Fit or Fortune

Why Vocational Progression, Not Profit, Must Be Set Free to Define the Future of Work

A Preface Rooted in Story:

As a Geordie, I'm incredibly proud of my North-Eastern heritage. And the older I get, these cultural flavours intensify in my identity like a red wine being associated with the terroir of the domain it originated from. Similar to ‘Protected Designation of Origin’, those guarantees that we see on products that guarantee their entire production process, including processing and preparation, takes place in the specific region they are associated with, our origins are meaning-rich, they form our roots, and our roots strongly influence our identities and our attitudes as our characters crystallise, which forms the origination of this essay as the spectrum of permutations open to us as life pathways in seemingly unknowable futures. Futures, we are compelled to forge and fit ourselves into, or run the risk of having others doing it for us.

In that vein, the summer of 1980 in the North-East of England was a bleak one to come of age. Shipyard cranes began to congeal like the scars of a bygone era; they would soon become. What would solidify once prideful relics over the once great rivers of Tyne, Wear, and Tees had previously been icons of industrial greatness that defined the boiler room of the British Empire, constructing ocean-going giants that would transport Britain's economic lifeblood for ten generations.

Geordieland's coal mines, heavy industrial heartlands, shipyards and steelworks pulses slowed in the winding down of their bitter demise. And a boy of seventeen walked out of the school gates with little more than stubborn optimism to show for his upturned education.

He had been raised to believe that honest graft, coupled with a proud attitude, would earn a man his place in the world. Instead, he found himself stepping into an economy where that age-old truth was collapsing under the weight of what would turn out to be a naively pernicious ideology. Forty-five years on, and those scars still weep and resentment runs high.

Margaret Thatcher's monetarism had taken hold, crushing inflation but also crushing hope, faith, identity and, above all, the opportunity to assemble a meaningful life. Apprenticeships dried up, dole queues lengthened – pride-eroding queues I've stood in myself – and the once-proud industrial North was bludgeoned by 'South-centric' that appeared to transmit the signal that working-class communities were disposable and disrupting the middle-class would be short-term. For that young man – me – the next decade became a restless quest for purpose. I burned through thirty-five jobs by the age of thirty-two, a restless odyssey that might look like indecision, but in reality was a desperate attempt to locate meaning in a labour market that had abandoned any semblance of a compass to set one's life bearing-point by.

What saved me was one conversation. In the mid-1990s, unemployed once again, I sat with an 'adult career guidance practitioner' who told me that I, too, could excel in his field. For the first time in my life, someone helped me articulate the qualities, attributes and insights I carried within the vessel of my life and mirrored them back to me as my potential. From an ominous crisis emerged an enlightened epiphany. Consequently, as stated in innumerable examples of my writing elsewhere, I retrained, qualified as a career guidance professional in July 1997 and stepped into a life-affirming vocation rather than just any-old-job.

Not only did that pivot-point change everything about me and my prospects in life, but it also altered my state, almost on a cellular level. Knowing and owning my true vocation made sense of every peak and trough, error and breakthrough, loss and win my life had ever encountered. It made me. Truly, it did, and this is why I evangelise and commit to helping others make sense of their lives, too, as my version of paying it forward. My story isn't unique. It is emblematic of a generation thrown into turbulence by design, not accident. To understand why work feels precarious, why meaning is elusive, and why so many careers lack narrative arc, we need to revisit that history.

The Dividend Paid on A Personal Ledger of Upheaval:

Like Andrew O’Hagan, whose moving talk at the Nairn Book & Arts Festival reminded me that the richest stories require lived experience, I know I could not have written this essay any sooner in my life. To write about fit and fortune honestly, one must actually have lost—and found—both.

My own journey is a case study in vocational rootlessness and the hard-earned clarity that eventually follows. In my teens, my family was uprooted from the rural freedom of Corbridge in Northumberland to the alien geometry of Washington Newtown, Tyne and Wear. That shift was more than geographic; it was existential. Gone were the woods, rivers, and private schools of my GP father’s former life—replaced by concrete, a new accent to learn, and the chaos of a family breaking apart.

The years that followed were defined by fracture and loss. My parents’ divorce, my own misguided attempts to protect my adopted sisters, and estrangement from my home all dovetailed with a rapid freefall—one that saw me leave home at 15 to escape abuse, and then burn through 35 jobs by age 32. My father’s premature death gutted me. My first marriage, founded more on loneliness than love, ended as quickly and as painfully as the fashion business that followed, repossessed along with my sense of hope.

By the early 1990s, I had crashed into the bedrock of self-worth. I remember sitting in a Newcastle bedsit, my so-called oldest friend’s taunt—“How does it feel to be a bona fide failure, Duncan?”—echoing like a death sentence. All vitality flickered out, until the serendipity of holding my late grandfather’s ticking watch in my hand. That slow sweep of the second hand became a metaphor for the possibility of rising again—the mechanical promise that any descent, however deep, contains the momentum for a return to light.

It was in the absolute pit of that valley, in the midnight tick of inherited time, that I realised the very absence of purpose was the proof of its necessity. Surviving those years is what makes me a purpose coach today. I am a success only because I owned the failure, learned its lessons, and used its allegories as guideposts for others. The rest of this essay flows from that wellspring.

The Collapse of the Psychological Contract and Its Aftershocks:

For most of the twentieth century, within the weave of British working life and the households those livelihoods sustained, a social contract shaped the transaction of work and wages. For generations, sons followed their fathers down coalmines, shipyards, and factories, skills were proudly handed down as traditions, ritual, sweat and heartbeat of those communities whose identities were forged upon them. This wasn't just employment: it was pride, identity, belonging, continuity. These career ladders weren't merely metaphors – they were as real as the sheave wheels at the pit head, not just raising and lowering miners down shafts, but lifting whole families and communities upwards.

Thatcherism, guided by the cruel arithmetic of Chicago School economics, targeted this social architecture. Monetarist dogma valued inflation targets as far greater priorities than the dignity of labour and the knit of the communities that relied on it. Neighbourhoods built on generations of honest toil were allowed, almost encouraged, to decay if they were seen as ‘inefficient’. Forty years ago, the miners' strike ended not in heroic compromise but in an enforced defeat at the hands of State machinations.

Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation binge, the ‘Big Bang’ in the City, the hollowing of England’s industrial heart, the sales of once civic pride-instilling public assets – all these betrayals shredded invisible promises that the British people deserved to own our share in our nation’s prosperity. By 1984, Tyne & Wear's unemployment topped one in five. Sunderland, during my time on the dole queue, was upwards of 20%. The blast furnaces ran cold, the coal seams ground to a halt, the shipyards were mothballed, and with them, the brass bands’ beat of belonging went quiet.

Sociologist Huw Beynon nailed the heartbreak: mining villages were never simply economic nodes. They were pulsating cultures, steeped in irony and songs, paternal pride and maternal endurance. “To lose the pit was to lose the hinge of life,” Beynon writes, exposing the shallowness of those who framed resistance as reactionary. In taking up the steel thread, Gavin Mueller, an American, based at Maastricht University, reminds us that the Luddites weren’t opposed to the loom or the spindle per se. They fought the hollow progress that robbed communities of self-worth. With ‘Luddism’ as the rightful moral stance and only sanction they had available in the fight to defend their livelihoods: the refusal to quietly dissolve into the metrics of another’s pursuit of profit. Not as the inaccurate dominant trope that they simply hated technology and resisted it at all costs.

Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ shows these acts weren’t British eccentricities but a tested formula. Shock, confusion, and dislocation are fertile ground for privatisers. The North-East became a test-bed for neoliberal experiments – its people recast as data points in an economist’s notebook, as much as the suffering was seen as a regrettable price to pay for progress, ravaging those communities and consigning their occupations to history was necessary, collateral damage.

Whilst in the United States, Reagan’s union-busting, deregulation, and punitive tax policy left cities like Detroit gutted: Motor City disembowelled, neighbourhoods abandoned, and the promise to the American worker rescinded with bureaucratic precision. Clearly, the fate of once-proud industrial cities is neither just a local nor a British heartbreak nor a coincidence: it is a global warning signal, powerfully articulated by Jeremy Rifkin in ’The End of Work’. Rifkin charts how the automation revolution did not simply displace workers from jobs, but signalled the unravelling of entire urban and cultural fabrics in American heartlands - Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Flint among them. These were cities built on production lines and crafts, where neighbourhoods throbbed with pride and identity, and where “what you do” and “who you are” were inseparable.

Rifkin reveals how automation and the relentless pursuit of efficiency hollowed these cities from the inside out, leaving factories shuttered, main streets blighted, and generations stranded in cycles of alienation and irrelevance. Far from liberating workers, this wave of technological “progress” bred a permanent underclass and a collapse in the sense of purpose that work once instilled. He warns that retraining alone is a false promise when the jobs themselves are vanishing, and calls for a societal reckoning - not just with new forms of livelihood and the rise of the volunteer 'third sector', but with the very narrative that once tied work to dignity and belonging.

In this sense, the plight of Britain’s North-East finds resonance on the far side of the Atlantic; the industrial soul of America, too, has been battered by the winds of redundancy and the stock market’s doctrine that regards vocation as a dispensable and luxurious indulgence investors cannot afford. Rifkin’s vision is both sobering and clarifying: the end of mass, meaningful employment is not a footnote to history, but a defining challenge for civilisation. Will we allow cities - once symbols of collective endeavour - to be consigned to ruins and nostalgia, or will we reimagine new architectures of contribution that underpin The World of Work and value for the generations yet to come?

The unwritten psychological contract – stability in exchange for loyalty – disintegrated. Work shed its cloak of lineage and duty, donning the threadbare suit of transaction. This was not the evolution of work, but its dispossession.

In this vein, I find that ‘The Last Ship’ by Sting is no mere ballad; it’s a breathing artefact of the times my life touched, carrying the ache and beauty of the North-East’s fading shipbuilding era. Fellow Geordie, Sting’s melody draws us into the marrow of an old shipyard town, where identity wasn’t abstract but hammered out in the rhythm of steel against salt air.

In his melancholic, yet defiant song, the clatter of chains, the acrid smell of coke and the remnants of craft are neither romantic nor sentimental - they are the bones of belonging, now rendered ghostly memories of a Tyneside that once stood tall. Communities interconnected by a humbling heroism, the infamous dark humour borne of self-preservation and unyielding defiance towards the heartless.

The hero returns to his hometown, walking streets haunted by what once was, encountering not just personal ghosts but the collective memory of a community hollowed out by the myth of ‘progress.’ Sting’s lyric becomes a vessel for a collective grief, yes, but also a stubborn kind of pride - the knowledge that even as the shipyards stand empty, their imprint persists in the skin and soul of the proud region that they shaped.

The essence of which is distilled in his verse, here:

"The old man's breath is a shipyard gale,

The salt and steel on his face and hands.

The cranes are ghosts on the gray Tyne mist,

And the ghosts they are calling out to me."

These words do not lament only an industry: they mourn the dissolution of hard-won trades as the spinal column of heritage. The song reminds us that our roots are neither disposable nor purely economic. They are inherited stories - grit, rhythm, and dignity - passed from shipbuilder to child, woven into identity. In the end, “The Last Ship” becomes both an elegy and an anthem for resilience: for the refusal to forget what true vocation means. Even as the world shifts beneath our feet and progress peels again, we deserve to pay tribute to the nature of man responding to their innermost calling and the appreciation that good lives can only be build on meaningful foundations. It is our job to pay heed to history’s warnings, for fear of all dignity being lost.

The Real Human Cost of Profit-First Futility:

Just like in my native North-East of England, factories close with a headline and a handshake for the directors, but the aftershocks ripple for generations. There are mining villages in County Durham and Northumberland (and no doubt Yorkshire, Leicester and elsewhere too), where they are waiting for the work to come back four and five generations on from the pits closing.

The net effect of which is that we see the Right-Wing political party ‘Reform’ winning council Elections in the City of Durham. The home of the Durham Miners' Gala, having been held there annually since 1871, is organised by the Durham Miners' Association (DMA). A precursor to The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which itself was formed later in 1945, is widely celebrated across the world as a celebration of miners' solidarity and working-class life.

In my years as an outplacement consultant, I've sat across tables from hundreds of - engineers, technologists, marketeers, CEOs, chemists, and HR managers whose decades of craft and loyalty vanished into redundancy notices and P45s. Their grief was not a passing inconvenience, but a psychic wound that gnawed at their identity and sense of belonging. Dignity did not return to many. Too many communities never recovered.

This is not an anecdotal lament: it is a crisis mapped by rigorous scholarship. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, in their study of American and British working populations, reveal how the disintegration of stable work arrangements, especially for those without university degrees, propels communities into cycles that spiral beyond economics. Their phrase "deaths of despair" encompasses suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced diseases—not merely as tragic outcomes, but as barometers of hope draining from a population.

What is most significant is the link Case and Deaton draw between educational attainment, declining job quality, and rising midlife mortality. As vocational ecosystems collapse, those unable to find meaning and security in work report increasing pain, sickness, and biting loneliness - even before physical health fails. Rising rates of depression and self-harm accompany lost wages, the disintegration of family ties, and the slow abandonment of social anchor-points: working men’s clubs, union halls, places of worship, neighbourhood friendships.

In places once defined by proud trades, we now trace new patois of addiction, loss of the civility communities once relied on and the accompanying collapse of trust - whole districts limping through stagnation, heartbreak, and self-doubt.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s data supplements this picture. Their research shows that in the UK, health inequalities are now deeply entrenched, with millions facing destitution at least once a year. A January 2024 study by the Resolution Foundation found 30% of households in Scotland lacked enough savings for a month's income. Of the 26.1 million households in the UK, approximately 11 million households, representing about 42% of the total, have less than one month of income in savings to cover their cost of living. Emergency admissions and critical care occupancy surge in deprived areas, and the chance for dignified recovery shrinks as resources thin out.

Poverty is not simply a question of static income, but a throttle on health, resilience, and life expectancy. The spiral of hardship is self-perpetuating: poor health drives deeper poverty, which in turn hammers access to work and treatment, which, in turn, destabilises our communities and prospects of any of the downward cycle of the whirlpool abating. Ultimately, people and communities despair.

The gig economy’s digital sheen has been sold as liberation. But the only people to benefit are the top strata of society. Yet, for most, ‘flexibility’ means precarity - algorithmic piecework, zero-hour contracts, sporadic gigs, inability to consistently cover the rent and chronic instability across most of life’s departments. Security is not indulgence; it is the very soil from which pride, creativity, and ambition obtain nourishment. When stripped away via the malevolence of scarcity, human potential withers. This is the false economy of gearing education, economic policy and the welfare system to the needs of employers, not designing a socioeconomic framework that rewards maximised potential, shared prosperity and lives that point towards the greater likelihood of knowing what self-actualisation truly means for themselves.

The False Dichotomy: People versus Progress:

Those vested apologists for all this sell it to us as change in the name of progress. But that is a trick of deception, not of policy. Real progress is measured not by efficiency, but by the elevation of people, of communities, of culture, of prosperity. Not a profit at all costs kind of mentality. History’s balance sheet makes for clear reading. Time and time again, the Right and the elites try to buck the trendlines, but in the end, their house of cards falls back to reality. The common good, egalitarianism, cooperation and consensus serve humanity better.

Post-war Germany chose Mitbestimmung: worker representation on boards, a respect for the rhythm and insight of those whose calloused hands kept the engine running. Vocational training there is pride, not penalty – young people vie for apprenticeships, and skill is culture, not fallback. The result? Economic might, high productivity, but a dignity that resists the cold logic of 'cost optimisation'.

The Scandinavian ‘flexicurity’ model demonstrates a civilising third way. Businesses can pivot fast, but the social floor never fails to catch those people unfortunate enough to fall through the gaps. The institution of family remains a focal point of assistance. Retraining, robust safety nets, and a national consensus that workers should land with their dignity intact. The Danish do not pit entrepreneurship against humanity; they believe one validates and fertilises the other.

Japan’s keiretsu system, while far from perfect, carved a path where loyalty and skill were exchanged for genuine job security and identity. Lifetime employment wasn’t a dead end, but a crucible for excellence, tradition, profound pride and socialising success.

Ignore these proven blueprints, and the future is bleak. Naomi Klein’s notion of “end times fascism” is not a mere flourish, but a chilling diagnosis of our age. In her 2025 Guardian essay, co-authored with Astra Taylor, Klein details how today’s right-wing leaders and their billionaire allies have moved beyond opportunism. “They are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine, and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking, planning and seeking to profit off apocalypse”.

She argues that these elites are “actively betting against the future - not just betting against it, but fuelling the fires that are burning this world.” For Klein, the savagery lies in their purposeful abandonment: “To bet against the future on this scale - to bank on your bunker - is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world”.

Far from isolated dystopian fantasy, Klein names the very real trend of plutocrats and politicians laying plans for escape - be it luxury bunkers, walled cities, or private ‘seasteads’ - while letting ordinary people “fend for themselves amid escalating disasters.” Such “apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety” are, according to Klein, the ultimate act of cowardice and contempt: letting the Earth burn, so long as the wealthy endure.

Her call is not simply to alarm, but to galvanise: “Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet”.

The extrapolations are stark: if the ultra-wealthy and powerful continue to decouple themselves from social responsibility and seek to actively profit from chaos, the very foundations of trust, democracy, and any remaining possibility of shared flourishing come under threat. Without a decisive shift, the rest of society faces deepening inequality, ecological ruin, civic fragmentation, and a loss of hope among the majority.

Vocational Progression as the Bedrock of Civilisation:

Vocational progression is not a perk for high-net-worth households, high-flyers or a safety net for those who’ve lost their way. It is the deep seam running through any bona fide civilisation worth the name. Mastery - hard-earned, self-assured, bristling with conviction and quietly passed down - is what knits a place together. Please think of the joiner who takes a young apprentice under his wing. The nurse whose touch, calm at three in the morning, brings comfort you remember a lifetime later. The coder, completely lost in her full ‘flow’, but changing the world one silent improvement at a time. These people are the reason communities hold fast. They’re not ‘resources’ - they’re the living memory and beating heart of who we are together as humanity.

This isn’t just the sentimentality of civil service mandarins - OECD and ILO studies, alongside a raft of cost-benefit analyses, show that apprenticeships offer some of the highest returns on public investment available. In countries like Germany and Switzerland, firms frequently recoup their entire investment in an apprentice before the training period is even finished, thanks to higher productivity and reduced recruitment costs. For individuals, the figures are no less impressive: OECD research finds that completing an apprenticeship can boost future earnings by more than fifty per cent in key sectors, and even short stints dramatically improve job security and satisfaction rates.

But such tangible value flows far beyond economics. Where skill is fostered, local economies are more resilient to shocks, crime rates drop - sometimes dramatically, as seen in recent UK efforts to use apprenticeships among prison leavers to reduce reoffending - and social trust deepens. In these communities, technological - and the resultant societal change - is more readily absorbed, because the habit of passing on mastery is woven into everyday life, not bolted on as an afterthought or a vote-winner by politicians.

The basic point here is this: where apprenticeships are strong, communities don’t just benefit financially. People become more skilled, more self-assured, and more connected to one another. When these foundations are in place, in situ, there’s far less need for government quick fixes or flashy new schemes - because real, lasting strength is already woven into the fabric of daily life. To this end, my Work Aesthetics philosophy acts as a living seam within the Good Being canon, insisting our labour is an act of beauty – a message modern economic regimes forget at our peril. Vocational depth isn’t nostalgia; it’s a safeguarding mechanism against the fragmentation of meaning in an increasingly volatile world, desperately in need of solidarity.

• Communities Live as the Heart of Economic Wellbeing:

  Corporations do not hold the soul of a nation’s being. That responsibility falls to communities: bound by heritage, ritual, memory, and a communal striving, animated by aspiration, and healed through collective investment of respect, trust, care and honesty. When an industry falls, it is not merely payrolls or profits that vanish, but the intricate emotional wiring that holds a home together -the local shops and cafes, the afterschool clubs, the Saturday football kickabouts, and the building bonds of shared histories, relayed in common parlance, their meaning maturing and deepening echoes with every expression of them.

• The Real Infrastructure is Emotional and Cultural: It is a mistake to imagine that only buildings, services, or financial flows keep a community alive. A street without dignified work loses not just money but hope, self-respect, and civility. The shops where neighbours greet each other, the church halls where birthdays and wakes are marked, the green patches where children invent their games—these are the true organs of socio-economic health. When they shutter, the civic heart falters.

• The Map of Respect in Practice: That’s why the Good Being canon insists on a Map of Respect—a living model that radiates from one’s own sense of worth, through kin and neighbours, outward to community and, ultimately, the world and whatever higher source each person claims. When these ripples retract or break (as they did in pit villages after closures, in Scottish mill towns, in American Rust Belt cities), we lose not just connections but our anchoring sense of moral mapping.

• Ecosystems That Heal & Endure: Resurrection is possible, but not through capital alone. It requires the slow, attentive work of building intentional, place-based ecosystems. The Basque experiment of Mondragon is not just a utopian footnote but a living example: worker cooperatives that thrive in global markets yet fiercely defend the dignity of place, local memory, and reciprocal stewardship. Preston’s re-localised procurement—“community wealth building” in action—shows how devolving economic power, and reinvesting contracts in local hands, can revive not only markets but morale, solidarity, and belonging.

• From Abstraction to Human Texture: Community, at its best, is where a child can trace the arc of possibility by watching a neighbour repair an engine, where elders are known by name, not as statistics. It is the constellation of small acts—the loaned ladder, the team shirt passed down, the stories recalled in pubs and kitchens—that creates a sense of being “held” within something larger than oneself. Absent this, all economic “growth” is a rootless bloom, and all renewal an empty promise.

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To truly build back better – and let’s face it, we are still failing to do so - we must measure value in the currency of communities bonded: in nets of trust, density of stories, and the quiet pride of belonging, passed from hand to hand. Down through the generations, their light still burns within us today. It is our singular most compelling responsibility not to allow their light that resides in our hearts to extinguish. This really is the epitome of what love is.

The Moral Reframing: Profit as By-Product, Not Fixation-Point:

Profit, per se, is not the enemy. But neither is it the end of the process. A society judged solely on the Dow, FTSE or GDP scale is morally, as well as materially, devoid of purpose and rendered bankrupt by pointless consumption. And it set to get worse.

Naomi Klein’s “end-times fascism” is a final warning: when the wealthy build lifeboats and abandon the ship of collective responsibility, the project of civilisation is at risk. The only alternative is a rekindled logic of reciprocity. Workers are more than costs on a ledger. They are conductors of craft, culture, and cohesion, and our design principles must reflect this.

The Constitution of Humanity, core to Good Being, places meaning before margin. Work Aesthetics reframes labour as sacred, and The Meld is the ever-burning hearth – the locus where calling and contribution intertwine.

My own journey is both a warning and a witness. One career conversation illuminated a path from fragmentation to belonging. For thirty years, I have seen that spark flare in others, too – buried beneath bureaucracy, resurrected in dialogue.

Imagine if every citizen had the clarity of fit and the tools to seek purpose, if our economies were shaped to reward contribution over surplus. This would birth more than “efficiency.” It would yield fulfilled, resilient citizens living lives of mutual recognition. In the words of the canon: what else is civilisation for?

A Good Being Compass at the Crossroads:

Every client I’ve ever met - no matter their story or station - arrives at the same crossroad. The temptation, in work and in life, is always to scan the horizon ahead for signposts directing the way forward: something or someone to tell us where to turn next. But every answer worthy of the name is already within, buried in the proof of our past and waiting to become the architect of our future. I have never given anyone an answer they did not already have in their own head. All I do is facilitate clarity.

That’s the crux of this essay, and of every act of coaching or communal stewardship I know. Take stock. Honour the real victories and the honest bruises. Extract what matters from the sweep of your own life, and set a bearing-point for what success, fit, and purpose look like for you - and, by extension, for us all.

We are not meant to drift as individuals, as a species, as communities, as a civilisation. Progress is process: see, test, recalibrate, and move deliberately from error towards new solutions, never repeating what failed simply because it is familiar. Whether you stand at your own kitchen table, a boardroom, or the 'polis' of a battered post-industrial town, the keystone does not change. If Gut, Heart, and Mind turn together, we generate momentum, we build traction, move forward, and love. If they seize, or remain static, all progress halts. We react, rather than proact.

So, what do we do with nostalgia and noise swirling about our decision-making? First, we turn to each other. We ask: Who is drifting, struggling for meaning, in our midst? What skill, story, or belonging do I have that could anchor even one more life? From there, we move - in small, stubborn, focused acts of connection. Mentor an apprentice if you can. Stand firmer in defence of dignity, craft, equality, fairness and long-term contribution, even when the 'numbers' try to drown our shared aspirations out. Let your own Map of Respect stretch, ripple outward, and remake the fabric of your neighbourhood or team.

Refuse to measure worth by materiality alone. Stand guard at the borders of dignity - yours, your neighbours’, your community’s. Civilisation is not something handed down. It is stitched, stubbornly and beautifully, every day - by the hands that say 'enough' to drift and 'yes' to meaning.

Remember the maxim: If we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got. But if we dare—if we anchor the three cogs of Gut, Heart, and Mind, and choose to forge rather than float—then we, and the world around us, can become more than we ever believed possible.

The last ship has not sailed. Together, we build the next.

Conclusion: From Darkness to Light, Pits to Peaks, Despair to Delight – Anything is Possible:

As long as we strive for consensus, cooperation, compromise and convergence, there is must to remain optimistic about. If the collapse of industry, dignity, and belonging across Britain’s, Americas, Canada's, 'The West', 'The East's' towns and cities can be described in data or policy, their true meaning can only be understood through stories like mine - and those of countless others who languished unseen in the mincing machine of hopes and dreams. The dark decades I recount were not detours from my life’s calling, but the crucible in which they were forged.

As messenger, the message I carry - and offer here - is that every inner collapse and test of faith our lives encounter contains the hidden watermark of our future’s purpose. Our society must learn to spot, preserve, and nurture those moments: to count the cost of every lost trade, fractured family, or aimless worker, not just in numbers, but in generations of potential that might one day rally, resolve, and rebuild our broken society.

What saved me in the end was not quick advice, a CV rewrite, or some threadbare pep talk. It was the slow resurfacing of meaning - the recognition that the deepest valleys give us the richest vantage from which to help others climb. But the catalyst was that happenstance meeting with a compassionate human who directed his attention to helping me appreciate my Self. Had it not been for him, I might still be wandering in the wilderness.

We must craft, sculpt, create, hone, chivvy, chisel, germinate, sustain, nurture, make and build our World of Work a vessel for such resurgence; 'fit' before fortune, meaning before metrics, connection before scapegoating, abundance before scarcity. Each and every one of us possesses skills to gift full flight to.

If I have gleaned anything from my explorations through light and dark, it is that even the faintest ticking in the shadows that lie at the edges of life, when paid heed to, can fledge into the first lines at the beginning of a new song - one that any of us, at any age, at any stage, can learn to sing. And that we are all part of a huge chorus designed to sing or anthem in unison.

There is music, song, dance, towers and ships in each of us. Our responsibility in this life is to set them free.