We live in a paradoxical age, at least those of us who have access to the holographic wonders of the developed world. We find ourselves in a glittering emporium where everything is available if we have money, and even if all we can afford is a beaten-up smartphone, the latest world events and the knowledge of a million encyclopedias are available at our fingertips. A Rip van Winkle of even a hundred years ago who suddenly awoke to find himself in 1926 would be amazed by today’s world of plenty where surfeit has replaced scarcity in so many ways: supermarket aisles bulging with food from every corner of the globe; myriad apps and cable channels offering us 24-hour entertainment of our choice; the chance to speak and text with people from the other side of the planet; the option to purchase products without needing to get out of our chair.

And yet deep down we are bored. Excruciatingly, disablingly bored. 

One of the most important conflicts within the human mind is that between our love of novelty and our need for the repetitive and familiar. In theory, our brave new world provides us with all of the novelty that we crave because the options at our fingertips seem almost infinite. What do we do if the first sentence in an online article doesn’t float our boat? We click on another link and find a different one. What if we can’t choose which of two football games to watch? Then split the screen and flit between them. A cornucopia of fresh news greets us as we log on each morning: today, America’s annexation of Venezuela; yesterday, a fire in a Swiss disco; the day before, anti-government protests in Iran. We have unlimited access to all the drama that is happening around the world and should never be bored again. With this dizzying array of data and information and images, our minds should be sizzlingly alive.

And yet somehow all that information congeals together to form a kind of blob, until everything feels the same because very little of it has any real meaning to us. We are like a baby with those toys of different shapes and colours strung up in the front of our pram, watching and gurgling with joy as those baubles spin, but with no understanding at all of what they actually are. But that baby’s joy is always fragile, because they also long for the reassurance of routine and may start to wail if their parents replace the shapes with a different toy. So part of us wants constant novelty and part of us wants everything to stay the same so that we feel safe, but our desire for both of these things is constantly undermined in the technologically-saturated world we have created, where modern devices and apps are simultaneously the endless distraction that we long for and the disorienting hall of mirrors that undermine our sense of psychological rootedness. We are being pulled in two directions and it is silently, day by day, chipping away at our mental well-being.

One of the key ways that contemporary life is duller than in the past is its lack of chance encounters in public life. Take the simple process of travelling around our country. When I was a young man, a train journey might lead to an interesting conversation with a total stranger I knew I would never see again. I admit that the opposite was also true – ending up next to a screaming baby or a garrulous bore – but that at least made the process something of a gamble and tinged it with the unexpected. With mass use of the car, far fewer people use buses and trains, and the car has become a bubble of home which separates travellers from each other and protects them from the unsettling presence of unknown human beings. Chance encounters can be avoided as we rest safely ensconced in our fortress of metal and rubber. There is much less casual social interaction and this is removing the tiny acts of politeness which bind our society together.

In fact, almost every new technological development or gadget – headphones, smartphones, laptops, TVs, cars, virtual reality – enable us to cut ourselves off from each other and make it clear that we don’t expect to be disturbed, like hanging one of those little signs on the outside of our hotel room. I know that in the past we had other ways of achieving the same purpose, especially in anti-social England where we don’t particularly like other people very much: burying our nose in a book or hiding behind the wall of a broadsheet newspaper. But travelling in public has become purely functional and something to be endured, not a welcome change of scenery and certainly not a potential adventure, and the last thing that we want is a random meeting or anything that takes our attention away from our smartphone screen.

When we arrive at our destination, get out of our car, and actually use our legs and walk from the car park to the high street, we find that this has become a drab and depressing wilderness of litter, charity shops, estate agents, bookmakers, and boarded-up shells that used to house a butcher or a baker. This monochrome world is reminiscent of gloomy pictures we have seen of the post-war years, so understandably we shun these mausoleums and head for the dazzling kaleidoscope of the shopping mall on the edge of town.

For me, there are very few human inventions as dispiriting as a shopping mall. The harsh, vulgar lighting, the mind-numbing muzak, the utterly predictable cluster of big-name stores, the seats that are hard and steely because people are meant to be spending money rather than sitting down: if cathedrals were the expression of the religious belief, for all its ills, that once lay at the heart of western society, shopping malls are a perfect symbol of the shallow, ugly materialism at the heart of ours. Cookie-cutter buildings for a cookie-cutter world. One thing I have never understood about English culture is why people will get on a coach to take them halfway across the country to a famous shopping mall like Bluewater when they could travel just a few miles to a local equivalent which is virtually identical.

In a country which was once famous for being full of hobbyists – trainspotters and twitchers and pigeon racers and collectors of garden gnomes – shopping has now taken over as our most popular leisure-time activity. But this trend is far from confined to the west. When I ask my online students, most of whom are from East Asia, to tell me about their favourite hobby, many of them simply say ‘shopping’: their lives are working 9-9-6 (from nine till nine on six days of the week) just so they can splash out on their credit cards each Sunday. Yet I find it hard to believe that any pleasure felt is more than ephemeral: the ecstasy of buying that labelled t-shirt must surely fade as soon as they get home and hang it up next to the fifty other labelled t-shirts they have bought, some of which they have never even worn.

I’m sounding like a snob here, but my incomprehension is at least as great as any snootiness I feel. And I’m not singling out airheads buying the latest fashion because some influencer wore it on Instagram. There are examples of this compulsive, acquisitive behaviour which are supposed to operate on the higher level of being an experience rather than an object, but they follow a very similar underlying pattern of using what we consume as a status symbol. For example, a common form of this allegedly more profound expression of purchasing power is the person who is ticking off how many countries they have visited and has plans to try to visit all of them before they pop their clogs. This accumulation, whether of objects or of experiences, and a concomitant fixation on how much and how many rather than their quality, is an essential feature of the unquenchable desire to possess in modern consumer society, with its transient highs that come at the moment of purchase and the ennui that quickly follows.

This roller-coaster ride between ecstasy and boredom also happens in both the home and in the virtual world which is starting to take up most of our waking hours. The algorithms that track us and aim to supply us with content that we want, which sometimes used to suggest sites that were unlike our usual fare, nowadays offer us a list of recommendations that are becoming more and more obvious and interchangeable. Anecdote again, I know, but in my own case I have a list of recommendations on YouTube that pop up again and again, some of which have been there for several months, as if the algorithm seems convinced that it knows better than I do what I might want to watch. The hint of the unexpected that used to intrigue me has largely gone and I flick with bored impatience through the options put forward before eventually choosing none of them. The problem, though, is that I am then faced with the question: what do I do now?

The contemporary internet, with its algorithms and its bots pretending to be human, is becoming as predictable as those cut-and-paste shopping malls that squeeze everything more interesting out of our city centres until all that is left is a kind of commercial monoculture, an urban equivalent of the vast sterility of so much modern farmland stretching endlessly into the distance with geometrical precision. Yet still we keep returning to it as if there is no option, posting photos of our dinner or narcissistic pictures of a set of muscular abs or a glamorous made-up face. We’re hooked, and lack the imagination to break out of our prison even if in reality it has no bars: the bars are in our minds, or perhaps our hearts, which makes them all the stronger. And we experience the same sad mix of instant thrill and underlying tedium that we encounter when we go shopping offline, as we press the enter key to get our latest fix, like rats in a lab experiment on addiction.

The gradual trend, at least in the UK, away from living in houses to living in apartments is another key factor that separates neighbour from neighbour and traps each of us in his or her routinised private space. Houses, despite the greater physical distance they create between neighbours, are not as isolating as apartments in the sky. When I say this I’m not trying to romanticise life in the kind of street of terraced houses in which I grew up, with jolly neighbours inviting each other around for mulled wine at Christmas, but having lived in both houses and apartments at various points in my life, I can vouch that, in my case at least, I almost never knew anything about my neighbours in the latter. In theory, people should meet quite often in the lift, but in my experience all that results from sharing the lift with someone is a kind of embarrassment and a desperate desire that the lift speed up to reach the ground. Our home is indeed our castle, but the moat around it has grown deeper.  

Suburbia is just as deadening as city-centre tower blocks, of course, with its streets which are empty and silent except for the rush-hour panic when people rev up their cars and travel to work and take their kids to school. The physical environment is very different from that of the city centre, of course, but there is the same blend of reassuring normality and soul-sapping tedium that exists in both the shopping mall and in the virtual world. Almost no one walks, and certainly not children, who are driven to every destination because of fears of stranger danger and also the chance that a car may mow them down. If the shopping mall is the Christian hell of raucous noise and the fires of flashing lights, suburbia is the Greek hell of a frozen underworld where nothing ever changes.

So here we are in paradise, and we swing between momentary delirium and listless monotony. Surely, I tell myself, there must come a point where this latent ennui becomes manifest and we start to want to break free of our chains and experience real life again. It’s hard not to conclude that too much comfort and wealth is bad for human beings and that the recent years of relative political calm (at least in most developed countries), affluence and technological advance have stripped us of much of what makes us truly human. Perhaps the doom-mongers are correct and AI will inherit the world which we have so wastefully abandoned.