At times, looking back on one’s life is a melancholy process. We tend to have a great fondness for the past – the children it brings and the achievements with which it surprises us – but those of us with a depressive nature still cling to guilt, anger and that ever-present feeling of under-achievement.

Such are visited upon us in dreams – those episodes so beloved of psychiatrists who remain forever convinced that diagnosis is cure. An early middle age spent talking to Freudian fantasists did little for me – except to morph into absolutely certainty my growing sense that, if there is one thing most psychiatrists need, it is a really good psychiatrist.

In my dreams these days, I have episodes in which people keep trying to tell me I’m being unreasonable. It’s an interesting word, that one: ‘unreasonable’ has come, over time, to mean little more than ‘out of step’. But if everyone else is hell-bent on stepping off the cliff, is my view that unreasonable?

I came to maturity as a father keen to promote the cause of women dissatisfied with a life consisting entirely of fawning all over men. But as fatherhood proceeded, what I uncovered was a wife with laughable double-standards, infinite demands, and motherhood values eased by gardeners, au pairs, cleaning ladies, lunches, and the purchase of occasional-table style magazines.

I found this an unreasonable apportionment of responsibilities. But when I put this forward as a thesis, I was amazed to find that the chattering circle I inhabited in those days thought me the unreasonable one. I was old-fashioned, a dinosaur – nay, a misogynist.

Of course – and there is no irony intended here at all – I do fully accept that I arrived on this Earth with anger in my soul. All avid reformers have this: every one of us thus cursed cannot help but point out those who are taking the piss…..and cannot resist the desire to tell the herd it is full of sh*t, while at the same time wanting to be an anonymous member of that same dumb-f**k herd.

The anger does not go away, and there is no form of catharsis that will vapourise it. In fact if anything, the reaction of passive acceptors makes it worse: “What are you doing messing about all day on that bloody computer?” “Why can’t you just accept life as it is and enjoy it?” “Why do you have this obsessive need to be a troublemaker all the time?”

Don’t mess about: accept, enjoy,  and stop being an obsessive. Observe all the ways the tribe has to make one feel bad about trying to do good.

Stepping outside the stockade is the most terrifying thing one can do. But staying inside while cannibalism is breaking out….well, that’s the most depraved thing anyone can do.

Earlier at The Slog: Gold, Varoufakis, and the triumph of Syriza reality over Greek myth