I was on the bus and the woman next to me was looking at her phone. She was trailing down a list of feeds on facebook. All big culture coming and hitting you in the face on the 36 bus. She was looking at a video of a woman doing stomach exercises. The woman was a kind of top model type. And I thought: well, there you go, it’s not all bad, it’s good to exercise, big culture can be a nudging force for good. But then I thought that often it isn’t because the next post down will be some attempt to get you to spend £300 on a pair of trainers manufactured for a fiver in South East Asia so that a set of guys in California or Florida can put even more cash into their back pockets. And that model doing the stomach crunches will be sporting those trainers maybe. There is a constant discordant battle going on in big culture. Radio Five Live will run a piece about Mindfulness or How to get good sleep and with the next sentence they’ll ask you to tweet in or share some social media page or contribute to what they call the conversation, whereas if you really want to be in a position to get a good night’s sleep you really want to stop contributing to the conversation, cut it out the constant whirr of opinion and liking or loathing. Yes, on the whole, all things considered, I apply what I now call the mostly distrust what big culture offers you back stop. Join me here on…

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