How would any of us know it was new year if the papers weren’t full of articles about how to improve ourselves written by people so clueless about life that they opted for the media as a long-term career? Such guidance has been especially prevalent this year, maybe because it’s a new decade or maybe because these kinds of articles are a lot easier and cheaper to produce than proper investigative journalism – who really can say? But I would like to draw everyone’s attention to one article published over the weekend, about how we can all lead better lives, written by none other than British radio’s own Chris Evans (as opposed to Hollywood’s own Chris Evans). Because, truly, no one is better qualified to give life guidance than a man who, in 2000, at the age of 34, gave the then 18-year-old Billie Piper a silver Ferrari, even though she didn’t know how to drive.

Ah, but that’s all very much in the past, Evans assures us, because he is now ENLIGHTENED. He proves this at some length in an article that itself seems to defy the very notion of space and time, with observations including: “Newton saw his falling apple one day and declared: ‘Look! Gravity!’ That was his identity that day, he became the gravity guy. But what about the tree whence the apple fell? The tree that had defied his gravity in the first place, rising skywards, majestically, towards the stars.” The headline on the article is I Have Seen the Light, but the editors could have saved themselves a few characters and just titled it, more accurately, Made Ya Think.

Evans thrillingly reveals all the things he has learned with such aperçus as: “Everything you really want, you already have” (probably true of a man who owns one of the most expensive car collections in the country) and: “We say: ‘I am not myself today,’ but we never say: ‘Myself is not my I today.’” Made ya think!

On and on it goes, with Evans – who earns £2m a year on Virgin Radio – counselling readers that they shouldn’t “seek to be enriched and find yourself enslaved” and “our need to go on holiday [is] completely surplus to who we really are”. (Quite how this fits with Evans’ instruction that in order to have a happy life one must “have at least two holidays booked at all times” is, alas, not explicated.)

If you’re thinking: “Sounds like my man was given some Eckhart Tolle for Christmas,” you would not be far wrong. Tolle – the favoured writer for all narcissists – has indeed shaped what I guess we can call Evans’ “thinking”. But, true to form, Evans doesn’t just like Tolle – he worships him. He is, Evans says, in a line that is a million times funnier than anything that was in Zoolander 2, “my No 1 guru”; Evans has read The Power of Now every year for the past two decades, a habit that has been scientifically proven (maybe) to have a more corrosive effect on the brain than long-term cocaine use. “Manifestation is the art of making what you want to happen happen. It is a real superpower available to us all,” Evans continues, and there, I’m afraid, I must manifest cutting him off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eckhart Tolle … Evans’ guru. Photograph: Johnny Louis/Getty Images

It is quite something how these guys all go the same way, isn’t it? They make too much money and then decide to show their humility by adhering to some kind of cod quasi-mystical/religious theory that conveniently always puts them at its godlike centre. Kanye West has taken this to the extreme, with his VVVVIP invitation-only weekly gospel services, and poor old Tom Cruise took it further still, advocating the benefits of Scientology with a mad glint in his otherwise dead eyes. But Evans suggesting everyone can become a millionaire like him if they just read enough Tolle isn’t far off. What’s striking about Evans is that even the most coked-up British celebrities generally avoid this pitfall by clinging on to some vestiges of humour and self-awareness. Robbie Williams at his most nonsensical was always funny about his nonsense, while Noel Gallagher has made a whole post-Oasis career out of laughing at the whole shebang. Evans, however, can now be found in Sunday papers opining “‘I’ is everything.” Isn’t it just?