Everyone loves generalising about other people; no one likes being generalised about themselves. This, I suspect, is the animating force behind the attention economy, the secret sauce in the Twitter like, the fairy dust in the clickbait.
It’s what all those push-button culture war headlines have in common: “Are takeaways and Netflix to blame for young people failing to get on housing ladder?”; “Is Brexit revenge on the arrogant metropolitan elite?”; and, fast becoming the equivalent in the books world: “Why don’t men read novels anymore?”
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