“I Was Told I Might Never Walk Again”: Esmée Gummer on Running 5,000km and Getting 1 Million People Moving

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For the last three months, I've watched in awe as a blonde, tanned, ON running-clad pocket rocket by the name of Esmée Gummer filled my social feeds.

Back in June, she started a mammoth 5,000km running challenge, setting off from Inverness in Scotland and working her way through every UK city, plus Dublin, until she reached her hometown of London.

Rather than another self-serving distance challenge designed to go viral online, Esme's was rooted in community. Aptly named The Nation’s 5K, she hosted a free community run club in every city, with the simple goal of encouraging more people to move in an inclusive, fun, and welcoming environment. She took time to speak to every single runner who showed up. She showcased their stories on social. She made it about them, as well as her.

Her passion for fitness has an inspiring backstory; when she was 18, complications from surgery left her paralysed, and she was told she might never walk again. But day by day, she built her fitness back, and her experience is now the inspiration for everything she does. It's also the main reason she wants to encourage as many others to run as possible; to reap the joys of movement while they can.

As a runner myself who tackled a few Ultra distances in 2021 and who has hosted various run clubs over the years, I can't even begin to stress the energy, effort, and skill this feat will have taken. Ultra distances are mentally and physically gruelling; even with the best training and preparation, you go to war with your mind and body for hours at a time. I ran three ultras—45km, 52km, and 58km—in 2021, and was so tired come the end, I think I was practically non-verbal.

Esmee was averaging more than that daily, every day, for 99 days straight, hosting a run club in the middle or at the end.

The run club presents a different skill set altogether, which is what makes this challenge so unique; hosting a run club requires energy, passion, and ample forward planning. There are safety elements, route planning, and community to consider. It's hard to fathom how she did both—the gruelling physical challenge of the day-to-day paired with the mental challenge of the energy required to inspire the many runners who showed up to run alongside her.

It's the achievement of a lifetime—but it was never about that, really; rather, the people she brought together along the way. Below, she shares her story.

Esmée Gummer on the 5,000km Run That Changed Her Perspective on Strength, Community and What It Means to Succeed

"What happened to me at 18 is everything I am today. Without that experience, I would never have realised the value of movement and saying yes. I also ultimately wouldn’t have taken on many of the challenges I have in the past, especially not my recent 5000km run."

"At first, the accident made me too grateful to push myself—I didn’t run for six years because I was just so happy to walk again. I didn’t want to risk anything by going above and beyond. But eventually, I realised that I didn't have to be nervous about my body—being able to recover from something like paralysis is evidence of how strong I am, not a sign of weakness."

"That mindset switch gave me so much confidence and was the biggest learning from my paralysis, and it was the reason I could run 5,000km. The inner strength that 18-year-old me found to put one foot in front of the other when I could have easily given up is the same fire that took me through this challenge."

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What Running 5,000km in 99 Days Really Looks Like

"I always knew it would be hard, but you can’t ever really prepare for a challenge like this."

"The Nation’s 5K means averaging around 50km a day for 99 days, while also hosting a 5K in every city. My routine involved waking up in the van, normally in a car park or a campsite, choking down some food (normally pancakes and syrup) and a cup of tea if we had time to get the gas on. I brushed my teeth on the roadside, got changed, and started running."

"Every ten to 15 km, I would stop at a checkpoint for a refuel (think crisps, Quorn sandwiches, Ritz crackers and Philadelphia, Squares bars or Red Bull). When I got to a city, I would hopefully get a couple of hours of downtime to eat some pasta or a rice bowl in the van. At the same time, I'd be filming and approving content, doing interviews, or watching a quiz show on the campervan TV, before heading into the run club."

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No One Gets Left Behind

"At the 5Ks, I’d give my introduction speech, then run/jog/walk alongside everyone and always come in last. I took this spot so no one else has to worry about it. We’d normally be at the run club for about two hours, then head back to a gym or leisure centre for a shower before snacking in bed, back in the car park."

"Running with hogweed burns was probably some of the hardest moments of my life. The blisters broke every time I bent my knee, and I didn’t sleep because of the pain. Other times, like running a 430km week towards the end of the challenge, put strain on my body in a way you can’t explain."

"People would often ask me how I wasn’t tired or sore, because I was often still jumping around and dancing. I always laughed and said, “I am!”. But I was so adamant that I wouldn’t let the physical pain change my mindset. We are rightly taught to listen to our bodies, but for this challenge I had to totally disconnect from mine."

"It would tell me to stop, that it didn’t want to do anymore, but I had to keep going. At the same time, I had more respect for it than ever. It’s complicated, but this challenge was never going to be simple."

"By the end of month one, I'd covered 1,555km, climbed nearly 17,000m and hosted 24 run clubs. I remember feeling such a huge sense of achievement; those stats alone are ridiculously impressive. Yet that was only a third of what I was having to do to complete this challenge I had set out to achieve. It was difficult to celebrate for too long as I had to keep my focus for what was to come."

"The biggest surprise of the journey was honestly how much my body was capable of. If I’m honest, that remained throughout. I never got used to the fact that my body was running an ultra marathon a day; I would love to say that it became second nature, when in reality I was surprised every single day that my body was doing it."

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Why Bringing People Together Mattered More Than the Miles

"I started my own run club in London about three and a half years ago, and the stories that came out of it blew my mind. People weren’t just telling me that they fell in love with running, but that coming to do a 5K had genuinely changed their life."

"It was nothing to do with the run itself, but the people they met. They’d tell me that they turned up to their first Say Yes Club run often feeling like they didn’t know who they were, what they were doing with their life, or even that they didn’t want to be here anymore. Then, they met someone on that run who became their best mate, and a year on, they were celebrating their birthday together with a new group of friends, going on holidays together, getting new jobs, and running races together."

"I wanted that impact to go further than just my corner of East London. On this challenge, I’ve seen the same thing, where people have started their own run clubs after coming to a Nation’s 5K club, or left having exchanged numbers with someone they might not have ever crossed paths with."

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Creating Welcoming Spaces for All

"The standout highlight of my The Nations 5K run clubs was seeing people like Bethany, who feel like they don’t belong in the running space, finally feel welcome."

"We had these experiences at every single 5K. People sometimes turned up saying they were too slow, not good enough or extremely nervous, but then they would hear my speech and see the crowd and feel welcome."

"If everyone who came to my run club left feeling like that, I definitely feel like I’ve achieved what I wanted."

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What It Really Means to Make Running Inclusive

"Social media has a big part to play in making people feel that running isn’t “for them”. The algorithm pushes extreme versions of running—we’re led to believe everyone is running 20-minute 5Ks, and marathons have become the new normal."

"Even offline, a lot of run clubs cater to fast runners—I’ve seen plenty where, if you can’t complete a 5K within 30 minutes, you basically can’t join in, and that’s despite the fact that the average 5K time for a woman is 38 minutes."

"I invited people to walk, jog, run or wheel the 5K, and I've learnt a lot about making exercise genuinely feel inclusive rather than simply putting the word “inclusive” on an event along the way."

"I’ve learnt that you have to take the feedback from the people and listen to it, rather than think you are making people feel included. At every single 5k, I started at the front of the group and made my way back through to the very back, making sure I spoke to as many people as possible."

"By doing that, you get to talk to people, you understand them, and you know if they feel safe and connected. It’s very easy to call your club inclusive and then spend the whole time at the front leading, without connecting with every person there. I have hosted 77 run clubs back to back, and I can honestly say I have learnt more than I ever knew before."

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Redefining Success After 5,000km

"I had so many ideas of what success looked like for this challenge before I set out. I spent the start of the challenge going through these in my head day after day, measuring the success of the challenge based on these. But it didn’t take long for me to have a deep conversation with myself about what was truly important. For me, that was always having an impact on people and getting them moving."

"I'll never know how many people I've impacted, which I used to be bothered about. I can’t count how many people were inspired to move because of my challenge. Maybe they saw it on Instagram and went for a run; maybe their neighbour came to one of my runs and told them about it, which in turn encouraged them to go to the gym that day."

"It used to bother me that I didn’t know the true number, but actually now I think it’s quite beautiful that my message is just out there, changing lives without me knowing."

"If having an impact on people and motivating them to move was the goal, I've definitely achieved it, and I can't wait to spread it further."

"I was presented with a Guinness World Records title at the finish of The Nation’s 5K in London for the most run clubs hosted in different cities by an individual."

"The idea of the Guinness World Record title was motivating because it wasn't about me. A lot of people have done record-breaking challenges—I didn’t want to be known for going the furthest or the fastest. I wanted to be known for bringing people together."

"I’m really excited that the record was for the run clubs and the number of people we got together."

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I Grew Up With Nineties Lad Culture. I Thought Things Would Be Better for My Daughters

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There’s a scene in my novel, Such a Nice Boy, just after my main character, Amanda, discovers that her fifteen-year-old son is a sexual bully, in which she’s asked how many twenty-something women she talks to regularly. ‘None,’ she replies. ‘Exactly,’ says her friend.

It was a thought that had occurred to me a few years earlier, too, when the Everyone’s Invited website became headline news. Horrified by the stories about rape culture in our schools, I remember talking to my friends about it one evening. We’d all dealt with bad behaviour from men as teenage girls, but as we’d moved out of the dating world and become mothers — no longer seen by men as fair game — we’d actually started to believe things were getting better for women and girls.

Some of those friends had boys (I have two girls myself). All considered themselves feminists. And all would’ve been devastated to learn their son had mistreated a girl. It was a conversation that would prove to be the spark for my novel, but, as I would soon discover, researching it would leave me so disturbed I’d regularly find myself unable to sleep.

Growing up in the nineties, many girls experienced misogyny firsthand. But as they became women and mothers, they began to believe things were changing for the next generation. (Image credit: Valerie WINCKLER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

I began my research with the big-picture stuff, wading through studies from academics and charities showing that there had indeed been a cultural shift for the worse. But it soon became clear that, in order to accurately portray this, I’d need to see what kids — and particularly boys — were looking at online for myself.

So I created TikTok and Instagram accounts for Nathan, Amanda’s fictional son, and gave him interests like football, cars and good-looking actresses. It didn’t take long for the nasty content to appear.

Aware that many parents think gaming is relatively harmless, I also made him a gamer. It took half an hour to see the first violently misogynistic conversation in one of Discord’s thousands of chatrooms. What struck me was not just its throwaway nature, but how the conversation on either side of it was so nonsensical that it had to be a chatroom full of either kids or very immature adults. I went on to find dozens of chatrooms clearly labelled as woman-hating on that platform, but I chose not to go into those because I never wanted Nathan to be an incel.

Thanks largely to the drama Adolescence, there is now far greater parental awareness of this kind of extreme online misogyny. But there is another factor that has been linked to harmful attitudes towards women and girls, and which many parents still don’t like to think their child would look at: porn.

When Amanda discovers porn on her son’s phone, she doesn’t find anything now considered extreme; she finds the kind of videos I found on the first page of my first visit to Pornhub. Ones with titles like this: ‘Cutie woke up when I penetrated her holes’ — an act which, if it took place in real life, would be classified as rape.

In her latest report on the impact of pornography on young people, the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, describes how seeing violent porn is now a normal part of online life for children. And, she says, ‘it is impacting children’s behaviours and beliefs in deeply concerning ways — in particular when it comes to attitudes towards women and girls.’

To put it another way — and these are the words of one of the teenage girls quoted in her report — ‘porn makes boys act vile towards girls.’

Of all the research I did, it was what I saw and read in relation to porn that kept me up at night. As a mum of two girls, it terrified me to think they would soon have to navigate this world and, for a while, I can honestly say I looked at all teenage boys with suspicion, feeling an anger towards them that, deep down, I knew was irrational and unfair.

It was only once I stepped back from the research that I was able to listen to what I’d had to repeatedly remind myself: that boys never asked for this stuff to be pushed to them.

Take, for example, the 14-year-old quoted in one article who wanted his teacher to show him how to choke a girl because, apparently, they’re all ‘mad for it’. He didn’t know not to take the violent sex he was learning from as gospel.

Leafing through the Children’s Commissioner’s reports into children’s online reality, one of the things I kept coming back to was just how clueless our generation has become. The children themselves are saying it loudly: parents don’t understand their online lives or how common harmful experiences are and, even more worryingly, because of that, they wouldn’t turn to them if something went wrong.

So What Can We Do?

The advice from the Children’s Commissioner is to start having conversations about these topics early — and, most importantly, to keep having them. And from my own experience, I can tell you it’s not as bad as you think. Mine were ten when we first discussed porn, and perhaps because they were so young, there was no squirming or embarrassment on either side.

Having grown up in the nineties, my friends and I believed we could see the evidence of progress all around us. But spend any time in the online lives of children and young people, and you’ll see a totally different and, at times, terrifying world.

It’s clear to me now that we parents need to do more. Because if we can’t help our children navigate this world safely, if we can’t influence them to make the right choices, then it will be those who don’t have their best interests at heart who will fill that gap. And no parent wants to be like the mother in my novel, learning the hard way that bringing up a decent, well-adjusted child is arguably more difficult today than it has ever been before.

Rebecca Spargo is the author of Such a Nice Boy, which is available now.

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Is a £300 Electric Toothbrush Really Better Than a £30 One? We Asked Leading Dentists to Weigh In

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Earlier this year, Dyson caused a huge stir with the launch of their CameraJet toothbrush. Priced at £419, it features a built-in camera and water jet for a more precise clean, using Gap Optical Targeting to target missed interdental spaces and remove plaque as you brush. So, a toothbrush and flosser in one, just far more powerful.

And of course, the internet had a lot to say. Many people questioned whether they were really ready to pay upwards of £400 for a toothbrush and whether they really wanted a camera inside their mouth—the jury is still out on that one.

Most people complained about the price tag, but Dyson’s offering isn't even the most expensive electric toothbrush on the market. Oral-B iO10 electric toothbrush comes in at a whopping £800. All this discourse raises a bigger question: when did investing in your oral health become so so expensive?

(Image credit: Dyson / Press Association )

We’re living in a time where the pursuit of health, wellness and longevity—whatever you want to call it—seems to have no upper spending limit. Cold plunges, glucose monitors, health retreats, longevity supplements, peptide injections, hyperbaric chambers, and now oral care are all being optimised, and at a hefty price tag. And as someone who, in the name of journalism, has taken on a few practices, the bill at the end is certainly big.

Oral health isn't just about preventing cavities or keeping your breath fresh. Research has found it’s closely linked to our overall health, with studies linking poor oral health with cardiovascular disease and even certain cancers. It’s easy to see why gum health has become wellness’s latest target. Unsurprisingly, it appeals to people willing to drop serious money on their health, a group larger than you might think.

I’ve used a Spotlight Oral Care electric toothbrush for years and, my dentist and I agree, my teeth have never been in better condition. Once you go electric, there is no going back and all that. I definitely couldn’t, and I’m not alone. According to the Adult Oral Health Survey, 59% of adults in England use an electric toothbrush. But is there room to do more? Will a £400 super-toothbrush deliver better results? I suppose that’s what the longevity industry taps into: this intrigue, this idea that there’s always more we could be doing, and the pressure to do it for our health.

A more expensive toothbrush won’t fix poor brushing.

Dr Deepak, founder of Tooth Fairy

According to Niamh Turney, Senior Commercial Manager for Oral Care at Dyson, the answer is yes.“Most other toothbrushes just brush and miss the gaps between teeth. Many people then do not floss afterwards. Dyson CameraJet integrates flossing into the everyday brushing routine by using a camera to automatically detect and target gaps between teeth as you brush. It’s engineered to support overall oral health,” she explains.

I’m not even going to pretend I’m not intrigued. If there’s one thing Dyson has built a reputation for, it’s innovation. But do all those high-tech features actually make a real difference?

Dr Krystyn Wilczyński, cosmetic dentist, isn’t convinced. “You really don’t need to spend £300 to get an excellent clean. Once you have a good-quality electric toothbrush with an effective cleaning action, a pressure sensor and a two-minute timer, you’ve covered the features that matter most to me as a dentist,” she tells us.

Which is an important and refreshing reminder when it’s so easy to get swept up in the idea that more expensive automatically means better. Dr Deepak Aulak, founder of Tooth Fairy, argues that it always comes back to the basics. “A more expensive toothbrush won’t fix poor brushing. Brushing for two minutes twice a day, cleaning along the gum line and using the right pressure matters far more than the price tag. That said, a good electric toothbrush does make those habits easier. The best toothbrush is the one that suits your mouth and your needs.” He adds, “Anything above around £150, you’re often paying for features most people simply won’t use.” I suppose that’s the key takeaway. Find a toothbrush that does what you need it to do.

It feels strange to debate whether a toothbrush is worth more than £400 when millions of people across the UK struggle to access NHS dental care

It feels strange to debate whether a toothbrush is worth more than £400 when millions of people across the UK struggle to access NHS dental care. Government figures show that 60% of adults in England had not seen an NHS dentist over the previous two years, and oral health inequality continues to grow. You can even see that divide in electric toothbrush ownership: 47% of people in the lowest-income households use one, compared with 76% in the highest-income households.

Younger consumers, however, are embracing oral care for more aesthetic reasons. The goal of whiter and straighter teeth, brighter and picture-perfect smiles and easier access to oral cosmetic procedures have pushed oral care from a simple health habit into a beauty step.

So it’s no surprise that brands are responding by turning toothbrushes into sleek wellness technology, pushing the idea that toothbrushes—and even toothpaste—should do much more than simply clean your teeth. Whether that’s leaning into the beauty side or the longevity side.

It will be interesting to see how Dyson’s launch changes the category. Will toothbrushes become even smarter? Will they lean further into wellness? Or will they simply become another luxury gadget promising to optimise a routine that’s already straightforward?

So, how much is too much to spend on a toothbrush? That really depends on what you want from it. Innovation can be genuinely useful, whether that’s better battery life, more sustainable materials or features that encourage better brushing habits.

But no matter how smart the technology becomes, it always comes back to the fundamentals, which, as boring as it may seem, remain simple: brush properly, floss regularly and see your dentist when you should. The extras are, well, extras but also very nice if it’s in your budget.

The Best Toothbrushes for All Budgets

Dyson

Camerajet™ Electric Toothbrush With Flosser (ceramic Pink)

Spotlight Oral Care

Sonic Toothbrush in Black

Oral B

Io3 Matt Black Electric Toothbrush & Travel Case

Philips

Sonicare Diamondclean 9900 Prestige Electric Toothbrush

Philips

Philips Sonicare 2100 Electric Toothbrush Pink Hx4021/03

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The Age of Underwhelm: Why Does Nothing Feel as Good as It Should?

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Recently, a friend introduced me to the term “dopamine chasing”, and when I say introduced, what I really mean is, accused me of it.

She’s not wrong. In my search for… something—be that content to feed the ever-ravenous social media machine, or a sense of, if not meaning, then perhaps expansiveness—I have developed an insatiable appetite for experiences.

Sometimes it feels good, like I’m Mario jumping on toadstools to boost my reserves, except instead of toadstools, I’m collecting experiences. I imagine they’ll enhance my life; make me stronger, more interesting, better travelled, better experienced — whatever that means.

Lately, though, I’ve started feeling more like a lab rat, banging my paw against the reward lever even when it fails to spit out whatever got me onto this course in the first place.

I notice it on a micro level when I instinctively reach for my phone as a treat, and on a macro level when I plan trips of a lifetime. I’ve written before about treating travel as both an escape hatch from the ordinariness of life and a way of returning to that life as a better version of myself. It was on one such trip, which, though objectively extraordinary, somehow left me a little flat, that I started wondering what exactly I was after.

We’re a nation of truffle hunters, sniffing out the next thing that might make us feel something.

I’m hardly alone. Mastercard data shows that experiences now account for 23.3% of UK consumer spending, while 88% of Britons say they’re willing to cut back on “things” to afford more of them.

We’re a nation of truffle hunters, sniffing out the next thing that might make us feel something. From Arctic cruises and safaris to fully immersive brand worlds, we’re chasing bigger experiences, more intense emotions and increasingly elaborate ways to feel alive. But what does this relentless pursuit of pleasure tell us about the emotional state of modern life?

The obvious answer is that we’ve all fried our dopamine receptors. Dopamine has become cultural shorthand for almost every modern compulsion: why we scroll, shop, snack, swipe. We talk about dopamine hits, detoxes and addiction as though somewhere inside our brains laps a rapidly depleting reservoir of pleasure that we keep fecklessly draining.

“We often talk about pleasure as if it were one thing,” says Dr Eva Periche-Tomas, a clinical psychologist and senior researcher at the University of Oxford. In reality, she explains, reward involves several distinct processes: anticipating something, wanting or pursuing it, and actually enjoying it when it happens. Crucially, “these can come apart”. This goes some way to explaining the disconnect we can feel when we’ve spent months planning a holiday, wedding or night out, only to find the event doesn’t live up to our expectations.

Kate Moss backstage at a fashion show. We spend so much time anticipating extraordinary experiences, but what happens when the reality doesn’t quite live up to the expectation? (Image credit: Kyle Ericksen/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)

Why Doesn’t Anything Hit Like It Used To?

There’s an even more inconvenient feature of the human brain that puts the kibosh on holding onto that post-holiday glow, or feeling satisfied for any length of time: humans are exceptionally good at getting used to things.

Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation. Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, has spent decades studying it. She also has a really good example of how it showed up in her own life. Despite being almost blind for many years, within a fortnight of having laser eye surgery, she adapted to her new, almost perfect vision.

Apparently, whether it’s those shoes you’ve been saving for or the miracle of sight, no matter how new, shiny, thrilling or, in Lyubomirsky’s case, legitimately life-enhancing, the emotional impact tends to diminish as it becomes part of ordinary life. So we rats start chasing the next fix.

This seems like a cruel component of life, and I was quick to decry “late-stage capitalism!”, but Lyubomirsky explains that always looking for the next thing isn’t necessarily a design flaw.

From an evolutionary perspective, a species that stayed content every time it secured food, shelter or a mate might not have been particularly motivated to seek anything else. Adaptation keeps us moving. The problem is that the same machinery operates when the “next thing” is no longer survival, but another restaurant reservation, purchase, trip or scroll.

When Did a Nice Life Stop Being Enough?

Until recently, writer Phoebe Lovatt tells me, she was a “big experience seeker”, moving between cities and searching for the next “expansive life chapter”. Now, with a young child, her life has become smaller geographically: more local, more routine. But social media means other possible versions of it still feel within reach. “I’ve got my mate in Mexico, my mate in New York, my mate in LA,” she says. “It just constantly gives you the sense that you are failing at having a rich life.”

I can see parallels in my own insatiable appetite for experiences. Somewhere between my first ‘grown-up holiday’ (to Benidorm, I might add) and my recent trips, I stopped being content with a tan and a good time and started expecting to come home transformed. The same goes for the once-humble weekend: it’s no longer enough for it to pass pleasantly; I need to have done something with it.

We can’t just be normal. We need to be exceptionally hot, exceptionally rich, exceptionally well-travelled.

Phoebe Lovatt

We know by now the perils of having access to everyone else’s lives, but I think we overlook the impact of having a live feed of everything we could be wanting. Phoebe describes this as a constant “contrast experience”: you can be content, pick up your phone, see a friend on a beach in Malibu and suddenly your own life feels mundane.

And the bar hasn’t only risen for what we do. It’s risen for who we’re supposed to be. “We can’t just be normal,” Phoebe says. “We need to be exceptionally hot, exceptionally rich, exceptionally well-travelled.”

Somewhere between having a nice life and living your best life, just living—something to be thankful for in itself—stopped being enough. Social media lets us press our noses up against the windows of the world’s most beautiful hotels, see what strangers eat for breakfast in Copenhagen, where they swim in Sicily and which facial they booked before going. Leisure has become another arena to demonstrate taste, curiosity, self-knowledge and our own exceptionalism.

Phoebe offers a simple test: would you still want to do it if nobody knew you’d done it? If you couldn’t post it, write about it, Substack it or fold it into the story you tell about yourself, would you be quite so invested?

It’s an awkward question for me; someone who’s made a career out of turning experiences into stories. But aren’t we all doing the same thing, to varying degrees?

Are We Experiencing Our Lives...or Reviewing Them?

Then there’s that age-old issue of living in the present. As if that wasn’t already slippery enough, we’re now so programmed to view experiences through the lens of how we’ll package them for an audience later that we’re drifting further from anything resembling ‘the moment’.

Before it happens, we anticipate and plan it; while it’s happening, we evaluate it; afterwards, we turn it into something: a story, a reel, a pithy little anecdote. Often, we’re doing all three at once.

Perhaps we’re not actually feeling less; we’ve just become used to only recognising the capital-F Feelings as proof that we’re feeling at all.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, author of The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, argues that what she calls “influencer logic” has spread beyond influencers themselves. When everyday users treat their lives as potential content, she tells me, “it reduces our capacity both to experience subtle forms of pleasure, and to express subtle forms of emotion.”

She uses language as an analogy: a limited vocabulary restricts not only what we can express, but what we can identify. Social media, she argues, has its own narrow vocabulary of what looks interesting, desirable or worth sharing.

Perhaps we’re not actually feeling less then; we’ve just become used to only recognising the capital-F Feelings as proof that we’re feeling at all. Awe. Transformation. Euphoria. The best night ever. The trip of a lifetime. Core memories. A perfectly pleasant weekend can’t compete.

All dressed up with nowhere to go? In our endless pursuit of pleasure, even the most exciting experiences can leave us feeling strangely underwhelmed. (Image credit: Getty Images)

Another thing sending us on a wild goose chase when we’re in hot pursuit of happiness is the endless checking.

Did I enjoy that enough? Was it worth the money? Did we make the most of the weekend? Am I relaxed yet? Am I happy?

According to Lyubomirsky, that kind of emotional quality control can be self-defeating. Research suggests that becoming preoccupied with whether we’re happy can actually undermine happiness, partly because our attention becomes fixed on the outcome rather than the experience itself. “If you’re sort of constantly asking yourself, am I happy yet?” she tells me, “that’s gonna undermine your happiness.”

There is a pathway to getting more pleasure from less.

Professor Elizabeth Dunn

I thought back to my last massage. Partway through, I started wondering whether I was relaxed. If you want to dash your own relaxation, there’s surely no quicker way than checking whether it’s working. Suddenly, I was hyper-aware of every sensation and, crucially, how unrelaxed I felt. The more I noticed it, the less relaxed I became.

Dr Nick Earley, a clinical psychologist, sees a related problem in the language of optimisation. Under sustained stress, our attention is already trained towards whatever requires handling next. Add constant stimulation and the pressure to squeeze every last drop from our leisure time, he argues, and we can end up “scanning for the next thing rather than inhabiting the one we’re in”.

Focus too intently on pleasure — or, in my case, relaxation — as an end goal, and you risk monitoring your progress towards it instead of actually experiencing it.

Could Less Actually Feel Like More?

It’s not all doom, though. Professor Elizabeth Dunn tells me about a study in which participants were given chocolate, then asked either to abstain from it for a week or given a large supply to eat freely. When they returned to the lab, the abstainers enjoyed and savoured the chocolate more. “There is a pathway to getting more pleasure from less,” Dunn tells me.

This ‘less is more’ approach runs counter to our maxxxing culture, and an economy largely organised around convincing us that the opposite is true. It might also explain why, alongside our drive for bigger and better experiences, another apparently contradictory desire is gaining cultural currency: to switch everything off.

Emma Breschi, who spent much of her twenties working as a model, has experienced the glossy version of the extraordinary life from the inside. “I think a lot of what we’re calling a search for excitement might actually be a search for connection,” she tells me.

What if We’re Looking for Pleasure in the Wrong Places?

Phoebe describes what she sees around her as a “crisis of meaning”. Work feels precarious, the future difficult to picture, the news relentless. At the same time, culture offers an abundant menu of things to buy, book, watch and experience. “No wonder everyone’s just kind of numbing out,” she says.

It’s tempting, when the bigger structures of life feel uncertain, to adopt a last-days-of-Rome mentality. I may not know what the world will look like in five years, but I can book the restaurant, plan the trip, buy the ticket. Life might feel out of control, but I can make Friday night really, really good.

The problem comes when we expect those things to provide not only pleasure, but proof: that our lives are interesting, that we’re using our time properly, that we’re happy. Phoebe talks about the odd expectation that ordinary people should now live like “a socialite or like a trust fund baby or a celebrity”. Twenty years ago, she points out, most of us didn’t know what rich people’s houses looked like. “It’s created a level of aspiration that’s impossible to reach,” she says, “and even if you do reach it, what does it mean?”

Pleasure is a long game.

Millie Gooch

Author Louise O’Neill knows a thing or two about arriving at the life you thought would make you happy. For years, she says, her happiness felt conditional: I’ll be happy when I find the right relationship, sell enough books, achieve the next marker of success. Eventually, on paper at least, she got there. “I had the man, the house, everything looked perfect,” she says. And yet she still found herself lying awake wondering: “Is this it?”

There is a difference, she realised, between “a life that looks presentable on social media” and actually feeling alive inside it.

Therein lies the danger of packing pleasure with so much existential weight. A holiday can be wonderful, a restaurant can be delicious, a party can be the best night you’ve had in ages. None of them can permanently satisfy us.

Searching for Ways to Feel Something

The more people I speak to, the less convinced I become that my original question — why doesn’t anything feel as good any more? — is the right one.

Millie Gooch, founder of Sober Girl Society and author of Hangxiety, thinks we have a tendency to confuse pleasure with immediate reward. Her work focuses mainly on alcohol, where the distinction is obvious: something can feel good now while leaving us feeling worse later. Her preferred measure of pleasure is less about the intensity of the immediate sensation than whether something leaves you feeling better overall. “Pleasure is a long game,” she says.

I like this idea, partly because it exposes how limited my own pleasure accounting has become. It also raises the possibility that in pursuing pleasure principally through intensity, I might’ve overlooked a much less glamorous source of it: frequency.

Professor Ciara McCabe, who directs the Neuroscience of Reward Group, studies anhedonia — the reduced ability to experience pleasure. One approach her lab recommends is deliberately scheduling small positive and social experiences, such as getting a coffee or going for a walk with a friend. The aim, she says, is to create “regular opportunities to experience joy”, rather than waiting for rarer, enormous milestones.

This feels counterintuitive in a culture that tells us to dream bigger, aim higher. Of the two posters I remember being pasted to my secondary school walls, one read: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. The other said something about shooting for the moon because, if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. Neither seemed to be pointing me towards an adult life stuffed with more coffee dates.

And yet the science backs it up. Lyubomirsky studies savouring: deliberately directing our attention towards pleasurable experiences we might otherwise take for granted — the sun on your skin, the changing seasons, that coffee with a friend. The point isn’t to extract every last ounce of happiness from them, but simply to notice them.

I think a lot of what we’re calling a search for excitement might actually be a search for connection.

Emma Breschi

In my own pursuit of expansiveness, I got the idea that the opposite of an ordinary life is an extraordinary one; when that felt flat, I started questioning my capacity to feel anything at all. But the more experts I speak to, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that a life that feels fuller isn’t necessarily one packed with more extraordinary things, but one in which I’m able to pay more attention to ordinary ones.

Dr Nick Earley put my original question on its head: “The question isn’t how to find more stimulation. It’s how to become more present for what’s already happening.” It’s easy to seek more stimulation; it’s harder to sit down and soak in what’s already there.

I still want the trips of a lifetime. I want the thrill of wheeling my suitcase through an unknown airport, dinners where the table heaves with people and chatter as much as it does food. I want adventures that make the world feel bigger and my place in it smaller. I don’t think I’ll ever be the kind of person who can fill her cup with a brew of ‘mindful’ tea.

Thankfully, none of the people I spoke to suggested I should. What I’m trying to do instead is dial down the pressure I put on those experiences. Travel and sensory pleasures can delight me, surprise me, challenge me, disappoint me or simply give me a cracking night out. They can’t make my life meaningful on command. And constantly checking whether they’re working is probably one of the surest ways to miss them.

I’m not going to stop chasing pleasure altogether, but I might try taking my paw off the lever long enough to notice what else is already there.

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Dua Lipa, Celine Dion and Sarah Pidgeon Swear by This Trophy Jacket-and-Jeans Formula for Instant Fashion Confidence

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Summer, it's been fun but it finally—finally!—feels like colder temperatures have arrived. And if you're feeling a bit thrown for a loop after an unseasonably warm September, there's one hot-weather outfit formula that you can quickly Autumn-ify. All you need to do is substitute the "nice top" for a trophy jacket in the famous "jeans and a nice top" outfit formula.

In Paris, jeans became the "casual" vehicle by which to wear really quite fancy jackets during the day. Céline Dion kickstarted the "jeans and a trophy jacket" formula to greet the paparazzi stationed outside her hotel—and, since then, we've seen every hot jacket (tweed jackets; military jackets; leather jackets) coupled with jeans. The final ingredient in many cases is a nostalgic court heel (imagine!), making this a trifecta—jacket + jeans + heels—that you almost certainly have in your wardrobe. The trio is very '90s red carpet when celebrities didn't coordinate every look with a stylist but, instead, wore a mix of their own clothes and gifts from favourite brands, delivering less polish but way more personality.

Céline Dion

Céline Dion (Image credit: Getty Images)

Céline Dion's tour looks have been a collection of jaw-dropping gowns (not an overstatement!), but her on-the-street outfits have been just as captivating, particularly this peplum-waisted jacket paired with straight-legged jeans (Givenchy by Sarah Burton). A peplum waist might trigger alarm bells, understandably, but it's actually a very sensible partner for straight-up-and-down denim, providing not just contrast but sculptural interest.

Liberowe

Velvet Peplum Jacket

Jeanerica

Kyoto Droit 1990

Le Monde Beryl

Leather Petra Mules

Daisy Edgar-Jones

Daisy Edgar-Jones (Image credit: Backgrid)

Daisy Edgar-Jones has engaged in some on-point period dressing while promoting Sense and Sensibility. And while the corseted gowns and archival pendant necklaces were ravishing, it, again, was a jeans-and-jacket combination that captured our attention (her take on a modern-day Elinor). It felt like a particularly good way to wear a military jacket, which can feel slightly on-the-nose paired with tailoring. Instead, low-rise jeans with a very slight flare (perhaps even too slight to be called "boot-leg") were the perfect foil.

Mango

Jacket With Strip Collar

Abercrombie & Fitch

Slouchy Straight Jean

Gucci

Vittoria slingback pumps

Sarah Pidgeon

Sarah Pidgeon (Image credit: Getty Images)

Sarah Pidgeon put a trophy spin on everyone's favourite jacket. Her take on leather wasn't an oversized biker or a minimal blazer (very CBK) but, instead, a cinch-waisted, bell-sleeved style that had as much romance (and softness) as one can eke out of leather (bravo, Balenciaga!). The split-hem jeans, with frayed edges trailing under the spike of a court-heel stiletto, added a counterbalance of grunge.

Ducie

Bernadette Jacket

Arket

Coral Wide Jeans

Toteme

Nappa Kitten Pumps

Dua Lipa

Dua Lipa (Image credit: Backgrid)

A (Matthieu Blazy-era) Chanel tweed jacket is now the ultimate shopping acquisition (as well as his shoes, which are extremely hard to get your hands on or feet in). And Dua Lipa just demonstrated how to wear one if you manage the seemingly impossible—with nothing more, nothing less than jeans and pumps (take note that her jeans stop just below the ankle for a super-polished appearance).

Sister Jane

Fringe Tweed Jacket

Levi's

Ribcage Ankle Jeans

Charles & Keith

Aira Kitten Heels

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The Human Cost Of Fashion’s Heat Crisis: “It Feels Like Being Locked Inside A Pressure Cooker At High Flame”

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For garment workers in the dense industrial hub that surrounds Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, a typical day begins at 5am. They make breakfast for their families and clean the house before walking to work—a journey that can take up to an hour.

In Dhaka, the weather is both warm and humid—the temperature rarely drops below 26°C, and in the summer months it can reach as high as 45°C. During heatwaves, which are increasingly frequent and protracted as global warming’s consequences land, inside the factories, where T-shirts and trousers are made for the world’s biggest clothing companies, temperatures can be a sweltering 38°C.

And it’s not just in Bangladesh—across China, India and Vietnam, where much of the world’s clothing is produced, rising heat stress is threatening the lives and health of the people (mostly women) who work along the supply chain. Less than two per cent of them are paid a living wage to cut and assemble clothing under the immense pressure of volume-based production targets.

The speed of their labour is the last price component that can be squeezed in fashion’s seemingly bottomless search for the cheapest goods. Materials, electricity and logistic costs are relatively fixed, so when a fashion brand demands a lower price, labour is the only movable variable.

Now, ultra-fast-fashion brands and mass retailers, from Shein to Kmart, sell T-shirts for as little as £2.16. Before the retail mark-up is applied, the cost price might be just a third of this. And once fabric and overheads are accounted for, there are mere cents left for the people who construct and sew garments.

As heat adds another layer of stress and risk to jobs already fraught with zero-hour contracts (where there is no guarantee of minimum hours), no sick leave and hazardous working environments, the fashion industry is facing a reckoning over its treatment of workers.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Marie Claire)

“We wear bras, blouses, sarees and aprons in 40°C heat. It feels like being locked inside a pressure cooker at high flame,” says a 36-year-old sewing machine operator from India who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Sometimes, I think I’m like a broiler chicken—just waiting to burst.”

She has been working in the garment industry for nine years and has a number of strategies in place to meet her production targets, fearing scolding from line supervisors if she falls behind. She avoids drinking water to minimise toilet use and chews gum to suppress thirst. “I only pee at lunch or after I reach home,” she says. “That’s how I survive, by controlling my body.”

Another 39-year-old woman from India works as a fusing operator—a physically demanding job using a heat press machine to attach brand labels onto garments. She has been in the industry for five years and works at a factory that produces clothes for major international brands where the production pressure to meet high volume targets is intense. “If I go to the toilet, when I come back, my table is loaded with garment pieces and I’ll be yelled at. So I control myself from peeing to avoid scolding. I hardly drink water—only when I feel like fainting will I drink a little,” she says.

A 33-year-old tailor (also from India) who works six days a week to support her household describes the factory—which has no ventilation and only a few functioning fans—as a “furnace with no relief” in the summer months. She is on a day-pay contract with minimal security and no benefits and is expected to make 120 to 130 pieces per hour.

“If I don’t meet my piece count, I won’t get paid,” she says. “We don’t even have time to wipe the sweat off our faces. If we stop, the pieces won’t get done—and then the supervisor scolds us in front of everyone. That’s very humiliating.” As we have seen across Europe this summer, extreme heat is no longer a projected threat—it is already disrupting lives all over the world. Every one of the past 11 years has been one of the hottest on record.

If I go to the toilet, when I come back, my table is loaded with garment pieces and I’ll be yelled at.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Marie Claire)

The World Meteorological Organisation has confirmed that the global average surface temperature in 2025 was 1.44°C above the pre-industrial average.

In the worst affected places, temperatures are also rising at night, limiting the ability of anyone without air conditioning to experience a reprieve. But despite its prevalence, and the fact that it is the leading cause of weather-related deaths globally, heat is viewed differently to other extreme weather events. Because droughts, floods and bushfires are visually more dramatic, the threat they pose to human life is better understood.

By contrast, extreme heat is viewed as an annoyance, and experts say we are unprepared for its catastrophic health impacts and how unevenly it affects different social groups. Dr Harshita Umesh is the founder of Vaada Hope Foundation and a surgeon in training from Bengaluru, India.

Garment workers present at the hospital where she is a resident with a range of health problems, many of them compounded by the heat and their precarious working conditions. These include dehydration, headaches, fainting, cardiovascular strain, an inability to concentrate which results in injury, gastrointestinal issues from food spoilage and insufficient water intake, urinary tract infections, kidney stones and irritability that can result in violence from their managers.

To make matters worse for the women inside the factories, extreme heat’s impact on menopause, pregnancy and fertility is under-researched. “Garment workers usually drink very, very little water so that they don’t have to use the restroom. The consequences of that ends up being a urinary tract infection, it ends up being sepsis, it ends up being kidney stones, it ends up being people in the hospital,” Umesh says. Heat is “an underlying stress that exacerbates everything else around it”, especially for female garment workers who may already be in “a chronic condition of starvation and are under a lot of stress already”.

In two reports released at the end of 2025, human rights campaigners Amnesty International accused fashion brands, factory owners and the governments of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka of failing to ensure garment workers had the right to unionise and collectively bargain.

The harsh reality of these workers’ lives—powerless to demand better conditions and under such intense time pressure that bathroom breaks are out of reach—is just one part of the inhumanity in these jobs.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Marie Claire)

Garment workers usually drink very, very little water so that they don’t have to use the restroom.

Another is that they do not have paid sick leave, and Umesh recounts stories of women who present in hospital, needing treatment, but refuse it because they cannot afford to take the time off work. “If you have a quota to meet, you might not go to the doctor on time,” she says. Meaning something like a small injury to a finger can get infected and swollen. Usually, such an injury would be curable with medication and time, but if “you have to go back to work or your family will starve”, you will refuse treatment.

She recounts incidents of patients returning when the infection becomes too bad to ignore—if it’s spread to the bone, the only option to save their life is to amputate the finger. “Every garment we wear tells a story and it shouldn’t be one of blood, sweat and tears,” Umesh says. “Workers must be paid a living wage, not because the world is watching but out of respect for human dignity and life.”

To make an already difficult situation even worse, the solutions—air conditioning and extra fans—are compromised by how much they cost to install, old infrastructure that cannot physically support them and by pressure from the fashion industry to decarbonise the supply chain, which means using less electricity, not more.

Solutions are further compromised by global instability impacting fuel sources. In May, due to energy shortages linked to the Iran war, Bangladesh manufacturers were forced to turn off fans and air conditioning to save power while temperatures peaked. Pivoting to renewable energy from solar panels seems like a logical solution, but infrastructure and who shoulders the expense of installation remains a barrier.

While the issues of the industry’s environmental harms and contribution to global warming are entwined with the harm it perpetrates on workers in its supply chains —namely through over-production—there is an urgency missing from the industry’s approach to the health impacts of heat stress. Grace Forrest, the founding director of the human rights organisation Walk Free, believes the fashion industry is too focused on innovation to lessen its environmental footprint.

(Image credit: Getty Images/Marie Claire)

“Right now, harmful impact is far outpacing the delivery of effective and structural sustainability solutions,” she says. “Many of the ‘solutions’ will not address the human harms stitched into the fashion industry.”

Dr Hakan Karaosman is a supply chain expert and associate professor at Politecnico di Milano. He believes at least part of the solution is fashion brands changing their business models and accepting that they must pay a fair price. “We are seeing production as a commodity. We are seeing workers as a commodity. So we don’t really humanise the workforce,” he explains. “Let’s ask the workers how we can help them improve their conditions so they can be more dignified.”

The women who gave their voices to this article asked for urgent, basic interventions that are so simple it is heartbreaking to consider how difficult their working days are. “A glass of lime water—if [lime] is too expensive, then at least cold water. Something to make it bearable,” the 33-year-old tailor says.

Other requests include more frequent and unpenalised toilet breaks, air coolers or air conditioners during high-temperature periods, electrolyte water, better ventilation and roofs that are made of materials other than metal. The 36-year-old sewing machine operator asks for something that would help the people at the top—those making the decisions that impact the workers’ lives—have more empathy for them.

“Let the directors of these fashion brands sit in our seats—just for one hour,” she says. “Let them feel this heat, this sweat, this pain. Maybe then they’ll realise that they are killing us for their profits.”

This story was initially published by Lucianne Toni on the Marie Claire Australia website

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I Smell Hundreds of Perfumes a Year—Merit’s New Fragrance Made Me Stop and Pay Attention

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I’ll admit, I’m a self-confessed perfume snob—and I’m very particular about the type of fragrances I wear. I like to smell elegant, understated and expensive, which usually means something nuanced, beautifully balanced and difficult to immediately decipher.

So, when a makeup brand branches into fragrance, I’m always sceptical. To me, it can often feel like a commercial play to drive sales rather than an exercise in olfactory exploration and genuine brand enrichment. However, Merit’s first fragrance, Retrospect, was one of the few exceptions to this rule. Despite ultimately being a skin scent, it is incredibly complex and nuanced, opening with a burst of bergamot, pear and ambrette before settling into something softer, muskier and more lived-in. It’s also incredibly good value for the quality, with 30% fragrance oil and a price tag of £72.

Today, Merit revealed its second fragrance: New Wave. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be rushing to try it, but after the success—and, frankly, the perfumery credentials—of Retrospect, I made a point of getting my hands on it. And it really didn’t disappoint.

(Image credit: Lottie Winter)

First, the bottle. It’s the same molten, pebble-esque form as its predecessor, complete with that distinctive thumb-dent, but New Wave has been given its own identity with a slightly different lid and warm, golden juice.

Next, the fragrance itself. New Wave is an amber, but if that immediately makes you think of something powdery and sweet, you'd be mistaken. Yes, the amber character is apparent almost immediately, with a distinct vanillary warmth, but it's cut through by the dry, herbaceous quality of angelica seed. It’s slightly earthy and almost medicinal, stopping the amber underneath from becoming too plush or predictable.

This tension makes sense when you look at its construction. Master perfumer Dominique Ropion and perfumer Meabh McCurtin took the historic Ambre 83 accord, with its rich, resinous, vanillic character, as their starting point, then worked to make it feel lighter and more contemporary.

As it settles, the edges soften and orange flower starts to come through, but not as an overtly pretty white floral. Instead, it's more of a resinous floral: warm, slightly honeyed and almost balsamic, with the flower kind of absorbed into the amber rather than sitting on top of it. Ylang-ylang adds to that solar warmth, but I find the orange flower much easier to identify on my skin.

Then comes the dry-down. The sweetness recedes and the woods, ambroxan and other amber materials come to the fore, leaving behind something smooth, dry and distinctly ambroxy. There’s still a trace of that original warmth, but by this point it feels less like classical amber and more like warm skin against dry wood.

The base itself is extensive. Benzoin, labdanum, olibanum and patchouli sit alongside ambrofoam, ambroxan and musk; earthy cypriol and vetiver; tobacco; cedarwood and oakwood; then vanilla bean and tonka bean. On paper, it sounds as though it should be overwhelmingly rich. On skin, it’s remarkably controlled.

(Image credit: Lottie Winter)

For me, this is where New Wave stands out. It doesn’t progress neatly from bright top notes to a floral heart and finally a heavy amber base. The amber is there from the beginning; it's everything around it that changes. This feels particularly apt given it was initially inspired by an afternoon at the Musée Picasso in Paris, where the Merit team became interested in Cubism and Surrealism—and, specifically, the idea of knowing artistic rules well enough to break them. Ropion and McCurtin have essentially applied the same principle to classical amber perfumery: retaining its richness and sophistication while playing with the way we expect it to unfold.

New Wave is also an extrait de parfum, and its longevity reflects that. It has impressive presence when first sprayed, but it isn’t one of those fragrances that enters a room before you do. Instead, it develops slowly over several hours, becoming warmer, woodier and more intimate as the day goes on.

Retrospect was the fragrance that made me think that Merit deserved to be taken seriously as a perfume brand, and New Wave has confirmed it. The two smell very different—Retrospect is softer, muskier, and more intimate; New Wave is warmer, richer, and more assertive—but both show the same attention to composition.

At £79, it represents exceptional value for this level of perfumery. But more importantly, New Wave doesn’t smell like a fragrance created to capitalise on a successful beauty brand. It smells like the work of two very accomplished perfumers who were given enough room to make something genuinely interesting. And, for a perfume snob like me, that makes it a very easy recommendation.

Launching 22nd October on meritbeauty.com

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