I can’t recall when the anxiety around drinking began to creep in, but it stalked me for much of my 40s. I should probably stop imbibing cocktails and wine because they’re bad for me, I told myself, and then carried on regardless. That being said, there is only so much alcohol or nonsense a person can tolerate after 40, and by design my consumption began to ebb. 

At some point in this internal debate, perhaps five or so years ago, the scientific community began to say that drinking was the new smoking, the studies all pointing the way to the inevitable conclusion: no amount of alcohol is good for you. The party is over.

People of a Gen X vintage once could justify a night on the red wine as being ‘good’ for our pulsating cardiovascular systems. Now, not even a glass should pass our collective lips. 

On the back of this, a modern temperance movement has taken root. No longer spearheaded by evangelicals and do-gooders as it was a century ago, the case against the demon spirit is now being made by the scientists, armed with sufficient evidence, and aided by wellness influencers for whom most things are toxic. Except this time, the scientists have the research and public health statistics to make the case, rather than the Bible. The wellness brigade brings the mocktail recipes. 

Having just entered 50 with all vitals in mercifully good order, I wonder if somewhere, deep in my cells, there is irreparable damage wrought on the wild nights out of (gulp) 30 years ago, or by my more adult turn towards a stiff negroni before dinner and reassuringly priced wines. The health anxiety is real, and the guilt hovers like an angel on one shoulder prodding me to the gym, while the devil gets out his cocktail shaker. 

However, in a recent moment of reflection on the possibility of furring arteries and rotting livers, a different fear surfaced: what about all the hours I’ve lost mindlessly trawling the internet? Apparently, the average person will lose 41,000 hours of their life to doomscrolling. Would I have been better off down the pub damaging my liver than sitting at my desk, staring into the void? 

That can’t be comparable, I scoffed to myself. It’s not apples and apples, but apples and algorithms. All the same, I wondered about the emotional and creative damage, the sort of wreckage that is far trickier to measure than cholesterol levels. 

Screen anxiety is real, too. Again, there has been a steady supply of ammunition in the case against endless, mindless scrolling. The research mostly focuses on young people, and rightly so – their brains are still forming. But what is it doing to the rest of us, some of whom had internet-free childhoods? The findings on this group are bit less clear, but one takeaway across the research that rings true is that humans remain fundamentally cave people. We need to see each other, hug each other, be in proximity to one another. We have not yet shed the desire to sit around a fire and share food and stories. Yet, at another level, we have such unimaginable ability compared to our troglodyte ancestors that we can build goods and design worlds that our brains simply cannot handle. 

We can figure out how to create fire, but we keep burning our damn fingers. 

All of this left me wondering: which has been worse for me, ribald nights out and wine-soaked dinners with other people, or the lost hours (days? weeks?) of scrolling alone in a dark room?

By scrolling I should clarify. There is the rabbit hole and there is the fun-house. The former is those lost hours, starting with a simple search to look at the weather or find a recipe, the gateway Google to the hard stuff: Reddit forums about heart attacks; plane crashes of the past decade; talkboards on perimenopause symptoms. A land of no restraint, a place of no unanswerable question (just don’t think too hard about the answers you’re given). 

This is the land of freedom we were promised, the endless curiosity that can be satisfied by the machine. And while it is certainly handy to not always have to consult encyclopaedias and dictionaries, I never really emerge from the rabbit hole with my neurons fizzing in the way they do after a good book. Rather, I think I can smell their charred ends. I suspect this has weakened my thinking, while at the same time fostering the illusion that I can see connections between all the seemingly unrelated things I Google. My mind is too great to be constrained by the discipline of thinking slowly, focusing on one question, reading on and off the screen. Bam! Blip! Beep! The endgame of this, of course, is the attention span of a rabid squirrel and the growing fear that Donald Trump is not the only person with ‘the weave.’ 

We are all weavers now. The more I read online the more I feel my thinking and the language I use becomes flatter, more like everyone else. LOL, right? How can you measure the meme-ification of a mind? Am I being original, or just parroting forms of what everyone else is saying? Wine might have raised my liver enzymes, but has the internet knocked a few points off my IQ? 

And then there is the fun-house: social media. Again, much has been written on this, and my experience of long nights of a furrowed brow and glazed eyes is not unique. I joined Facebook in 2007. At that point in my life, I had the exact mixture of nosiness and lack of confidence to get high on social media like mental catnip. Hours – years, probably – lost to comparing myself to others, a perennial pastime. I suppose I could have flipped that on its head and instead gone on a search for community in some form, but there was no specific group that pulled me in. 

Then Twitter (as it was) came along, and now I was able to feel flat, earnest, and dull compared to all the wags out there being funny and building virtual communities. I also watched in horror, especially around 2016, and certainly during the pandemic, as people who were caring and thoughtful in real life were transformed into the worst sort of nagging virtue-signallers online, inching towards being full-on bullies and saying things they never would to a table of people at a pub. What the hell was going on? I was no longer able to look away and quietly read a book. Let hours of doomscrolling commence! 

Social media isn’t a distraction, it is a distorter, allowing the user to focus and obsess on the deepest insecurities in themselves. It’s like a magical mirror, one that starts out with pretty reflections but reveals ugliness soon enough. Those of you who have never felt the pull, many congratulations. Indeed, to the well-adjusted, this may seem like a completely ludicrous line of thought — why would you internalise all this internet nonsense, especially as a grownup? To which I have no real answer, except to say that for those of us who self-flagellate, social media has proven at times to be an excellent weapon of choice. That being said, it’s now so noisy, so fake, so full of videos (please, stop with the Reels already!), and advertisements, it has become too tedious to use. Imagine what that is going to be like once AI is fully up and running.

It would be fitting somehow if social media use drops off a cliff because it ultimately bored us to death.

I continue to wonder about those lost hours and days. Would I have been better off sitting around the pub or out on the lash, being silly and talking nonsense with friends, rather than beating myself up in a darkened room for not measuring up to a marketing team’s fantasies? The obvious answer is neither, and that I would have been growing my own vegetables or crocheting a blanket or something enriching. Or, perhaps, er, writing a few more books. 

 There is, of course, a place for the internet, and there is a place for social media, but like a nice wine or a stiff gin and tonic, at what point does it turn into poison? Will the scientists eventually tell us that any more than an hour a day on social media will harm our health? Will they tell us going ‘no-browsing’ is the only way to preserve our well-being? That’s news I might actually welcome. 

Midlife by its nature comes with regret, but quite frankly, most of my bad behaviour was fun. Yes, there were some very near-misses and yes, I was lucky. I was searching for stories, for ideas, for interesting people out there in early 2000s London. I still am. Isn’t that the job of a writer? 

I’m far less fond of the seasons I lost online, sucked into a vortex of self-loathing or mindless scrolling. Like all bad habits, it’s easy to overdo both: the nightcap that stings the next day (and boy do they ever after 40) or the slightly sickly feeling, a touch dizzy or vertiginous, from staring into the social media void for too many hours. I suppose the reality is that one is no worse than the other, though arguably, social media, with its isolation, is far more damaging. I suppose the real one-two is drinking and scrolling alone, a pit I, thankfully, never fell into.

Age, perhaps, takes care of both issues. Hangovers grow ever so tiresome, so I just drink less. Social media is increasingly full of garbage, so my hours have turned into minutes. But while many nights out remain fun memories, there is no warm, happy feeling — and certainly no laughter — when I think about the hours lost to the screen. 

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I couldn’t get my hands on London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe fast enough after reading his New Yorker piece in 2024 about the mysterious and tragic death of Zac Brettler. Anyone who lived in London in the early 2000s sensed the change afoot when Russian money washed up for some laundering. Even in less monied circles, there were oddities and disruptions, not least the worsening of house prices and the strange, now-quiet streets in parts of the city only populated by the ghost figures of private investment trusts. In that sense, this is a book about London, but it is also a detailed story about a family’s tragedy. What I didn’t expect was the thread about emotional inheritance, and how some behaviours replicate or at least echo through generations. On a more technical level, it is a masterclass in narrative pacing and investigative journalism. The author delves into the London underworld, though sadly comes up with no answers. For me, that might have been the most poignant part of the story, and certainly one that resonates with my work as a historian: sometimes we have to accept that we will never know the full story about a particular event.