SHY away from lifestyle surveys, that's my advice. Anyone who leads a lifestyle rather than a life is a pretentious idiot for one thing. And these surveys are always depressing, focusing on the shallow obsessions of consumerism.

The latest one, courtesy of Barclays, compares 1977 with 2002 - the Silver with the Golden Jubilee. It is full of jargon coined by sociologists desperate to prove they don't merely regurgitate the blindingly obvious.

Back then we were anarchists, the report says; now we're "changeoholics". Oh yeah? Very few of us were anarchists, I'm afraid. A few punks gobbing in the gutter does not a revolution make.

Britain has always been a conformist, conservative society, albeit one which enjoys the antics of a few lively individuals like Sid Vicious from behind the Daily Mail safety curtain.

The most anarchic thing I did in 1977 - when I was eight - was to refuse to do the washing up; an uprising swiftly crushed by the full weight of matriarchal disapproval.

The term "changeoholics" attempts to make our lives sound interesting and dynamic, but it boils down to the fact that no one's job is safe any more. Let's face it, we've less energy than the previous generation.

Young people spend hours slumped on their sofas gawping at young people spending hours slumped on the Big Brother sofa. You'd find more vim in a sloth sanctuary.

Oh, but how much choice we have today! Three TV channels then, 123 today; no websites then, two billion today. And by how much have our lives been enriched by this splurge of screen fodder? Precisely?

As you would expect from Barclays, this "study" is a crude marketing exercise. It is trying to create a "lifestyle" to which we all should aspire, preferably funding it by Barclaycard.

We run our lives at several speeds, says the report (so did the caveman: chase something, kill it, eat it, run like hell from something else). They've even given it a name: "gearshifting". It might be, the survey suggests, that we go flat out Monday to Thursday, then catch "a cheap flight to a European city for a long weekend".

An unnamed father is quoted moaning about when he was 15: "all we ever did was go on holiday around the UK. One year it was the Peak District, the next somewhere in Wales or Scotland.

"My kids are younger than that now and they've been to three different continents."

Well, whup-dee-do. Despite suffering such terrible parental neglect, this man is determined to ensure his kids never endure the ignominy of a British holiday. And, the unwritten message is, neither should your children.

Why do we do this? Why endlessly mock our Seventies selves, and kid each other that we are more worldly because we drink Aussie chardonnay instead of Black Tower?

Because we've turned into a bunch of snobs, that's why. Far fewer people are likely to host a street party for the Golden Jubilee than they did for the Silver Jubilee. Nothing to do with a budding republican movement (unfortunately). Instead, we are embarrassed at the prospect of having a knees-up with our neighbours. What an unrefined way for us sophisticated consumer types to spend our "leisure time". And we don't know our neighbours anyway.

I'm not a changeoholic or a gearshifter. I still like meat pies in gravy, The Jam and punk, the Saturday teatime football results and trips to the East Coast. My favourite caf is not Starbucks but the Spurriergate Centre.

That's all right, though. Because I don't earn the sort of money Barclay wants from its customers anyway.

Updated: 11:10 Wednesday, May 29, 2002