Oxford Matinée #1: The Joy of Bullying

This week: dopamine crack pipes, bullying BBC presenters, and Dr Sour’s advice for performative male feminists.

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The Examined Life

Reader, welcome to The Matinée, a weekly dose of wit and wisdom, for paid subscribers.

This week, I endured my final exam at the London School of Economics. After raising not even one drink to my lips in a two-week fury of abstinence, I discovered I knew a bit about Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. I asked whether examinees could smoke. To no avail. As Mencken put it: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Admittedly, I underestimated how much work was required of students on demanding courses at elite universities. My literature degree was a wine-soaked haze of Dionysian indulgence and pregnancy scares, in which I spent more time in the student union pub than the paint on its walls. My master’s in journalism was… much the same.

That said, publication here at Oxford Sour has been sporadic. A gentle reminder: I’ve extended all subscriptions. Thank you for sticking around.

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Digital Lobotomy

Second Story Sunlight by Edward Hopper (1960)

This week, as I clattered along the Piccadilly Line into Holborn, the genesis of our collective nervous breakdown careened into view.

You’re familiar with the figures—one in four Brits suffers from anxiety, depression or a combination of the two.

Indeed, mental health, the au courant fixation of the Lanyard Class, has switched codes from stigma to social signifier. One cannot riffle the pages of the Daily Telegraph without reading the declarations of middle-class Waitrose Women declaring: “It all makes sense, now! I cheated on my husband with my spry, muscled personal trainer because I have ADHD!”

That is not to be glib. I’ve trouble doubting the vertiginous rise in cases of both autism and ADHD, and as a long-time captive of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, I’m in no position to extract the Michael—few would elect toward such maladies.

That said, when perusing any social media feed, one observes a Swiftian conceit.

One side claims the Eiger-like rise in such conditions is purely natural, a result of ‘increased awareness;’ the other claims ADHD and Autism are, essentially, euphemisms for ‘attention-seeker.’ The truth is somewhere between the two camps warring over which end to crack an egg.

The figures are troubling. We’ve gone from 1 in 336 people diagnosed with such disorders to one in every thirty-four people. Whilst I have my reservations—some indeed self-diagnose in cases of monkey-see-monkey-do—such a giant explosion suggests something else is at work.

Now, I am not a scientist. But I am a paranoiac in reverse—I plot to make others happy. Here is my wine-inspired thesis: Much of the rise in ADHD and Autism-like symptoms might have something to do with the average person spending six hours daily rigged up to a dopamine crack pipe, commonly known to its peddlers and addicts as a smartphone.

You can call it a fixation or a Theory of Everything or a moral panic. But what else can explain the clearly observable tide of such symptoms whose onset arrives in tandem with smartphones? Better awareness? Plausible. They’re making it all up? Ludicrous.

At risk of sounding like Ted Kaczynski having swallowed Debrett’s Guide to Modern Manners, It’s the screens! It’s the screens! It’s the screens!