Lifelong sufferers report dysphoric levels of internal torment. Christopher, now 62, started shedding when he was 28. “I was so proud of my thick hair, but it just got thinner and thinner,” he says. “It changes your image of yourself fundamentally, at least it did for me. Because my hair was so thick I never thought it would, and then I just thought, ‘Oh fucking hell. I’m going to be one of those bald guys.’ I’m not exaggerating — it robbed life of any pleasure. Just looking in the mirror became a torture. And I already drank a lot, and I started drinking really heavily after that. My drinking took on a really dark turn after the hair loss — it just poisoned everything.”

Christopher had five hair transplants over a couple of decades, and the final one “took” completely, leaving him with a full head of hair. But he tells me about a friend who started losing his as a teenager. “I know that it destroyed his self-confidence,” Christopher says. The friend, now 70, neither treated nor shaved it, persisting with “combovers and things like that”. “He would say, ‘Once you go bald, your looks are gone and you’re always going to have to accept second-best in terms of a wife’… I know it ruined his life.”

In an age of technologically compelled self-obsession, a version of this fear is already filtering down to my own age group. Having barely achieved the quarter-century, friends are inspecting their family trees for evolutionary disadvantage, peeling back fringes to reveal widow’s peaks and Eiger foreheads. It is now more than common for my social reunions to begin with an update on the loosened thatch — stories of smoothing back your rug only to find yourself with furry fingers, and of showers that seem uncomfortably akin to shaves. These anecdotes find plenty of statistical company. A quarter of men who develop hereditary male baldness (“androgenic alopecia”) see symptoms before the age of 21; by 35, two-thirds of men have lost at least some of their hair. 

Such is the potency of this fear that young men try to palliatively anticipate what’s to come. Ben is 29, and has been using medicinal treatments for hair loss for two years. “It was like a preventative thing,” he says. “I don’t like to think of myself as someone who is vain. But I don’t really exercise, and if I were to lose my hair, I’d basically just become my dad… It’s almost like a psychological thing where, if I take this pill, I’ll keep my hair. It’s like an anxiety deferred.” But he’s sure this is more prevalent among young men than it used to be. “If I was a 30-year-old man in the Seventies, and I was going bald, no one would care. Something has happened in the last 40 years.” And he’s right. For most of human history, however miserable it made them, men could do nothing about their condition. But now an entire male baldness industry has arisen to simultaneously nurture and service their fears. 

Suggested reading

Fat positivity is a fantasy

By Kat Rosenfield

The gold standard is, of course, the transplant, a treatment which sprouted onto the British male psyche in 2011 when Wayne Rooney explained: “I was going bald at 25 — why not?” In response, millions of men must have thought: if a guy who’s been turned into a Shrek doll by his own fans can have a decent head of hair, why not me? Other celebrities followed suit (“Rio Ferdinand shows off his new hair and beard transplant,” as the sidebar of shame had it last month) and now a £1.5 billion transplant economy has now opened up, headquartered in Istanbul. Nor is the trip necessarily a fool’s errand. For the scale of change possible, observe the stunning transformation of Arsenal defender Rob Holding from tonsured no-hoper to barbershop pin-up.

Though increasingly popular, this is still the expensive option, costing thousands in Turkey, and tens thereof in England. For those of leaner means, or whose condition is not yet so severe, there are alternatives. An entire fleet of companies has surfaced: Keeps, Rogaine, Happy Head, Scandinavian Biolabs, Sons UK, Numan, Unthin, Manual and Hims. If you haven’t heard of them, check the social media feed of any man you know. You’ll find their before-and-after adverts squatting there, admonishing and inviting. 

For around £20 a month, you’ll receive a mixture of topical and oral treatments (pills, shampoos, serums and sprays) which make use of two main chemicals, minoxidil and finasteride. The first came about by happy accident. Minoxidil is a vasodilator (a drug used to treat high blood pressure) originally developed in the Seventies. But when it was tested, doctors noticed that it also stimulated hair growth (exactly why is still somewhat unclear) and it was directed towards hair-loss treatment in 1986. Finasteride, meanwhile, is a “preventer”. The drug stops testosterone from turning into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a male development hormone, and was first developed to treat enlarged prostates in 1992. But, since DHT also stops hair growing, reducing its presence in the body can slow hair loss, including after it has already begun. The product joined minoxidil in a different section of the pharmacy in 1997. As cosmetic treatments, neither is available on the NHS for hair loss, though they have been available from private pharmacies for years. 

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In this way, these companies are effectively pulling off a marketing trick more than a medical miracle: they offer the slickness of a “telehealth” service, employing online physicians to validate prescription-subscriptions which are then sent out in the mail. And in this digital setting, a distinctive, millennial tech start-up aesthetic emerges: gorgeous websites, pastel colours, and stylish, sans-serif fonts. Hims is most typical, and like any modern company worth its screentime, offers a philosophy as well as a product. “Hims is about personal wellness,” its website boasts. “You should look and feel your best all the time. Our job is to make that easy and affordable… We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted. Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves [we’re too often told]. What a load of bollocks.”

This is the language of wellness, of looksmaxxing and personal optimisation, turned into breathy corporate advertising copy. The packaging of Hims’s bottles and pouches is of a piece — beige, clean and minimalist. Manual, which Ben uses, does the same: “You get a little box, and it’s very cute, and it’s like you’re opening a present… It’s almost like they’ve managed to remove all stigma around what is essentially a pharmaceutical product, and it just becomes another thing that you take alongside your vitamin D and vitamin C tablets.” Much like the supplement industry, they are marketing hair regrowth as a route to the giddy state of “self-care”. And not just hair regrowth — several (but not all) of these companies offer other optimising pathways to spot-free skin and top-notch sexual performance. In this context, hair regrowth becomes just one waypoint of many along the road to total masculine performance. 

But obviously there is a catch. For a start, none of these treatments is guaranteed to work — and certainly not to levels of reforestation depicted in the adverts — while the hair that grows can be thin, and disappointingly downy (“peach fuzz”, Christopher calls it). The drugs can also take months to have any effect, which, for all the many happy customers, will see many men paying for weeks’ worth of ultimately useless brew, while (unlike transplants) any improvements will disappear the moment you stop taking them. And, frequently noted in manosphere-adjacent corners of the internet, finasteride especially can have some worrisome side-effects: depression, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. Which makes you wonder if Hims were onto something with the specific combination of treatments they offer.

Suggested reading

What does Caitlin Moran know about men?

By Kathleen Stock

Nevertheless, men are flocking to these companies. While there’s little evidence that hair loss is statistically more prevalent today, the psychologists’ verdict is that social media has made millennials and Gen Z more “hair aware”. Popular Reddit threads such as r/tressless and r/HaircareScience provide a platform for tens of thousands of young men to trade tips on courses of “min” and “fin”, and share their own progress, uploading dozens images of their gradually thickening scalps. Even those who suffer the side-effects shrug them off: “Had a couple of days of ball ache and I don’t get morning wood anymore,” one user told me. “But fine. Satisfied with the results.”

Another man in his 40s making use of finasteride explained it “has had some psychological effects such as moderate depression that I have recently mitigated via antidepressants”. But, not to be deterred, he’s just starting using minoxidil too. Ben, meanwhile, used finasteride before minoxidil, and reported a plunging period of depression. “I was taking actually a very small dose, like half the dose I was recommended, and I just felt dead inside… It’s actually really disturbing that you can send off for something on the internet which can put you in such a dark place.” (Manual lists “low mood, depression or thoughts of self-harm” as very rare side-effects on its website.)

This is not exactly the relationship one might expect between a health supplement and its consumer, and it’s quite self-evident what all this really adds up to. In his 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to clarify the phase of late capitalism that had established itself in the post-war United States, based around the marketing of luxury and consumer goods. Many had been retailed through what he called “the dependence effect”, by which consumers’ “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied”. Frequently, producers may go as far as to “actively create wants through advertising and salesmanship”. In the Fifties, this meant white goods and General Motors. But now individual happiness is found in the mirror, much as it was once found in things. 

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Why men need bad-boy literature

By Nicholas Harris

Since then, with nowhere else left to colonise, capitalism has begun to cultivate the interior self, as it once did the fields and forests. And, it should be noted, this follows a strategy that has already been tried and tested to tremendous effect on at least 50% of the population. Women, for whom the scale of personal refurbishment demanded by society was always greater, have long been sold the language of optimisation and tweakments. It is part-and-parcel of existence as a female citizen-consumer, but also of a feminist discourse that has been critiquing the relationship of the cosmetic to the political for decades. 

The old stereotype of male insouciance when it comes to appearance is equally now long dead. A brave new world has crept up to replace it: of hair regrowth, breaking your femurs to gain a few inches in height, chin implants to achieve a squarer bone structure, and penis-enlargement surgery. But this is all about as liberating as the first appearance of Botox, another very 21st-century promise of cash-for-youth, cash-for-looks. It is another patch of the private realm swept into the orbit of commerce and checkout, a demand that may be exploited, but is ultimately unsatisfied.

Johnson admitted in an apology, made after emails that confirmed his long-denied use of performance-enhancing drugs, that he spent thousands of dollars a month on steroids. The aim was to endow himself with a physique that implied the extreme fitness that he was attempting to sell to others. But that fitness was illusory: one powerlifter who knew him recently mocked his 455-pound deadlift, a decent number for a novice lifter or a teen boy but unimpressive for someone spending as much on steroids as the Liver King.

The Liver King’s story is a microcosm of the ever-evolving Right-wing manosphere, which emerged from self-help roots in the early 2000s to attain a quasi-political, quasi-spiritual status, alongside the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The most obvious Trump train rider in the manosphere was former advice blogger and accused rapist Mike Cernovich, who published the political book MAGA Mindset as a follow-up to his Gorilla Mindset self-help text, between blogging about topics such as grip strength when choking a woman during sex. Liver King never became explicitly political the way Cernovich did, but his message was a streamlined and extremely dumbed-down version of the MAGA-adjacent ideology being preached by anon fitness influencers such as Raw Egg Nationalist — whose alignment with Tucker Carlson led to appearances in a documentary, The End of Men, as well as on Fox News.

For all these men, there is some kind of secret — an ancient secret, in the case of the Liver King — that gullible, inward-looking initiates must uncover, via various steps. The navel-gazing nature of all this recalls the fitness fads, cults, and other New-Age quests for meaning of the Seventies that cultural critic Tom Wolfe labelled America’s “Third Great Awakening”.

The previous two awakenings concerned the revival of Protestant spirituality in the mid-18th and early-19th centuries; all three were spurred by a sense of social disorder. First, New England Congregationalists strayed from the true light of the lord that led them to the New World. Second, newly Independent Americans found themselves facing down the settlement of the frontier with little assistance from their laissez-faire government. And in the Seventies, hippies and flower children found themselves grappling with the violent disappointments of popular protests, while a bloated, bureaucratic state struggled to bring about even a stalemate in Vietnam.

Throughout these three centuries, but with increasing velocity and urgency from the Sixties onward, the personal began to substitute for the political. Now, as Malcom Kyeyune recently noted, we are in uncharted territory: now, with “proliferating numbers of belief systems and fringe political narratives on the Web”, the political is personal. In other words, the “personal” — abetted by the technologies like social media that centre the user, indeed making them the narcissistic centres of their virtual worlds — has completely subsumed the “political”; everything everywhere is personal and filtered through some sort of Freudian superego that functions as a “self-marketing machine”, with the rest of life merely incidental. Online, various quasi-faiths and crude scientism are offering people personal uplift combined with the promise to fix their little communities, the only parts worth saving, the parts open to the elect.

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Glenn Youngkin is the Republican future

By Oliver Bateman

Though influencers such as the Liver King, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Bronze Age Pervert are new to the scene, relatively speaking, nothing about their appeal is novel (even though certain practices, such as directing red light on the testicles to stimulate testosterone production, are only now technologically possible). They themselves emphasise this: their appeals harken back to past practices, times when “men were men”, even if they cannot agree when exactly that was. Hesiod’s age of gold? A Twenties naval port, with nattily-attired “wolves” awaiting the hearty “rough trade” from the high seas, sure to appear whenever the “fleet’s in?” A seedy Forties YMCA, where the bodybuilding demimonde has gathered to “slonk” raw eggs before proceeding to grease up and commence lifting in jockstraps? Regardless of the time of the last real men, it was very different from our present fallen, failed, and low-testosterone state of existence.

Calls for the rebirth of masculinity echo throughout recorded history, issued by everyone from the aforementioned Hesiod to Japanese author and extreme nationalist Yukio Mishima (a favourite of this current round of fitness-cum-politics influencers). The “Third Great Awakening” of the Seventies ended with the emergence of religious groups such as the Promise Keepers, an Evangelical movement seeking to call men back to “courageous leadership” and “marital” fidelity. Meanwhile, in secular literature, the breakdown of masculinity and paternal authority was addressed in Robert Bly’s influential 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men — a text which inspired any number of subsequent manosphere efforts, including Tom Matlack’s “The Good Men Project”  (a website that launched the careers of everyone from Hugo Schwyzer and Harris “Dr. Nerdlove” O’Malley to yours truly) and even the pickup artistry of Neil Strauss and Mystery (Iron John, like Robert Greene’s works on power and seduction, found itself on many “PUA” reading lists).

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The evangelist who united America

By Oliver Bateman

I mention my personal involvement here — the personal is political, after all — because I’ve followed the manosphere’s trajectory since the early 2000s. I’ve also spent decades strength training and eating raw meat and raw eggs, as well as interviewing and writing about some of the world’s leading strength coaches and athletes. These activities would suggest, on the surface, that I am sympathetic to the cause of egg-slonkers, bronze-age warrior worshippers and bodybuilding aesthetes. Far from it: I see their Liver King-style marketing as sophomoric, the sort of thing I’ve attacked in print whenever possible.

My interest in strength stems solely from viewing it as preferable to incapacity. The enjoyment I’ve derived from weight training arises, to quote venerable strength coach Mark Rippetoe, who I recently interviewed, from “completing a task you couldn’t do previously”. And yet, throughout my career as a journalist covering sports and fitness, I have been asked what I have learned from figures such as Raw Egg Nationalist. When I interviewed the paleo diet influencer John Durant, during the early days of the alt-Right’s emergence as a media phenomenon, he assumed I shared his belief that eating raw or rare meat is a radical political act. I do see it as political, but only in the sense that I stand with politicians who support regenerative grazing practices and increasing access to meat for poor and undernourished children; meat is merely a means, not an end. I’d gladly eat something less primal, including biologically identical lab-grown meat, if such a thing could ever be manufactured cheaply and at scale.

That’s not to say that these fitness influencers don’t offer some useful advice. All popular gurus and spiritual leaders do. Eating organ meats, getting adequate sleep, spending time in the sun, and even taking some pride in one’s body — an edifice that is both temple and tomb — are not bad practices in and of themselves. However, this advice is chained to a lot of gobbledygook, from bizarre, hero-worshiping misreadings of history to faux-scientific racism. The noted dissident author Zero HP Lovecraft, for instance, once used a voice changer to record a podcast in which he argues that the different races are different species.

Suggested reading

The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussein

It is almost impossible to say how influential these figures are; on the one hand, they will claim that they directly created the Trump phenomenon, but on the other, they will joke that they’re just “frogs” who “shitpost online”, unlike the “facefags” (people whose identities are public) who genuinely care about things. Bronze Age Pervert, whose book Bronze Age Mindset is the sort of amusing Nietzschean pastiche one might expect from a PhD student having a spot of fun, is known to be read by congressional staffers; and yet, he huffily complained about City Journal allowing Kyeyune to publish an article that’s mildly critical of him. Like the Liver King, these figures take zero responsibility for the failures and shortcomings of their acolytes — but unlike him, most of them will never be seen at all, so what difference does it make?

Here, then, is the great weakness that stems from the evolution of “the personal is political” into “the political is personal”: far from allowing the development of strong convictions, the new creed is so malleable as to be meaningless. If one argues that the job of the Republican Party is to win elections and reward its constituencies, those on the Right who preach that “the political is personal” won’t help. Why would they bother? Most are already arguing that the nation or the world has collapsed, which is far easier than facilitating real political change, which would require moving the GOP to the centre.

Things are fairly hopeless, according to the manosphere. Yet if pressed, the Liver Kings and Bronze Age Perverts won’t turn on, tune in, and drop out like millenarian hippies bound for the commune; they’ll hang around, continuing to offer advice on how to infuse the self into politics and vice versa. They and many of their followers — some of whom left the Left by way of the so-called “post-Left” — would gleefully ridicule such “personal-political” posturing were it to issue from gender identitarians or committed anti-racists. Zero HP Lovecraft, however, says the quiet part out loud (in the same podcast in which he compares white and black people to wolves and coyotes): if one side is doing racism, then we will do racism as well.

This is the grave danger behind the very online Right’s turn towards “the political is personal”: at the back of the ironic fitness, the talk of physiognomy, and the IQ-test silliness, there lurks an us-versus-them mentality. And it’s a mentality that allows the manosphere to gleefully join the progressive Left in bidding farewell to any of the remaining civil norms that facilitate debate and compromise. It will do nothing to break the sclerotic gridlock in the body politic — and nothing, ironically, for the young men of America who are actually trying to get stronger.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here.

All year, we’ve had striking school children and Extinction Rebels tell us that time is running out and that we must take radical action now. They’ve made themselves heard and the politicians are pretending to listen: “OK, Zoomers — we’ll stick up a few more windmills — now, run along back to class.”

But according to environmentalists like George Monbiot, that’s not nearly enough. Clean tech alone won’t save the planet — we have to drastically reduce our consumption too. That way we can kick our fossil fuel habit much sooner, plus all the other ways in which we mess up our world. In short, our lifestyles are unsustainable, no matter how we power them. It’s an argument he sets out in his compelling Confessions interview with Giles Fraser (he also makes his case here).

What would 'living with less' actually look like?

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OK, let’s assume that things are every bit as bad as Monbiot says they are. Let’s also assume that people would vote for the radical reduction in consumption that would be required to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. You may think that deadline unrealistic, but it does allow us to ask an interesting question: what would living with less actually mean?

Extinction Rebellion swerves the question by referring it to the ‘citizen assemblies’ they want established. Other campaigners, including Monbiot, focus on the extravagantly wasteful appetites of the wealthy — whose private jets and grotesquely oversized yachts have got to go. Then there are the full-on Savonarolas, who look beyond the lives of the rich and famous, to humbler folk. They want us to give up our cars and stop eating meat, pronto. As for all of our stuff — the gadgets, trinkets and fast fashion — that too can fuel a modern bonfire of the vanities. (Though not literally, considering the emissions.)

In short, living with less means minimalism, veganism and bicycle-friendly cities — plus a hefty dose of egalitarian politics. From a youthful, Left-leaning, metropolitan point-of-view that doesn’t seem too bad. Rather agreeable, in fact.

Suggested reading

Who will ride the Green wave?

By Peter Franklin

Except that actual de-consumerism would be a lot harder. We know this because we’ve done it before. Go back 50 years and we were living with less; and a hundred years ago, even less than that. So, let’s use the past as a rough guide to the future.

The first thing worth noting is that a lower level of overall consumption does not require economic equality. Quite the opposite in fact. Rich people tend to spend a lower proportion of their money than the rest of us. Indeed, that’s one of the problems with the current age of inequality: because they tend to sit on their cash piles, millionaires and billionaires act as a drag on consumption and therefore economic growth. The conventional Left argues for more redistribution on the grounds that it would boost consumption. However, that goes against the logic of radical environmentalism. A seriously green agenda wouldn’t just need to re-invent capitalism, but socialism too.

In any case, it’s not the Gulfstreams and Daimlers that are making all the difference. It’s the era of mass mobility that’s put such a burden on the planet — all those millions of cars and billions of air miles. Lifting that weight from the world means rolling back freedom of movement for the many, not just the few. Access to affordable air travel and the private car would have to be heavily restricted.

Suggested reading

Why rationing air travel is the same thing as taxing people out of the skies

By Peter Franklin

As well curbing emissions, this would change society. The history of liberalism goes hand-in-hand with the history of transport — specifically the individual’s ability to physically escape the ties of family, community and place. We wouldn’t have to sacrifice all our gains, of course. There’d still be room in the new dispensation for bicycles and buses (indeed a great deal more room, with cars off the streets). Nevertheless, by limiting our options for getting around, we’d be shrinking our horizons.

“Think global, act local” is an old environmental motto. But in a less mobile society, would we continue to think globally? After all, it’s hard to be a citizen of the world if you can’t get there. We’d have to forget foreign holidays, wave goodbye to the gap year: luxuries that our ancestors couldn’t imagine would become unimaginable again. Moreover, what applies to tourism and travel would also apply to migration. A globalised economy that depends on millions of workers moving back and forth across continents doesn’t fit with a living-with-less regime.

There might, however, be a new source of labour. Or, rather, a return to an old one as colleges and universities were emptied of their students. That so many young adults today can study for so many years is a sure sign of our great wealth, but would it survive the economics of ‘de-growth’? I doubt it.

Suggested reading

Who gains from the great university scam?

By Mary Harrington

Another relevant pattern from the past concerns family structure. One of the reasons why people were able to live with so much less is that social bonds were stronger and a whole lot more restrictive. The only welfare state was the household and, perhaps, the immediate community — which is why our forebears couldn’t afford to be as socially liberal as we are.

Some environmentalists see fit to lecture people on the number of children they have. And, fair enough, each extra mouth places an additional burden on the environment; but then so does living in ever-smaller households so that the same population requires a greater number of resource-consuming homes. Learning to live with less would mean learning to live together — at the expense of personal autonomy.

Suggested reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

It’s hard to think of a single stable society that lives with much less than we do that isn’t much more conservative than we are. Take attitudes to crime and punishment, for instance. These are typically harsher in places and times where the impact of theft and vandalism is more deeply felt. A simpler, less consumerist society may appeal in theory to the green Left; in practice it may prove more pleasing to the reactionary Right.

But, hang-on, a de-consumerised future wouldn’t have to mimic the pre-consumerist past, would it? Though we’d need to make difficult choices, we could prioritise the things that mattered most to us. Indeed, part of the attraction of this whole agenda to radicals is that the process of priority-setting would allow society to be reordered in keeping with their values.

Perhaps, but if the climate emergency does compel us to change our ways, democracy won’t allow one side of the cultural divide to load most of the pain on the other side. We saw what happened in France when President Macron tried to introduce a fuel tax that hurt the left-behinds more than the well-connected. So if we do need to radically cut our consumption, those in the forefront of the cause are going to have to accept that the sacrifices will be as painful to them as to anyone else.

But there’s something odd about the perfectly choreographed, meticulously turned-out K-pop idols adorning bedroom wall posters across the planet – none of them are wearing glasses. Well not odd, because in showbiz image is everything – but, rather, at odds with the astonishingly high levels of shortsightedness among young Koreans.

Further reading

What's making Millennials so lonely?

By Peter Franklin

Back in 2015, Nature published an article on the phenomenon by Elie Dolgin – and, if you’ll forgive me, it’s a proper eye-opener. It seems that the world is in the grip of a myopia epidemic – with an especially high rate of incidence in East Asia:

“East Asia has been gripped by an unprecedented rise in myopia, also known as short-sightedness. Sixty years ago, 10–20% of the Chinese population was short-sighted. Today, up to 90% of teenagers and young adults are. In Seoul, a whopping 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.”

It’s been getting worse elsewhere too:

“Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago.”

What on Earth is going on? Variations between different populations might suggest a genetic component, but Dolgin, noting the astonishing rise in cases from one generation to the next, says that “genetic changes happen too slowly to explain this rapid change”.

We might be tempted to shrug our shoulders – after all, it’s a pretty minor condition, isn’t it? Well, not for everyone:

“In severe cases, the deformation [of the eyeball] stretches and thins the inner parts of the eye, which increases the risk of retinal detachment, cataracts, glaucoma and even blindness… about one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss.”

A recent article in Optometry Times, by Raman P Sah, confirms the threat:

“Myopia is now one of the leading causes of vision impairment and blindness in the world… The increasing prevalence of myopia has emerged as a global health concern because of sight-threating pathologies like myopic macular degeneration, choroidal neovascularization, cataract, and glaucoma associated with high myopia.”

When a potentially serious medical condition that used to be rare (at least among young people) becomes increasingly common, we need to know what’s causing it.

Further reading

The hermit generation: The young aren’t rebelling against society, but hiding from it

By Peter Franklin

Can we blame reading for the epidemic – whether it’s printed material or, more latterly, electronic media? Is all that squinting over page and screen harming our eyesight? Dolgin argues that it isn’t – at least not directly.

Researchers believe that the real problem is not with the act of reading (or checking social media apps or playing computer games), but with where such activity normally takes place: indoors. Dolgin guides us through the compelling evidence that exposure to the brightness of daylight helps young eyes stay healthy.

Of course, humans have been spending time indoors ever since our ancestors built the first hut. But in recent times we’ve conspired to keep ourselves – and especially our children – cooped-up as never before.

Though we fret about the impact of modern life (and especially new technology) on our wellbeing, we’re rather selective in our concerns. We pay a lot of attention to some potential threats (e.g. smartphone addiction) and surprisingly little to others (see above).

Yes, it’s true that social media exposes young people to pressures and influences that previous generations did not experience, but what about all the other ways in which we’ve altered the physical and social environment in which children grow up? I’d say that any factor that prevents children getting enough sunshine is worth worrying about.

Back in the 1990s, I got chatting to a very nice bunch of Seventh Day Adventists. They were missionaries, of a kind – dedicated to a Biblically-based programme of health and well-being. They summed up their approach in the acronym NEW START, which stands for Nutrition, Exercise, Water, Sunshine, Temperance, fresh Air, Rest, and Trust in God.

Decades on, it strikes me that contemporary culture is now very keen on the NEW part of that formula (even if the ‘water’ bit is now called ‘hydration’). However, we’re not so good when in comes to the START. Obviously, Trust in God is a challenge to our sadly untrusting secular society, but we could make more of an effort on the STAR. Making sure children get the sleep they need, and stay away from the alcohol and other substances they definitely don’t need, is a matter of control (and teaching self-control), but to give them more sunshine and fresh air, we need to set them loose.

Further reading

Why cities are no place for kids

By Peter Franklin

It’s time to return to a free-range childhood with plenty of unstructured, unsupervised outdoor play. Of course, that requires reasonably clean and safe places for them to play in, but adults (including parents, teachers and the various regulators of the public realm) also need to get over their paranoid, risk-averse mind-set.

In over-protecting children and over-organising their lives, we may be doing them real physical harm.

If we really care about our kids, we should kick ’em out.