‘Objects should not touch because they are not alive,’ said Sartre, in Nausea, while clearly having a bit of a bad week. ‘But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.’

Objects in a supermarket aren’t normal objects either. They are branded objects. While products live in a world of physical space, brands seek out mental space. They seek to get into our heads. In many cases companies employ marketing psychologists to do just that. To manipulate us into buying. To toy with our minds.

Caveperson

IMAGINE A CAVEPERSON was frozen for 50,000 years.

Let’s call her Su.

Imagine the block of ice she was frozen in suddenly melting in front of your local supermarket.

The caveperson – Su – steps inside. The automatic doors magically close behind her. The light and colours and crowds frighten her. Shopping trolleys appear like strange metallic beasts, domesticated by the humans that push them along. The shining shelves of plastic packaged goods bewilder her. The self-service checkouts are mystifying. The carrier bags look like sacks of strange white skin.

‘Unexpected item in bagging area,’ the robotic voice says. ‘Unexpected item in bagging area . . . Unexpected item in bagging area . . .’

Su begins to panic. She runs towards the window and bangs into the glass.

Su begins to wail. ‘Owagh! Agh! Ug-aggh!’

More noises.

The twist at the end of the story arrives.

(Drumroll.)

Su is effectively Us.

(Ironic gasp.)

Su is all of us. It’s just that we are a bit more used to supermarkets.

We haven’t biologically changed for 50,000 years.

But society has, massively. And we are expected to be grateful for all this change. After all, if she hadn’t been frozen Su would probably have been killed by a stampede of wild boars at the age of 22 or by a sacrificial ritual at the age of 16. And we are lucky. Nothing is luckier than being a living 21st-century human compared to being a Neolithic dead one.

But because of that luck, we need to cherish this life we have. And if we can not only feel lucky but also other things – calm, happy, healthy – then why not? Why not know what the world can do to us? Because that knowledge can help us.

It helps me, now, in a supermarket. In shopping centres. In IKEA. On the computer. On a crowded street. In an empty hotel room. Wherever. It helps to know I am just a caveman in a world that has arrived faster than our minds and bodies expected.

Blur

TWO DAYS AGO, I wobbled. I felt the strange psychological pain of grey skies. Picking up my daughter from her dance class, I felt as if I was sinking into the pavement. I began compulsively swallowing, and started to feel the old agoraphobia pitch for an unwanted sequel.

But now I have a little more awareness than I used to have. I could see I hadn’t been sleeping well. I’d been working too hard. I’d been worrying too hard about this book. I’d been worried about a million stupid little things. So, I stopped obsessing about emails and stepped away from this Word document and did a moderate ‘Yoga for Sleep’ video and ate healthily and tried to disconnect. I took the dog for a long walk by the sea.

And I realised: it doesn’t matter. Stop being neurotic.

Nothing I was worried about would fundamentally change anything. I would still be able to walk the dog. I would still be able to look at the sea. I would still be able to spend time with the people I love.

The anxiety retreated, like a criminal under the spotlight of an investigation.

14

WANTING

‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’

—Sylvia Plath

Wishing well

TYPING ‘HOW CAN I become’ into Google, as I write this, the top five consequent autofill suggestions are:

– rich

– famous

– a model

– a pilot

– an actor

Transcendence

WE ARE BEING sold unhappiness, because unhappiness is where the money is.

Much of what is sold to us is the idea that we could be better than who we are if we tried to become something else.

Think about fashion magazines.

Lucinda Chambers served as fashion director of British Vogue for 25 years. Shortly after leaving her job, she gave a damning verdict on the industry she had left behind. She declared that, despite their talk of empowerment, few fashion magazines actually make anyone feel empowered. ‘Most leave you totally anxiety ridden,’ she said in an interview with the fashion journal Vestoj that soon went viral, ‘for not having the right kind of dinner party, setting the table in the right kind of way or meeting the right kind of people.’ In addition, the way fashion magazines focus on unattainably expensive (for most readers) clothes just exacerbates the misery, by making people feel poor.

‘In fashion we are always trying to make people buy something they don’t need,’ said Chambers. ‘We don’t need any more bags, shirts or shoes. So we cajole, bully or encourage people into continuing to buy.’

Fashion magazines and websites and social media accounts sell a kind of transcendence. A way out. A way to escape. But it is often unhealthy, because to make people want to transcend themselves you first have to make them unhappy with themselves.

Yes, people might end up buying a diet book to get the body of a model who endorses it, or a perfume to be more like the image of a celebrity whose name is on the bottle, but that all comes at a cost that is more than financial. People might feel better in the instant hit of the purchase, but in the long term it just feeds a craving to be someone else: someone more glamorous, more attractive, more famous. We are encouraged out of ourselves, to want to have other lives. Lives that are no more real than pots of gold at the end of rainbows.

Maybe the beauty secret no magazine wants to tell us is that the best way to be happy with our looks is to accept the way we already look. We are in an age of Photoshop and cosmetic surgery and soon to be in an age of designer robots. It is probably the perfect time to accept our human quirks rather than trying to aim for the blank perfection of an android.

We might think: oh, I need to look a certain way to attract people. Or we could think: actually, there is no better way of filtering out the people who will be no good for me than by looking and being myself.

Being unhappy about your looks is not about your looks: when fashion models develop eating disorders it isn’t because they are ugly or overweight. Of course not.

There are various indicators worldwide that eating disorders are on the rise. The non-profit group Eating Disorder Hope reported in 2017 that eating disorders around the world have tended to rise in line with westernisation and industrialisation, and looked at a comprehensive overview of international research. In Asia, for instance, places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore have far higher rates than the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, though those latter countries have rapidly rising rates as these countries ‘advance’ and ‘westernise’.

Another telling case is Fiji. Research there has found that eating disorders began to rise in the mid-nineties, just as TV was introduced to the South Pacific island state for the first time. The New York Times first reported back in 1999 how eating disorders in Fiji had been virtually unheard of, before TV gave them the slender role models of global hits such as Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210. Indeed, ‘you’ve gained weight’ used to be a common flattering compliment in Fiji, before American television gave girls and young women other body ideals.

In the UK, figures from NHS Digital in 2018 showed that hospital admissions from eating disorders had almost doubled within less than a decade, with girls and twenty-something women most at risk. Caroline Price, from the UK’s leading eating disorder charity Beat, told The Guardian at the time the figures were published that although eating disorders are ‘complex’ and down to ‘many factors’, modern culture has a lot to answer for.

‘Eating disorders are on the rise partly because of the challenges of today’s society,’ she said. ‘This includes social media and exam pressure.’