Must every day be an ‘awareness’ day?

When I was a self-dramatising adolescent, I would consider suicide roughly once every six weeks, trying it on for size in the manner of pulling on a pair of mock snakeskin platform boots from Dolcis, before deciding that it wasn’t really me. Invariably, the decider (apart from not knowing whether T Rex would beat David Bowie to the top of the Radio 1 singles chart on Tuesday) would be the flying cars, the invention of which I excitedly imagined was just around the corner. I’ve got to stick around to see the flying cars!

Alas, the future wasn’t to be the sleek futurist dream that kept my teenage self sucking it up and soldiering on. Remember in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when O’Brien says to Winston, ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever’? It didn’t turn out like that at all. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an arm around your shoulders and an annoyingly saccharine voice saying ‘I’m here for you…’ – forever.

I know it’s a cliché to be nostalgic when one is old, but I really preferred life when we weren’t encouraged to whine about everything under the Sun – sorry, have ‘awareness’ days, weeks and months in honour of everything under the Sun. We’re really being spoiled at the moment, as October is Menopause Awareness Month, leading up to the joyous climax – or weepy maelstrom – of World Menopause Day on 18 October. But if you’re still short of something to worry about, the ‘awareness calendar’ informs me that October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month and 14 to 20 October is UK Malnutrition Awareness Week. We then move on to Movember, or Men’s Health Awareness Month, ‘an annual global campaign that encourages men to grow moustaches and participate in various activities to raise awareness about men’s health issues’. If you need to put in extra empathy hours as the nights draw in, 11 to 17 November is Anti-Bullying Week and 18 to 24 November Road Safety Week. Then the festive season starts not with a bang but with a whimper when we have National Grief Awareness Week (first week of December) after which there’s a hiatus while we enjoy ourselves in the state-sanctioned time-slot. Then there’s Dry January, when we can all feel sorry for ourselves about how much alcohol we’ve been drinking.

For now, let’s fret about the menopause. I’m not being needlessly nasty to my suffering sisters here. I fully comprehend that a minority of women will have a terrible time with it, and that female health issues are disgustingly trivialised and derided by a medical profession very much geared towards men. But how will ‘awareness’ help? It doesn’t matter how aware we are of it, the menopause can’t be swerved by half the human race. Some will sail through it, while some will suffer – and those who do suffer need to be addressed seriously on a case-to-case basis. But you’ll never ‘cure’ the menopause any more than you’ll ‘cure’ being a woman.

‘Awareness’ feels less like a precursor of action and more like an alternative to it. It’s as impotent and self-serving as any other kind of virtue-signalling – words not deeds, for that huge number of humans who now ‘identify’ as Good People while doing sod all to assist the less fortunate. The charity shop where I’ve worked for the past decade has endured a dramatic fall in volunteers during that time. It’s a fact that more working-age adults are neither studying nor working than ever before, but I dare say those who could be donating a few hours of labour a week are too busy signing petitions, posting caring memes on X and otherwise thinking about what wonderful people they are to get their hands dirty like us worker bees (even if we’re probably only volunteering to make up for some awful moral deficit).

The public sector is always captured the most thoroughly, running as it does on other people’s money. There you’ll be encouraged to have some downtime in the workplace, while you sip a hot chocolate (aka a menopause espresso) and argue with your workmates about whether the heating is on or off. There’s currently a theory among certain sceptical civil-service feminists that menopause awareness has suddenly become such a big thing because the ‘stunning and brave’ get off on it. There’s already a considerable school of thought – albeit from the usual addled suspects – that ‘transwomen’ experience the menopause, too. I hate to break it to them, but, as men, they already have their own annual self-pity party – namely, Andropause Awareness Day on 1 June, when we send thoughts and prayers to untold numbers of men in their fifties who have been driven to shaving their greying heads and careering around (at a moderate speed) on expensive motorbikes, a box of Viagra discreetly tucked into their back pocket. Or who deal with their mid-life crises by pulling on some pantyhose and calling themselves Patsy.

Do women who demand to have regular take-your-hormones-to-work days not understand that it was, until relatively recently, this very idea of females being at the mercy of their weak and feeble bodies that was effectively used as an excuse for keeping them barred from all the fun, challenging jobs, from professor to pilot? As I wrote on spiked earlier this year, ‘I’m wary of campaigns that portray females as troublesome bundles of leakage and weakness; if I was a boss looking to hire, I probably wouldn’t choose the candidate who I was forewarned might burst into tears if I told her to pull her socks up’. The same goes for the petitions demanding that women workers get paid menopause leave, for a malady which may have no physical symptoms and can last for years, apparently.

There’s a similar dynamic with our ubiquitous friend, the Mental Elf, now forever both making millions of us unfit for work – allegedly – and then leading us to bother our bosses for extra attention when we finally drag ourselves into the workplace. Some people have terrible mental-health problems – my son was killed by his – but they are comparatively rare. As an acquaintance said to me on this subject recently: ‘My view, as a mental-health professional, is that people are so aware of mental health they’re aware of little else, which is not good for their mental health.’ It’s all very well being ‘aware’ that some of our friends, neighbours and colleagues are having a rough time of it emotionally, but I can’t help but find this insultingly tokenistic when more than a million people in this country are on a waiting list for NHS mental-health services. All the mindfulness and journaling amounts to little more than fiddling while minds burn.

I’m not sure that ‘awareness’ – pretty much presenting life as a vale of tears – does much for the Mental Elf anyway. All the endless modern jabber about feelings doesn’t appear to have made people one whit happier – a problem shared is a problem perpetuated. Maybe today’s youngsters are the most anxious generation known to man because they’re exposed – partly through awareness campaigns – to non-stop warnings about how awful adult life is going to be. Yes, there are awful bits – but it is, among other things, the most brilliant adventure imaginable.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s definitely easier to control a tender population than a tough one, which is why the ministrations of the nanny state are always to be taken with a pinch of salt (but best make it a very small pinch or you’ll die). That’s why I find ‘awareness’ such a self-serving, narcissistic, atomised concept. I’ve given up on the flying cars; even if someone invented them, Ed Miliband wouldn’t let us have them. (Then we’d find out that Lord Alli had ‘gifted’ one to every member of the cabinet on the sly.) But I feel sorry for the self-dramatising adolescents of today, without these lovely brave new things to look forward to – just moaning, empathy and awareness, as far as the moist eye can see.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.