13 January

The catastrophic collapse in birth rates around the world is usually attributed to the young not having enough money to raise families. It is that too, but there’s a fascinating extra bit. We’re in a ‘relationship recession’. There’s a collapse in the number of people in relationships. Initial analysis shows this to be heavily driven by women, and their use of phones and social media apps to do something called ‘cultural leapfrogging’. In other words, organising a better cultural deal for themselves than what society has presented them to date. And I’m sure that’s a major driver. And great for women. The more worrying underlying trend here though is that social media is encouraging us to become a world of 8 billion individuals, individually planning our ‘best lives’, a life made up of ‘experiences’. Life as a Contiki tour. And those experiences are not really about experiencing anything, anyway. They’re about negotiating our position in imitative status hierarchies, back home. We live a permanent adolescent culture of comparison and pecking order.