Avoidance as a lifestyle

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Last Tuesday, I crunched along a gravel path in Central London and emerged into a neatly manicured garden, filled with well-dressed people. I recognised quite a few of them, from industry peers to faces I’d grown up watching on TV. Waiters hovered around, proffering delicate canapés that would do absolutely nothing to soak up the many glasses of prosecco being brought to the lips of attendees. Conversation filled the air. I stayed for exactly 45 minutes. In that time, I listened to two short speeches from our hosts and chatted briefly to three people, only one of whom I had prior acquaintance with. Then I made my exit.

This, you might be surprised to hear, was a personal triumph. The event was the Substack summer party and it took a huge effort of will to get me there in the first place. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to show up; on the contrary, I was quite embarrassingly pleased when the invite dropped into my inbox. But I didn’t have a plus one — friends I asked were busy, a romantic partner is non-existent — and I was up against one of the biggest obstacles possible: myself. I am world-class at talking myself into sticking with familiar comforts, avoiding any possibility for awkwardness, discomfort or (perceived) rejection. Often the consequence of this is spending the majority of my weekday evenings at home, or in the gym.

I’ve written about a period of hermittude before, but this is different. I want to be social now. I’m yearning for it. At weekends, my calendar has begun to fill up again, both with pre-scheduled plans and spontaneous adventure. The stability of being back in London has clearly boosted my appetite for other people. I’m ready to go out into the wilds once more, make new acquaintance.

And yet, when push comes to shove, I find myself so often opting for the road well trodden: staying in.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. The rise of the ‘homebody’ has been the focus of a glut of media, especially since the pandemic. Why young people aren’t going out as much to the likes of clubs is a collective cause of fret. There’s economic reasons for this, obviously. But I was out all the time when money was much tighter. Some of the biggest socialites I know are ones who live on the breadline. In fact, financial constraint is sometimes a driver: evenings out on the town can, counterintuitively, be great ways to save on money if you’ve honed the art of blagging a free meal or drink via making acquaintance of the right people.

Plus, people are still willing to spend money they do have — and some they don’t. What’s changed is where they want to splash the cash. Food culture is obviously in the midst of a massive boom, (driven in part by how easy it is to package and post trendy restaurant spots on social media; influencers are filling tables like no one’s business). A recent survey of 1,000 young Londoners (millennials and Gen Z) found the majority would prefer to go to a restaurant as a social activity, than visit a pub or club.

So it’s not just penny pinching. No, something else has shifted. We can all feel it. The call of the wild is being overpowered by the call of… well, if not the couch, at least pursuits that carry less potential for any sort of social anxiety: meals out, gallery trips, park picnics. I’m never one to bash a wholesome exploit — god knows, I am subject to weekly despair when thinking about Britain’s relationship to drugs and booze —but I think underpinning these social changes among the young is something a bit more concerning. There’s a thread connecting the evenings in, the rise of gym culture and self-optimisation, the complaints about a crisis in dating and the Deliveroos.

To cadge from sociologist Rosalind Gill (who I mentioned last week, via Sophie Gilbert), I’ve got a theory: we are experiencing the emergence of avoidance as a sensibility.

Avoidant attachment style(s) of course, has long been part of internet discourse du jour. That relates to how we form relationships with other humans, what pattern our bond-making falls into. In the mainstream, avoidance is mostly considered through a romantic lens. What I’m talking about here is something much wider; a collective recalibration impacting how great swathes of young people perceive and react to the world.

Such a change has been catalysed by the promise of tech to reduce experiencing friction wherever possible. Swaddled by convenience culture, friction essentially has come to mean to ‘any situation that makes us feel a bit discomforted’. This ranges from going on more than two dates, to thinking for ourselves. Avoidants, you see, are made, not born. And everything about our digitally dominated world encourages an arms-length approach, or swerving the mess that accompanies engaging with our fellow humans.

I suppose, fearful avoidance would be the attachment style that most closely mirrors the mass behaviour I see but as I’m talking about a thematic framework, rather than diagnosing everyone individually, it doesn’t really matter. A good analogy is a household budget vs the national economy. They share some principles but they don’t map onto each other in exactly the same way (which is why we don’t have to balance the sodding books at the cost of public services. Politicians just claim we do, and then consistently fail to clear the debt anyway, immiserating us all in the process).

Our tech increasingly allows disconnection from the normal friction of a life shared with other humans, particularly when it comes to our leisure time. QR codes instead of ordering at the bar. Meticulously planning your restaurant experience via social media, website menus and online booking portals. Netflix. Hinge. PureGym pods. Ghosting. InPost lockers. AirBnb. Posts on Reddit asking questions like ‘is this bar busy on Saturdays?’. Uber, both cars and eats. Chat GPT. WhatsApp. Self-service checkouts. I could go on.

Under such circumstances, the requirements of standard social interaction — like a bit of casual conversation — are increasingly being reframed as a ‘stressors’. Slight discomfort is pathologised as an abnormal anxiety response. By these metrics, many of us are triggered. So we retreat to our safe little cocoons, often taking to the internet when ensconced to complain about the lack of opportunities to meet others, to be surprised, to be approached. There seems to be a latent expectation that life will arrive at the door with minimal fuss, the way a Friday night pad thai now does.

I have set myself a goal this summer, to really lean into the friction. Before I left London last year, I was whining to friends I’d become too comfortable. “I just have everything sorted, y’know?” I said in explanation for my move. In retrospect, replanting myself in a city with a totally different character to the one I adored was perhaps not the most sensible of decisions. But it certainly introduced a monumental amount of discomfort into my life and with it, the most growth I’ve undergone since my last big break-up. I’m so thankful for the period of change it kickstarted and I don’t want to squander — or surrender — the lessons I’ve only just started to learn. A major one is this: the price of connection, of living life full-throatedly is at least a little awkwardness. It’s messy and nerve-wracking putting yourself out in the world. But if you don’t try, well. You already know what will happen.

Reviews and views

• I went home to Herefordshire this weekend for Father’s Day, to see the man who is essentially, if not legally, my stepdad, and was reminded I grew up in god’s own country. Yes, an increasingly wetter climate means one day we might all be underwater but for now it’s resulting in lusher vegetation. We had rainfall over night, followed by glorious sun and when I woke up, our garden looked like this:

  

  On Saturday evening, I rocked up to the pub with a handful of my cousins and was reminded of the fact that there are beautiful little holiday cottages available for rental on my aunt and uncle’s farm, which is about three fields’ walk from my childhood house. Given I’m always trying to lure people to the beautiful place I grew up, I said I’d give them a mention for anyone looking for a weekend break (or longer). One cottage is a grade II listed converted barn that sleeps eight, the other a converted milking parlour that sleeps two. If you’d like to stay (and help my aunt collect chicken’s eggs in the morning — that’s an option), click here for more details.

• I was working from Birmingham on Friday, which is always a pleasure, partly because I have a sick love of commuting, but also because I just like Birmingham, a very unfairly maligned city. It’s also much easier to get back to Herefordshire for a weekend now I have a reason to spend a working day in Brum. My mood was buoyed further by realising there was a Foyle’s just above the train station; I’d had an odd craving to re-read The Bell Jar all week, perhaps because the weather is so sticky right now and I’m in one of those Transitional Moments. Anyway, I bought and inhaled it on my evening journey back home. Alongside The Bell Jar, I also left Foyle’s with my first ever Andrea Dworkins, plumping for Right-Wing Women and Pornography. I don’t think I was ready to take on Dworkin before. She has a terrifying reputation and boy, does she not pull punches (a large section of Pornography’s introduction is devoted to using the Holocaust as an analogy for the sexualised violence engendered — she believes — by porn). I think I had to be an adult to read Dworkin, or at least capable of forming my own opinions. It is extremely refreshing to read a polemic so righteously sure of itself though. We are very timid now!

• I went to a breakfast talk on Wednesday as part of the month-long London Festival of Architecture (on until 30 June, events here) which has a lot of very good, very free events all over the city. This one took me to Guildhall, to hear about efforts to pedestrianise the city. I wish I could make this sound less wonkish because it’s actually a fascinating question of: how do you make a place work for people? Right now, for example, Camden is currently trialling pedestrianising its high street. I’ve watched The Strand, where my uni campus was located, be completely rejuvenated by a 10 year pedestrianisation project that’s almost complete. But there’s lots of clusters of the city (and elsewhere in the UK), where pedestrianisation is felt to be paternalistic and cars have become a focal point of a culture war — with people clinging onto their vehicular access for dear life. It’s a problem with no immediate solution as frankly, it is top down governance to tell a resistant community: ‘btw, this is good for you so we’re doing it regardless :)’. But a lot of the time… it is good for them, long-term. Quite the bind. Anyway, I’d never been to Guildhall and rounding the corner into the complex actually robbed me of my breath for a second because the combination of open square, church spire and gleaming cream stones looked more like Kotor, in Montenegro, than EC2V.

  

  Balkans or Cheapside?

• Reminder: for those in London, we’re throwing a HEATED day party this Saturday! It’s from 3pm — first I will be on the National March for Palestine, which is gathering at 12pm at Russell Square. But afterwards, I’ll be heading to The Glove That Fits for a day of music and mingling, with a bonus Radical Connections session at 4.30pm to get people introduced to one another, if they so wish. Plus, the Glove informs they’re doing some food now. You can bring your own or buy on site. Click here to grab tickets.