How we’re becoming a society that expects ‘money for nothing’ - David Behrens

The handouts in question were supposed to help deaf and blind people. But they’ve been hijacked on the Chinese social network TikTok by so-called ‘sickfluencers’ promoting them to those with self-diagnosed mental health issues. As a result, claims rose by 40 per cent last year at a cost to taxpayers of £258m.

It’s part of a ‘money for nothing’ culture that has taken hold in the minds of impressionable young people who really think it’s now possible to make a living without earning it.

Even those who do work feel increasingly that they should not have to do so all the time. Nearly a third of young workers were signed off with mental health complaints last year, a figure said to have increased four-fold during the last decade.

There are two factors driving this and they are closely linked: the largely fictitious belief among the young that you can pay your way simply by ‘influencing’ others online; and the more tangible reality that work is no longer something you have to leave the house to do.

The second of these phenomena prompted Lord Stuart Rose to warn this week that we are spawning a generation who are “not doing proper work”. Rose, the former chief executive of Asda and M&S and by no means a reactionary figure, said the nation’s working practices had regressed by 20 years in the last four. How, he wondered, could you grow the economy with a workforce reluctant to get out of its pyjamas.

But what constitutes “proper work” these days? That rather depends on the type of influencer you listen to. A fuss was made last weekend by British ‘content creators’ on TikTok who feared its threatened ban in the US would decimate their income. A 23-year-old Londoner named Tom Pratt, who apparently makes a living by asking his American followers trivia questions on geography, was among those complaining that his livelihood was being pulled from under him.

Wait – that’s a job? Asking trivia questions to Americans? It sounds cushier than waiting every morning for a train that’s never coming and then shifting palettes at some warehouse until it’s clocking-off time, doesn’t it? That’s what every other 23-year-old is thinking: if Tom Pratt can do it, so can I.

And that’s what the Stuart Roses of this world are up against: this belief that money will fall at your feet and that your mental health will suffer if it doesn’t.

Tony Blair picked up the same theme. It was dangerous and counter-productive, he said, to allow young people facing the normal challenges of life to believe they were suffering from a medical condition.

A reality check: very few people make a living from social media except those who own the platforms. That’s why Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook of Apple were at Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday and Tom Pratt wasn’t. Those are the real influencers.

So when Trump granted TikTok a stay of execution despite its supposed risk to national security it was to give himself a bargaining chip in negotiating a trade deal with China, not because it was unfair to some content creator with an inflated sense of self-entitlement.

It’s not just young people who are prey to the influence of geeks bearing gifts, mind. We’re all susceptible to those who court our attention by telling us what we want to hear – and Nigel Farage’s behaviour this week represented a far more malevolent type of manipulation.

He was also in Washington – trying but failing to gain Trump’s favour – when Axel Rudakubana admitted murdering three little girls in Southport last July. To Farage this was not a tragedy but a chance to peddle conspiracy theories. He had been right all along, he said; the government had covered up the murderer’s interactions with the security services.

Yet we knew of those interactions the moment he waived his right to a trial by jury. If you make information known at the earliest opportunity you can hardly have covered it up, can you? That was an inconvenient truth that sat outside Farage’s narrative. If this were summer and the nights still warm his rhetoric may have ignited riots all over again.

He and his role model Trump have got where they are by twisting the truth in the knowledge that enough people will believe them. That is the worst kind of influencing. And this week more than any other, it should make us all fear for our mental health.