20 October

This is a stock image, the sort of thing billions of people share. How happy everybody looks! Because they’re socialising. ‘Living their best lives’, as we now call it. There’s an uncomfortable truth about socialising though. Most socialising is based on comparison and status. On the continuous assessment of yourself in relation to other people. We know this from school, we forget it in adult life. It’s no coincidence that the advent of social media has at the same time led to an astronomical growth in ‘mental health’ issues. Social media allows us to socialise all day and all night, every day. It’s very useful to show the underlying mechanism in play, in socialising. It flushes it out. It’s about status and identity, the now never-ending assessment of where we ‘fit in’.