How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?: Essays on Modern Life

by Pandora Sykes

I like a colourful world, don’t get me wrong – but to be calm and contented, I need to construct much of that colour for myself.

‘The woman who does not require validation from anyone is the most feared individual on the planet,’18

My phone morphed from a thrilling roulette – into a Tamagotchi of anxiety and dread.

But for the most part, the WhatsApp group is a tyranny of triviality: a mindless, maddening, enriching, life-enhancing, unrelenting chunter of chatter.

‘Sometimes I go missing.40 It is my right as a human being, and those close to me have grown tolerant of it,’ Dent writes in the Guardian.

‘You put off responding to [a message] because you want to give it your full attention – and thus never answer, giving the sender the impression you don’t care, when in fact it is the most important thing in your inbox.’

We are furious, coddled, traumatised, triggered – sometimes all at the same time.

We are constantly putting ourselves in each other’s shoes, claustrophobically inhabiting one another’s every opinion and experience and weighing them to determine their validity, jostling together like sardines as we choke on everyone else’s feelings. We are so absorbed in one another’s intimacies that we have become incapable of rational thought.

Distilling ourselves into every cause and every conversation renders them meaningless. You can be annoyed by someone or something without feeling duty-bound to express it. It sounds obvious and yet it seems like we’ve forgotten it’s possible.

We don’t pause or reflect. We listen in order to respond – not to learn. The most radical answer, says Davies, would be to slow down. I think the most revolutionary thing we could do is to say: I don’t have an opinion. But I’d love to hear yours.