So The Apprentice has started again, bringing with it a fresh batch of free strangers to hate. The men in particular are an especially gruesome crew this year - half have got stupid sticky-uppy designer haircuts and faintly resemble lapsed Gillette models; the other half look like face-transplant recipients queueing for a ghost train. What's up with Raef, for instance? He's the absolute spit of Uri Geller staring at a pin. Horrible.

And that's before they've opened their mouths. The minute they do, the usual torrent of hideous yah-boo moneyspeak comes tumbling out, reaffirming your gut objection to their every waddling molecule. Their arrogance is breathtaking. Or at least it appears to be in the eight-second soundbite I'm judging them by, and sod it, that's enough. I'm a busy man. I don't have time to develop long, festering grudges. Give me knee-jerk hate figures and I'm happy.

As they stand on screen burbling away about their personal mission statements and saying things like, "I'm a red-shelf player; I give 120%; I'll kick, scream and gouge my way to the top of the boardroom and no force in the universe can stop me", it occurs to me that what these people really need is a dose of humility. Clearly, no one's ever taken them aside and said, "Er, you sound like a bit of a bell-end here. Perhaps you ought to sit down and be quiet." What they need is a good slagging.

Being slagged off is good for you. It thickens the skin and strengthens the backbone. And I'm no stranger to it, in part because each week this column - written originally for the lo-fi steam-powered paperware edition of the newspaper - is replicated on the Guardian's dazzlingly futuristic Comment Is Free site, held aloft in cyberspace by pixels and sheer willpower. As the name suggests, each article on Comment Is Free is accompanied by a dangling thread in which passers-by can leave comments, observations, witticisms and - yes - capsule slaggings.

And every week, without fail, various world-weary travellers will stop by to tell me I'm not as good as I used to be, or wasn't any good to start with, or have bored them into the afterlife, or can't write, or can't think, or should stop typing immediately and drown myself in the bath, assuming I can manage that, which I probably can't, what with being so rubbish and all.

Now, when you read stuff like that, your brain does two things at once: on the one hand, it marvels at the haughty self-importance of the failing human sneer who bothered writing it. And on the other, it agrees with every word they say. Lurking deep within everyone's brain are two interdependent creatures. One's an insecure, quivering homunculus; the other a needy egomaniac. So long as they both take turns pulling the levers, everything works out OK. But the balance is a fine one. The homunculus thrives on negative feedback. Deprive it of a regular slagging, and it eventually withers and dies, leaving the egomaniac to take over. At which point you're swaggering around thinking you're it, describing yourself as a "red-shelf player" and so on. Cruising for a bruising. Swerving your speedboat into the rocks with an insouciant grin on your chops.

And there's a surplus of arrogant titheads around because we don't, as individuals, receive anything like enough negative feedback these days. Instead we're all led to believe we're somehow unique and important, that we have a destiny, that we matter in some way. But this doesn't add up. There are billions of us. An infinite swarm of haircuts and anuses, that's humankind for you. We can't all be "special". The vast majority of us are meaningless energy blips, and we'd do well to remember the fact. Maybe if we saw ourselves as merely part of the herd (which is, after all, what we are), we'd be more inclined to work together to solve the planet's problems.

But that's not going to happen until regular, repeated personal slaggings become an important part of everyday life. Technology can help. It's far too obsequious at present. Switch on your computer and it's all "Hello" this and "My Documents" that, and "Would you like me to help you with that?" Enough bumlicking already. Each time you boot it up, it should growl, "What do you want?" and start tossing you stuff with a shrug. iPods could get in on the act by automatically inserting subliminal messages into your favourite album tracks - invisible voices that whisper, "You are despicable" directly into your subconscious.

TV can do its bit, too. If I were in charge, every episode of every soap would be legally obliged to include a five-minute sequence in which one of the main characters turns directly to camera and tells the viewer they're nothing but a random assembly of atoms, of less consequence and meaning than the average fencepost, which at least has a definable purpose. The national suicide rate may rise slightly, I grant you. But overall it'd be character-building.

Finally, I'm ready and willing to be called on as a personal "anti-life coach" for anyone who's currently too pleased with themselves. I can offer energy-sapping depressitudes and personally targeted invective round the clock, for just £3,000 a month. Unless you're an Apprentice candidate. Then it's free.

· This week Charlie enjoyed the end stages of a heavy cold: "I can't be the only person who actively enjoys the bit where you start hawking up huge medallions of phlegm." He read Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of Snoopy creator Charles: "Peanuts was the most reassuringly cruel and depressing strip in newspaperdom; why people find it 'cute' is beyond me."