That is the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man living in 1959, when John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run is set (it was published in 1960). Rabbit got married and had his first child at 23; in America today, he would probably be 30 before he had the wife or the kid, and it’s not impossible that he’d be living with his parents until then. But in the late Fifties, making the passage from youth to adulthood in your twenties was not merely possible — it was compulsory. In a culture that was tentatively embracing personal freedom, this could feel more like prison than possibility.

In an essay on Rabbit published in 1995, Updike explained how his protagonist was a reflection of his times. “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957, and without reading it, I resented its apparent injunction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American man goes on the road — the people left behind get hurt,” wrote Updike. “There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave.”

What Rabbit does has terrible, horrifying repercussions: in consequence of his actions, his wife accidentally drowns their baby, while the mistress he takes up with and then deserts is left to organize an abortion by herself. But there is also something glorious, something exciting, something right about what Rabbit does. He is no beatnik, and he acts from no organized sense of radicalism. He is, essentially, normal. Rabbit is not exceptionally clever, hardly exceptionally brave, and neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad.

His defining feature, besides his propensity to flit, is that his days of being exceptional are behind him: he’s a former high-school basketball star desperately hankering for the time when everyone cheered him and he was famous throughout the county. This ordinary man’s one great gift is to have deduced the rules of the world that is about to come, and to have started living by them a little ahead of the people around him.

His flight is less a rebellion, more a rush towards the new kind of conformity, scratched out against the great dominating influence of mass media but nonetheless shaped by it. The moment Rabbit decides to make his escape is probably when he gets home to see his wife slumped in front of a children’s TV show with the host enjoining his audience to “know yourself”. Rabbit is appalled at the banality; Rabbit is inspired by the sentiment. His drive towards freedom is soundtracked by the radio.

The novel ends with him still running, this time away from his infant daughter’s funeral: “His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” Even with everything he has done, all the mess he has created, Updike knows there’s something magnificent about his Rabbit.

Eventually, Rabbit would run through four novels (Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest), covering not only a life but also the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a commonplace that the Fifties invented the teenager, but really the teenager was only a side product of the decade’s greater creation: the individual in lifelong pursuit of self-realization. An age of personal freedom, carved out against the backdrop of screens that declared how a person should be: mass media defined a mean reality, and taught its consumers how to want the things that would mark them as an individual like everybody else. Liberty through the eternal eye of the camera.

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The 21st century has been the undoing of that one, singular lens. Rabbit’s predicament feels alien now partly because the things that hemmed him in are now almost exotically elusive for young people, but also because the media landscape he’s both repulsed by and defined by doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. At the very least, his disappointing wife would have been scrolling TikTok as well as watching television; Rabbit would probably have been listening to podcasts.

Actually, they’d probably have been making the content as well as absorbing it. The atomized individuals spawned by the media age have become, in turn, creators of their own atomized media in which they create perfectly consumable versions of themselves which just happen to replicate the tics and interests of every other individual in this ecosystem. Currently, two influencers are locked in a legal battle over who owns the greige, minimalist aesthetic both have made their trademark. One believes herself to be the original, and is suing the other for copyright infringement, claiming that she has been imitated right down to the level of specific camera angles.

It is, on the surface, an absurd claim: how can anyone “own” something as generic as an absence color? Weirder still: both influencers in the case derive their income from selling the products they feature in their Instagram and TikTok posts, meaning their entire existence is predicated on being mimicked. A more likely explanation than plagiarism is that both influencers simply followed the cues of audience engagement and the algorithm until they arrived at two versions of the self that were very nearly indistinguishable from each other.

But the fact that the case exists at all suggests that even the blandest wants to believe in the myth of their individuality. “You want to feel like you have unique value that you’re giving out into this world,” commented another influencer unrelated to the case. The inevitable result of the feedback system, though, is that “you kind of middle yourself out”. Every individual is their own brand online, and every brand is a variation of a wider product category. There are as many different versions of the “Instagram clean girl” as there are kinds of cereal.

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It’s a curious thing that the #sponcon influencer essentially has the same profession Rabbit was trying to escape: demonstrating consumer goods that promise to make your life better, and which will probably end up gathering dust somewhere in your cluttered, non-minimalist house. The rush to individualism that Rabbit embodied has turned everyone back into a version of him. The TV host’s message to Rabbit — “know yourself” — becomes its inverse: be knowable to the world. And by being knowable, buyable. The consumer and the consumable in one perfect whole.

Each person ends up in a duet with their own digital version, alive to themselves as much as they can imagine being recognized and consumed by others. I thought about this while I was watching Charli XCX last month on the (brilliant) Brat Tour. The setting is simple: for most of the show, Charli is on her own on the stage, performing directly to a video camera, the footage from which is then displayed on giant screens either side of the stage. She is singing to herself; we in the arena are watching the output, just as though we were consuming it on social media. She is, splendidly, herself, and we are the witnesses to it.

If you want to see it this way, the Brat Tour is the ultimate triumph of social media over mass media. Tens of thousands of people, including me, poured into arenas to experience a simulacra of watching Charli on their phones. The screen Rabbit ran away from has become the destination and the home for a collective dream of individualism. Everyone is special and different; everyone is the same in their pursuit of the self.

Do they still? Next month’s belated 40th anniversary reissue of ABC’s legendary debut will be marked with — deep breath — the album performed live at Hammersmith Odeon, numerous remixes, a disc featuring Mantrap, the group’s 55-minute espionage thriller directed by Julien Temple, and an essay by lead singer Martin Fry. For once, the hoo-ha seems reasonable. Entering the album chart at number one, the record featured three classic top 10 singles and remained on the charts for 50 weeks.

Yet for all the Lexicon‘s success, it’s hard not to conclude that the love song has since become the exception rather than the rule. Was it a case of the singer, not the song? Did Fry’s voice give a depth to his creations that might otherwise not have been there? Hardly: the song-cycle was so spectacular that its success happened despite, rather than because, of the magic pipes of the warbler. Fry was a profoundly humdrum vocalist, a phenomena that affected many of the biggest bands of the time, including Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, whose Simon Le Bon and Tony Hadley both often sounded as though they had a crucial body part trapped in a door.

The death of the love song is often attributed to that old, shag-shy stalwart: the end of innocence. When sex got slammed on the table, love, and all the yearning metaphors that fuelled the great love songs, went out through the window. But love wasn’t murdered by sex; after all, Mick Jagger and David Bowie were both slappers who wrote many great love songs. I’d also wager that Adele and Ed Sheeran have put it about a lot less than most people, definitely less than most pop stars, but their love songs are the aural equivalent of that tinned gunk designed to nourish invalids. Like great political leaders, then, great love songs can’t be conjured up by monogamy or banished by promiscuity. Neither can “commercialism” be blamed, as if the great love songs were written in some Arcadian glade. On the contrary, many came from songwriting industrial complexes, from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building.

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Instead, much of the blame can be placed on the atomisation of society. Great songs — love, and otherwise — require an oceanic element, a single story that millions can relate to. When I was a teenager, we would congregate in the cloakrooms on a Tuesday lunchtime, literally holding our breath until we found out where our favourite single was in the new Radio 1 top 20. I remember my friend Carol bursting into tears when “The Jean Genie” failed to reach the top spot and having to go home as she couldn’t sufficiently pull herself together to face an afternoon in double physics. Then came Thursday’s Top of the Pops, when you could moon over the latest teen idols singing their love songs, just for you — and, if you were lucky, witness the outrage of your dad as David Bowie cracked on with his guitarist.

It’s not just songs, though; artistic representations of love have generally deteriorated. Is it likely that we’ll ever see a film such as Casablanca or read a book such as The End of the Affair again? Now, even romcoms have been ditched for superhero franchises, while Sally Rooney writes novels which might generically be called “Janet and John Get Naked and Say Stuff about the Pointlessness of Existence”. Love, though always as mysterious as a mermaid, was once as easy to find as chips — but with the endless chatter and clatter of online life, how will we ever stop our trivial amusements long enough to hear the song of the siren? Stop that racket, I’m trying to watch Love Island!

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Of course, none of this is helped by the fact that, thanks to social media and therapy culture, we talk about our emotions so much that there’s nothing left for love songs. Consider this lyric from last year, in Cat Burn’s “Ghosting”:

“I always come first, prioritise myself
‘Cause I could lose it all
And fall down a deep hole
I gotta watch my mental health
So I recharge alone
Don’t take it personal
I’m just an introvert
So don’t stress, I’ll be fine
I just need some time.”

This may well be an excellent life lesson — but as a love song, it sucks. And not in a good way.

Though I know what I like when it comes to love songs — “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys, “Baby It’s You” by The Shirelles, “Just Like Heaven” by The Cure — others will disagree. So I asked the composer Robin Watt, whose modern showtunes have been compared to those of the American Songbook canon, what he thought the problem is. “Irving Berlin, probably the most successful composer in history, famously played piano with one finger,” he told me. “A lack of musicianship isn’t a bar to composing great love songs. Berlin often broke the rules by having unusual lengths for each section or bunging in an extra bridge. In total contrast, these kids today can’t seem to break out of this dreadful musical rut. The effect is one of permanent suspension in a state of despair, whereas once a melody was about creating and resolving tension. Even uptempo stuff today still has this thread of self-regarding woe to it. The solution would be that composers stop taking themselves so seriously — but, unfortunately, that won’t happen as long as they have all these ‘issues’.”

ABC’s subsequent decline after the splendour of their debut is a microcosm of what has happened to the love song generally over the past four decades. Beauty Stab, their 1983 follow-up, was not just an example of Second Album Syndrome, but a veritable self-immolation; Simon Reynolds called it “one of the great career-sabotage LPs of pop”. Though ABC has staggered on in various incarnations ever since, it quickly went a bit Light Entertainment. In 2005, Fry toured with Tony Hadley, a missed opportunity which, if they’d only included Simon Le Bon, might have been a crooning equivalent of the Three Tenors — the Three Tenners, perhaps, as that’s the absolute most you’d pay to see them.

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Haunted by his Citizen Kane, Fry announced in 2015 that his new album would be called The Lexicon of a Lost Ideal, “a take on The Lexicon of Love, but all these years on. I’m a man in my fifties now with a wealth of experience. It’s about how you grow older but you make the same mistakes over and over and over again.” When it was released the following spring, imaginatively re-titled The Lexicon of Love II, it entered the UK album charts at number five, ABC’s highest ranking since the original. It wasn’t a bad record — but there’s a world of difference between not bad and perfection.

Will the love song ever get its mojo back? I really do hope so, even though I personally have heard all the great love songs I can handle. Because only then can we once more go serenely to our favourite pizza parlours without hearing the great love songs of the 20th century slowed down and droned to death by sad young people who know there’s something missing from their own repertoire, but don’t have the lexicon — of love — to put it right.