Author Simon Griffin on why people have forgotten about good manners

When I was young I wanted to play in the National Basketball Association. By the age of about 15 I realised this was increasingly unlikely to happen, partly based on the fact that most other boys were at least a foot taller than me by this point, but largely based on my complete lack of ability. But as I lay on my bed looking up at my carefully curated collage of adverts torn out of FHM and Loaded magazines, Michael Jordan looked back at me and told me to Just Do It.

Author Simon Griffin

Whether it was inspired by Gary Gilmore’s final words before being executed doesn’t really matter, in 1988 Nike’s trademark slogan was being plastered all over the world and 30 years later it’s still going strong. It’s enabled and empowered new generations of go-getters and high achievers – the ultimate mantra to prove anyone from anywhere could achieve anything in life if they put their mind to it. (Impossible is Nothing, as a rival shoe manufacturer would say many, many years later.)

Wake up, get up, and Just Do It. Do early morning yoga classes, do a gym session at lunch, and do a creative writing course in the evenings so you can do your blog. Do a marathon at the weekend. Do that job promotion, do that new business plan and do the extra hours that you know will pay off one day. Do work emails in the rain whilst ignoring your children playing rugby, do amazing meals with exotic ingredients imported from all over the world and do luxury holidays filled with doing even more stuff. (Just don’t forget to do regular Facebook/Instagram/Twitter updates so everyone knows about it.)

Fill your life with acts of great significance and meaning and they will build statues in your honour. Just F***ing Do It.

Of course, we also need to remind ourselves that we need to do the washing up, do the laundry and do the weekend shop too. All the stuff that Jordan and Charles Barkley never seem to mention in their adverts, like doing the car insurance renewal. We live in a world of perpetual doing. The list simply doesn’t end. There’s never a point where you get to check your list and say with a smug smile, “I’ve got nothing to do.”

Which is perhaps exactly why we need to force ourselves to do less. Give ourselves time to switch off and do absolutely nothing.

A few thousand years ago our lives were a lot more simple. Not necessarily easier, but certainly less filled with stuff to do. You got up, ate, fed your livestock, went in search of food, spent some time sharpening spears or arrows, looked for more food, then maybe whiled away a couple of hours making fires or doing some recreational drawing on the walls of your cave. Today – thanks to the miracle of smartphones – we can’t go 15 minutes with checking to see if someone’s emailed a message that we probably don’t want to read, or updated their profile with a picture we don’t want to see.

Not only are we stuffing our lives with more stuff to do on a daily/hourly/minutely basis, but we’ve more choices than ever before. A few years ago one national supermarket chain had 224 varieties of air freshener, 98 types of rice, 60 varieties of cola and a mind-blowing 283 varieties of coffee. No self-respecting café in 2019 would ever dare offer you the binary option of black or white. We want different blends from different countries with different methods and different syrups and different milks and different foams.

All this stuff squeezed into exactly the same amount of hours in the day that our cave-dwelling ancestors had. We simply don’t have the time for things to go wrong, so if someone dares behave in a manner that differs slightly from our own expectation of acceptable behaviour – for example, eating a boiled egg on a crowded commuter train – then a whole arsenal of toys are going to be ejected from the pram.

Manners have nothing to do with class or wealth – as so frequently demonstrated by a variety of overpaid public figures – they cost nothing, after all. But they do take time, and in our busy little bubbles that’s almost more valuable than money. We’re cash rich and time poor, so who gives monkey’s if we offend a few people by clipping our nails on the train or pushing to the front of the queue? You’ll probably never see those individuals again anyway. We’ve all got a million things to do and are constantly reminded of the million things other people are doing, so the faster we can get things done the better, right? Well wrong. The faster we get things done the faster we get them done. Doing things properly always takes a lot more time, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.”

Whether you’re doing the weekly/daily/hourly grocery shop, taking a group of hyperactive kids to the cinema, or signing up at your local meditation class, please, forget just looking after number one, and be on the look-out for number two as well. It’s much more dangerous when it hits the air-cooling device.

We’re not talking Mother Teresa levels of selflessness here, just a few moments of clarity when we acknowledge that perhaps flossing your undercarriage within two feet of someone’s face in the changing room, might not be to everyone’s delight. A little lightbulb that pings on as you smugly sprint to the front of the newly opened checkout that tells you maybe other people have been waiting a little longer.

We don’t need to Just Do It or Live Life to the Max. Turn off your f***ing phone and experience the truly life-changing miracles of doing one thing at a time. Only when we can treat ourselves to this level of kindness, will we be able to pass on that kindness to others.

Simon Griffin is the author of F***ing Good Manners (Icon books, £9.99). He is also the man behind F***ing Apostrophes.