Lookleft wrote:
"As you say you are a non-pilot and occasional passenger so please tell us what is wonderful about your occupation and how we can access it."
I'm retired! But my whole career history is too complicated to describe here and wouldn't illuminate much. However I can say that I've had to survive the loss of a business (courtesy of an idiotic bank) in 1988 that cost me 7 years of almost unrewarded toil and left me with about £100k of personal debt and innumerable other scars - at the age of about 40. I came very close to suicide, not helped by my intake of alcohol at the time.
I clawed my way out of this via a crappy job, starting as a part time employee doing poorly paid night work using computing skills acquired informally over the years, and ended up with a share option in the company which eventually bailed me out of the mire. Thereafter I ended up with the company taken over by a major media giant - a hellish environment and one that made me, like many others there, extremely ill. Trust me when I say that being responsible for production systems on a national newspaper is hideously stressful even if it doesn't entail responsibility for the lives of other people.
No one can say exactly where most serious illness comes from but as I lay in a hospital after the operation that (just) saved my life it was clear to me that no matter what, I had to get out of that environment. It had been obvious to me from the first day that it was the kind of place that might kill me but I rationalised the risk away. Three more operations and almost a year later I was back at work thinking "I'll give it another couple of years..." Then one day I just walked out. This has been quite costly but I'm alive, 11 years later. Had I stayed there I doubt that I would be. At some point one has to think carefully about what is really important. One consequence of serious illness is that this consideration is forced on us.
Meanwhile I note that no-one has so far (up to writing this) commented on the union aspect of this problem (for want of a better way of putting it.) I think that this is very revealing.