The Instagram ideal of summer is a plate of glossy spaghetti on a rickety table in a cove on the southernmost tip of Italy. The menu is on a chalkboard balanced against a wall, the wine comes in glass jugs that are misty from being overwashed, and (sorry!) you can only reach it by boat. I know this fantasy of lunch – which is presented as authentic and yet feels knowingly staged by the time it hits the internet – because every time I open Instagram these plates of pasta are waiting to remind me that my summer in fact sucks.
This year, after two seasons kept on a leash, FOMO returned with a vengeance. At times it has felt as though everyone else has been island hopping around Greece or pasta-hopping around Puglia; bouncing from Glastonbury to All Points East to Notting Hill Carnival. And yet the first proper summer since the pandemic has felt, much like the orchestrated casualness of that pasta scene, closer to a performance of fun than the real thing.
Festivals in the UK haven’t been selling out, with many forced to give away free tickets and others to close due to flat ticket sales and rising production costs. The weddings and hen parties and stag dos that fell like dominos for two years have now been re-stacked perilously close to one another, with the price of travel and accommodation for these occasions rising determinedly month after month. Long planned holidays have been ruined shortly before departure by a canceled flight due to staff shortages. Fun now comes with baggage which is heavy, and also probably lost in transit.
All summer I have received harried voice notes from friends when they have found snatches of time. Everyone – young or not so young anymore, single or navigating the first moments of parenthood, overworked or under-stimulated in their jobs, financially stable or hanging on by a thread – has relayed that they are so unrelentingly exhausted they think something must be seriously wrong with them. Even celebrities have been feeling it of late, with Tom Holland quitting social media, and both Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes cancelling tours for the sake of their mental health. If burnout was the catchall phrase for the emotional fatigue people suffered during the pandemic (leading to the so-called Great Resignation, and more recently the trend of Quiet Quitting ) then social burnout – or the Great Exhaustion, as a psychology professor at the University of Sydney recently termed it – is hot on its heels in 2023.
Dr Jon Van Niekerk, psychiatrist and medical director Cygnet Health Care, has explored why returning to normal after lockdown may be psychologically difficult. His work has looked at this through the lens of ‘re-entry syndrome’, a phenomenon that has traditionally affected explorers returning from isolated expeditions, or astronauts who have spent long stints in space. “It could be that we’re just in a transitional period, where as a society we’re getting used to being around each other again,” he says. "Curbing re-entry syndrome is about gradually reintroducing socialising and not expecting things to go straight back to normal, because it can be quite overwhelming,”
Predicting human behaviour in response to big societal changes is notoriously difficult. The forecast for another roaring twenties at the turn of the decade was quickly proved wrong as we entered a global pandemic, and the subsequent speculation that lockdown would cause a surge in sexual activity was contradicted by a decline in both sex rates and sexual desire. There are, at least, some small positives: “We didn’t see the big spike in suicides in the UK that people feared would come from lockdown, [maybe] because everyone was dealing with the same difficulty,” Van Niekerk says.
Even before the pandemic amplified them, our feelings of loneliness and isolation were becoming increasingly clear. In The Lonely Century, writer and economist Noreena Hertz noted how modern phenomena like smartphones and open-plan offices, and even more modern ideas like cuddle cafes and the gig economy, are signs we're being slowly closed off from conventional human interaction. Though the trend was already underway, Hertz writes that “Coronavirus triggered a ‘social recession’ with its toxification of face-to-face contact”.
Dealing with the fallout of that social recession might explain why this summer, which was meant to be a great moment of release, has felt a little off, and why, with life now closer to regular programming, the snapback to normal on our feeds – or at least, the performance of it – feels particularly disorientating.
“When things open up and you don’t feel like going to a party or a festival because you’re still struggling with your mood but other people are having an amazing time, that disconnect can be quite painful for people to tolerate,” says Van Niekerk. “People take for granted certain social behaviours like starting a conversation or small talk. For two years we were all deprived of keeping those social muscles exercised, so I think there is a lag and it’s going to take some time.”
He believes the key to riding out a period of social acclimatisation is to strike a balance between diving in so quickly you feel overwhelmed, and avoiding social interaction for fear of feeling just that. “We need to be patient with ourselves and relearn some of our social skills that have become a bit blunt, but also push ourselves to say yes and tolerate some of the anxiety as we move forward."
Tolerating that anxiety is made ever harder by the persistent fog of bad news. Anyone trying to sunbathe during the recent heatwave that saw record temperatures recorded in the UK brought to mind the cartoon of the dog staring into the distance of a burning room thinking: ‘This is fine'. The war in Ukraine has now hit the depressing milestone of six months and shows no sign of ending. Looming on the horizon is a dark winter where, without significant government intervention, experts predict many will die from being unable to afford their energy bills.
Avoiding feeling overwhelmed by these dispatches involves discipline with our media consumption, both in the way we read the news and when witnessing the Instagram vs reality disconnect we see as other people appear to be embracing living life at 100 miles an hour again.
Meik Wiking is is an author and the CEO of the The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, which he set up after reading Denmark had topped a list of 155 countries for happiness and figured someone should be exploring why. His research has confirmed a truism about social media – that it's not the thing itself making us miserable, but how we use it. Those interacting and making connections on social media may see benefits, but the endless, voyeuristic scroll we can all fall into often only increases feelings of loneliness. “We’re social animals so we think of ourselves as a part of a group," Wiking points out. "The mistake is thinking our friends and other people around us must be much happier than we are with our own life."
Comparison is the thief of joy, as Theodore Roosevelt and various items of wall art for sale on Esty have asserted. In the Instagram age that might translate to: a plate of pasta is always greener on the other side of the screen.