Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life

by David Mitchell

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  In October 2012, it became horrifyingly clear that even superheroes can’t resist the advance of technology …

  Those of us who worry about the old media have had a fraught week – and we’re used to stress. The last few days have been up there with those anxious months in the 1480s when the bottom fell out of illuminated manuscripts. They’ve seen the demise of Ceefax, probably the most recent of all the old media, a brand spanking new old medium, hardly conceived before it was careering towards obsolescence. Useful, if clunky – like a seatbelt, but it didn’t save lives – this valiant example of British innovation will be sadly missed and reminds us that not everything that came out of the BBC in the 1970s is tinged with rape.

  Worse than that, the most powerful journalist in the world has quit. It has emerged that Clark Kent, aka Superman, is to leave his reporting job in the forthcoming issue of the comic. Initially I assumed he was protesting against all the nasty commenters on the Daily Planet website: the thousands calling him an arsehole without having paid for the paper, or complaining that he only got to save the world because of his posh upbringing on Krypton. But apparently not: as well as his other powers, Superman is super-thick-skinned and embraces the internet age. He’s off to work in new media and, according to Scott Lobdell, the writer of the series, is “likely to start the next Huffington Post”.

  Presumably Kent originally chose to work in the print media in order to be at the beating heart of news, so he’d find out about impending world crises and sport before his fellow citizens and would consequently be best placed to save their lives. But, as the under-resourced Daily Planet came increasingly to rely on stories cobbled together from Twitter, the giving out of free DVDs and endless pages of comment, Kent’s disillusionment must have grown. The last straw was a disagreement with proprietor Morgan Edge over his preference for celebrity gossip over hard news. Apparently they’d also just given some comedian a column.

  Superman will be all right, of course. If his internet start-up founders, he could reboot his career on Dancing with the Stars. But, in an era of crumbling institutions, where will the fictional heroes they once sheltered end up? What hovels will they fashion for themselves in the entrepreneurial rubble?

  Jimmy Olsen becomes a pap

  The Daily Planet’s keen young photojournalist has long since noticed which way the technological wind is blowing and gone freelance. With his digital camera and close working relationship with Superman, he can sell pictures of world disasters to the highest bidder. “No sooner has Superman heard that there’s a bus about to fall off a suspension bridge than we’re there: Superman rescues the bus while I see if I can get up-the-skirt shots of the flustered passengers. People really lose their sense of modesty when they think they’re about to die. I can have the shots online before Mr S has repaired the bridge with his laser eyes.”

  Dr Watson sets up a reflexology clinic

  Disillusioned with the NHS, Watson has been searching out a better way to spend his time during Holmes’s frequent cocaine binges. “Medicine is a mug’s game,” is his diagnosis. “People resent what you earn and sue if you accidentally kill them. Worse than that, you’re constantly having to meet diseased people and deal with the insoluble problem of their mortality. Far better to earn my crust sympathising with affluent malingerers. After all, alternative medicine does a hell of a lot of good for those who don’t happen to be ill. Also, in my Harley Street clinic, I get to meet the kind of rich person who’s likely to be involved in an interesting murder.”

  Mr Chips says goodbye early

  In the latest reimagining of the tale of Mr Chipping, the noble and dogged public schoolmaster who inspired generations of schoolboys with his principles and erudition, Chips leaves Brookfield in disgust when the prime minister, an old Brookfieldian, slashes spending on libraries and the arts. “You can’t spend your life worrying about whether or not children know Latin,” he concludes. “You’ve got to follow your dream!” In this case, a gay dance reimagining of the Satyricon which he’s staging above a pub in Wandsworth.

  Rumpole of the Bailey makes sideways move into corporate law

  With legal aid now capped at the bus fare for a trainee solicitor to come and explain how to plead guilty, Rumpole desperately needed a more remunerative outlet for his legal knowledge. Inspired by an old university friend who makes an excellent living concocting legal challenges to anything nasty that gets printed about Jeffrey Archer, Horace decided he’d had enough of criminal law and is now doing a roaring trade defending chemical conglomerates against class actions from the various poor people they’ve maimed.

  Inspector Morse takes the plunge into app design

  In ITV’s latest remake, following the success of Lewis, Endeavour, Morse at School, Morsel (the Inspector’s Infant Cases), Space Morse and What If Morse Was in the Sweeney But He Wasn’t Regan He Was Still Morse?, comes Morse Code, a brand-new quality drama in which Morse didn’t die but just went into hiding and had plastic surgery to look like Robson Green. Increasingly disillusioned with the police force post-Hillsborough, Morse does an IT course, moves to the Isle of Skye and tries to make a living designing cryptic-crossword- and real-ale-based smartphone apps.

  Mary Poppins works in PR

  Preferring to leave the tedium of caring for other people’s children to those who are trying to obtain residency rights, the former magical nanny is forging a very successful career since founding Practically Perfect PR. “There are two types of PR company,” she explains. “Those who tell people about events, movies, shows and products that are already very popular and don’t really need PR, and those who fail to tell them about those that aren’t and do. The trick is to be in the former camp.”

  Jeeves is now an accountancy whiz

  The news that Bertie Wooster has enrolled at film school so horrifies Jeeves that he puts his days in service behind him. Far from a revolutionary, though, he finds another way of shoring up the status quo by optimising the tax arrangements of his former employer and other members of the Drones. So brilliant is the ex-valet’s interpretation of tax law that the British taxpayer accidentally ends up owing Bertie the entire GDP of China.

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  The flaw in dating websites’ business model has come into focus. They seek to make money out of loneliness and sexual frustration but their services threaten the existence of those very feelings. It’s not the same as selling food or porn, which satisfied customers return to buy more of. If a dating website has any properly satisfied customers, it’ll never hear from them again.

  You may think that’s unlikely to be a pressing problem. Perhaps you’re of the view that internet dating is the last resort of the socially dysfunctional or irredeemably unattractive – that signing up for a dating website is just the final hopeless gesture you make before resigning yourself to dying alone. On a singleton’s “to do” list, it’s one place above “Bequeath all my money to a cats’ home”.

  If so, you’re railing against the tide of general chat. Everyone’s saying how internet dating is the future – the technological solution to busy, modern, disconnected urban life. “There’s no shame in it,” people declare – which obviously implies there’s some shame in it or they wouldn’t have brought up the concept of shame. Nobody ever bothered to point out that there’s no shame in eating soup or going for a walk. But nevertheless, it could genuinely mean that there’s now less shame in it (unless it’s an S&M dating site, in which case there’s exactly the amount of shame that you’re into). And, anecdotally, I’ve heard online dating can be a great way for professional men on the rebound to have one-off sex with women seeking long-term relationships.

  Whatever your view of the efficacy of the phenomenon, many of the dating websites themselves seem to think that simply introducing the single to the single doesn’t constitute a viable commercial plan. There have to be lies to entice people in. A recent edition of Panorama exposed a number of ploys that sites have been using to prey on the horny and
alone. For example, there’s “pseudo profiling”, which a former employee of Global Personals explained thus: “We’d steal someone’s identity through, say, MySpace or something. We’d take someone from a totally different country – Spain or wherever. We’d take the person’s photos online and we’d start knocking out messages. It was all fake.”

  So, behind many online dating profiles, there’s just a stranger dishonestly typing bullshit to attract the desperate. On top of that, the websites are generating pseudo profiles. How unfair of these companies to ensnare with their corporate lies lonely people who are quietly trying to lie each other into bed. Customers should be able to assume that the falsehoods they’re reading contain at least a kernel of truth: their correspondents are sincerely looking for sex or company, and are willing to endure sex to get company, or endure company to get sex.

  If I sound cynical about dating, it’s because I’ve never really understood it. But then I was never introduced to it properly. At a formative age, nobody ever told me that it was something you were supposed to do if you fancied a girl: that you should invite her on some sort of prearranged social encounter and, in so doing, irretrievably and unilaterally betray your feelings. Obviously I’d seen dating depicted in films and stories – but the same could be said for dragons and talking badgers.

  “How can two people who don’t really know each other very well possibly spend all that time having dinner with a candle in between them, or walking round a museum, or even going to the theatre, which admittedly is mainly sitting in silence but with all sorts of intervals and snack- and programme-buying gaps, not to mention the drink afterwards, while in denial of a huge, mortifying subtext of mutual judgment?” I thought, not in exactly those words. I didn’t really believe that, post the era of widespread ballroom dancing, such a formal and artificial way of piloting a relationship was what anyone actually did.

  It’s quite an odd concept to a shy teenager, and so I think it warranted a full explanation. I wish someone had said to me: “Honestly, this genuinely happens. Ask her to the cinema or something. It won’t necessarily work out, but posterity will judge your actions to have been perfectly reasonable.” I might have had a go then. I was an obedient adolescent and underwent all sorts of odd and awkward situations – piano lessons, university interviews, French exchanges – because I was reliably informed it was part of the unavoidable ordeal of growing up.

  But the only relationship advice I can remember being given was that I should “be myself” – a disastrous suggestion that, for many years, meant “silently infatuated”. “Being myself” was never going to encompass saying: “There’s a rather nice little Italian restaurant I’ve been meaning to try – perhaps I could pick you up at 7.30?” Just typing that has made me feel slightly sick, but there’s no doubting the logic that, if you want someone to go out with you, asking them out is not an insane first step. But, like with algebra, the logic needs to be pointed out for all but the most gifted.

  For my generation, a proper grounding in dating chutzpah, like the teaching of English grammar, had been removed from the curriculum. A lot of men my age went into the world thinking that the only way you got a girlfriend was to find a way of copping off with someone at a party. And the level of drunkenness often required by both individuals in order to make that happen can impair judgment of mutual compatibility. I’m not saying I approve of arranged marriage, but it sometimes works better than getting hammered, having a cry, drinking through it, throwing up and then returning to the party’s chaotic closing minutes saying to yourself: “Right, who’s left?” Which is why I usually stopped at the throwing-up stage.

  Had online dating existed when I was growing up, it might have been harder for me to treat such interactions like the mythical unicorn. I might have learned sooner about how to converse on random subjects with a subtext of wanting to be found attractive – or “flirtation”, as I believe it’s known by non-robots. I think that would have done me good, even if the person I was exchanging lies with was just an employee of the website. With dates, as with piano lessons, there’s not much point turning up unless you’ve practised.

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  Scientists may have discovered a way of reversing the ageing process, according to recent research. It’s not certain, though. You probably guessed that from the way I introduced the topic. If a definite way of reversing ageing, if the elixir of life itself, had been announced, I wouldn’t need to make direct reference to it. It would be the main news story for months, barring further Yewtree revelations, and I’d be able to bring it up more informally. “So this elixir of life we’ve been hearing about …”, I might have written. “Quaking as we now are at the terrifying prospect of immortality, spare a thought for the undertakers!” or: “I can’t see property prices sliding any time soon now people won’t necessarily ever perish.”

  So don’t get too excited. I’m not about to inform you of something you actually need to know, when what you expected was a few sarky paragraphs on the Lib Dems to doze off over. The research is very vague and small scale and inconclusive and difficult to understand. A sample of only 10 men underwent this anti-ageing treatment, which isn’t very many – although it is very menny. In fact, it’s only nine more than the sample group for Spider-Man (10 more if you don’t count fictional people), and no one’s saying it’s reasonable to infer from that study (I think of it as a study) that, if you get bitten by a spider, you’ll be able to walk up walls. No one’s claiming that. It’s simply too early to draw any firm conclusions.

  Anyway, in this study it was found that, after five years, the telomeres of the treatment group were, on average, 10% longer, whereas those of the control group were 3% shorter. “The telomeres of the treatment group” is not, I should point out, the title of a fantasy novel but a series of science words which can be used to convey meaning. Specifically, telomeres are stretches of DNA that protect our genetic code. Got that? I expect you can pretty much imagine exactly how that all works.

  Well, I can’t. To be honest, I was just parroting an incomprehensible snippet from an article written by someone who had probably uncomprehendingly cut and pasted the phrase straight from somewhere else. And you can now pass it on to other people. “Telomeres are just stretches of DNA that protect our genetic code,” you can say and I doubt you’ll get questioned any further. Let’s just all pass that phrase around and it’ll work just as well as genuinely understanding anything.

  That’s what social conversation is based on, anyway: the good-humoured exchange of vaguely recognisable noises. Let’s not get too deeply into the concepts they represent – after all, it’s difficult to hear in this clattery room with that music on. Let’s just repeat them to each other: “telomeres”, “five-iron”, “twerking”, “laburnum”, “DNA”, “CIA”, “RNB”, “R & LI”, “two over for the round”, “prune at this time of year”, “shoffice”, “sashimi”. “Telomeres? We’ve got a hedge of them at the back!” “Oh yes, just off the M4 isn’t it? Horrible loos.”

  If you insist on understanding telomeres better, it might help to hear that, according to Fergus Walsh writing on the BBC website, they’re “often compared to the tips on shoelaces as they stop chromosomes from fraying and unravelling and keep the code stable”. It’s a comforting explanation as it creates the illusion of understanding a complex piece of biology out of the fact that most people understand shoelaces.

  The key thing to know about telomeres is it’s better if they’re longer. Unless it isn’t. But it probably is. Having short telomeres seems to be an indicator of being generally screwed: cancer and heart disease and dementia are all abrading away at your poor genetic laces like a microscopic version of whatever it is that makes shoes get cancer. Whereas the long-telomered man walks tall, in securely fastened footwear. They reckon. Probably. Although Dr Lynne Cox, lecturer in biochemistry at Oxford, strikes a note of caution when she says: “Globally increasing telomere length in cancer-prone mice actually predisposes to more aggressive cancers.”
Good point, well made. Might be worth taking a wedge to this difficult lie. Yes, absolutely nose-to-tail on a Friday at about six. But then it’s been a wet year and now they’ve gone absolutely crazy all over the trellis.

  “But what is the treatment?” you must be asking by now. “You may as well tell us what the treatment is – we’ve stuck with you this long. What is it that lengthened the telomeres of 10 men in a way that might make them live longer and feel younger, or might make them as aggressive-cancer-prone as a mouse, or might make no difference either way? What is the secret?” I’ll tell you: it’s regular exercise, sensible eating and a less stressful life.

  It’s a bit of an anticlimax, isn’t it? It helps to have a bit of a rest now and again. It helps to have a bit of a walk now and again. It helps to eat your greens. On the face of it, the only interesting thing about this blindingly obvious conclusion is with what meticulous scientific tentativeness and by what a bafflingly circuitous route it’s been drawn.

  Worse than that, having thought about it a little more, I realise that it’s offensively out of step with our culture. Having a rest, taking a stroll, eating carefully: I’ve never heard anything so geriatric. They might as well have said that the secret to youthful-looking skin is smoking a pipe and wearing a cardigan. How do they recommend we all maintain a teenager’s sex drive into middle age? Wearing slippers? Do those little tartan trolleys help to reduce cellulite? Our civilisation is far too image-obsessed to accept, even for a second, that mortality-acknowledging prudence can possibly be the way forward.