Talking Cure?

 On the drive home the other day I heard a report regarding the state of the current workforce, or perhaps more correctly the current shirk-force. It seems that many have not returned to work after lockdown. On hearing lockdown I paused for a moment. Oh yes, that brief period in 2020 when the government went mad and paid everybody to stay at home… except for those whose job it was to regularly come into contact with many strangers.

I remember the interminable online discussions about the situation and the crazy conspiracy world of anti-vaxxers and others who yearned to tell the world how elite cabals had planned it all down to the last detail. I think the ensuing fallout confirms, however, that it was way more cock-up than conspiracy. Anyway, back to the malingering workers, and I choose my words deliberately.

It is a long-established matter of record that if you keep on telling people the same thing, they will eventually, no matter how sceptic they were at the outset, come to give that thing some credence. Maybe it starts off with a grudging acceptance that rather than being actually untrue it maybe does have a kernel of veracity for some. Once embarked on the journey the confines of the rabbit hole become more comfortable and eventually, the ‘wisdom’ of crowds dictates that it is so.

For years now, the populations of developed countries have been berated for benefiting from the spoils of earlier generations and their now questionable morals. It is little wonder then, that being browbeaten for so long, those same populations become susceptible to accepting the blame for pretty much everything. To then be told that in bearing that burden it is likely they will suffer from poor mental health, it is little wonder that – hey presto – we are in a mental health pandemic.

A very large part of the reason – dare I say, excuse – for the new absences from the workplace appears to be because of ‘mental health’. I note that qualifying adjectives are no longer required. Today, to have mental health appears to mean the exact opposite. And across the country former workers are seizing the opportunity to sit on their arses and not be challenged because of their perilous mental state.

Oh, come on! Swinging the lead has never been so accepted, and now that it is becoming normalised it is hardly surprising that more and more are taking it up as the easy option, rather than getting off their fat backsides and doing their bit to rebuild the economy. Over 20 per cent of working-age Brits are economically inactive, neither in work nor looking for it. This is a national disgrace. Worse so because those jobs will end up being taken by incoming low-grade workers in the main.

If you can work from home, fine. And if you can afford to retire, fair play to you. But if, as I strongly suspect, a huge proportion are playing the system the burden falls once again on the backs of those of us for whom anything other than working is sheer luxury. I just submitted my tax return. What a kick in the teeth then, to recognise that most of what I pay will go towards the upkeep of so many human grazing stock.

What’s the cure for depression, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, morbid fascinations, portents of doom, unease about the future, fear of climate change, the upwards spiralling of the cost of living and all the things that people fret over? Talking about it? I don’t think so. It’s about time we stopped letting people talk themselves into illness and started prescribing some stiff-talkings-to and a good old-fashioned British kick up the arse!