I can remember going to see the unique, rare genius that was Amy Winehouse in concert and having tears in my eyes at how the crowd – largely drunk themselves – laughed and jeered as she slurred her words between songs and desperately struggled, inebriated, to compose herself. It made me burn with a kind of anger and shame. I tried – ludicrously, embarrassingly – to send silent telepathic messages to her. It’s okay. You’ll be okay. They just don’t understand.

Right now, writing this, with the sun outside the window, I am fantasising about a Caipirinha. Brazil’s national cocktail. Cacha?a, lime, sugar. Heaven in a glass. I have memories of drinking it in shady Spanish squares, and the craving is in part a craving to return back to being carefree and 21 again. But I know that would be a bad idea. I have to remind myself why I want it and what might happen. I have to remember that there wouldn’t just be one glass. I have to remember a craving for an innocent drink has previously – after a perfectly respectable afternoon work meeting – ended up with a phone call home from Victoria station at six in the morning after losing my wallet. I have to remember the subsequent spiral into a furious relapse of depression and anxiety – the kind where you end up crying as you stare at your sock drawer and where the sight of grey clouds or a magazine cover prompts feelings of infinite despair. Doing all that remembering, being mindful of causes and consequences, makes it a lot easier to resist. An evening of heaven in a glass doesn’t outweigh a month of hell in a cage.

My point here isn’t specifically about alcohol. It’s about how the pattern of addiction – dissatisfaction to temporary solution to increased dissatisfaction – is the model for most of consumer culture. It is also the model for a lot of our relationships with technology. The dangers of excessive technological use are becoming clearer than ever. In 2018, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, began to talk about the overuse of technology.

‘I don’t believe in overuse. I’m not a person that says we’ve achieved success if you’re using it all the time. I don’t subscribe to that at all.’

The trouble is, not overusing technology is sometimes easier said than done.

‘Make no mistake,’ writes neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in his book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload: ‘Email, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.’ Each time we check social media ‘we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones’ telling us we have ‘accomplished something’. But as with all addiction, this feeling of reward is unreliable. As Levitin puts it: ‘it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex.’

As with living in Ibiza, or in a religious cult, it is hard to see the things we may have problems with if everyone has the same problems. If everyone is spending hour after hour on their phones, scrolling through texts and timelines, then that becomes normal behaviour. If everyone is getting out of bed too early to work 12-hour days in jobs they hate, then why question it? If everyone is worrying about their looks, then worrying about our looks is what we should be doing. If everyone is maxing out their credit cards to pay for things they don’t really need, then it can’t be a problem. If the whole planet is having a kind of collective breakdown, then unhealthy behaviour fits right in. When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.

A paradox

THERE’S A PARADOX about modern hi-tech consumer societies. They seem to encourage individualism while not encouraging us – actually forbidding us – to think as individuals. They discourage us from standing back from their distractions, like serious addicts have to if they want their life back, and asking: what am I doing? And why do I keep doing it if it doesn’t make me happy? In a weird way, this is easier if you choose a socially unacceptable compulsion like heroin addiction than if you have a socially acceptable one like compulsive dieting or tweeting or shopping or working. If the madness is collective and the illness is cultural it can be hard to diagnose, let alone treat.

Even when the tide of society is pulling us in one direction it has to be possible – if that direction makes and keeps us unhappy – to learn how to swim another way. To swim towards the truth of ourselves, a truth our distractions might be hiding. Our very lives might depend on it.

You are more than a consumer

DON’T LET ANYONE or anything make you feel you aren’t enough. Don’t feel you have to achieve more just to be accepted. Be happy with your own self, minus upgrades. Stop dreaming of imaginary goals and finishing lines. Accept what marketing doesn’t want you to: you are fine. You lack nothing.

15

TWO LISTS ABOUT WORK

‘How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.’

—Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) ‘I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.’

—Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)

Work is toxic

1.We have become detached from the historic way of working. We, as individuals, rarely consume what we make. People often can’t get the work for which they are qualified. Slowly, human work is being taken on by machines. Self-service checkouts. Assembly-line robots. Automated phone operators.

2.Also, the world economy is unfair. Yes, some progress is being made. The numbers of people in extreme povery is falling year by year, according to figures from the World Bank. But other inequalitites are rising. The world’s eight richest billionaires own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world, according to a 2017 report from Oxfam. The Western middle classes are shrinking, according to research from Credit Suisse, while the extremes of rich and poor are getting greater. Meritocracy is a hard myth to cling on to.

3.Workplace bullying is rife. The competitive nature of many work environments fuels aggressive rivalry that can easily tip over into manipulation and bullying. According to research conducted by the University of Phoenix, 75 per cent of workers in America have been affected by workplace bullying, either as a target or a witness. But the targets aren’t always who you think. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, rather than the targets being weaker members of a team, they can often be more skilled and proficient than the bullies – workplace veterans who might be a threat. And research from the TUC in collaboration with the Everyday Sexism Project found that 52 per cent of women said that they had been sexually harassed at work.

4.In extreme cases, workplace stress can be fatal. For instance, between 2008 and 2009 and again in 2014 the French telecoms company Orange reported waves of employee suicides. After the first wave, where 35 employees killed themselves in a matter of months, the boss dismissed it as a ‘fashion’ although an official report quoted in The Guardian blamed a climate of ‘management harassment’ that had ‘psychologically weakened staff and attacked their physical and mental health’.

5.Assessment culture is toxic. The Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe, believes that the way work is now set up in our societies, with supervisors supervising supervisors and everyone being watched and marked and continually assessed, is toxic. Even people who aren’t in work suffer the same equivalent endless rounds of tests and monitoring. As our schoolchildren are also discovering, all this testing and evaluating makes us stress about the future rather than be comfortable with the present.