The shelter is theirs. They are a part of it.

After I spoke about my experience of mental health problems with them I got talking to the man sitting next to me. He was about my age. He looked like he’d been through a lot, mentally and physically, but he was smiling. He said he’d become homeless after his relationship had broken down and he’d fallen into a depression that he’d tried to deny and had then become an alcoholic. He told me that the centre had saved his life. He pointed vaguely to the door and told me that ‘out there’ life didn’t make sense. He got lost in it.

He found the world dehumanising. Here, though, it was the simple things. ‘Just talking to people, sitting around the table with people, working for stuff you can see.’

That was the feeling I had of the place. It was like a distillation of the things people need in life. And it strictly edited out the stuff that harmed the guests – the place was very strict about drink and drugs and so on. It had thought hard about what to let in and what to – literally – shut out.

Although most of us are in a better place in life than the guests at the Joel Centre, its ethos is a good one to adopt. And deceptively simple. Accentuating the things that make you feel good, cutting back the things that make you feel bad, and letting people feel truly connected to the world around them.

That is the biggest paradox, I think, about the modern world. We are all connected to each other but we often feel shut out. The increasing overload and complexity of modern life can be isolating.

Added to that is the fact that we don’t always know precisely what makes us feel lonely or isolated. It can make it hard to see what the problems are. It’s like trying to open an iPhone to fix it yourself. It sometimes feels like society operates like Apple, as if it doesn’t want us to get a screwdriver and look inside to see what the problems are for ourselves. But that’s what we need to do. Because often identifying a problem, being mindful of it, becomes the solution itself.

Lonely crowds

THE PARADOX OF modern life is this: we have never been more connected and we have never been more alone. The car has replaced the bus. Working from home (or unemployment) has replaced the factory floor and, increasingly, the group office. TV has replaced the music hall. Netflix is becoming the new cinema. Social media the new meeting friends in the pub. Twitter has replaced the water cooler. And individualism has replaced collectivism and community. We have face-to-face conversations less and less, and more interactions with avatars.

Human beings are social creatures. We are, in George Monbiot’s words, ‘the mammalian bee’. But our hives have fundamentally changed.

I have noticed as the years pass that the number of my virtual friends is rising while the number of friends I see in real life is shrinking.

I have decided to change this. I am making an effort to get out and socialise with friends at least once a week and I am feeling better for it.

I’m not nostalgic about vinyl and compact discs but I am nostalgic about face-to-face contact. Not Facetime contact. Not Skype contact. But actually talking to someone, out in the elements, with nothing but air between you. At home, I am trying to put my laptop down and speak to my kids so they don’t grow up feeling they were behind a MacBook Pro in importance. I am trying not to cancel seeing friends out of sheer can’t-be-bothered-ness.

And it is an effort. It’s so bloody hard. There are days when I’d find it easier to talk North Korea out of its nuclear weapons programme than to talk myself out of checking social media seventeen times before breakfast.

Online socialising is easy. It is weather-proof. It never requires a taxi or an ironed shirt. And it’s sometimes wonderful. It’s often wonderful.

But deep, deep down in the subterranean depths of my soul, I realise that the scent-free, artificially illuminated, digitised, divisive, corporate-owned environment can’t fulfil all my needs, any more than takeaway meals can replace the sheer pleasure of eating in a lovely restaurant. And I – someone whose anxiety once tipped into agoraphobia – am increasingly forcing myself to spend longer in that messy, windswept thing we sometimes still romantically call the real world.

How to be lonely

HAVE YOU EVER heard a parent moan about their kids’ need for constant entertainment?

You know. ‘When I was young I could sit in the back of the car and stare out the window at clouds and grass for 17 hours and be perfectly happy. Now our little Misha can’t go five seconds in the car without watching Alvin and the Chipmunks 17 or playing game apps or taking selfies of herself as a unicorn . . .’

That sort of thing.

Well, there is an obvious truth to it. The more stimulation we have, the easier it is to feel bored.

And this is another paradox.

In theory, it has never been easier not to be lonely. There is always someone we can talk to online. If we are away from loved ones then we can Skype them. But loneliness is a feeling as much as anything. When I have had depression, I have been lucky enough to have people who love me all around me. But I had never felt more alone.

I think the American writer Edith Wharton was the wisest person ever on loneliness. She believed the cure for it wasn’t always to have company, but to find a way to be happy with your own company. Not to be antisocial, but not to be scared of your own unaccompanied presence.

She thought the cure to misery was to ‘decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone’.

10

PHONE FEARS

A therapy session in the year 2049

ROBOT THERAPIST: So, what is the problem?

MY SON: Well, I think it goes back to my parents.

ROBOT THERAPIST: Really?

MY SON: My dad, specifically.

ROBOT THERAPIST: What was the matter with him?

MY SON: He used to be on his phone all the time. I used to feel like he cared about his phone more than me.

ROBOT THERAPIST: I’m sure that’s not true. A lot of people from that generation didn’t know all the consequences of their phone use. They didn’t know how addictive they were. You have to remember, it was all relatively new back then. And everyone else was doing it, too.

MY SON: Well, it gave me issues. I used to think, Why aren’t I as interesting to him as his Twitter feed? Why wasn’t I as good to look at as the screen of his phone? If only I didn’t feel like I had to distract him to get attention. This was in the days before the 2030 revolution, of course.

ROBOT THERAPIST: Hmmm. Where’s your father now?

MY SON: Oh, he died in 2027. He was run over by a driverless car while trying to find a funny gif.

ROBOT THERAPIST: How sad. And what have you been doing since then?

MY SON: I invested in a robot dad. I looked into all the hologram options but I wanted a dad I could hug. And I have programmed him never to check his notifications. He’s there when I want him.

ROBOT THERAPIST: That is so wonderful to hear.

How to own a smartphone and still be a functioning human being

1.Don’t feel you always have to be there. In the not-soolden days of letters and landlines, contacting someone was slow and unreliable and an effort. In the age of WhatsApp and Messenger it’s free and easy and instant. The flipside of this ease is that we are expected to be there. To pick up the phone. To get back to the text. To answer the email. To update our social media. But we can choose not to feel that obligation. We can sometimes just let them wait. We can risk our social media getting stale. And if our friends are friends they will understand when we need some headspace. And if they aren’t friends, why bother getting back anyway?

2.Turn off notifications. This is essential. This keeps me (just about) sane. All of them. All notifications. You don’t need any of them. Take back control.

3.Have times of the day where you’re not beside your phone. Okay, I’m bad at this one. But I’m getting better. No one needs their phone all the time. We don’t need it by the bed. We don’t need it while we’re eating meals at home. We don’t need it when we go out for a run. Here’s something I do now: I go for a walk without my phone. I know it sounds ridiculous to present that as some big achievement, but for me it was. It’s like exercise. It takes effort.

4.Don’t press the home button to check the screen every two minutes for texts. Practise feeling the urge to check and don’t.

5.Don’t tie your anxiety levels to how much power you have left on your phone.