The yoga industry is booming – but does it make you a better person?

Brigid Delaney in The Guardian

It was 2010 and the newspaper I worked for in Sydney commissioned me to interview yoga entrepreneur Bikram Choudhury.

He was in town to open the first of a chain of hot yoga studios. Choudhury’s brand of yoga – which he had trademarked and franchised – involved 26 poses in a humid, heated room with mirrors and carpets. When I visited the studio and caught the stench and the robotic instructions from a mic’d-up teacher, I thought: Yeah, this won’t take off.

I had been doing yoga for a decade by the time I met Choudhury. Once or twice a week, I’d go to nice, easy hatha classes, wearing whatever old tracksuit was to hand – just like everyone else in the room. Yet my progress was slow; I had never managed to get beyond beginners’ level. I was always at the back of the class, struggling to get my arm behind my calf to touch my other hand. I just assumed that this pace was my natural limit.




'He said he could do what he wanted': the scandal that rocked Bikram yoga



In his suite with harbour views, Choudhury told me about all the famous people who did his yoga – people such as Madonna and Jennifer Aniston. Then he looked me up and down.

“You,” he said. “You need to do some Bikram. You are overweight.”

“What? Huh?” I said, shocked at this breach in interview etiquette.

“Do my yoga,” he said, indicating a pair of lithe Bikram yoga instructors seated at his feet, “and you could look like them.”

For years after meeting him, I would walk past the fogged-up, vile-smelling Bikram yoga studios and think: screw you, Bikram.

But part of me also wondered if he had a point – could you completely change your body shape by doing his yoga? Should this even be an aspiration when you do yoga?


FacebookTwitterPinterest Yoga has morphed into a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Choudhury is now in the sin bin. In 2016, he lost a lawsuit in which a former employee had claimed sexual harassment and wrongful termination – and he was ordered to pay $7m in damages.

But yoga – hot, cold – and all sorts of novelty yoga (including nude yoga, beer yoga and goat yoga) is booming. In the past decade, it has morphed from being an exercise you might do once a week at your local gym to a lifestyle – and a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire.

According to a 2016 Yoga Journal report, 36.7 million people practise yoga in the US, up from 20.4 million in 2012. The yoga market is now worth $16bn (£12bn) in the US and $80bn (£74bn) globally. In the UK, “yoga” was one of Google’s most searched-for words in 2016, while the yoga and pilates business brings in £812m a year, and rising.

People are packed into classes, which cost north of £10 a pop, yoga teacher training costs thousands (fees start at around £1,500 and can go to £5,000) and yoga retreats are pricey.

It is not just the studios. Take a look at the market for yoga mats. According to market research company Technavio, the US yoga and exercise mat business is expected to climb from $11bn (£8bn) now to $14bn (£10bn) in 2020. Sales of athleisure clothing, generated $35bn (£25bn) in 2015 – an all-time high – making up 17% of the entire US clothing market, according to market research firm NPD Group. Yoga pants by Lorna Jane cost $110, while GQ magazine has described Lululemon’s yoga pants as a cult obsession among “a certain set of gym-minded women and busy moms across the country”. You can even buy Lululemon prayer beads for $108 (£80).

In my local area of Sydney, upmarket yogis have colonised the high street. Most people I see walking around the city’s Bondi suburb have stopped wearing proper clothes. Unless you are around the bus stops in time for the morning commute, people dress almost exclusively in exercise gear – yoga pants, vest top and hoodie, flip flops in the summer, trainers in winter. They loiter in the aisles of the organic fruit and vegetable shop, their yoga mats hitting me in the face when they turn around. They zip around the narrow streets by the beach on mopeds or bicycles and, after class, gather around the large communal tables of cafes, sipping $10 juice in mason jars or almond milk chai.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘After class they gather around sipping $10 juice.’ Photograph: Alamy

Secretly I wanted to be them. But it was more than just a look. Every yoga class I tried out in Bondi had a semi-spiritual element that I found enticing. At the start of class, the teacher might read some Sanskrit verse, or play sitar music while reading from a spiritual book – such as Eckhart Tolle. In increasingly non-religious countries such as the UK and Australia, this is where a lot of young people receive their moral or spiritual teachings.

In many respects, yoga is the perfect pastime for our age – the meditative elements give us the opportunity to find peace and stillness in a time of increasingly hectic and crowded information, the instructional bits give us moral lessons in the absence of traditional religion, while the stretchy, bendy, sweaty physical stuff is a great way of countering eight or more hours a day spent hunched over a computer. But is any of this yoga making us more enlightened or more compassionate? Or is it just another wellness industry trend that only the rich and idle can afford to properly indulge in?

One day last year, after my usual weekly class in a studio full of part-time models, I came across a flyer. It promised that in six weeks I could become a “modern yogi”. All I had to do was to attend classes six times a week, meditate daily, keep a journal and take part in weekly meetings that are part tutorial on mindfulness and part group therapy. The programme promised that “an exciting transformation will occur”. Could I become one of those people I saw walking around Bondi – yoga mat strapped to my back, my Instagram feed full of downward dogs on the cliffs, with a Pacific Ocean sunset in the background?

I started the $600 programme, stuck with it and found things started to shift. After doing yoga and meditation every day for six weeks, my body felt looser, more pliable. Getting up during cold winter mornings and bending down to pick a sock up off the floor became a lot easier. Physically it was tough, and it took a month to really get my fitness level moving, but gradually I was able to keep up with the more athletic Vinyasa classes. At the end of 90 minutes, I would be covered in sweat and felt a curious mix of exhausted and blank. The repetitive sequences became a routine that I did robotically, without thinking. I was bored in class, but I also turned off my mind and the classes themselves became like a moving meditation.

As for the spiritual aspect, occasionally the weird speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home. On Friday in my first week, in a move that shocked just about everyone, Britain voted to leave the European Union. The teacher, an Irishman, referenced Brexit in his sermon about 45 minutes into the class. “You might not like change. You may resist change,” he said, walking around the heated room. “You may not agree with it. You may think the change is a bad thing. A very bad thing. But change has happened. It has happened and you can’t do anything about it. To resist it is pointless.” His voice was heavy, sorrowful, and he sighed. “It is what it is.”

There was a feeling in the class that we needed to hear things like this – but afterwards, I thought: Is this going to be the extent of our resistance and our protest against political situations that we don’t like? We stretch and get a sermon, go and have a juice – and that’s it?


FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Occasionally the weird spiritual speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home.’ Photograph: Getty Images/Topic Images

I started thinking a lot about yoga and so many activities that are part of the wellness industry, and how so many people pour energy into their bodies when perhaps they should be trying to pour energy into the people and politics around them. Self care is great – but what if there’s no energy left to care about anyone else?

In the New York Times, American writer Judith Warner noted a disturbing social trend. Just as the women of the mid-70s took flight into consciousness-raising groups, the workforce, divorce and casual sex, their daughters are also taking flight, but that flight is inwards. “They’re fleeing to yoga,” she writes in the Times, “imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day.”

Warner glumly, but correctly, concluded: “There is no sense that personal liberation is to be found by taking a more active role in the public world.” In fact, “such interiority seems to be a way to manage an unbearable sort of existential anxiety: a way to narrow the scope of life’s challenges and demands … to the more manageable range of the in-and-out of your own breath.”

The more yoga I did, the more compliments I received. My hair was shiny – people commented – and my skin glowed, my clothes were looser, and, like so many others, I began wearing athleisure gear to work. After all, work was just a pit stop on the way to another yoga class. Maybe Choudhury was right after all – maybe I could look different if I did a lot of yoga.

I wrote in my journal, I went to the Monday-night tutorials, I meditated, I drank cold-press juices, I did all the right things to become a modern yogi. I was on the way to achieving the ideal of the glowy person in the organic shop. I was almost there before I started wondering – is this really what I wanted to be?

The answer was, of course, no. I was a yogi for about two months before the narcissism of the whole enterprise got to me. There were other things, it turned out, that I had to do.

'It was quasi-religious': the great self-esteem con

Will Storr in The Guardian

In 2014, a heartwarming letter sent to year 6 pupils at Barrowford primary school in Lancashire went viral. Handed out with their Key Stage 2 exam results, it reassured them: “These tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique… They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister.”

At Barrowford, people learned, teachers were discouraged from issuing punishments, defining a child as “naughty” and raising their voices. The school’s guiding philosophy, said headteacher Rachel Tomlinson, was that kids were to be treated with “unconditional positive regard”.

A little more than a year later, Barrowford found itself in the news again. Ofsted had given the school one of its lowest possible ratings, finding the quality of teaching and exam results inadequate. The school, their report said, “emphasised developing pupils’ emotional and social wellbeing more than the attainment of high standards”. Somehow, it seemed, the nurturing of self-esteem had not translated into higher achievement.

The flawed yet infectious notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80s. Since then, the self-esteem movement has helped transform the way we raise our children – prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences.

One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the chief executive of British exams regulator Ofqual admitted the value of GCSEs and A-levels had been eroded by years of “persistent grade inflation”. In the US, between the late 60s and 2004, the proportion of first year university students claiming an A average in high school rose from 18% to 48%, despite the fact that SAT scores had actually fallen. None of this, says Keith Campbell, professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and expert on narcissism, serves our youngsters well. “Burning yourself on a stove is really useful in telling you where you stand,” he says, “but we live in a world of trophies for everyone. Fourteenth place ribbon. I am not making this stuff up. My daughter got one.”

Campbell, with his colleague Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, has argued that this kind of parenting and teaching has contributed to a measurable rise in narcissism: witness the selfie-snapping millennials. Although their findings are disputed, Twenge points to other research done in the US and beyond – “twenty-two studies or samples [that] show a generational increase in positive self-views, including narcissism, and only two [that] do not”.


To get ahead in the 1980s, you had to be ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself

How did we get here? To answer that, you have to go back to 1986 and the work of an eccentric and powerful California politician, John “Vasco” Vasconcellos. That year, the Democrat Vasconcellos managed to persuade a deeply sceptical Republican state governor to fund a three-year task force to explore the value of self-esteem. Vasco was convinced that low self-esteem was the source of a huge array of social issues, including unemployment, educational failure, child abuse, domestic violence, homelessness and gang warfare. He became convinced that raising the population’s self-esteem would act as a “social vaccine”, saving the state billions.

But Vasco’s plan backfired spectacularly, with the fallout lasting to this day. I spent a year trying to find out why – and discovered that there was, at the heart of his project, a lie.

***

John Vasconcellos grew up an obedient Catholic, an altar boy, the smartest kid in his class, whose mother swore that he never misbehaved. But, being such a devout Catholic, he knew that no matter how good he was, he could only ever be a sinner. At primary school, he ran for class president. “I lost by one vote. Mine,” he later said. He didn’t vote for himself because “I’d been drilled never to use the word ‘I’, never to think or speak well of myself.”

After a spell as a lawyer, Vasco entered politics. In 1966, aged 33, he was elected to the California state assembly. But there was a problem: his professional success was at odds with how he thought of himself; he felt he didn’t deserve it. At 6ft 3in and over 200lb, he would stalk the Capitol building in Sacramento, glowering and anxious in his smart black suit, perfect white shirt and arrow-straight tie, his hair cropped with military precision. “I found my identity and my life coming utterly apart,” he later said. “I had to go and seek help.”

That help came from an unusual Catholic priest: Father Leo Rock was a psychologist who had trained under the pioneer of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, a man who believed that the Catholics had it absolutely wrong. At their core, he thought, humans weren’t bad; they were good. And in order to thrive, people needed to be treated with “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers coined the phrase). Vasco began studying under Rogers himself, a man he later described as “almost my second father”. Through intense group therapy workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Vasco became a devotee of the human potential movement, based partly on the Rogerian idea that all you need to do to live well is discover your authentic inner self.

 Illustration: Franck Allais for the Guardian

Around the state capitol, Vasco’s colleagues began to notice the buttoned-up Catholic was unbuttoning. He grew his hair and wore half-open Hawaiian shirts on the floor of the senate, a gold chain nestled in his chest hair. One reporter described him as looking like “a cross between a rock star and a drug smuggler”. He became a human potential evangelist, preaching the innate goodness of humans and handing long book lists to colleagues. His self-hating Catholic self had washed away, and in its place was a great, glowing letter “I”.

Vasco knew he was in a unique position. As a politician, he could take everything he’d learned about human potential and turn it into policy that would have a real effect on thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. He decided to campaign for a state-financed task force to promote self-esteem: this would give the movement official affirmation and allow politicians to fashion legislation around it. Best of all, they could recruit the world’s finest researchers to prove, scientifically, that it worked.

In the mid-80s, the notion that feeling good about yourself was the answer to all your problems sounded to many like a silly Californian fad. But it was also a period when Thatcher and Reagan were busily redesigning western society around their project of neoliberalism. By breaking the unions, slashing protections for workers and deregulating banking and business, they wanted to turn as much of human life as possible into a competition of self versus self. To get along and get ahead in this new competitive age, you had to be ambitious, ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself. What Vasco was offering was a simple hack that would make you a more winning contestant.

Vasco’s first attempt at having his task force mandated into law came to a halt in 1984, when he suffered a heart attack. His belief in positive thinking was such that, in an attempt to cure himself, he wrote to his constituents asking them to picture themselves with tiny brushes swimming through his arteries, scrubbing at the cholesterol, while singing, to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat: “Now let’s swim ourselves/ up and down my streams/Touch and rub and warm and melt/the plaque that blocks my streams.” It didn’t work. As the senate voted on his proposal, Vasco was recovering from seven-way coronary bypass surgery.

After a second attempt was vetoed by the state governor, Vasco decided to enhance the name of his project, upgrading it to the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. He reduced the proposed budget from $750,000 a year to $735,000 over three, to be spent on academic research and the gathering of evidence in the form of public testimony. On 23 September 1986, Assembly Bill 3659 was signed into law.

The response from the California media was immediate and savage. One editorial, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called Vasco’s task force “naive and absurd”. Nothing made Vasco more angry than his ideas not being taken seriously, but he was about to become the joke of America.

***

Until Monday 9 February 1987, Vasco’s task force had been largely state news. But on that morning, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who had been tickled by the politician’s crusade, began an extraordinary two-week run of his popular Doonesbury strip devoted to it. By the end of that day, reporters were crowding Vasco on the floor of the assembly chamber. Rival politicians gave dismissive briefings – “You could buy the Bible for $2.50 and do better” – while the Wall Street Journal’s story bore the headline Maybe Folks Would Feel Better If They Got To Split The $735,000.


Vasco's credibility turned on a single fact: that the professors had confirmed his hunch. The only problem? They hadn’t

Vasco was livid. The media, he complained, were “terrible, cynical, sceptical and cheap”. Their problem? “Low self-esteem.”

Meanwhile, something remarkable seemed to be happening. The response from the people of California had been great. Between its announcement and the task force’s first public meeting in March 1987, the office received more than 2,000 calls and letters, and almost 400 applications to volunteer. More than 300 people came forward to speak in support of self-esteem at public hearings across the state. And even if the media’s tone wasn’t always respectful, Vasco himself was now a national figure. He appeared everywhere from Newsweek to the CBS Morning Show to the BBC. This, he sensed, could be a major opportunity.

But first he needed to find a way to wrench the media conversation upwards. And things, on that front, were going from unfortunate to ridiculous. It began with the announcement of the task force’s 25 members. On the upside, it was a diverse group, including women, men, people of colour, gay people, straight people, Republicans, Democrats, a former police officer and Vietnam veteran who’d been awarded two Purple Hearts. On the downside, it also included a white man in a turban who predicted the work of the task force would be so powerful, it would cause the sun to rise in the west. A delighted Los Angeles Herald told how, in front of the press, one member of the task force had asked others to close their eyes and imagine a “self-esteem maintenance kit” of magic hats, wands and amulets.

Vasco’s team began hearing testimony from people up and down California. They heard from an LA deputy sheriff who toured schools, attempting to reduce drug use by telling pupils, “You are special. You are a wonderful individual.” They heard from masked members of the Crips, who blamed their violent criminality on low self-esteem. One school principal recommended having elementary pupils increase their self-importance by doing evaluations on their teachers. A woman called Helice Bridges explained how she’d dedicated her life to distributing hundreds of thousands of blue ribbons that read Who I Am Makes A Difference.

With the national media given so much to snigger over, it was beginning to look as if Vasco’s mission was a bust. But there had been some good news: the University of California had agreed to recruit seven professors to research the links between low self-esteem and societal ills. They would report back in two years’ time. For Vasco, their findings would be personal. If the professors decided he was wrong, it was all over.

***
  Me, myself and I: a selfie-snapping millennial. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

At 7.30pm on 8 September 1988, Vasco met the scientists at El Rancho Inn in Millbrae, just outside San Francisco, to hear the results. Everything hinged on Dr Neil Smelser, an emeritus professor of sociology who had coordinated the work, leading a team who reviewed all the existing research on self-esteem. And the news was good: four months later, in January, the task force issued a newsletter: “In the words of Smelser, ‘The correlational findings are very positive and compelling.’”

The headlines quickly piled up: Self-Esteem Panel Finally Being Taken Seriously; Commission On Self-Esteem Finally Getting Some Respect. The state governor sent the professors’ research to his fellow governors, saying, “I’m convinced that these studies lay the foundation for a new day in American problem solving.”

Vasco’s task force was almost done: all they had to do now was build upon this positive tone with the publication of their final report, Toward A State Of Esteem, in January 1990. That report turned out to be a victory beyond the reasonable hopes of anyone who had witnessed its humiliating origins. The governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who’d privately mocked Vasco and his project, now publicly endorsed it, as did figures including Barbara Bush and Colin Powell. Time magazine ran with the headline, “The sneers are turning to cheers.”

The man they were calling the Johnny Appleseed of Self-Esteem appeared on the Today Show and Nightline, on the BBC and Australia’s ABC. The report went into reprint in its debut week and went on to sell an extraordinary 60,000 copies. Vasco’s publicists approached Oprah Winfrey, who ran a prime-time special examining why she believed self-esteem was going to be one of the “catch-all phrases for the 1990s”. Interviewed were Maya Angelou, Drew Barrymore and John Vasconcellos.


What had really happened at that meeting? I found the answer on an old audio cassette, hissy and faint

Four months after the launch of Toward A State Of Esteem, the papers were reporting that self-esteem was “sweeping through California’s public schools”, with 86% of the state’s elementary school districts and 83% of high school districts implementing self-esteem programmes. In Sacramento, students began meeting twice a week to decide how to discipline other students; in Simi Valley, kids were taught, “It doesn’t matter what you do, but who you are.” Political leaders from Arkansas to Hawaii to Mississippi began considering their own task forces.

As the months became years, the self-love movement spread. Defendants in drug trials were rewarded with special key chains for appearing in court, while those who completed treatment were given applause and doughnuts. Children were awarded sports trophies just for turning up; a Massachusetts school district ordered children in gym classes to skip without actual ropes lest they suffer the self-esteem catastrophe of tripping. Meanwhile, police in Michigan seeking a serial rapist instructed the public to look out for a thirtysomething male with medium build and “low self-esteem”.

The credibility of Vasco’s task force turned largely on a single fact: that, in 1988, the esteemed professors of the University of California had analysed the data and confirmed his hunch. The only problem was, they hadn’t. When I tracked down one renegade task force member, he described what happened as “a fucking lie”. And Vasco was behind it.

***

In an attempt to discover how America, and then the world, got conned so spectacularly, I travelled to Del Mar, California, to meet the task force member who’d predicted their work would cause the sun to rise in the west. David Shannahoff-Khalsa welcomed me into his bungalow, looking little changed from the old photographs I’d seen: face narrow, eyes sharp, turban blue. A kundalini yoga practitioner who believed meditation to be an “ancient technology of the mind”, Shannahoff-Khalsa had been so disillusioned by the final report, he’d refused to sign it.

Illustration: Franck Allais for the Guardian

As we sat and nibbled cheese, he picked up a thick book with a shiny red cover: The Social Importance Of Self-Esteem. This was the collected work of the University of California professors. He flicked through its pages, settling eventually on Smelser’s summary of the findings. “The news most consistently reported,” he read out loud, “is that the association between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant or absent.”

This was a radically different conclusion from that fed to the public. Shannahoff-Khalsa told me he was present when Vasco first saw preliminary drafts of the professors’ work. “I remember him going through them – and he looks up and says, ‘You know, if the legislature finds out what’s in these reports, they could cut the funding to the task force.’ And then all of that stuff started to get brushed under the table.”

How did they do that?

“They tried to hide it. They published a [positive] report before this one,” he said, tapping the red book, which deliberately “ignored and covered up” the science.

It was hard to believe that Vasco’s task force had been so rash as simply to invent the quote, the one that stated the findings were “positive and compelling”. What had really happened at that meeting in September 1988? I found the answer on an old audio cassette in the California state archives.

The sound was hissy and faint. What I heard, though, was clear enough. It was a recording of Smelser’s presentation to Vasco’s task force at that meeting in El Rancho Inn, and it was nowhere near as upbeat as the task force had claimed. I listened as he announced the professors’ work to be complete but worryingly mixed. He talked through a few areas, such as academic achievement, and said: “These correlational findings are really pretty positive, pretty compelling.” This, then, was the quote the task force used. They’d sexed it up a little for the public. But they had completely omitted what he said next: “In other areas, the correlations don’t seem to be so great, and we’re not quite sure why. And we’re not sure, when we have correlations, what the causes might be.”

Smelser then gave the task force a warning. The data was not going to give them something they could “hand on a platter to the legislature and say, ‘This is what you’ve got to do and you’re going to expect the following kind of results.’ That is another sin,” he said. “It’s the sin of overselling. And nobody can want to do that.”

I wondered whether Smelser was angry about the quote that got used. So I called him. He told me the university got involved in the first place only because Vasco was in charge of its budget. “The pressure [from Vasco] was indirect. He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to cut your budget if you don’t do it.’ But, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea if the university could devote some of its resources to this problem?’” It turned out that Smelser wasn’t at all surprised about their dubious treatment of the data. “The task force would welcome all kinds of good news and either ignore or deny bad news,” he said. “I found this was a quasi-religious movement, and that’s the sort of thing that happens in those dynamics.”

Vasco passed away, aged 82, in 2014, but I traced his right-hand man, task force chairman and veteran politician Andrew Mecca. When we finally spoke, he confirmed that it was the prestige of the University of California that had turned things around for Vasco. “That earned us some credibility stripes,” he said. Like Smelser, he felt that the university became involved only out of fear of Vasco. “John chaired their lifeblood. Their budget!” he chuckled.

How did he rate the academics’ research? “As you read the book,” he said, “it’s a bunch of scholarly gobbledegook.”

What was Mecca’s response when the data didn’t say what he wanted?

“I didn’t care,” he said. “I thought it was beyond science. It was a leap of faith. And I think only a blind idiot wouldn’t believe that self-esteem isn’t central to one’s character and health and vitality.”

Was Vasconcellos angry when he read the professors’ reports?

“The thing is, John was an incredible politician. He was pragmatic enough that he felt he had what he needed, and that was a scholarly report that pretty much said, ‘Self-esteem’s important.’ At least, that’s the spin we got in the media.”

Mecca told me that, prior to the final report’s publication, he and Vasco visited editors and television producers up and down the country, in a deliberate attempt to construct the story before it could be subverted. An extraordinary $30,000 was spent on their PR campaign: at its height, five publicists were working full time. “We decided to make sure we got out there to tell our story and not let them interpret it from the stuff that was being written by Smelser. We cultivated the message. And that positiveness prevailed.”

So nobody listened to what Smelser and Shannahoff-Khalsa were saying?

“I’m not sure anybody cared,” Mecca said. “Who remembers Neil Smelser or Shannahoff-Khalsa? Nobody! They were tiny ripples in a big tsunami of positive change.”

***

More than 20 years on, the effects of Vasco’s mission linger. Whether the tsunami of change he brought about was wholly positive remains doubtful. I spoke to educational psychologist Dr Laura Warren, who taught in British schools in the 90s, and remembers her school’s edict that staff use mauve pens to mark errors, in place of the negative red. “It was a policy of ‘reward everything that they do’,” she told me. “That turned out to be a terribly bad idea.”

The Ofsted inspectors discovered as much when they visited Barrowford primary school in 2015. But after their critical report became public, the headteacher, Rachel Tomlinson, defended herself in her local newspaper. “When we introduced the policy, it was after an awful lot of research and deliberation,” she said. “And I think it has been a success.”

People who buy expensive cars enjoy killing pedestrians

Bridget Christie in The Guardian

Illustration: Nishant Choksi for the Guardian

 

As a standup comedian, I have a heightened sense of other people’s behaviour. In a room of 500 people, I can sniff out the one checking their watch, yawning and stretching their arms above their head. There are a myriad ways an audience member can display their apathy towards you. One standup friend, Joe Wilkinson, saw a piece of chewing gum fall out of a man’s open, dribbling mouth while he was doing his best stuff. I’ve had a man in the front row order himself a takeaway.

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I think society is ruder than it used to be, and I’m not alone in thinking this. Paul Piff is an assistant professor in the department of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California. Last year, he wrote a paper titled Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behaviour. In layman’s terms, what Prof Piff is saying is, rich people are more likely to behave like twats than poor people are.

Piff proved his suspicions in a number of ways, many of them involving the use of hidden cameras. One of his experiments, which he shared during an unintentionally hilarious TEDx talk, meant getting some of his mates to stand at pedestrian crossings and monitor which cars stopped and which didn’t. Normal cars (ie ones that look like their sole purpose is to transport people safely from A to B without exploding) stopped – which, incidentally, they were legally obliged to do. “Status cars”, such as 4x4s, convertibles, sports cars, chariots and the Diamond Jubilee State Coach, did not. Piff had proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that people who buy expensive cars enjoy killing pedestrians, which definitely qualifies as unethical behaviour.

Another of Piff’s films showed two young men playing a rigged game of Monopoly. One player was given an unfair advantage: more money, two dice, a crash course in Received Pronunciation, a massive throne to sit on, an ermine cloak and the Sovereign’s Orb. The behaviour of this player changed rapidly. He started playing in an incredibly annoying, obnoxious way.

The most fascinating part, for me, was that, even though he knew he was at an unfair advantage, the player still believed he had won the game through personal skill. I thought immediately of George Osborne cutting the maintenance grant for Monopoly players from low-income families, and how this meant that working-class kids would now always lose at Monopoly, so won’t even bother trying to play any more.

Piff believes that being wealthy can make people less ethical, more selfish and less compassionate. “The rich are way more likely to prioritise their own self-interests above the interests of other people,” he says. “It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.” Yes, that’s right. There is a professor, called Piff, who used the word asshole in an academic study.

I’ve encountered a lot of assholes recently. And I have noticed, with alarmingly regularity, that when I call people out for, say, walking into the road in front of my car without looking because they were on their phone, I am verbally abused in return. The man who ordered his takeaway during my show seemed genuinely baffled as to why I even brought it up. He was hungry and needed to eat. What the hell was my problem?

We are living in an age of narcissistic entitlement, and I don’t think this is purely down to wealth or privilege. Technological advances, easy credit, bad parenting and pizza restaurants’ willingness to stock every conceivable topping has created a world in which everything is possible and available, where there is immediate and unlimited choice – except in the case of the Labour leadership, where our options have been severely limited.

In a recent documentary about the police, a female officer said she’d noticed a big change in young people’s behaviour, which she put down to bad parenting, a lack of discipline and contempt for authority figures. She said that because we don’t say “no” to our children, and instead use tantrum-averting language (“Well, I’d rather you didn’t punch me in the face repeatedly, darling, because it makes mummy upset”), young people don’t know how to respond to being reprimanded: they go into meltdown.

We interact with each other less and less. We shop online, communicate online, we watch bands and sunsets through our iPads and don’t care about the people standing behind us. We’re forgetting how to behave in the physical world. I don’t know how we address this. But a good place to start might be to call our children assholes when they’re being assholes. I’d also suggest arresting anyone who orders a takeaway during the punchline of a show.

I'm an everythingist – craving new experiences, but unwilling to put the work in

Everythingism is the deadly combination of perfectionism plus narcissism plus utter laziness – which explains why I haven't read Crime and Punishment

• 
• • Sophie Heawood
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 11 June 2013 18.30 BST

Crime and Punishment: details available on Wikipedia. Photograph: CBW/Alamy

When I was pregnant, someone told me that she read Dostoevsky novels to her baby, both in the womb and after he was born. Apparently, at about two months old, he would respond with delight every time he heard the character names he had heard so many times in utero.

Massively annoyed by this insufferable woman and her competitive wankery, I resolved to go home and do exactly the same thing. Only I had never read any Dostoevsky, and wasn't sure that I could be arsed, in my seventh month of gestation, to begin a literary journey into desperate horse-flogging Russians and Siberian internment camps. So I went straight to the Wikipedia page for Crime and Punishment and skipped to the list of character names instead.

"Raskolnikov! Svidrigailov! Dunechka!" I barked at my foetus for no discernible reason, the laptop balanced precariously on my bump, while my internal smugometer wavered somewhere between pride and existential despair. A little like the characters in the books. Perhaps.

It was some time after this that I took a long, soft look at my slapdash, half-arsed approach to life, and realised that I am an everythingist. This is a word I have invented to describe the sort of person who is greedy for the benefit of all new experiences, but unwilling to put the work in to fully commit to any of them. An everythingist leaves no experiential stone unturned, which means doing absolutely everything by halves. It is the deadly combination of perfectionism plus narcissism plus utter laziness. It will get you nowhere in the end. Halfway there at best. Every time an everythingist's mother opens her mouth, the words "oh just bloody well get on with it" come out.

Here's how to tell if you, too, are an everythingist. Do you clutch your phone in your hand at all times, like a beacon against the cold, a magic talisman with its promise of otherness, betterness, of more attractive people desirous of your company elsewhere? Does it ensure you are unable to quite go with a plan or be in the moment because of all the other plans and moments where you might be, cheating on yourself with your other selves? Does your phone give you FOMO (AKA fear of missing out) for the party you're not at, even when you're at it? Did the news that Prism could be spying on all of our data give you a giddy rush when you thought that one of the lockdown powergeeks might be looking in and realising that you – you! – are the chosen one? Do you tend to fall asleep in your clothes, just in case the revolution should begin outside your bedroom window in the night?

Do you, like me, think that fairytale endings will magically happen to your life – ie, you will fall in deep rewarding love and raise daughters with Rapunzel hair in a beautiful Welsh farmhouse one day, writing novels on a typewriter, milking your nanny goats at dawn? Of course, this all will have to happen magically as you absolutely refuse to give up nightclubs and the closest you have come to milking your nanny goats at dawn was all a case of mistaken identity and that restraining order for going within a 40-metre ring of the late-night Turkish greengrocers is a gross infringement on your civil liberties, which you will sort out as soon as you find the bit of paper they wrote it on.

The everythingist can't be tied down by a job and so they work freelance (ie are self-unemployed). They don't want to be restricted by narrow labels like straight or gay because they believe their sexuality to be a fluid concept (i.e. they keep getting dumped). They are breathlessly addicted to their youth, despite being 12 years older than their parents were when they had them; can't read a book to the end because they've already started two more; and they need to know, at all times, that they could, in theory, if they wanted to, at any point, run away to Rio de Janeiro.

The everythingist works from home, revelling in their freedom to go for a walk in the sunshine while other sad jobsworthy losers are stuck at their desks with not so much as a freelancer's liedown to look forward to. The everythingist has been planning this walk in the sunshine for 17 days now, having been quite distracted by all the freelancer's liedowns that it is their right and freedom to enjoy. In their lunch hour. I mean, why not? It's not as if there's any lunch.

If you are not an everythingist, and you're one of those people who gets stuff done and gets over it – I realise now that you have the greatest freedom of all. The freedom to finish things, and not have all your half-read books, half-written books and half-experienced experiences clanking around your neck like shells. I can only apologise for how I used to giggle at you for being boring and keeping lists and being on time while I dashed over half an hour late to meet you, hopes and dreams blinding my eyes so that I couldn't read a bus timetable. I'm so sorry now. For everything.