Two people got married last week. I don't know if you noticed. The groom was a rap star and the bride was famous for having made a sex tape and being on a successful reality television programme and together they hired various European palaces in a nuptial spree of excessive proportions that involved engraving their guests' names into marble tables, building a golden toilet and posing winsomely for about 800,000 Instagram photos (filter: pre-revolutionary). Jay-Z gave the happy couple a giant bottle of Chianti as a wedding gift, dipped in gold with a diamond cork.

As it happened, I was in America when Kim Kardashian and Kanye West got married. My hotel television gave me access to the E! entertainment channel and I was able to follow every overblown detail as it unfolded. They had a correspondent posted outside the Palace of Versailles for the pre-wedding shindig who reported faithfully on whether Justin Bieber was going to turn up (he didn't) and who told us that the chocolate eclairs were "delicious", the bride looked "stunning" and the happy couple had been "overwhelmed" by fans. The interesting thing about the coverage was that it was entirely non-judgmental. There was no sneering about the ludicrous extravagance and no supercilious sense of who-do-these-people-think-they-are-flashing-their-cash-around-and-isn't-it-all-a-bit-nouveau?

When I got back to the UK, the tone was totally different. Kardashian was "whale-arsed", the whole thing was "tasteless" and their choice of venue for the ceremony (a 16th-century Tuscan fort) represented "a clash of high and low culture". Admittedly, some of the coverage was extremely funny.

But there is a difference between poking fun and being unnecessarily mean-spirited. At times, it seemed too easy a target, as though various media outlets were snootily covering something that didn't merit their attention by … er … giving it yet more attention. There was an implied superiority about it all that I found uncomfortable, a sense that it was all beneath our contempt but – here – have a bucketload of contempt anyway. Of course elements of the wedding were hilarious and absurd. But do we really need to pour bad-tempered bile over the proceedings to show our disapproval?

We are becoming an ever more cynical nation, where necessary scepticism has tipped into contemptuous finger-pointing and derisive mockery. In Britain, where we have a long and noble tradition of satire, not wanting to be duped is practically a national characteristic. But the recent failure of our big institutions – the MPs expenses scandal in Parliament, phone hacking in the fourth estate, corruption in the police and allegations of historic sexual abuse at the BBC – has left us innately suspicious of other people's motives. To be open-minded is seen as being somehow gullible, unforgivably naive. We are convinced someone is trying to get one over on us, all the time.

Last week, researchers found that cynicism could even be bad for your health. Scientists at the University of Eastern Finland said that people with high levels of cynical distrust and who agreed with statements such as "I think people lie to get ahead" or "It is safer to trust nobody" were twice as likely to develop dementia.

Cynicism, when it stops being a tool of inquiry, a means of probing beneath the surface of what we're being sold, becomes something nastier and more blinkered. It becomes suspicion. It is cynicism of our mainstream politicians – the belief that they're all the same, all out for what they can get apart from that nice Mr Farage – that has been largely responsible for Ukip's recent electoral success. And it is cynicism about immigrants – the notion that people are coming to this country to milk our benefits system and take our council houses – that has aided this lurch to the right.

We should be sceptical. We should be inquiring. But cynicism runs the risk of becoming prejudice. And that goes for Nigel Farage as well as the golden Portaloos.

Google car would drive me mad

The world is split into two types of people: those who like driving and those who believe it's a representation of all that is most terrifying, and who are overcome with sweat and self-loathing every time they fail to parallel park.

I am in the latter category. I failed my test the first time (rolling backwards on a hill start). I sat it again a few weeks later and passed, although more by luck than any true evolution of my driving skills. If I'm allowed on the road, so my reasoning goes, just imagine how many other bad drivers are out there too, forgetting to check their mirrors and mistaking the brake for the accelerator. So you would think I'd welcome the news from Google that they've developed a driverless car. The Google car, which looks a bit like an automated mouse, drives itself using sensors and software. There is no steering wheel, simply a stop/start button and a screen that shows you the route it has chosen to take. The driverless car will, we are told, reduce accidents and congestion. It will also enable commuters to catch up on work or do important things like updating their Facebook status.

And therein lies the problem. Because as much as I dislike driving, I also feel that absorption in a task is an important part of being human. In this hyperconnected world, we are constantly under pressure to reply to emails, answer phone calls or add our comments to a shared Excel spreadsheet. When we drive, we are insulated from these demands. We are concentrating instead on the exercise of something practical. We are looking at the road and perhaps listening to the radio, and our minds are free of the tyranny of the blinking red BlackBerry light.

I'd be sad to lose all that, however many hubcaps I scratch along the way.

People don't fit in pigeonholes. Get used to it

All hail Laverne Cox, who is currently looking smoking hot on the cover of Time magazine. Cox is a transgender actor best known for her role as Sophia Burset in the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black.

"If someone needs to express their gender in a way that is different, that is OK," she says in the accompanying interview.

This is the year in which a bearded drag artist, Conchita Wurst, won the Eurovision song contest, and American Samoa's Jaiyah Saelua became the world's first transgender footballer to play in a men's World Cup qualifying match.

Last month Dr Kate Stone won a landmark adjudication from the Press Complaints Commission. It stated that references to her transgender status were "irrelevant" in newspaper reporting of an incident when she was almost killed by a stag in the Highlands.

It feels as though something has shifted, as though we are gradually getting more comfortable with the idea that not everything fits into neatly defined pigeonholes.

Labels are for jam-jars. We don't need them for gender identity.