Why this exists

The idea for PayMeToJudgeYou came after years of watching the internet fill up with self-declared therapists, life coaches, psychics, mindset gurus and other people who discovered enlightenment shortly after buying a stone.

Most of it is bullshit.

So I wanted to do something simpler: honest, direct and occasionally uncomfortable.

No healing crystals. No manifestation. No pretending every terrible decision is “part of your journey.”

Just an outside opinion based on life experience, common sense and a small amount of actual education buried somewhere beneath decades of poor decisions.

A highly questionable beginning

I grew up in severe neglect, violence, bullying and isolation. At 16, I was thrown out and sent to live alone on the other side of Norway.

Somehow, I became a chef.

Then I joined the Norwegian Navy, where people unexpectedly seemed to like me. This was confusing.

Even more confusing was the fact that the military apparently considered me responsible enough to carry an assault rifle with live ammunition.

Standards were different back then.

Then everything broke

My health collapsed. IBS. IBD. Hospitals.

Eventually, my brain joined the protest.

I spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals, sometimes involuntarily, heavily medicated and occasionally restrained.

Then came fourteen rounds of electroconvulsive therapy.

It actually helped.

For a while.

Excellent decisions continued

Naturally, I then developed a serious gambling addiction.

I accumulated debt in the millions, committed crimes to finance it, got convicted, destroyed a relationship and generally made several decisions I would not recommend.

So I sold almost everything I owned and left.

For years, I travelled around the world with most of my life inside a bag. I reached roughly 70 countries and accumulated an unreasonable amount of experience with relationships, loneliness, bad decisions, strange people and situations that probably should have ended worse than they did.

Somewhere along the way, the socially isolated kid became surprisingly good with people.

Maybe travelling fixed something. Maybe age did. Maybe it was the electricity. Science remains undecided.

Back to Norway

Later, while living in Portugal and walking through Spain, my health collapsed again.

I nearly died.

So I returned to Norway, declared personal bankruptcy and moved into a barn on an island.

Some actual relevant experience

During all of this, I also worked for years in health and social care.

Psychiatry. Addiction. Child welfare. Emergency services. Correctional care.

I've spent a lot of time around people during the worst periods of their lives.

I've seen addiction, psychosis, violence, trauma, crime, destructive relationships and spectacularly poor decision-making.

I've also contributed a fair amount of poor decision-making myself.

And now?

Eventually, the Norwegian authorities decided I was too ill to work normally anymore.

So now I live in a small apartment next to a pig farm in rural Norway.

Not exactly the ending from a motivational TED Talk.

But it gives me something useful: time.

Time to read your case properly. Time to think. And time to tell you what I actually think instead of feeding you whatever comforting nonsense sounds nicest.