How clean is your sleeping? And, no, this has nothing to do with changing the sheets more often. Actor and queen of dubious wellness fads Gwyneth Paltrow is now seeking to do for the previously straightforward and cost-free business of going to sleep what annoying green-juice gurus have done for eating: turn it into yet another manic form of self-improvement.

“Clean sleeping”, according to a new book from her lifestyle website Goop, turns out to be remarkably like the boring old sleeping you’ve been doing all your life, only more time-consuming and expensive.

First, download and learn some special yoga techniques. Then massage your feet for three minutes every night with special cream. And, finally, why not splash out £50 on a special pillowcase “infused with fine strands of copper oxide”, which supposedly reduces wrinkles through the power of – and I’m paraphrasing a lot here – metal ions and witchcraft?

Because sleep, according to Gwynnie, who claims at least seven or eight hours of it a night, is going to be 2017’s “biggest health trend”. Heaven only knows how the increasingly preposterous clean movement is going to top this. Clean breathing, maybe, using special fresh air bottled and sold at £70 a pop? Or are they finally clean out of ideas?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m as tempted as anyone, right now, just to shut out the big bad world and contemplate my navel for a while. Why not forget about the scary things nobody can change, and concentrate on those you can, such as losing half a stone and making a New Year resolution to be more patient with the kids?

Who knows, perhaps everything else will just magically fall into place if we can all become marginally better, thinner and more organised, if slightly self-obsessed, people. Just plug into your mindfulness app, strip away the horrid toxins polluting your clean life or – if that all sounds too hard – simply curl up with one of the umpteen books churned out this year on how to do hygge, the Danish art of cosiness.

But the truth is that most Brits are making a reasonably passable go of life as individuals. It’s as a collective – a people who used to rub along well enough, but seem increasingly incapable of tolerance, empathy or letting go of our cherished individual grievances – that we’re failing. Louise Casey’s review said migrants needed to integrate better into British society. In fact, it’s all of us.

Sixteen years ago, sociologist Robert D Putnam published Bowling Alone, which identified a growing threat to democracy from what he called declining “social capital”, or a reduction in humans doing ordinary everyday things together – such as joining a bowling league or volunteering for the parent-teacher association.

The idea that doing small things in collaboration with others encourages people to participate more actively in society as a whole – perhaps by turning out to vote or paying taxes to support public services – was fashionable in Labour circles in the past decade and lived on under David Cameron in the guise of the policy he initially hoped would define him, the ultimately doomed big society.

Togetherness and social cohesiveness is also an underlying theme of hygge, although you wouldn’t know it from the saccharine British magazine interpretations, generally involving images of a lone woman blissfully drinking hot chocolate in cashmere socks. (As an exasperated Danish friend pointed out, the whole point is that you’re not meant to get hyggelig on your own. It’s about togetherness, friendship and quite often communal singing – not expensively accessorised me-time – as such, it’s hard to disentangle from communitarian Scandinavian attitudes more generally.)

But whatever it does or doesn’t do for democracy, evidence suggests that looking outwards rather than inwards – strengthening your ties to others, finding ways to be part of something bigger – does at least make people happier than obsessing on themselves. If there’s a basic human skill we need to improve and practise, it’s not eating or sleeping, but the rusty art of togetherness.

Sitting dutifully through the school carol service in the village church last week, I felt myself getting emotional in a way that can’t entirely be explained by the sight of tinsel-haloed small people squawking Away In a Manger. There was something unexpectedly moving about the sound of voices coming together at the end of a harsh, divisive year.

Joining a choir has been said to help sufferers of depression and anxiety, and it’s not hard to see why singing together could unlock emotions that doing it alone in the shower does not. There is something powerful about the synchronicity of singing in time with others, the way each voice in a harmony relies on the rest. Choirs are now so popular that there are even versions specifically for hopelessly bad singers, who just want to join in.

Outlets for this fuzzy and half-articulated desire for togetherness are everywhere. It’s there in the renewed popularity of live events, from festivals to lecture tours, and in the unstoppable rise of social media. It’s there on dancefloors, but also in the rise of grassroots movements such as Momentum – at least until zealots predictably began trying to divide and conquer – and it is also welling up in More United, the centrist grouping set up after Brexit to crowdfund for candidates standing or openness and tolerance.

A third of Britons feel motivated to do something vaguely political as a result of this year’s events, according to a More United poll this week and, while most wouldn’t join conventional parties, they do want to come together in some other way, even if they’re not yet clear how or why.

But togetherness was there in leavers voting in the EU referendum, too, finally finding a tribe with which they could identify and a way to feel they mattered. You don’t necessarily have to agree with the reasons people want to be together to accept that they do.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with resolving to be a better person, or with occasionally longing – as Voltaire’s Candide put it – just to cultivate your own garden for a bit, and stop worrying about other people’s. But don’t kid yourself about what it actually achieves. As an idea, “better together” has been rather tarnished by political association. Still, it’s true all the same.