Things that are not ideal but we must persevere:

One: it’s been cloudy in London for a long time.

Two: I am redundant – I am without job. This happened seven days ago, on a Tuesday, at about 4pm.

“Dan, do you have a minute?” said my boss.

“Sure!” I said in the slightly-forced cheeriness I feel compelled to put on throughout the first six-or-so months in any job.

And we stood up and walked into a meeting room and sat down, and she looked at me with a face that was at once humourless and embarrassed and also, I thought, slightly detached.

“Dan, there’s no easy way to tell you this.”

“Uh huh,” I said, completely uncomprehending and more concerned that I was about to be called out for something insane I’d Googled on a company computer. How long take man eat one whole pig.

“We’re had a bad summer, and I’m sorry to say we don’t have the budget to keep you.”

“Ohhh.”

My reaction to this, given what I was expecting, was initial relief. Phew, I thought, in a strange flash. I’m not in trouble. I’m just losing my job.

I left the office that evening feeling weightless. I called my dad and then my mum – my dad urging action and bombarding me with websites to try and recruitment agencies to reach out to, my mum saying “Oh fucking hell, lovey, I’m so sorry for you” – and I walked through Fitzrovia, down Oxford Street (my mum panicking down the handset that somebody would swoop my mobile phone from my hand), and through the blare of Soho. Everybody is always eating in restaurants in Central London. How many years I’d spent looking through the windows of those restaurants – and for three months, only three, I’d begun to acquire the financial means to enter my own restaurants, to sit down with the levity that wealth brings and scan the menu with a giddy hunger for meats and flavours rather than a gut-heavy fear of prices. Now, in the space of an hour, it had all receded before me: back on the wrong side of the glass.

It’s a funny feeling, losing your job and wandering through Mayfair. I’ve always remembered it as being the most expensive rent on a Monopoly board. I listened to my mum’s sympathetic tones through the phone, watching rich people step out of taxis and swish into members bars with top-hatted doormen pulling golden bars aside. Astronomical wealth. Incredible indifference. And here I am bewildered: all this life experience, all that travel, all those books read and jobs worked and articles written, all those friends and relationships and triumphs and disasters – all that time and work and strain, and I can’t even make a steady wage to pay rent.

I don’t think I’d mind so much if I was one of the friends in ‘Friends’. Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA – they were all in it together! A big turning watermill of friends going through breakups and sackings and job interviews – forever sprinting home and bursting into the living room with a breathless ‘I got the job!’ or ‘he kissed me!’ But today most of the people I know now are very much not broke, and they all have boyfriends or girlfriends or husbands or wives. My peers are getting richer and more successful as the years go by. I’m happy for them, of course – but with each passing year the increasing gap – in money, in love – serves to exaggerate my own failings.

Part of me wishes that writing wasn’t my thing. Sometimes I look at my engineer friends and I think – fucking hell. I wasn’t bad at maths in school; I was top of my class even, for a while at least. But I never knew you could get important, well-paid jobs in it. I never knew what was out there until it was too late – until I was years out of university. One student I used to teach, Angelo, lives in Rome and works as a costume designer for Netflix. His colleagues design props: monster heads and swords and things. When was that an option? Which turn-off in my youth did I miss where, if I’d only indicated left or right, I might have ended up there?

Friends getting sent to Paris and New York on business. Friends managing teams. Friends starting companies. Friends buying stocks and shares. Was this always the goal? Is this always what everybody wanted? And if it was, why did nobody say so? I never knew money was important to any of us – I never dreamt we’d all become career people. Only a few short years ago employment was just a means to an end – a way to keep the good times coming. And I seem to have blinked – travelled too long, perhaps, or job-hopped too much, or else shoved my head deep into a starry-eyed Beat-Gen sandpit and shut out the world – and everything has changed. Last time I paid any attention we were all in the playground together, dreaming and laughing and playing hide and seek. And now, having stayed hidden for two hours – giggling at my genius – I’ve emerged at last to find the playground is empty. I never heard the bell ring; I never saw everyone leave.

I’ve always been heavily swayed and influenced by films and books – it’s still true today. And when you’re young, all the books and films you consume say the same thing: don’t chase money. In every film, the bad guy is some suited money-man yelling into a 1980s aerial phone, some oily-haired exec cutting throats to please the board. Every film, every quote, it’s always the same: choose passion over money, experience over money, joy over money, family over money. To listen to the pervading media – as I have and do – you’d think money was the least important thing in the world. And not only that – but straight-up rotten. Money is the root of all evil – Jesus throwing the money lenders out of the temple. And all those quotes! Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Adam Sandler in Click, lying in the rain, shrieking and begging his family’s forgiveness – Ebeneezer Scrooge recoiling in horror at the chains and ledgers and lockboxes hanging from Jacob Marley’s spectre – the cowardly lion in Disney’s Robin Hood, sucking his thumb and scooping gold towards himself – and all those villains, thousands of them, who cling to the sides of cliffs and helicopter feet and reject the outstretched, forgiving hand of the hero to instead reach for the diamond that rests tantalisingly close on an outcrop, only to lose their grip and plummet screaming into fiery waters. You can’t take it with you when you die! people say. I’d give all the money in the world just to be young again for a day! Time is the most precious thing we have!

And so I tried to live that way. I thought – okay, these lessons all seem to be saying the same thing. I’m going to actually pay attention to this and action all this advice. And so I travelled and sought experiences rather than money – working all the while, naturally, but never seeking actively to up my station, merely to live – and I had a pretty nice time for a while, and I certainly have a lot of stories to tell – but now I live in London, where it seems money is the lifeblood.

The ache inside, I have realised, comes from the rift between the old me – the one who knew how to live freely – and the version of myself who now feels pressure to be responsible. I think often of Vietnam, where life is cheap and I could save large amounts of money teaching only a few hours a day, and I’d have so much time to write and so much inspiration for stories, and I could spend my evenings in a blur of neon lights and palm trees and adventures with colourful expats – but something in that vision makes my stomach lurch. After a near decade of careless roaming, I have lived in England for three years – long enough back home again to realise that it’s always a trade-off, everyway everywhere. I picture myself in some café in Hanoi, in some bar in Phnom Penh, some beach in Sri Lanka, looking at my phone and seeing another friend back home has gotten married and bought a house and had a second baby as their first child is starting kindergarten. I don’t have to imagine that ache; I know it well.

But then – dash it all! – is it any nobler to make a stand here? To dig in and roll up my sleeves and wade into the scrap of the rat race and fight for my own little plinth of esteem? To compete against the best and brightest of the world, the hordes that flock here, and try to heave myself into a position of means and recognition? That makes my stomach lurch too!

I’m trying to imagine a world between worlds – what that could look like. There must be something in the middle, something between being a late-stage capitalist cog with traded-in morals, and a dysfunctional economic runaway forced to the far side of the planet. I don’t want to be run out of town by the difficulty of it – but equally I refuse to mutate myself in order to thrive here. I’m trying to reevaluate my relationship with money, trying to understand how I might earn enough to allow myself a comfortable and free lifestyle without compromising on my values – the foremost of which is ‘do no harm’. I could work for a charity, maybe, or a company that provides a service that really helps people. If they paid me a good wage I could take big trips abroad sometimes, and keep that part of me – the Indiana Jones part that I treasure so dearly – nourished.

Maybe each month I could donate a little money to charity, and each month I could save a little money for a rainy day – easing this feeling in my belly, the heaviness, the dull weight pendulum swing of a future without security. And maybe, if I can find time to write around work, I could keep my dreams of being an author alive.

I think I can do it – I think I need to at least try it. Just a few short years ago I’d have been halfway to Vietnam already, bank balance hovering somewhere near zero without a care in the world – but the world is very different now than it was five years ago, and I am pretty different too. I never wanted to compromise on anything in my youth. Today, I accept that perhaps life can’t unfold on exactly the terms I first sought – and that a little compromise is sometimes necessary to keep going. It’s not an easy truce, however: like peace-talks between warring factions, there’s a tension in the air. The first step towards selling out everything you believe in, my brain warns, is selling a tiny piece of it.

That mindset, obviously, is not particularly conducive to progress – and so I am trying to talk myself around to the idea of compromise within specific parameters: mental red lines. Never working for anybody I believe causes society more harm than good, for example. Never advertising anything I don’t believe in. Never letting myself become a grey person. Never – never ever – giving up the author dream.

There’s a lot of unknowns on the horizon – and it’s going to take a lot of work to figure it all out. Time to get back to it.