Unless you're living on the street and surviving on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks, there's no point in being gloomy. We've spent too long trying to cheer ourselves up by spending money on brightly coloured things we don't really need. We've stopped using our imaginations.

When shopping replaces imagination

Most of us exist somewhere between genuine hardship and everyday comfort, which makes it easy to feel oddly guilty about complaining at all. Jarvis Cocker's point isn't that suffering is required for happiness—it's that we've outsourced joy to shopping, then wondered why the rush never lasts. That new thing in the box promised to fix something, but it didn't, so we buy again. The cycle keeps us numb and distracted from what actually works.

What's quietly radical here is the suggestion that imagination might be cheaper and more reliable than retail therapy. A walk where you notice something you've never seen before. A conversation that goes somewhere unexpected. Building something with your hands. These don't require money, but they do require showing up mentally—paying attention instead of scrolling. The gloomy feeling often isn't really about our circumstances; it's about feeling passive in our own lives. When we outsource entertainment and meaning to things we can buy, we hand over the one tool that actually makes life feel like ours: the ability to think, create, and discover on our own terms.