Originally published by LJ Pearce-Coca at ljpearcecoca.com. 9th May 2026

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not look dramatic from the outside.

It is the exhaustion of opening another brown envelope. The exhaustion of logging into another portal. The exhaustion of explaining, again, that you are still disabled, still anxious, still autistic, still ADHD, still ill, still not magically transformed into a perfectly productive citizen because a form asked you to account for yourself in boxes. It is the exhaustion of being poor enough to need help, but not trusted enough to receive it without suspicion.

The Finnish UBI Experiment and the Question Beneath It

This is where David Beck’s discussion of the Finnish Universal Basic Income experiment becomes interesting. Not because the Finnish trial gave us a perfect answer. It didn’t. The experiment gave 2,000 unemployed people €560 per month, unconditionally, between 2017 and 2018. It did not dramatically increase employment, which is often the headline critics reach for first. But it did appear to improve things that are harder to reduce to a political slogan: stress, confidence, mental health, trust, stability, and the ability to plan.

Because in the UK, from 1997 to 2026, we have run a very different experiment.

Mental Health Decline in Britain From 1997 to 2026

We have tested what happens when work becomes less secure, benefits become more conditional, housing becomes more expensive, poverty deepens, and more people are asked to hold themselves together inside systems built around proof, pressure, and performance. And the answer, increasingly, seems to be: people get sick.

The Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey series shows that common mental health conditions in adults aged 16 to 64 rose from 17.6% in 2007 and 18.9% in 2014 to 22.6% in 2023/24. Among 16 to 24-year-olds, prevalence rose from 17.5% in 2007 to 25.8% in 2023/24. (NHS England Digital)

The longer comparison is just as uncomfortable. The King’s Fund notes that between 1993 and 2014, common mental disorders increased from 15.5% to 18.9%, driven particularly by increases in anxiety and depression. (The King’s Fund)

So the story is not simply “people are weaker now.” That is the lazy interpretation. The more serious interpretation is that the conditions have changed.

Why Work No Longer Feels Like Safety

Work has not disappeared. In many ways, it has expanded. But work has stopped functioning as a reliable route to security for millions of people. Joseph Rowntree Foundation data shows the number of workers living in poverty increased from 2.5 million in 2000/01 to 3.8 million in 2023/24. (Joseph Rowntree Foundation)

That figure matters because it breaks one of the central myths of the modern British welfare imagination: that paid work equals safety.

For many people, it doesn’t.

• You can work and still be poor.

• You can work and still be one rent rise away from panic.

• You can work and still be too exhausted to cook, too overwhelmed to apply for better jobs, too ashamed to admit how close to the edge you are.

And for disabled people, chronically ill people, neurodivergent people, and people with mental health conditions, the situation becomes even more complicated.

Disability Benefits and the Psychology of Conditional Welfare

The conditional welfare system does not simply ask: “What support do you need?”

It often asks:

“Can you prove you deserve support?”
“Can you prove it in the correct format?”
“Can you prove it repeatedly?”
“Can you prove it while unwell?”
“Can you prove it without sounding too capable or too incapable?”

That is not neutral administration. That is a psychological environment.

Why Financial Security Affects the Nervous System

Beck’s discussion of the Finnish experiment matters here because the Finnish trial removed some of that conditional pressure. Participants did not have to constantly prove they were looking for work, and the payment was not withdrawn if they took small amounts of work. The point was partly to test whether a simpler and less stressful form of social security might support people better than a bureaucratic, conditional one.

This is where the idea of “echo-effects” becomes powerful. If someone has a secure income floor, the effect may not stop at their bank account. It may echo outward into sleep, food, cognition, relationships, confidence, and the ability to make decisions. That sounds almost too simple. But anyone who has lived with financial anxiety knows it is not simple at all.

• Money is not just money when you do not have enough of it.

• Money becomes nervous system regulation.

• Money becomes executive function.

• Money becomes the ability to answer an email without your chest tightening.

• Money becomes the difference between thinking about your future and surviving your afternoon.

Neurodivergent Burnout and the “Canaries in the Coal Mine”

This is where psychologist Lindsay Mackereth’s “canaries in the coal mine” idea becomes especially useful. Mackereth argues that neurodivergent employees are not fragile; they are often early indicators of dysfunction. The workplace may be built around back to back meetings, rigid schedules, sensory overload, unclear communication, and constant availability, and neurodivergent people may feel the damage first, not because they are weaker, but because their systems register the dysfunction earlier. (lindseymackereth.substack.com)

That metaphor changes something.

Because if neurodivergent people are the canaries, then their distress is not just an individual support issue. It is information.

The canary does not die because it lacks resilience.
The canary dies because there is poison in the air.

And this is where many workplaces, welfare systems, and political debates still get it backwards. They look at the person who collapses first and ask: “What is wrong with you?” When the better question might be: “What are you detecting before everyone else?”

• The ADHD employee who cannot tolerate chaotic systems.

• The autistic employee who burns out under vague expectations.

• The depressed worker who cannot keep performing enthusiasm under insecure conditions.

• The disabled person who cannot survive a benefits process built around suspicion.

• The low-paid worker who is technically “employed” but functionally trapped.

• These people are not outside the story of Britain’s future. They may be the early chapters. Because the pressure is spreading.

What Happens When Systems Extract More Energy Than They Return

The UK’s 2025 sickness absence figures show 148.8 million working days were lost to sickness or injury, 9.8 million more than in 2019. (Office for National Statistics) The government’s 2026 Keep Britain Working review described a “quiet but urgent crisis,” noting that over one in five working-age adults are out of the workforce, substantially because of health problems, while disabled people remain locked out of work at twice the rate of non-disabled people. (GOV.UK)

So perhaps the issue is not that too many people have become dependent. Perhaps the issue is that too many people have been asked to function inside systems that extract more energy than they return. And here is the contradiction I keep coming back to.

The UK is now moving toward stronger employment protections. The Employment Rights Bill/Act reforms include measures around exploitative zero-hours contracts, fire and rehire, day one rights, sick pay, unfair dismissal, bereavement leave, and other protections. (Acas)

That matters. It is not nothing. But it also reveals the scale of what went wrong. If, in 2026, we are trying to repair basic security at work, then the question is not only what new rights are coming. The question is what people have been living without.

• Reasonable notice of shifts.

• Security against sudden dismissal.

• Sick pay that does not punish illness.

• Protection from being rehired on worse terms.

• A basic sense that your life is not completely disposable.

These are not luxuries. They are the minimum conditions under which a person can begin to plan. And planning matters. Planning is not just a productivity skill. Planning is a mental health resource.

Why Planning Is a Mental Health Resource

People cannot build lives when everything is provisional. They cannot regulate their nervous systems around “maybe.” They cannot heal while being constantly reassessed. They cannot take creative risks, care risks, educational risks, or work risks if one mistake means falling through the floor. This is why UBI remains such a morally irritating idea. Not because it answers everything. It doesn’t. A basic income would not automatically solve housing, ableism, workplace discrimination, NHS waiting lists, poor management, social isolation, or the deep cultural suspicion aimed at people who cannot work full time.But it does challenge one of the most exhausting assumptions in the current system: that people must be pressured into usefulness before they are allowed to feel safe.

What If Security Came Before Productivity?

Beck’s reading of the Finnish trial suggests something more humane and, frankly, more psychologically literate: security may come first. Functioning may come after.

That is the reversal.

Not: prove you are productive, then we may let you survive.
But: survive first, then let us see what becomes possible.

For neurodivergent people, that distinction is enormous.

• ADHD is not helped by constant panic.

• Autism is not helped by sensory and bureaucratic overload.

• Chronic illness is not helped by suspicion.

• Depression is not helped by poverty.

• Anxiety is not helped by conditional survival.

And yet so much of the British system seems to operate as if pressure is motivational. Sometimes pressure does motivate. But sometimes pressure disables. Sometimes it does not push people into work. It pushes them into shutdown, burnout, relapse, avoidance, or despair. It makes them smaller. Less imaginative. Less able to take the very steps the system claims to want from them. That is the hidden cost. A welfare system built around proving need may save money in one column while creating damage in another: poorer mental health, reduced trust, administrative overwhelm, crisis reliance, family strain, and a population increasingly too exhausted to participate fully in civic or working life.

This is not only about people out of work. It is also about people just about surviving in work.

• The person who looks fine because they still reply to emails.

• The person who still pays rent but has no margin.

• The person who earns too much to be helped and too little to be safe.

• The person who keeps going because stopping would be financially impossible.

They are not thriving. They are maintaining the appearance of functioning.

And this is where the canary metaphor becomes less comforting. Because if neurodivergent people are dropping first, that does not mean everyone else is fine. It may mean everyone else has a slightly longer fuse. The same workplaces that overwhelm ADHD and autistic people often drain everyone eventually: unclear expectations, impossible workloads, insecure contracts, surveillance, low autonomy, poor rest, and the constant demand to be cheerful about it. Neurodivergent people may simply reach the point of visible distress sooner. That should make us listen, not dismiss them.

A humane society would treat these early signals as design feedback.

It would ask:

• What if benefits were less humiliating?

• What if work was less brittle?

• What if support was not framed as special treatment?

• What if security was considered part of public health?

• What if the people struggling first were not the problem, but the warning?

What Happens to Human Beings When Survival Becomes Less Frightening?

The Finnish experiment did not prove that UBI is a magic answer. But it did something more useful. It gave us evidence that reducing financial fear can improve people’s wellbeing, confidence, trust, and stability, even when employment outcomes are mixed.

That should matter more than it currently does. Because employment is not the only measure of a life.

• A person who sleeps better matters.

• A person who feels less ashamed matters.

• A person who can plan next month matters.

• A person who is not constantly forced to perform desperation to survive matters.

Maybe the question is not whether we can afford to make survival less frightening. Maybe the question is how long we can afford not to.

To be continued.

References

Beck, D. (2023). Experimenting with unconditional basic income: Lessons from the Finnish BI experiment 2017–2018, by Olli Kangas, Signe Jauhiainen, Miska Simanainen and Minna Ylikännö. 2021. ISBN: 978-1-83910-484-8. Social Policy & Administration, 57(3), 456–457. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12839

Department for Business and Trade. (2024, October 10). What does the Employment Rights Bill mean for you? GOV.UK.

Digital NHS. (2025). Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey: Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing, England, 2023/24.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation. (2026). Work and poverty.

Mackereth, L. (2025). Neurodivergent employees aren’t fragile — they’re the canaries in the coal mine. Substack.

Office for National Statistics. (2026). Sickness absence in the UK labour market: 2025.

UK Government. (2026). Keep Britain Working: Final report.

Some quick housekeeping and orientation: I started this substack and originally wrote more overtly about topics of the pressures of modern life, especially for neurodivergents, but also for everyone, how our economic policy choices, or rather the decisions impressed upon us, impact us as humans, and not always for the better. I will still touch on these topics, as I’m immensely curious about UBI, for example, but I am writing fiction, so you will see more of that type of content too, but just know the former ideas do still inform my work. So there you go, hopefully that explains things a little better. I look forward to writing on here more.

When people start thinking about writing a book, one of the most practical questions turns out to be surprisingly simple:

Where would this book actually sit in the world?

Quite literally, where might readers encounter it?

One way to explore this is through something the publishing world calls comp titles. I’ve never particularly liked that phrase because it suggests competition, as if books are somehow trying to defeat each other in a Battle Royale-style showdown. Modern Economic Policy gets into everything I find, and it can be exhausting sometimes when you want to make something.

In reality, it’s closer to finding your book’s neighbours, books that live in the same general space as the one you’re trying to write. These other books might share a genre, similar themes, or overlapping subject matter. The goal isn’t imitation, it’s orientation. Understanding the landscape your idea might eventually enter.

Step 1. Books Adjacent To Yours

A simple place to begin is with books published fairly recently, usually within the last one to five years. If you want to be stricter with yourself, you could narrow that to the last three years.

Then pick one book that feels adjacent to the one you’re imagining.

Look it up on Amazon, Goodreads, or your library catalogue. If you scroll down far enough, most platforms quietly reveal something useful: the section “Customers also bought”, showing what other readers bought alongside that book. What you’re seeing there is essentially a small map of that book’s neighbourhood. From there you can preview the first few pages and ask yourself:

Does this feel like the kind of space my book might live in?

If the answer is yes, add it to a list.

Over time, that list becomes something like a reading map for your project.

Step 2. Books With The Same Flavour As Yours

But there’s another category of books that can be just as useful. These aren’t necessarily adjacent books. They’re what I think of as flavour books. These are the books that shape the feel of your writing rather than the exact genre.

For example, you might find a book tackling a similar theme but for a different audience. Or a book that explains something complex in a way that suddenly makes the whole subject clearer. Sometimes the influence is stylistic rather than conceptual. You might admire how an author structures a story. Or how they simplify difficult ideas. Or how they hold attention across chapters.

These books become part of the creative ecosystem that feeds your work. The process for finding them is similar.

Start with one book that captures the flavour you’re drawn to. Look it up, scroll through the recommendations, preview the opening pages, and ask yourself:

Does this book help me think about how I want to write?

If the answer is yes, add it to the list.

Step 3. Reading!

Eventually, you’ll have two reading lists. One list of adjacent books: the neighbourhood your book might live in. And another list of flavour books: the influences shaping how you want your work to feel and the themes you like to explore.

At that point, something interesting becomes possible. You can turn those lists into a reading practice. For example, you might decide to read one book per month for a year, using a mixture from both lists. Twelve books that gradually sharpen your sense of the territory your book belongs to.

And it’s worth saying something important here. You don’t have to finish every book you start to read. If a book stops being interesting, that’s information. You’ve learned something about what draws you in, and what doesn’t. You can simply move on, to another one on the list.

I should say that this is something I’m experimenting with at the moment.

It’s still early days for me. I’m curious to see what patterns emerge after doing this for a while. My plan is to come back and write another piece once I’ve lived with the process a little longer and can see what it actually changes in my own writing.

So for now, think of this less as advice and more as a small working experiment.

Where did this idea come from?

The idea itself isn’t originally mine. I first came across this approach through Gabriela Pereira, who runs DIYMFA. Her book and podcast explore the idea that you can build something very close to a creative writing MFA (or in the UK, a creative master’s degree) without necessarily enrolling in an institution. Instead of paying for a formal programme, you build your own learning ecosystem through reading, writing, and engaging with creative work.

For some people, the community aspect of a formal programme is the real value. For others, the structure. For me personally, the autonomy matters more. As someone who is autistic and ADHD, the ability to study asynchronously and in environments that work for my sensory system makes a huge difference to the quality of my thinking.

Home works well.
Libraries work well.
Quiet hotel bars sometimes work surprisingly well.

Places where I can concentrate without constantly adjusting myself to the environment.

To be honest, I’ve rarely had a particularly good experience in traditional work or education spaces. The marketing around support for neurodivergent people often sounds much stronger than the reality I’ve encountered. I’m sure that isn’t true everywhere. And things have improved so much, with awareness rising year by year. But it’s not perfect, and there’s still work to be done there.

In the environments I’ve personally experienced, I’ve often found that I simply work better alone. Or I work better with body doubling, where I engage in a kind of parallel play in my work, with someone else there doing something separate to me. But library quiet study areas and quiet hotel bars can give me this.

If you’re different to me, DIYMFA does (or at least did) offer options to interact live with the founder and other writers if you enjoy learning in a group. If that kind of real-time community energises you, it might be worth exploring those options, or whether they are still available.

But the core idea doesn’t require any of that. You can quietly build your own creative education in whatever spaces allow you to think most clearly.

Which makes me curious about something. If you write, or if you’re trying to write, where do you actually work best? Inside institutions and structured programmes? Or in quieter, self directed spaces where you can think at your own pace? I suspect the answer varies more than we’re usually led to believe.

to be continued…

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Lying in the 1980s Italian Riviera, Call Me By Your Name tells the story of 17-year-old Elio Perlman over one sultry summer that transforms his life. Elio's intellectually oriented, sophisticated family takes in an American graduate student named Oliver, a young man in his mid-20s, to help Elio's father with research. A quiet, gradually developing attraction between Elio and Oliver is kindled over the course of the summer and forms a fiery, fleeting love affair.

The novel is told in Elio's reflective, passion-filled voice, sweeping through the steam of their illicit summer with each other and barely attending to the following years, during which the memory of all that remains shapes Elio's understanding of love, loss, and what he is.

Read more

Renowned for dissolving fact from fiction, Carrère is a French writer whose books often explore the tenuous boundaries of imagination and reality, with special reference to psychological fragmentation. Class Trip is simple enough in premise, being about a small boy on a school skiing trip, but it soon becomes a heart-stopping portrait of childhood fear and isolation.

The protagonist, Nicolas, is a twelve-year-old boy whose head already bears a burden of anxiety, much of which he has picked up from his overprotective, paranoid father. The father fills the head of Nicolas with horror stories and danger lurking in every alley, and this fear gets anchored in the head of Nicolas until his imagination gets blurred with realism. One of the most affecting elements of the story is how Carrère doesn’t commit to the reality of the situation until late in the narrative.

The Alpine winter landscape is more than a setting, it's a metaphorical one of the emotional coldness and frailty of the protagonist. The whiteness of the landscape, the isolating chill, and the deadly beauty of the mountains mirror Nicolas's state of mind. It is as if nature and his fear have conspired together to tease the reader more. This ice landscape is not only pretty to behold, but also psychologically suggestive.

As a reader, you’re pulled into Nicolas’s distorted worldview, which reminded me of how people living under systemic precarity, particularly in today’s UK, are often forced to perceive the world as threatening, unstable, and unforgiving. Like Nicolas, such individuals lead lives in states of hyper-vigilance, internal anxiety, and perpetual fear that something might at any moment go extremely wrong. Unstable shelter, unstable income, and isolation create a basis of fear that conditions how the world is experienced. Carrère's description of a scared, isolated child is a grim metaphor for what it means to be vulnerable in a world that offers so little safety net.

Carrère doesn't offer closure or reassurance. Class Trip left me with questions and a residual sense of emotional chill. But there lies the power of the novella: it involves one in the inner world of fear and helplessness so that one can experience an enormous sympathy with all those individuals who live in ambiguity day in and day out. Carrère's work teaches us that vulnerability is not a question of fault of character but often the consequence of situations wherein one ends up.

If you like the free writing, please consider becoming a paid member…

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How One Vote Can Change Everything — The Secret to Power, Equity, and Freedom

What if everything you had ever been told about capitalism and democracy had been only one interpretation of reality? What if, in another now, the rules had been reimagined—not by revolution, but revelation? In Another Now, Yanis Varoufakis dares to do the unthinkable: to show us a world where power is shared, freedom is not for sale, and equity is not something spoken of in hushed tones.

But there is the question that hangs on every page: Why do we never get there?

Read more

In the shadow of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, his story tells us that purpose can turn suffering into strength. Frankl's time in Auschwitz convinced him that individuals who found meaning in their suffering were most likely to survive. This view is comforting, but it has the unintended effect of placing the burden of trauma on the individual, with a perception that their ability to find meaning is what makes them resilient, their ability to choose how to respond in the face of difficulty and horror giving them a strength no one can take away. But this interpretation must be critically judged. Trauma, especially of the sort which has happened during the Holocaust, tends to leave scars that can hinder development rather than promote it.

Read more

I am writing to you to express my concern over the government's proposal to give DWP investigators the right to access and scrutinise the bank accounts of those who claim benefits, including those who have disabilities.

I am one of over 25,000 Organise members who have signed a petition to put an end to this policy. You can see the petition here: https://the.organise.network/campaigns/network-prevent-the-dwp-scrutinising-disabled-people-s-bank-accounts-83484c04f5c4a649

The proposed policy is disproportionate and unnecessarily overreaching. The Government says there will be 'safeguarding measures' but no details about what these are, and it's a slippery slope - once these powers are granted, there's no going back.

How people spend their money is a private matter that shouldn’t need justifying to anyone. The Government mustn’t move forward with this plan to protect all benefit claimants' dignity and privacy.

Now the Bill is entering the Report stage, please will you make sure that these dangerous plans are removed from the Bill, and safeguards put in place, to protect sick and disabled people from this scrutiny?

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kind regards,

LJ

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Let your eyes rest here.

There is a book — a quietly powerful one — by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. It is not shouty, no, but it doesn't need to be. Because if you've ever felt it — that insidious grasp of power consolidating, reshaping lives, turning you in a vice, warping democracy — then this book won't surprise you. It will validate what you always knew deep down.

I felt it myself in secondary school… maybe you did too. That moment when something didn't feel right. When the world around you began to whisper that the story you were told… wasn't the complete truth.

It's 2024 now. The budget says one thing. The increasing anger says another. And behind both of them? Quiet hands. Invisible patrons. Those who fund the think tanks, spin the headlines, and make policy without transparency.

The photos below? They're from a chapter that speaks plainly.

Not with rage, but with honesty.

Not with drama, but with fact.

If something stirs within you — a curiosity, a gentle tug — pursue it. The sources are listed below. Let them speak. Let them ripple through you.

And if the time is right, subscribe. Or don't. No pressure.

Just follow what feels right for you.

Have a beautiful day.

• “The men who sold the war”, 18 May 2004, UK Channel 4.

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Edward Bernays”, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Bernays.

• Tobacco Control, “Tobacco industry quotes on marketing to kids”, https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/10/1/e8.

• Big Tobacco funded 1980s think tanks: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/psny0120.

• “Myths and Facts about Koch Industries”, Koch Industries website.

• “Charles Koch and the Kochtopus”, SourceWatch.

• “Charles Koch's Biography”, Koch Industries website.

• Robert Draper, “Covert operations”, The New Yorker, 30 August 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations.

• Bill McKibben, “The Koch Brothers’ grim environmental legacy”, Yale Environment 360, 6 March 2016.

• “My life’s work has been to advance liberty”, Charles Koch, 2016, https://www.charleskochfoundation.org/news/my-lifes-work-has-been-to-advance-liberty.

• “The Koch brothers' political machine”, The Washington Post, 2014.

• “Top 10 recipients of Koch Industries campaign contributions”, OpenSecrets.org.

• “Charles Koch’s political networks”, Center for Responsive Politics.

• “Charles Koch’s biography”, Koch Industries website.

• “Kochland: The secret history of Koch Industries and corporate power in America”, Christopher Leonard (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

• Jane Mayer, “Dark money”, Doubleday, 2016.

• “The Heritage Foundation’s climate change denial”, DeSmog, https://www.desmogblog.com

• .

• Michael Gerson, “The conservative mind”, Washington Post, 27 April 2007.

• “Heartland Institute: About”, https://www.heartland.org/about-us/index.html.

• “Conservatives and climate change”, Yale Climate Connections.

• Lily Geismer, “What does the left get wrong about the right?”, The Washington Post, 2021.

• “The Data Challenge”, eds. Tom Cronin and Marc Hetherington, 2019.

• “The Heritage Foundation: Political influence”, InfluenceWatch.

• Lily Geismer, “Democrats and Neoliberalism”, Vox, 11 June 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/11/18660204/democrats-neoliberalism.

• Robert Draper, “Covert operations”, The New Yorker, 30 August 2010.

Best,

LJ

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Become a paid subscriber for £5/month and unlock exclusive essays, how-tos, toolkits, and intimate reflections to support your creative and neurodivergent self in a demanding world.

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