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You overindulged last night; now you’re reading this article with squinting eyes and a throbbing brain. But that’s ok: it’s the first day of Dry January, our nation’s secular rite of penitential self-improvement. Time to flex those atrophied willpower muscles and go “monk mode”. Instead of hitting the beers, you’ll hit the gym. With your extra mental bandwidth you’ll make some headway through the pile of unread books you’ve been eyeing guiltily all winter. You’ll crack on with your New Year’s resolutions: start learning Mandarin or writing that screenplay.
I know how you feel: I’ve had a few bouts of overindulgence in my time. One of them spanned my twenties and ended in rehab (that’s another story). And through hard-won experience I’ve learned one big thing about behaviour change: willpower is overrated. What counts is your environment. Psychologists agree: the marshmallow test – which supposedly proved the crucial importance of individual self-control to success in life via the choices of pre-schoolers – didn’t replicate. When you’re resisting temptation, you’re already losing.
So I wish you luck in your attempt to go sober for the next 31 days. The odds are in your favour: there’s no reason to go out because all your friends are doing Dry January too. And this year, more than ever, you’ll be swimming with the tide of collective action: alcohol sales are at an all-time low. Britain, once a famously boozy nation, increasingly prefers to abstain. But here’s the chaser: I’m equally sure that much of the extra time and headspace you’ll gain this month will go to waste. In Western countries, our bodies are getting fitter while our minds are getting slower and sicker. We are drinking less, exercising more and slimming down – but we’re spending more time single, socialising less, and using our downtime less meaningfully.
The explanation for these opposing trends has little to do with willpower, and everything to do with our changing world. For decades our homes have been getting more comfortable and more entertaining, so we increasingly choose isolation. Instead of eating out, we order in. Instead of going to the cinema, we stream. The invention of the smartphone compounded these developments, propelling us into what the US author Derek Thompson has called “The Anti-Social Century”. Thompson has documented how Americans spend more time alone than in any recent period; Britain, trending the same way, is not far behind.
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The cliché is that we’re living through a “loneliness epidemic”. But, as Thompson points out, that may be a misdiagnosis. Growing numbers are chronically lonely, but for most the problem appears to be subtler. We’re spending more time alone not because we lack social options but because, more and more, we prefer solitude. Socialising may be fun, but it also involves friction, compromise, possible rejection – and increasingly the trade-offs don’t seem worth it. WhatsApp and social media mean that even when we’re alone we’re connected. Paradoxically, the problem may be that we aren’t lonely enough to go out and spend time together.
There are upsides to our growing isolation. Sobriety is one: fewer get-togethers means less booze. And that leaves us more time and energy to exercise: physical activity rates are up across all age groups. That can only be a good thing, even if we increasingly train solo rather than play team sports. Thanks to the miracle drugs we’ve invented to combat our obesogenic modern food environment, we may have passed peak BMI too. That’s the good news. But how are we spending all the time we’ve clawed back from alcohol? What are we doing with our fitter, leaner bodies when we’re not in the gym?
Increasingly, the answer is: nothing very worthwhile. Of her 900 waking minutes, the average UK adult spends 201 – almost three and a half hours – on her phone. (For teenagers, it’s nearly five hours.) We think of our smartphones as tools for communication, navigation and information access. But a device that never leaves your side, and that you use almost constantly, is less like a tool and more like a climate. To a large extent, your phone is your environment.
As a result, it’s no surprise smartphones are profoundly shaping our behaviour. Take two examples: gambling and reading. Online gambling rates more than doubled over the past decade, fuelled by sports betting among young men; around one in 40 UK adults is now believed to have a gambling problem. Meanwhile a long-running survey of US teenagers found that, whereas readers once outnumbered non-readers by two to one, now the reverse is true by a ratio of three to one. (Comparable numbers have been reported in the UK.)
Expect those trends to continue. In the smartphone age, activities that reward effort and sustained attention – that is, most things worth doing – are endangered. Our devices, too useful to relinquish, exert an irresistible addictive pull. We are like alcoholics condemned to carry a hip flask with us everywhere we go.
The downstream effects of your phone-based life means that, for all your gains in physical health in 2026, insofar as you resemble the average British person you will be more solitary, sadder and stupider than you were last year. A record 40 per cent of adults are single, rising to 63 per cent of men under 30; according to demographer Alice Evans, by keeping us separate smartphones may be driving down fertility rates. Strong social bonds underpin wellbeing, so unsurprisingly mental health problems are up, particularly among teens. New evidence shows plateauing IQ scores and declining verbal and numerical reasoning among Westerners, with smartphones a likely culprit. The online world may even be changing our personalities, making us less conscientious and more neurotic.
The average person is, of course, a chimera – a composite that includes the dropout junkie and the teetotal striver. But averages make norms, norms make culture, and culture yanks the puppet strings of your individual will. That’s why gyms are busy on 1 January, and pubs are busy on 1 February. And if you think you’re less vulnerable than most to the trends I’m describing, you’re just like the large majority of people who are convinced they have above average qualities. This is called the “illusory superiority effect”, and it’s one of the cognitive biases to which you’ll be more prone next year thanks to your declining reasoning skills.
In the last century, mass democracy and the knowledge economy presupposed a literate and cognitively skilled citizenry. If the gloomiest forecasts for the 21st century come true, perhaps society will increasingly have more use for our bodies than our brains. In the meantime, some of us will seek ways to resist the isolating and intellectually stunting effects of the modern world. The answer, I am sure, does not lie within. Could 2026 see a disruptive tech start-up offer customers a mental edge via a smartphone that delivers the convenience without the compulsion? I hope so. Because when it comes to facing the temptations of the way we live now, resolution or sobriety won’t cut it.
[Further reading: OK Boomer, buy me a drink]
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