Why do people bend to the tyrannical pressures of social media? Let's get real

I once interviewed a pop star who earnestly told me that he had stopped smoking weed and that, ever since, he had a clearer mind and more focus on his music. Five minutes later, while we were still talking, he lit up one of the biggest spliffs I have ever seen.

We know that celebrities are different people in private than in public; that someone reading out the birthday cards on CBeebies could be racking up lines in a club on their night off. But what happens now that social media makes nanoscopic celebrities out of us all? Who are we being real with and who are we performing for?

It’s a question I ask myself when I hear research revealing that, for millennials, Instagrammability is now the No 1 consideration when deciding where to holiday. Or the news last week that half of cosmetic surgeons in the US say that people are asking for procedures to look better in selfies, and that there is a disconcerting increase in the number of people asking for procedures to make them look more like how they do in Snapchat filters: enhanced cheekbones and digitally smooth skin.

Those holiday Instagrams are not for the benefit of the friends who were there – who know that one lagoon Instagram involved a €150, 30-minute-long boat trip and was preceded by a three-hour-long, airless journey in a car where burnt, bare thighs were sweat-sealed to the upholstery. This isn’t old-fashioned peer pressure, which mostly dissipates as you get older and realise that your friends’ lives are bogged down in their own struggles. It’s a new kind of pressure from another group: the people who only get to see the celebrity version of you. This is the group we watch the daily machinations and monologues of, but would never call and say: “Do you fancy a drink this evening?” When my close friends talk to me about relationships, jobs, mental health and loneliness – the oldest topics of conversation in the world – I feel as if they are now soundtracked by the sound of sorta-mate Instagram stories, always laughing, always on a beach; people who seem to have it all figured out only because we don’t know them.

This blurring of the line between friendship and infatuation, between our online and offline realities, only becomes more complicated when more of our genuine social interaction becomes mediated through technology. Recently, there was a story of a mother who paid for someone to tutor her son in the video game Fortnite so that his friends at school didn’t mock him for being bad at it. Can anyone draw a neat line of reality in that child’s life?

The danger is that we become snobby; that we think these problems are just for people who have applied to be on Love Island or are still in year 9. But the power of our not-really-friends looms large over even those of us who think they’re savvy to fakery, not least because we unwittingly perpetuate the same illusion, posting the moments we are doing something exciting, so, somewhere, someone we once went on a course with thinks everything is going better for us than it is for them.

Nobody mention the Tory Glastonbury

George Freeman gets rather upset when people call his Big Tent Ideas festival the “Tory Glastonbury”, which every single article ever written about it seems to have done. But considering that Freeman, the Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk who until last year was the chairman of Theresa May’s policy board, said he launched the festival in response to Jeremy Corbyn’s messianic treatment at Glastonbury last year – and that last year’s festival was held in the private estate of former Betfair executive Mark Davies, a Tory donor, and that this year’s headline speakers are Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey – it seems a little churlish of him to dispute the nickname.

Last year’s event was poorly attended and those who did show up were mostly pale men wearing ill-fitting suits. It looked more like the summer party of a regional logistics company than the event Freeman had told the Financial Times was going to be like a “first rave … you’ll remember who you brought”, presumably only true if you brought the conservative philosopher and tobacco-company shill Sir Roger Scruton to your first rave. After the event, Freeman agreed with Sky News’s assessment that it was “blokey” and “nerdy” and said they needed to organise more music next time.

Well, we’re two weeks out and the full lineup is out and there’s … no music. Although the festival promises to be “10 times bigger” and has rebranded as a “non-party” festival with a smattering of token Labour and Lib Dem MPs, but the majority of slots still going to big-name Tories.

In fact, there are already a bunch of major festivals in the UK with thousands of attendees and big-name headliners that embrace market-capitalism, conservative ideals of private enterprise and snobbish elitism.

Take last weekend’s WeWork Summer Camp, held in a field in Tunbridge Wells where Bastille and Lorde shared a stage with various motivational speakers and CEOs, creating the bizarre spectacle of people giving Powerpoint presentations in front of thousands of droid-like believers who voluntarily wore the T-shirts of the companies they worked for. The festival is only open to members of the “WeWork community”, and has the motto Do What You Love, which is kind of their way of saying Make Work Your Life.

Then there’s next month’s House festival, on Hampstead Heath, which has partnered with, among others, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK and Freuds, the PR firm run by Matthew Freud (who was considered part of Cameron’s Chipping Norton set and married to Elisabeth Murdoch). The festival is primarily for members of the Soho House group of private members’ clubs. Members who already pay more than £1,500 a year to join the club can chuck a further £150 on tickets, to see Nile Rodgers, the Manic Street Preachers and Rita Ora, while eating unlimited lobster. If that’s not a Tory Glastonbury, I don’t know what is.

Ariana and Pete: the new Brangelina

I have always been dumbfounded by gossip magazines’ obsession with Brad, Jen and Angelina, an ever-rolling carousel of misinformation about three people who would all be really boring at a party. But now I am Brangelina-level obsessed with the engagement of comedian Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande: the bonkers three-week timeline from meeting to engagement, the big-dick energy meme which came from a comment an Ariana fan posted about Pete but is now a major part of internet lexicon, the weird song on her album called Pete Davidson. Now I understand what it’s like to pick up a magazine just because it has a pap photo of a couple leaving a shop.