Steve Jobs’s button phobia has shaped the modern world

Koumpounophobia is the fear of buttons. Steve Jobs had it — or at least a strong aversion, which explained his affinity for touch-screens and turtlenecks. So do an estimated one of every 75,000 people alive today.

Your correspondent was only recently made aware of the phenomenon when a friend, K of Cambridge, requested that I refrain from wearing buttoned shirts in his presence. ‘A minor quirkiness with buttons,’ he confessed over email, while we were planning a rendezvous. ‘They make me very mildly uncomfortable.’

I turned straight to Google: ‘fear of buttons’. There it was: koumpounophobia, from the modern Greek koumpi (‘to button up’), with case studies, digital fora offering solidarity among sufferers, and adverts for hypnotists to address the matter.

‘Are you koumpounophobic?’ I wrote back.

K replied, ‘I had to look that up.’ He hadn’t known the term either, and had spent 30 years believing himself a lone freak.

‘I wouldn’t call it a phobia,’ he said, ‘but I don’t like to look at them, don’t like them touching my skin or knowing they’re even there. I don’t run away screaming but it gives me a general level of the creeps that I have to think about it to not let it bother me.’

Got it: not a phobia — just chronic dread at the thought or sensation of the things.

K has hated buttons since he can remember. As with most of his kind, metal fastenings are exempt; it’s plastic ones that are a problem. This means K and his fellow 0.001 per cent are fine with blue jeans and other trousers, only no collared Oxfords or — once upon a time — standard-issue keyboards, unless strictly necessary.

Formal treatments of koumpounophobia tend to focus on childhood traumas that may have precipitated it.