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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
We are living in a self-service world. At the supermarket (if you still physically go to one), you can use an automated checkout and not have to bother asking the person at the till how their day is going. If you need cheering up, don’t worry about calling a friend, just open your favourite social media platform and let the algorithm lull you into numbness. If you need relationship advice — actually scrap that, you don’t, because now you’re in a relationship with an AI chatbot and, unlike the yoomans, they don’t cause you any drama. Idyllic isn’t it?
Well maybe not. While we have been so busy making everything so convenient and becoming so self-sufficient, we seem to have also made ourselves lonely and miserable. The World Health Organization estimates that 4.4 per cent of the global population is suffering from an “anxiety disorder” and that loneliness is linked to around 100 deaths per hour.
At the same time, the self-help and wellness industries are booming. According to Grand View Research, a market research company, the global “self-improvement industry” has grown to about $50bn and will swell to over $67bn in 2030. McKinsey reckons the broader “wellness market” — which includes physical and mental health — is worth $2tn, reporting that more than two-fifths of Gen Z and millennial Americans now see “mindfulness” as a “very high” priority. About a fifth of the 50 most-listened-to podcasts on Spotify are focused on self-help and improving your mindset. Almost a third of Britons have had therapy during the past year.
What gives? How can we all be trying so hard to make ourselves better and yet also finding it hard to cope? Are we working on ourselves too much? Or perhaps we pathologise every little niggle and make it worse by turning it into a full-blown “mental health problem”. A recent study led by a psychologist at Oxford university suggested as much, concluding that in some cases “this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: interpreting difficulties as a mental health problem can lead to changes in self-concept and behaviour that ultimately exacerbate symptoms and distress”.
There is a delicate balance to be struck between raising awareness and destigmatising mental health issues, versus psychiatrising ourselves into oblivion. And I should say that I don’t wish to diminish the value of self-improvement. Indeed, I spend a lot of time on these things myself (sometimes in some slightly “woo woo” ways). But maybe there is something else going on, too. While we have become so very good at — or at least so fixated on — helping ourselves, we seem to have forgotten about the importance, the value and the joy of helping others.
On the left breast pocket of the dowdy navy blue school blazer I had to wear at my south-east London Catholic secondary school was sewn a crest, with its Latin motto underneath: Serviam, or “I will serve”. I remember finding it slightly bemusing. Who would I serve? God? What if he didn’t exist? And even if he did, what was the point in serving him — surely God didn’t need my help?
The idea, my teachers explained, was to serve God by serving others. Indeed, this is central to Christian teaching, as to other religions: devotion is expressed not just by belief and prayer but via actions, too. God is encountered not through divine abstraction but in ordinary and often rather inconvenient acts of service.
So it is perhaps not surprising that as religion has declined and our societies have become more and more geared towards serving ourselves, so has the idea of the importance of service to others. The number of people who volunteer regularly has declined significantly in recent years: in 2023-24, 16 per cent of British adults said they had volunteered formally at least once in the previous year, down from 27 per cent just a decade earlier.
I get the sense that many people do want to contribute to society but they are not sure how. Some worry that it will make them feel worse. I have been volunteering once a fortnight for 18 months at a suicide charity, and I can tell you that it’s quite the opposite. As one of my fellow volunteers on a recent shift put it (unprompted), “it’s a bit like mindfulness. You battle the Tube to get here and then you step in here and you focus on something that’s really important. Everything that’s outside of this place disappears for four hours.”
As the saying goes, “if you want self-esteem, do something estimable”. Perhaps McKinsey might think of adding “acts of service” to its “wellness market” surveys. Or perhaps we don’t need to think of it that way at all; there is life outside the markets.
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