Darwinism goes into reverse.
18 August 2018, 20:40 | Updated: 18 August 2018, 20:50
It's official – the human race has peaked. Look around...this is as good as we'll get.
The problem started with the invention of the internet. Thanks a lot Tim Berners-Lee! That was the beginning of the end for reading.
Things got a lot worse when smart phones came along. That was the fault of Steve Jobs.
We should have known not to trust anything sold to us by a man in a turtle-neck.
Those phones are not that smart – they don't seem to learn anything for a start.
They are still stunned when we leave the house to go to work at the same time every day and are completely unprepared to offer us any advice on, say, the cancellation of the train we always get.
We have to look it up manually. If they are so smart, they should alert us that we'll have to leave the house early, but they never do.
What is worse is the effect they are having on us.
Smart phones do not make smarter people. In fact the opposite seems to be true.
Take pictures, for instance.
Whenever someone lifts a phone in front of you, looking like they are taking a snap of you and intruding on your day, rest assured that they are not. They are, in fact, taking a picture of themselves.
Everyone has their camera permanently on selfie-mode.
In “the good old days”, people used to take images of the places they visited and then replayed the results in slide shows to their bored friends.
“Here is the Eiffel Tower”, they would say...”and here is the Grand Canyon....and that's the Hanging Gardens of Babylon”.
Not any more – if anyone under the age of 50 were to narrate a showing of their holiday images they would say, “here's a picture of me, and here's a picture of me, and here's a picture of me...and oh look – it's a picture of me!”
If you think that is the apex of the superficiality of the Me Generation, then prepare yourself – it gets a lot worse than that.
Apparently, actual grown-ups are buying clothes on the internet, uploading images of themselves wearing them to Instagram and then sending the clobber back for a refund.
They do this to “keep up” with the internet “stars” who parade an Outfit of the Day for their “fans”.
If you are fabulously rich, then you might be able to afford to buy 365 outfits a year, but “ordinary people” can't. So to emulate the ones that can, and show off online, people order kit they can't afford, record themselves wearing it and then pop it back in the post to get their money back.
In all your life, have you ever heard of anything so stupid?
Following the posts of some airhead fashion blogger is bad enough; there are only so many hours in a life, but there surely is something more vital they could be doing than scouring the internet for something they might look good in and then take 100 pics of themselves to get that special shot and then upload it to social media in order to get “likes” from strangers.
What's worse is that this is no isolated occurrence. There are approximately 200 million Outfits of the Day posts on Instagram alone.
Research by a credit card company suggests who is most guilty of doing this.
The study says it's not young women, it's 35-44 year olds and - here's a bigger surprise - mostly men!
If that's true, I'm a yellow beret.
There's no way that middle-aged men are behind this stupid waste of time.
Men do not buy clothes off the internet to make it look like they've got a different fashionable outfit for every day of the year.
Men pick up whatever is the least dirty thing on their bedroom floor and wear that, don't they?
Unless I am ageist, sexist and mistaken, it must be the daughters of middle aged men using their dad's credit cards.
Or the researchers were drunk when they wrote their report.
Either way, it doesn't really matter. A large enough number of people are doing it to help make up the £7bn worth of kit we send back each year.
One in ten on-line shoppers admit to ordering things they don't want just to kid on to strangers on social media that they have such a fabulous life that they can afford them.
One of the most stated reasons is that they don't want to be seen in the same outfit twice.
I have been wearing the same dozen things for at least the last ten years, and five of them are T-shirts.
The shame!
You know, pretty soon there won't be any space left on the internet because everyone on earth will be putting up endless pictures of themselves pouting and making gormless goo-goo eyes.
Millions will be leaving their jobs in order to spend more time with their significant other – their phones.
They won't have any money coming in but at least they won’t have to buy anything – they'll just try everything for the day and then send it back for a refund.
I bet people start doing it with food.
