I’ve recently been doing some day-job work for a book about humanity’s future. Boy oh boy, did I need to do some very, very slow deep breathing and distant staring out of windows while reading that. It’s an amazing book, but sometimes my frustration and terror, at not only where we’ve got ourselves, but also where we are positioning ourselves for our next tomorrows, are very, very enormous. This book offers hope in the form of creativity within science which I think is a good possibility, practically speaking, but I wonder if we need more stories first, to tip our global, political and social focus. Stories to remind people of the hardships which have gone before when we’ve handed over control to those ruled by greed, fear, and hatred; stories to remind people that we all have a better time if we just try to share the fucking cake and not try to punch anyone who would also like some, please. Fewer stories about the shoes/vase/pillow/hat/protein powder/lipstick/sofa/storage solution to finally fill you with happiness. And I say that as someone who loves things, who very much wants rings and sunglasses, dog coats and plates, face creams and t-shirts and spatulas. But we just fucking can’t have everything we want, because – honestly, if we haven’t understood that yet, then what really is there to say? 

Is self-sacrifice the only flavour of tale that can change behaviour? Does it take someone losing something major, or risking something major, before people can feel or behave differently, rather than bubble-shaped lecturing bullshit like this? This was a remarkable episode of the excellent This is Criminal, covering the utterly inspiring and staggering career of Chicago TV reporter Russ Ewing, a man who endangered himself repeatedly to bring dignity and protection to black men and women surrendering to the corrupt police force of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Do we need more of these stories? Are enough people still willing to stand up for something, when they might be torn down for something completely different? 

Another interesting listen recently, on Purity Spirals – the examples within the documentary are deliberately innocuous-seeming, but the historical occurrences mentioned in this are well worth noting. It’s all well and good to pretend Cancel Culture is about speaking up and not letting Bad People Get Away With Things, but it doesn’t actually seem to be working, does it? Unless there’s a coherent moral code that your society agrees on (and of course we have neither one moral code nor one single society) then it’s just a lot of angry shouting and sharp jabbing, which – again, would love to know otherwise – doesn’t transform us into brave and self-sacrificing civil rights campaigners. But hashtag be kind isn’t an answer: it’s further gutlessness, because we’d (I’d) all rather be buying those scarves and trainers than not buying them, and then protesting outside offices and parliament, and writing piles of letters nightly to CEOs and MPs and investors, giving up time from scrolling through apps to engage critical thinking skills and hand valuable hours over to the hard work of social improvement. (The fact that I know people who do this makes it worse, of course. I have no excuse.) Abstaining from actively writing hate tweets to someone doesn’t lessen the wider destructive social effects of a) sitting on our devices all the damn time, and b) being continually fed the idea that consuming more and more is the only way to find meaning in our brief existence. And I don’t know how to unite my growing loathing of tech with the aforementioned book’s suggestion that we all need to be more science- and tech-literate to survive our future. So I’m improving at crosswords instead. 

One personal silver lining: I haven’t watched TV at all this year, barring The Great Escape during half term with one of the children – my mother-in-law and I got up at the exact same moment (when Bartlett and MacDonald board the bus) and left the room giggling with tension because neither of us can bear that bit – but now the child has learnt to mime picking something up off the floor five steps away when I say, “I can’t see a bloody thing,” which honestly is the best, and possibly only reason to reproduce. No TV has meant that I’ve read tonnes more so far, as well as enjoying all the Agatha Christie BBC radio plays I can find on youtube, and getting out for more runs and swims and all that jazz. I swam in the sea twice last week, near some seals, and fortunately survived with both hands intact. 

I promise I will write the bread recipe soon. I felt it was too hypocritical today, when I made the most beautiful loaf, with the most perfect rise, crust and crumb, and all because I forgot to put in the salt so it tastes of absolutely nothing. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. 

What Is To Come

1. We do not know what is to come. We know it doesn’t look immediately good, or at all good if nothing changes – I mean! our free time is increasingly gobbled up by our all-connected devices, which harvest our thoughts and our data to strengthen the wealth and power of international companies! our wages are weak against our cost of living, with employment rights potentially being weakened further after our exit from the EU, so we do whatever we can to get whatever we can! we are encouraged to spend our leisure time side-hustling and girl-bossing because it a) gets us extra and b) reduces our time to think freely, so it’s encouraged as a positive thing by those who benefit from this! we volunteer to be sold to, constantly, relentlessly, as a hobby and a citizen, and those ever-growing companies are delighted because the more we want, the bigger their profit, and the more we want, the less we’ll fight for everything they take from us in return! inequality is rising! divisions are growing! we are all, in the words of Mitchell & Webb, looking like the baddies! – but the fact is this. Something has to change. 

It is literally not sustainable; either we go, or dramatic change must come; unfettered capitalism cannot maintain itself when soil is barren and air is unbreathable, I think; things will be bumpy, at the very least, and all we can do is hold on tight to what we believe makes humanity worth battling for. Art, and humour, and story, and discovery, and creation, and sharing, and forgiveness, and responsibility: community and togetherness, if you like, or privacy and peace, if you prefer. And of course those things have historically been used in dark ways sometimes! Of course everything has a middle path! And this isn’t even a recent thing, more a tipping point we’re at right now; in Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book, Inventing the Victorians, he talks of the Victorian era as a time when “crudely speaking, work patterns shifted from those following the rhythms established by families and communities to those timetabled by managements keen to optimise the productivity of their workforces. At the same time, traditional leisure pursuits were being undermined… There was a switch from locally-generated activities and community-based entertainments to increasingly officialised ones: national cricket and football leagues, public swimming baths dance clubs, museums, exhibitions, arcade games, ticket-only entertainment events.” I know, right. I know. So it’s not as if all Olden Days were a utopia – we’ve made progress in so many ways, and that’s the progress we’ve got to keep fighting for, that general direction of so many things, but we have to find a new way of fighting that isn’t going to end with the whole world blind. 

And it is necessary to remind ourselves somehow, somehow, that our children don’t need iPads as a human right, and maybe we’re all doing ourselves more favours if we remember that adults also need to go for walks, or make bread from scratch, or listen to something positive on the radio as a group, or discover more about our local trees or birds, or learn to sing a song together, or make a zine, because not everything has to have a goal of building a career or becoming a giant success or being acclaimed, sometimes just doing something quietly is great, and yes, I also know that some people don’t have the time to do those things, the freedom, or the headspace but my god, what are we doing propping up a society where almost everyone I know logs several hours a day on their phone, minimum, but we don’t have time to make eye contact and volunteer and actively be with people, rather than just tapping our screen and being “connected”. What is it we truly need? 

A v gloomy recent Salon piece which, honestly, I can’t even link to here because it set off heavy panic in me, did at least end with some useful suggestions, about actively being with people, and attending marches and writing and creating, because staying online basically just makes us all melt down, and who is a better consumer than a panicking, deeply unhappy one? “Action is the answer”, it said, because those people and organisations that like complacency and an easily controlled populace rely on our inaction. 

So please, please, please. I want so much better for the future of humanity. Please share the actions we can take. Please put your devices away and give yourself the gift of a life unlogged. Please work together for change. 

2. Most of this all came about because January was spent without a TV, but with plenty of books, running, radio plays and puzzles (both jigsaw and -book versions) instead. I was struck as I always am in these instances, how much better I feel when I’m not mindlessly, automatically slumped in front of a screen, how valuable and rich my hours seem, how many more thoughts I have, how much more varied my input is, yet how much calmer my brain is. (Having said that, I did miss my usual Mad Men January watch, because it is the best television ever made, and also because the crippling January depression I usually get didn’t come this year; and I do still want to give everyone access to the Watchmen TV series, which I watched at the end of last year and haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and I have also been to the cinema four times since the start of the year, and also stayed up one night watching all of Adam Driver’s SNL sketches on my phone which yes, is very much a cheat, and no, I don’t regret it.) I understand the gross lolling privilege of my position recommending bread and Radio 4 as the cure for all ills, but I suppose my point is that we should have the freedom to choose those things if we want them, and I believe our economy, our society, and our deliberately addictive technology undermines both the chance to make those choices, and the ability to make them. 

3. Some podcast recommendations: 

• Two excellent episodes of Desert Island Discs: Daniel Kahneman (who said his passion for economics developed from listening to his mother gossip, and understanding the power of narrative) and Lemn Sissay (I think I’ve recommended this elsewhere, but it keeps popping into my brain and I love it) 
• This episode of Heavyweight, which generally always makes me cry, but this tale of soul mates divided — or not? — is, somehow, both devastating and utterly beautiful and warming. But really, every episode is brilliant. 
• While I disagree with lots of what he says, this episode of Seth Godin’s Akimbo is quite interesting, on the Gift Economy as an alternative to the Private Property Economy. 
• I love Jenny Slate’s description of her twenties as a ‘surprise second adolescence’ in this episode of the sadly defunct The Cut on Tuesdays. That’s so accurate, and it’s staggering looking back that as twenty-somethings we are just let loose in the world to work and breed and live alone and vote and everything. We don’t know anything! I’ve been thinking so much about how we find the balance between fresh, new, innovative ideas to kick against defunct traditions, and ceding an ear to experience and wisdom. Old people aren’t always wise, I know, and young people aren’t always inventing the newness they think they are, but I see more and more the importance of experience and the dangers of binning something because it comes in a particular package. (I know I am entering middle age because I’ve started rolling my eyes at some of the drums I see teens and twenty-somethings banging. Please don’t invite me to your parties, I wish I was more fun.) 

4. Next time, I promise: recipes for sourdough starter and a sourdough loaf, and a blood orange cake that will blow your mind. 

Over the summer, my quite-old-but-not-that-old phone ate all my text messages and became almost thrillingly unreliable. Ever since then, I pick it up not with the usual subconscious rat-excitement, but with something like dread — it’s so clearly an addiction to something which, beyond podcasts and the camera, offers me far more hassle than pleasure or use, as is the way with anything one becomes addicted to. (Oh, and maps, occasionally.)

I absolutely loathe it, and once I’ve submitted this current big project, my next fairly dull task will be to try and wean myself off it almost entirely. Keep it in the office, plug the landline in somewhere more accessible and use that more, not have to check before I leave one room and walk into another than my phone is in my hand. God, it’s horrible. (Yes, also, music on the phone, also good. Christ.)

I realised the other night that my own anxiety and weariness comes from a sense that absolutely every choice I make these days feels like a battle for my soul. (Ugh, and the period-tracking app is useful. UGH.) It doesn’t feel like merely existing, it feels like living, heavy with some kind of extra-gravitational moral weight: did I turn off the lights/should I turn on the heating/is this food environmentally damaging/can I recycle this/are the children growing up to be vocal about the right things/but not so vocal that they increase division in society/it feels right to keep them off the internet/but will they be prepared when they are free-range on there/it’s great they’re all keen readers/but modern popular children’s books are almost universally awful. This isn’t parenting, or being an adult. This is living in an era where we are facing mass extinction either through climate change or mass conflict, fuelled and fired by those agencies which benefit from conflict and fear: arms manufacturers, politicians, media companies, product-makers, internet figures fashioning themselves into products.

If you are the product, what does that do to your soul? If your daily life, your family, children, friends and colleagues are the backdrop and the context for your self, sold and packaged to consumers or employers, do you gain more than you lose? If your most passionate conversations and throwaway jokes are all equally public, equally up for scrutiny, how does that ensure a fair life for you? If everything you ever say can come back and bite you — my primary reason to wish all children and teens weren’t ever allowed to say or write or do anything on a screen — how does that shape your life?

If you are a female MP, trying hard to improve lives around you, do you deserve to get hundreds upon hundreds of messages describing brutal sexual assault and violence against you and your family? You’re a public figure! That’s the price! If you’re a beauty journalist, having months of harassment and bullying by vicious internet trolls, how do you find the strength to speak up in a moving instagram video?

But. What if the source of that latter bullying seems to be — unless the source mentioned was not correct, unless something else is going on, which is of course more than possible, because nothing can be trusted on the internet — fairly calm critiques of your working practices both on- and offline? What if the trolls who have attacked your children in fact only mentioned them once, in the context of you promising never to use them in your social media? What if those board users were asking questions about your transparency and correct use of Ad and Gifted tags, and only when you set the internet against them does that board start screen-grabbing your own systematic and extremely public bullying (sometimes over long, long months) of other women in the media, attacking their looks, abilities, work and parenting? What if all your friends suddenly start deleting their old tweets (as you have already done) because your accusations have shone a bright light on a forum that at worst, matches tonally exactly the conversations you and media friends have on twitter, and at best are supportive spaces discussing dementia, cancer, cleansing routines, and their own experiences of bullying and unpleasantness at the hands of blue-tickers?

How does that make those female MPs feel? How does that make the women and men, boys and girls who have been harassed, doxxed, bullied and intimidated feel? I wonder what that does to your soul, when every mistake is so public? 

Running to the river now is in the dark; even when we climb out we do so by torch light. I hope you can all find something like this for yourselves, something calm and quiet and personal and fulfilling.

I come home and peel off my cold wet clothes, and look forward to more moments without my phone. 

1. I really, really loved this essay on introducing hope back into a nihilist world. It captures my own struggles with the messiness of everything – if this, then that, so which is worse? – and how everyone seems to be struggling with genuine, literal existential crises. But hope! And weight-lifting! I’ve been doing weights since the start of the summer and every time I lift it’s like a fucking joy injection. If you can start lifting heavy stuff, I massively recommend it. 

2. I want to post a link to the Pop Culture Happy Hour review of Todd Phillips’ Joker film, but I also want to be a better person than that, so I won’t. But Ready or Not is great fun, so maybe watch that instead! 

3. Here are some excellent children’s books series, if you want them: The Dark is Rising series, His Dark Materials, The Murder Most Unladylike books, The Sinclair’s Mysteries, the Tiffany Aching books… is that it? Always looking for more suggestions if you have them, please. 

4. Next time I get an invoice paid I am 400% getting this for the pup. The cold is mean to these feeble, speedy hounds. She is extreme excite. 

Instagram is my sole 21st-century vice these days, keeping me in touch with friends and far-off family. It lacks the wicked humour of Twitter, but it does shield me from Twitter’s apoca-rages of public shaming and vibrating despair at our hurtling handbasket of a world; the strangers I follow on Instagram are generally more calmly constructive about Next Steps (‘here’s how to get in touch with your MP’/‘here are some alternatives to the products that might be v v bad for the environment’ etc). My vice within that vice are lifestyle bloggers, ranging from fashion to interiors, food to fitness, travel to parenting. And while we’re all distracted by the gnarled new shapes current external pressures are forming us into, a couple of things are super noticeable right now. 

1. Boy oh boy, do these guys make me want to never buy anything ever again*. Every new pair of sunglasses, new sofa, new dungarees, new phone cover, new coffee pot and enamel plate and blanket and trainers and paint – I think of the unlikelihood that these products are 100% recycled, or not made by exploited workers somewhere along the production chain, or aren’t costing us clean air, clean water, vital forests, unique habitats. (Spoilers: no, we’re still mostly treating our planet like we can get a new one from TK Maxx once this one’s broken) 

2. The replacement of meaningful, tough – and perhaps flawed – spirituality with that of the god(dess) of Self. Fine, many of us might not believe in a bearded man up in the sky/(insert appropriate variation), but the endless search for self, for improvement of self, for the soothing of self seems not just pointless, but actively bad in these quick-fix forms. On one blogger’s Instagram story today, a company had sent a free product along with some boosting text: “Give yourself permission to say no/make a list of your achievements today/get a full night’s sleep/go outside, move your body/indulge in your sensitive side” and topped it all with a large card bearing the text “Put yourself first and everything else will follow”. Now, for all I know, these cards could have been the final words in a package consisting of 400 pages of campaigning notes for intersectional feminism, workers’ rights and environmental protection, but it does staaaaart to feel like what was once a thoughtful Tumblr hashtag to support people with mental health issues has become 99% of the world behaving as though they’re recovering from a deep PTSD. Which they probably are, fuck it, look at us right now. hashtag literally all recent elections

My point is: there’s a reason major cultural organisations throughout time (aka religions) put humility, charity and selflessness way up there on the Thumbs Up scale. (REMINDER: Donna and Tom celebrated Treat Yo Self Day once a year, guys, not every time they connected to the internet. ONCE A YEAR.) Yes, I need to get good sleep and breathe some fresh air and carve some space out for myself in my busy life. But jesus, do you know what generally makes me feel better than all of that? Helping someone else. 

You’ll meet new people! You’ll gain amazing skills! You’ll actually have specific jobs to do, so can more often than not feel like you’ve made the world slightly better with only a single hour or two from your week! 

Here are some good places to start – if anyone wants to send me any more (supporting immigrant families? mental health? sexuality? wider conservation?) I’d be delighted to add to the list: 

The Samaritans Great training, varied shifts, listen to someone other than the anxious voice in your brain. 

Home Start Full training to support families with young children for a couple of hours a week. 

Age UK Offering visits, phone calls or day service support to older people who may be suffering from loneliness. 

Contact the Elderly Tea parties! Who doesn’t like tea parties! Driving guests to the parties once a month, or hosting in your home. 

Rethink Good training to support people suffering from mental health issues (or their families) across the UK. 

The Woodland Trust Count seeds, guide some tours, speak at schools. I <3 trees. 

Canal & River Trust Hang out with Good People as you litter-pick, de-weed, check boats and welcome visitors around the waterways. 

Guides/Brownies/Scouts/Cubs/whatever I don’t feel like I could actually do this one for all the brownies in the land (PUN INTENDED) because I am frightened of children I can’t legally call Maggots and carry around by their ankles, but every volunteer I’ve met in these fields was just the nicest. We love you, brave people. 

Please send more, if you have any suggestions. Charity shops, community centres, religious centres, even assisting local councillors, if you don’t like what’s happening in your area with schools/hospitals/parks/housing…  

Good luck out there. It can feel pretty sweet. 

*not legally binding