The account
When he has not had a purpose, he has made one.
This page is one man's position, stated so you can weigh what the rest of the site says.
Who he is
James Roberts, born in Manchester in February 1976. More than twenty years in travel and hospitality recruitment, latterly running a firm of twenty. He has interviewed and met men all over the world through wars, recessions, a financial crisis, a pandemic and the arrival of entirely new commercial models in his sector.
He drank daily from eighteen to forty-five, went into residential treatment in Cheshire in June 2020, and has not drunk since. He moved to Tenerife that December and ran a small BnB there for five years, which he sold.
What he is not
He is not a philanthropist and does not present himself as one. He has no professional standing in charity, finance or law, is not a career coach or a therapist, and holds no qualification relevant to any of it.
He is not giving you an example to follow. He is describing what he has watched happen to other men and what he has needed himself.
What he has observed
- Capable men, at the point of losing a role, lose the structure rather than the ability. The skill is intact. The Tuesday is empty.
- The ones who came through it better tended to have somewhere their hours were expected — not a hobby, a commitment somebody else was relying on.
- Men who admitted they wanted to be needed committed properly. Men who picked something noble instead tended to stop within months.
- Nobody who gave him a confident prediction about his industry over thirty years turned out to be right about it.
Observation from one vantage point, not a law, a framework or a prediction about you.
His own position
He says plainly that he cannot go long without a purpose. The guides in this network were built for himself before anybody else read them, which is the honest account of why they exist.