I've snapped today and decided that I have too much crap in my life. To takes just too much effort to just get through the day. I am expending too much time dealing with idiots, stopping companies stealing off me, worrying if I could save 5p by switching my gas or water supplier. Its the grinding pathetic minutae of life that has finally got to me!

Gone are those big serious concepts that used to piss me off - I'm no longer concerned about starving children, I have no fears about global warming, I am de-sensitized by the daily death and carnage in I see in foreign climes on CNN. Democracy is an abstract concept that I no longer even recognise. We all lie, we all steal, and those that don't are stupid or lazy.

But these concepts are too big for me to feel angry about anymore, because its life's pathetic little nuances that have pushed me over the edge - the blinding, crushing, irritating minutae of 21st Century existence has finally turned me angry and selfish.

As Norman Mailer once put it in An American Dream - today 'I could feel all that is good in me going away, going away perhaps forever .... my courage, my wit, ambition and hope. Nothing but sickness and dung remained in the sack of my torso'

Now its only the sickness and dung that I am left with too - the crap of a generation that has sucked the lifeblood from me follows me from room to room. Intellectual detritus follows me at every turn. Society goads me. Sells me false hope, fills my time, emptiess my wallet, pisses on my shoes. I am judged not be myself but the crap around me, and its the crap around me that now overwhelms.

I want to teach my kids to grow up and be honest with themselves, be productive happy people - I say work hard, study. It will have its rewards. But I know this is wrong. High ideals are just baggage in todays society. What I should tell my teenage daughter - drop out of school, celebrate your ignorance, act like a vacant slut on some reality show and you'll never have a mortgage. Sell out, give up, and if you're lucky you'll never have to work again. Because the alternative is 20 years of hope, crap, and frustration and the system will get you in the end. I'm not yet 40 yet my values are old. I have failed to equip my children to succeed in the 21st Century.

Here endeth the first lesson ...