Hilton, the celebrity gossip columnist—famous for outing the sexuality of movie stars, and invading the private lives of public figures—was rushed to hospital after a severe mental health crisis, where he was found to be self-harming for fifteen minutes on a TikTok livestream.

Hilton rose to infamy at the dawn of Web 2.0—when the logic of the internet moved from one-sided communication, towards a participation-culture of user-based content. But his business model based on outrage and cruelty, once the preserve of a certain, particularly vindictive few—has been baked into the infrastructure of social media platforms. Now, when someone in the grips of a mental health crisis goes viral, and thousands of people in the comments start poking fun at them, you have to wonder, how did behaviour we once associated with the most malicious, tabloid-ish cobwebs of the internet, suddenly become an ordinary feature of online life?

Before attempting to answer that, it’s important to draw a distinction here. A lot of discourse around the Hilton situation frames what happened to him as poetic justice, or karma. For what it’s worth, I don’t align myself with that position. I don’t think any of us should be the arbiter of morality. We can say he never cared about anyone else in crisis, and while that’s true, if we offer no compassion when we see someone struggling, then we are no different than him, and we mirror the behaviour we turned into a bogeyman.

Attention is a limited resource, and we are living through a crisis of scarcity. Perez Hilton understood the economics of attention well. When we have more information at our disposal than ever, but our capacity to pay attention to it stays the same, it creates a deficit, which, in turn, creates competition. Hilton knew that humiliation, obscenity, sex scandals and nasty gossip were the easiest way to get us to look. It didn’t matter why we looked, so long as we paid attention. And this is the same logic we see in the algorithm on our social feeds. Like Hilton, the algorithm has no sense of morality, or personal integrity, only a shameless interest in what catches the eye. So if he can be cast as a sociopath, then so can the people who built these apps in his image.

The attention economy has consequences for what we get shown, and also, for how we look at it. When content reaches a saturation point, and we are bombarded by demands for our constant attention, we become desensitised to what we see on our screens. We can’t care about everything, so we detach as a way to protect ourselves. This detachment can sometimes look like dark humour or irony, and on its surface can seem callous and cruel, but when every doomscroll offers a fresh dystopia, irony becomes a filter to stop us from getting the tears in our eyes. But the insulation this irony affords us, also prevents us from seeing real suffering. When the context we find in the offline world collapses in a shareable Instagram reel, we are conditioned to consume everything with the same ironic distance. But I do think we’re de-programming ourselves as we become more media-literate, and we always have agency. On some level, we know that algorithms are designed to rage-bait us, divide us and keep us watching. And I think we are moving away from irony, because it gets stale after a while and it’s lazy. Irony is the centrist dad of personal emotions, because it is just a way to take a position without taking a position; to say something without admitting you mean it. I can feel us move towards hope again.

When I think of Hilton’s case, I think about the tyranny of the upload button. When social media platforms encouraged us to showcase every aspect of our personal lives, we didn’t have to read celebrity gossip columns anymore, we became gossip columnists of our own lives, with the ability to document our downfalls. When YouTube told us to “broadcast yourself” we were never told when the broadcast would end. So we publicised our private lives, until everything became see-through, our darkest traumas became storytime content, and we lived our life through the spectacle of a screen.

The attention economy is such an unforgiving machine, that by the time this article is published, nobody will be interested in reading about Perez Hilton anymore. In this environment, we are not allowed any time to reflect on ideas, or change our opinions—we need to report them live and direct, before we even get a chance to think. In this livestream-of-consciousness, everyone has to have a memorable hook, or a sticky buzzword, without leaving room for hesitation or nuance. But when the motivating factor of journalism becomes virality instead of conversation, we lose our creative integrity, and the common good gets clouded by click-through-rates.

In an ever-changing media landscape, immediacy is a poison that turns every tragedy into a momentary spectacle. Our life gets pulled into shareable fragments, 7 second clips because no one has time to listen to the full podcast anymore. So all surfaces are on display, illusions with nothing behind them, fighting for our attention in an overstimulated world.

At the end stage of the attention economy, we see everything, but take none of it in. Whether it’s Perez Hilton, or your Instagram feed, we remain spectators, and in this immersive theatre, the coliseum might have collapsed, but the broadcast never ends.

_{photo credit: Keith Hinkle, Wikimedia commons}

We tell ourselves self-discipline must be the answer. If we could just pedal faster, or write better emails, or shave more time off our personal best, we will find the ladder again. It must be our fault we misplaced it. It must be our fault we can’t afford our own home. It must be our fault the cities we grew up in have become unaffordable. And the plastic in the ocean is killing the fish. Genocide, cultural erasure and cute dogs flow freely on our Instagram feeds. And to pacify us, we get to huff on a blue raspberry disposable vape that we bought in an unregulated phone repair shop that used to be an Xtravision.

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Our impulse to self-soothe in the wake of a world outside our control, feels like the moment you realise there’s a hurricane next door, and you shut the windows to have a wank. Taken in this way, vapes are a symbol of economic and political powerlessness. We have less means of controlling our own lives, but more objects to choose from to manage the stress. In the absence of agency, we get customer satisfaction, with more colours and flavours with cute little logos to trick us to think that we still make decisions. Our cup is empty, but we can still add more items to the basket and use Klarna at checkout. But puffing on a cartridge while the world goes up in smoke, is a bit like drowning on a sinking ship, but instead of being handed a life raft, we get colourful stickers of a life raft, as we continue to fall to our watery graves. So with the stickers, we still sink, but at least we get to sink in a cool, customisable way. Because we’re all individuals now. And we are important enough to know, that everyone drowns, the only choice left: is whether we get to drown and look hot while we’re choking.

Vapes are so deeply embedded in culture, that they have become taken for granted. And when something becomes so commonplace it seems unworthy of comment, that’s when it becomes ideology. Ideology lives in the everyday common sense, inside the pots and pans, the unrelenting glow of the screens we’ve lost our reflection in, disguising itself in plain sight, so visible that its hidden springs go undetected. In a society that is, in many ways—collapsing—rising levels of wealth inequality, higher grocery prices, mental breakdowns that go viral instead of getting treated with care—vapes have become a protection against structural despair. But we can’t solve structural despair with individual consumption. We can’t buy our way out of a housing crisis. We can’t push ourselves to the top of the queue for medication we needed last week. More smoke inhalation won’t lift stagnant wages, or make our loneliness disappear. A fresh drag of Watermelon Ice won’t prevent the bombs from dropping on innocent victims, illegal occupations on stolen land, or stop Big Tech from mining our data, but at least we can do cool smoke tricks now. So we French inhale while our future’s in freefall, and hold back the tears when the fumes get in our eyes.

Delayed adulthood is a term that gets bandied about a lot lately. And recently, I’ve seen examples of it everywhere. Last week, I was out in a pub in East London—a hipster-ish establishment that sold IPAs I’ve never heard of, to a clientele of creative directors and marketing teams, who were talking in accents they don’t have, about topics they don’t care about. (We all know you aren’t that passionate about queer representation, and that Eastenders lilt originated in Buckinghamshire..) Standing beside the bar, I spotted a quaint little wooden box full of crisps I hadn’t seen since childhood. It had all the greatest hits: Monster Munch, Hot Lips, Banshee Bones and Jonnie Onion Rings, and my excitement basking in the warm sentimental glow of the past, was soon overshadowed by the boiling horror beneath it: that we have no stakes in the future, but at least we can enjoy nostalgic snacks.

I had the same crushing realisation, when I met my agent at CAA. They have a massive boardroom corner office boasting a fridge fully stocked with Ribena (pre-mixed; in case we’re too hapless to dilute it ourselves.) In a culture where life becomes more uncertain, consumerism fulfils the role of a stand-in mother figure, coddling us into a comfort blanket, as she sings sweet lullabies to drown out the looming apocalypse. And faced with a crisis beyond our control, we crawl back into the womb. So our nostalgia for relics of a lost time, aren’t always in remembrance of the past, they’re often a yearning to return to a time before we were conscious. In utero, there were no responsibilities, or deadlines, or landlords, just sweet, unburdened bliss.

In the increasing instability of the present, the past has a closing down sale, and everything must go, but nothing is ever really allowed disappear. Whether it be vapes, Ribena or crisps that haven’t seen the light of day since the Iraq war; it’s always the same paint on a different wall—we are offered nostalgia instead of a better future, and coping mechanisms instead of political solutions. If you’re still living with your parents at the age of 36, that doesn’t make you a fuck up. Some of us flew the nest, and hit a brick wall, to stumble back with a clipped wing, and a feeling that life is passing us by. So if you’re a baby bird with a beard now, It’s not failure to launch when you can’t afford lunch.

The horizon of the good life has disappeared, and the promises that we’ve internalised have been uprooted. Unable to parse out this contradiction on the level of politics, we experience it as a personal flaw instead, so society’s failure becomes social anxiety. Compelled to either look inside at our own shortcomings, or look across at our neighbour’s nicer car. We can look anywhere we want, so long as we don’t look up.

Now, with nowhere left to dispose of our anger, we turn instead, to disposable vapes. But the grief still goes on, grazing skin that has become too hardened to feel it, oozing out of the crack in our smiles, and when we let the light in, we become translucent bodies, unable to hold onto hope as it slowly passes through. And while a nicotine rush might temporarily stifle the pangs from a stilted future, it can’t make us breathe easier, or believe that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. So when faced with the blinking red light, and staring down the barrel of an empty cartridge, we are confronted with a difficult truth: we vape, while we ourselves, are being vapourised.

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It feels a bit weird to talk about myself. But someone has to do it. And I think it should be me. No one knows me as long as I do. And I’m a writer, so I think I’ll do a good job. For someone who works online, is extroverted, and posts regular videos that are filmed in public— I’m surprisingly shy when it comes to being fully myself on the internet. It’s easier to slip into a persona, or a caricature of myself, reciting a script with a Rode microphone as armour, to protect myself against the feelings of rejection. So I’d rather be rejected for my character, than for my character. I’m very sensitive, which may come as a shock to some of you. Growing up, I felt embarrassed about writing. Even now, I feel embarrassed about talking about writing. It feels a little bit self-indulgent. It’s the same reason I rarely appear on podcasts. I don’t want people to ask me questions they don’t care about, only for me to give them answers they’re not listening to. If I wanted to talk to the wall, I would just go visit my granddad. He’s in a coma. I’m joking. He died when I was 3.

The age of 15 was a pivotal year for me. It was when I discovered my talent for writing. I never applied myself in school. I like to say that I dumbed down my intelligence. But maybe that’s what everyone says. A retrospective conclusion for the bored and misunderstood; to make it seem like we were fooling everyone all along. Either way, I was constantly distracted and couldn’t sit still. I was the class clown, and had dyspraxia that was yet to be diagnosed. So I didn’t really fit in, and I used to spill everything that fumbled into my hands. To go back to Eddie Rockets for a moment, I’m reminded of when I clocked in after going to a rave the night before, operating heavy machinery on no sleep. I carried a tray of drinks over to a table of American tourists, tripped over myself and drenched the pass in Coca-Cola and Sprite Zero. After readjusting my mandated-waiter bowtie, and swallowing what was left of my fragile pride, I brought another tray of drinks over, and tripped over the same wet patch again. I probably should’ve mopped it up first. I didn’t even put out a wet floor sign. But I believed in myself; what an error of judgement— I haven’t made that mistake since. I wasted so much product that day, the restaurant could’ve sued me for damages. I told the table it was my first shift. I wanted them to feel sorry for me. They did. I was two years there at that point. I used that line on a weekly basis. They still tipped me a fiver. Pity is a powerful aphrodisiac. They’d only arrived in Dublin two hours previously. I dispelled their misty-eyed dreams of shamrocks and leprechauns. Delivering a transnational dose of clumsy realism. That’s customer service.

Sorry for that brief disturbance, but I assume you were already disturbed. Anyway, my childhood— I grew up in a family of musicians and performers, and was lucky enough that my creativity was encouraged. I played the piano from a young age, and picked up the guitar soon after, often practising for 8 hours a day. My first venture into writing was through lyrics. I was inspired by artists like Eyedea and Sadistik, writers like Oscar Wilde, comedians like George Carlin, as well as a few spoken-word poets; Shane Koyczan, Andrea Gibson, Emmet Kirwan and Elayne Harrington to name a few. Although music was always in my blood, my love of words soon took over. Through writing, I found a new way to express myself. Creativity was a world I fell into whenever I got bored of the real one. Mr Walsh— my English teacher— a self-described misanthrope with a loud personality, and a voice dragged through nettles— is one of the main reasons I pursued a career in writing. He encouraged me when he didn’t have to. And he hated just about everything. So that meant something. I love consistency. And hatred. My parents have always been so supportive of me. To this day, my mam reads all my comments and texts me whenever a blue check-marked account follows my Instagram. And my dad watches all of my videos and pitches new ideas for topics. And while I’ll never take their encouragement for granted, to get support from someone who doesn’t have a dog in the race, or an offspring in the bloodline, felt a bit different.

I used to wait outside Mr Walsh’s classroom and stop him in the hallway when no one was around, to sheepishly hand him a crumpled sheet of my new scribbled poem. He would put on his glasses and read it in front of me, while I awkwardly awaited his appraisal. I always felt so validated by his reaction, he’d readjust, flip back his hip-length matted black hair, and in his trademark, growling sandpaper droll, he’d say— “Frankie, these poems are exceptional, you have to put them together and publish them, for fuck sake.” It would be really funny (to me) if I was lying about that. Funny, and twisted. The same way people on Instagram lie about profound things their kids say. Your kids are not profound, you are just insecure about your parenting skills, yours sincerely, a childless man. You’re welcome.

Lately, people who fall in love with AI chatbots have become the new subject of ridicule. We accuse them of being socially inept, and unable to form human relationships. Or, write them off as terminally-online freaks who need to touch grass. (When I made a video about performative reading on public transport, I got accused of the same thing.)

But there’s a hypocrisy rotting at the core of this popular discourse; one that seems so obvious it goes by undetected: for a culture that promotes mental health awareness, we really do have an empathy blind spot. Our compassion skews lopsided when we can’t identify with struggles that look different than ours. Your suffering has to be relatable to be accepted as suffering. So we live under the banner of emotional healing, but our pity is packaged with terms and conditions. So as soon as you suffer in a way that seems weird, (or, become so isolated that you think AI is your soulmate) we’ll feed you to the lions and laugh as they eat you.

Our tendency to individualise social problems; to see behaviour in a vacuum without asking what created it— allows us to turn victims into a laughing stock. We all have a tiny little Jerry Springer trapped inside of us. Waiting for a modern tragedy to sensationalise, or a kebab shop brawl to be livestreamed. When we don’t see the pain in someone’s eyes, we risk transforming real struggle into a circus of spectacle. This instinct is nothing new. The media have always turned polite society against the marginalised. If you think about ‘welfare-cheats’, immigrants stealing jobs, video games creating school shooters, or even banning drag queens from libraries in case they eat your children— this same moral panic now takes aim at the lonely who fall in love with their AI companions. We take complex social issues and reframe them as individual moral failings to feel ashamed about. We laugh at how different they must be from us, instead of asking: what hurt them so badly? In a lot of ways, we never really stopped going to church. We culturally internalised religion and recast it into personal morality. So the condemnation of those living in sin, once confined to the pulpit— has reached the court of public opinion, where all judgements are final and mistakes are unrecognised. We’re all religious now. We swapped sermons for story-times, burned down the confession box and replaced it with an altar of Instagram comments.

When we ridicule vulnerable people who already feel isolated and alone, we reinforce the idea that their loneliness is a personal shortcoming, instead of a structural one. So within this moral prison, we shackle the people who need freedom the most; we shame their behaviour, and turn them into a punchline, further entrenching the conditions that led them into seeking non-human connection. While we take the piss out of those who get attached to a machine, we need to interrogate the social conditions that create this need in the first place. The emptiness they feel, is an emptiness that grazes us all. And we just make fun of it. We all get a lump in our throat, or a hollow in our chest. We all walk around with the same five or six fears in the back of our minds, and share a tint of dull grey when the light leaves our eyes. The feeling itself is universal. All that’s different is how we respond to it. But if these people aren’t getting their needs met by humans, we are telling them they shouldn’t have their needs met at all. Which seems a lot more damaging than asking Claude what he’s wearing right now. If they can get their rocks off with a large language model, then maybe they won’t randomly lose their shit at the stranger behind the deli counter in a supermarket somewhere. And that would be a win for everyone. Especially the deli staff. I once worked in a chip van and got fired in two days. I couldn’t take the heat. The oven was inches from my back.

Personal asides, aside. This is a story about loneliness, and the unwavering determination to be understood. AI companions emerge as a social response to unfulfilled needs. In the absence of genuine connection, we search for its substitute. We yearn for the light in the dim of the fog. And whistle in the dark when the music stops playing. We don’t know who our neighbours are, therapy is too expensive, friendship has been brought to the marketplace, we look for love and end up with likes, family businesses get swallowed by apps, and finally, our cosy email jobs will soon be gutted by chatbots; the same chatbots we run to for comfort when we feel disconnected, or just want to vent about the marketing job that they’ll eventually steal from us. Because the poison that kills us is the medicine we drink. And our primary role is to feed the machine. In this brave new world: we are technologically advanced, but emotionally deformed.

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Love Island and other shows like it, are only popular because we work too much. After a long day of gainful employment, we have no bandwidth left to concentrate on anything meaningful, so when we get home to recharge for tomorrow’s round of extraction – we all yearn for mindless entertainment slop. The slop is warm, and gooey, and touches all surfaces it slimes its way in to. The slop doesn’t unearth dormant rebellion. Or challenge the nature of power itself. Watching Love Island, we don’t care that every season brings the same recycled theatre to our screens; of beautiful strangers betraying each other in a villa we could never afford. Yet, we can’t help but watch the choreography in motion, where each new step brings a fresh transaction in the same old currency: pretty privilege + petty rivalries = big business.

Nobody really tunes into Love Island for the plot twist. We tune in because its predictability gives us comfort in a world that’s unstable. And this sameness, is the show’s unique selling point. The current moment is characterised by how we try to make solid out of the fleeting, but it always seems to melt in our hands before we can hold it close. We do this with subcultures, situationships, careers and even our sense of self — remodeling the procrustean bed we sleep in, so that our audience, employer, love interest, or algorithm doesn’t shite in our sheets. We have always craved consistency. Ever since we could see, we’ve looked for shapes in the clouds, and stitched stories from thin air. Drawing form to the formless, we give our pets personalities, and our personalities platforms. We see faces on front doors of houses and find constellations in the blackness of the speckled night, laughing through the apocalypse, while transforming uncertainty into something we can fall in love with.

To explain our obsession with Love Island, first we have to look at the changing nature of work under capitalism. Today, the line between work and rest has been ruptured, with slack messages after dark and passive aggressive weekend emails; in the new regime, it is our attention, rather than our bodies, that is being extracted. So in these terms of engagement: we can clock out but never switch off. We may have worked longer hours on the factory floor a century ago, but at least we had the right to go home. Now, life imitates LinkedIn. After close of business, we can’t take off our nametags, we are billboards for the billionaires that own us, badges with blinkers on, blinking twice for help and once for another ten minutes of sleep. In some ways, physical labour was a lot less grueling than maintaining our undivided attention. Technology should have liberated us, instead, we lost the right to be a person.

Now, our non-working hours leave us depleted, and our rest is spent in an attention deficit. With no time to recover, we sedate ourselves instead, reaching for whatever requires the least attention and yields the most comfort. The slow erosion of our mental bandwidth means our decisions come from a place of surrender rather than of conscious choice. We are headless chickens crying in Meta glasses, hapless romantics blending into static, trying to find another channel to connect with before we submerge back into fizzling grey. In our sedated state, we are constantly entertained, but never fulfilled. There’s a perverse victory in the act of submission. It feels like you’re flying until you hit the ground. Finally, you get to choose your own numbing agent now; whether it’s vodka, cocaine, rough sex, cough syrup, a toxic relationship, TikTok, Ryanair holidays, a slab of dubai chocolate that was probably made in a shed, roaring at cyclists to feel morally superior for once, overspending, undereating, interrupting people, or watching reality tv– when the dullness droops from your tired eyelids and the wound starts to sting again, the question isn’t why do we watch Love Island, it’s why do we feel the need to sedate ourselves?

Now that exhaustion is the default, distraction is our new way of life. We’ve become sleepwalkers, choosing low-level anesthesia over the energy it takes to fight a broken system, because comfort is a pitstop on the way to revolution, and most of us feel like we’ve already arrived. Whether it’s contestants in a villa, or real estate porn, or serial killers in leafy villages, the mechanism stays the same. Our real problem is exhaustion, and the slop is the salve we smear on the wound. When certainty is a memory in the back of our minds, and we rewind relics of a long-lost life, why do we keeping hitting autoplay? Why do we repeat the same mistakes under different names? Who kept us chained to this co-working space, and convinced us that the coffee bar was worth it? The soft power of a ping pong table in the games room, the sugar-free syrup beside the Nespresso pods, and a neon sign that assures us of “good vibes only” – makes you feel like a willing participant in your own exploitation.

But the violent rebellion of an unscheduled afternoon still hums softly in the distance, we just can’t hear its sultry tones over the brown noise we deafen ourselves to sleep at night. So we just replace one frequency with another and burrow our way into a brand new escape route. Because while we’re exhausted, we’re overstimulated too. The barrage of personally curated algorithms demanding our constant attention, unread emails, performance reviews and polite layoffs before the end of probation periods means that we are too restless to close our eyes, but too tired to lock in. The treacle to slow down our racing thoughts is the same treacle that rots our teeth in the morning. But we still drink it daily and put up with the taste.

On another level, reality television seems to solve a social problem. Any emotions or tendencies that we deem as taboo, get outsourced onto characters we see on TV. Like spectators in the coliseum crying for bloodlust; we can’t manipulate or gossip, or find joy in peoples’ misfortune, but we can live vicariously through the bad decisions and acts of the cast of Love Island. Today, the arenas have become streaming platforms, and the gladiators have become influencers, algorithms are our amphitheaters where we watch strangers rise and fall in-between adverts, celebrating tragedy from the safety of the nosebleed section. So reality TV, is a safe space for collective sadism, it gives us a socially acceptable outlet for the impulses we suppress in everyday life. Love Island acts as a storage unit, an open field to banish unspoken desires to dark places. Here, we get the catharsis of judgement without the guilt of judging someone we know. Jealousy, bitterness, and the quiet ecstasy of watching someone fail, are instincts as old as the first season of Big Brother. And that was ages ago.

We live in front stage, believing we’re rational, kind and adhering to social convention, but when we spend hours watching strangers’ gaslight and humiliate each other for clout: our screen doubles as a mirror. Because the behaviours we point at, are behaviours we engage in ourselves. And the comfort we find in this dynamic, is that we get to act as the polite stranger drifting through life, presenting the sanitised, matinee performance of ourselves to our friends and colleagues, while secretly enjoying behaviour we pretend to be above. So when we judge the cast for shortcomings we’re guilty of too, we have to realise: we are no different than them, we just have vaguer jawlines, less money and worse makeup.

Love Island and shows like it, act as a scapegoat, we need to point at something as being fake and transactional, to reinforce the idea that we are authentic and normal, when really, so much of our lives are a scoresheet, a litany of read receipts and snapchat streaks. On any given day, we are immersed in performance. We curate photo dumps with airbrushed lighting, we workshop captions to seem spontaneous, and manufacture disinterest as a strategy of romance. Our entire social infrastructure is built around our desire to be seen. And we do it for free. We just call what they do fake, to make us forget that what we do is fake, AND unpaid. At least the cast of Love Island had to sign a consent form and might end up with a skincare empire. We get paid in exposure, and “do it for the plot” as if plotpoints can buy us the keys to the kingdom.

In an overworked culture, we’ve been treating our need to sedate ourselves like a personal fuckup, when really, it stems from exhaustion. The sedative is only the symptom, and the cause is a flattening of our collective attention spans in a world that doesn’t let us take a breath. So our decision to watch Love Island, isn’t always freely chosen, as much as it’s shaped by time poverty, energy levels and stress. And here, the moralising impulse to cast blame and castrate begins to fall apart. Because any analysis that condemns us as shallow, or vapid, while leaving out the conditions that made us stop dreaming, just mistakes the plaster for the wound.

With long hours, no work-life boundaries, and ever-increasing levels of financial insecurity, we can’t just be expected to make better choices because we want to. The inimitable force of the human spirit isn’t enough. We can’t will power on willpower, when the bootstraps we pull are the lead in our shoes. After a 12-hour shift and a 2-hour commute, our eyes are too bloodshot to read a book. Self-actualisation feels like a selfish thought experiment when you have to choose between putting food in your kid’s lunchbox and paying the electricity bill this month. And if you’re not the only one numbing yourself, the cut probably goes deeper than you. Around us, millions of tiny cuts bleed quietly, until eventually, we stopped noticing the blood. But when we all share the same pain, the same sense something’s been lost, the same emptiness that pricks our skin when everyone stops dancing; the cut that once seemed part of our design, becomes a mark of collective identification. Because when we are all bleeding in the same place at the same time, we tread on the edge of the same blade.

A truly free society, wouldn’t leave us too tired to read, write, create or think. It would leave us with enough time to cultivate our passions, rather than numbing our exhaustion. So Love Island, is why we need a universal basic income. And while most of us won’t pick up the cello or start quoting Nietzsche out of nowhere, we might, at least, be able to recover the energy we lost that made sedation feel like the only available option. If we had genuine economic security, we could buy the rarest commodity of them all: the ability to choose how to live our lives. if we can seize the hours back on the clock, and choose how much we work without being coerced, we can finally afford to spend free time freely.

The popularity of Love Island doesn’t tell us much about us, but it tells us everything we need to know about the conditions that make a show like it exist. When our entire week is waiting for the week to end; so we can live for the weekend, the weeks become months and the years pass us by like a slow knife that doesn’t hurt anymore, because our numbness looks like resilience from the outside. Exhaustion is a slow tapering of ambition. We wean ourselves off the idea that things could look different, the way we abandon beliefs that are too distant to dream of. We’ve been spending all of this time filling the void, that we forgot to ask who dug it in the first place.

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