FunkLip

Golden handcuffs are the most expensive trap in the UK professional class. You take a £120K job. The salary feels life-changing for the first 6 months. Then the lifestyle catches up — the mortgage on the bigger house, the kids' private school fees, the car finance, the holiday cottage in Cornwall, the partner who's also stopped earning to look after the kids. The £120K, once a luxury, has become the minimum required to keep the life running. The job becomes impossible to leave because the entire structure of your life depends on it. You stop questioning whether you actually like it. You start measuring everything against the salary you'd be giving up. The lads who 'made it' in the City, in law, in tech management are the most trapped people in the country. Their version of freedom is being able to afford to retire by 55, after 25 years of work they couldn't escape from. The lads with no salary and no fixed costs have more genuine freedom at 27. What looks like the prize from the outside is actually the bait. The salary holds you in place better than any contract could.

London is the greatest city in the world but one thing it does lack is a good beach. If we're gonna have more days like this we should 1) clean up the water and 2) build a big beach in inner London accessible by tube. (NYC did this in the 1930s) How about along the shore here