In the end, Vučić surprised everyone — with an early concession. “It is clear,” he said, as he took meekly to the podium at SNS headquarters, “that we have lost these elections.” The most powerful man in Serbia for 14 years, a leader who had carefully cultivated a strongman image, stepped down without even a hint of resistance. What made his acknowledgment of defeat even more miraculous was who he lost to: the Student List (SL), a new outfit that emerged out of two years of mass protests. Every one of SL’s 250 candidates had been selected through decentralized student plenums; none was a professional politician. Among them were academics, doctors, lawyers, artists, and athletes. For political novices, the scale of victory amounted to an electoral coup. According to CRTA, an independent pollster, Student List received 52.45% of the vote, while Vučić’s “United Serbia” list received just 39.2%. At just under 70%, turnout was the highest it has been in decades.

Vučić’s defeat sent thousands of people streaming onto the streets across Serbia. Belgrade’s Slavija Square, a traffic roundabout with a large fountain in the middle, became a spontaneous meeting point for mass celebrations. With all traffic stopped, revelers commandeered trams, climbed on top of bus shelters and the rooftops of buildings, and danced the kolo, a traditional folk dance. More than one stranger collapsed sobbing into my arms. It was a multigenerational celebration: university students brought their parents, and toddlers perched on shoulders. Some waved red football flares and set off deafening fireworks. Countless members of the crowd kept repeating “14 years” in a daze and in disbelief. Others chanted “pobeda!” — “victory!”. Some removed chairs from “Ćaciland”, a pro-Vučić encampment across the street from the parliament building, which had become a symbol of the confrontation between the student movement and the government. 

“We’re celebrating our freedom for the first time in 30 years, not 14 years, but 30 years,” Katarina, covered in pins and other Student List regalia, explained to me amid the cacophony. The “30 years” refers to a widely held belief that after the revolution that brought down Slobodan Milošević on 5 October 2000, not nearly enough changed. In Serbia, some even like to say “there was no October 6th”, meaning there was no real reckoning with the past or the atavistic authoritarian strain in society. Following Milošević’s fall, Serbia never underwent a thorough transitional justice process, leaving broad swaths of the security sector unreformed and former ministers like Vučić free to again take power. Student List has vowed to remedy this, and to undertake a rigorous purge that will hold former SNS officials accountable.

It’s about time. Past protest movements against Vučić had always generated excitement, only to peter out within a few months. But the student-led protests never slowed down. The trigger for the two years of unrest was grief, which quickly transmuted into rage. On 1 November 2024, a train-station canopy collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people. Many believed a recent renovation of the canopy had been hindered by corruption. The slogan of the ensuing protests was “corruption kills”, and their symbol was a bloody red handprint. The canopy renovation reportedly cost more than five times as much as the original estimate said it would, and the main project was awarded without a conventional public tender. For many in Serbia, indeed, the canopy collapse was symbolic of a deteriorating country. Under Vučić, critics say, Serbia has become a place where building contracts are awarded based on personal connections; where state institutions are staffed and stripped for parts by regime loyalists; and where health and safety are barely an afterthought.

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Indeed, the Vučić government’s corruption scandals have been legion. In April 2016, masked men demolished buildings in Belgrade’s Savamala district near the planned luxury development Belgrade Waterfront in the middle of the night. The buildings had been blocking construction of the Emirati-funded development, which was part of a deal overseen by Vučić. For years, many have believed that he or someone in his inner circle had ordered it, and on the eve of the election, the former Belgrade chief of municipal police confirmed it. Vučić is also widely said to have a close working relationship with violent football fans and organized crime.

Little wonder, then, that some of the student protests were attended by more than 300,000 people, by far the largest since Milošević’s fall. With little access to the Vučić-dominated media, the students managed to find new ways to boost their visibility. They blockaded the faculties of universities, resulting in nearly six months of disruption to academic life. Hoping to gain the attention of EU officials, who for years regarded good relations with the strongman as a necessary evil for maintaining regional stability and keeping more dangerous ultranationalists under control, some students rode from Serbia to Strasbourg and Brussels on bikes. And, during countless street protests, they held silent vigil while standing in the street, always for exactly 16 minutes — one for each life lost in the canopy collapse.

During the past two years of protest, Vučić attempted to stem the discontent in a number of ways. First, he thought he would simply wait for the protesters to wear themselves out, just like their predecessors had. When that didn’t work, he tried sacrificing some of his closest associates. Early last year, Vučić had his Prime Minister, Miloš Vučević, resign, in an effort to appease the students. But when that failed, Vučić took more drastic measures. In one particularly jarring episode, the government allegedly used a so-called “sonic weapon” against protesters, prompting people to scatter in a sudden panic. Police and SNS-linked thugs have also beaten protesters, in some cases severely.

All the while, Vučić depicted the protests as a Western-backed “color revolution”, while his surrogates have alleged that the movement is supported by “Ustaše”, a reference to the fascist organization that ruled Croatia during the Second World War, and which massacred Serbs, Jews and Roma. The government has also used Pegasus, a powerful Israeli spyware tool, to surveil protesters through their phones. And, in the days preceding the vote, police raided SL offices and the private homes of several SL activists. At least seven people were arrested, accused of planning election-day unrest. But the students and their supporters were undeterred. As more than one told me, “We’re not afraid anymore.” Faced with determined opposition, and with his own party’s support in steep decline, Vučić likely decided that stepping down was preferable to a bloody street revolution.

The students’ most impressive feat was transforming street protest into a viable electoral vehicle. First, SL was adamant that no single leader would come to dominate the movement. This prevented opportunists from hijacking the protests for their own agenda, and excluded the kinds of narcissistic personalities who have historically gravitated toward Serbian politics. This also guarded against replicating the same personalist style that has disfigured Serbian politics for decades. The leaderlessness of the movement made it harder for Vučić to launch salacious smear campaigns against opponents in pro-government tabloids, a signature of his rule that always kept his political rivals cowed. Serbia’s official opposition were also excluded from the movement from early on, as they were often tainted by association with past scandals. As Savo Manojlović, a member of the Belgrade city assembly, and leader of a movement that supported Student List told me, “a crucial role in this process has been played by the emergence of new, uncompromised faces on the political scene”.

Student List is also ideologically heterogeneous, encompassing conservative nationalists, pro-EU liberals, and Leftists in its ranks. Indeed, the diversity of political thought in the movement is itself a testament to the obloquy in which Vučić is held. On Sunday night, Serbian flags and Orthodox Christian iconography predominated among the crowd of revelers, but there were also socialists celebrating in keffiyehs, and even some muted expressions of “Yugonostalgia”. Yet if that “big tent” approach proved effective at winning elections, critics can rightly point out that the lack of clear ideology will ultimately make it difficult to govern. Indeed, absent the singular, unifying cause of bringing down Vučić, SL members may soon find that more divides them than unites them. It helps, at least, that SL claims it does not necessarily aim to transform itself into a traditional political party like the SNS. Instead, members hope to use the movement to dismantle the Vučić regime: then create the conditions for fair ideological and political competition in future. In other words, SL is the custodian of Serbia’s transition to a genuinely democratic system.

SL has also been deliberately ambiguous about most aspects of foreign policy. This was partly a strategic decision, made to keep the focus on Vučić’s domestic malfeasance. As Vuk Vuksanović, a lecturer in foreign policy and grand strategy at King’s College London, tells me, SL’s victory actually means that foreign policy will change the least of any area of Serbian governance. “The Balkans are now a region where people are preoccupied with things closer to home,” Vuksanović says. Indeed, much of SL’s official program deviates little from the SNS line. Under Vučić, Serbia maintained good relations with both the US and Russia, along with China and the EU. SL is already signaling that it will do the same. Yesterday, sociologist and SL representative Jovo Bakić went on RT to pledge that there would be no changes to Serbia-Russia relations, and that SL would continue Vučić’s policy of opposing sanctions on Russia.

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The one area where SL’s foreign policy does dramatically depart from its predecessor is on Israel. Vučić cultivated close ties with Tel Aviv through arms sales, and oversaw the recent inauguration of a new joint Israeli-Serbian drone factory near Belgrade. But SL explicitly says that it would end arms sales to Israel and increase aid to the Palestinians. SL deplores Israel’s wars on its neighbors and view Tel Aviv as one of Vučić’s strongest backers. On the issue of relations with the EU, meanwhile, SL has had to tread more lightly. The movement contains both europhiles and euroskeptics, so has sought to balance between both. “SL has been playing a middle ground,” Vuksanović tells me. “They cannot fully reject the EU because it’s Serbia’s biggest trading partner, meaning the economy depends on it, but they also can’t do hyper-globalism because it irritates conservatives.”

SL’s success at transforming a student-protest movement into an electoral vehicle capable of taking control of the state will undoubtedly be studied for years to come. Surely, many would-be Gen Z activists will see their success as a template ripe for emulation, especially as youth-led protests are spreading across the globe, from India to Albania, while riots rage across Western Europe. If nothing else, the SL example demonstrates that such movements can have other fates besides wanton destruction and fizzling out into nothingness. Indeed, what is perhaps most distinct about SL is that it never descended into street violence. In fact, it always actively discouraged it, aware that the government would use any acts of violence to demonize the movement and justify more repression. Last week, after the last major protest before the election on Slavija Square, students even picked up rubbish left behind by protesters. Yesterday, after the vote, the students cleaned up the park that once hosted Ćaciland. It was symbolic of the task ahead. Now that they’re in power, SL will be cleaning up the mess that earlier generations of Serbs have made for them.

Later, in bed, like twentysomethings the world over, you defer sleep with your phone: scrolling through selfies on WeChat, video essays on bilibili, and microcelebrity meltdowns on Weibo. When you open the photosharing app, RedNote, one post catches your eye.

“You’re awake,” the title reads. “It’s ‘08 in a Beijing alley, and the Olympics are set to begin.”

The images flicker through dimly remembered scenes from childhood: cluttered newspaper stands, roadside skewer vendors, kindergarten kids in bright tank tops. Prominently featured are the Fuwa, the five adorable multicolored mascots of the 2008 Olympics. The posts have gnomic, melancholy titles (“Why cry? Wasn’t this the life you always wanted?” or “Never to find those happy days again”) that serve as little daggers to the Gen Z heart.

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But what really gets you — what really sets off the Sehnsucht in your bosom for the lost dreamworld of childhood — is the music. “Beijing Welcomes You”, the old Olympic anthem, is a soaring, catchy ballad that can crack the cool facade of even the most stoic of Chinese Zoomers. Its lyrics (“Open, always, is the gate of my home…”) capture a China that was confident, cosmopolitan, and welcoming; a China that now seems as forgotten as the threadbare plushies of our childhood.

What gives the song such emotional significance is the sheer breadth of its saturation. In the Summer of 2008, you heard it broadcast on the bus ride to school; on a walk with your parents in the park; as you snuck into the cornershop to buy red bean popsicles.

It’s clear from all the comments that the rediscovery of “Beijing Welcomes You” is, for China’s Gen Z, only part of a wider reckoning with the recent past. “In those days we all believed in progress and world peace…” writes one poster on bilibi (China’s YouTube analog). “This song has such pure intentions; there’s no political agenda to it at all. Culture above all else…” adds another. A reply to this notes that the star-studded cast features A-listers from both shores of the Taiwan Strait, as well as the Chinese diaspora: “Back then, everyone set aside their ideologies and national differences to showcase to the world nothing other than Chinese civilization and the Olympic spirit… Truly, those were the good times.” Without getting lost in the vexed politico-linguistic question of Chinese autonyms, it’s notable here that the commenter uses the term “中华文化” (Zhōnghuá wénhuà) for Chinese civilization, which has the expansive sense of an overarching culture spanning all Chinese-speaking people, as opposed to the more parochial “中国文化” (Zhōngguó wénhuà), which refers to Chinese culture within the People’s Republic. Such are the linguistic pains taken by the user to emphasize the ecumenism of Chinese unity manifested during the 2008 Olympics.

British readers might feel a pang of recognition at the potency of Olympic patriotism; images from the London 2012 opening ceremony are still apt to prompt wistful accounts from progressives about the forward-looking, multicultural, welcoming country they thought they grew up in. But whereas Britain’s Olympic games live on in cultural memory as the last gasp of liberal Britain, Beijing 2008 was supposed to be the inauguration of a newer, more open China — a China that never was.

The aesthetic that Chinese Zoomers have fashioned in response to these foreclosed hopes is a variation on “dreamcore”, a style that first took shape on US-based platforms like Tumblr and DeviantArt in the mid-2010s. American dreamcore is marked by its obsession with eerie liminal spaces like hotel lobbies, parking lots, or the yellow, fluorescent-lit basements of old furniture stores that inspired Backrooms, this summer’s horror blockbuster. Chinese dreamcore retains some of the formal elements — eerily empty streets, 2000s internet graphics — while sinicizing its content; this is, in other words, nostalgia with Chinese characteristics. It could even be seen as further confirmation of the late Mark Fisher’s pet concept, hauntology, the idea that we’re living now in the “slow cancellation of the future”, surrounded by the dreams we once abandoned.

That the Chinese youth are just as pessimistic, anxious, even fatalistic, about the present state of affairs as young people in the West may come as a surprise. From Friedrich Merz to Mark Carney, politicians on both the Left and Right often invoke China as the presumptive winner in our global return to bipolar Great Power geopolitics — the country with the technology, infrastructure, jobs, growth rates, and above all, the sense of collective purpose buoyed by national unity. But behind the phalanxes of dancing robots and ribbons of high-speed rail is the stark economic reality facing the generation now coming of age, who, like their counterparts in the West, are coming to terms with the closure of the guaranteed upward mobility that their parents enjoyed.

In the late Seventies, China’s then-leader Deng Xiaoping implemented a wildly ambitious suite of market reforms. As Deng overhauled the creaky Soviet-style economy that he had inherited from Mao, a corresponding ideological makeover of the Chinese Communist Party was inevitable. Gone was the fiery Marxist-Leninist exporter of international revolution, replaced by the staid, technocratic guardian of state capitalism we’re familiar with today. Jettisoning the Mao-era baggage, however, meant losing the story that gave the Communist government its legitimacy — the grand Us vs Them narrative of the working class as co-authored by Marx and Engels, a story second only to the New Testament in its ability to form social cohesion and inspire mass action.

What narrative could fill the ideological vacuum left by Marxism? Political scientist Feng Chen argues that the CCP’s pivot to “eudaemonic legitimacy” accomplished precisely that. Here, eudaimonia, Greek for happiness or flourishing, refers not to any lofty Aristotelian actualizing of human potentialities, but to satisfying people’s demands for iPhones, McDonald’s, electric cars, hotpots, Korean beauty products, and so on. The result was a tacit social contract that “led the masses to link their assessment of the regime to their personal material advancement”. In the post-Mao period, political legitimacy depends on the uninterrupted economic growth that allows the government to deliver the (literal) goods.

One shortcoming of deploying eudaemonic legitimacy as a long-term political strategy is that it’s crassly reductive. Human beings are more than rational self-maximizers; man does not live by designer handbags alone. We have an exasperating tendency to put forth moral, not just material, demands — and when these moral demands are unmet, political stability falters. For Chen, eudaemonic legitimacy depends not only on delivering economic growth to the people, but also on ensuring that those people adhere to a notion of morality that is itself narrowly economic.

In the Mao era, moral character meant subscribing to a mix of proletarian solidarity, anti-imperialism, and ascetic self-discipline. A capitalist China required, at minimum, an abandonment of these collectivist socialist ideals — and, ideally, something to replace them. From the late Nineties, Chinese media saw a number of happiness campaigns — deliberately engineered self-help movements involving everything from TV talk therapy to positivity gurus to a torrent of translated American self-help paperbacks. The plan, as the anthropologist Jie Yang documents, was to inculcate new values in Chinese society — values such as “self-care, self-realization, and self-enterprise”, enabling the Chinese people to positively affirm themselves as autonomous agents, happily engaged in private enterprise.

So as the government delivered on economic growth, the governed reconceived of the good life along exactly such lines. What could go wrong?

The more basic problem with the quid pro quo of political acquiescence for material gain is what to do when growth tapers off. In the popular Chinese consciousness, the tapering took place sometime between 2018 and the beginning of the pandemic, and the record-breaking 17.9% youth unemployment rate recorded in July evinces no change to this downward trend. Attitudes, though, can be slower to change than economic realities, and a distinct generational gap has opened between the Deng cohort, who maintain a sunny and increasingly obsolescent optimism that comes only with decades of double-digit GDP growth, and their children, who are now faced with a job market decimated by outsourcing, automation, and cutthroat competition. In response to this future of secular stagnation, Gen Z has rejected en masse the chipper self-help morality of China’s boom years.

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In the absence of civil society — and in the face of continued state-sponsored optimism campaigns — China’s youth has vented its dissatisfaction in the only direction available: inwards. The ethnographer Dino Ge Zhang has coined the term “Sinopessimism” to characterize the private world conjured up by the slang of Chinese Zoomers. They describe their time in higher education and the workforce with the term 内卷 (“involution)”, or “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless”. The natural reaction to an involuted society is 躺平 (“lying flat”): in other words rejecting expectations of upward mobility and career advancement in favor of alternative lifestyles.

However, Gen Z’s most distinctive neologism must be 历史的垃圾时间, or “garbage time of history”. The term, coined by Hu Wenhui, a newspaper editor in Guangzhou, borrows its meaning from “garbage time” in sports, referring to the final portion of a match so lopsided that its outcome is already a foregone conclusion. Hu, in a 2023 WeChat post shared millions of times, extends this to cultural critique: those living in the “garbage time of history” are stuck in an agonizing interim period when nothing seems to work, when decaying, outmoded social structures refuse to collapse, and when individuals feel powerless to respond. Though Hu limits his examples to the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and the fall of the Tang dynasty (while making thinly-veiled allusions to contemporary China throughout), it’s written in the same spirit of global pessimism that moves Western Zoomers to drop the term “late capitalism”, or the Gramsci quote that diagnoses the present as the “time of monsters”.

Nothing expresses the ennui of the Sinopessimism generation better than Chinese dreamcore. Time will tell if it remains a trendy hashtag or develops into a full-fledged artistic movement. But for now, if nothing else, Chinese dreamcore stands as a melancholy corrective to the widely-held assumption that the passing of the globalized era (which counts, as one of its fading triumphs, the Beijing Olympics) also heralds a new epoch of winners and losers: namely the oft-repeated narrative of China’s inevitable rise, and the West’s gradual decline. It seems misguided, to say the least, for Western progressives to spread narratives of Chinamaxxing at a time when the Chinese youth are themselves avoiding their economic present by escaping to the safety of the past. Ultimately, this new epoch of isolationism may consist only of losers and other losers.

If there’s any doubt about the crisis in China’s youth outlook, take a look at the panicky, hectoring responses it has elicited from the establishment. Discussion of “lying flat” is censored online; meanwhile a battalion of mainstream academics have come forth with thinkpieces rebutting the concept, decrying it as a “fraudulent academic concept,” a “logical fallacy,” or, my particular favorite, the “absurd fantasy” of “idiotic literary youths.” And, in direct response to Chinese dreamcore, a recent article published in the Social Sciences Review of Gansu Province warns of the “latent ideological risks stemming from the glorification of ‘negative emotions’”. More than just a case of bad vibes, officials are treating the pervasive pessimism as a serious ideological challenge — the one really obvious lesson from the 20th century being, after all, that keeping around a bunch of nihilistic, directionless, and economically downward young people tends to be really, really bad for political stability.

Still, one comment under a Chinese dreamcore post stood out to me as a corrective to the idea that China’s recent past really was so much brighter. It was from a bewildered Gen-Xer. “The 2000s were a time when I was scared to leave the house at night, back when trash piled in the streets, and my hometown didn’t even have streetlights. I don’t know where exactly the romance is.” So even the golden years of childhood prove no escape. If Western pundits idealize a non-existent future for China, its youth romanticize a non-existent Chinese past. All attempts at escape turn up only dead ends. How, then, can we comfort ourselves amidst this time of monsters? Perhaps there is a slender hope: that one day, with enough distance, our present may also be misremembered as beautiful.

It’s a thought perhaps shared by the author Katherine Rundell, who won the Bailie Gifford non-fiction prize for her 2022 biography of the poet John Donne. She said in an interview afterwards, having rather fallen in love with Donne’s lusty, dirty Jacobean verse: “I do think a lot of the visions we have of sex and sexuality today are profoundly depressing. You tap them and they ring like money.”

That’s certainly true of British porn star Bonnie Blue, who lined up 1,000 men to have sex with her in a deeply profitable stunt that has also profited her parents, who are on her payroll. Yet intercourse with a legion of men in a day isn’t sex so much as an endurance marathon: where you’re the track and endless strangers are running over you. I wonder how much erogeneity those strangers experienced, having waited like nervous schoolboys queuing up to aim their pee at a target on the wall. It’s not half as fun an image as that created by the humourist Dorothy Parker, way back in 1934, who said of the Yale prom that “if all the girls who attended were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.” 

Now she’s back leering suggestively at the camera while dandling a newborn on her lap; it hardly stirs the loins. If Bonnie Blue can plausibly be accused of having so much sex it loses all meaning, most of her generation is, perhaps, not having enough. The numbers here are stark, with one recent poll finding that just 30% of Gen Zers had lost their virginity. Another found that almost 30% of those aged 18-24 had not had sex at all in the previous year.

Philip Larkin might have claimed that sexual intercourse was invented in 1963, between the lifting of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. But when was it uninvented? When did it die? Was it when Marvel conquered the cinemas? As the film director Richard Linklater said in an interview with The Times in 2024: “Superheroes don’t have sex. They don’t have genitalia, frankly.” Or was it when the political gap between young men and women became a gaping abyss, perhaps crystallised on the day that Andrew Tate, currently facing charges of rape and sexual trafficking, was described by Nigel Farage as “an important voice for men”? 

If Tate became popular online, technology could also be responsible in other ways. Perhaps real intimacy is too scary for a generation who have never really been left alone with their imaginations, always having a device to look at instead, and who have always been seen in those devices themselves. Too much of one’s own reflection is never good. Bonnie Blue is from a generation deeply concerned about their looks; girls who are rarely seen without a full face of make-up, having grown up watching YouTube tutorials of how to plaster themselves in industrial quantities of slap every morning. 

I mean, the last time I saw my 14-year-old without her enormous false eyelashes and thick foundation — honestly, months can pass between sightings of her actual face — I immediately took a photo of her. When she protested, I explained it was important for me to have a reference to give the police in case she goes missing. (She responded that even in a hostage situation she will never be seen without the lashes, so I suppose it’s good that they give her an impetus to escape?) 

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But whose fault is this really? Because I have to admit that my daughter was photographed every single day of her early childhood. I always had an iPhone in my hand, and if she asked to see the picture, there it was. There was no waiting for weeks to develop a blurry camera film. So isn’t it pretty rude of us to ask her generation to forget about their image and stop being so vain — when we’ve been the paparazzi all along? We didn’t even need a long lens to see them on their beach lounger; we’d plastered the close-ups of their childhood holidays all over social media before the plane had even landed at Heathrow.

Still, at least now that my daughter has a smartphone herself, I seem to be alone among my fellow parents in not tracking her every move via GPS. My generation, it seems, are not content with being paps; we’re stalkers too, knowing where our kids are at all times, even once they’ve gone to university or fully moved out of the house. It’s not the greatest conducement to developing a private life, is it — your mum being able to see if you’ve been a dirty stop-out; your dad able to track your walk of shame all the way home. How are our children to develop an erotic hinterland if we never leave them alone? 

Not that the situation is necessarily hopeless. For at least one prominent Gen Xer has shown herself more than happy to teach the kids how it’s done. In the last month alone, the actress Gillian Anderson has published More, the second in a series anthologising women’s sexual fantasies, and released a film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in which she stars as an older woman who teaches a younger woman to experience sexual pleasure. All this after Anderson’s hit role as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education, a Netflix show beloved by teenagers around the world for the way Anderson’s on-screen son secretly shares her tips with his classmates. 

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And, beyond TV, Gen Z and Gen X really do seem to be meeting in the middle (forget Millennials). I’m certainly not the only single middle-aged woman who recently dabbled in the dating apps, and found men in their twenties only too happy to swipe right. When I struck up conversations, and even went on dates with them, I was fascinated to know why. (They should never have dared approach a journalist; I see everything as a potential interview.) 

More than one told me that with women their own age, they worried about saying the wrong thing, whereas they were so unlikely to even be able to impress someone of my generation that it almost took the pressure off. It seemed that anxiety towards their female peers was fuelling their interest in women who were not their peers — as well, no doubt, as the desire to learn something about sex from someone more experienced. 

One 20-something bloke even told me that he had been on a recent date with someone his age who sat down in the pub and immediately asked him where he stood on Israel and abortion. It didn’t feel like a conversation so much as a test: one he now didn’t want to pass, whether he turned out to share her views or not. “But people your age are so much more open-minded,” he added, with a hopeful look in his eyes.

This phenomenon is appearing in all kinds of non-porn and porn-adjacent content. Quentin Tarantino, for example, was an early adopter, starting with his magnum opus Pulp Fiction in 1994, and has stuck with the preoccupation throughout his career. He featured Qualley’s own bare feet prominently in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. On Instagram, risqué but not technically pornographic OnlyFans models striking poses involving their feet will periodically appear on my feed — often multiple times throughout the day. Zoomers tend to be shy of sex conversations, but with clues here and there — feet jokes, the feet-featuring reels I’m sent, side comments that fixate on women’s footwear — it’s clear to me that it’s an interest among my cohort. 

The best statistics, however, come from foot-porn numbers, available from Pornhub, and concern material showing actual naked people in a video. According to the porn aggregator’s 2025 report, the “feet” category gained a 69% (don’t laugh) increase in views over the course of the year. More to the point, Gen Z viewers’ searches for “feet” were 347% more frequent than searches by other generations. The only category that Gen Z seemed to like more, compared with older generations, was “party,” at +385%. As Pornhub sadly put it, this was a manifestation of “the need for connection” sought by Zoomers. 

The 24-year-old Julia Filippo, among the most viral in the ever-expanding cadre of Miami OnlyFans girls, plays to the interest. Scroll her Instagram, and you’ll see her sucking on a long, phallic lollipop with her leg bent over behind her head, and four individual, smaller lollipops placed between her white-pedicured toes. In another post, captioned “glizzy time,” she’s in a bathtub filled with hot dogs: in one photo, her leg is bent up as she stares at the hot dog she’s placed between her toes; in three others, in slightly different poses, she’s pointing her toes, which are holding a mayonnaise-globbed hot dog, at the camera. Hungry yet? In still another, Filippo performs a sexualized version of the king pigeon yoga pose, staring at her foot with her tongue out, as if she’s ready to lick it. 

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Filippo has 1.2 million followers on her main Instagram account and 292,000 on her secondary one. Meanwhile, there’s also wikiFeet, where you can browse and rate celebrity feet. While men are included, it’s the women the website boosts and who get by far the most attention. FeetFinder, a platform that allows one to anonymously sell feet pics online, estimates that its “established creators” make between $2,000 and over $5,000 a month — just for pictures of their feet. 

In the outright porn category, adult superstars like Riley Reid have embraced foot fetishism, too, and wholly departed from hardcore content creation. Reid posted on X on Jan. 14, “did someone say feet content?” holding her open-toe heels up to a mirror, and on Mar. 18, “these feet got dance moves” to a video of her moving her feet around and wiggling her toes.

Graphic foot-porn tends to be some combination of the female performer enthusing about how “sexy” or “cute” or “little” or “smelly” her feet are (depending on the foot-proclivity in question), followed by her (or her co-star) maybe enthusiastically removing her heels or sneakers or sandals or pantyhose, maybe some toe-sucking (by her male counterpart, and sometimes, herself sucking her own toes), then maybe a footjob (like a handjob, but with feet), and … you can imagine the rest. There’s also fully solo feet-play, and lesbian feet play, involving genital stimulation, mutual foot-licking, foot-deepthroating, and other such goodies. Sometimes the actress’s feet will be well-kept and, dare I say, pretty; other times, they’ll be dirty, which is probably the point for some viewers. Still rarer, but definitely out there, is the inverse dynamic: a female porn actress sucking on a man’s toes. 

This odd new interest demands the question, why now? The foot fetish is one of the oldest recognized fetishes, and has long been an emblem of deviant sexuality, but during the great kink mainstreaming that took place in the era of Tumblr and the sex apps, it wasn’t particularly prevalent. An informal poll of Boomer and Gen X kinksters, including Melanie (her name has been changed), a 58-year-old woman who frequently uses the Kinkster platform to solicit BDSM encounters, turned up no one who’d ever encountered the interest in the wild. Melanie said she has been involved in the kink scene throughout her adult life and has met dozens of men through it, including of younger generations such as Millennials, and that she’s never come across foot fetishism.

Zoomers, however, were raised on porn, and no one can avoid it online anymore. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, who is a practicing Muslim, has a hijabi wife, and is 41 years old, has openly said: “every third video that scrolls on its own, is gonna be some OnlyFans model.” And the algorithm likely plays its part in encouraging the fetish. Filippo, for instance, is clothed on Instagram, even if scantily so, which meets Meta’s anti-porn threshold. Instagram seems to optimize such pornographic-but-not-officially-porn content. OnlyFans promotions on X, which have the option of showing graphic content, also seem to skew towards feet pics — leading one to suspect that such material gets the most clicks. The promotion by the platforms must, to some extent, create even more demand.

But in a more human sense, perhaps because Zoomers are overexposed to graphic porn content, eroticism has moved elsewhere, to content that is more interesting because it’s traditionally less explicit. The foot fetish is also alluring because it still has an aura of weirdness and taboo, so it can still shock in a porn-universe where little is shocking. What is more, in an increasingly sex-averse world, it substitutes as an object of desire. 

There’s traditional sex appeal to some of it — Filippo is conventionally attractive, showing a lot of skin, whatever — but it isn’t the point. Nor is the appeal sexual humiliation, in the old-fashioned sense. The Zoomer interest is of a different variety than, say, the 59-year-old, Leftist independent journalist Glenn Greenwald’s leaked tape from spring of last year, in which he paid to suck on a Brazilian male prostitute’s toes. Greenwald wore a schoolgirl skirt throughout the affair and showed the man that he’d sent him $2,000 by PayPal after he was done, to top off the humiliation ritual. 

To the straight Zoomer man, a woman’s foot is a location upon which to channel desire; he doesn’t want to experience pain or degradation or anything like that per se. The foot-as-object is the point, not submission. The foot provides very little sexually, in comparison to other body parts, and thus feels safer, and is even more appealing to a sex-avoidant generation. Will Gluck, the director of the new romantic-comedy One Night Only, said that he avoided significant nudity and sex-heavy scenes specifically because younger movie-goers are made uncomfortable by them. I, for one, am 19 years old, and I remember that in middle school, one of my more annoying friends stole my phone from me and proceeded to follow multiple foot fetish accounts on Instagram — I probably spent hours thereafter unfollowing all these accounts. That, at least, was my introduction to all this.  

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And there may be something to the foot itself. Women take better care of their feet than men and wear nicer shoes, but then why wouldn’t a man have the urge to masturbate to a woman’s manicured hand, too, or fixate on it during sex? Freud recognized the foot as an object of particular sexual fixation, speculating that it was a “phallic substitute,” for when a child recognized that his mother did not have a penis. 

There’s also a sense of return to a pre-Sexual Revolution sexuality. Overstimulated by porn and scared by actual sex — and by many accounts having worse and more awkward sex at that — Zoomers long for re-mystification. 

The last really major era for the foot fetish, by contemporary standards, might have been the 1950s, with a defining artifact of the moment Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, featuring the late Brigitte Bardot. For Vadim, the actress’s feet were a topic of fixation in a way that immediately recalls 2026. Bardot plays a young orphan girl who’s been placed with a family — in Saint-Tropez, no less — where she navigates relationships with men from opposing ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. In the opening scene, the camera zooms in on Bardot’s feet as she’s sunbathing. In another, she’s scolded for walking around barefoot in the shop she works at, as if this alone made her a slut. She also bikes barefoot and walks throughout the town barefoot. All throughout the film, there are numerous close-ups of her feet. The film would come to define the wild and playful “Bardot aesthetic” and also was seen as shattering the sexual mores of the ’50s. That feet had the ability to do this is a tribute to their sexual power. 

Of course, what followed during and after the Sexual Revolution was actual sex — more of it in film; more of it in the real world; more of it pre-marital. Zoomers aren’t doing as much of that, but their foot fetishism demonstrates that sexuality, in some form, will always be present. When Zoomers do have sex, it’s also often different — many need to have sex as if they’re imagining themselves in a porno, wherein fixations on objects of desire such as feet would come in. Unlike Tarantino, who operates in a sex-and-kink-celebrating world, Vadim was not necessarily thought of as a foot fetishist. Feet were understood as an expression of sexuality, even if somewhat scandalous. What else is Gen Z’s foot fetish, if not just that? Chanel is just being honest about it — and making a great profit on a mere fraction of a shoe, as well. 

In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

The mostly women queuing obediently around Manhattan for cult hits like Soft Swerve and HeyTea are displaying sartorial choices as sweet, shapeless, frothy and generic as the products they’re waiting to consume. Soft Swerve, for the uninitiated, is a New York-based chain serving kiddie-colored soft-serve ice cream in Asian flavors, topped with whimsical, nostalgic items such as mochi or Fruity Pebbles. HeyTea is a blended-tea-drink chain launched in China that brands itself as distinctive by using real fruits and juices instead of powders. And while millennial restaurateur David Chang and his pastry chef Christina Tosi deserve credit for the soft-serve revival in the aughts — their “cereal milk” flavor tapped into millennial nostalgia for adult-free Saturday mornings bingeing cartoons — at least Team Chang did so with a healthy dose of kitsch and camp to add some acid. Gen Z goes the same route with earnest sensitivity. The trend, it seems, is self-infantilization. 

The “West Village girl” uniform on display in these lines is amorphous, unisex and pre-sexual: white tank-top and figure-obscuring, light blue, baggy denim. Each young woman wears exactly the same thing as her friends, and as everyone around her. This look’s stylistic predecessor, “mom jeans,” wasn’t very sexy, but it was more grown-up, accommodating a postpartum midsection and tapering down the leg in a last-ditch nod to the feminine silhouette. The new West Village cozy-chic barrel cut is so voluminous and unstructured below the knee, it resembles a pair of surplus-store jogging pants. 

The Zoomer mood board deserves the label “self-infantilization chic,” or “toddlercore.” The generation is defined by historically high sugar consumption, the choice of lifestyle over fashion, aversion to sex and vice, diligent consumption of media, and dutiful consumerism. At the center of the board should sit a single analog hack many Zoomers have probably never heard of — the sugar tit. 

The sugar tit was a staple in the South for poorer families, especially during the Great Depression, and is essentially a makeshift pacifier. To make one, mothers whipped softened butter and sugar into a creamy emulsion, then wrapped it in cheesecloth for babies to suck as they explored the world, wearing a flour sack fashioned into a onesie. Thus ensconced in a cocoon and suckling on mommy’s teat, they could enjoy a carefree existence while mainlining sweet cream.

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Ejection from this paradise is the existential gripe of the character Rue, the lead in HBO’s Gen Z-defining television series Euphoria. The show identifies the basic fact of eviction from the womb as the origin of Rue’s outsized anxiety and ensuing opioid addiction. Anesthetizing drugs offer Rue the closest simulation she can achieve to this amniotic sanctuary, until her tragic almost-reunion with mommy in the finale.

A cozy, safe place in an IG-worthy line makes the same promise as Rue’s drug addiction: a second-best return to the creature comforts of early childhood, when a diet of already-masticated foods is spoon-fed for easy digestion and quick endorphins, and while the conflict between baby and mommy, self and object, male and female linger on the horizon.

Soft Swerve offers a checklist of exotic flavors — ube, saffron, halva — but the essence of the pleasure is mouth feel and texture, or lack thereof. These chilled, aerated puddings are a toddler’s fever dream. Like the sugar tit, they combine ice cream and baby food, and even the self-definition of a deliberate scoop isn’t required. A concoction that is neither liquid nor solid splooges out from a teat-like apparatus to the queuing masses. 

In late May, the soft-serve lines were eclipsed by the grand opening of a HeyTea Tea Bar on the Upper East Side. The city already had more than a dozen locations of the Chinese chain, the heir to the boba craze, but the UES outlet is the first in New York to offer sit-down service. Drinks such as the Coconut Mango Boom, Supreme Brown Sugar Bobo Milk Tea, and King Jasmine Guava start at approximately 400 calories. The signature “Cloud” line is topped with a “cheese cloud,” a “pillowy foam” of condensed milk, cheese, and cream — in other words, a sugar tit. And the chain’s marketing copy is correspondingly banal and unthreatening. The IG feed for its United States locations promises that the product “never gets old … milk aroma. Easy on the palate, easy to love….” Just what the toddlers ordered.

Gen Z’s culinary fixation also extends to savory mushy foods, though to a lesser degree. That soggy midday snack, Tater Tots, is “no longer just for kids,” as the Nickelodeon slogan once promised. Fried blobs of mashed potatoes have appeared on gastropub and upscale menus, satisfying the desire for the toothless enjoyment of soft edges. Lacking the confident crisp of frites or chips, each tot-morsel pays off with a creamy reward at the center. 

Clout, in this form of consumption, is communicated not just by imbibing the decadent, excessively sweet novelty du jour, but by displaying the supposedly insider knowledge and expertise to be there in the first place — never mind that thousands of other insiders are there with you; it’s better that way, there is safety in crowds. Documenting the endless wait under the blazing sun for a mere trifle (a mass-humiliation ritual, really) transcends the banality of it all. A lick off a finally attained matcha-colored cone or a sip of the last liquified-mango-custard of the day is an act of valor. And the “mukbang,” internet slang for a video of a person eating, completes the consumerist burlesque. Contrary to the obvious sexual potential, this Zoomer dessert-porn signals the chaste pleasure of wholesome childhood favorites.

On the rare occasions Zoomers prioritize lining up and paying for fashion over food, for example the April 3, 2026, grand opening of Uniqlo Union Square (USQ), it is usually for items characterized by ultra-relaxed, voluminous silhouettes for men and women alike. Clothing popular with Gen Z comes in various neutral shades of white, beige, and pale blue. With the exception of the occasional animal motif, Uniqlo’s best-selling adult garments are interchangeable with its children’s collections. The sizing is mass market, the fit is relaxed, and the leisurewear for men and women could easily function as jammies. There is even a resurgence from denim mainstays Levi’s and Gap, not just of overalls, but of baggy, hygge overalls, once again, channeling the onesie. Perhaps snap-crotches will be next for an easy diaper change. 

Fashion these days is focused on comfort at the expense of sexy provocation or a visionary reconfiguration of the human form. In fact, fashion is hardly prevalent at all, with Zoomers obsessing over easier, less distinctive options such as skincare and accessories. The post-Covid focus on grooming is supposedly a self-care revolution, but it really seems more like a self-erasure. The ubiquity of “clean girl” and “glass skin” aesthetics, and the preference for “blush blindness” — essentially pristine, bouncy, baby skin with an innocent pink flush on the cheeks and barely rouged, moist lips — opts for a common, innocent face for the masses.

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If any fashion choice sums up this generation, it is that Gen Z icon and avatar: the Labubu. Though the trend has waned, at its peak, Labubu, a mid-teens Pop Mart creation, drew long lines and sold millions, all through the appeal of childhood-stuffed-animal attachment. There were collaborations with brands as storied as Coca-Cola and Art Basel. Labubus hung from key chains and dangled from designer statement bags, and the larger and more demonic-looking, they were, the better.

Ugliness, in fact, was the essence of the Labubu appeal. The bubble heads, distended bellies, and pudgy legs revealed the underbelly of all that Zoomer optimism and perfect skin. These coveted plushies were the scowling talismans of the hangry toddler. They are what happens when the owner can’t get their way: an Oscar-worthy tantrum that only ends with another sweet, gummy treat, a mouth plugged with a sugar tit.

Zoomer men are little better. They also display the pre-sexual signifiers of self-infantilization — potato sack silhouettes, Tater Tots cravings, and jolie-laide plushies — with one distinctive touch of their own: the “broccoli cut.” This hairstyle is a closely shorn fade on the back and sides of the head, which is supposed to be read as ultra-masculine, referencing the sharp, clean-cut geometry of alt-Right aesthetics. But the front, in nearly schizoid dissonance, is often curled or even permed into loose, tousled tendrils, with a light touch of wispy bang. Like the softly billowing flesh of the Renaissance putti, broccoli hair is reminiscent of the pre-verbal intimacy between mother and son; it is a last frolic in the feminine cocoon before being wrenched from mommy’s nip and inducted into the world of men and masculinity.

It’s quite the self-own that Clavicular, proselytizer of jutting edges and hard exteriors, has adopted this hairstyle. What a waste of bone-smashing and steroidmaxxing to adopt the romantic coif of a cherub, and to accidentally acknowledge that the eternal feminine perfects the eternal masculine. Manosphere stars routinely fall for this trap. HSTikkyTokky, the main subject of Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, is also a broccoli-cut mannequin, though it is more forgivable on textured, ethnic hair. In the closing sequences of the film, he perhaps realizes that there is no honor in the combative machismo he projects, and he brings his mother into it — we suspect to humanize and defend him. In a climactic scene, she offers him a juice bar to calm his nerves while she does damage control. To save face, he protests to the camera, “but mom, I don’t want a juice bar….” Except that we know he really does. He’s even willing to stand in line for it. 

That this clash of earthy charm and trendy crowd is now a common sight in London is thanks to the likes of Jimmy McIntosh (AKA “London Dead Pubs”). It is a combination that could have been created only by the internet. McIntosh is a “pubfluencer”, one of a host of TikTokkers introducing Gen Z to London’s historic pubs. Pubfluencers talk seductively of a prelapsarian age where there was a “proper boozer” on every street corner, without food, exposed lightbulbs, or bespoke “apps”, where everybody knew your name and could understand your job title. Their short-form videos pitch the last of the capital’s authentic drinking spots as living museums where, if you are really fortunate, you might even see a real-life Cockney.

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The desire to retreat into our drinking past has never been stronger, all while our pubs face armageddon: 161 pubs closed in the first three months of 2026 (that’s about two a day), and only last week HMRC ordered officials to levy higher business rates on pubs based in “attractive locations” or “character properties”. At the same time, an £8 pint of Cruzcampo means that, in many town centers, drinking on a Tuesday can feel like everyone but you has been warned of an imminent earthquake. In London, however, that is exacerbated by a lack of true locals, with a transient population moving between expensive pubs for their weekly extravagance. Perhaps it is asking for too much to allow us to take our heritage for granted, but in London, we have done something deeply un-English to our national pastime: we have made it a treat.

Amid all the fuss, it’s no wonder that young people have started seeking out a bit of old-fashioned London character on Instagram. McIntosh boasts 100,000 followers and (in a neat example of nominative determinism) a capacious Mackintosh coat. He has earned a cult reputation for producing articulate and thoughtful videos about old haunts, aided by surreal humor. In his scrutiny of the city, he has been likened to Ian Nairn, the boozy architecture critic who railed against half-witted postwar town planners. McIntosh similarly bemoans threats to cherished venues, but the usually exasperated Nairn was fighting when all was not lost. Making social media content about the state of London’s pubs in 2026, all McIntosh can offer is nostalgia for how they used to be, and recommend a few that still carry the torch.

Niall Walsh, one of McIntosh’s rivals in the nostalgia game, straddles old and new just as awkwardly. An Irishman with an account called “Proper Boozers”, he celebrates the right things, even if he could be more subtle in his working-class bingo: horse racing on the box, tat on the ceiling, cheap pints at the bar. In each video, his disembodied voice judges the pub on whether it meets his threshold of authenticity with the simplicity of a Roman sparing or condemning a defeated gladiator. Turner’s Old Star in Wapping, with its scratched wooden floor and fizzing Fosters? Proper boozer. The Blackfriar on Queen Victoria Street, with its pretty murals and overwhelming food? Not a proper boozer. “Maybe that’s nostalgia,” Walsh laments of his ideal pub. “Maybe those pubs are disappearing.” If they are, they are doing so slowly enough for Walsh, who has created a handy interactive map of London’s authentic hostelries, turning previously rough dives into the Bermondsey beer mile.

Given Gen Z’s inclination to nostalgia (one recent survey said that 47% of adults aged 18-29 would rather live in the past), they were clearly ripe for the taking as an audience. Each generation covets something of the previous, of course, but Gen Z’s obsessions seemingly slip into envy. It may be because they are fed images of the past every day; without the internet, of course, previous generations could live in relative ignorance of what their parents got up to. The past should seem quaint, yet it appears increasingly normal — more normal than the present.

The pubfluencers know that, repeating the phrase “bygone era” to death, sending a shiver down the spines of those who want what they have never had. The pub slots neatly into an imagined history of simpler, slower times, with images of grizzly regulars and sticky carpets providing an antidote for our characterless age. Yet if the ceremony of past pub going clearly appeals to young people, with all its etiquette and icons, so too does its sense of opportunity, of what might happen and of whom you might meet. As Gen Z envied previous generations their music, their Saturday jobs and their houses, now they envy them their carefree nights at the pub.

To be fair, pubs, as with all weighty traditions, have long been associated with nostalgia. In his quietly irritable essay “The Moon Under Water”, George Orwell described his ideal pub as “uncompromisingly Victorian” with the “solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century”. Tellingly, though, pubfluencers are more reluctant to put a date on when exactly a pub trip should be harking back to. That may be for a canny reason. Visiting lonely-looking pubs up the Holloway Road, McIntosh talks vaguely of a “fading way of life”, but it is up to the viewer to work out whose way of life is fading. It is useful to keep the nostalgia in the eye of the beholder, blurry and rosy at the edges, rather than show too much truth about the proper boozer.

It is now acceptable to turn up and order a pint anywhere in London. The “fading way of life” that McIntosh mourns was a socially conservative, white-working-class one, which wouldn’t always have been so eager to welcome a diverse, young crowd. Even 40 years ago, London’s proper boozers had tight clienteles who supported them day in, day out, drinking as routine in a manner now vanished. The establishments frequented by them were not places where today’s hipsters could feel comfortable saying what, or dressing how, they wanted. After all, landlords used to carry mallets. But now that the white working class has largely disappeared from London, leaving only a few of their pubs behind, those who remain will take whatever company they can.

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The wistfulness, anyway, seems rather misplaced: that fact is that the “proper boozer” has never been more pleasant for outsiders. Gone are the days when a young filmmaker zooming in on a chap in high vis at the bar would be gifted a black eye to match his stout. In a bleak financial environment for pubs, he is received with open arms, and so are his followers wishing to sample the Guinness themselves.

Still, if the choice in London is between an expensive treat and a kind of false pageantry, I would rather retreat to the provinces. Nostalgia, it’s clear, can be wearisome, and there is a fine line between treasuring history and living on past glories. In middle England, a semblance of locality offers some contrast to the ills of the capital’s pubs, and it is often pleasant to drink where no TikTokker has been before you. Even if a pint is still relatively pricey, the pub will often be the only place to go for miles around, and so locals will gather as locals do. That might be at an identikit Greene King pub, but you can’t choose your local; the local chooses you, complete with a bar layered with charity collection boxes and grim-faced staff in green-and-black-check uniforms.

Jimmy McIntosh would not be caught dead filming in that kind of pub. Pre-printed chalk boards, fairy lights and, God forbid, some middle-class drinkers would be a tough sell on social media. Yet is not attitude as important as a period carpet? The Camel is a fun yet exhausting place to drink. There is a lot to look at, but it is far from authentic — it feels like TikTok with pork scratchings. Compared that to the average chain pub, a far closer match for our indistinct “bygone era”. You can still find pubs around the country that people sleepwalk into; it is only in London that we set calendar reminders and ask the landlord to see the receipt. At least in an unremarkable, suburban Greene King pub, you might notice the quiet behaviors that really make you feel like another round, where people still wile away a whole afternoon. As an added bonus, you can be sure that you won’t have someone in a large coat rehearsing a script by the jukebox.

The young man in question is called Bear. Never was a name so ironically bestowed for this Bear is anxious, tentative, and terrified of overstepping. He’s in love with a co-worker at the local music store, a girl called Nikki, but cannot steel himself to declare his affections to her. In a hippy shop selling crystals and dreamcatchers, he buys a “One Wish Willow” — marketed as a “collectible toy from the Eighties”. He breaks it in half as instructed, and wishes “that Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the world”. He immediately gets his heart’s desire, and all hell breaks loose.

To boomers, this may sound like a familiar tale of the terrifyingly unhinged power of the female libido, with shades of Fatal Attraction or Single White Female. But this film is no nostalgic reprise of that late-Eighties theme. The obsession of the title belongs as much to the male as to the female; and if anything, the latter is to be thoroughly pitied. Thanks to the fulfillment of Bear’s wish, Nikki is subject to an all-consuming romantic possession that drives her towards abject self-debasement and social humiliation against her better nature. During a rare moment of lucidity, she begs for death as a release, and who would blame her? We’ve all been there, Nikki love.

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Actress Inde Navarrette pulls off an astonishing feat as the obsessed young woman, alternating insane aggression with comic pathos. Her devotion is child-like in its intensity, completely untrammeled by attempts to play it cool. Most of the time she is all id, no ego, openly begging Bear for more affection, ferociously guarding him against imagined rivals, and covering the front door with tape to stop him leaving for work. When that fails, she becomes literally rooted to the spot until he returns, with devastating consequences for the carpet.

But for all of Nikki’s spellbound antics, the more interesting character is Bear — sensitively played by another relative unknown, Michael Johnstone. His story makes a compelling contrast to the original “monkey paw” trope, created by author W.W. Jacobs in 1902. Jacobs’ short story depicted a cozy working-class domestic scene, interrupted by the arrival of an acquaintance fresh from the colonies, carrying with him a mysterious shriveled object that will grant three wishes. Ignoring the visitor’s dire warnings and his own misgivings — “it seems to me that I’ve got all that I want” — the family patriarch, Mr White, wishes for two hundred pounds. Next morning White receives this exact sum as compensation for his son’s death, “caught in the machinery” at work. The old man’s second wish is to bring his horribly mangled son back. His third wish is to cancel out the second, finding himself too afraid to answer the ominous knock at the door.

As befits a child of his time, director Barker says he first came across The Monkey’s Paw via an episode of The Simpsons, but one hopes he has read Jacobs’ story too. Along with all the timely social anxieties it expressed about the costs to the working classes of industrial progress, and the threat from the exotic foreigner (Mr White, anyone?), there was a simpler message there too. The Indian fakir who originally put the spell on the monkey’s paw, Jacobs wrote, “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow”. White’s mistake was to fail to accept his lot in life, trying in Promethean fashion to alter destiny instead. As such, he firmly belongs in the pantheon of classic Gothic overreachers, along with Victor Frankenstein and Dorian Gray.

But Bear’s tragic flaw is precisely the opposite. He is a chronic underreacher who uses his modernized monkey’s paw as a lazy proxy for a deliberate, intentional choice. Romantically he is paralyzed, terrified of being seen to “take advantage” of a girl — even though that’s precisely what he eventually does. And even after it seems clear Nikki has fallen under his spell, still he can’t bring himself to publicly own his feelings. When she asks him if he likes her, his guarded response is: “Why, do you like me?”.

Crazy as she is, Nikki can tell what Bear’s real problem is. At one point she gives him a “Tiger’s Eye” stone as a love gift, to bring him “confidence and will-power”. But it doesn’t work, reappearing during the film’s finale to no avail. It’s not hard to conclude that through this character, Barker has neatly encapsulated the predicament of a generation: unable to ask a pretty girl for a light, let alone steal fire from the gods.

According to some recent estimates, nearly 50% of men between 18-25 have never asked a woman out on a date. Possible reasons are legion, but include the fact that there are simply fewer chance encounters with strangers as social life has moved online. There is an attendant awareness in the young of social media’s potential for making private humiliations public. And there’s the surrounding progressive culture, placing huge emphasis on the potential for men to get sexual approaches wrong. Unfortunately, the threat of heavy social censure only seems to produce confusion and fear in conscientious types, while leaving habitual sex pests perfectly unperturbed.

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In a sense, then, Obsession acts as a permission structure to examine this inadvertent mess, drawing to the surface of consciousness a widespread ambivalence, but without telling viewers how to feel about it. Such story-telling neutrality makes a nice contrast with the socially conscious horror that was popular about a decade ago, following the success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Made at a moment of peak didacticism, Peele’s film — though otherwise pretty good — was widely interpreted as saying black people should be afraid of white people, and that white people should feel bad about this. For a while afterwards, we got a spate of clunky lectures disguised as horror films, addressed primarily to viewer’s consciences and only secondarily to their viscera.

But Obsession prefers showing not telling, and is all the better for it. When I eventually staggered out of the cinema, senses bruised by spectacle and noise, the world looked temporarily different. Strangers’ smiles seemed uncanny, the birdsong eerily pronounced. I felt peculiarly in touch with the numinous, and that doesn’t often happen to me in Horsham. It was as if I’d had a tiny holiday from reality, or a restorative miniature psychotic break.

You don’t get much of this uncanny afterglow from streaming films at home, which is another reason why the phenomenal success of Obsession and Backrooms is so cheering. It is striking that both Barker and Kane Parsons — the 20-year-old director of Backrooms — began experimenting with their craft on much smaller screens, bypassing turgid studio systems by taking their output straight to YouTube, and building massive fanbases there. But still the silver screen retained its old power to bewitch. As a result, now these directors are luring the kids out of their bedrooms to watch with other people — a fact that may do wonders for the birth rate, if nothing else.

Presumably these newcomers are encountering the thrill of mental surrender to a huge cinematic experience at close quarters, with no pause or mute button available, in a place where it is frowned upon to have a rival screen out at the same time. And who knows? Perhaps they are also learning of that time-honored way to make an easy move on your love object, something that also used to be big in the Eighties: reaching for a trembling hand in the scary dark.

Later that day, I searched “Crohn’s disease” on the X app and found someone talking about Dr. Ray Peat. I connected with several sick people who were following a Peat diet, and they helped me one-on-one to build a recovery plan. Their instructions — avoid pork and seed oils (polyunsaturated fats), eat raw carrots, take desiccated cow thyroid — saved me. After I ovulate each month, I take progesterone dissolved in Vitamin E oil. The product, Progest-E by Kenogen, is crafted by Dr. Peat’s widow. The first time I took it, my body was so affected by its immediate tempering of estrogen — a key Peat idea is that estrogen is a driver of disease — that I had to lie down.

My muscles, taxed by estrogen dominance, became so relaxed from the progesterone that I could no longer stand. I still take it. The regimen runs for 14 days post-ovulation until I begin bleeding. I pop aspirin, another Peat hallmark, like candy every day. A few times a week, I take a custom blend of Vitamin D and Vitamin K called Estroban from a Washington, DC, cosmetics lab to offset aspirin’s blood-thinning properties. I eat as much red meat as I want, and my gut inflammation is at an all-time low. Three years later, my Crohn’s disease is no more. I will never try a new medication, I will never get surgery, and I will never stop Peating.

My devotion to Dr. Peat is what’s now being called healthmaxxing. It’s an online trend that, along with the intertwined practice of looksmaxxing, is drawing ire from the online Left, Millennials and Gen X specifically. “Why should so many perfectly healthy young women spend their youth tending to their imagined poor health?” The Cut asks. It’s “warped and wrongheaded” to looksmaxx, according to The New Yorker. In these precincts, taking pride in cultivating your health and personal appearance is coded as selfish and indifferent to Palestine, and women interested in healthmaxxing are targets for ridicule. 

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Women are subjected to shame online and offline. A popular Peat poster, Veronica Hoffman, known online as the mononymous Veronica, is the founder of anti-aging and hormone-safe skincare line Aurabiōm. Veronica is dragged across X as a crackpot anti-vaxx lolcow for her insistence that a cortisol-free lifestyle is required to stay beautiful. Others celebrate her and credit her with changing their lives. 

Many “Trust the Science” Millennial and Gen X women have accepted chronic illness as just part of living in an America under siege by people they disagree with. They brand themselves the permanent victims of obesity and mental-health disorders. Lena Dunham, the self-appointed voice of Millennial women, has recently completed press for her new memoir, Famesick. Like Veronica, she publicly diarizes — but instead of discussing health, she discusses her relationship with her fatness and mental illness. Dunham presents obesity as a feminist victory, a rejection of patriarchal ideals of beauty. Non-famous Millennial women watch Girls and read Famesick and see a stunning and brave heroine theatrically parading the medical interventions necessary to correct health issues that shouldn’t have arisen in the first place. Motivated by these negative examples, my generation, Gen Z, has taken health into our own hands.

Americans are sicker than they have ever been. A 2023 article in the journal Current Opinion in Immunology puts the global figure for autoimmune-disease prevalence at 19.1%, up from the approximately 8% estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal in 2004. At that time, 78% of those affected were women. Nobody with a medical degree treats this as an emergency, and the Millennial American treats psychiatric conditions as just another personality quirk.

In an inversion of the days of pro-anorexia Tumblr, the internet has become a solution for sick women. If I had not connected with the Peat community on X, I would be dead — because I refuse lifelong, humiliating interventions for my health condition. Substack and X have become places where hyper-online sick women discuss experiences in and out of the medical-pharmaceutical complex. Many of these women conclude that contemporary illness is tied to hormonal disruptions, such as estrogen dominance, thyroid dysregulation, and progesterone deficiency. They believe that nutrition and environmental conditions contribute to these disruptions, and that seed oils, synthetic additives, urban living, artificial light, lack of sunlight, and the psychic stress of New York City or Los Angeles have negative impacts on our bodies. Contemporary life is incompatible with health, and has created a public-health crisis to which women seem to be the most vulnerable.

Lily Sperry, a brand consultant who runs the popular alternative-health Substack Health Gossip, articulates the environmental side of the issue. Sperry has posted on X about living in Chicago and feeling drawn to more rural environments. “Your approach [must] consider the context that you’re operating in — like, are you living in a city, alone in a studio apartment, not getting sunlight? I think those factors should be addressed,” she wrote me in an email. Sperry’s paid-subscriber chat room functions as a nouveau, female-oriented forum for this philosophy: acupuncturists, energy healers, and the alternative-health-curious post threads asking for infrared sauna recommendations, healthy restaurant lists, and product reviews. Women share what has actually moved the needle for them, not what their doctors suggested.

Balancing hormones is the pillar of this movement, which distances itself from looksmaxxing, though both exist in overlapping internet circles. Veronica and others explicitly identify hormonal balancing as the holy grail, first for female health and second for beauty. Hoffman diarizes her wellness routines publicly on Instagram: European travels under red-light chicken lamps, nibbles of the Mexican thyroid medication Cytomel, and aspirin in between. My own Crohn’s is a case study in what hormonal intervention can accomplish. When I began progesterone supplementation post-ovulation, it deleted my symptoms. My inflammation markers sank quickly. I still see regular doctors, and haven’t given up conventional medicine entirely, but I credit my deep remission to my desire to balance my hormones, and not to my yearly $8,560.32 box of Humira.  

Health is a nobler goal than beauty, especially for women, who are labeled vain if they prioritize the latter. But healthmaxxing and looksmaxxing are intertwined, though they’re also polarized thanks to unhealthy (and fertility-destroying) pharmaceutical looksmaxxing approaches practiced by influencers like Clavicular, who takes meth to stay skinny and uses a hammer to reshape his cheeks. Hoffman coined a phrase now printed on hats: “You’re spiking my cortisol and making me less beautiful.” Chronic stress elevates cortisol, which destroys skin, hair, and body composition. Modern female life is a cortisol machine. Taking action against it is both a health intervention and an aesthetic one. 

The Millennial author Tao Lin, one of the earlier adopters of the health-first philosophy, reached similar conclusions via a different route. Like the healthmaxxing women of today’s timeline, Lin took to the internet to determine what was wrong with him, and self-diagnosed with autism and other disorders. His approach is centered on detoxification — first of the body through garlic and bentonite clay (a detoxifying skin mask), and then of the mind by opting for psilocybin over benzodiazepines for anxiety. In Lin’s 2021 autofictional book, Leave Society, he portrays the protagonist’s healing as a meaningful, spiritual event. 

Still, he says, looks can’t be separated from the overall holistic health approach. “I healed myself to reduce the amount of pain and itchiness and anxiety and depression and autism and other undesirable symptoms,” he told me. However, “most forms of healing make people look better, which can help people motivate themselves to heal themselves, which seems good.” 

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New Mexico podcaster, author, and wellness influencer Chloé Happe frames the movement with characteristic clarity: “The entire basis of alternative health is us calling out into the void, ‘Hey, we’ve really lost ourselves here. How do we find our way back?’” she told me. Happe was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, a tradition in which health is a religious obligation. The first time she understood that this wasn’t a universal principle, she told me, she was at the state fair with an aunt who hadn’t been raised in the church. Happe, waiting in line for her first hot dog, pointed at an obese man and asked, loudly, why he was so fat. Her aunt was horrified and made her apologize. She felt guilty, initially about the comment, and then about eating the hot dog. “I knew that being fat and eating hot dogs were things to feel guilty about,” Happe says. It’s not allowed in Leftist circles to say so, but she was right.

Ultimately, this has become a political problem. In a scene from Desolation E-Girl, Happe’s debut novel, her protagonist deletes photos of herself wearing a MAGA hat from her X profile because she assumes that it may cost her suitors. For the Left, MAHA-type alternative health-consciousness and Right-wing politics have become almost the same thing, and people are afraid that embracing one means embracing the other. When RFK Jr. joined the Trump campaign, he effectively poisoned the concept of health for most Left-leaning people. Rational engagement with the health question now requires social courage. This, even though many of these impulses — a view of industrial modernity itself as the cause of illness — used to be Left-coded.

What actually drives the healthmaxxing wave is something older than MAHA and even older than the crunchy California Left that RFK channels: a concept as old as the Greeks that beauty is synonymous with health, and that both are good. What’s truly sick is that we can no longer state this without controversy. 

Substack’s most compelling writer is a sickening cockatrice of the two types, filing bleakly post-moral missives from the trenches of tortured male sexuality. The Worst Boyfriend Ever, for it is he, writes long, granular accounts of his actual sexual conquests. Almost every post features a new woman or five; some are afforded a separate “Slut Review”, while most appear as comedy episodes in broader tales of his travels. He is a self-described “retarded horny clown”, an “awkward antisocial sensitive young freak”, a cheater and a rapist and a racist who variously claims that his blog is “fiction btw” and all completely “real”. He is one of the most popular voices on the site, regularly in the top-30 blogs in the fiction category, but you will feel like you need a shower after reading him. 

If WBE is real, then what we can glean about him is as follows: he’s 27 and white; he used to live in Seattle and now sleeps in his van, roaming around the West Coast and doing lots of drugs and having sex with lots of women who read his Substack. He went to college, and for a time worked in marketing. He’s a dork: he compares himself to a character from the anime film Neon Genesis Evangelion and litters his posts with weebish screenshots and memes. His homeless, druggy, itinerant lifestyle means that, despite his frequent and intimately described attempts, he is “literally too weak to rape now”. His body count, consensual or otherwise, is in the seventies and rising. He has ex-girlfriends, despite the handicap of a “somewhat recessed” jaw. He regularly solicits sex with prostitutes. He loves using the n-word. He hates himself.

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WBE is sometimes very funny and sometimes fairly moving but mostly just shocking. He’s fascinating in the way that only three-car pile-ups can be. Men read him because of the vicarious thrill of watching him live out their own suppressed ids. Women have sex with him because they want to read all about it later in a blog post; they hope he’ll describe them not as the 99% of women he “fucks” in the back of his van (“Fat Ginger Bitch Chicago”; a “tiny little corpse”; “objects”) but the 1% for whom he holds sentimental candles, like a woman called Celine who seems to have a personality. In reality very few escape humiliation; they lie on a spectrum from fuckable (mostly Asians, ideally willing to larp being racist or based or say “rape isn’t real” to amuse him) to unfuckable (like the “ugly autistic retarded BPD former mental patient” he scams out of $2,000). 

He might be an ironic construction: the daydream and release valve for a real writer conducting an experiment on the boundaries of permissible speech. But I think he’s real: he splices his posts with actual pictures of hotel rooms, drinks and dating profiles mentioned in his writing; he shows the women he sleeps with, sometimes anonymized via AI renderings, sometimes not. For this reason, and because of his well-documented appearances at a smattering of disastrous LA readings, I believe the Worst Boyfriend Ever walks among us — a real Adderall fiend, a real rapist, a real vessel of porn-sick Zoomer chaos. If so, he should be in prison; either way, it’s hard not to rubberneck.

WBE deserves scrutiny because he is every Gen Z preoccupation metastasizing in the spirit of one raving man. He is a pornsick, blog-based Clavicular, drenched in the aesthetics of the alt-Right, who has clambered from the gutter of 4chan and Reddit to scare the hoes on pseudo-literary Substack. He takes edgelordism offline, walks the walk. Rape jokes become actual rape: “All the stories are real but I call them fiction, because they’re so dark,” he writes, meaning that when he writes that he “had to wrestle [women] down pry their legs apart and even once contend with tears in their eyes” he is confessing. His biggest fanboys wave these problems away with appeals to personas and artistic license — but if we take him on his word, these assaults actually happened. 

Obviously, this notoriety is good marketing: his blog’s success rests partly on flirtation with legality. Last spring he self-published a first book based on his blog; he has a real agent and real liability, and is publishing what he himself claims to be real evidence. We have become so used to men in public life obfuscating and denying and reframing their misdeeds; maybe all they needed to do was to claim radical, picaresque authenticity, write about their rapes in romans à clef. But for WBE, the jig might soon be up. In one post, he writes that an ex-girlfriend has warned him of a lawyer collecting women’s testimonies for a “Class Action Fuck You Lawsuit against me & my beautiful artistic expressions”. He fears being banned from Substack; it is his livelihood, and he survives on cash and favors from fans. For many readers, keeping up with this baddest of boyfriends is about seeing whether he’ll get away with it. 

WBE has captured an important cultural moment. He embodies an overcorrection of the progressive consensus of the past decade; he is living proof that its tools of cancellation and shame are now completely blunted. Liberal feminism and ubiquitous pornography were always uneasy bedfellows, and inevitably porn — which tramples all humanity in its pursuit of orgasm — won out. So it is that a decade on from #MeToo, one of the most-read underground writers is boasting about how he “struggled” with one woman “for several hours, until her wrists were ‘really sore’ from being held down by me as I unsuccessfully tried to rape her”. The fact is that fans find these vignettes refreshing; one commenter under a rival Substacker’s takedown writes WBE “shines like a beacon of hope in this endless sea of oestrogen and … feminist monolithic culture we find ourselves in”. Some women comment things like “you’re a rapist and you should die”; others arrange to meet WBE and shag him. His blog chronicles the fag-end of ultra-permissive sex positivity: in the dying days of the fourth wave, all we’re left with is lots of terrible, demeaning and dangerous hookups, slurs and pills and Japanese brothels. 

This backlash is hitting the literary world too. Literary culture has lately abandoned its gonzo male rebels in favor of austere and right-on writers like Sally Rooney, with her schoolmarmly moral absolutes. Her style is remarkably similar to WBE’s: arid, straightforward, unbeautified — but a stultifying complacency about sexual politics makes it hopelessly boring. In the eyes of his admirers, WBE is here to remedy literature’s overfeminization with a new, poisonous irony that not only defies hyperliberalism but laughs in its po-face: “I’ve never fucked a girl with so many tattoos… beside my sister. Half-joking. Truth is my sister has a lot of tattoos too and it makes me sad. But at least she’s White.” If masculinity was castrated by post-#MeToo party lines, then blogs in the Substack bro ecosystem (Delicious Tacos is another big name) are drops of water in the desert for long-muzzled men. 

For 10 or so years, punky young men couldn’t say “retard”. Now that the post-2020 backlash is upon us, they can — but they still want to shock. That’s how you get WBE defending his “freedom” to say the n-word, bragging that he’ll write it 30 times before starting a post. That’s also how you end up with his best but most appalling passages, about soliciting then getting robbed by transsexual prostitutes in the Philippines, or seducing the sister of the already-cuckolded boyfriend of a reader stricken with cancer. These installments shock us not only because they are horrible, but because they remove the stabilizers of qualifying ethical commentary — guilt or redemption — that we’re used to. No force holds our hands and shows us This is Bad; WBE rarely shows regret. 

We — I — may want this stuff to be rubbish; the biggest problem is that it’s not. When a masseuse offers sexual services, WBE bemoans too much distraction from his craft (sitting in a cafe on his laptop); he adds: “make it snappy you fucking jappy! She wasn’t japanese she was filipino.” He warns her off his prostate “because im not fucking gay” before she “oil[s] up my beautiful white naked body”. These episodes cross several moral lines, but that doesn’t make the writing bad. On several metrics, his writing is in fact good: it has earned many, many readers; it is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny; it is very difficult not to continue. WBU plumbs the outer limits of autofiction: how will a schmaltzy and tired genre respond when an exciting interloper is a villain? How will we?

My suspicion is that this rightward Substack jumpscare will burn itself out: WBE’s nihilism is poisoning himself as much as everyone else, and like many in his coterie of writerly dirtbags his yelps for attention are shot through with borderline suicidal shame (Christian conversion incoming). His downfall can only be self-inflicted: WBE won’t be banned; he can’t be canceled. Like all internet edgelords he doesn’t give a toss about his critics, those he claims never to read yet cites relentlessly. They are merely “jealous miserable snobs”. He hates himself more than we ever could; he is “completely fucking alone”; he will probably be undone by substances and his unbearable inability to connect with other people. Until then, he’ll be the patron saint of a generation — my generation — reared on the sex-with-everyone-all-the-time spirit of pornography then neutered by progressivism, and now exalting in its own sniggering degradation after years in the wilderness. The Worst Boyfriend Ever will never make it to a university syllabus — but he doesn’t need to. All the students will have read him anyway. 

After years of depressing statistics about the decline of churchgoing and religiosity, news of last year’s “Quiet Revival” felt like a long-awaited good-news story. Based on YouGov polling data, and turned into a report by the Bible Society, it was especially pertinent to my thesis that we are seeing a surprising rebirth of belief in God in the secular West.

But secular campaigners and some religious journalists soon pointed out that the remarkable figures for increased churchgoing did not reflect actual attendance numbers reported by church denominations. Similarly, the 2025 British Social Attitudes survey directly contradicted the data — showing a continued decline in church attendance across all age groups.

The picture was complicated. But the Bible Society continued to stand by its report. YouGov was a reputable polling company, used and trusted by hundreds of organizations, including secular organizations like Humanists UK. The Bible Society had sought and been given repeated reassurance of the quality of the data.

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Then came the bombshell. The Bible Society this week announced they were withdrawing the Quiet Revival report, having discovered that YouGov “failed to activate key quality control technologies that protect the sample from a wide range of errors and this undermines the reliability of the result”. It appears that the survey had been contaminated by bogus respondents.

This is an important wake-up call: that we should all be very wary of putting our faith in surveys and polls, especially when they align with our deepest desires. Confirmation bias runs deep. As a Christian I’ve been guilty of it, as are people on the other side of the aisle.

In fairness, the Bible Society has owned up to what went wrong, and will no doubt think carefully about how it publicizes any future research. For the moment, a dose of humility and introspection is in order, and perhaps an opportunity to build some bridges with critics whose concerns turned out to be fully justified.

Even so, the danger with a U-turn of this magnitude is that it can also lead to errors in the opposite direction. Humanists UK, freshly vindicated by the reversal, now states on its website: “We need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain.”

That statement is true. Yet it doesn’t do justice to the actual picture of what’s happening both here and in Europe. “Revival” is not the word we should ever have used for what’s happening — but “rebirth” does still feel appropriate. 

The same day that the Bible Society’s report was retracted, Le Figaro, one of France’s leading newspapers, published a full-page article on the continuing rise in adult baptisms. For the past two years, this famously secular country has seen the largest number of adult converts to Catholicism in living memory. This year’s Easter vigil is expected to set a fresh record, as over 20,000 people enter the Church.

Nor is France an outlier. Spain is reporting a similar trend. Something unexpected is also happening in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark; all reporting an uptick of interest, especially among young men. Likewise, many Orthodox parishes around Europe are dealing with a boom in young catechumens.

In the UK, meanwhile, the Catholic diocese of Westminster is about to see its largest intake of new converts for 15 years, while other parts of the country are recording similar spikes. Attendance at Alpha courses, an introduction to Christianity run by many churches across the UK, has also risen sharply in the past two years.

Commercial metrics tell the same story. Christian music streaming on Spotify has surged in recent years and, against an otherwise stagnant book market, Bible sales in Britain are at a historic high, rising from £2.69 million to over £6.3 million from 2019-25.

None of these figures amounts to a “revival”. But they are reliable data points and indicate that something is happening. 

How that plays out in future church-attendance statistics remains to be seen. At this point, my best guess is that any new converts are not yet offsetting the number of older religious people who are dying. That means the church is still shrinking, but that the decline itself may be slowing. This is underscored by figures from the Church of England. Recent modest growth comes in the context that Covid lockdowns had already decimated churchgoing. In the end, though, this is about more than mere numbers. 

A “vibe shift” is a hard thing to quantify — but there’s been an undoubted change in the way people publicly talk about faith in the past few years. That’s perhaps best captured by the list of influential converts that have popped up recently, including the former atheist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her husband the historian Niall Ferguson, and the sociologist Michael Murray. Even Prince William, after years of speculation about what the future head of the Church of England actually believes, has confirmed a “quiet faith”.

Of course, many of these celebrity personalities lean Right in their outlook. Likewise, it’s no secret that the religious vibe shift is overlapping with a wider political vibe shift. The result is sometimes dubbed “Christian Nationalism”. 

Yet whenever Christianity gets into bed with politics — either of the Left or Right — it’s a recipe for disaster. Being co-opted by cynical political actors like Tommy Robinson would be a far greater catastrophe for Christianity than a flawed report.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t be surprised when social tumult creates a messy picture. Religious renewals of the past have always been bred of cultural disruptions and mixed motives. Whether or not we approve of the Tommy Robinson crowd, the common thread is that people are searching for identity.

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Will the Church of England rise again?

By Tim Wyatt

The default secular humanism on offer today has manifestly failed to deliver on its promises. We are being atomized by technologies that are programmed to polarize us. AI is proving a dangerous substitute for real human relationships, while the identities and ideologies promoted by social media have created a generation of disillusioned, distracted and depressed young people. Little wonder many have started looking for a better story.

That’s why, as I’ve met with vicars, church ministers and youth leaders over the past three years, I’ve kept hearing the same thing: that spiritual hunger is leading more and more seekers to their doors. Besides, if a Christian revival ever truly gets underway, we won’t need a spreadsheet to tell us. It’ll be obvious. 

But what had Kruger actually said that was so offensive? That Zoomer women’s wombs were factories for future taxpayers? That a Reform government would go full-Hungary, scrapping income tax for mothers of three or more? That they’d ban abortion? 

Wrong! Kruger said: “I’m not interested in your love life… But I am interested in the framework in which you make your decisions, and I’d like the framework to be more pro-social.” There were no plans to touch no-fault divorces, no handmaidens, no mothers’ medals after all. The biggest thing these anti-woman fascists wanted to do seemed to be to introduce household taxation… are you getting all this, Atwood? Labour’s faux-outrage, an opportunity for a tidy bit of political point-scoring, seemed for naught.

For Kruger is perfectly correct in his suggestion that young women’s choices, especially around fertility, are influenced by society’s messaging around motherhood. Research that may surprise those readers sold on the idea of Gen Z as cat ladies-in-waiting reveals that about 92% of young women want children one day. Whether they’ll have them is a different matter entirely.

Why? The assumption, particularly among trad types online, is that old chestnut: women, the gatekeepers of fertility, are selfish and misled. We are said to desire only career advancement for its own sake, or meaningless casual sex, or to spend any disposable income on baby-replacements in the form of houseplants, toys and small dogs. A straw poll of Zoomer life goals over the next few years would admittedly bear this out: the women I know would tell you they want to travel, to meet someone, to get a dog or a better job. Wiping dribble off a baby’s chin hardly gets a look-in — but all but one of my friends ultimately desires motherhood. But will they have children? What is it about our current sexual culture — or the “sexual economy”, as Kruger called it — that might prevent them? 

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By Poppy Sowerby

The Center for Social Justice, in a determined attempt to crack the case of tottering birth rates, recently identified 600,000 “missing mothers” — that is, women in the UK who want children one day but are probably going to miss out because of insecure housing, extortionate childcare costs and even environmental doomerism. But buried amid female economic woes was a purported solution: a call to arms for the other party in the business of babymaking. The father. 

For once, it was not just the cosmo-swigging career girls being scolded for not having babies; this time, actual researchers had spent more than 10 seconds thinking about the sexual marketplace and discovered that the Zoomer men expected to sire the next generation were not exactly up to snuff. (Of course, they might have realized this with a five-minute scroll through Hinge… but they got there in the end). Yes, the study found, our future baby daddies were both desperately unprepared and desperately unprepossessing as potential mates. This delayed maturation of today’s men means that their adolescence now extends well into their twenties. “The average age of leaving home for a young man sits at 25, three years older than for young women.” 

Of course, women often also find themselves in a state of suspended adolescence, reliant on parental funds and living in godforsaken houseshares with collections of cuddly toys — but the report found that male “readiness” for children was a critical factor for those women who were ready themselves. Its suggestions make perfect sense: “Start adulthood earlier — especially for men.” Reduce the school leaving age and the number of young people in higher education; get them, and especially the blokes — who are increasingly festering into a cohort of NEETs — into the workforce. Parental dependence is emasculating, off-putting and disastrous for self-esteem; politicians who are quick to point the finger at feminism for driving women to look for baby substitutes at cat shelters should only be taken seriously when they consider the problem of male listlessness. Much effort has been expended on the project of “changing women’s minds” about having babies — but when we already know we want them, it’s time to start considering what, or who, is getting in the way.

For Zoomettes, the banquet of potential partners cheffed up by the NEET pandemic is unappetizing indeed. Directionless dolts clog up dating apps, offering non-committal porn-infected sex interrupted by the periodic flushing of the loo by one of ten thousand housemates in his Flatbush flatshare. If you were us, would you have his child? My suspicion is that many more women would be more receptive to the delights of family life if the pick of husbands weren’t limply balding their way through their thirties until their bands “really take off”. The thought often occurs to me when I run into other women picking up their contraceptives from the pharmacy. Who’d do otherwise? After all, if you’re dating a man whose lifestyle is essentially unchanged since their teens, his suggestion that you have a baby is like a 10-year-old telling you they really really really want a puppy. Who’s gonna be doing all the work?

We are all to blame for tanking birth rates — and we will all suffer the consequences. But the tradition of giving women a kicking as the perpetrators is looking shabbier by the day. The reasoning that women are cold and selfish victors in a post-feminist world has never been borne out, not since Theodore Roosevelt was describing “the woman who deliberately avoids motherhood” as “in effect a criminal against the race”, nor even when JD Vance bemoaned that his country was run by a league of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”. 

It’s not that young women today don’t want children — ask them, as Vance probably never has, and you’ll realize they do. It’s that they would be foolish to center their lives around wanting them when the pool of potential partners is so desperately dank. Any government serious about helping those women who do want to become mothers must give up their “this-is-what-a-feminist-looks-like” act and stop being squeamish about pro-maternal policy. There is nothing anti-feminist about bringing about conditions in which women who want children end up having them; the radical solution is to stop yelling at we twentysomethings and lick the leagues of would-be fathers into shape first. Would Daniella Kruger want Mr Neet McNojob sulking around her house amid a rising pile of nappies? Me neither.

But as I’ve gotten older — and I’d like to think wiser — and as my own worldview has evolved, I’ve started to understand that the joy I experience around kids is not just about surplus energy or drawing a contrast with my New York City lifestyle, but actually the activation of an inborn paternal instinct. Some part of my being has a desire to make what sociobiologist Robert Trivers calls “parental investment.” That is to say: to play a crucial role in the future, to sacrifice something, to be a part of a clan and not just an isolated hedonic maximizer.

My generation, Millennials, is having children later, and at lower percentage rates than generations that came before us — only 40% of Millennial men are fathers, compared to 46% of Gen Xers, and only 33% live with a spouse and children, as compared to 66% of Gen X men. Among Zoomers, breeding is even less likely, in part thanks to a significant gender gap: 57% of Zoomer men want kids (a priority valued much more highly among Trump voters), but only 46% of Zoomer women want them (and likely they don’t want them with Trump voters). Add to this the ethos of AI, robotics, and life extension, and it suggests that one of the many schisms coming to our civilization will be that of the childless versus the parents: those who maximize life extension and hedonism, and those who value what will start to be considered “trad immortality” — that is, old-fashioned biological procreation. I don’t mean that everyone will fall into just these two camps, of course, but that this distinction will be a meaningful and historical one. The seeds of it are already planted. 

Much is said, and rightly so, about the consequences of delayed parenting for women: both positive and negative. But there is far less emphasis on the consequences of delayed parenting for men. Men also undergo hormonal, neurological, and psychological changes when they become fathers. As biological anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa writes, “humans are unusual among mammals in that our offspring are dependent upon older individuals for feeding and protection for more than a decade.” 

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Men, like women transform when they have to provide care and protection to a family. The shifts are less obvious but no less existentially and morally meaningful. Men of my generation, however, are reaching or crossing the boundary of age 40 not only without having had kids, but without ever having thought about having kids, and thus remaining in what can only be deemed a long adolescence — or a long 20s, at least.

To be sure, not everybody should have children. And I suspect that lifelong bachelors do play a valuable role in civilization (for instance, there’s a reason why historically almost no philosophers have been married). Certainly some people’s most procreative acts are creative and intellectual, and not biological. But on the whole, something is wrong with a society in which increasingly few men unlock the deepest meaning of their own masculinity — a tissue-deep meaning. In a 2014 Emory University study, fathers showed much higher levels of plasma oxytocin, higher prolactin, and lower testosterone than non-fathers. A landmark 2011 longitudinal study out of Northwestern found that the men with the highest testosterone — the most competitive, virile males by the manosphere’s own metrics — were the most likely to become fathers, and then experienced declines of roughly a third in their testosterone levels after becoming fathers: peak masculinity leads to fatherhood, and fatherhood transforms it. For some in the manosphere, this sounds like a disaster (because “high T” is God), but we are meant to become less aggressive and more nurturing when we have children. 

Fathers also live longer than non-fathers, even controlling for marital status. Fathers show lower rates of mental illness and engage in fewer risky behaviors. Moving away from the reductionist sociobiological point of view, any serious reader of great literature knows that fatherhood is often the mark of the hero, of a boy transformed into a man, who is ready to apply the lessons of his long education to the future and the next generation.

Whether extrapolating from Tolstoy — think of the birth of Prince Andrei’s son in the first part of War and Peace — or science, it is not hard to see why a world with fewer fathers, and a lower share of fathers, is less healthy, less civilized, less enmeshed in the meaning and drive of life.

Earlier this year, the internet writer and former academic sociologist Justin Murphy wrote a long post on X, perhaps to provoke conversation, about his own dislike of being a father. The responses to his post were, to my mind, salutary: one premise of Murphy’s confession was that fatherhood is central to manhood, and that manhood without fatherhood — or without a taste for fatherhood or love of fatherhood — is a manhood or masculinity that must question itself and interrogate itself. Certainly this is the right track. 

The gulf is wide between the pleasures of a civilization that suspends adolescence forever and the ancient challenge of sacrificing one’s own gratification for the sake of new life and of the future. What Murphy’s viral post demonstrates is that it’s hard to transition from an easy life to a difficult one, where you must be ultimately responsible and seek more than self-fulfillment. I have this anxiety myself. One reason for it is that men of my generation never learned how to overcome such feelings. Without rituals of manhood, which bring men gradually, but definitively, into modes of responsibility both positional and spiritual, the shift from bachelorhood to parenthood produces anxiety and shock. 

A highly technologized, ultra-modernized world where everyone lives far from nature, tradition, and religion, is one with more choices, and concealed preferences. So my point here is not to punish those who choose not to have children, but to inject some kind of paranoid philosophizing into the conversation. Are we forgetting that we have a choice — and that both tradition and biology make a very powerful case for fatherhood? 

Some, yes, are meant to be monks, playboys, philosophers, esoteric computer programmers who spend their lives in largely solitary conditions. But those are few. How many of us are really Leopold Bloom without wives and without children — without a hero’s journey, without the inheritance of Odysseus, who knows who he is because he has an island home, a wife and a son, an old father, a loyal dog? Many of us. Which means, ultimately, that many of us will never experience the sweetness of growing old.

Influencers slouch around their kitchens pouting, strut across the road dragging small dogs or squint through small black sunglasses in their living rooms; whatever they do, they do it in medium-wash denim and try their best to look as though they’re about to leave the house for a high-powered job (j-o-b… look that word up).

The men aren’t behaving much better. Bands of bros have begun to clog up East Village bars in backwards JFK Jr Kangol caps, or skate through Midtown in suit and trench coat; some have even submitted to being “styled” by their turtlenecked girlfriends. While in 1988 People magazine was calling John John “the sexiest man alive”, today Gen Z are making edits captioned “he’s my fashion killa”, under which other Zoomers purr: “he’s so Lana Del Rey actually”. There’s even a JFK Jr lookalike contest in Washington Square Park on Sunday (Iran, if you need a target…); America’s prince, as he was known in his Nineties heyday, has been discovered by a new generation of admirers.

The Bessette/Kennedy look is Zoomer crack, but so is the lore. Son of a slain president meets a pretty Manhattan party girl — a publicist at Obsession-era Calvin Klein, no less. They meet (while he’s dating Daryl Hannah), they marry and then they die, along with Bessette’s sister, in spectacular fashion in 1999. For Americans who secretly crave royal intrigue, they always embodied something approaching their own House of Windsor. And today, as grand American dynasties make way for populist parvenus like the Trumps, the Kennedy Curse, still at work, condemns this white-bread couple to a fashion girly’s Pinterest boards, there to cycle and shout and snog forevermore. For a brief shining moment, the Kennedy clan embodied muscular, forward-leaning confidence; today the torch is carried by a worm-brained health secretary and a deeply unserious Millennial congressional candidate. It feels good to remember them in their prime.

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Like Lady Di, fortunately, JFK Jr and Bessette are petrified in photogenic youth; the writers of Love Story made it clear that the parallels are baked in, directly inspired by royal blockbuster The Crown (the screenwriter Connor Hines said he’d been inspired to cover Kennedy and Bessette after watching the Netflix series). Resembling Diana too is the fey Bessette, who declined to give interviews and so was in her time known as wounded, inscrutable, the woman with “the downcast eyes”. And just like the British royals, the pair represent the faded glamor of a lost world.

For the many Zoomer fans of the series, of course, the lost world is not Camelot but a decade which even those of us who scraped 20th-century birthdays certainly cannot remember. Nineties New York is a foreign country for transplants like me, a dreamland of square jaws, land-lines and the print press. My suspicion is that the tragic hero and heroine of this tale were really quite ordinary; his pedigree and her muteness propelled a myth which would have wilted in the social-media age. His image was carefully manicured — after all he was plotting a stab at his birthright, politics — and hers was in the hands of icy Post columnists who resented her discretion.

Yet Carolyn and John’s new fans are rather the opposite. Absent their own mythos, motivation or mystique, they ape that of others. Fashion cycles may span 30 years, but the Nineties hold a particular weight in the Gen-Z imagination precisely because it was the final decade before the encroachment of the internet into the everyday. It is worth pointing out that the fantasy of the couple’s chicly opaque private lives is betrayed by the series itself: much of it seems to have been based on books written by close friends of the couple looking to make a buck in the 2000s; read a little around the subject of JFK Jr’s “charisma” and you’ll realize how many New York/Washington scenesters seem to have made a career of repeating five-minute anecdotes from 30 years ago. Sycophants circle even today, their reverence jarring in the age of nepo-baby hatred: “If there was anybody destined to be president, it was him,” a political scientist told the Guardian about spotting JFK Jr during a White House dinner. Years before social media, this couple were guinea pigs for hysterical overexposure.

For a new generation of vibe curators drooling over the couple’s battered Birkin 40s and fat striped ties, the broader resonance of what Bessette and Kennedy represented is lost — not just #couplegoals but the last gasp of American aristocracy, the great dynasties which once enjoyed such ease and prestige. These clans are now most loudly championed by Temu torchbearers like Jack Schlossberg, JFK Jr’s doltish 33-year-old nephew whose own Kennedy Curse seems to be an ambition for congressional office coupled with Brooklyn Beckham levels of attention-gobbling anti-gravitas. A social-media saddo just like his fans, Schlossberg managed to snatch a couple of headlines by lashing out at the series’ portrayal of his uncle by saying, so eloquently, that the show’s creator Murphy “looks like a thumb” and is a “bloated” “pervert”. Get that man on Capitol Hill! Were John John given Instagram and a front-facing camera, would he too have been unmasked as a shallow try-hard? One wonders whether the public’s love affair with Camelot was really a story of scarcity, of dignified distance.

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Why the Nineties rocked

By Douglas Coupland

Hamming up this Kennedy mystique, Murphy — he of the scandalously glossy biopics of monsters like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein and the Menendez brothers — casts JFK Jr as an Edward Cullen prototype, a boring, brooding hunk helped along by fanfic dialog. In Murphy’s hands Bessette, rehabilitated by the 2024 biography on which the series is based, is a spiky, witty city girl. What results is a kind of aristocracy drag, something for the “quiet luxury” TikTokers to get their chops around. Bessette’s style — pared-back professional minimalism — has always been her most memorable feature (perhaps because she was otherwise silent, or more likely dull); after a promotional image of the Love Story set was mocked by fashion types, Murphy brought in the costume designer Rudy Mance, who dutifully obsessed over the type of top-stitching on a Prada bag because, as Variety put it, “someone would have noticed”. Because the targeted viewer is from a generation which sees curation as a shortcut to authenticity, I have no doubt this is true — but you have to ask exactly who gives a fuck, particularly when other details seem to go so awry. It’s worth reading the invective of one former JFK Jr employee who laments that her George magazine boss is portrayed as a “pussy” with a “lisp”, “lip-quivering” and “whining” his way through the relationship like a “big baby”. Nineties aesthetics overlaid with 2020s masculinity make for a strange brew: it’s possible that Zoomer viewers would be repulsed by this family’s firm commitment to pluralism when it came to women — in which John was no exception — and so shrewd showrunners turned him into a palatably lovelorn pussio.

The show luxuriates in long-gone sexual archetypes: the muscular Brown grad chucking footballs around Central Park and the waifish blonde wilting over desks at her glossy fashion job. You’d be shocked at how Zoomettes are shrieking over John John’s chest hair; even the hair on his head, as one wistful TikTok commenter put it, is “so rare nowadays” (ubi sunt, hairlines?). Murphy asks us to imagine that 30 years ago we, too, might have been the hottest couple in the world. In reality, boyfriends have always balded, jobs have always dragged and living in the city has always meant dodging dead rats — but young women’s yearning scrubs all that from their daydream of an always-better, cooler and more authentic New York where they definitely would have swished about galas in slip dresses. It’s telling that Zoomer women are so sold on the show’s vision of Carolyn’s lifestyle: a suitor sending you roses via your secretary and leaving you gravelly voicemails is far more desirable than dodging foot-fetishists on Hinge. Murphy knows this, and so gives us full fantasy.

Daydream all you like, but please don’t bring your impersonations to the dive bar. Pity the backwards-capped imitators who will try out the Kennedy cadence on girls at The Spaniard. Nothing about John and Carolyn’s relationship is desirable: it was often grim, toxic and unfaithful — but this pair looked good together, and that alone is enough to send Gen Z rushing to a West Village pharmacy to buy tortoiseshell headbands just like poor old CBK.

Perhaps that’s the great tragedy of this pretty pairing’s demise: though they should have split up, grown haggard and morphed into the patrician Boomers they were destined to become, they were condemned to pop mythology. America no longer produces princes, so it must relentlessly reanimate them; if the greatest Kennedys had the rich ideals of Camelot, Gen Z has only the flimsy aesthetic refuge of a well-dressed couple necking around Manhattan. Before production, Murphy said the series should be a “showcase for Nineties minimalism”; what he created is really a shrine to Twenties triviality.

The prenuptial agreement is also a container of sorts, the kind you preemptively clap over a bomb before it explodes, to minimize the blast radius. When I got married in 2008, signing one of these would not have occurred to me. Prenups were for people who were coming to their marriages with something to lose, a fortune either made or inherited before the spouse came along. The rich divorcee, looking out for the interests of children from his first marriage; the heiress with family money and anxious parents; the elderly billionaire who wanted to hedge his bets against having a tragic accident while on honeymoon with his 25-year-old trophy wife. (The protagonist of my upcoming novel, a wealthy tech founder, has a prenup with an adultery clause: if her husband cheats on her, he won’t see a dime.)

But now the prenup is getting a glow-up, especially among Millennials and Zoomers who are signing them in droves. Brooklyn Beckham famously has one, as do Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian; Taylor Swift, after her fairytale engagement, reportedly brushed the stars out of her eyes and got busy with a contract to protect her fortune. But it’s not celebrities, who’ve always signed these agreements, who are responsible for their sudden popularity; it’s everyone. A recent poll found that 41% of engaged or married Zoomers, and 47% of Millennials, have entered into one.

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The advent of the digital economy is no doubt a factor here; an article from The New Yorker notes the proliferation in recent years of “new apps such as HelloPrenup, Wenup, and Neptune that fast-track the process; the latter has couples discuss their finances with an AI chatbot before being matched, by algorithm, with a lawyer”. Surely, though, it isn’t only this. Algorithms and apps represent the supply; the demand, on the other hand, is cultural. The money quote comes from a 38-year-old consultant named Kaylin Dillon: “This generation just doesn’t trust marriage.” In other words, signing a prenup isn’t about protecting your assets. It’s about guarding your heart.

Perhaps this was predictable. What more inevitable fate for a generation raised on a steady diet of safetyism, complete with the notion that every interaction should have an escape hatch to protect one from emotional harm? A generation so hell-bent on litigating disappointment that they invented the concept of “nonconsensual ghosting”; whose playdates were arranged by their parents and whose messy breakups were mediated by deans; in whom has been inculcated such a horror of failing at anything, ever, that they have learned to live in a state of perpetual caution while eschewing vulnerability at all costs?

For 10 years in the 2010s, I wrote a teen advice column; about halfway through that decade, I started to notice a disturbing uptick in the number of letters, usually from girls, asking how a person might pursue romance “without getting hurt.” My answer, which invariably horrified them, was that this was impossible — that getting hurt is table stakes for getting to fall in love, which is why it’s lucky for us that falling in love is so terrific.

But the contemporary young person doesn’t necessarily see it that way. The decline of social trust — not just in marriage, but in other people; the rise of online communities where women gather to annihilate the reputations of the men who disappoint them; the lingering sense, in the wake of the MeToo movement, that men are so predatory and heterosexual relationships so fraught with danger that they’re hardly worth the trouble: these, to quote one Jon Bon Jovi, give love a bad name. And having been encouraged to gamify everything from their workout routines to their sexual encounters in search of safety and predictability, of course young people remain drawn to the friction-reducing promise of prenups, to the suggestion that we might never get our hearts broken at all if we just find the perfect container to cushion them, the perfect set of rules to govern their affairs.

It’s just that insofar as it works, it’s a great way to ensure you never feel much of anything, bad or good; certainly, you won’t experience the transcendence that all the songs and stories are about.

And it’s hard to think of a more potent illustration of the notion of setting yourself up to fail than entering a marriage with one eye already on the door, already thinking about what you want to take with you when you leave. To be planning how you’ll break free of your vows before you ever make them; to be asking yourself, “What do I want to take away from this?” instead of “What do I have to give?” The couple planning to wed should be like two people building a rocket to the moon, practically delirious with excitement for the journey they’re about to embark upon and faith in the person they’ve chosen to make it with. To introduce a prenup is to shatter the fantasy with pragmatic fatalism, redrawing the rocket to include a nice big escape pod — whose inclusion not only suggests the inevitability of failure but also paradoxically weakens the structure that was supposed to transport them to another world in the first place.

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None of this is to say prenups shouldn’t exist. I’ve read enough murder mysteries and celebrity divorce memoirs to know that pre-marital contracts have their uses, just as I’ve read enough about the plight of women in the era before no-fault divorce to understand why lowering the bar to exit a bad marriage was a good development. Ironically, the rise of the contemporary prenuptial agreement may even signal a return to tradition, insofar as it suggests a view of marriage more in common with that of ancient people — who saw it as a means to transfer property, consolidate wealth, and form strategic attachments between families to accrue power and resources — than with the modern romantic.

But that traditional, transactional approach to marriage was a product of a time, and a system, in which women’s rights were limited; in the girlboss era, in a society organized around equal rights and individual self-actualization, it suggests a totalizing inability to let our guard down even when it comes to love, to family, to lifelong commitment. And if the impulse to contractually protect ourselves from heartbreak and betrayal is understandable, there are nevertheless tradeoffs to changing the way we think about our commitments to each other, to adopting norms that undermine their seriousness and strip them of their magic right out of the gate — because isn’t the entire idea of marriage to build something lasting, something that isn’t easy to dismantle, something it would cost so much to walk away from that you’d do it only as a last resort? Isn’t that why we mark the act of commitment with ritual, tradition, and an enormous amount of cake; why we make our vows in sacred spaces, in the sight of God, in front of our families and our communities? The purpose of all this ceremony isn’t just to celebrate love, but to make a promise for which you will, and want to, be held accountable.

The obvious defense of prenuptial agreements is that having one is simply good sense, on the order of having car insurance or a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. The trouble is that what’s sensible when it comes to fire safety can look terribly cynical when it comes to love — maybe even fatally so. Because to really make a go of it in love, in marriage, does require a certain sort of delusional belligerence. Not just to make the delirious leap together, but to keep leaping, like fools, forever, because the foolish act of leaping is everything. It’s the material the rocket of your marriage is made of; it’s the fuel that makes it fly. And maybe it’ll take a while to get there, and maybe it won’t always be easy, but who cares? Yes, who cares, when you’re going to the moon!

In the following hours, Clavicular took to X to gleefully celebrate. One post of his reads, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” It features an AI-generated image of him running over a tatted-up black man in his Cybertruck (in real life, the man was indeed black — this matters, given Clavicular’s musings about racial IQ and his liberal use of the N-word). The first comment beneath his post asserts, “unfathomably based.” James Fishback, the ascendant and Groyper-esque Republican contender for Florida governor, tweeted, and Clavicular reposted: “@Clavicular0 did nothing wrong.” 

The stalker had apparently previously harassed Clavicular, and he’s alive and expected to survive. The streamer was also reportedly taken in for questioning by Miami Police, who did not press charges. Whether or not Clavicular hitting a man clobbering on his windshield legitimately falls under self-defense is beside the point. Normal people simply don’t shamelessly advertise that they drove over a fellow human being. (There has also been speculation that the entire affair was staged, which is a real possibility with internet personalities, but which is perhaps even worse.)  

Then again, Clavicular is hardly a normal person. He initially gained notoriety in November for injecting fat-dissolving peptides into the cheek of his 17-year-old then-girlfriend. He engages in bone-smashing, pounding himself in the face either with his bare fist or with a hammer, a practice he endorses as promoting muscular jaw growth. He takes crystal meth to stay lean. According to fellow online-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes, Clavicular is a “chad” (an attractive and confident man, in contrast to an involuntary celibate) and a “WANGHF” — “white-ass n—r going hard as fuck.” “I’m like Nietzsche … I heralded the coming of the overman,” says Fuentes, implying that he was a harbinger for Clavicular. 

On Kick, the streaming platform that is a major competitor to Twitch, Clavicular boasts 97,800 followers as of this writing. Tune in, and you might see him at a club, approaching girls, microphone-on-chest. An hour into the new year and freshly unbanned from the platform, he was on Kick, interacting with two girls in a manner bordering on coercion, pressing them to pose for him to take a photo. On the chat, multiple users were suggesting, “run over George Floyd.” After around two minutes, the connection was “lost,” I surmise because the approach did not go as anticipated.

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Clavicular may seem to be an extreme case and an outlier — demented, pathetic, and dangerous in equal measures — but unfortunately for society, and especially for conservatives, he seems to have a project and a somewhat coherent set of beliefs. These were on useful display three days after the Cybertruck incident, when Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles released a  two-hour-long interview with the streamer — the first collision between Clavicular and mainstream conservatism. 

It would be hard for anyone over the age of 40, much less someone unacquainted with the lingo of the chronically online Right, to follow their conversation. Knowles — one of the more traditionalist conservatives out there — began by acknowledging the profoundly absurd nature of their rendezvous: “I’ve had the privilege of sitting down with people from a wide variety of backgrounds: priests, exorcists, scientists, refugees. Never before, though, have I sat down with a looksmaxxed, meth-head, livestream-cel.” The same week the episode was released, Knowles had also interviewed the Catholic bishop Robert Barron. 

Knowles repeatedly attempted to persuade Clavicular of his worldview: a concern for electoral politics, society at large, and faith and family. The Catholic commentator advocated for “spirituality-maxxing.” Knowles wondered if looksmaxxing for its own sake amounts to mere vanity. “In a lot of regards, it could be perceived that way,” replied Clavicular serenely. 

Here, in stark contrast, are the two grand Right-wing persuasions of the internet. Both spring from Gen Z’s concern with the direction of society and its crisis of meaning, as well as Zoomers’ very real material concerns. The first emphasizes strong communities, religiosity, and public policy in pursuit of the common good. That’s largely the conservatism of YouTube video essays, podcasts, and youth organizing. The latter, epitomized by figures such as Clavicular and Andrew Tate, says something like this: Society is decadent, morals are gone, and so I — the radically atomized individual — am going to do absolutely everything that I can to succeed. The proposition that “God is dead, and we have killed him” is the so-called conservatism of Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.

A viral segment of the interview had Knowles and Clavicular clashing on transgenderism. Knowles contended that it’s in the public interest to maintain societal order and prevent degeneracy and the mutilation of fellow citizens. Clavicular was unmoved: “The way I see trannies is that’s one more person to mog,” meaning to outshine. “Go descend yourself, that’s fine with me.” (“Ascending” is the online Right term for attaining higher status.) 

On the likely presidential matchup between JD Vance and Gavin Newsom, Clavicular argued, “JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom moggs…. [Vance]’s got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three chad.” I suppose most Americans agree that Newsom is conventionally better looking than the vice president. But that Vance’s looks constitute him being “subhuman”? “How are you fat and expect to lead a country?” quipped Clavicular. Clavicular agreed with Knowles’s assessment of the California governor as a “liar” and “degenerate.” Nonetheless, he’d vote for him “100 times over” merely because of physical looks.

Those still wondering if there can be good-faith overlap in agenda between figures like Clavicular and traditional conservatism should retire their hopes. Knowles was desperate to find areas of agreement with Clavicular (successfully), and to persuade him to use his powers for the good of his community, his nation, and others (unsuccessfully). Clavicular shut it all down by simply not caring. Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of Michel Foucault springs to mind: “I had never seen such an amoral — not immoral, amoral — person in my life.” 

Ironically, Clavicular’s individualism-maxxing is far more at odds with today’s conservatism than would have been the case 10 years ago. In the Right’s more libertarian days, from the 1980s to some point in the early part of this decade, the individual was the foremost unit of political emphasis. The predominant view was that people made decisions and were wholly responsible for them, and that the government had little role — if any — in making itself a vehicle for the country’s improvement. 

Trump changed this view, breaking with long-held conservative fetishizations of the free market, small government, and neoliberalism. Yet the paradox is that with Trump, young men had someone to look up to who disregarded norms, proudly belittled others, and knew how to win. Instead of asking what the winning was for, substantively speaking, a good chunk of the Gen-Z Right took to idolizing the hyper-atomized individual who could do anything alone.  

And so today, we find some of the newest members of the Right celebrating and defending a streamer who injects a cocktail of drugs into himself every day, who smashes his skull, and who got expelled from college in three weeks for hiding testosterone in his dorm room — a concoction he has been, at first secretly and now openly, injecting since he was 14 years old.

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All this — even down to the testosterone — is bizarrely similar to the mistakes the young Left made a decade ago, when the common good took a backseat to hyper-individualism in the realms of sex, gender, and lifestyle. The Left’s flagship movement, of course, was trans. We saw self-proclaimed champions of rationality and of working-class politics promoting the notion that any small boy could become a girl — that he wasn’t really a boy at all. This opened the door for corporations to market Pride and “diversity,” appealing not to a collective American identity, but to boutique groups, and their supposedly morally superior particularistic inclinations. We got “Somaliweek presented by Amazon,” never mind the company’s egregious labor violations. 

The Left’s historic antiwar stance, too, was jettisoned somewhere in the apparent need to promote American-style liberal democracy abroad, justifying an ever-expanding slate of foreign wars precisely on individualistic grounds (cue “human rights”). Somewhere along the line, between watching Don Lemon on CNN and grabbing $6 iced matcha lattes, Leftist youth forgot that the advancement of our society as a whole belonged in their calculations.

Thus, Clavicular can be seen as the Right-wing embodiment of the transgender craze; the eternal pursuit of physical “betterment” that leads to nothing much, and in all likelihood to nothing better. And the tragedy is that this Right hyper-individualism, just like the Left variety, is deeply intoxicating to young minds. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts — almost certainly run by Gen Z interns and staffers — clearly recognize the power of “mogging.” In October, DHS released a reel showcasing “Life after all criminal aliens are deported” (since deleted from their official X page due to copyright issues). Spliced between images of Trump in his heyday and clips from 1980s films, appears a pale-white, freckled Gio Scotti, the Italian model and e-girl lauded by the online Right for her “genetic superiority.” Newsom, the liberal who stands for nothing more than vibes and electoral success, has realized the efficiency of “mogging,” too. In the aftermath of Clavicular’s disparaging comments about Vance, Newsom’s Press Office tweeted out an old, particularly unflattering image of Vance. Clavicular quote-tweeted, “Huge impact moment.”

The young Right would be wise to learn from the young Left’s mistakes. Or suffer the same fate in a few years, as the nation turns away, exhausted, from the politics of incomprehensible jargon, antics, and tantrums. 

Kaufman chose the MDD diagnosis over other forms of depression because it sounded more enduring and less likely to be caused by something specific, which tracked with her feelings. She was only in the eighth grade, but decided she was doomed forever. Her behavior reflects a larger trend of teens diagnosing themselves with psychiatric conditions, using information gleaned from friends with official diagnoses, or from the internet, and therapists on TikTok. 

Young people are sometimes using “these digital platforms as a substitute for mental health treatment,” according to a Canadian study published in the journal Acta Psychologica. Moreover, the study found that “the overwhelming majority of TikTok videos on mental health are not created by professionals, and most contain misleading information.” 

Kaufman would spend the next three years fighting with her parents, smoking weed, vaping, and getting involved with sketchy older guys. At the time, these behaviors seemed like symptoms of her mental illness. But looking back, now 21 and happy, Kaufman thinks they were just symptomatic of being a teenager. 

We worked a retail job together in 2022 at the infamous one-size-fits-all clothing store Brandy Melville, often commiserating over a can of Diet Coke. I thought she was the “cool coworker” because of her vaguely apathetic aura, platinum-blonde hair and affinity for sad music. At the time, I had a raging eating disorder and thought of the 1990s Kate Moss as my personal Jesus — a delusion fueled by my employment at the shamelessly body-type-exclusionary store. (The “one” size is extra-small.) 

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Compared to what’s happening today, Kaufman’s form of self-diagnosis was low-tech. In 2018, Kaufman relied on WebMD and Mayo Clinic articles. Now, mental-health influencers are rampant on TikTok, and social media are rife with infographics listing symptoms of OCD, autism, and everything in between. The trend started during the pandemic, with content creators offering users easily accessible resources for therapy. But the result has been to flood young people with potential diagnoses, and has made us very quick to call ourselves crazy.   

Many never seek professional help, but some do, often in order to validate the conclusions they have already reached. Frequently, those conclusions turn out to be wrong. “At least three-quarters of the time, we are talking about normal variation,” says Dr. Jennifer Katzenstein, a pediatric neuropsychologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.   

Katzenstein says she’s seen an increase in self-diagnosis in the last three to five years among her teenage patients. Many don’t realize, she says, what normal stress looks like, or what normal social anxiety looks like, or that sometimes it’s normal to be inattentive and easily distracted. “A lot of our kids who feel awkward in social situations think that they’re on the autism spectrum,” she says. “They’re coming in thinking that’s the diagnosis.” 

Katzenstein notes that the problem is a side effect of a well-intentioned and mostly beneficial nationwide push to remove the “stigma” from mental-health conditions. Destigmatization means we aren’t bullying people for their diagnoses anymore. And the lobotomies and forced sterilizations of the past have become inconceivable. We can now openly have conversations about mental health. But the side effect is that these conditions have gone viral and are seducing vulnerable young people who want explanations for their emotions. 

Moreover, as teens and early-20-somethings tinker with their identities, they’re working these supposed conditions into their self-images and behaving accordingly. When they view themselves as sick, they accept and anticipate sick behavior. “We go in looking to affirm,” Katzenstein says. “Our brains want to be right.”  

Kaufman landed on MDD because she thought of herself as someone who was fundamentally sad, not someone who experiences sadness. Her supposed condition became her identity. During this period, she says, she also expected less of herself and would excuse bad behavior as symptomatic. Her social circle echoed and amplified her conclusions. “There have been times where most of the people I’ve surrounded myself with treated their real or perceived diagnoses as a personality trait,” she says.   

The social consequences of destigmatization have been much more far reaching than might have been expected, and have created many negative downstream consequences. At 23, I have become used to the idea that I’m “crazy” — that everyone is. A guy at a party recently said to me that he was interested in me because he was “into super skinny chicks who act insane.” Offensive words, but my first response was to be flattered by “skinny.” I barely clocked the “insane” part.    

This is the cultural ambiance now. On dating apps like Hinge, it is alarmingly frequent to encounter guys who’ve answered the “I go crazy for … ” prompt with “girls who are slightly autistic.” Friends of mine have been told that their ’tism is cute (yes, Generation Z abbreviates autism now).  

Obviously, this trivializes real mental-health issues, and it fetishizes them, too. When guys say they are into girls with autism, what they mean is that they’re looking for quirky girls who are a little awkward and random. They want the effervescent and pink-haired Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, not the girl with sensory issues who can’t interpret facial expressions or understand sarcasm. Not to mention that people with legit autism diagnoses would probably prefer to be chosen for themselves, rather than their neurodivergence.  

It’s difficult for everyone, from peers to parents to mental-health professionals, to navigate this new landscape. Gwen Schubert Grabb, a Los Angeles-based therapist, says she’s seen the “come one, come all” attitude of the mental-health movement being taken advantage of. Increasingly, she says, young people — and some older adults, as well — arrive with a list of symptoms to rattle off. And sometimes they have an agenda. “Look at the emotional-support and service-animal industry,” she says. “People I don’t even know will call me up and ask me to write a letter so they can bring their dog to some kind of event. I am like, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’”  

But she’s a professional and can discern when something illegitimate is afoot. Most others can’t, or are afraid to. 

Anna Caruso, 22, a senior at Northeastern University, has long suspected she has an anxiety condition and, at times, depression. But she kept it to herself growing up because the attitudes at home and at school were not sympathetic. However, she noticed a pivot in acceptance toward mental illness during Covid.  

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Caruso says that when her high school reopened during her senior year, a student body that once seemed perfectly healthy was now largely mentally ill. It seemed unlikely, but difficult to challenge. “You never want to be the person to say, ‘Hey, I really don’t think that you have a mental illness,’ right?,’” Caruso says.

She does not underestimate the impact the pandemic had on young people’s psyches — social isolation and a rise of deaths across the world should be, by anyone’s standards, a valid reason to be unhappy — but the sheer numbers struck her as unbelievable. And to be fair, she’d diagnosed herself, as well, with some combination of anxiety, ADHD and depression.

“During Covid, I feel like everyone wanted to be, I don’t want to say a victim, but people wanted to be felt sorry for,” says Caruso. 

The pandemic years were also the era of George Floyd and McCarthyism-levels of cancel culture. I’ve long been tempted to believe that some of my straight, white, affluent peers were using neurodivergence to join the ranks of the marginalized. If someone was “mentally ill,” then they, too, were a part of America’s disadvantaged class.  

I’ve seen white classmates trade stories with students of color about times they’ve been subject to “mistreatment,” because education systems designed for the neurotypical, for example. Classmates have also established “safe-space” social circles. Sometimes it’s as subtle as nodding along to a black peer speaking on prejudice, with an attitude of: “we’re in this together.”

In a cultural atmosphere that systematically rewards suffering, people tend to find a reason to suffer. But there is a crucial difference between sympathy and empathy. And as with the mental-health discourse, there is a grave risk of romanticizing, or trivializing, the real issues. So far, destigmatization has been many things: a flytrap for teens trying to understand their identities; an excuse for guys to be weird about girls who “aren’t like the others”; and a means to expiate white guilt. Mental-health problems should not be stigmatized, but this trend should be.

For example, Nick Fuentes, the perma-smirking king of the racial Right, describes Usha Vance as a “foreigner” and a “jeet,” mocks her name (“what the fuck is that?”), and blames her husband for “race-mixing.” Fuentes, who boasts a million followers on X, is having a something of a moment, with Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, going to bat for him (before apologizing some half a dozen times). But many lesser e-pundits share Fuentes’s views; even a Department of Government Efficiency staffer has called for normalizing “Indian hate.” 

At the intersection of these crosswinds stands Nikki Haley’s son, Nalin. The scion of one of America’s most prominent Indian families, he has shot to online fame in recent months, after he went public with his religious conversion (to Catholicism) and let loose his political opinions — ones that often clash with his family’s.

For one thing, Haley isn’t shy about venting his weariness of immigration of all kinds, not least from India. When Vivek Ramaswamy called for an “end [to] identity politics” this week, Haley replied, “End H1-B visas,” the program used by firms, especially in tech, to import latter-day indentured servants, more than 70% of whom are Indian.

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“We don’t just stop illegal immigration,” Haley tells me by Zoom on Tuesday. “I think we need to stop legal immigration.” With green eyes, impossibly white teeth, and six-pack abs, he cuts a striking figure. He is well-versed in meme warfare and knows just how to “ratio” accounts much bigger than his own — that is, garner more “likes” for his replies than the original poster. Like that of the British-born progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan, with whom he’s repeatedly tussled. 

When I mention his demand that Hasan be “denaturalized,” he interrupts: “and deported.” Tongue in cheek, surely? “No, I quite literally mean that. I’m often sarcastic, but not in this case. I mean, he hates America. If you hate America, you shouldn’t be in America. … Everyone wants to make it so complicated. That’s the thing with the past generation. They always talk about the rules, regulations, process. No, it’s simple. If you don’t like America, get out.”

That’s not how American naturalization works legally, and the e-Right’s calls to denaturalize and deport any immigrant who says the “wrong” thing clashes sharply with both constitutional writ and the spirit of the American tradition. And if that sort of thing were all that Nalin Haley stood for, he could easily be dismissed as just another online loudmouth (albeit, one who puts his name and face to his fulminations). 

Yet behind his bravado is a serious-minded 24-year-old recent graduate emerging from the political shadow cast by his mother. Nikki Haley served as a lawmaker in South Carolina, became the state’s governor, and was tapped as UN ambassador by Donald Trump in his first term before unsuccessfully challenging him for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Her son’s rage — and that of his Gen-Z-male cohort — is a predictable consequence of policies promoted by that older generation of conservatives, who prized cheap labor and free-market dogma far above America’s internal stability and cohesion. 

Nikki Haley supported legal, merit-based immigration as part of a pro-business platform. Her son wants to close the border entirely. Nikki Haley believes “it is not that Israel needs America — America needs Israel.” Her son thinks “Israel is just another country, and if they want to have a better relationship with the United States, they need to stop interfering in our politics.” Nikki Haley believes in an expansive foreign policy. Her son wants to end all foreign aid “as long as we have unemployment, people below the poverty line, medical debt, and bad schools.”

These domestic ills aren’t abstractions to him. “My friend group from high school, all graduated, great degrees from great schools,” he says. “It’s been a year and a half, and not one of them has a job — not one. So I’m angry at that, because I’m having to try and help my friends get jobs when their parents got jobs immediately — not just after graduating college, but out of high school.”

Statistics bear this out: in September, the share of the long-term unemployed, those who’ve been out of the job market for more than six months, hit 26%, according to The New York Times, much of it driven by recent graduates. The jobs that are available for recent grads are often precarious or temporary. “So when you see a bunch of foreigners coming over here to take jobs that [my friends] wanted,” Haley says, “they have every right to be pissed, and I’m pissed for them.”

It isn’t about jobs alone. “I look at the housing market,” he says, “and I don’t see how I’m ever going to own a house. And I do very well for someone my age” — he works in finance on the South Carolina side of Charlotte — “and I still don’t see it.” Again, the generational discontent: “My parents bought their first house for $90,000. I mean, that house probably now is worth $400,000. How can we compete?”

Then there’s the rising crime and disorder. “I live in what is known as a very safe area,” he explains. “Yet someone got shot and killed outside my apartment complex a couple months ago. . .  Outside my apartment in that same couple months, someone got jumped for a bad drug deal. And I’m tired of having to go to CVS to push a button for an employee to come unlock the toothpaste for me. Like, that’s ridiculous.”

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Overall, the effect is akin to “living in some fake world, some fake TV show,” he says. “We are the United States of America, we don’t do this. Things should be safe. Things should work. People should have jobs. Houses should be affordable.” If the son of Nikki Haley feels this way, it’s not hard to imagine the depths of anger and despair among less privileged Zoomers, a reality that probably explains, at least in part, the cohort’s often-brutal political rhetoric.

Nalin Haley was four years old when his mother was elected to the state House of Representatives. But things really changed when she was first elected governor, in 2010. Nalin and his sister, Rena, he recalls, “didn’t know that we had to live in this big house that’s also a museum” — the governor’s mansion.

When they arrived, the main housekeeper asked the two children what they wanted to eat. “And you know, we were very simple. We were like, ‘Well, what do you have?’ And she said, ‘Everything.’ We, having grown up very simple, we just asked for grilled cheese.” By his own account, Nalin’s parents — the governor and her husband, the businessman and military officer Michael Haley — kept him humble. All through childhood, including the years spent in the governor’s mansion, he had to do chores and was expected to work summer jobs.

On matters religious, however, Nalin Haley had to carve his own path. Beginning when he was in fourth grade, his maternal grandparents, Indian-born Sikhs, lived with the family and served almost as surrogate parents amid the political storms of those years. “I had my parents being [Protestant] Christian, and my grandparents being Sikh. As a result, I was very confused.” Which of these faith teachings was true?

To answer that question for himself, Haley absorbed books on world religions when other kids were reading about cars and dinosaurs. Eventually, thanks in part to a spiritual experience he’s reluctant to divulge, he concluded that Christianity is the true faith. He would go on to attend Villanova University, a Catholic institution in Philadelphia. Yet it wasn’t until after graduation that he was received into full communion with the Roman church.

“I needed to research my own faith better in terms of the history, the early beliefs, the Church Fathers,” he says. “When I did that, I felt as though anyone who does that kind of research will walk away a Catholic.” In his choice of denomination, too, Haley is representative of his generational cohort of Gen-Z men, an influential subset of whom is turning to Christianity — and specifically, to liturgically traditional communions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

In parallel to his spiritual conversion, he also began to develop his own distinct political ideas — not always the case in other political families like, say, the Cheneys. “I was not just going to have the same political views as my parents,” he says. Yes, he supported his mother in the 2024 Republican primary, but he did this, he insists, mostly to be a “good son.” All along, “I didn’t and was never going to be an advocate for a view that I did not have.” He repeats this point several times, almost like a mantra — a loyal son, but not a political disciple.

Yet when it comes to his views on immigration, critics from both the Left and the Right insist on seeing him as something other than his own man. He’s received his share of racist abuse from the toxic sewers of the online Right, notwithstanding his Christian faith and hard-line restrictionist views on immigration. “I just don’t let it bother me,” he says. “The internet’s not a real place necessarily. It is in some sense, but it’s also not. … I know who I am.”

As for one of the main sources of the racist sludge, Fuentes, Haley insists he’s barely watched the former’s show and doesn’t know his views. “I have no idea what to say about him or what to think about him,” Haley says. “And none of my friends really know about him, either.” I find that hard to believe, given Fuentes’s enormous influence among Zoomers. Still, it’s a relief to hear Haley add that racial animosity is out of the question for him: “As a Christian, I can’t have that. As a Christian, Jesus told me to love everybody, including groups of people who I don’t agree with.”

He goes on: “I get it from both sides. Someone who is biracial, only someone who is biracial can understand the feeling that … You can never feel one way or the other, because one way or the other, those two groups will never fully see you as them.” Christianity, it seems to me, serves as the bridge between these social realms for him — and could do so in an increasingly fractured American polity, if we’re lucky. 

The Left, meanwhile, reproaches him for backing an immigration policy that, if it had been in effect when his grandparents immigrated from India, would have barred them from entry — thus, in a sense, foreclosing his own existence. That line, too, leaves him unfazed. “It’s not 1969,” he shrugs. “It’s just not. We have a different country. We have a different set of circumstances.” It’s reasonable, then, to “adapt” and to “have different policies.”

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In 2025, “we have lawlessness, we have crime, we have unemployment. We have all these issues. So my first thought isn’t, ‘Well, what happened in the past, and how could we have changed the past?’ Because we’re not living in the past. We’re living right now. And so my thought is, ‘What can we do to stop the lawlessness, the unemployment, the housing crisis?’ ”

The 21st-century economy, he worries, won’t produce enough of the kind of high-wage jobs that defined middle-class prosperity in his parents’ and grandparents’ time. If the future is scarce service-sector jobs, why import more unskilled labor to undercut already low wages for such work among native-born workers? “A lot of people are just going to lose their jobs. They’re just going to be sitting around without jobs. And the next thing you know, you’re going to have people saying, ‘We need UBI,’” or universal basic income.

The economic pressure on his generation, he fears, will compound existing trends toward loneliness and alienation, especially between Gen-Z men and women.

“The future of division in America,” he speculates, “is not going to be about race. It’s probably not going to be about income, although that is a big disparity. It’s going to be about gender. It’s going to be men on one side, women on the other. If you look at someone’s” — algorithmically curated — “‘For You’ page on TikTok or on Instagram, for a young man it’s going to be completely different from a young woman’s.”

Gen-Z women are veering sharply to the Left: an overwhelming majority just voted for Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Meanwhile, Gen-Z men like Haley are shifting to the Right, and even the very hard Right that sometimes plays out as crass misogyny online, thus deepening the mutual alienation of the sexes. Yet, Haley wonders, it might not be as hopeless as all that, because both parties are responding to the same set of frustrations: “They’re tired of modernity. They’re tired of technology. All of this modernity is not natural to them.”

What both sexes desperately need, he says, is time together — in person. “They’re being more anti-social,” he observes of his cohort. “Their attention spans are getting shorter. So they only see what’s on the phone. That means that in terms of race, if all you see about a certain race is what you see on your phone, you’re going to have that view of them. If all you see about a certain gender is on your phone, you’re going to think that about them.”

He adds: “But make no mistake, the future of Gen Z, regardless of its men or women, is nationalist.” When I ask him whom he prefers among the suspected contenders for the 2028 Republican nomination, he suggests that JD Vance comes closest but says the vice president needs to “somehow work on his charisma, aura, and likability.” And if the immediate slate of political contenders on the Right aren’t up to the task, Nalin Haley is prepared to enter the arena himself.

“I want someone to fight for me,” he says. “And if no one’s fighting for me, then I’m going to fight for myself and those around me who are suffering.” His anger is often palpable. At times, it’s discomfiting. It’s also, I must admit, at least partly justified. Mere hectoring moralism, without more, will do little to assuage it. Reforming the material substrate beneath that generational rage should be the foremost task of both parties. 

Welcome to Oktoberfest, the world’s biggest beer festival, which began in 1810 to celebrate a royal wedding and this year drew over six million revelers from across the world. Like a giant Christmas party, it is filled with good-natured revelers and resounds with goofy German humor. Locals mix with tourists and celebrities. The Bayern Munich football team had visited for a few steins, with Harry Kane dutifully decked out in lederhosen — while Arnold Schwarzenegger was spotted a couple of days earlier chaotically conducting a band. Armies of waiting staff rush around delivering plates piled high with pork and vast glasses of frothy booze. “It’s better than I thought it would be,” says Osvaldo from Mexico City, having polished off his fifth stein. “We don’t have good beer because it is mixed with other shit,” he says. “But here it’s different — you don’t need lemon and all that other stuff.”

Beer, of course, is more than just a drink in Germany. It has special significance; it is part of their nation’s cultural heritage. And it also has economic clout: Germany is one of the world’s biggest beer producers with around 1,500 breweries, many of them based in Bavaria. But beyond the revelry, all is not well for this cornerstone of German culture. For just like the country’s pivotal car industry, the cherished brewing sector is struggling. Sales of alcoholic drinks fell more than 6% in the first half of this year compared with last year. And the average German now consumes only 88 liters of beer a year, down from 126 at the start of the century — a decline fueled in large part by abstemious younger generations.

Even here at Oktoberfest, the problems are apparent. “I don’t really like beer — it’s so heavy,” confesses one young woman outside a raucous tent. Her friend agrees. Young Germans, she tells me, are significantly changing their approach to well-being. “They want to live healthier.”

Not that everyone is into wellness. In one tent, I come across a lively group snorting what I presume was cocaine from the top of a bald man’s shiny head. One gives me a big grin as he sniffs deeply, then wipes his nose. Two tables down, another ebullient gang of pals pass around a mirror with chunky white lines laid out on it. Minutes later, I pass yet another high-spirited gaggle tapping small piles of powder onto their clenched fists. Yet as Benedict, a 24-year-old data analyst, tells me when I describe these enthusiastic scenes of debauchery, Oktoberfest “is the biggest drug festival in the world if you count alcohol as a drug”. And it seems many do. In a YouGov survey, almost half the 18-24 age group said they were teetotal — the highest in Europe. Consumption of alcohol among younger teenagers is at an all-time low, storing up future problems for the beer sector.

The German drinks industry is far from alone in confronting such a situation. Times are tough in Britain, too, with scores of breweries and hundreds of pubs closing annually; wine sales in France have crashed, and in the US increasing numbers of the young in the land that once had prohibition are more likely to be teetotal.

But in Bavaria, the heartland of the traditional brewing industry, the crisis is hitting hard.  Schönbrunn, close to the Czechia border, has been the home of the Lang-Bräu brewery for 172 years, surviving some of the most tumultuous events in European history. But after struggling for the past two decades, it has closed. When I visit, the brewer Richard Hopf, 38, explains what it was like to close a family-run firm after six generations. “Some people were crying — most of the village is very sad,” he says, trying to capture the significance of small breweries in these close communities. “In the past there was the church, but for the last 30 years it was the brewery,” he tells me “People would come here, buy your beer, drink one, talk. It was a big place for getting together. Everyone knows each other here.”

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Hopf shows me around the maze of rooms where for decades his family fermented, cooled and stored their beer, pointing out proudly the machines which could fill 6,000 bottles an hour, but now stand silent. This plant used to produce 1.5 million liters annually, exporting about 20% of their output to China and Korea at one point — although most sales have been within a 30-mile radius.

As we tour the ghostly plant, he tells me about his father winning a burst of global media attention after making “Erotik bier” — with a highly-suggestive label — as a joke. But those carefree days are long gone. As the cost of energy and staff rose in recent years — and with cut-throat supermarkets dominating sales — beer prices remained largely static. “The end result,” he says wistfully, “is the market just goes down and down and down.” And in such a climate, the family firm could not get the financing needed to modernize — so these days their storage rooms are stacked high with empty bottles.

While the closure has been painful, Hopf and his brother were left with little choice. The machinery and buildings were constructed in the decades after the Second World War and were too dated for efficiency. “You must think 20 years in the future,” he explains. “You have to forecast the beer you might sell then, but we knew things were only going to get worse because the baby boom generation is dying and younger ones drink less beer.”

It is a similar story in Bamberg. A hundred kilometers away, set in rolling hills, it reflects centuries of history and is famed for its number of breweries and its diversity of beers — including the local specialty, Rauchbier, a smoked draft served straight from oak barrels. Inside Schlenkerla, a bustling time-warp tavern, one manager explains the appeal beer’s appeal, telling me their brands sell around the world. “I was recently in Lviv, in Ukraine,” she says, “and I saw a whole shelf of our beer there.”

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But having survived the war largely unscathed, its breweries know they face a struggle. And it soon becomes clear that this 28-year-old saleswoman is emblematic of the sector’s problems. “Bavarians are more likely to drink beer than other parts of Germany but I prefer wine,” she tells me. “I don’t drink so much personally. I am very boring. When you work here it seems like only older people drink.” When I ask her what she meant by “old”, she replies: 40.

The manager of an Irish pub over the road echoes the sentiment. “I know it is a national symbol but it’s not for me,” he confesses. In Wirtshaus Graser, the town’s newest microbrewery, the barmaid says business is good — but even she sounds a warning, admitting that Gen Z Germans seem far more abstemious than their predecessors. “I am from the generation that partied and drank a lot during their teenage times.”

Falling sales, rising costs and generational change have created an existential crisis for German beer makers — and sales of the alcohol-free products that now comprise almost one-tenth of their output will not fully plug the gap. But exports are falling even faster than the intensifying domestic decline, leading the head of one major brewery to warn two months ago about a “landslide” that would sweep away both big and small firms. “The brewing world is crumbling,” says Stefan Blaschak, managing director of Oettinger, which is closing one of its four plants. It is a huge dent in the self-image and confidence of the nation that powers the European economy — something which cannot be masked by all the beer-soaked revelry, drinking chants and sea of lederhosen at Oktoberfest.

Concealed by the jollity of Bavaria’s biergartens and the frenzied Oktoberfest partying, another national champion is flailing in an economy that is strugging to adapt to a world of rapid political, societal and technological change. The number of German jobless hit 3.02 million in August, the highest figure for a decade, as the manufacturing giants that drove the post-war economic boom shed staff. Industrial output slid 4.3% on the previous month as car production crashed to its lowest level since the start of this century. All those dirndl-clad waitresses clutching overflowing steins of golden Helles might be the nation’s fetching global image, but it is pretty sobering to see that Germans, of all people, are losing their thirst for beer.

No, the reason pink cocaine is “one of the most significant developments in the drug market in recent years” (according to a recent Spanish government report) is rather more basic. It’s because it’s pink. A bright, lurid, Barbie Dreamhouse pink that really pops on Instagram. It also comes in pastel yellow, pale violet and sparkly blue, too, but either way, the color is the thing. Illegal drugs follow hype cycles just as reliably as consumer products. Pink cocaine is the narcotic equivalent of a pastel green matcha latte or a bright orange Aperol Spritz. Did I mention that it smells of strawberries? 

Sold in distinct zip-up baggies and snorted in small “bumps” off keys, credit cards and designer spoons — including miniature pink AK-47s — tusi is now more popular than cocaine in Colombia where it originated, and is well established in Spain, where police seizures of the drug regularly appear in the press. It’s coming to Britain too. Last December, border police uncovered a huge stash hidden in a lorry in packets branded with the image of Pink Panther. “Pink cocaine in the UK was a niche drug last year but this year it’s more than that,” says Trevor Shine, the director of TICTAC, a drug identification service which tests drugs found by law enforcement. “It’s growing fast. At this rate in a few years it will catch up with drugs such as cocaine, MDMA and ketamine.” 

Joe*, a DJ familiar with Ibiza’s party scene, told me the tusi high is similar to ketamine, but with an extra twist. “Like ketamine tusi has that floaty, dissociated rush, but it’s more intense and playful. It’s heavier than just a bump of K. There’s this edge that makes it fun, almost euphoric, rather than just spacey. The mix of intensity and surprise is probably what makes it stand out.”

Joe first snorted tuci thinking it was just a new type of pink-colored cocaine, but says since then it has become a well-hyped drug. “The bright color makes it stand out in a baggie, people post it on socials as if it’s some exotic new drug. There’s a certain novelty to saying you’ve done pink coke.”

The exotic color — plus the fact that it’s sold for prices similar to cocaine, and often much more — have given it a sheen of undeserved exclusivity. It has also increased its social media clout through another form of modern viral marketing: celebrity association, albeit in a uniquely grim form. Reports following the death of the One Direction singer Liam Payne in Buenos Aires wrongly asserted that he had the drug in his system at the time of his death. Pink cocaine was also namechecked in the Sean “Puffy” Combs sex trafficking trial in the US, with one former employee alleging that “all employees, from the butler to the chef to the housekeepers”, were required to keep a supply of drugs on their person at all times, including cocaine, marijuana gummies and “Tuci”. Truly, it is a drug for our times.

Tusi first started appearing in Colombia in the early 2010s, made and sold by a new generation of young narcos in Bogota and Medellin who — like many young drug users — saw cocaine as old hat. The bright color helped it to stand out among the array of white powders being sold on the party scene, much like the blue crystal meth concocted by Walter White in Breaking Bad. Initially, the name tusi really did refer to its 2CB content but over time, the narcos swapped out 2CB for less mind-bending, more readily available drugs such as the dissociative ketamine, the more sensual MDMA, and caffeine, boosting its popularity, particularly within the reggaeton music scene, among tourists and young party people. 

Now, tusi is made by a mixture of amateur DIY cooks and well-trained chemists, often employed by crime groups. Every respectable young narco in Colombia sells their own brand of tusi with a distinctive image and color. One product sold in Medellin, “Homero”, is marketed with images of Homer Simpson. Tests of samples from one of Colombia’s largest dance music festivals last year found tusi was a bit of a mish-mash of highs. It mainly contained ketamine, MDMA or MDA (a similar drug to MDMA), and caffeine, although methamphetamine and benzodiazepines were also common. The tests also found only half of tusi samples were actually colored pink, with purple being the most popular alternative color. 

Tusi has now spread through South America and into Europe, the US and Australia. According to unpublished data from TICTAC, UK police seized twice the number of samples of pink cocaine during the first six months of 2025 than during the whole of 2024. The first organised criminal convicted of selling pink cocaine in the UK was also jailed last December. His main market was Essex, a consumer culture that seems almost ready-made for pink cocaine. 

Still, it is Spain, with its hedonistic club scene and Colombian gang links, that has become Europe’s tusi heartland. It’s also where most British drug users are likely to first encounter the drug. “Tusi’s just started to pick up over the last year in the UK, but it’s big all over Ibiza,” Danny, a British drug dealer who operates in Spain, tells me. The pink powder is openly sold, alongside cocaine, MDMA, ketamine and weed, on Ibiza’s main strip in San Antonio, as well as on social media apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram — usually indicated by a pink colored emoji such as a heart or a purse.

In Ibiza, ambulance services now report they are at risk of collapse due to drug-related callouts from clubbers. In July a woman traveling from Barcelona was arrested at Ibiza’s main airport after being caught with a suitcase stuffed with 1,000 grams of tusi. During a crackdown last year, Spanish police arrested a gang of Italian-led criminals based on Ibiza linked to a €25 million stash of party drugs, including 21 kilograms of tusi, stored in 21,000 gram-sized bags. 

But tusi is not just limited to Ibiza. Claudio Vidal, national director at Energy Control, a Spanish drug-harm reduction NGO, said that the drug is now “integrated into the drug repertoires” of young people going to nightclubs, raves and music festivals across many parts of the country, including big cities such as Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. Vidal said around one in five young adult drug users asked by Energy Control said they had used the drug over the last year. Domestic production appears to have increased in Spain, with drug gangs often importing ketamine from India and MDMA from the Netherlands. In December, Irish mobster John Gilligan was arrested after police seized an alleged tusi lab and 600 kilograms of drugs at his home near Alicante. 

In contrast with Colombian tusi, Spanish tusi seems relatively consistent in its makeup. Tests of 470 samples purchased in Spain between 2020 and 2024 found ketamine and MDMA present in over 90% of samples. Increasingly, ketamine and MDMA have been the only drugs found in tusi, with over half of samples in 2024 including just the two drugs. The third most common drug was caffeine, found in just under half of the samples. On average, most samples had around twice the amount of ketamine than MDMA, and around twice the amount of MDMA than caffeine. Other drugs were only very occasionally present. Cocaine, for example, was found in just 2% of the samples, and unlike in Colombia, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines were extremely rare. Almost all the samples were pink, although very rarely some were colored blue or yellow. These results chime with the content of samples of UK-bought tusi handed into the Welsh-based drug tasting service Wedinos in the last year. 

Tusi is expensive and buyers appear to be prepared to pay a lot of money for the fact it’s pre-mixed and pink. In Spain, tusi usually costs around the same as a gram of cocaine (€40-€100, depending on where you are). But this is roughly double the €30 a gram for ketamine and MDMA, tusi’s main components. Partly because of this, the rising popularity of tusi has left seasoned drug experts baffled. 

“Most people who regularly use party drugs would not buy this product,” says Al Bryant, head of content at UK charity Cranstoun. “A drug mixed like this is a blag, an excuse to put the price up, and could increase risks.” 

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Even though tusi is a more consistent product than its reputation presumes (it does not, as many “explainers” say, contain fentanyl), the mix of ketamine and MDMA does present a risk for users, says Ram. “Ingesting both drugs together will impact your body in different ways. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic and sedative, while MDMA is a stimulant with euphoric and mild hallucinogenic effects. Risks increase when you don’t know the mix of drugs taken, the purity, with effects often being exacerbated with consumption of alcohol. Users have also reported an altered perception of time, which can lead to dosing more regularly than intended. It is also a bag of unknown combinations of unknown quantities of different drugs that could be a huge risk to one’s health and wellbeing.” 

Vidal says in Spain the main negative consequences associated with tusi have been related to ketamine. “Some people, after repeated doses, enter a sedated state, or begin to experience the psychedelic effects of ketamine when they don’t want to or are not prepared for it. In this context, anxiety or panic attacks are the most common reason for emergency room visits related to tusi use.” According to Barcelona’s main hospital, the number of drug related emergency cases linked to tusi quadrupled between 2023 and 2024, although the drug still accounts for a small proportion of drug casualties. Vidal says that the long-term effects of ketamine are dependence and bladder damage. Not that this seems to be stopping its inexorable rise. It’s bright, it’s Instagram-friendly, it’s pre-mixed and it’s created by combining cheap man-made chemicals imported from around the world. 

“Everyone just wants everything immediately,” one former psychonaut told me. “Maybe the phone-scrolling generation might have a dopaminergic association with immediate highs without care for content or quality. I guess drugs roll with the times.” 

*Names have been changed

But while kids these days might be useless, I’ve been convinced for some time that they’re not fragile. Addicted to screens, anxious due to social media, “triggered” by any number of words or ideas, and confused about gender… this is the caricature this generation endures. But it no longer seems to be the norm, or at least that there is significant resistance among the youth themselves to this stereotype. The fragility of youth seemed to peak around 2020, sometime before the start of Covid. I know vanishingly few teenagers or university students who fit the profile assigned to Gen Z by adults who wish to disparage them. The kids who do are typically socially awkward, have a hard time fitting into the social jungle of high school, use “trauma dumping” as a means to bond with peers, and employ gender identity as a means to mediate their changing relationship between self and world.

Let’s take the example of a gender identity, which is different from being either gay or lesbian. This offers the awkward youth a script she can follow when negotiating the strange in betweenness of adolescence. Identifying with a non-binary label allows her to feel secure in herself insofar as she remains shielded from the perplexities and of maturity, sex, and attraction by the role she has adopted. At one point, about five years ago, gender identities were seen as edgy and cool. A solid majority of the girls in my daughter’s 2020 seventh-grade class were some version of rainbow identity.

But these memories of middle school are now a joke for them: “Remember when I was nonbinary and changed my name to Arlow?” They laugh. Now these identities are seen as, by and large, a way for the awkward teen to grab a hold of something that has the lineage of something edgy, but which has since become establishmentarian. A new Pew survey seems to support this: younger teens, those ages 13-14, are less comfortable with using someone’s chosen pronouns than adults are. They/them is the new square. It doesn’t win social credit points anymore.

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And so, basic is back. True, there is a microgeneration, the 21-32-year-olds, for whom the values of extreme progressiveness still register as edgy. They have advertised their fragility as a marker of their morality. But this type of readily offended, easily triggered individual is now ridiculed by the younger members of their cohort who remind me more of Gen X than any of the recent generations we’ve seen lately. I can recall the days when bike-riding teenagers with mullets and rattails did wheelies as they weaved through traffic, roaming through neighborhoods on a summer evening, all without helmets. I saw just such a scene last week on the corner of Barack Obama Boulevard and Park Street in central San Jose. “This gives me hope for the future,” beamed my husband. It should.

There’s more. From what I see, both among my own high school children and their many friends, and from my first-year university students, is that these kids are more ready to accept intellectual danger than the teens who preceded them a few years ago. In fact, they are hungry for it. They ridicule the false virtue behind those who are easily triggered. They want the truth rather than “your truth”. They are ready to grapple with difficult ideas, and to consider things that are complex rather than merely affirming. They take it as a sign of respect if they are spoken to frankly, rather than treated with tiptoeing consideration so as not to offend.

But very few adults in positions of responsibility seem willing to take a risk and fill the void by giving these kids something dangerous and demanding to grapple with. And so we are at an impasse between generations, each wanting and needing something from the other, neither fully courageous enough to step outside of our mutually self-assigned roles, that of protector and that of protected, to foster youth competence rather than youth self-confidence.

Consider the speeches I heard at last week’s high-school graduation. Before the students processed to the stage, my own high school daughters leaned over to me in their seats and warned me about the clichés we were about to hear: “We made it! We never gave up. Follow your dreams. Believe in yourself.” They were exactly right. The student speeches we heard were predictable and underwhelming.

But for all their banality, the students’ speeches seemed to be original. They had awkward sentences. They referenced in-jokes. They were personal and showed personality. The speeches were delivered with all the enthusiasm of youth, even if they were clumsily written. The clumsiness itself is a part of the beauty of youth. They are not afraid to take a misstep.

The principal’s speech was a stark contrast. It was almost certainly written by ChatGPT. While the youth at least attempted to be funny and personable, hers was vague and detached. It was less than merely bureaucratic and more than merely polished. With a quote here from Henry Ford, another there from Muhammad Ali, and a closing assertion that hard work will breed success, it felt like it was written by the predictive morality of a computer code: both artificial and risk averse — much like the contemporary teen is typified as being.

And yet it is often the parents who are risk averse.

Even the most thoughtful among us — the most prudent, prepared, and planned — realize in short order that we could never have been ready for the arrival of a brand-new human being. But rather than accept the new child on its own terms, as separate, unknown, unruly, we have instead taken solace in books, in “best-practices”, in pop psychology and mommy blogs. Many parenting resources contain good ideas, I’m sure, but even the best ideas are only minimally effective in dealing with complex, emotional, sinful, gracious, self-serving, generous children. But it is understandable to want to attempt to mitigate the risks of having a child by feeling that the scope of what we can control is increasing. And what we can’t control, we often affirm. This gives us at least the illusion of influence. As though how they turn out has to do with our skills of validation.

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Which brings us back to the incompetence of the average teen. It is true that most of them couldn’t survive on their own until they’re at least 20. But a large reason for that is because adults have protected them — because we are scared. We seem to have simultaneously too little faith in youth and too many expectations. We have little faith because, in part, we are ourselves timid. We have eschewed forms of meaning that demand something of us and replaced it with a religion of niceness. It makes us feel like we’re in a safe, socially normative space. We’re all spiritual but not religious. We believe in the sameness of our own subjectivity. Our lack of courage around thinking deeply about the painful realities of life has, in part, contributed to the intellectual flabbiness of our youth. When we teach that inoffensiveness is the highest ethic, one becomes timid and alone.

Should we be surprised, then, that Gen Z is returning to religion. It is difficult to track the behavior of the younger cohort of Gen Z, which is emerging in real time and hasn’t yet entered the world of official statistics. But in my own parish church, located in a quiet urban corner of the Canadian prairies, junior- and senior-high attendance has easily quadrupled over the last four years, now comprising about 10% of the total each week.

Of course, one can’t make a generalization based on one small church, but the overall positive attitude towards religion is palpable. Perhaps this is because they want to experience competence. They want to encounter something demanding. (Even my daughter, the one for whom operating a can opener is a challenge, is slowly and painstakingly making her way through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship).

My sense is this: the future is going to belong to the youth who want something difficult and demanding now. The sentence-generating machines that have been programmed with the morality of inoffensive relativism are going to look and feel increasingly shallow, and the strong among the young are going to not only reject this artificial world, but search for something that offers something more to them because it asks for something more of them.

The Clare Boothe Luce Center’s annual leadership conference for young women promises to nurture “strong, conservative leaders” and help “young women flourish… while strengthening their families, communities, and country”. With more than 120 there, this was its biggest gathering yet.

Clad in what I thought was my smartest outfit — white shirt, black trousers, ballet flats — I realized my miscalculation the moment the elevator doors opened. Before me stood Mia, 21, from North Carolina, in a long white dress and stilettos, her curls immaculate. It was a sea of voluminous blowdries and meticulous makeup. Nearly every girl was dressed as if she was about to meet a senator, or marry one, while I looked like the Senate librarian.

Over breakfast, I met some of them, as they daintily picked at their syrupy pancakes with scarlet nails: Maddy, a sparky 20-year-old in baby blue, was working as a Comms intern for her “hero”, her state’s first female senator; Cecelia, the youngest and sternest, was interning for the conservative and religious First Things magazine. Paige, another congressional intern, grinned at me: “Today is so fun!”

They were fresh-faced and ambitious. Most were under 21, and were in DC forging the beginnings of their political career, only a few among the swarm of interns that descends upon the city each summer. They came from colleges all over the country, often from campuses that were allergic to their political persuasions, and they hoped that the people they met here would one day be their colleagues in congress or on the senate floor.

Kimberly Begg, the center’s president, is a Catholic attorney, who has five children, and has worked for various conservative causes throughout her life. She took this job last year, feeling a desire to teach the values she’s living to the next generation. “I want them to know what it means to be a good woman,” she said. “Not just how to excel at work, but how to live. ”

Her summer interns are taking note. One of them, Anastasia, told me she’d learned “how to look good on camera and spread the message”. When I asked her about this message, she responded brightly: “That you can be a mom and be ambitious.” I would hear this repeatedly: you shouldn’t disvalue mothering alongside your greater career goals; ; you can most definitely have it all. The practicalities of this were never addressed — can you stay home while running for senate? Instead, we were told that womanhood isn’t possible without babies.

The first speaker was the 30-year-old Mary Margaret Olohan, a redheaded White House correspondent for The Daily Wire. She’d grown up in an Irish Catholic family, “proudly” one of 11 children, and had been homeschooled. She began her career as a publicist during the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings, where several women accused the now Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct during his confirmation hearing. “I don’t know if you were politically cognizant then,” she told her fresh-faced audience, “but that’s when I was radicalized.” Olohan quit her job to become a journalist, a “truth-seeking one”, convinced that the “Pro-Abortion” media were trying to stop Kavanaugh’s appointment, and now she covers abortion as a beat.

Today, she’s a regular visitor to the Oval Office: “There’s things you have to do to get noticed, I wear bright colors, have a peppy smile, I make sure I look good, really good.” Recently, she’s been reporting on the doxxing of ICE agents. Yet she told us that she’ll always make space for Mass during her work day, even if it means missing a scoop.

Like every other speaker that day, Olohan offered career advice with the caveat that there are “more important things to remember. You should never prioritize your career over finding your spouse… You should try and put yourself in the position that you can be at home. Like me, if God willing, I have a family, I can be at home writing.”

As girls queued for selfies, Maddy, who writes for her student newspaper, told me she was excited that such a young woman could be breaking such big stories. “She was just so cool. I mean, how old is she? And she’s everywhere.”

But not everyone felt so inspired. Courtney, a dazzling blonde from Utah who is currently interning in Congress, sighed. “We’re all girls here, so I may as well just tell you, I’m 17 weeks pregnant. And it’s really hard. I’m the only girl in my office, and I’m just totally exhausted. No one gets it.” She looked around the room. “This is what I hoped DC would be like.” She clearly admired Olohan: “I really want to do that too. To fight abortion, trans stuff, to fight for America. I want to make a difference. But I’m so tired now, and I haven’t even had the kid yet.” And yet for all her talk about balancing work and homemaking, Olohan had offered little practical advice: “I mean, she’s not even married yet. How can she tell me what I’m supposed to do?” Courtney asked me.

The other girls, whose youthful naivete no amount of makeup could conceal, had no answer. “I mean, in an ideal world, you’d have your family around. Someone to look after the baby, right?” Maddy ventured, as the rest of us nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t know how to trust someone else with my kid,” Courtney replied. “And don’t even get me started on daycares.”

There was a fracture at the table now: tiny, but visible. None of the other girls was married. None had boyfriends. Maddy said she’d gladly date someone “if he’s not intimidated by a strong woman”. She was here to network, but Courtney was here to find out how to live.

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Courtney had become pregnant by “accident”, and married her boyfriend earlier this year, “because what else can you do?” All the girls I spoke to were vehemently pro-life, except Maddy, who thought there “should be some exception for rape”. Paige and Courtney weren’t so sure; they grimaced at Maddy’s mention of rape. “Two wrongs just don’t make a right,” Paige told me.

Besides, Courtney was grateful for her unexpected pregnancy. “Now we have to become real grown-ups, we have to step it up,” she said. Her husband is 23 and still has two years of college left. He is spending the summer delivering Amazon packages. “He’s a good man, for that. He wants me to stay home.” She showed us wedding photos taken at the Utah State courthouse.

What really struck me, though, was that in a room of worshipping conservatives, who were excited by what the new administration had been doing, there was no mention of Donald Trump until after lunch. The values of being a “conservative woman” — being polite in your power, being nurturing with your strength — didn’t seem to align with Trumpian chaos. He was the unmentionable representative of a more turbulent revolution.

When I asked about Trump, Paige perked up: “He’s not perfect. But he loves America.” “I just wish he’d get off Twitter!” Courtney sighed. The girls liked Melania Trump and admired her reticence. “People are so mean to her, it’s so disrespectful,” Courtney said. “Feminists especially.” But their real heroine was Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s feisty 27-year-old press secretary. “They say [Trump] doesn’t like strong women, I mean just look at the women surrounding him. Look at her, she’s amazing,” Courtney said. Leavitt, who had a baby on the campaign trail, went back to work just four days after giving birth. To these girls, she’s the ultimate embodiment of conservative womanhood. She grinned through it all with her hair freshly blow-dried.

“Everyone knows conservative women are the happiest in America,” McFarland told the cheering crowd. Like many others that day, McFarland offered happiness like a revolutionary compact: work harder and look better, don’t waste energy on girls who “suck the energy from you”. Don’t out-man the men but outshine them.

We heard from Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s lawyer, and Paula Scanlan, who spoke with steely hurt about her time on a swim team with Lia Thomas, the transgender athlete. “Women are naturally kind and caring,” Scanlan said. “It’s really challenging to break through that.” Courtney nodded beside me.

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In line for the bathroom afterwards, a group of girls discussed Scanlan’s courage. “She can’t be more than 20,” one said, admiringly. An 18-year-old from California sighed, “That’s the problem with being young. Guys just can’t match our maturity. I have to date, like, a 25-year-old.” The line dragged. Despite the day’s lengthy applause for single-sex spaces, the girls broke into the men’s bathroom. “This is so funny,” a 20-year-old from Maryland told me. One girl dry-shampooed while another fixed her lashes. Another took a mirror selfie to send to her mum.

As I was leaving the conference, I exchanged numbers with Maddy. “It’s funny,” she said when I complimented her outfit, “it was actually my mom’s wedding dress.” “She gave it to me.”

Was that it? Did this maternal gesture in some way sum up the entire movement? In this room, femininity wasn’t something to rebel against or escape from, but something to inherit and slightly refashion, like your mom’s old wedding suit. The girls identified as “first-wave feminists”, because they weren’t looking for equality, but a way to make peace with everything they’d been told to seek. Here, the pursuit of love didn’t conflict with ambition, nor was faith at odds with intelligence.

Yet, as Courtney seemed to realize, there were holes in the story of conservative womanhood these girls were being sold. “Tradwife or Girlboss, maybe you don’t have to choose,” read one of the conference’s ads; and in many ways, the movement on offer here felt like a soft-lit inversion of the girlboss era, with self-empowerment refashioned as political purpose. Where the girlboss promised liberation through self-branding, the conservative woman here was encouraged to become her fullest self by serving others, her God, her country, her family. Yet both models offered the same tired bargain: perform perfectly, and you’ll be rewarded.

Courtney was waiting for that reward. She left hopeful that she would “figure it all out”, become a mother in a few months and then become something else too. And the day’s agenda only offered a more orderly container for those things, one with clear expectations and attractive packaging. But Courtney’s tired eyes and unasked questions still hover over the whole thing: a reminder that no amount of lipstick or prayer can gloss over what this brand of femininity can’t sustain.

We were told all day that boys have it harder now, and the women nodded along, because nodding is easier than asking what hard really means. They’d been “going dancing”, having “movie nights”, cooking each other “cute little dinners”. But they were also getting on in the world. And at some point, the fervor they built up trying to change America would have to be sacrificed for their truer calling: motherhood. Then, it would be the boys left standing in the Oval Office, the Senate floor, or even in their own homes, making decisions.

That siren call of conservative womanhood is not shouted but whispered. A murmur that tells you your instincts are sacred, your sacrifice noble, your submission a kind of strength. It makes giving things up feel like choosing them. Even while Courtney abandoned her political dreams (at least for now) she felt her greater purpose would arrive with her baby. I could easily feel the allure of such a promise. But that’s what I left shaken by: how quietly a life could be rerouted, not by force, but by suggestion. This way they could have it all, supposedly, but the rooms of real power were still off limits, reserved for the boys who never had to choose.

Neil Postman would know better. Forty years ago this year, the late cultural critic wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a pessimistic yet prescient polemic worth revisiting in the age of the political hysteria of the algorithm. In it, Postman predicted that America wasn’t trending towards existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s 1984, but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that resembled Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. He was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but over-entertained.

Postman saw “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” He was, in fact, observing his own obsolescence. In the near future, books and literacy, serious social criticism, maybe even democracy itself would become afterthoughts in a world mediated through screens, because those mediums turned everything into trivialities.

If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our Soma comes in the virtual variety: TikTok’s infinite scroll, crypto speculation, and algorithmically tuned content streams designed to blur time and lull us into a flow state. Every flick of the thumb offers a micro-hit of novelty, outrage, or reward. Karl Marx once believed that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, but we killed God and began worshipping the murder weapon instead.

Trump is the perfect man of this Postmanian moment. He’s a one-person technological diversion who doesn’t even try to conceal anything — he haphazardly tweets out war plans and private conversations with world leaders while friends and enemies alike hang on his every word, however nonsensical or contradictory. Although he has authoritarian tendencies, he’s ironically too wrapped up in his own media representations to be an effective dictator. If he were to suddenly transform into one, no one would notice — not because of censorship or gulags, but because they’d be too distracted by other push notifications.

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To be fair, there’s plenty of dissent in the streets, but it’s the paper-thin kind that’s designed to be shareable online. These protests don’t hint at emerging mass movements; they mask the lack of them. The vast majority of January 6 protestors had no plans to stage a coup, and once they breached the US Capitol, they opted to take selfies, not power. Last month, millions took to the streets in No Kings marches that seemed designed to wrest attention from President Attention and little else.

Meanwhile, there’s a more profound crisis no one is marching about: no one has faith in anything anymore — not leaders, not institutions, and barely any faith in friends, family, or community. They’re a victim of the self-flattering effect of our me-first libertarian ideals and the user-centric technology that surrounds us. In America, there are no kings, but also no subjects either. Everyone is a king unto themselves.

To Postman, this transformation has everything to do with media theory. In the Sixties, theorist Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “the medium is the message,” arguing that the dominant form of media of each era alters human perception and social organization. Postman agreed, but with a twist: he thought a better formulation would be “the medium is the metaphor.”

In other words, each dominant medium supplies the underlying metaphors by which a society understands reality. As such, the printing press changed how we thought and democratized knowledge. A print-first culture, the argument goes, created the apex of human civilization and produces citizens who are capable of participating in rational-critical debate: because the medium itself encourages habits of logic, nuance, and focus.

Television, on the other hand, is a visual medium governed by the logic of spectacle and attention for its own sake. It prioritizes immediacy, novelty, and emotional impact. It flattens complexity into sensation.

In Postman’s view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn’t just reshape entertainment — it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began to conform to the imperatives of show business. A sermon became indistinguishable from a TV commercial. A newscast adopted the rhythms of a sitcom. A presidential debate turned into a pageant of postures and soundbites. The result was a shift in epistemology: a society once anchored in reasoned argument had become entirely unserious and stuck in an all-consuming present tense.

Four decades on, Postman’s cultural diagnosis now feels not just accurate, but almost restrained. Where television reduced discourse to entertainment, social media reduces it to performance and dopamine loops. The metaphor of our age is no longer the flickering image, but the infinite scroll. And the scroll, unlike the TV show, never ends.

Each platform brings with it a new grammar of cognition. X is still defined by the written word, but in a way that favors brevity and snark. TikTok rewards emotion and mimicry. Instagram curates identity through visual branding. YouTube teaches us to talk quickly and passionately, and AI interfaces like ChatGPT threaten to flatten language into plausible-sounding filler that imitates thought without demanding it.

In Postman’s time, one could still imagine a crisis of democracy rooted in a shared set of spectacles — a Walter Cronkite broadcast, a presidential debate, a televised trial. Today, there is no common stage. The media environment is hyper-personalized and designed to flatter every user with the illusion of centrality. This is what Postman warned about when he lamented the loss of “the epistemology of the typographic mind” — a culture where ideas could be built, revised, tested, and transmitted in a coherent, cumulative way. What we have now is a hallucinated collective monologue, where everyone talks and no one listens.

But maybe not forever. Unlike in Postman’s time, there are signs that a counter-revolution is brewing. Curiously, it is Gen Z — the first generation raised entirely under the Internet’s Eye of Sauron — that now appears most divided over it. Among them, two distinct tribes are forming.

The first are the true children of the algorithm: grown-up iPad kids whose earliest memories involve the Black Mirror of screens and who now, as young adults, continue to live mediated lives. Their social life is dominated by apps, with their identities shaped by filters, likes, and short-form video confessionals. They date less, drink less, drive less, and often prefer the cocoon of home to the messy intimacy of in-person relationships.

They are also, not coincidentally, the loneliest cohort in modern American history. Their daily lives are saturated with stimuli, but starved of substance. Unlike their millennial predecessors, whose optimism was eventually battered into nihilism, many of these young people seem to have skipped straight to resignation.

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And yet, within the same generational cohort, a surprising rebellion is emerging. A second group of Gen Z, equally fluent in the mechanics of digital life, is choosing to abstain from it. They are “rawdogging reality,” as the phrase goes — deleting social media, abandoning optimization, and seeking instead the solidity of old things. They knit. They golf. They go to church. They lift heavy weights and read heavy books. They quit dating apps and swapped TikTok for running or pickleball clubs. Part of it feels like aesthetic irony or a nostalgic affectation, yes, but there are hints of a scattered and half-formed countercultural movement.

In New York, members of the high school Luddite Club are now in college and are attracting converts to the tech-free lifestyle. On TikTok, paradoxically, videos under the #deinfluencing tag go viral by encouraging people to stop buying things. Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and other ritual-heavy faiths are seeing quiet revivals often led by twenty-somethings dressed like mid-century altar boys. The average age of the liturgy-heavy church I attend is mid-to-late 20s, and a group of friendly Gen-Zers in my neighborhood successfully convinced me to join an old social club.

Some cite moral clarity or traditional values; others cite a desire for structure, beauty, and meaning, all of which are notably absent online. Even the secular version of this backlash appears in odd places: in the preference for physical media, the resurgence of film cameras, the rise of “quiet luxury” over hyper-branding, and the revival of slow, analog hobbies once left for dead. Call it post-irony or post-digital asceticism, but the impulse is the same.

This rebellion, fractured and flickering, is one of the few hopeful signs in a culture otherwise anesthetized by its tools. Unlike the millennial generation, which largely absorbed technology as destiny — first in its techno-utopian promises, later in its gigified disappointments, these Generation Z refuseniks are not trying to reform the system. They’re walking away from it. That’s why the No Kings rallies often look like the world’s largest retiree convention. This new group’s politics, to the extent they have any, are not oriented toward revolution or regulation, but toward restraint, retreat, and restoration. They want silence. They want limits. And if there is any hope of clawing back a shared reality from the hall of mirrors that is the modern internet, it may lie with them. We can only hope.

As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localized housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?

This is a terrible start to a supposedly new era. What Canada needs is not just a total rupture with the Trudeau years but a break with decades of virtual NIMBY dictatorship under all parties, at all levels of government. At this rate, the divide between the generally affluent home-owning Boomers and Gen Xers and the downwardly mobile Millennials and Gen Zs is only likely to persist into the Carney era. This generational divide, of course, exists as well in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, but the Canadian context is distinct: owing to the lesser relative salience of culture war and immigration issues compared with other Western nations, it is now the central cleavage of Canada’s politics, in a way that it isn’t elsewhere.

So how great is the gulf between them? Statistics Canada shows a 65-67% gap between average Millennial household wealth ($493,423) and the equivalent figures for Boomers ($1,397,609) and Gen X ($1,485,654). On top of this, there is said to be $1 trillion in Boomer wealth set to be passed down soon, but even this is in doubt given longer lifespans and this cohort’s tenacity in holding on to what they have.

The reason for this disparity is real estate, which props up the economy. Young Canadians have either been excluded from homeownership by high prices and interest rates, with big cities like Robertson’s Vancouver and Toronto among the two most unaffordable cities in North America; or they are new homeowners who managed to buy properties but are now squeezed by rising mortgage payments.  Older Canadians meanwhile have seen the value of their properties soar over a much longer period.

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But this snapshot is part of a 60-year-old pattern whereby Boomers exert their influence as the largest generation. Because “Canada’s was the loudest boom in the industrialized world”, as the demographer David K. Foot has recounted, “Canadian boomers are a… more important factor in Canadian life than American boomers are in American life”. The subsequent history of Canada has been one of governments responding with reflexive deference to their demands. The growth of the public sector in the Sixties catered to their educational needs, while the Nineties-era turn towards fiscal austerity (and federal disengagement from housing) coupled with the rise of prohibitive zoning at local levels reflected this now middle-aged cohort’s intention to keep and grow their personal net worths.

They have maintained this goal — through ceaseless real estate appreciation — with fanatical discipline ever since. As Foot wrote, “It was just as inevitable that once the boomers were housed, the [housing] boom would end.”

But it’s not just their numbers that let the Boomers get away with so much: it’s also their enormous capacity for political cohesion. People who voted for the first time in 1965 kept voting at high rates — around 60-70% — throughout their whole adult lives. In contrast, later generations, especially Millennials and Gen Zs, mostly voted at the lower rates of 30-40% range, with few exceptions.

In fact, Foot failed to foresee how the Boomers would prolong their stranglehold well past their working-age primes. He predicted they would relinquish their urban properties and cash in early, mass migrate to smaller retirement towns, and gracefully free up space in the cities for younger cohorts, believing that not long after 2000, “houses will be what they were before the boomers entered the housing market, places to live rather than investments… the days of rapid and huge increases in house prices are gone.” Of course, this never happened — quite the opposite.

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Gen X is in a special position; though they were not able to benefit as quickly from the system set up by the Boomers, enough of them were nonetheless able to break into the housing market and build up household wealth as the price upswing was in its initial stages in the mid-Nineties and 2000s, an entry point that was closed off to many Millennials who came after. As a result, they even have a marginally higher average net worth than Boomers and are not in a position to break ranks politically with the status quo.

Naturally, the flip side of Boomer hyper-engagement is consistent Millennial and Gen Z non-engagement: countless youths who have abdicated their civic rights altogether, citing apathy or ignorance.

What we are dealing with here are gross sociological distinctions, which cannot be put down to partisan differences. Canadian and global outlets who covered the race put special emphasis on a supposed bond between the disenfranchised youth and the populist Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre, just as the over 55s flocked to Carney: in this telling, the former voted on cost of living while the latter voted on anti-Trump nationalism, depicted with scorn in Right-wing media as a luxury issue for Boomers intent on drowning out the affordability debate with nostalgic invocations of their own postwar golden age.

Yet the polling data does not confirm this: yes, the Boomers have gone majorly for the Liberals, but surveys carried out in the lead-up to the election and in its immediate aftermath indicate a very close, competitive race for the youth vote, with apparent Liberal leads for the 18-35 cohorts. It was actually middle-aged Gen X males (along with the oldest Millennials) who went overwhelmingly for the Tories.

But it is enormously comforting for the Right to say that they have a strong lock on the youth vote, and they will continue to do so. To hear Poilievre speak, it is as if the housing crisis sprung up overnight in 2015 right as Trudeau was elected — instead of being the result of decades of joint Liberal and Conservative misrule, including the last Tory government of which he was a part. Other than deregulation, which really needs to happen at the municipal rather than the federal level, it is also hard to see Poilievre’s neo-Thatcherite agenda as anything other than a return to vintage Nineties Boomer conservatism; or as JD Vance said of him, “Mitt Romney with a French accent” (Poilievre doesn’t have an accent, but point taken).

In any event, Canada’s youth is still up for grabs, even as young and old jostle for the favor of the governing Liberals who have historically been the big-tent brokerage party par excellence. In the 20th century, Liberal leaders brokered ingenious compromises to reconcile the divergent interests of competing groups in Canadian society: English and French, East and West, capital and labor. Today, they must do the same with the Boomers and their children; they must first admit, however, that a zero-sum standoff currently exists between them, instead of ignoring the problem in the first place as Robertson did as mayor in Vancouver, and as Trudeau did as prime minister.

Enough first-time voters responded to Carney’s pledge of a Second World War-style, nationally directed industrial policy to get “government… back in the business of building affordable homes”, that is, to mass manufacture homes at scale: the very idea that his housing minister can’t seem to contemplate. But what will it take for such an ambitious plan to actually succeed?

Carney will need to compensate the Boomers and Gen Xers whose home values will start tumbling once new units enter the market en masse. A creative way to do it would be to find ways to deploy the older cohorts’ own wealth toward funding the construction boom, perhaps through the issuance of special Canada Construction Bonds that pension funds and retirees can purchase, the returns on which would be drawn from the profits to be generated by the resulting newly manufactured affordable unit sales. This is exactly the kind of financial alchemy that Carney should be able to perform. The “counteroffer” to the Boomers could then be supplemented by seniors’ discounts, subsidized nursing care, and the construction of retirement villages as part of the new industrial policy.

Whatever the case, young Canadians must realize (as well as young Americans, Britons and anyone else with this challenge) that the conflict will be settled not on the terrain of patriotism or political ideologies but of raw self-interest. Beating the Boomers at their own game will be the only way to humble them.

Yet Tough, throughout the article, and in later remarks in an interview with Adam B. Kushner for his morning newsletter for The New York Times, is reluctant to reach his own conclusions, and presents the material in carefully couched language such as “most researchers I spoke with believe that stimulant medications are, on the whole, a positive thing for children with ADHD.” And: “most scientists I spoke to agreed that the condition is produced by some combination of biological and environmental forces.”

This kind of hedging is understandable given the sensitivity of the topic for the families involved, and it accurately reflects the medical rhetoric, though not the science. Scientists can believe and agree to all kinds of things that aren’t based on evidence. And they have a powerful incentives to do so — institutional inertia, the difficulty of speaking out against a popular consensus, and the financial interests of their institutions and the pharmaceutical companies, to name just a few. However, if we want to slow the flood of pills — and, most important, help American schoolchildren, especially boys — we must fight the tendency to temporize.

Tough is the author of several books on education and child development, and is a meticulous researcher and long-form feature writer of the highest professional standing. He spent a year compiling the story, which is worth reading in full, and which appears to represent the most reputable, thorough, and mainstream analysis of today’s science. In it, he documents a situation that most American families are aware of — an explosion in ADHD diagnoses, which last year spiked to 11.5% (or 7 million kids), up from about 3% (or 2 million kids) in 1993.

Of those diagnosed, a disproportionate share are boys: 21% of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys officially have ADHD, according to 2024 figures. The actual number displaying the collection of symptoms associated with ADHD is probably much higher, given that not all families pursue a formal diagnosis. Tough does not provide hard numbers on what percentage of those diagnosed are taking prescription stimulants such as Ritalin or Adderall, but says that it’s the “preferred” treatment.

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Most Americans aren’t aware, however, of the sketchiness of the underlying science — which has always seemed pretty obvious to dissenters, but has now been conclusively demonstrated. The field started, Tough says, with an observation, made by a Harvard-trained psychiatrist in 1937, and since very widely replicated, that giving amphetamines to children classified as having behavioral problems has the “spectacular” effect of getting them to sit down and stay cheerfully focused on a task. Skeptics have pointed out that stimulants do that to everyone, and are popular precisely with people who wish to get through boring tasks more pleasantly (long-distance truckers, Fifties housewives, every college student unprepared for an exam).

Nonetheless, the ideas that the source of the children’s noncompliant behavior might be a physical deficit, and that the drug might correct it, has been compelling. Since the Nineties, massive amounts of research has gone into proving this attractive proposition by looking for a biomarker for ADHD (such as a gene or a correlation such as “less brain electrical activity”) and scientifically demonstrating the benefits of the treatment.

Initial results were promising, Tough writes. The Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, launched in the early Nineties and funded by National Institute of Mental Health, was “one of the largest studies ever undertaken of the long-term effects of any psychiatric medication.” In 1999, the researchers announced early results that Ritalin, their stimulant of choice, produced “significantly fewer symptoms” in children with ADHD after 14 months, compared to comparison groups of ADHD kids receiving only behavioral training or no interventions at all.

In 2017, in an effort to find a biomarker, an analysis of brain scans performed by the Enigma Consortium, a global network of scientists, announced that “patients with ADHD have altered brains; therefore ADHD is a disorder of the brain.” This was the “most ambitious” project to date, per Tough. However, his more recent conversations with the scientists who participated in those projects reveal a different story.

The brain-scan differences, he says, were either nonexistent among adults or “so minor as to be almost imperceptible” among children. Martine Hoogman, a Dutch neuroscientist who led the Enigma team, wrote to Tough in an email: “‘Back then, we emphasized the differences that we found (although small), but you can also conclude that the subcortical and cortical volumes of people with ADHD and those without ADHD are almost identical.…’ In retrospect, she added, it wasn’t fitting to conclude from her findings that A.D.H.D. is a brain disorder.”

As time passed, the MTA began to turn up different results. By 36 months on stimulants, improvements in children’s behavior had disappeared — in fact, children in all three groups demonstrated “exactly the same” level of symptoms. Moreover, careful observation of the children in question revealed a diagnosis in flux. As later studies have shown, sometimes they seemed to have ADHD, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes children in a comparison group — who didn’t have it at the study’s outset — developed it. Tough quotes Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London, as saying that “the traditional notion that there is a natural category of ‘people with ADHD’ that clinicians can objectively measure and define ‘just doesn’t seem to be the case.’”

At the same time, situational explanations for the behaviors have seemed to grow in significance. A 2016 study published by researcher Arielle Lasky and members of the MTA group, Tough writes, interviewed adults in their mid-20s who had participated in the study as children. “Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their ‘niche,’ or the right ‘fit,’ in school or in the workplace,” he says. When the subjects found pursuits that were more interesting to them than school had been, their symptoms disappeared. Given such results and the difficulties of finding a biological cause, Sonuga-Barke proposes that we view ADHD not as a medical problem, but one of “misalignment” between what he tactfully calls “a child’s biological makeup” — but could also easily be called a child’s personality and situation in life — and “the environment in which they are trying to function.”

More disturbing information has come out as well. The MTA study found that after 36 months, children in the group taking Ritalin were on average one inch shorter than children in the control groups, and that the height lost was not made up later — they were still shorter as adults. And last year, a study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that even a medium-strength daily dose of Adderall more than tripled a patient’s likelihood of developing psychosis or mania.

Several studies have also debunked the appealing assumption that better classroom behavior actually translates to better learning. Children work faster and behave better, but Tough’s conclusions are mostly reflected by the words of F. Xavier Castellanos, a neuroscience researcher at New York University, whom he quotes: “There’s a real disconnect between the almost awesome effects on behavior and the minimal effects on academic achievement or attainment.” A 2023 study on adults found subjects’ strategies for problem-solving became “significantly worse under the medication.” It shouldn’t take a neuroscientist: Most people with any experience with recreational drugs in this category have noticed the same effect.

So why is the overall consensus, as Tough represents it, still so gentle in taking on the status quo? Why do the researchers still believe or agree that the medications are beneficial? And why does someone as smart as Tough introduce paragraphs with careful sentences such as “the failure to find a clear biomarker doesn’t mean that there is no biological basis for ADHD”?

In most human affairs, the burden of proof is on those arguing for something; we aren’t required to prove a negative to move on from a bad idea. Sonuga-Barke theorizes that research priorities have been distorted by the urgency of the children’s distress and the families’ needs for a solution. “In the field, we’re so frightened that people will say it doesn’t exist,” he told Tough, referring specifically to the quest for the biomarker. “We have to double down because we’re terrified of what will happen to the kids who can’t get the meds. We’ve seen the impact they can have on people’s lives.”

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There is, however, urgency to a change of direction. For one thing, doctors who “believe” that stimulant medications are “on the whole, a positive thing” are unlikely to arm families with the information they need to make fully informed choices about their child’s health. The obfuscating language in Tough’s story surely is being replicated throughout the medical establishment. As James Swanson, a research psychologist who worked on the initial MTA study, told Tough, “If you’re honest, you should tell kids that, look, if you’re interested in next week or next month or even the next year, this is the right treatment for you. But in the long run, you’re going to be shorter. How many kids would agree to take medication? Probably none.”

And for another, the situation looks very different when you admit that the problem is not a physical deficit of some kind, but something afflicting a large share of children and, by my guess, most teenage boys. Diagnosing and possibly medicating these kids may get them through a bad time more successfully — it’s clearly a lifeline for many struggling families — but it does nothing to prevent the problem from arising, or to help the kids learn.

In his book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, which analyzes debunked science crazes in illuminating detail, the journalist Jesse Singal discovered that “at root, when society accepts a false story, it’s often because that story tells society something it wants to hear.” He also observes that it’s a pattern for junk science to be taken up when it provides “an easy way out” of a complicated problem.

In this light, we might conclude that ADHD has been an easy way to address (or not address) the vastly complicated problem that contemporary school is unsuited to the needs of a large percentage of the child population, especially boys, and desperately needs reform. We might target our attention on the long, physically confining days; the constant usage of attention-shattering screens; the stultifying conformity; the chaos-promoting soft-discipline; and the deeper questions, exacerbated by AI, of what any of it is doing and what it’s for.

Or we might target other things. But to target anything, we have to move the blame off the kids, where it never should have been in the first place. Our children’s bodies and personalities are not deficient. We are.

Welcome to renting in 2025. What did you think I was talking about?

The perils of modern dating are well documented, but the concurrent battle for housing — the uncanny tonal similarities, the vibe of existential uncertainty — is little discussed. For those between 25 and 34 — that Gen Z/Millennial crop now looking, in many ways, to settle down — the confluence of these twin concerns is not news. This group makes up a third of the UK rental pool; in the capital, the average age of the renter is rising. If the analogy of renting and dating is indulged a little, then marriage would be the logical equivalent of buying. The data here is what you’d expect, with the number of unmarried couples in Britain in the 25-35 age bracket doubling between 1991 and 2021.

The cost and uncertainty of the housing market is often cited as the keystone in the collapsing birth rate, a more sensible analysis, in my view, than blaming social vogues (or feminism) alone. It is understandable that couples looking to start a family would wait to first cobble together a deposit; it must be frightening to think of the site of your baby’s first few years being at the whim of a landlord, with creeping rents which threaten to outstrip pay rises. The marital custom of house then kids also makes financial sense: having children is expensive, so getting your ducks in a row by prioritizing a mortgage seems prudent. In this sense, falling birth rates is a policy failure — an unchecked housing system which has doomed Millennials to the status of tenant is a direct cause. But what of dating?

The game of seduction, in both the rental and romantic sense, has become more miserably cynical in recent years. Both are subject to a scarcity mindset; both have moved almost exclusively online. This was intended to provide the “customer” with a bounty of choice and customization — will I filter for a garden, or a dishwasher, or a brunette? — but the reality is a sense of fraught competitiveness. In London in particular, the restless urgency is exhausting.

I suspect Boomers forget, or have little sympathy for, how soul-destroying it is to queue up for viewings with your begging bowl, gazumping other young professionals with ever-higher security deposits, lugging your worldly possessions across the city to a borough you’ve never been to when your last landlord unexpectedly hikes the rent out of your price range. It is disconcerting, unnatural even, to form attachments to a street — even to get to know the shopkeepers, the barmaids, the postman — only to be booted into a different postcode a year on. Similarly, dating apps engender a dread of insecurity: it is peopled by the romantically homeless, sofa-surfing and subletting hearts in empty situationships. Settling down young is not, in a romantic sense at least, something my crowd has ever aspired to — but the alternative, the promised sexual freedom, takes its toll.

In both scenarios, the true villain is the timewaster; estate agents, like daters, have been known to ghost would-be tenants when a better offer comes along, while triggering the break clause is the instinctive get-out for bad Hingers (“we met on an app; you didn’t think it was serious, did you?”). Recently, my estate agent held a series of viewings in my flat; it occurred to me how similar that initial look-around really is to a first date. I watched as bashful viewers dutifully took their shoes off, gave the right compliments, asked tactical questions — do you get much noise?; do you get used to the stairs? — only to scurry off, as I have done after many a viewing and many a date, and debrief with a friend. Bit cramped, they say; definitely lied about his height. Needs doing up.

What does this grand theory amount to? The fate of daters and renters in modern Britain really boils down to one thing: casualization. I don’t believe young people desire marriage any less than they desire home ownership; while there is less social pressure, and certainly less religious imperative for wedlock, the fact remains that my generation has been conditioned to expect uncertainty and insecurity by an array of economic factors which have shaped a lifestyle of casual impermanence. A buoyant, optimistic generation — like our parents’ — is one that comes of age both socially and financially confident, which knows ease and ambition, and for whom the trappings of adulthood (a spouse, a car, a home) are not just appealing but within reach. Can we say the same for young people today?

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If those trappings are less fashionable among Gen Z, it is because we have been weaned on post-2008 bohemianism: the further into my twenties I get, the more I realize that the lifestyle we have been taught to accept as cool — bouncing around different living situations, gliding from moldy flat to ketamine-dusted warehouse to freezing-cold houseboat, all the while jumping from lover to lover too — is in fact “cope”. Nobody wants this. Our generation was promised a lifestyle of choice; what it got was instability; our low-low expectations of dating are colored by our expectations of how we have to live, the dire roommates we have to endure, the grim proximity to grimmer neighbors. We are used to being buffeted around, at the mercy of a hostile market, told to accept imperfection at great expense.

A perceptive joke flying about social media at the moment is that we are seeing the return of “recession indicators”. The theory goes that the return of Millennial pop culture — its fashion, its TV, its heavily filtered selfies — heralds an impending economic collapse. This month Trump’s tariffs threatened to plunge America and its trading partners into recession; the return of 2008’s economic headwinds seems less and less a joke. But I predict a stranger consequence of the return of Credit Crunch mores: a doubling down on its depressing romantic values, the injection of even more uncertainty, casualness and insecurity into the dating world, an even darker cloud of pessimism sailing over pub tables as Hinge voyagers steel themselves for summer. The consequence of miserable economics is miserable daters: romantic paralysis is the result of a culture in which commitment is framed as a luxury. Having the means to settle down, the confidence and security, seems almost quaint now — an echo of a different time. Nothing, and nobody, belongs to us. We are the recession-era precariat, and our sex lives suck.

But the kids are not alright. Back in 2020, we had no idea what the impact of lockdown would be on those young people whose normal development was so casually interrupted. And while every parent has a lockdown horror story, it was the most vulnerable children who were worst afflicted. Lockdown widened the school attainment gap, delayed children’s development, and plunged a generation of tweens and teens into psychiatric turmoil. But it didn’t just harm children; it also formed them. Especially for those who came of age concurrently with lockdown, the sheer strangeness of that period was itself a worldview-shaping experience — in ways we’ve scarcely begun to grasp.     

Some of this was an effect of lockdowns forcing ordinary life online. This sense of reality coming unstuck preceded Covid, but was sharply intensified by it. I recall being taken aback when, toward the end of the Covid era, I had a conversation with a woman in her early twenties who cheerfully argued that not only is the earth flat, but also birds aren’t real. She might have been joking; but it felt like she wasn’t. Then again, if you’d just spent two formative years with nothing to do but scroll, you might be forgiven for concluding that there’s no meaningful difference between reality and internet memes. After all, in that situation most of your reality is internet memes. 

This sense of generalized unreality seems to have become, especially for the young, a permanent fixture. Just recently, Channel 4 warned that Gen Z has lost trust in authoritative sources of information, preferring online sources of information, gathered in a “magpie” fashion and validated by peers. This echoes a broader trend noted last month by liberal commentator Anne Applebaum, who deplored the rise, across the globe, of a politics fusing New Age beliefs with anti-democratic practices. In this worldview, she laments, “superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction”. She contrasts this critically with her own worldview, in which — she says — “logic and reason lead to good government”, and “the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes”.

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But from the perspective of the “Birds Aren’t Real” cohort, we might ask: where was Applebaum’s logic and reason, during the multi-year collective freakout in which buying a Scotch egg prevented Covid infection, and children cut mouth holes in N95 masks to play the flute? For the unreality wasn’t just online; it was everywhere, often accompanied by vigorous social shaming and coercive state power. Asking zoomers of my acquaintance for their memories of Covid, the most common theme was the absurdist tyranny of Covid rules — and then how politically formative it was to defy them. One young friend describes seeing a group of “Covid marshals” exit the van in which they’d traveled together unmasked — and then, after climbing out, donning masks and fanning out through London streets to enforce mask-wearing and social distancing among pedestrians. Another remembers quietly abandoning mask mandates, and realizing that doing so had no effect.

I don’t want to get bogged down in who went crazier. My point is simple: a whole microgeneration experienced, on the cusp of adulthood, a collective and officially enforced reality in which every rule suddenly turned nonsensical and authoritarian, at their expense and in the name of a threat that didn’t really affect them. How do you respond to an experience of this kind? At the extremes, the answer seems to divide between those who concluded that when the world is so arbitrary, there’s no point trying to do anything; and, conversely, those who concluded from this there are no limits at all on what could be done.

At one end of the spectrum, Gen Z has checked out. The youth mental health crisis preceded Covid, but lockdown escalated it. In its wake, disability claims have risen most sharply among teenagers and young people. Among claimants under 25, 70% were for mental or behavioral conditions, accounting for more than half of the rise. Labour’s Wes Streeting recently asserted that such conditions are “overdiagnosed”, and this may be the case. But it may also be the case both that the distress is real, and also that these young adults are just doing what they were conditioned to do. Given that they spent two years forcibly shut in with only the internet for company, while the government paid for everything, it would not be surprising if some of those young people might be a bit screwed up. Nor would it be surprising if many of them simply view this situation as normal, and expect it to continue.

Some of those young adults are now spiraling in psychological distress, and perhaps also learned helplessness. Lest anyone mistake me, I absolutely don’t want to shame those people. The shame should be on everyone who assented to policies that deprived a generation of normal coming-of-age experiences, in the name of a virus that posed little risk to them. What we owe to these now perhaps deeply damaged young men and women is not disability benefits, but contrition, reparations, and a way out of the hole we shoved them in.

But at the other end of the spectrum are those young people who drew the opposite conclusion, and are as a result exiting the political mainstream altogether. Again, small wonder: their entry into adulthood was equal parts internet unreality, nonsense rules, and finding that the only way to get laid was by flouting the mandates. Scale that up to a whole microgeneration, and the likelihood is that they’re not going to spend their adult lives coloring inside the political lines. For example, we should perhaps not be surprised that Channel 4’s study finds 52% of 13-27-year-olds would welcome “a strongman leader unbound by elections or Parliament”. Like the mental health crisis, the slide toward authoritarian views is a macrotrend that predates Covid; but there’s no question that Covid represented, for many, a definitive rupture. This is, after all, a generation that experienced two years of arbitrary, capricious, and profoundly post-liberal state power. Yes, lockdowns were a form of collectivist authoritarianism; even so, is it really so strange that some would afterwards gaze approvingly at the strongman variety? As one anonymous young commentator put it in 2023, it was “all wisdom of the wise was broken, torn up and transgressed purely to advance the interests of old people”. As a result, the author suggests, those who were young during Covid have concluded that “there is no limit to what politics can achieve”.

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Across many European nations including France, Germany, and Spain, the sharpest rise in so-called “far-Right” parties is consistently among the young — and, especially, young men. Just recently The Atlantic described the same phenomenon in the United States, linking it explicitly to Covid. In the UK, when we compare the 2019 and 2024 general election breakdowns, it’s clear that while the Right-wing youth vote hasn’t grown significantly in absolute terms, those young people that do vote Right opted in increased numbers for the party to the Right of the Tories: Reform.

But it’s not just a Rightward tilt; it’s an anti-mainstream one. The same vote breakdown shows the percentage of 18-24-year-olds who opted for the two mainstream parties fell by a quarter, from 77% to 50% of young voters. Along with Reform, the biggest winner among the youngest voters was “Other”.

Coming of age under lockdown, then, seems to have effected a generational exit both from any sense of shared reality, and, by extension, from political normativity. Will this right itself over time? Maybe. But looking around modern Britain, I see few obvious reasons why a twentysomething would feel motivated to salvage a political order that mortgaged future tax revenues to fund years of furlough and misspent PPE procurement, to no measurable benefit over countries that didn’t lock down and to the considerable economic detriment of the young. It is a political order that’s depressing white-collar wages through AI, and blue-collar ones through mass immigration; that’s squeezing young professionals and letting house prices soar, but safeguarding the triple lock.

In his push to get Gen Z to forsake PIP and re-engage, Wes Streeting should perhaps be careful what he wishes for. As this generation reaches political maturity, we should expect British politics to get angrier, more radical, more plural and fractious — and, perhaps, considerably less democratic.

While there has been much suspicion that the CCP uses TikTok for influence operations, such as by disseminating Chinese propaganda, the app can be weaponized in even more dangerous ways. Its “For You” algorithm leverages machine learning to track users’ attention, and it employs this knowledge to show them, unprompted, whatever content is most likely to hold their attention. This makes using it a far more passive and addictive experience than other social media platforms, which gives it the potential to inflict long-term harm on young Westerners by keeping them distracted, shortening their attention spans, and, ultimately, atrophying their brains.

The app’s ability to cause mass “TikTok brain” in young Westerners should prompt consideration of its use as a new kind of civilizational weapon. Such a threat could be temporarily averted by simply banning the app, as the US is close to doing, but this is ultimately an issue that can’t be legislated away because TikTok is only a symptom of a much deeper ailment.

The first thing that should raise suspicions is that the CCP forbids Chinese kids from using TikTok — instead, they use Douyin. As American tech ethicist Tristan Harris has pointed out, Douyin is a “spinach” version of the app filled with science experiments and educational videos instead of twerkers and toilet-lickers. TikTok has imposed screen-time limits for younger users (to prevent it from being banned), but Douyin has been doing so since 2019. Further, unlike TikTok, the app is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am. Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.

China has been suspicious of Western liberal capitalism since the 19th century when the country’s initial openness allowed the Western powers to flood China with opium, which accelerated the fall of the Qing Dynasty and led to the “Century of Humiliation”. To this day, many in China believe Western liberalism leads to decadence, but one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy.

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Despite not being well known outside China, Wang Huning has been China’s top ideological theorist for three decades, authoring many of Xi Jinping’s policies. Among the Chinese, he is widely known as “guoshi”, or “teacher of the nation”.

Although Wang refuses to do press or even speak with foreigners, his books reveal something of his worldview. His 1991 America Against America, based on his travels a few years prior, has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US. The premise is simple: the conflict between America’s economic system and its value system have made the country fundamentally unstable, destined for commodification, nihilism, and decadence. And, as Wang morbidly diagnoses, the country will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

According to Wang, America is directed mostly by blind market forces; the country obeys not a single command but a cacophony of demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere. It constantly produces wondrous new technologies, but these have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US toward more and more commodification, which eventually consumes “human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power and law”, and devours meaning and purpose. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang wrote: “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.”

To prevent China’s own technological advancement from leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture”, Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US’s problems is by instilling “core values” — a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future. This idea has been central to President Xi’s governance strategy, which has emphasized the “core socialist values” of civility, patriotism, and integrity.

So how has the push for these socialist core values affected the CCP’s approach to social media?

The creator of TikTok and CEO of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, originally wanted the content on TikTok and Douyin to be determined purely by popularity. As such, Douyin started off much like TikTok is now, with the content dominated by teenagers singing and dancing. But in April 2018, the CCP began action against Zhang. Its media watchdog ordered the removal of some of ByteDance’s apps from Chinese app stores, citing their platforming of “improper” content. Zhang then grovelingly apologized for content “that was incommensurate with socialist core values”. Shortly after, ByteDance announced a recruiting drive for thousands of content moderators, with job adverts specifying a preference for CCP members with “strong political sensitivity”.

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The CCP’s influence over ByteDance has only grown since then. The party allegedly has a “golden share” in ByteDance’s Beijing entity, and one of its officials sits on the company’s three-person board. The CCP’s intrusion into ByteDance’s operations is part of a broader governmental strategy called the “Profound Transformation”, which seeks to clear space for core socialist values by ridding China of “decadent” online content. In August 2021, Chinese state media called for an end to TikTok-style “tittytainment” for fear that “our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse”. In the wake of that statement, there have been crackdowns on “sissy-men” fashions, “digital drugs” such as online gaming, and “toxic idol worship”. Consequently, many online influencers have been forcibly deprived of their influence, with some having their entire presence erased from the Chinese web.

For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West’s terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China. And yet, while cracking down on this content domestically, China has continued to allow its export internationally as part of Xi’s “digital Silk Road”. TikTok is known to censor content that displeases Beijing, such as mentions of Falun Gong or Tiananmen Square, but otherwise it has free rein to show Westerners what it wants; “tittytainment” and “sissy men” are everywhere on the app. So why the hypocritical disparity in rules? Is the digital Silk Road intended as poetic justice for the original, whereby the Western powers preached Christian values while trafficking chemical TikTok — opium — into China?

Since Wang and Xi believe the West is too decadent to survive, they may have opted to take the Taoist path of wu wei — sitting back and letting the West’s appetites take it where they will. But there’s another more sinister and effective approach that they might be adopting — the “accelerationism” of an amphetamine-fueled British philosopher.

At first glance, Nick Land could hardly be more different from Wang Huning. Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land ranted about cyborg apocalypses. In the late Nineties, he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls of his house, once owned by the libertine occultist Aleister Crowley. At nearby Warwick University, he held bizarre lectures, with one infamous “lesson” consisting of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.

Land and Wang were not just polar opposites in personality; they also operated at opposite ends of the political spectrum. While Wang became the CCP’s top ideological theorist, Land became the top theorist, along with Curtis Yarvin, of the influential network of hard-Right bloggers, known as NRx, or neo-reaction.

And yet, despite their opposite natures, Land and Wang would develop almost identical visions of liberal capitalism as an all-commodifying, all-devouring force, driven by the insatiable hunger of blind market forces, and destined to finally eat Western civilization itself. Land viewed Western liberal capitalism as a kind of AI that’s reached singularity; in other words, an AI that’s grown beyond the control of humans and is now unstoppably accelerating toward inhuman ends. As Land feverishly wrote in his 1995 essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”

To simplify Land’s overwrought drug-fueled prose, Western capitalism can be compared to a “paperclip maximizer”, a hypothetical AI programmed by a paperclip business to produce as many paperclips as possible, which leads it to begin recycling everything on earth into paperclips (commodities). When the programmers panic and try to switch it off, the AI turns them into paperclips, since being switched off would stop it from fulfilling its goal of creating as many paperclips as possible. Thus, the blind application of short-term goals leads to long-term ruin.

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Land believed that, since the runaway AI we call liberal capitalism commodifies everything, including even criticisms of it (which are necessarily published for profit), it cannot be opposed. Every attack on it becomes part of it. Thus, if one wishes to change it, the only way is to accelerate it along its trajectory. As Land stated in a later, more sober writing style:

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

This view, that the current system must be accelerated to be transformed, has since become known as “accelerationism”. For Land, acceleration is not just a destructive force but also a creative one; all democracies accelerate toward ruin, but an undemocratic system — run by elites unfettered by the concerns of the masses — could accelerate a country to prosperity.

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the liberal West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he embraced anti-democratic ideals, moved to Shanghai, and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star.

A few years after Land moved to China, talk of accelerationism began to emerge on the Chinese web, where it’s become known by its Chinese name, jiasuzhuyi. The term has caught on among Chinese democracy advocates, many of whom view the CCP as the runaway AI, hurtling toward greater tyranny; they even refer to Xi as “Accelerator-in-Chief”. Domestically, Chinese democracy activists try to accelerate the CCP’s authoritarianism ad absurdum; one tactic is to swamp official tip-off lines with reports of minor or made-up infractions, hoping to break the Party by forcing it to enact all of its own petty rules.

The CCP in turn views US President Donald Trump as the “Accelerator-in-Chief,” or, more accurately, “Chuan Jianguo” (literally “Build China Trump”) because he was perceived as helping China by accelerating the West’s decline. The CCP is also known to have engaged in jiasuzhuyi more directly; for instance, during the 2020 US race riots, China used Western social media platforms to douse accelerant over US racial tensions.

But the use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision. Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification because that’s what consumers want.

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Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early Nineties, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, and finally to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties are liable to fall into disuse and disrepair.

And this is why TikTok is such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth — its future — into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors. We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been grey matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ seems to have steadily fallen — which could in part be due to technology making us spend ever more time in a passive, vegetative state. Distractive media seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut”, while for American kids it was “influencer”.

The resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. And if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, one arrow, two eagles).

So, the CCP has both the means and the motive to help the West defeat itself, and part of this could conceivably involve the use of TikTok to accelerate liberal capitalism’s demise by closing the gap between desire and gratification.

Admittedly we have no hard evidence of the CCP’s intentions — but ultimately intentions are irrelevant here. Accelerationism can’t alter an outcome, only hasten it. And TikTok, whether or not it’s actively intended as a weapon, is only moving the West further along the course it’s long been headed: toward more effortless pleasure, and resulting cognitive decline.

The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is wholly the West’s. After all, TikTok dominated our culture as a result of free market forces — the very thing we live by. Land and Wang are correct that the West being controlled by everyone means it’s controlled by no one, and without brakes or a steering wheel we’re at the market’s mercy.

Of course, democracies do have some regulatory power, as evidenced by moves taken in the US and India. But although banning TikTok may stop the theft of our data, it won’t stop the theft of our attention. Just look at how users already began to flock to other short-form video sites such as Red Note. And how TikTok has inspired YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and X’s For You algorithm. Effortless dopamine hits are what consumers want, and capitalism always tries to give consumers what they want. The market is a greater accelerator than China could ever hope to be.

So what’s the solution?

Land and Wang may be right about the illness, but they’re wrong about the cure. It’s true that we in the West have little left of the traditions that once tied us together, and in their absence little unites us except our animal hungers. But the belief that meaning and purpose can be imposed on all of us by a Great Leader is a fatal fantasy that has littered history with failed experiments.

Sure, democracies are vulnerable because there’s no one controlling their advancement, but autocracies are vulnerable precisely for the opposite reason: they’re controlled by people, which is to say, by woefully myopic apes. China is still suffering from the disastrous one-child policy that has led to China’s current population crisis. For all our problems, we would be unwise to exchange the soft tyranny of dopamine for the hard tyranny of despots.

That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy, responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed).

But ultimately these are short-term measures. In the long-term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps such as TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies.

Whether or not the CCP intended it as such, TikTok is a time bomb that could wreck a whole generation years from now. We can’t wait until its effects are apparent before acting, for then it will be too late. The clock is ticking. Tik Tok…

***

A version of this article was first published on The Prism.

The latter story sent ripples through my friendship group; we were horrified by Blue’s ragebait provocations that all men should cheat unless their girlfriends are “treating them every day”. Blue, a former escort, has made millions filming encounters with married men for her OnlyFans, and her star rose when she turned on the disgruntled girlfriends of her punters, whom she called, flatly, “lazy”. It is for these statements, calculated not to arouse men but to annoy women, that she is famous.

Elsewhere in the dystopian sex-positivity scene we read a viral account of Twitter-famous “whorelord” Aella’s birthday party — a factory-style line-up of 42 strangers rewarded for their participation in an orgy with a physical badge of honour (it reads “I went to Aella’s birthday gangbang and all I got was this crappy sticker”). In order to keep these scores of presumably deeply weird men entertained, a group of “fluffers… were strewn about, lying on fuckbenches”; after seeing to the birthday girl, the blokes could “continue banging” the fluffers.

Great. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you know it’s illiberal to object to the fact that many women, from privileged artists (Lily Allen, Kate Nash) to normal if naive teenaged girls, have so deeply drunk the kool-aid of neoliberal feminism that it is somehow empowering, rather than the most degrading thing imaginable, to be sold in any capacity to men? Or to recoil from the bleak spectacle of a methodical orgy in which anonymous pervs can waddle over to a woman sat on a bench whose only function is to fuck them?

It takes little consideration to see that these latest additions to the ancient and undying canon of prostitute-lore — from Mary Magdalene to Fantine to Pretty Woman — are yet more slanted apparitions, this time not icons of feminist victory but promotional material for feet pics. Internet virality and atrophying feminism have collided — and the result is more of the same.

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Because of just how hot being a sex worker is right now, we’re obsessed with reading about it. The pseudonymous Eve Smith’s How Was It For You?, released this summer, is a bracingly matter-of-fact account of a prostitute’s progress; in it, we are told that the only “type of man” who does not visit brothels are those who “buy you half a shandy on a date at the pub and expect to get into your knickers”. We are laughing at this man not because he sees sex as transactional, but because he is not willing to pay enough for it. How desolate. Elsewhere, Smith brushes away critics’ horror by saying her colleagues are merely “grinding to buy food, to pay rent, to support our kids”; “we can’t rely on men,” she writes, though by definition she has chosen by her own account to do precisely that. The great target of her ire is not the clients who endanger her so much that she must hide weapons “around my dungeon”, or the difficult childhood which sets the scene for her entry into brothel-work, but the “liberal, middle-class white woman with a moralistic agenda”, the radical feminists who pity her. This is understandable; their concern undermines her entire way of life, and so must be infuriating.

But this does not mean their fears are baseless. The statistics on prostitution are naturally elusive, and their presentation by advocacy groups is almost entirely contingent on the group’s bias: the pro-decriminalisation Prostitutes Collective claims only 6% of “migrant sex workers” are trafficked (“many said they prefer working in the sex industry,” the website cheerily states), whereas studies in Norway and Canada put the average age of entering prostitution at about 15; one 1986 study claimed that 90% of the “adolescent prostitutes” it surveyed had been abused by a caregiver or neighbour.

A culture which shamefully casualises prostitution, whose pornification is so complete that punters can reasonably buy erotic videos from the girl who works behind the till in the petrol station, has forgotten how bad things really are. In the UK, you are more likely to be murdered as a prostitute than in any other profession. One 2008 study of 130 prostitutes  in San Francisco found 68% had been raped on the job; this figure rises to more than 90% being raped in the past year in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (in a study which also noted gang rapes by police officers). At the same time, our engagement with these facts has been obliterated by the dogma of supposed sex positivity. A 2024 revision of “Roxanne” would have the fraught heroine not pining, lost, in a doorway but grinning from ear to ear while filing a hefty tax return (girlboss!).

The most likely reason for this extraordinary lapse in critical thinking is the transformation from in-person prostitution to the digital; it is analogous to the place of pornography changing from the top shelf of a newsagent to the private, free and instantaneous ease of the smartphone screen. It’s so simple, and so much less risky and humiliating, to hop on a website and set up a profile than to stand on a street corner. But the fact that your leering client is physically absent does not alter the philosophical lie at the heart of prostitution, digital or otherwise: that consent itself can be bought.

Until OnlyFans ballooned in the cultural imagination, prostitution was subject to a different kind of fantasy, one laden with pity and horror. Think of Taxi Driver (1976), Sport and Iris spinning slowly in the pinkish light of the bordello, the pimp’s ringed, lecherous fingers in a carousel with the child’s own, small and limp. Twelve-year-old Jodie Foster crystallises the spirit of prostitution: she clunks about in too-tall shoes, brazen and glassy-eyed  — that is until, in moments of privacy, she’s revealed as little more than a costumed kitten, her backstory blurted out in southern syllables between chomps of a jelly sandwich.

Iris reveals the doubleness of the fantasy prostitute: she is both surprisingly tough and impossibly vulnerable, vixen and victim, a painted-faced trader in a stageworthy performance and a font of misery waiting to shatter and spill. The message of cinematic portrayals of prostitutes has, until very recently, been thus: succumb to your tragic fate, or be saved. Those saved tend to be young: in Pretty Baby (1978), Brooke Shields’s Violet, the same age as Iris, is saved from the brothel by the New Orleans photographer Ernest J. Bellocq. Older, more cynical working girls tend to die off, like Christie in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho who is dispatched by an airborne chainsaw. Christie is somewhat more plucky than her colleague, and so lives a bit longer. Ultimately, the 20th century would have its prostitute in her final act either returned to a state of cosseted security, or once again a tangle of limbs, paying the toll for her moral lapse.

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This fate was not always so fixed — once, prostitution at the higher levels could be a route to influence. Nell Gwynn, Charles II’s favourite actress and courtesan, escaped syphilitic destitution with wit and pluck in a world curiously both more pious and less horrified by the presence of prostitution in public life. The figure of the prostitute in the novel is, concurrently, less hinged on tragedy. The witty narrator Fanny Hill of John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is tricked into the game as a 15-year-old, having her “maidenhead” auctioned off (to a client described as a “liquorice old goat”) before mastering, and enjoying, her craft and being carried off into married respectability by an eligible former customer. These cheerier narratives are yet more fantasies, though exceptions to a plight which mostly meant disease and destitution.

A century later, the archetypal prostitute-victim spirals into the cultural imagination via Victor Hugo’s Fantine in Les Miserables (1862). Buffeted between misfortunes by cruel swindlers and heartless bureaucrats, Fantine descends into penury and is killed by disease, having sold her hair and two front teeth. Then, it was understood that not all prostitutes would prosper; one was far more likely to end up a Fantine than a Nell Gwynn or Fanny Hill. Now, to warn of prostitution’s pitfalls is to be intolerant, shaming and unkind. Because concerns about the very nature of prostitution are unsayable, the character of charitably termed “sex work” is warped by the few OnlyFans girls who rake in millions a year at little supposed personal cost. It is of no interest to “sex-positive” feminists (and certainly the legions of oleaginous “fans”, rarely mentioned in these discussions) that many of those shunted into prostitution are subjected to regular violence, exploitation by pimps and brutality by police.

Just as we baulk at the victim/vixen archetypes of film and literature of the past, we should question the untouchability of the 21st-century cult of the digital sex worker, whose central claim — that we can get rich with no consequences to our happiness or safety — has led god knows how many women to sell pics to dirty old men in the village for a few weeks, realise they can’t earn anything like what they’ve been told, and delete their profiles, only for that material to exist in perpetuity on both third-party porn sites and in the minds of dismal men, for whom the object-status of all women was never in doubt. How is this new myth, of the emancipated OnlyFans model, any less of a fantasy than the child victim Iris saved from the bordello, or the witty, scheming Fanny Hill? Do not believe the messaging; we are further from seeing prostitution for what it really is — a scourge which visits the bleakest of fates on the most vulnerable — than ever.

Every year since 2016, one day in late November or early December, Spotify releases its personalised data hoards. You receive about 10 slides of digested stats on your top artists, top songs, hours listened and “vibe” — for example, I had a “theatrical vocal baroque” January, apparently. As a matter of course, you then share them on Instagram. The wild frenzy that greets it is like the flourishing of the mayfly; for at least 24 hours, social media becomes a gallery of humblebrags, with literally everyone you know posting screenshots of their yearly listening stats. I, too, have shared humiliatingly smug stories of my own Wrapped report card: top-five artists, top-five songs, secret delight at results which, I tell myself, set me apart from the Swifties lurking in my friendship group.

Having poked us with the algorithmic cattle-prod to sponsored genres and artists for the past 12 months, Spotify is pulling back the curtain to reveal that yes, we are in fact individuals with laudably individual tastes. Look, you’re in the top 1% of listeners to Lewis Capaldi! That must make you, somehow, exceptional, despite the certainty that his warblings were first piped into your AirPods while you shuffled through a rack of polyester loungewear at a provincial H&M. There is something sanctifying about the certainty of a data digest — its ability to both herd and coronate you. And Spotify knows this.

The compulsion to share exactly how we are special, via this musical ritual of Spotify Wrapped, is strange. For what could be more intimate than the song you chose to listen to again and again while staring out the window of the 344 after an abortive summer situationship? Yet we are still compelled to expose even these tender intimacies — for at least it suggests we have some depth. A meaning-laden song appearing in your ranking is like a scar from a tender blade, and our posting of it is a signal to others: admire my hinterland, I am complex.

Such is the power of Wrapped that users now admit to gaming their digest before it’s released; “imagine hating me, a girl who is simply in her room trying to change the trajectory of her Spotify Wrapped until it’s too late” read one viral tweet last week. Are some people genuinely listening to Kate Bush on repeat to knock Sabrina Carpenter out of their top five? My Zeppelin-devotee dad would hide his Madonnas at the back of his record collection; for us not so. Even our guilty pleasures, the secret indulgences of our inner lives, must be laid out for scrutiny.

The rewards of this relentless self-fashioning are significant: we narcissists love to feel special. And Big Tech loves reassuring us that we are exactly that. Throughout the year, Spotify will send you personalised “mixes” to cajole you with the assistance of an AI-generated, upbeat African-American DJ. That Gen Zs are attracted to the idea of an individualised radio show, whose host talks only to you and only plays music you already know you like, speaks to our desire to be deemed exceptional, and our aversion to being challenged.

It’s all a long way from the cultural tribes of old. A few short decades ago, school playgrounds were populated by oil-and-water groups of loudly dressed teenagers — here, the punks; there, the mods; hippies, skinheads, rockers, squares. The records you bought, the cut of your trousers: these were once shorthand for the subculture which defined your adolescence. By the time I was at secondary school, such tribes had all but disappeared; for whatever reason — certainly involving the atomisation of tastes brought on by the internet — the best you could hope for in the mid-2010s was one goth per village, a shuffling, black-clad relic still admirably committed to looking constantly miserable. Our consumption of music, like many other elements of youth culture, had morphed from the collective to the painfully individual. Why risk gassing about a new indie song in the canteen when it probably hasn’t yet made its way into the algorithm of anyone there?

Though 2024 has been in some ways defined by one of the biggest fan monocultures of all time — the obsession with Taylor Swift — the general music scene involves headphoned commuters listening to playlists comprising every different genre imaginable; a little bit of Elvis, a little bit of Charli XCX, leaving us with the impression that we are no longer part of cultural clans but selective, discerning and irreplicably special individuals. How Swift managed to gather up three generations — tweens, twenty-somethings and Millennials — with her lab-grown brand of pop must have something to do with its universality (being, you might say, universally bland); other artists who hope to succeed her (Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter) try to do so by replicating her ultra-processed musicality. Song-streaming apps, which encourage us to skip as soon as things get boring, have pushed out material which is difficult. The most marketable asset in modern pop is hyperpalatability, and the Wrapped charts will reflect that. So just as countercultures vanish, like the sartorially segregated playgrounds above, the insipid comes to blanket all.

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As a result, Spotify, Apple Music, even — gulp — Amazon Music, preclude a culture in which we hear snippets of a remarkable song by an unknown and unremarkable band in a little record shop. Instead, we’re fed “smart shuffles” which, though apparently random and niche, have behind them the heft of record companies who have paid to put that song in your ears, or at the very least place it on your TikTok “for you” page.

But I’m afraid to say that, at 26, I am not as invested in the hopes and dreams of up-and-coming bands as I once was. My adolescent Luddism about music — refusing to download anything, only burning full albums from CDs — now seems unbearably tedious, and I am addicted to Spotify’s convenience. Oh, Big Tech is buggering your debut single? Shame — yeah a medium latte, thanks.

I am just as blasé about data surveillance — a battle my generation lost the moment we got Facebook. Rather than being suspicious of Big Tech, we delight in the way it defines us — and curate it for maximum shareability. Instead of baulking at the bald fact that Spotify logs every millisecond of our listening, notes when we click and skip, and kettles its 626 million users into demographics — prosecco-swigging mums, try-hard roadmen, anxious bisexuals — we broadcast it for free, becoming pro bono brand ambassadors.

The allure of digital reports like Spotify Wrapped now dominates every corner of our digital lives. As I’m writing this, my tyrannical FitBit bleeps at me to get moving; I’ve just checked my nightly sleep report (score, 43 — poor), logged my weight and admired the step count from an ill-advised early morning walk home over the weekend. The point of it all is to explain things — why I’m knackered, why my calves are or are not shapely enough, why I am more virtuous tramping to work on foot than those suckers on the bus. The way such tech has become irrevocably integrated into our routines might explain the love affair between Gen Z and our data overlords — after all, what’s new? I suspect we will not grasp the sinister consequences of this narcissistic stat-harvesting until a massive leak exposes to the world the fact that we have a playlist dedicated to the Vengaboys; until then, just tell me how original I am again. Nobody understands me better than a million zeroes and ones stored in a cloud.