How I finally learned to stop worrying and love the list

Standing in the supermarket, that special circle of hell undreamt-of by Dante, clutching a crumpled bit of paper scrawled with indecipherable hieroglyphs, I reflect that I have measured out my life not with coffee spoons, but with lists.

What, on the current shopping list, could I have meant by “combustible socks”? In which aisle is “tessellation” to be found? And what is the spiteful trick by which my handwriting, apparently legible when I wrote my list, transformed itself into an illiterate scribble when I came to do the shopping

The shopping lists are only the humblest item in the great hierarchy of lists by which my life is (theoretically) ordered. Looming over them all is the great ur-list of everything that needs to be accomplished before actual living can begin.

Lists are often presented to us as empowering devices to take control of the overwhelming randomness of existence. But I am beginning to think of mine as self-imposed tyrants – handwritten rail tracks of duty and obligation from which no deviation is possible.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I abandoned them. My partner’s list-free shopping trips give a flavour of this: he returns from his hunter-gathering excursions with an exotic salmagundi of whatever happened to catch his fancy: harissa, blinis and a Fray Bentos pie in a tin (a Proustian echo of his childhood, apparently) feature, while dull necessities such as bin bags are grandly ignored.

Just as I am ready to fall out of love with lists, a book by the writer and journalist James Vincent reminds me of their charm. Beyond Measure is an account of the ways that humans learnt to quantify the world – in which lists are an essential element.

Beginning as a form of Mesopotamian, and later Egyptian, accountancy, lists morph into writing and thence into abstract thinking, philosophical systems, and science (including, perhaps, Charles Darwin’s famous list of the pros and cons of marriage: on the plus side, “charms of female chit-chat”; on the minus, “I never should go up in a balloon”).

Even ancient lists prove to have their longueurs: of the Onomasticon of Amenope, a list of 610 elements of the known world, a tetchy Egyptologist remarked, “There was never written a book more tedious” (Vincent disagrees). But Aristotle’s Categoria established the list as a technique of exquisite philosophical subtlety, while authors from James Joyce to Helen Fielding have found lists a bravura source of comic inspiration. The catalogue of resolutions with which Bridget Jones’s Diary begins – “Be more assertive… Eat more pulses” – is one of the great literary lists.

Assailed by information as we presently are, the list – and its diminutive, the listicle – has morphed from a means of philosophical inquiry into a kind of information fast-food. Lists of things you should have done before you are 30, 40, and so on; lists of 100 best films/albums/novels; entire books of lists – do these enrich or impoverish our thinking?

As for the recent list in a Sunday newspaper of 53 ways to beat the gloom – I found myself sinking deeper into melancholy with each successive item, until I reached No 18: “Buy foods you can’t identify”. This is what we have been doing at home, in our list-bound and list-free ways, for years.

As to which makes us happier, it remains a work in progress.