What has it felt like to be alive in 2025? The basic answer probably touches on a few aspects of the 21st-century experience. One is the horror and conflict that seem to define the news almost every day. Another centres around the material pressures that increasingly grip supposedly peaceful countries: the never-ending cost of living crisis, and the impossibility for millions of people of a secure job, a dependable home and some halfway viable idea of the future.

Something else demands a mention: the all-pervading mixture of absurdity, nastiness and anger fostered by the internet. Bigotry runs rampant. What we still rather laughably call social media now seem to operate on the basis that the ideal story mixes wildly improbable elements with the kicking-up of moral outrage (witness that ghoulish “online content creator” Bonnie Blue, who, having claimed to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours, ended the year by announcing her support for Nigel Farage). You can check your feed in a mood of mild curiosity, but find yourself instantly pulled into what this results in: great storms of mockery, loathing and polarised shouting.

The biggest prizes seem to go to the high-profile figures who cynically manage to turn all this to their advantage – which is the essential story of everyone from latter-day porn stars, through extremist “influencers”, to the current president of the US. And the resulting noise seems only to increase people’s feelings of anomie and disorientation, particularly among the generation that was born into a world remade by the internet, and then came of age amid the aftershocks of the crash of 2008. I get emails three or four times a week that paint this picture, crisply summed up in a press release from September, sent by the British Association for........

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