There are upsides and downsides to working from home. Upside: I now live a life almost entirely unencumbered by trousers. Downside: the postman has figured out that I’ll always take my neighbours’ parcels for them. Upside: I get to spend more time with my family. Downside: most of that time is spent yelling: “Shut up I’m on a deadline I’m sorry I love you!” at them. Simultaneous upside and downside: I don’t have anyone to gossip with.

That last one is an upside because gossip is a base activity reserved almost exclusively for people who revel in pettiness and jealousy. But it is also a downside, because gossip is flat-out brilliant and I really enjoy knowing what’s wrong with people.

This lack of gossip is enough to cast me as a tragic recluse. But, to make matters worse, I’m a tragic recluse who will die young. According to a professor of evolutionary psychology speaking at the Cheltenham Science festival, gossiping can prolong your life. Robin Dunbar claimed that the amount of incessant sticky-beaked rubbish you indulge in with your peers has a bigger effect on your life expectancy than anything else, apart from giving up cigarettes.

Now, I’m no professor of evolutionary psychology, but I think this means that we’ve all been wasting our lives. Ploughed your life savings into the eradication of natural diseases? You ninny. You may as well have just massively slagged off all your friends whenever they weren’t around. That’s what they did to you, and look at them. They’re in great shape.

Oliver Burkeman on gossip Read more

Gossiping has always served an important social function. It’s one of the things that separates us from the animals. The ability to share information with one another is what allowed early humans to live in increasingly large groups. We have an economy because of gossip. We have cities. The reason why dogs don’t have cities is because none of them had the wherewithal to get together and spend an afternoon trashing Binky the Poodle’s crap new haircut.

In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re only alive right now because one of your earliest ancestors had a bit of a gob on them. Without gossip, they would have never been able to discover that Ug from three caves down had a collection of sharp flints and a weird thing for fascistic etchings. And without this knowledge, Ug would have broken into their home, slit their throat, danced around wearing their bum as a hat and wiped your entire family from existence in the process. If it weren’t for gossip, humankind would be angrier, less trustworthy and more prone to wearing the bums of their enemies as a hat.

But gossip has lost its way. What started out as a survival instinct has now warped and blistered and become the Sidebar of Shame. Instead of weeding out potential conmen from our tribe based on glimpses of their behaviour in specific circumstances, we’re all pointing and laughing at Amanda Holden because she went outside with some yoghurt on her top or whatever. That’s not proper gossip. That’s gossip’s lazy cousin.

And, clearly, there is such a thing as too much gossip. If your life expectancy increased in line with your density of gossip, then Neighbours would have been the origin story of how Mrs Mangel gained the powers of immortality. Dumbo would have been an instructional documentary about how to outlive your friends by mocking disabled children. When it comes to gossip, a little goes a long way.

But a little is more than I’ve currently got. The only people who I could possibly gossip with right now are my four-month-old son (who doesn’t seem to care how weird it is that my wife won’t throw away used teabags) and my wife (who doesn’t seem to care that our son has got a wobbly head and craps himself a lot). That’s it.

If I spent more time at the Guardian office – which is, as far as I can tell, much like any other workplace in that it is staffed almost exclusively by legions of embittered egotists clinging on to decades-old grudges as if their lives literally depended on it – I’d probably qualify as immortal by now. But that isn’t the case, so instead I have no choice but to resign myself to an early grave.

And that’s probably for the best, because gossiping is an ugly trait anyway. It is the sociological equivalent of eating kale – it might save your life, but people will slowly abandon you if it’s all you ever do. Perhaps I’m better off staying out of it altogether. After all, if gossiping is as good for you as not smoking, then dignity and discretion are as bad (and therefore cool) for you as smoking. Live fast, reveal nothing, leave a good-looking corpse, that’s my new motto.