I talked openly about not wanting children from about my mid-twenties. It was never an agonising decision, or even a decision at all. It just was, for both of us.

Over a decade later, this choice has become a huge topic of conversation. It’s no longer unusual and I often see it talked about as a logical reaction to the state of the world.

I remember saying back then that this wasn’t a world I’d bring children into. In 2015. Do you remember 2015? Before Trump, before the referendum, before the pandemic. Before the worst of social media and before AI. Thank GOD I felt it even then, because it’s so much worse now.

I often wonder if I’m just going through the same process people did when machines started taking the jobs of factory workers. The worry, the feeling that everything is falling apart. Is this how it felt when the first whispers of concentration camps started to spread? Apathy or substanceless outrage, everywhere, every day.

Life expectancy, literacy, violent crime and so many other markers of quality of life have all vastly improved over the last century. So why does everything feel poisoned?

I imagine people in 1926 would report a greater satisfaction with life than now. Less comparison with others. Less awareness of all the world’s horrors. Less consumerist manipulation everywhere we look.

They were in the same place we are now, chaos-wise. 1926 was the year of the General Strike in the UK: coal miners protesting wage reductions. Capitalism was capitalising, oh boy. The French bombed Damascus. Enormous, deadly hurricanes in Florida and Cuba. A necrophiliac in San Francisco had murdered and raped eight people. Italy readopted the death penalty. Life wasn’t in any way easier.

But they didn’t know about all of it, all at once, all the time. They weren’t shamed, persuaded, pressured and coerced into psychic dead-ends at every turn. I’m sure people living in a small village on the Isle of Wight either didn’t hear about most of this, or read about it a maximum of a couple of times a week in the paper. Consuming news in 10-minute bursts, separated by days of nothing but local, affectable life.

It’s not that I don’t think we all have a responsibility to be educated on global issues – I do, strongly. Believing there’s nothing you can do about the world’s problems is easy self-comfort; there’s lots we can do at every level about the terrible things we see every day.

But the more you engage, the more the algorithm feeds you. War, famine, disaster, political cruelty, disintegrating human rights… Our daily bread.

At some point we have to call time in order to replenish, or we do risk apathy. The brain will surely initiate kill switch protocol after too much impotent rage.

Something has to give. I already limit my social media time. I stopped following breaking news accounts. Still it endlessly flows into my brain. Brick phone? Cave dwelling?

My job has been internet for my entire adult life. It’s almost impossible to disconnect from the constant noise. I fantasise about being committed to a sanitorium for ‘exhaustion’ and having nothing but the classics to reluctantly retrain my stuttering brain on.

I think to get back to real, we have to actively centre real more. Read real books, write on real paper with a real pen. Listen to real sounds instead of drowning out thought with endless podcasts. I need to look at real things and touch real things.

A new season is required. A season of real replenishment.