We're Dying Sooner... of "Shit-Life Syndrome"

Isn't that just a topic that makes you want to laugh, cover your mouth in horror for laughing, and then cover your mouth just in general horror? Life expectancy has been rising for years and years and all of a sudden, not anymore. And researchers have, believe it or not, put this down to "shit-life syndrome". That phrase is the actual name. I didn't make that up. (I wish I had.)

Peripherally, I knew this sort of thing WAS a thing in the UK and in the USA, even before I moved to England. We have ever-growing masses of people for whom the reality of their working lives is minimum wage, long hours, decades of debt and daily job insecurity. The Guardian blames this on poorly-educated people, but I'm in this situation and consider myself not to be completely ignorant, and I really don't think I'm a unique case. I'll be honest, I meet a lot of these people doing cleaning work (many seem to have quirky personalities that turn interviewers off, or they are smart people, but lacking the skills that would gain them work in other industries). But in kitchen work it is a mixed bag, there are some very clever, well-educated people who have landed in the gruelling work of a kitchen simply because they can't get work elsewhere. Surely, they can't all be terrible at interview. Surely it's a reflection of the reality, that it's not so easy to get regular, reliable work in the industry you're after.

So many of us are just working a gruelling, low-paid, low-skill job, with poor progression prospects and poor job security, and are reduced to feeling grateful for being a slave, just because it means the rent gets paid this month.

Well, it's correlated with poor health, to diet-related and lifestyle-related conditions which would be largely preventable with enough "education". Or is it? As I have spelled out recently, when you're tired you stop listening to the things you know and you start doing what's convenient. You eat a takeaway pastry and call that dinner, instead of the meat and three veg that you know is much better for your health, and you do it because dang it, you're tired and you've lost the will to care.

We are increasingly being treated for depression not because of major life events slapping us in the face, but merely thanks to the drudgery of our shit lives. We up the medication, or we self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Dependence on drugs is rising, as are overdose numbers, not just in the drug capital of the world but here in the UK too. We're not becoming more stupid about drugs though, because we've never been more educated about their dangers. We're simply growing in numbers, we of the Shit-Life Brigade, and we search for the easiest escape because we are just too tired to figure out a better way to solve it.

It's mesmerising, until you're actually stuck in it.

For the past year I've oscillated between "not enough work" and "too much work", a Newton's Cradle of job insecurity. When you're low on income you worry about money and you spend so much time and effort trying to find work; and when you actually find it, you're almost blind with fatigue and you hate what you are doing, but you're still trying to catch up from the past few months, while also conscious that you need to try to save for a future where you again, won't have enough work, and it is a cycle that repeats. For most of that time I've survived just by thinking that it's not permanent, that the exhaustion will pass, that soon I'll have permanent work in an industry that I enjoy. What must it be like for people who can't even see a light at the end of the tunnel? What would I turn to if I thought there was no escape from shit-life?

Don't get me wrong. I am very fortunate. I am healthy and have enough to eat, a roof over my head. Most of the time I am content. But I try to get my head around a world where fully half of us are treading water for our whole lives. It makes me want to rebel. It's my eyes trying to claw their way out of my head, yelling out "NO!" (Let's pretend that eyeballs have a way to yell.)

I reject your assertion, World, that I have to live my whole life in a blur where the aim of the game is just to survive. I want more than survival. I want to have part of my life to myself, and dang it I'm going to do what I can to make that happen, even if it means giving up takeaway food and living on omelettes, fruit and sandwiches.