21 September

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of kidult culture is its insistence that only happy, positive things are important. Trying to raise any serious or even critical issue at all prompts loud accusations of ‘hysteria’ or ‘alarmism’, and a counter-movement of a flood of ‘positive’ social media posts to show that life is fine after all, no need to think or do anything. Sometimes called toxic positivity, but even more than that, it’s what I call the ‘culture of the feels’. Where we assess our lives purely according to how they make us feel. Feelings aren’t things, they’re symptoms of actual things. You don’t feel happy, you feel happy *about* something. Feeling bad is a symptom that something bad is happening, and you need to fix that bad thing. Not try to force ‘positive’ emotions over the top of it. Emotions and feelings are neither positive or negative. They’re like street signs for your life. Instead we run from our problems, in endless distractions - travel, entertainment, booze, buying things, gigs, drugs etc. All things that boost the happy feels, temporarily. The joy of adulthood, now being lost, is being happy because there are problems to solve. Things to get stuck into, to work hard and think hard about. Rather than this adoelscent substitute for adult life, where we chase only ‘positive’ escapist experiences. Where we don’t have ‘mental health problems’ every time we’re presented with a challenge. We should relish challenges.