{"id":90984,"date":"2026-07-27T05:43:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T05:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/90984\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T05:43:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T05:43:09","slug":"dua-lipa-the-magical-thinker-unwittingly-making-britains-young-women-miserable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/90984\/","title":{"rendered":"Dua Lipa: the ‘magical thinker’ unwittingly making Britain\u2019s young women miserable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who broke Britain?<\/a>\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0You won\u2019t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The hardcore socialist whose ruinous idea is why Liz Truss became PM<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert\u2026 who accidentally cost Britons billions<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The shadowy maverick who pulled Labour\u2019s strings\u2026 and sunk Starmer<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Steven Bartlett: the glorified PR man quietly making Britain worse<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The Tory who sold off Britain\u2019s greatest assets \u2013 then told us to take back control<\/a><\/p>\n

Dua Lipa<\/a> has made mediocrity unbearable, and the ordinary feel like failure. In doing so, she has accidentally broken Britain.<\/p>\n

With ready access to Lipa\u2019s enviable social media feed from the phone in their pocket, young people think they can have it all \u2013 if they only they manifest hard enough. They are disappointed time and time again.<\/p>\n

Lipa has won three Grammy Awards, and was the first female artist to have five songs reach over two billion streams on Spotify. But it\u2019s really the 30-year-old singer\u2019s cultural cachet and influence that sets her apart. She has the biggest Instagram follower count of any British celebrity, even greater than David Beckham \u2013 broadcasting life updates, promotions and book recommendations to 88.5 million followers.<\/p>\n

The danger is this: young people<\/a> think Lipa\u2019s life is valid point of comparison, rather than an outlier to the human experience.<\/p>\n

An indication of how Lipa became the face of modern aspiration is that this month the phrase \u201cevery time I want something god doubles it and gives it to Dua Lipa\u201d went viral.<\/p>\n

Spend time with women in their twenties and early thirties and you\u2019ll hear variations of the same sentiment.<\/p>\n

The majority of those people who follow Lipa\u2019s every move are young. Instagram is overwhelmingly a young person\u2019s platform (in the UK, 25- to 34-year-olds make up 30.5 per cent of its users, and those aged 18-24 19.1 per cent).<\/p>\n

Nothing epitomises the fairy tale her fans follow in real time than her wedding to classically handsome movie star Callum Turner. It took place at a Sicilian mansion nicknamed \u201clittle Versailles\u201d. She wore a feather and crystal-embellished dress which it took 1,155 hours to make.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Lipa\u2019s honeymoon posts displayed an astute social media strategy \u2013 interspersed with scenes of yachts in the harbour and pictures of luxurious hotel interiors, were regular, everyday items. In one she wore a Napoli football shirt, another featured a picture of cherries in a cardboard punnet being handed to her. It makes her feel relatable.<\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, I like Dua Lipa immensely. I have seen her perform twice \u2013 one back in 2017, and then again two years ago, at her Glastonbury debut<\/a>. She rose to fame via her own ingenuity, by posting covers on YouTube. She always has something insightful to say (her book club, unlike other celebrities\u2019, features books she has actually read, not just what\u2019s trending). She\u2019s principled \u2013 take her backing protests against Ivanka Trump\u2019s resort<\/a>, and vocal advocacy over Palestine<\/a>. Taylor Swift would never.<\/p>\n

But I also think that unintentionally, Lipa and others like her have been responsible for a phenomenon whereby young girls think they ought to have it all \u2013 and are inevitably disappointed when they don\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s 15-year-olds are the unhappiest <\/a>in Europe<\/a>. The proportion with low life satisfaction increased from 13 per cent to 25 per cent between 2015 and 2022 \u2013 one of the steepest rises recorded across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It would be facile to claim this is all down to social media<\/a>. But it is notable that girls \u2013 who use social media more intensively than boys and for whom the link between heavy social media use and lower life satisfaction is stronger \u2013 have experienced<\/a> the sharpest declines in wellbeing.<\/p>\n

A 2024 meta-analysis of nearly 80 different studies found that social comparison on social media was one of the biggest predictors<\/a> of negative wellbeing. Seminal books likeThe Anxious Generation blame smartphones for the malaise of young people \u2013 partly for allowing \u201cconstant comparison\u201d. The benchmark used to be the girl next door. Now it\u2019s Zendaya, or Millie Bobby Brown. So when you\u2019re stuck at home on a Saturday night you refresh your Instagram feed \u2013 and see the highlight reel of your friends\u2019 lives, then Dua Lipa\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Where other influencers<\/a> like Kim Kardashian are nakedly commercial \u2013 her Instagram grid is saturated with brands she\u2019s associated with \u2013 it doesn\u2019t appear Dua Lipa is trying to sell you anything. She\u2019s funny and often posts photos where she\u2019s wearing a face mask or pulling silly faces. She does short captions devoid of the motivational speeches, lectures or sponsorships that characterise other influencers\u2019 posts. It makes it all feel more of a diary rather than promotional. And so, her life appears accidentally perfect, without being contrived. Nothing is worse for a young woman already feeling insecure.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you can\u2019t fault Dua Lipa for having a nice life and for sharing that joy with others. But there\u2019s a difference between celebrating extraordinary success, and suggesting others can achieve it simply by believing hard enough. Lipa is the biggest British household name to popularise manifesting \u2013 that is using visualisations and affirmations to make something you want happen. Psychologists call this \u201cmagical thinking\u201d. Lipa routinely talks about how she manifested her life \u2013 when I watched her perform at Glastonbury in 2024, she talked between songs about how she had manifested performing there. People online speak about how she manifested her husband with her 2024 song \u201cTraining Season\u201d where she sang of how she was done with unready suitors \u2013 she said it was inspired by \u201cthe power of manifestation\u201d. That year a Time magazine headline explained the secret to her seemingly perfect life: \u201cDua Lipa Manifested All of This\u201d.<\/p>\n

Manifesting might sound like harmless woo-woo, but what if it\u2019s more nefarious? Research shows a link between a belief in manifesting and being more likely to make risky financial decisions and be declared bankrupt. They are more likely to believe it\u2019s possible to \u201cget rich quick\u201d \u2013 was there ever a greater metaphor for how the youth of today are deluded? Just last week Allure published a piece about coaches charging clients who believe they can manifest a slimmer jaw. So many manifesters listen to related \u201csubliminals\u201d \u2013 songs containing affirmations \u2013 that the track \u201cFace Like a Model\u201d has over 1.2 million streams on Spotify.<\/p>\n

Above all, psychologists point to the self-blame<\/a> which results from believing in manifesting. It is an added burden to think you haven\u2019t achieved Dua Lipa\u2019s success not because you\u2019re poor or unlucky, but because you didn\u2019t believe hard enough.<\/p>\n

Twenty years ago Dua Lipa would have collided with young women\u2019s worlds rarely, appearing only on magazine covers and red carpets. But smartphones and social media have collapsed the distance between extraordinary and the everyday. Now Dua Lipa is in your pocket, between photos of your schoolfriend\u2019s wedding, and your cousin\u2019s new puppy. Lipa didn\u2019t break Britain by being successful \u2013 rather by making a successful life look ordinary. It made an ordinary life look like failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who broke Britain?\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,625,3134,142,5987,3507,4126],"class_list":["post-90984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-dua-lipa","tag-influencers","tag-social-media","tag-who-broke-britain","tag-women","tag-young-people"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116990352050917959","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}