Cwtches over comments: Let’s get back to the sensual world in 2026

Stephen Price

A strange phenomena has happened to ‘friendship’ since the advent of social media.

Everyone in one place, we have no need to meet up, to catch up, to see each other in person. We have an inbox, and we have the highlights and lowlights of a Facebook feed.

Amongst truly uninspiring content this week alone, I’ve learned what ex-schoolmates had for tea, I’ve had some inspiring quotes from a truly uninspiring acquaintance who’s hardly one to dish out advice, and I’ve been sent memes. Lots of memes.

As well as the memes popping up amongst ads, I’ve had countless more funny (and unfunny) reels sent direct to my Instagram inbox.

And when I’m not receiving reels, I’m scrolling and seeing or sending them myself, or ‘hate-watching’ content from narcissists who I wouldn’t have know existed without the curse of a mobile phone.

Not that I’m bored – I’m really, really, really busy. I have no time to see my friends, I’m renovating a house, my work bleeds into my free time, but I still scroll.

On the loo, while watching films, while out walking with my dogs.

And I get absolutely no joy from it at all.

On holiday in Iceland in October, I had the misfortune of sitting next to someone en-route to the airport who not only took up half my seat, but spent the entire hour-plus journey demonstrating one of the ugliest scrolls I’d ever seen.

In a thankful experience of memory loss that comes with older age and deadened senses (thanks, iPhone), I can’t recall too much of what my side-glance caught but the content went from gorillas to rants, celeb gossip to lip-fillers, and everything inane in between.

Had my fellow passenger seen mine, tailored for me, she’d have thought the same. I, however, witnessing an algorithm-curated extravaganza of pugs, subversive humour, as well as Welsh stuff, gay stuff, music stuff – mine is *infinitely better* of course. Ahem.

To her, I’d be the one to roll eyes at. To think, ‘imagine wasting an entire hour on THAT’.

Because, sadly, so many of us, at least in my generation and below, are being lost to the scroll.

During those rare moments when you’re at a train station or similar, perhaps with a dead battery or with a book in hand, there’s a feeling of superiority that rises when you, the non-scroller (for that moment) look around at the masses of people of all ages stuck in the Matrix. We know it’s not good for us, but we’re hooked.

And it’s not to say that good isn’t coming from the scroll – who’s to say the scroller isn’t reading an e-book, writing a novel, editing photos from an epic hike or keeping in touch with distant relatives, but let’s be honest, most of it is purposeless, unfulfilling wank (can I write that word? I haven’t yet in two years… It’s staying.)

I joined Instagram back in its very early days, drawn to its very simple photo-sharing aims. Snap, filter, post.

Unlike Facebook, my followers and those I follow are (mostly) associated through shared interest alone. And it was a happy, inspiring place – I found new places to go, new artists, new music. But all that changed pretty much overnight when Mark Zuckerberg took over.

Now, videos take priority – loud, intrusive videos that disrupt music, TV, peace.

Meme sharing simply isn’t friendship. And what was once funny has now become a burden.

Logging on to Instagram is now a task – an inbox of ten plus individuals sharing ten plus reels they found funny, but not funny enough to put on their own stories.

It’s all done with kindness, and it’s something I do too. See a meme or reel, find it hilarious, pass to your posse. Individually tailoring the darker humoured ones to your closest, bleakest of allies, and sharing the puppy vids with your fellow dog-lovers etc.

Only it’s become too much.

And it stopped being funny a long time ago.

With the scant personal information we really share now, besides the curated stuff, how many of us are actually sharing how we really are with the wider world?

Is this really the reason we no longer meet up any more? Because we’re already, in such an inadequate, soulless form, ‘in touch’ regularly anyway?

As social beings, millennia spent in community, with friends and family nearby, whether even misanthropes like me agree or not, we all simply need each other.

To laugh in person, to show up for others and be showed up for in person, to reveal the truth behind the smiles and facade.

To dance, to embrace, to be present.

To aliven deadened senses.

It’s so sad to think that I’ll watch reels of dogs, while my dogs are sat in front of me, waiting for unadulterated attention.

It’s so sad to wonder why my eyes are sore and deteriorating when nature is waiting just outside my door for me and my dogs, the most beautiful antidote to the burning bright light of a screen.

We talk of the breakdown of community life and family life even, but do we put in the effort on an individual scale to keep familial bonds tied, to keep chapels open, to keep community groups going?

Friendship is no different. We are so much more than a shared meme, a like and a share.

Like Coelho’s Alchemist, the gold is already there beneath our feet, under our eyes, but we fall victim to the belief that things can’t wait, that what’s on our screens is more important, more exciting, and that there is better somewhere else. To see a child lost to screen-based free-time is a sad thing, but we somehow slip into accepting it’s fine for us.

We have a choice though, to break the habits and to make more effort to see more, do more, be more.

Just as Kate Bush did back in the late 80s, I’ve had enough. I’m stepping out of the page into the sensual world in 2026, and I urge you all to join me.

Mmmm, yes.

After my (widely-agreed-with) op-ed condemning LinkedIn earlier this autumn, I was heartened to see a touch of humanity in a post from a friend of old, Jamie Rees, a freelance Marketeer from Sir Benfro and real life human being from the dance floor of Exit nightclub in Cardiff in the 2000s share the following (in its entirety because it’s so special, not to up my word count!).

Leaving the city behind for his former square mile recently, Jamie wrote: “For the past six months, I’ve had the privilege of sitting on this bench, taking in this view, before walking the Pembrokeshire coastline. What felt like a tightrope at the start has become a path that now feels steady, grounding, and quietly transformational.

“Stepping away from social media for much of that time had a profound impact on my mental health and sense of direction. When I briefly returned, I noticed how quickly my focus narrowed and my momentum faltered – a useful reminder of where my energy is best spent. Watching Strictly Come Dancing last night and seeing couples who valued growth and self-discovery over trophies felt like timely validation.

“So, as I switch on my out-of-office and step back from this space, one thought I’m taking with me: when I return in 2026, with some genuinely exciting projects ahead, I want to live in a world where a cwtch carries more weight than a comment.

“I won’t be very present here next year, but if you see me out and about – let’s have that cwtch.

“Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.