There’s an amazing study done in America where people were asked two questions. First, do you think this is a bad year for your country? Something like 80% of Americans said yes. Then, was it a bad year for you personally? And the majority said, “No, actually, my year was okay.”
That’s essentially the thesis of my new book, How to be Hopeful. Because we presume everybody else is having a terrible time, it’s become almost impolite to say that you’re hopeful. Things aren’t great, but historically this is a relatively peaceful, stable, prosperous era compared to the Great Depression, the Plague or the Blitz. We just need to start going, actually, I am okay. I have an ordinary life, and that is okay
We keep being told this is a climate of unprecedented chaos, but when you look at what people actually mean, it’s the rapidity of the news. Donald Trump sending 63 tweets a day, saying he’ll buy Greenland. He’s one man. He will die soon. Historically there have always been people like Trump who grab all the attention; they come and they go. The only gigantic change in our lifetime, apart from the climate crisis, is social media. Everything feels chaotic, isolating, disassociated, unreal, out of your control, and that’s all you being on social media. Take it away and you feel back in control.
Social media 1.0 is a failed experiment
I was leading a life I thought was pretty normal for a progressive, good person. I consumed all the news, kept absolutely up to date, listened to all the podcast analysis, read all the papers, got involved online explaining things and trying to change the world. When I added it up, it was 18 hours a week minimum. Then you take a break and ask what effect it has had. I just feel insane and anxious. Have I changed anything in Ukraine or Sudan or with the climate crisis? No.
And if you have any kind of public platform, people come at you every day. You haven’t spoken out about this, you haven’t spoken out about that, as if a humorous columnist from North London making a little proclamation on Twitter is going to change a single thing.
We’re ten years in now, and it hasn’t changed anything other than make everybody mentally ill. The platforms doing this to us are making so much money and becoming so powerful, and all these fights only benefit the people who own them. They engineer the algorithms so we’re constantly at war with each other. You destabilise democracy, everybody lives in a different silo, there’s conspiracy theory and fake news.
So I said, I’m going to rebel against this. Social media 1.0 is a failed experiment. It’s making children mentally ill, it’s costing the NHS billions, families are breaking up, and we haven’t solved a single one of the problems we thought we’d solve.
There’s a clip I love, filmed in Belarus. When you think you’re arguing online, standing up for something you believe in, and you’re crying, and people are attacking you, this is who you’re talking to. The camera pans around a very luxurious, very expensive office where men are playing pool and drinking coffee, and in the background there are thousands and thousands of phones and laptops, all using AI to argue with real people who are losing their mental health online. They think they’re changing the world. They’re arguing with bot farms funded by Russia and China and boosted by Elon Musk.
I cannot publicise myself on a platform that’s full of Nazis and child pornography. I had a million followers on Twitter, and that used to be great for promo, but I simply cannot be on there anymore. We’ve all got to have standards, right?
Sending a really great tweet isn’t the thing that changes the world
The problem of the last ten years is that we came to think talking about stuff was the most important thing, rather than doing stuff. Let’s make Britain do things again. Everybody talks about feeling like they don’t have control, and it’s because we sit here waiting for someone else to sort it out.
You can’t change the world, but you can change your street. You can change your local community centre. You can change your relationship with the people you’ve been fighting with online by going to the pub and looking them in the eye. It turns out the easy answer wasn’t the right one. Sending a really great tweet isn’t the thing that changes the world.
When I was really addicted to Twitter, I’d think everyone was waiting for me to say something. I’d leave a meal with my children because my phone beeped with a news story. “Kids, sorry, mummy’s just got to respond to this.” The greatest tweet I ever sent, as far as I remember from the stats, was about how much I fancied Matt Cardle in the final of X Factor. Something like 20 million impressions. Far less effective than the last time I donated blood.
The problem with doing good things is that we often think it’s quite worthy and boring and joyless, and it’s not. It’s thrilling and exciting. Our gardens combined are bigger than our combined national nature reserves. If you have a small area where the grass isn’t cut, insects breed, and once you’ve got insects, everything else feeds off them. Get moths back into your garden and you’ll get bats. If a peregrine falcon turns up in your back garden, I’m getting more out of this than the peregrine is. Looking out the window and seeing a redstart or a goldcrest fly past. These are the things that have made humans happy for tens of thousands of years. It isn’t natural to be the only living thing in a green space. Then very recently we invented social media and were told it was equally fulfilling to post a picture of your breakfast.
No one is born an anxious person
I have also become increasingly irate at the way we talk about anxiety now. When young people get diagnosed, it’s, well, you’re an anxious person, you’re going to be anxious forever, here’s some medication. But anxiety is supposed to be a transitionary state. No one is born an anxious person. There’s no such thing as an anxious person, there’s someone who’s suffering from anxiety in that moment, and you need to work out what triggered it and then unpick it. The uptick in anxiety diagnoses is truly dispiriting.
The lie we’ve been told about anxiety is to distract yourself. No. Take your headphones off. This is your life. We are born and then we die in such a small amount of time, and if you’re walking around listening to what millions of other people are listening to at the same time, you’re not where you are.
I was at a bus stop in the rain a few weeks ago, 20 minutes till the next bus, and my old coping method for anything suboptimal was to pretend I was dead until it was over. This time I thought, no, this is 20 minutes of your actual life you’ll never get back, how great can you make it? Take the headphones off, listen to the rain, look around. What are those two arguing about? What’s that shop selling? Oh, they’ve got a fatsia japonica growing there, and I’ve got the same soil, so I could grow one too. There’s a plane overhead, track it, oh, it’s going to San Francisco, how amazing. Optimise your normal life. I remember that 20 minutes so fondly now, when otherwise I’d just have sat there resenting the late bus.
I have also finally learned how to love winter. I get seasonal affective disorder, and I was terrified of it. But you can’t say “I’m a summer person, I hate winter,” because winter is going to happen anyway. Winter is a quarter of your life. The job of your life is to find a way to love the things that will happen inevitably. Instead of “it’s all shit and I’m going to run away,” or “it’s all shit, I’m waiting for a government or a revolution,” ask how am I going to make this 20 minutes, this day, this season, fun? It sounds simplistic, but it’s profound. You have to find a way to love it all, because it’s coming regardless
If there were ‘doom cakes’, we wouldn’t eat them. And yet we doom scroll
We’ve sold happiness, made it something you talk about and show and buy, rather than something you do. Hope is a verb, it’s a doing word. Being happy is the same. It’s not something that suddenly happens, you have to make space for it, put the right things into your life. No one ever came off a three-hour jag on Instagram going, “I feel so much better.” We call it doom scrolling and we still do it. If there were such a thing as doom knickers or doom sex, we wouldn’t be having it. If there were doom cakes, we wouldn’t eat them. And yet we doom scroll.
A lot of it seems obvious, but I deal with so many young people with terrible mental health. Their therapists tell me they ask two questions. First, your mental health today, one to ten? The kid says, one, it’s terrible. Then, what have you done today to help it? Did you go for a walk, see your friends, eat healthy food, do some exercise, connect with nature, help someone else? And they say no, I sat at home and scrolled and ate terribly. Your days are what you put into them. If you have good days, you’ll generally have a good life. We know all the things we’re supposed to do, and very often we let ourselves be distracted from them.
We are so lucky to live in a stable country. To potter in your garden is a luxury so many people on the planet can’t have. We’re not being bombed. Our sons aren’t going off to war. We’re not getting letters saying our relatives have been killed. So many people never get the chance at an ordinary life. They’re in drought zones or war zones or repressive countries. If you do get the chance, you can tend your garden, spend time with your children, feel part of a community and make the world a tiny bit better every day. You can’t change the world, but you can change your days, your street, your family, your friends’ lives. That’s enough. If everyone donated blood and their organs and tidied the streets and found one local charity to help or one person to mentor, that’s a better world. I’ll stand by that world.
One of the reasons Paul McCartney is one of my great heroes is that he’s a Beatle, he could do anything, go anywhere, and what he loved and deified was a normal life. His mother died young, he was plunged into a crazy career in his late teens, and his whole thing was that the ordinary life is beautiful. Making bread, being with his children, going for a walk, building his house, taking his wife on tour. He wanted his marriage and his children to work as well as his career.
Let’s make it socially acceptable to say, actually I feel quite hopeful
One thing I’m best at is guessing when it’s time for change. When I wrote How to Be a Woman, it was clear people were ready for the way we talked about women to change. It was the worst time to be a woman in the early ’90s, upskirting, Jessica Simpson being called fat at a size 10. With What About Men?, there was clearly a crisis in masculinity, though I published a year too early, then Adolescence came out and everyone said, “Yeah, let’s talk about men.”
With this one, I think we’re about to reach and pass peak despair. You can’t spend more than a decade thinking everything is terrible and the future is fucked. A new generation comes along and doesn’t want to buy into it. Parents look at their children and think, I can’t keep saying the future is doomed, because that’s their future and it’s freaking them out.
Underneath it all we’re a very hopeful species. It’s not currently polite to say you’re hopeful, and you just need two or three people going, “Yeah, I’ve decided to be hopeful now,” to make it allowable. Let’s make it socially acceptable to say I actually feel quite hopeful, my life is not that bad, I think things could get better, and here are the things I’m doing. I’ve decided not to believe in this apocalyptic death cult that thinks everything is getting worse and we might as well drown our children because their future is doomed. I don’t buy into that. It’s not my vibe.
The kids are already ahead of us. All mine have bought brick phones now. They were told they needed to be online for their jobs, and they’ve just watched everyone go mad. The evidence is there in the NHS mental health bill. We’ve got the most anxious generation of children, not teens, children, we’ve ever had, and nothing else has happened to this country. The only thing that changed is that they’ve all got these phones in their hands. So, ipso facto, let’s get rid of the phones.
This piece is adapted from a conversation between Caitlin Moran and The Skylark on 9 September 2026. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Caitlin’s latest book, How to Be Hopeful: A Year of Living Joyfully, Ebury Press, is available now. Caitlin is on tour until 27th September. Find out more here.
