we own the best hours of your life.” It prefers softer language. Opportunity. Career pathway. Competitive salary. It feels less like surrender when it arrives in a branded folder.

The first day is full of optimism and ergonomic chairs. You sit up straight, open a fresh notebook, and imagine the future as a staircase. Promotions. Raises. Recognition. A version of yourself with sharper clothes and fewer worries.

You don’t realise you’ve stepped onto a treadmill until the view stops changing.

Work introduces itself as purpose, then gradually reveals itself as maintenance. Maintenance of rent. Maintenance of bills. Maintenance of a lifestyle calibrated precisely to require the next pay day. The machine hums gently, and you discover your job is not to build it, but to keep feeding it.

You become a cog, but a very professional cog. A cog with performance reviews and a branded mug.

The language shifts subtly. You are not tired; you are “experiencing pressure.” You are not unhappy; you are “seeking new challenges.” You are not trapped; you are “valuing stability.” Words rearrange themselves until exhaustion sounds like a personality trait.

Stress becomes background noise. A faint ringing that follows you home, sits beside you on the sofa, and climbs into bed with you. You wake up tired because even your dreams have deadlines.

There is a peculiar pride in being busy. The busier you are, the more important you must be. The calendar fills, the inbox swells, and somewhere in the chaos you begin to measure your worth in unread emails. You tell yourself this is temporary. A busy season. A demanding year. A short sprint.

The sprint quietly becomes a marathon with no finish line.

Your identity begins to merge with your role. “What do you do?” people ask, and you answer with your job title, as if it were your species. Hobbies shrink. Weekdays blur. Sundays develop a nervous twitch around 4pm. The office creeps into your vocabulary, then your thoughts, then your bloodstream.

You are told not to be bullied, not to be pressured, not to be manipulated. The posters say so. The training modules confirm it. The corporate intranet celebrates it in cheerful fonts. Yet the pressure arrives anyway, disguised as targets. The manipulation arrives disguised as incentives. The coercion arrives disguised as teamwork.

No one raises their voice. The deadlines do the shouting for them.

You promise yourself balance. Work-life balance. The phrase suggests a delicate set of scales, perfectly poised. In reality it’s more like a seesaw with a concrete block on one end and a weekend on the other. You cling to Friday evenings like a lifeboat. Two days of recovery before the tide pulls you back out.

Years pass in quarterly increments.

Retirement appears on the horizon like a distant coastline. Freedom waits there, you tell yourself. Rest. Travel. The hobbies you postponed. The friendships you rescheduled. The version of life you pencilled in for later.

Later becomes the most expensive promise you ever make.

Because the body keeps score. The late nights, the early alarms, the meals eaten in haste, the stress stored in muscle and bone. By the time the finish line arrives, you are exhausted from the race you barely remember entering.

You finally step off the treadmill and discover your knees hurt. Your back aches. Your energy has a bedtime. The world opens up just as your stamina begins to close down.

You have time now. Time in abundance. Time you once imagined like a golden field stretching forever. And yet time feels different when it arrives at the end rather than the middle. Slower. Heavier. A reward that tastes of soured irony.

You realise the machine never hated you. It didn’t even notice you. Machines don’t hate their cogs. They just replace them when the teeth wear down.

And still, the most rebellious thought creeps in: maybe the lie was not that work had value. Maybe the lie was that it deserved all of you.

You were told to smile. To stay positive. To not take the blame. To not believe the lies. Good advice, printed neatly and ignored efficiently.

Because the system never needed you to believe the lie.

It only needed you to keep showing up.