I began this piece a few years ago and did nothing with it. Later I realised that more recent developments, most notably the enormous and rapid expansion of so-called 'social media', were relevant to the theme. I've yielded several times to the temptation to keep adding a few more examples as they make themselves known, but that process could go on for ever.

 

Now it's time to stop and say what I want to say.

 

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WE'RE STILL LIVING through a tiresome period of confessional writing. Articulate people, many already with access to the mass media through their work as journalists, columnists, performers or ‘celebrities’, want us to know all about their personal troubles. They write the stuff themselves, get someone else to write it for them, or have themselves interviewed so that they can tell us all about ‘Me’.

 

They want us to know, for example, how they coped with their drink or drug addiction; how they or their spouse/partner/parent/child/sibling will soon die from a terminal disease; how they recovered from brain tumour surgery; how they survived a horrendous car crash; how they endured the damaging emotional effects of a collapsing relationship. If they’ve had, or are having, a seriously bad time, they want the rest of us to share in it.

 

It’s suggested that this sharing will give support and hope to others suffering from something similar. Perhaps it does and one hopes it does but, for the majority of the suffering people I’ve known, details of how well or badly someone else is coping with a similar situation may well be the last thing they want to hear about. They would much prefer not to be reminded of their condition and its privations any more than is absolutely necessary. And when it may be necessary, to have it done by their qualified specialist, not another amateur victim like themselves.

 

The last thing I want is to mock or belittle any individual’s physical or emotional suffering. I’ve seen some close at hand and occasionally I might have managed to help one or two people deal with it. I know it’s real and I know it hurts. What I’m less sure about is whether any other people, apart from those very close, have – or even should have - the slightest interest in their difficulties.

 

From the point of view of the sufferer, I also recognise the value of writing, or talking, about your more challenging experiences. As you work them through your mind, you can get them into perspective and reflect on them. It can be an extremely valuable and cathartic process. A few years ago, I had a brief stay in hospital for the first time in my life. For several days, with the resignation borne from being entirely in their hands, I faced quite unfamiliar and sometimes not entirely comfortable experiences. I wrote my observations every day and commented on them later. Months afterwards, I was glad to read again of what was a unique and demanding experience for me. I’m pleased that I made a record of it and that it didn’t all simply happen and dissolve.

 

But could it really be worth publishing widely for others, mostly complete strangers, to read? The largest readership I can imagine having any interest in my personal diaries would be my partner and children, and possibly a few close friends. After my death, they may look for them or discover them accidentally and think them worth reading. Equally, having much more important things to do, they may well consider it not worth the effort.

 

What’s bothering me more today is the way that admittedly serious confessional writing on life’s major tragedies has spawned a whole gush of trivial, flossy material. People of whom most of us know very little, and care even less, produce it. They are, more or less, ordinary nobodies, like most of us, but they have engaged an agent to publicise their brief, temporary fame. Their whole purpose can best be expressed as ‘Hey, it’s Me. Look at Me. I’m nobody really, but now I’ve tasted some publicity, I can’t bear to be ignored.’ Any number of these inconsequential ephemera are even written by people who have neither experienced nor earned a single moment of fame themselves. They have competent writing skills and regularly bash out a piece on just about anything at all that requires little or no actual thought to produce, furnishing instant, subjective, opinions that no one needs on minor issues that no one is worried about. Newspaper colour supplements, especially at weekends, contain plenty of these.

 

As we know well, most politicians who retire, resign or are kicked out of political life by the electorate, suffer massive withdrawal for a while. The first thing some of them do, especially demoted cabinet ministers and MPs who suddenly find themselves unexpectedly voted out, is to rush out a generally poorly written (even ghost-written) self-important autobiography. It’s their pathetic attempt, as they tend to say, ‘to put the record straight’ before the serious analysis begins – if anyone can be bothered to analyse them at all. Fortunately, these wretched volumes reach the remainder shops rather faster than most other books and mercifully only rarely reach the paperback stage.

 

And, as it happens, the next thing some of them do to ensure the public’s continuing attention is to become a ‘media personality’. ‘Remember Me? Yes, it’s Me, yet again. I used to be an MP or somebody’s adviser. Now I’ve reinvented myself as an instant expert on things in general.’ Or ‘Here I am again, always ready to appear on any panel game.’ Or ‘Yes, I’ll present it. I know nothing about the subject, but there’ll be some people to research it for me.’ Before long they’ve become ‘media tarts’, prepared to do practically anything to retain that exposure and attention. At this point, the temptation to name some names is almost irresistible. But anyone actually reading this can readily do that for themselves. You know who they are, and so do they.

 

This excessive and persistent regard of the self and the need to be looking at and thinking about Me, and telling the rest of us about Me, has led us steeply down-market to some very trashy and marginal subjects covered by those we call columnists, or even more recently, ‘bloggers’, a term suggesting that blogging is a recognisable profession. Not the real columnists like the late Malcolm Muggeridge or Peter Jenkins. Not people of the calibre of Alan Watkins, Andrew Rawnsley, Peter Riddell or the late Hugo Young. Of course, most of them and others with their qualities are still at work, but there’s this entirely new layer now consisting of much younger people from the It’s Me generation. Among the most commonly used words in their pieces are “I”, “me” and “mine”. Through their endeavours, the term ‘columnist’ has become a pejorative.

 

At this level, we encounter in-depth treatments of life-enhancing issues such as How I lost three (often more) unwanted stone; How I managed to stop smoking; What to do when your man won’t wash up; Why I’m glad to be fat/thin/prematurely grey-haired/bald/over thirty; Why I hate virtually everything and everybody; My favourite hangover cure; How I put my naïve foot in it in glossy magazine circles; Where I go to buy the prettiest frocks; What’s in my garden; Aren’t I funny; Isn’t it marvellous being ill; Am I being Green enough; How to manage on your own for a day; How I ate in a new restaurant the day before it actually opened; How to manage without your smartphone.  The ‘Sunday Format’ programme on BBC Radio 4 satirised all this superbly a few years ago. Despite that, this vacuous tendency flourishes today more than ever.

 

No one could seriously care less about these superficial scribblings, or about the superficial scribblers behind them. What cause do they serve? Entertainment, information, journalism itself?  None of these. They are written to achieve two purposes. One, simply to extract fees from youth market-obsessed editors, perpetuating and expanding the It’s Me cult in the process. Two, and doubtless most important, to provide printed matter which can be surrounded by expensive advertisements. The result is that their readers are encouraged to focus ever more closely on their tiny, limited interior selves, their transient wants, their obsession with shopping, their acne, their finger nails, their weight, their mobile phones, their relationships and the latest clothing or electronic toy.

 

Interest in the political process, evidenced by voter turn-out, has never been lower than among the flourishing Me worshippers. They seem to know little and understand less. Do they have any interest in what’s being done by others in their name? They couldn’t care less about the aching problems of their own society, let alone those of the wider world. Such things are shoved aside and into the darkest background. Thus the validity of the democratic process, always under threat, is compromised. Perhaps, and I suggest it with the greatest reluctance, just perhaps Thatcher was right after all. There is no such thing as society. There’s simply an infinite series of individual little Me’s, minds trained on dross, vision stuck at shop window level, living through an extended regression of maxed-out credit cards.

 

Commercially driven platforms of the so-called ‘social media’ like Facebook, Twitter and others only add to this effect, drawing individuals further into themselves and away from the realities of the world beyond themselves. They claim to have ‘friends’, many of which quite possibly don’t actually exist or have motives that are far from friendly. Indeed, their rapt attention while thumbing their hand-held electronic devices causes them to bump into trees, lamp posts and real people as they walk along, oblivious to anything else but Me. Recent surveys tell us that there are people taking dozens and dozens of ‘selfies’, photos of themselves, every single day. They then send them to all their ‘friends’: ‘Here’s a picture of Me standing in front of something interesting that you can’t see because I’m standing in front of it’. It’s also reported that many of the Me-obsessed deliberately wake up during the night to check their incoming texts.

 

Has this always been there in different guises at different periods of our development? Are we experiencing the inevitable dusk of a terminally waning capitalism, or will it all drag on like this forever, getting slightly worse year by year simply because it can? Is humanity running out of ideas – and out of time? Will the It’s Me cult swallow us all, leading to fourth or fifth world conditions for everyone as we slither slowly and inexorably back into the slime, before some people have even had time to climb out of it?

 

They’re all very serious questions. I couldn’t begin to answer them. I always hope that minds and imaginations much better equipped than mine are giving them the attention they require. And yet the dramatic worldwide financial events of the year 2008, and the following continuing recession and its adverse implications, tend to suggest otherwise. Our apparently consistent and ongoing economic growth over ten years used to be triumphantly trumpeted once a quarter by our leaders. Now we all know, as many should already have suspected, that it was mostly predicated on nothing more substantial than some fraudulent banking practices and a gigantic raft of personal debt, a good deal of it unsecured, amounting to trillions of pounds and dollars. And where did that all come from? Apart from the housing market, it was largely generated by those very hordes of shopping addicts, the mall-freaks for whom buying and consuming products they don’t actually need is an absorbing leisure activity, the It’s Me people.

 

All that said, perhaps someone in the print media would now like a thousand words on ‘I think I may just have a slight headache coming on.’

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                                                                                                        FINAL VERSION JULY 2017

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AFTERWORD  My comment above about low voter turn-out only applies to those pre-occupied with 'Me' to the exclusion of all else. Voter turn-out in the pointless June 2017 general election revealed a huge, unprecedented and welcome participation by people under the age of thirty.