Can I be honest for one second? I just want to say I don't understand anything. The world makes no sense whatever. Contemporary reality has got so bizarre that it's not even worth being angry or upset about. We are – to judge from any media you consult – living simultaneously in the greatest and most abundant age of democracy and technological liberation in history, and in an ignoble, corrupt hive of folly that is about to be wasted into an arid ecological dark age, reduced to 1930s-style penury, wiped out by bacteria or . . . well you know the scares as well as I do.

On the streets, the world looks affluent, young. Old people? They are in the modern art galleries. It's all so unbearably hip and at the same time, it's finished. Allegedly. But most of the faces I see look in pretty good shape.

In his great book The Embarrassment of Riches, the historian Simon Schama explores the moral psychology of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. Even as they rode a galleon of merchant wealth, Dutch burghers worried. They worried about the consequences of excess, about the punishments they believed to be inevitable even as they bought one more nautilus goblet. The western world in this century has taken this culture of "embarrassment" to insane extremes. We are, simultaneously, madly optimistic and pathologically pessimistic. To put this as eloquently as possible, this paradoxical age is doing my bleedin' head in.

A few years ago I went to Ghana. At a crossroads somewhere west of Accra we visited a mosque. People were coming and going in the late afternoon heat. No one had anything. Not a laptop, not a house. Did they fear the end of the world? No, everyone seemed incredibly sane. I am not romanticising poverty. I just don't understand how a society that has as much as modern Britain can find so little to hold on to.