Glasses Off, Time to Go Home

On Social Stamina, Online Exhaustion, and Why the World Outside X Looks a Lot More Ordinary (and Hopeful) Than the Doom Merchants Claim.

It’s bank holiday weekend, and I am, to put it bluntly, completely peopled out.

The socialising started on Friday night with friends who’d managed their first child-free weekend in eighteen months. Just let that roll around in your head for a moment. A year and a half without a break. If it were me, I’d probably need to be poured back into the house with a ladle. They didn’t quite hit that level, but let’s just say, they got messy. I helped them get messy. And it was glorious.

We even managed something approaching a pub crawl, although “crawl” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Parents who’ve had the longest dry spell of their social lives, me working what feels like three jobs, my husband doing two - by eleven o’clock we were all utterly exhausted. The secret language of couples and long-time friends kicked in, those subtle signals that it was time to go home. Mine is subtle - remove glasses, polish them very deliberately, re-perch them on my nose with a weary sigh. My husband’s is more direct - he’ll just say “I’m doing, I would like to go home now”.

Both work. Very effectively.

Saturday, a different set of friends, a food-festival-type thing that I’m calling “explory.” New stalls, new flavours, crowds to weave through - fun, but the sort of fun that comes with a social hangover. By the end of yesterday I realised I had aggressively burned through my (very limited) weekly ration of “time with people who are not my husband.” I think we all have these rations, don’t we? Hours we can allocate to others before the tank runs dry. Mine is empty now. Consider me running on fumes until Tuesday.

And yet, here I am still writing - which probably tells you that, like so many of us, I’ve spent a little too long online this week.

Specifically, on X.

I’ve come to the realisation that I just don’t have the stamina for it anymore.

Where originally when I started out my Bear account, I had the energy to wade through wave after wave of ignorance, replying, fact-checking, occasionally trolling for sport, now I just… don’t.

Not in an “I’m giving up for good” sort of way.

More in the sense that I know I’m not going to convince someone who believes Nigel Farage is both prophet and messiah. If you genuinely think the sun shines out of his arsehole, the honestly, there is no amount of careful explanation that will shift you. And at a certain point, why even bother?

That’s the shift, I think. When I first came onto the hellsite, it was fun. It was a little chaotic, yes, but it felt like an adventure. There was discovery in it. Now? It feels no more or less like a tool. Useful for breaking news, occasionally delightful when the algorithm goes batshit and serves me a wall of cat photos, but mostly a blunt instrument. A place I check because I feel I should, rather than because I want to.

And it’s not necessarily just the trolls either. It’s the way the whole place magnifies a tiny sliver of reality into something that feels like the entire picture. A handful of “concerned citizens” outside a hotel suddenly looks like a national uprising because the same clip is boosted, reshared, reframed until it’s unavoidable. The so-called “weekend of hotel protests” that was hyped up for days ended up being about 2,000 people in total, scattered across the country, but on X, it was presented like it was the second, slightly sloppy, Stella-fuelled storming of the Bastille.

Step outside into the real world, though, and it looks very different.

This weekend I’ve been all over - pubs, food festivals, Lidl, Sainsbury’s - and you know what I saw? People. Just… peopleing. Buying milk, dragging reluctant toddlers through supermarket aisles, couples bickering about which wine to buy, groups of mates balancing too many pints on one tray. Ordinary, slightly mundane life. No looming sense of civil war, no palpable fear. For all the shouting online about how “this country is going to the dogs,” the reality was queues at the bakery and people trying to navigate the self-checkout machines.

Now, of course, there are issues. Serious ones. I’m not suggesting the United Kingdom is some utopia where everyone hums along, but what strikes me is how often the problems punctuate rather than overwhelm. They appear in moments - a headline about inflation soaring again, a conversation with a friend stretched thin by childcare, a foodbank quietly expanding in the church hall down the road - rather than hanging in the air everywhere you go. The texture of everyday life is not collapse. And that feels like it matters.

Which brings me neatly to Notting Hill Carnival.

It’s Carnival weekend, which means we’re in for three days of columns, op-eds, and breathless television segments about how it’s the end of civilisation as we know it. You can almost set your damned watch by it. Every year the same hysteria (and usually from the same people): lawless streets, cultural decay, Britain burning. Every year the same tedious demands for it to be banned.

Now, I may or may not bite this year.

Part of me wants to ignore it altogether, because engaging feels like rewarding bad faith and attention seeking. But on the other side, part of me also recognises that the pattern is the point. Carnival coverage isn’t about reporting on an event - it’s about reinforcing a narrative that Britain is perpetually teetering on the brink. The reality, of course, is thousands of people dancing, eating, drinking, celebrating. But that doesn’t fit the script, so instead we get headlines that would make you think it’s Thunderdome with bunting out there.

Photo by Glodi Miessi on Unsplash

Sound familiar?

Probably because it’s the same trick as the “better off on benefits than £100k” line that went viral this week, which is a claim that looks damning in isolation, but collapses the moment you scrutinise. Yes, in some extreme, vanishingly rare scenarios, benefits can look high on paper, but even those scenarios involve catastrophic circumstances: serious disability, high medical needs, discretionary housing support because the rent is sky-high. To hold that up as the “norm” is like saying the NHS is overflowing with plastic surgery because one person had a nose job on medical grounds.

And yet, it lands.

Why?

Because the story has been told for so long that it feels true. The lazy benefits scrounger, the chaotic Carnival, the “Britain in decline” narrative - they’re all variations on the same theme. Small examples inflated, amplified, repeated until they overshadow the far bigger, far more boring reality, which is that most people are just trying to get through the week in one piece.

I have to remind myself of this as well, because I can fall into the trap of navel-gazing too. When you spend your days immersed in commentary and analysis, it’s easy to believe that the thing dominating your feed must be dominating everyone’s lives. But it’s not. Sometimes it’s just noise - loud, yes, but still just noise.

That’s why weekends like this are becoming more and more important in my life. Nights out with messy friends, explory food festivals, supermarket runs. They’re reminders that the “real country” isn’t a headline or a hashtag. It’s a dad trying to juggle four ice creams, a teenager nervously buying flowers for a first date, two pensioners arguing cheerfully about the bus timetable.

And maybe that’s the thought I want to leave you with to end this week. That the world outside the six-inch screen is still mostly cohesive and not collapsing. That problems are real, but they punctuate rather than define. That the loudest voices online are often the most detached from reality.

I’ll keep writing, of course - about benefits myths, about the politics of distraction, about Carnival coverage if I can’t resist. But I’ll also keep reminding myself (and hopefully you, too) that most of the country is just… peopleing. And that’s a good thing.

So thank you, as always, for reading.

I also want to say thank you for the kind messages after my more confessional post earlier this week about my dad - I haven’t responded to everyone, but I’m grateful. And yes, I know I’ve been a bit slack on the recipes. September should see me back on track, with some treasures from my battered copy of Kook en Geniet to share.

For now, though, I think I’ve earned a quiet night in, glasses firmly on my face, with the very real possibility of taking them off just to signal to myself that it’s finally time for bed.

All the best,

Bear