We’re all celebrities – now get us out of here

Everyone knows one: the person who can’t put their blasted camera down. Inevitably, they snap you just as you’ve taken a large bite, or they usher you into an endless sequence of selfies just as your favourite dance song comes on.

Now, a group of researchers in the UK and India have classified these obsessive chroniclers as suffers of a “condition”. Specifically, they have named a particular type of camera addiction, “selfitis”, defined as the habit of taking and posting online at least three selfies a day. In less pathologised times, we would have stuck with the old name for this behaviour: narcissism.

Over the past few weeks, I have been sorting some old clutter. Amid the junk are piles of photographs. There are shiny childhood snaps of peaty, Scottish rivers, bluebell woods covered in a sunny haze, family dressed in puffy Nineties jackets and bell-bottomed jeans, old school friends, much-loved horses and dogs, fireworks and Christmas trees.

Then there are those from the early era of the digital camera, carefully printed out and trimmed at home: Romanian mountains, a Thai elephant, toy boats in a Parisian pond, a snowman, a camel. What’s missing are any photos from about 2011 onwards. That was the year I finally bowed to pressure and bought a smartphone.

Something strange happened when smartphones arrived. We started taking more photos than ever, but looked at them less. And when social media took off and phones made it easy to turn the camera back on ourselves, the whole model flipped. Instead of acting as private mementos or family records, narrowly shared and long-appreciated, the streams of selfies filling social media are a disposable public commodity, looked at and “liked” by dozens, then forgotten a moment later.

Several public figures, including Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley and former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya, are now saying what we all knew in our guts. Living our lives for public consumption makes us depressed, anxious and self-obsessed. Thanks to the cameraphone, everyone can now experience what it’s like to be a desperate celebrity – and by god it’s awful.

Somewhat perversely, all of this ferocious “social” activity online is happening alongside an epidemic of loneliness. That’s according to a cross-party commission of MPS set up by the murdered MP, Jo Cox, which has cited research suggesting that millions of Britons feel lonely an awful lot of the time.

Meanwhile, the SNP’S Westminster leader Ian Blackford used his allotted time at Prime Minister’s Questions this week to attack Theresa May for doing nothing to stop the closure of 259 RBS branches, which will see 13 Scottish towns lose their last bank. Mrs May pointed out, rightly, that much banking activity has now moved online. It’s hardly reasonable to blame banks for shutting down expensive branches used by only a handful of customers a week.

But these two things – loneliness and bank closures – are connected. As digital efficiency replaces laborious physical processes, we are gaining time and losing community.

Paying in cheques or posting parcels used to be a whole morning’s activity for some customers – and not an unpleasant one. It could be punctuated by encounters with neighbours, a friendly catch-up with the teller, and a patient and dignified period of waiting. All of this is now replaced by five minutes on a computer and followed, in too many cases, by an empty morning alone without a word spoken.

This isn’t a problem government can solve. Just like littering or queueing, it is a question of culture. Church-going, living with grandparents and local commercial life are all withering away at once. Social media cannot replace these communities. But perhaps, by connecting people of similar situations or shared interests, it could be a tool used to invent new forms of social organisation that do – if we can look up from posting our steady stream of selfies, that is.

I might be grown up, but I still love advent calendars. The chocolate kind is the best, but even a non-chocolate one is delightful. There’s something about opening that little cardboard door and discovering a picture of a holly frond or a chocolate star that makes one feel all is right with the world.

This year, by accident, I ended up with two. The more luxurious, a Lindt “teddy advent house”, slightly misses the point by indicating on the outside what kind of chocolate shape you will find behind each door. But it still generates a cheerful feeling.

Advent calendars are quaint, silly and limited. In other words, they’re a perfect antidote to the world of bottomless news feeds, vicious online argument and lurid Facebook pictures.

Forget biblical names or Disney characters. Some parents are naming their children with their social media profile in mind. One young parent told the New York Times: “We chose Bryn Avery because I could get the Twitter [account].” She’s now posting a picture or quote by the toddler about once a day. This entire childhood will play out on Twitter, in aid of promoting the mother’s parenting start-up.

To the mother, this no doubt seems super-cool. To me, it’s utterly bleak. follow Juliet Samuel on Twitter @Citysamuel; read more at telegraph. co.uk/opinion