Are you deluded? Are you sure? Not even a little bit?

Don’t take it personally. Everyone is, to some extent. You are, your friends are, and Chris Kirkland’s dad definitely was.

Now if you don’t know the story, Chris Kirkland was an ordinary, not particularly sporty thirteen year old boy who by his own admission was a bit of “a chunky monkey”. The kind of boy who could be lapped in the 100m dash, his boobs jiggling majestically like a Baywatch slow motion scene.

Chris was a substitute for his school team. The goalkeeper got injured during the match and when the coach looked round for a replacement, he saw Chris sitting on the bench, head down, desperately trying not to make eye contact. The coach told him he was going to play in goal. Chris begged him not to put him on as “he’d never played there before”.

Chris’s dad watched him play that very first game in goal. Afterwards he walked round to the local bookmaker’s and placed a £10 bet on his son playing for England. Bit of a strange bet, but the bookie took Kirkland Senior’s business.

The odds for a boy to make it as far as the Premier League is 0.012%. And the odds for them to make it as a full England international are 0.007%. It was a fucking stupid thing to do.

Chris did go on to play for England. Precisely once. But he did make an appearance and he didn’t let in a goal - technically that makes him the greatest England goalkeeper of all time - And Chris’ dad made a cool hundred grand from that little moment of “delusion”.

Or take a story you might be more familiar with, what about Winston Churchill? From one chunky British hero to another. It could be argued that Churchill’s stance against Adolf Hitler was delusional in 1939. The U.K. was still traumatised by the horrendous and pointless bloodshed of WW1, the Americans didn’t want to get involved, and the Axis powers looked very much in their ascendancy. There were many politicians - rational and cool-headed ones - claiming that Churchill’s position was suicidal and that we should be appeasing Hitler or at the very least turning a blind eye to his actions. “Maybe just give him one more country and see if he tuckers himself out.” The PM ignored them, and Britain brought the fight to the Nazis.

The truth is - delusion is a part of life. We need it. When I told all my comedy pals that I was off to start a podcast that’d be the JRE of Europe, they thought I was mental. Turns out, I was: that turned out to be Diary of A CEO.

But even so, if I’d had listened to them, would I have helped build a channel with two million subscribers, interviewed some of my heroes, and become the unspeakable outcast of the UK comedy circuit?

Some delusion is healthy. It makes you a dreamer. Accepting the status quo forever and ever, that’s no way to go about life; you’ll never see what you’re capable of, or how wrong it could all go. And what a tragic thing to miss out.

But delusion isn’t for everyone all the time. Delusion needs to be tempered. Which is hard to do - you rarely know when you’re deluded, and if you do, you’re too deluded to fix it. But when left unchecked, it’s only a matter of time before reality jumps up and bites you on the bollocks. And the more you ignore it the nastier the bite will be.

Have I overextended this metaphor? Probably. But I got a 2:2 in drama from the University of Essex; I don’t even know what a metaphor is.

Politics today is deluded in the worst way. It would be one thing if we had real dreamers. Unfortunately, we seem to have two options.

1) Soul-shattering “realism” that shrugs its shoulders at us and tells us things will never change. That meaningful change is just “too hard” and “not feasible in the current climate.”
2) Hare-brained fantasists who run from evidence and data and say whatever they need to say to win votes.

We’ve been delusional for a while now. The best evidence for that can be found in our economy. We tell ourselves we’re a glorious first-world country. A captain of industry, a hub of culture and creation.

The truth is: we’re about to go broke. We’re one bad Budget away from the King doing Cameos. That’s right. We’ve got a 100% debt to GDP ratio. Our national debt is as much as we earn every year. In 2008, it was 35%. Even in the years of the global economic crisis, we had a healthier ratio. We binge-drank for years, and when the hangover came, we decided we liked it.

We can no longer afford policies that might genuinely help to improve the lives of people in this country. And now our politicians are faced with the difficult choice of having to cut public services in order to keep the country afloat. Except they’re not and every year we spend more and more money as we sink deeper into the financial abyss. And yet we pretend that this isn’t going to have disastrous consequences.

Triple lock pensions, the NHS, unemployment benefits, sickness benefits, schools, roads, defence. We can’t spin all these plates. Cuts need to be made. Something has got to give or we’ll go broke. Which sounds awfully right wing of me. But what other choice do we have?

It’s easy to see where the Left is deluded. We have a Labour PM now who says “we can’t prioritise national security over social security”. What that means is we’re very happy, as a people, to be invaded by Putin just as long as we can continue to collect our sickness benefits for having ADHD. Because that’s going to keep us safe if Putin sends the drones in. And there’s people here watching this going, oh Francis you’re so naive he’s not going to invade. Fine, what happens if he launches a cyber-attack on the NHS and you can no longer pick up your Ozempic. What are we going to do? Go to the gym and eat healthily? No thank you.

But it’s not only the Left who are delusional. There’s a large and growing faction of Righties here in Britain who think the problem – and the only problem – is illegal immigration. As soon as we stab a few dinghies in the channel, we’ll all be living like Scrooge McDuck. Once we stop having to share with those pesky asylum seekers, we’ll be kings.

Meanwhile, they don’t want to seem to spend any less than the previous governments. Triple-lock pensions! Really?! Everyone knows they’re not financially sound – including these politicians – but if they don’t treat the wealthy boomers who vote for them like squabbling toddlers, they might not get in.

Even if we end illegal immigration, lower legal immigration to a sustainable level, deport illegal immigrants and those who are here on a temporary visa who have broken our laws, we’re not even close to sorting out our problems. There will still be disenfranchisement, inequality, and disrepair. Yet, there’s a whole host of people on the Right who believe that we’ll all be living in an Enid Blyton paradise of cricket on the green, warm pints of ale and everyone is a bloody good bloke with a blonde side-parting.

Talking of a questionable blond, and if you really want a good look at some right-wing delusion, you need only peer across the Atlantic. Set your sights on Pennsylvania and see him: President of the USA, Mr. Donald J Trump.

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I love movies. There’s nothing I enjoy more than settling down in a cinema, a box of popcorn in one hand (salty, never, ever sweet - I’m not a nonce) and a branded drum of carbonated sugar-water in the other. As I sit my gelatinous buttocks on the chair, the lights go down, and I relax, ready to immerse myself in a tale told in technicolour. That is until someone starts talking or checks their phone, at which point I cease relaxing and instead dream of behaving like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

If you don’t know Falling Down, it’s the story of a good man doing his best who got pushed too far and then decided to run amok with a gun around LA. What else was he meant to do? Have therapy? He was a middle-aged man in 1993; therapy was just drinking scotch in the dark and shouting at the dog.

I digress. Falling Down wasn’t a blockbuster, but it’s a film that lingers in the public conscience decades after its initial release. It only made $96 million at the box office - a figure that in 2026 would make a Disney executive set themselves commit ritual seppuku in the boardroom with a plastic lightsaber, but to this day, it’s still quoted, referenced, and raided by nerds for niche Halloween costumes. The true metric of a film’s success is if decades later a divorced IT consultant can put on a short-sleeved shirt, carry a briefcase and have three people at Comic-Con go, “oh yeah”.

It’s one of the great films of 1993, the adolescent year of what is, for me, one of the golden ages of cinema. For two very specific reasons.

1. The DVD Market

These days, movies only really get one chance. A few weeks in the cinema, and if you don’t catch fire immediately, you and everyone else are out of this town for good. They’ll make a feeble sum selling it to a streaming giant, and after that it’s gone forever, buried on page 47 of Amazon Prime between Zombie Christmas 3 and a Bulgarian Jason Statham film called Maximum Revenge Time 4: Time 4 Revenge.

Given those stakes, it’s hardly surprising the big studios have become as gun-shy as they have. Reboots galore, remakes a-plenty, and safe, limp movies that won’t offend anyone but also won’t live in the memory long after the credits roll.

If you’re below the age of 30, you might not know this: there used to be comedy films. Actually, real-life comedy films; 90-minute sequences of moving pictures designed to make you laugh. Some were big spectacles, but many were just humble, low-stake stories. High Fidelity, Napoleon Dynamite, Clerks, This Is Spinal Tap, Best In Show, Dazed And Confused. Films in which the central question might only be “Will this man keep his record shop?” Not “Can they stop a huge purple bellend from diddling half the people in the multiverse?” They’re dead now; nobody wants to pay 60 quid for him and his missus to watch a film where zero bridges explode, plus nine for a Tango Ice Blast.

The same is true for dramas, arthouse pictures, and psychological thrillers. The only niche genre - i.e., not Marvel nonsense - that seems to have survived this scourge is horror. Don’t want to watch a slop-block-bluster? No worries! Go to screen 5 where you will promptly shit yourself on a filthy recliner.

It didn’t used to be this way - Hollywood used to have a pretty tasty back-up. If the film flopped in the cinemas there would be a very real chance it could be rediscovered in the home video and then the DVD market.

The ultimate example of this is The Shawshank Redemption.

Now, I can see many of the movie hipsters rolling their eyes and scoffing audibly because I picked possibly the most obvious choice to back up my argument; Next I’ll be telling you The Godfather is quite good and Stanley Kubrick knew where to point a camera. Relax guys, you can put down your A24 tote bags. Just hear me out. The story of how that movie turned from ‘underwhelming financial flop’ to one of the most beloved movies of modern times is fascinating.

In case you’re an amoeba, The Shawshank Redemption is a prison drama based on a widely forgotten Stephen King novella. It was released in 1994 to waves of “meh.” The critics enjoyed it, but audiences avoided it. As such, it grossed a dismal $16 million. That Disney exec is now going at his face with a cheesegrater.

Now there are a few mitigating circumstances to factor in here. Firstly the name was crap. ‘The Shawshank Redemption?’ What does that even mean? It sounds like a shady life insurance company. The only thing I know is that a movie with that title probably won’t feature guns or female characters with massive knockers which rules out the majority of the male population. Secondly, it had an all-male cast, and featured a vicious bumming. Now this was in the 90s, before bumming was cool. So, there goes the rest of the male audience, and the female one with it.

Oh, and that year, it was competing for attention with two lil’ motion pictures called Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump.

The producers also, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to use Stephen King’s name in promotional material as they didn’t want people to think it was a horror movie. Y’know, the guy behind cultural behemoths Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery, and the Stand. Of course you don’t want that old turnip cranking your style.

Now, this is where things start to get really interesting. The production company that made the film, Castle Rock, was bought by entertainment guru and wannabe cowboy Ted Turner. Teddy thought it was brilliant. He thought that it underperformed significantly and believed that all it needed for the movie to thrive was to get people to watch it. A radical theory in the entertainment industry, where the audience is now considered an inconvenience. So he placed it on near constant rotation on his cable TV channel, TNT.

Ted was right. The popularity of the movie exploded. People couldn’t get enough of it and, in the three decades since, it’s become one of the most popular movies of all time. It’s literally #1 on IMDb, above the likes of 12 Angry Men, Casablanca, and Air Bud.

What a lovely story. But imagine if it was released now. There’d be a theatrical release, a flop, followed by joyless obscurity until the sun explodes. Netflix would quietly upload it under “Critically Acclaimed Dramas”, where it would sit untouched beneath a thumbnail of Kevin Hart screaming at a 50ft tall white woman. I mean, would it even get made now? No one’s wearing a super hero costume, no special effects, no gratuitous nudity. What is there apart from a truly heart rending story, which is beautifully acted, masterfully written and exquisitely directed? Nothing. Where’s the hook? There’s nothing you can even put on a lunchbox.

There might be thousand Shawshank Redemptions out there, rotting on streaming services after a feeble box office run. Some of them may have even gone straight there. Most of them will be shit, but with DVDs, the cream could rise to the top. Now, all that lovely cream goes to waste, spilled and pooling on a wet concrete floor like where Andy met The Sisters. I don’t like this analogy anymore.

There’s a great Substack called Stat Significant, and they did a deep dive on the collapse of the DVD market and the disastrous effect it had on the movie industry. Which is what Substack was invented for: somewhere men over 35 can publish graphs about why everything was better in 2006.

At its peak, in 2006, the market was worth 16.6 billion dollars in US movie sales alone. It was worth around 60% of total movie studio revenue. It’s now worth around 800 million dollars. That’s a decrease of around 95.2% in value. Catastrophic is putting it mildly.

In the DVD age, hits could be hits twice. The comedy classic Superbad made 169 million dollars at the box office. Pretty good, but it also made 141 million dollars in DVD sales. Autists out there, I beat you to it: Superbad made nearly half its money from DVDs.

And it wasn’t just good films that benefited. Look at Michael Bay’s transformers. Everyone knows Transformers is unspeakably awful, but it turns out if you put enough explosions on screen and keep them in close proximity to a near-nude Megan Fox, you’ve got yourself a money machine. The first Transformers grossed 708 million at the box office and 305 million on DVD. That’s over a billion dollars!

And what were the studios going to do with all of this money? Well some of it was invested into cocaine, strippers and fat bonuses for everyone involved, but some of it was also used on making smaller more creative movies.

But the most beautiful thing about DVDS is their ability to rescue those brilliant bombs from obscurity. The Shawshank Redemption is not alone here. Take the cult 90’s comedy classic Office Space. A work of satirical genius by Beavis & Butthead and King Of the Hill creator Mike Judge, it’s today seen as one of the great dress-downs of corporate culture and, well, office life to ever grace the screen. Off the back of two hit shows and starring Jennifer Aniston at the peak of her Friends’ power, it underperformed massively. Globally, it only grossed 12.2 million dollars. This bomb would even kneecap one of Mike Judge’s later films, the even more popular Idiocracy, which bombed horrifically on release. However on DVD, it was a hit, and earned double what it ever made at the cinema.

Then there’s Donnie Darko. This esoteric time-travel movie about a wanking Jake Gyllenhaal took home a pitiful 517,000 dollars. There were many factors - Jake wasn’t a star yet, the plot was insane, and nobody knew how to sell it. Oh, and it featured a plane crash in the trailer, weeks after 9/11. Apparently 500,000 of those 517,000 dollars came from Saudi Arabia. But again, as word spread of this strange, sci-fi family drama with a wanking Jake Gyllenhaal began to spread, and off the back of one of the most depressing Christmas #1s of all time, Donnie Darko made millions on the DVD market. At last, it was a hit.

These films simply don’t exist any more. But companies like Miramax, a company with absolutely no troubling historical footnotes whatsoever, (whatever happened to them?) made tens of millions of dollars by making them. Miramax launched careers of a whole host of directors and actors but in particular Quentin Tarantino who then went on and created some of the most beloved movies of the last thirty years. Yes I know Pulp Fiction was released in 1994 and Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and that’s well over thirty years ago but I’m getting old and I don’t want to admit it. Anyway you know what they say, 44 is the new 33. Is 33 even young? Who knows anymore.

But it wasn’t just Tarantino, it was: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Kevin Smith, Uma Thurman, Robert Rodriguez, as well as bringing faded stars necromanced from the mausoleum, like John Travolta. After a string of disastrous flops including the Look Who’s Talking series (one movie about a talking baby is fine. But three?), Travolta was pretty much unbookable. No major studio would take a punt on him. It took a freak like Tarantino to see the potential; he convinced Miramax to pay him $150,000 to appear in Pulp Fiction. Within a year, he was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards.

Mind you he did end up going on to make Battlefield Earth a movie based on an L Ron Hubbard novel which is widely considered to be the worst movie ever made. A film so bad it makes Scientology the second-worst thing L. Ron Hubbard was responsible for. So I’ll let you decide if that’s a good thing or not.

Studios know that the only way to make any money at all is to get bums in theatre seats; there’s no DVD market, no rental circuit, so once it’s out, it’s out. A film now has roughly the same commercial lifespan as a yoghurt. That means making exclusively things that people deem worthy of seeing at the cinema. Remember those great comedies, dramas, musicals and arthouse films I mentioned earlier? Yeah, they’re gone now. Replaced by an infinity of Ryan Reynolds action-comedies and superhero slop. If it’s not a spectacle, everyone just waits until it’s on telly, when the studio hardly sees a cent.

Studios still make money on streaming services through VOD - which stands for Video On Demand, basically DVD but without any pesky DVDs. All the joy of owning a film, except you don’t own it, but nothing compared to what they used to make on the post-theatre market.

One of the most successful movies of the last few years was Wicked. Wicked made 756 million bucks at the box office. On (VOD) it made 100 million. Which works out at a little over 13% of the percentage of box office. That’s less than a third on what Transformers made on DVD. And Wicked made nearly fifty million bucks more at the box office.

Can you guess what was one of the most popular movies of recent years? That’s right, it’s the Super Mario Bros Movie and yes, correct again, our civilization is in terminal decline and maybe we do deserve it. Anyway, it made 1.356 billion at the box office. Which is obviously a dire indictment on everyone currently alive. Even that only made 75 million on VOD. That’s 5.5% of the percentage of the box office. A lamentable return. In 2006 studios would have expected to make 20% of total box office revenue from DVDs at the very least, which in this case would have amounted to just over 271 million bucks.

The numbers in streaming are opaque but let’s look at one deal that made headlines. Netflix paid Sony one billion dollars for access to its movie catalogue over four years. Which sounds amazing; one billion dollars is nothing to be sniffed at. However, that’s 250 million dollars a year for access to Sony’s entire back catalogue. That’s decent money, but not DVD-revenue-in-2006 money. It’s less “fuck you” money, more “let’s not argue” money.

2. Arrested Development

It’s our fault as much as it is theirs; if we didn’t watch it, they’d stop making it. Capitalism always wins. And what people want in these miserable, atomised and cash-stained years is a passport back to a time when things weren’t so awful and that means… childhood. Endlessly and forever.

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We need to talk about the most overused, abused, and cheapened word in the modern English language. No, I am not talking about “unprecedented,” “problematic,” or “influencer.”

We are talking about the word - fascist.

The nuclear option of modern political discourse. Or rather, it used to be. It used to carry the full, terrifying weight of moral condemnation; a label reserved for the kind of totalitarian ideologies that turned nations to meat-grinders across the twentieth century.

Now? “Fascist” is used what happens when you proudly wave the flag of your own country, or when you express a preference for strict border controls, or when you confess on Twitter that you don’t particularly enjoy the new Star Wars spin-off series.

If you walk onto a university campus, or open Bluesky (Remember that? It was Twitter for people who enjoy getting pegged), or turn on the news today, you will find a thriving industry of professional outrage merchants who treat these heavy historical terms not as precise diagnoses, but as all-purpose social media flashbangs. Fortunately none of them can actually throw.

We have entered an era of linguistic hyper-inflation. And just like real economic inflation, where printing money increases the supply but erodes purchasing power, - We've done to the word ‘fascist’ exactly what Germany did to the Reichsmark. You now need a wheelbarrow full of fascists to buy one actual Nazi.

Let's actually educate ourselves on what the word means, because the people flinging it around seem to think “Fascism” was invented on the /redpill subreddit. In 2016.

We have to go back much further than that, and a long way from Silicon Valley. While the ideals of this ideology can be traced back to the end of the 19th century, ‘fascism’ as it is commonly understood originates in 1920s Italy. Turns out those Italians gave us two things: incredible food, and totalitarian nightmare states. Swings and roundabouts.

Back then, it wasn’t an insult - it was a descriptor. One those being labelled with it would have happily accepted, like “conservative”, or furry. Back then, you would put “fascist” in your bio, proudly. There was even a Fascist Manifesto, for Christ’s sake - they called it that. Still I’d rather get caught reading that than the furry manifesto.

Fascism is a real thing, with real consequences. It has features we can identify, and in-borne attributes. Now we have a basic understanding of what it is, we can tell what it isn’t. And what it isn’t is 99% of what people say it is. Fascism is not just a vibe. It is not a synonym for "someone whose politics make me feel mildly uncomfortable." or "having a skeptical view on public spending." But you wouldn’t know it, if you listened to the internet. Or comedians. Or journalists. Or better yet, our political leaders.

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But leave it to the internet, with its hyper-insecure teenage boys, silicon-valley algorithms, and penchant for existential dread usually reserved for German philosophers or emo bands. Their dads waited until forty-five to have a midlife crisis, wile these lads have chosen despair 20 seconds into puberty.

For millions of young men, looksmaxxing is a religion. It is an online subculture dedicated to maximizing one’s physical attractiveness through a series of increasingly unhinged pseudo-scientific rituals. We are not talking about getting a nice haircut, putting on some deodorant, and learning how to ask a girl about her day. No, no. That requires leaving your room. Possibly even developing a personality. Unthinkable.

According to looksmaxxing theology, your entire worth as a human male is dictated by your biacromial diameter - the scientific term for the distance between your shoulder joints. If you have wide collarbones, you are a god. You have the "V-taper." “Get a deep V and you’ll be deep in V.”

In the dark, damp corners of these forums, having narrow clavicles is treated like a terminal diagnosis. It means you are doomed to look narrow, sloping, and inherently beta. You don’t have a torso; you have a wire coat hanger that has been stepped on by a heavy boot.

“I’m sorry, Julian from Croydon. I’ve looked at your photos. You’ve got a lovely personality, a master’s degree in chemistry, and you’re a very nice lad... but your clavicles are off-centre by 0.8mm. It’s over for you, mate. Back to the basement. Don’t forget to shackle yourself.”

Into this void of absolute, unadulterated insecurity stepped a young man who didn’t just participate in the subculture. He branded himself after it. A content creator known to his millions of followers simply as… Clavicular.

Clavicular is an absolute titan in the looksmaxxing community. He’s to the looksmaxxers what Elvis is to rock ‘n’ roll or what Zack Polanski is to erotic hypnotism. A figure too big for his movement. He wasn’t just posting standard gym progress; he was a self-styled "aesthetic consultant." Or what people over 30 call a closet homosexual. On his streams, which pull millions of views, he would look at photos of his desperate, teenage viewers, draw red geometric lines across their shoulders like he was evaluating a piece of prime real estate on a building site, and tell them exactly how "sub-optimal" their skeletons were. It was Grand Designs, except Kevin McCloud tells you that your ribcage has brought shame upon your bloodline. And then, of course, he would sell them the solution.

For the low, low price of a monthly subscription or a PDF download, Clavicular would teach these boys his secret methods for "widening" their frames. He’s like a Tate brother with a bleached asshole.

But here’s the problem with building a career, an empire, and an entire business model on being a flawless, genetically superior specimen: you actually have to be one. You can lie on a CV. You can't lie on a skeleton. Well, you can if you sleep with Kate Moss, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyone can pose for a photo under perfect lights and edit it to within an inch of fiction. Anyone can read a script drafted by a team of writers, specifically oriented to make them appear as charming as Byron. When nobody’s looking, a myth can be maintained with ease. On the internet, the truth has a horrible, stubborn habit of leaking out. Usually because a teenager with three monitors and zero girlfriends has decided to make it his life’s work.

It turned out that the high priest of wide shoulders, the man who was charging young lads fifty quid a pop to diagnose their skeletal failures, was utilizing some very old-school, very embarrassing digital magic: lens distortion, extreme camera angles, and aggressive video editing software. The classic starter set to catfishing. The same toolkit used by every 45-year-old divorcée on Hinge claiming to be 28 and “living their best life.”

The forums started posting side-by-side analyses. And funny enough, whenever Clavicular walked past a doorframe, the wood seemed to warp. Oh no, even his doorframes are looksmaxxing! The bricks on the wall behind him appeared to curve inward, as if his sheer masculine energy was bending the very fabric of spacetime. Every time he flexed, his bedroom became a Salvador Dalí painting.

Unless Clavicular was secretly a mutant with gravitational powers, the conclusion was inescapable: He was photoshopping his torso in real-time video.

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If you are a man of a certain age, your relationship with your morning routine is a masterpiece of low-input-low-output. You wake up at 7:15, groan like a Victorian floorboard beneath a fat elephant, drink a mug of instant coffee that tastes like wet gravel, spend eleven minutes on the toilet reading Wikipedia pages about niche naval battles in the War of Spanish Succession, all before leaving the house to the life you swore you’d never settle for.

Not one calorie is misspent. You’re a potato with a mortgage and a slightly elevated cholesterol level and a family WhatsApp group you’ve long since muted. It isn’t glorious, it’s not going to win you any awards on Instagram, but it is a system that has sustained human civilization since the Bronze Age. We built railways, fought wars, and wrote great literature on a diet of toast, tea, and mild existential dread. Brunel didn’t have a magnesium spray. Shakespeare didn’t check his readiness score before writing Hamlet. Churchill defeated the Germans and was pissed the whole time; he didn’t need a vibrating smart-ring to tell him the Luftwaffe was bombing his house.

Leave it to the internet, with its hyper-anxious middle managers, silicon-valley algorithms, and deep-seated terror of being un-productive for six consecutive seconds, to convince us that simply existing as a normal biological mammal is a failure of discipline. Apparently, being tired is now a mortal sin, and having a nice little sit-down is for pussies.

This is the doctrine of optimisation.

I: The Habits

For a growing legion of young men, living normally is no longer an option. You don’t have habits; you have “protocols.” You don’t drink water; you “optimize your hydration stack. You don’t have a chat with a mate; you “regulate your nervous system.” And whatever you do, you must protect your “dopamine baseline” at all costs.

We are not talking about getting a decent eight hours of sleep, eating an apple, doing the odd jumping-jack, or going for a brisk walk around the park. No, no. That requires leaving your house without a wearable diagnostic laboratory strapped to your wrist, telling you how poorly you slept. Which you already knew, because you were there. Afterall, nothing improves your morning like receiving a numerical breakdown of why it’s going to be shit.

Here are just a few rituals of the new age.

The 4:30 AM Solar Stare: Waking up in your blacked-out, lightless bedroom, before bee-lining to your garden and staring directly into the sun to “reset your circadian rhythm.” They call it “early morning sunlight exposure”; in Britain, it means staring at the shiniest cloud you can find.

Cold Plunging: Spending £2,000 on a custom, stainless-steel ice chest - a luxury wheelie bin for people with LinkedIn Premium - so you can sit in near-freezing water at 5:00 AM, hyperventilating like a panicked walrus, shivering uncontrollably while your neighbors watch through the blinds thinking you’ve finally lost your mind.

Monk Mode: A practice where young lads intentionally isolate themselves from human contact, ban music because it “causes unnecessary emotional spikes,” refuse to eat anything with flavor, and journal their reflections twice a day. No partying, no friends, no girls, it’s like highschool except this time it’s a fucking choice.

And lastly, Continuous Glucose Monitors: This is blokes who don’t have diabetes, wearing a plastic sensor stuck into their tricep that texts their emergency contact if they eat a banana, because the natural sugar spike might cause a 0.4% dip in their cognitive output while writing an email to accounting.

These strange rituals, which may or may not work, commandeer and shape the lives of those who enact them. It’s OCD draped in a Gymshark shirt. It’s religion for men who don’t believe in anything. All the guilt, all the ritual, and none of the choir boy action.

II: The Hero

Every trend has its logical conclusion. This one, in typically dull fashion, is called Bryan.

Bryan Johnson is a 48-year-old American tech millionaire who, in 2013, sold his payment processing company for hundreds of millions of dollars. If most normal blokes got £300 million, they would buy a yacht, a villa in Spain, a couple of sports cars, eat expensive ham, and get slightly rounder around the middle, while enjoying life. You’d die at 71 with a tan and a boat named after one of your first wives.

Not Bryan. Bryan looked at his massive fortune and decided that the best course of action was to spend two million dollars a year trying to reverse his biological age.

He calls it Project Blueprint. Under its commandments, his daily routine is a terrifying glimpse into what happens when an algorithm takes over a human soul:

• He wakes up at 4:30 AM every single day. The only people who have any right to be awake at 4:30am are fishermen, burglars and people still off their nut on ketamine. Brian would never do that as ketamine is fun. So I’ve been told…

• He takes 111 pills a day - pills for his heart, his liver, his skin, his hair, his kidneys, and probably a pill or two to cope with the stress of taking 111 pills. If he falls down the stairs it sounds like maracas.

• He eats a daily bowl of gray, blended vegetables and lentils called “Nutty Pudding” that looks like wet cement mixed with garden mulch.

• He stops eating entirely for the day by 11:00 AM. That’s right -no dinner. Ever. He goes to bed every night with an empty stomach and a heart full of metrics.

• He has even exchanged blood plasma with his 17-year-old son to “rejuvenate” his circulatory system - becoming the world’s first billionaire vampire. Every woman’s dream. The trade-off is he’s sterile and made of porcelain.

He doesn’t go to the pub, he doesn’t eat a pizza, he doesn’t stay up late watching a good film, he doesn’t laugh until his stomach hurts over a stupid joke. He sits in a sterile room, monitoring his nocturnal erections on a digital sensor.

And what has two million dollars a year achieved? He has successfully transformed himself into a haunted mannequin made of marble and cream cheese. He looks less like a rejuvenated 18-year-old and more like a sentient milk bottle.

Bryan, a man with more money than he could ever spend, has managed to turn staying alive into the most miserable, full-time administrative job on Earth. He has optimized away every single reason to actually be alive in the first place. That’s not living; that’s just maintaining a flesh engine. He has extended his lifespan by removing everything that makes time pass quickly.

III: The Heresy

Here is the dark paradox at the center of the biohacking craze: It consumes the very life it claims to optimise.

These lads spend four hours every single morning preparing their mind and body to “live at 100%,” which leaves them with zero hours left in the day to actually do anything remotely interesting. They have optimized away spontaneous pints on a Friday afternoon, bacon rolls on a Saturday morning, staying up late talking bollocks with their mates, and the simple, divine pleasure of doing absolutely nothing for an hour.

They think they are conquering mortality. They think they are becoming elite, high-performing Alpha males. In reality, they are just turning human existence into a corporate audit where they are both the cruel manager and the overworked employee. He has given himself a boss, and the boss is him, and the boss is a psycho.

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Ahhhh, the United Kingdom.

Land of cricket, The Beatles, William Shakespeare, deep-fried Mars bars, and, these days, turning its corner of the internet into an Orwellian bureaucracy.

Over the past few years, we have watched our government turn the World Wide Web into a tightly-monitored, state-approved parish newsletter.” They vowed, initially, to make our country the “safest place to use the Internet in the world”, a promise to shield toddlers’ eyes from Colombian snuff movies. Today, we see it for what it is - digital totalitarianism. From social media clampdowns, threatening to ban VPNs, to requiring a literal biometric check to gaze upon a mere sideboob.

When did this happen? How did they do it? And, most importantly, why?

I: Biometrics in the Bedroom

These things always happen the same: slowly, then all at once.

Not this time. The UK didn’t wade gently into the pool of online censorship; they strapped on concrete ear-warmers and cannonballed headlong into the deep-end.

It was called the Online Safety Act. Every authoritarian law has a lovely name. Apparently the “Give Us All Your Freedom Act” didn’t test well. Drafted under the Conservatives and passed under Labour in October 2023, this was a comprehensive (but still expanding) list of new laws concerning the British peoples’ use of the internet.

We’ll get to some of the more terrifying ones later, but honestly, at first, some of them sounded alright. Bad laws never arrive twirling their villainous mustaches. For example, in light of the act’s passing, platforms hosting adult material would be legally required to verify the age of any visitor before granting access.

It’s a hard one to argue, particularly if you wish to avoid a stay-order from your local primary school. “Only adults can watch porn.” Fine, who could take issue with that?

To access these platforms, a British adult can no longer just click a box that says “I am over 18” (has anyone in the history of mankind ever been stopped by that?) That era is dead. Instead, users must submit government-issued photo IDs, passports, driver’s licenses, or undergo third-party biometric facial age estimation scans via their webcam.

Yes, you read that correctly. It’s the only website that opens by negging you. To browse the web in the privacy of your own home, you have to look into your webcam and let an AI determine if you’re ravaged enough to look at tits.

This government is asking the law-abiding, erection-nursing adult population of their country to hand over their most sensitive and highly-classified identity documents to random third-party verification companies. If a financial institution gets hacked, they steal your credit card and you get a new one. If an adult-industry verification hub gets breached, hackers don’t just have your password, they have your literal passport, your driver’s license, and a high-resolution biometric mapping of the worst photograph ever taken of a human being: your horny, lonely face at 2am.

Ofcom’s gone from checking TV subtitles to auditing your wank. If these porn sites don’t play ball, Ofcom hands them a bill. Our communications regulator is currently investigating over 90 online services, ranging from 4chan to X,specifically targeting Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot. They are handing out devastating penalties, including a £1 million fine to one adult site operator and an £800,000 fine to the streaming platform Kick for age-check failures. The statutory maximum penalty? A staggering 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue. For a major tech firm, that isn’t a slap on the wrist; that’s corporate execution.

That’s not a fine, that’s a divorce settlement.

II: Digital ID - Have You Got A License for That Life?

And what if you don’t want to watch porn? Yes, you, the one eunuch watching this. What about you? Are you safe?

No, and the fact you’re not tells you everything about this policy. The porn wall is no wall at all; perfect stalking horse for the state’s broader, systematic push to eliminate online anonymity entirely. Porn’s just the pilot scheme..

With the passage of the landmark Data (Use and Access) Act, the UK government has formally built the legal scaffolding for a nationwide Digital ID network. They call it the Digital Verification Services (DVS) “Trust Framework,” (because nothing sinister has ever had the word “Trust” in the title), overseen by a brand-new bureaucratic beast called the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (OfDIA).

“OfDIA.” Sounds like Swedish flatpack; Assembly required. Surveillance included.

Under this law, the state is creating a statutory register of certified, private digital ID providers decorated with an official government “trust mark.” A “trust mark.” From the government. It’s like Jimmy Savile issuing DBS certificates. The act also establishes a legal “information gateway”, which sounds like somewhere you buy compost. which enables public authorities and government departments to share your personal data directly with these private digital ID ompanies.

They insist that this is “strictly voluntary,” but that’s clearly political code for “voluntary until you want to buy food.” Once the infrastructure is normalised, the transition from voluntary convenience to mandatory access is just a single stroke of a minister’s pen. And if their current actions are anything to go by, don’t think they won’t do it.

III: The Tweet Police

Let’s say you somehow bypass the biometric walls, you get your digital token, and you decide to actually use the internet to express an opinion.

Nope! In Britain, even your sentences come with sentences. Unlike our transatlantic counterparts, our government sees free speech as a serving suggestion. Libertapas.Sending a message that a court deems “grossly offensive”, which is a wonderfully objective legal standard, or “indecent, obscene, or menacing” isn’t just bad etiquette, it is a literal jail sentence. We’ve criminalised being a dickhead. Which as you can imagine is terrible news for me.

If you think this is an exaggeration, here’s just some of the data revealed through Freedom of Information requests. In a single year, across just 37 police forces in England and Wales, 12,183 people were arrested for online comments and electronic communications. To put that into perspective, that means the British state is arresting roughly 33 people a day for things they said down a phone line or typed on a keyboard. If the crime scene doesn’t have an IP address, they’re not interested.

It’s not just about being offensive. You’re not even allowed to be wrong.

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In the modern world, we have turned the simple act of having a casual human conversation into an elite-level logistics problem. We can instantly video-call somebody in Australia, but meeting a friend who lives ten minutes away requires six weeks’ notice, three rounds of cancellations and the signed-and-sealed blessing of both partners.

Avoiding people is easy. You can work an 8-hour shift, come home, order a three-course dinner directly to your bedsit, and stream a foreign film without interacting with another living soul. Okay, maybe your Uber Eats driver, but you still treat him as if he hasn’t got one. “Pedal through the pissing rain with my noodles, my brave little visa applicant.”

As comfy as it sounds, it isn’t. It turns out your body can’t tell the difference between being abandoned by the tribe, and working from home.We are staring down the barrel of a full-blown public health catastrophe. It is called the Loneliness Epidemic, not to be confused with next year’s Morrissey album. It turns out, substituting actual human proximity with algorithmic interaction and inhumane degrees of convenience isn’t just making us sad, it is quietly killing us.

Today, we’re looking at the staggering macroeconomic data, the terrifying biological repercussions of rejection, and why your phone is so good, it’s killing you.

I: The Lonely Crowd

For a long time, society treated loneliness like a personal failure, a niche emotional bummer that you could fix by just “getting out more” or joining a book club. Or maybe you were lonely for a reason. Maybe you’re a freak and nobody likes you.

Loneliness was itself the problem. Today, we know it’s the start of something. The first domino. The eecond domino is ordering a whole Dominos and crying on the bidet.

The scientific establishment has issued a massive wakeup call. According to data championed by the US Surgeon General, the mortality impact of being chronically socially disconnected is the physical equivalent of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

When it was discovered that cigarettes were causally related to serious illness and early death, the government only let them operate for 4 more decades before clamping down. Which, by government standards, is an emergency response. They spent millions running aggressive, multi-billion-dollar global public health campaigns to get people to throw away their cigarettes. We put graphic warnings on packs, we banned smoking in bars, and made smokers (our fellow men) stand outside in the freezing rain just to have a puff. Ironically, it’s now the only place left to make real friends.

Meanwhile, millions of “healthier” people are sitting alone in their apartments, eating quinoa, doing yoga, pristine lungs a-puffin’. They’re dying; their cardiovascular health is actively deteriorating at the exact same rate as a guy chain-smoking a pack of Malboros on their lunch break!

According to extensive meta-analyses tracking hundreds of thousands of adults, chronic loneliness triggers a 29% increase in the risk of heart disease and a 32% spike in the risk of strokes. Broccoli doesn’t hug you. Or, at least, it doesn’t hug you back.

So where are the graphic warnings for loneliness? Where’s the photo on the cat food packet with a single woman, her face devoured by their beloved Mittens?

Prolonged isolation signals to your ancient, evolutionary brain that you have been cast out from the tribe. And in the stone age, being exiled from the tribe meant you were about to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. So, your body enters a permanent state of hyper-vigilant biological panic. Your body doesn’t know you’re in a one-bed flat in Basildon. It thinks you’re barefoot in the Serengeti. Your cortisol spikes, your blood pressure goes through the roof, and your immune system drops its guard. “Left on read” is as good as “left for dead.”

“Well, nobody invited us to the barbecue, best find a quiet hole to die in.”

Part 2: Too Much, Too Young

We’ve been told for years that isolation is a pensioner’s bane. But tloneliest demographic in modern society is not the elderly. It’s young adults. The window that grandmother is staring out of? She’s actually watching a much lonelier 24-year-old walk home alone back to his goon cave.

Look at the latest figures from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS). When they mapped out loneliness by age bracket, they found that 27% of adults aged 16 to 29 report feeling lonely often, always, or some of the time. Compare that to adults aged 70 and over, where that number drops to just 16%. It turns out your nan has a better social life than you, and she still prints emails.

The generation that has never known a world without the internet, the demographic with 5,000 Instagram followers, 300 Snapchat streaks, and a dozen active WhatsApp group chats, is statistically the most profoundly lonely group of humans on the face of the earth. How?

This is the Connected Illusion. We’ve confused access with intimacy. Thousands of followers - not one pallbearer. We built an entire digital landscape that promised ultimate community, but instead gave us hyper-efficient voyeurism. Gen Z isn’t “connecting” on TikTok; They’re spectating. they are sitting in a dark room watching other people live their lives in 15- second loops.. emotional CCTV. A girl in Bali is healing her inner child, a man in Dubai is escaping the matrix, and you’re eating weetabix minis straight out the box, watching them do it

In yesterday’s pants.. Wondering why your life doesn’t look like a drone shot.

And the mental health fallout is staggering. According to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), 72% of 16-to-25-year-olds explicitly state that loneliness has a direct, negative impact on their mental health. We’ve given kids unlimited access to everyone except each other.

III: Livin’ In A Ghost Town

So how did we get here? Did we all just suddenly wake up one morning and decide we hated each other? No. That was gradual. Like boiling a frog… or living in Birmingham.

No. I mean, yes, have you seen the general public? One bloke’s licking his fingers before touching every avocado in Tesco. Another woman’s on speakerphone arguing over custody in Boots. You spend ten minutes in a Primark on a Saturday afternoon, misanthropy is the only logical conclusion. But that’s not what happened first. Before that, we systematically dismantled the physical architecture of human connection and replaced it with corporate convenience. We demolished the village… and built an Amazon warehouse.

Sociologists talk a lot about the death of the “Third Place.” Your first place is your home. Your second place is your work. The third place is the anchor of community life: the pub, the church, the football match, the local café, the community hall; the low stakes, shared environments where you hang out without an agenda, nobody was monetising the conversation or building a personal brand, and you could cross paths with people outside of obligation, and engage in standard, unscripted human banter. Remember that?

But look at what we’ve done to the third places:

The Workplace has been replaced by Zoom and Slack. We traded the watercooler chat for a muted microphone and an emoji reaction. The closest thing to office gossip is someone accidentally leaving their mic on while shouting at their kids.

The High Street has been crushed by Amazon. You no longer chat with the local shopkeeper; you receive a silent cardboard box dropped on your doorstep by a delivery driver sprinting to meet his algorithmic quota. Your relationship with your local shopkeeper has been replaced by an email saying, “Your parcel is eight stops away.” You know more about your parcel’s journey than your neighbour’s life.

The Local Pub, a national treasure, is evaporating due to soaring real estate costs and inflation, turning community hubs into luxury apartments for people to sit in... completely alone. “Sometimes you’ve got to live somewhere where nobody knows your name.”

Even when we venture out into public, we shield ourselves like we’re entering a radioactive zone. Look around any underground train cart, bus, or waiting room. Two hundred people… all alone. It’s like a silent disco sponsored by depression. Every single human being has a pair of wireless earbuds jammed into their skull, staring down at a glowing rectangle, checking the same five apps like one of them’s suddenly going to contain happiness sending a clear, universal biological signal to the rest of the species: Do not look at me, do not speak to me, I do not exist in this physical dimension..

We have optimised away the “friction” of human interaction, as if people were buffering, treating conversation like a software bug. completely forgetting that those tiny, friction-filled moments, the awkward smile at a stranger, the little nod men do instead of therapy, the brief chat with the barista are the exact micro-doses of social nutrition that keep our brains from melting.

Our species started this journey in pursuit of convenience and ease,but we kept pushing further. We’ve built a world where we barely need to leave our homes to survive, your ancestors crossed oceans. You won’t cross the road for milk, and we spend more of our lives consuming content than living it.

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Human connection is the bedrock of our species.

It’s the reason we build civilisations, write songs, weave matching underwear, and feign sustained interest in photographs of someone else’s childhood caravan holiday to Cornwall. Oh wow, a seagull ate one of your chips in 1993? Please, keep talking, I am riveted.

Finding your person is a majestic, life-affirming journey. But we’re not talking about them today; we’re talking about the survivors. Or, rather, the casualties. The eternal bachelors. The Cuppasoup market. The people who, through a divorce, a long-term relationship collapse, or simply because they spent their twenties and thirties prioritising their career over human replication, or due to plain-old-fucking-about, find themselves back on the open market after the age of 40.

And dating after 40 is not a chic, high-end cocktail mixer. It is the final, desperate hour of a rainy car boot sale in a muddy field in Kent or rural Ohio for our American viewers, where everything good is already packed away in the back of someone else’s Nissan Qashqai.

You got there late, and you’re going home either empty-handed or in a relationship with a decorative samurai sword, which is not getting anyone laid.

If you attend a car boot sale at 7:00 AM, you get the pristine antiques. You get the unblemished vintage watches, the mint-condition vinyl records, the solid oak furniture. In human terms, those are the emotionally regulated singletons. The ones with secure attachment styles, functioning boundary systems, and zero unaddressed childhood trauma.

But those people were bought and paid for decades ago. They were snapped up at 8:15 by savvy shoppers who knew what they were doing. They are currently at home, happily married, arguing about the dishwasher, and permanently off-the-market. They are eating pesto pasta in matching dressing gowns, and they are never coming back for the rest of us.

When you arrive at the romantic marketplace at 4:30 in the afternoon, the vendors are already packing up their damp tarpaulins. The rain is coming down sideways, and the trestle tables are adorned in unwanted leftovers. A single, left-footed Dunlop wellington boot filled with stagnant rainwater. A cracked ceramic mug commemorating the 1981 Royal Wedding. And a VHS copy of Basic Instinct you take home, only to find the one scene you wanted has been warped beyond all recognition into a sort of flesh-coloured Rothko.

We are all the damaged goods left on the table. And I am not excluding myself from this thesis. I, despite my efforts, know exactly what I am: a tired, 42-year-old man whose knees sound like bubble wrap when I use the stairs. If I were a car boot sale asset right now, I’d be an old, heavily dented kettle with an unreliable whistle and a severe limescale problem. You’d look at me and think, “That might still work... but do I need to be the one who finds out it doesn’t?”

The tragedy of midlife dating is that we are all standing in this muddy field, staring at each other’s cracked porcelain and missing gears, desperately pretending we’re browsing a premium antique showroom.

They desperately don’t want you to know that.

I: The Showroom Illusion, And The Maths Behind The Misery

In the old days, dating had a natural, organic rhythm.

You went to a pub, you drank four pints of sub-standard lager, you looked across a sticky carpet, and you made awkward eye contact with someone with a terrible haircut. Today, the entire infrastructure of romance has been outsourced to a digital monopoly designed by tech executives in California.

According to the Pew Research Center, around three in ten US adults have used a dating app, but among people who are single, the proportion is far higher. More importantly, look at who owns the architecture of modern love. A near-total monopoly exists. A single corporate entity, The Match Group, owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, Plenty of Fish,OkCupid, and even BLK - the #1 dating app for Black singles. They control the distribution of human intimacy. They’re basically the East India Company, but for getting ghosted by fuckboys, and their entire business model hinges on a lie…

The Illusion of Infinite Supply.

When you are physically standing in that muddy field at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, your human brain looks at the remaining cars and understands the reality of scarcity. You adjust your expectations. You look at a wicker basket and say, “Well, the handle is slightly loose, but with a bit of wood glue and some effort, it could hold my potatoes.”

The dating apps don’t give you all the information. You can’t see how many cars are left. The Match Group’s algorithms are intentionally calibrated to keep you swiping. Economists call this the “Choice Overload Effect.” A famous study by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper—often called the “Jam Study”—proved that when consumers are presented with 24 choices of jam, they are dramatically less likely to make a purchase than if they are shown only 6 choices. When you give the human brain infinite choices, it paralyzes the decision-making process. The apps exploit this by whispering in your ear that right behind that wicker basket with the loose handle is a hidden, magical warehouse containing ten million perfect, flawless wicker baskets that are hotter, richer, and live exactly 1.2 miles closer to your flat.

Sociologists analysing data from apps like Tinder have found a small number of profiles get most of the attention, while everyone else competes for relatively few matches. It is romantic feudalism. We are the peasants fighting over a mouldy turnip while a 26-year-old crypto-bro named Brayden hoards all the supermodels. Fuck you Brayden, rich and handsome bastard.

These platforms are built entirely for high-speed, superficial visual appraisal. They are designed for twenty-two-year-olds whose faces haven’t yet been subjected to the relentless downward pull of gravitational forces, corporate stress, and decades of societal disappointment, and starting a controversial political podcast.

When you are 43, your face tells a story. It’s a complex narrative involving two redundancies, three lockdowns, a few global wars, an interest rate spike, and fifteen years of wondering why your lower back hurts when you sleep on a mattress that isn’t firm enough, or one that’s too firm, or even just right - it will kill you.

Anyhow, that does not translate well to a 200-millisecond left-or-right swipe decision while someone is sitting on the toilet. Romance has become something somebody decides between a sudden bout of explosive diarrhoea and loading up Wordle.

The system is broken, users are forced to turn their entire human essence into a corporate sales pitch. Have you looked at over-40 dating bios recently? They are an absolute graveyard of human copy-pasting. Every single profile is identical.

If I see one more profile from a forty-four-year-old corporate compliance officer stating that they “love travelling, Friday night margaritas, country walks, and are looking for a partner in crime,” I am going to throw myself into the Thames.

A partner in crime? What crime are we committing at our age? Putting the wrong plastic in the blue recycling bin? Sneaking a bruised peach through the Waitrose self-checkout? We aren’t Bonnie and Clyde. If we commit a crime together at age 45, our primary operational concern will be whether the getaway vehicle has heated seats and adequate lumbar support.

II: What’s Really Left On The Table

At a car boot, everyone’s looking for the same thing: The Unopened Project.

On paper, this person looks like an absolute miracle. You find a profile and think, “My god, look! Good looking. No ex-spouses, no complex custody arrangements, no shared mortgage. They’ve made it to 42 completely unencumbered!” But beware. The Unopened Project is the human equivalent of a 1990s flat-pack wardrobe still inside its original cardboard wrapping. You think it’s pristine, but the moment you open it, you realise the glue has dried out, the dowels are missing, and it has spent twenty years developing a highly specific, totally inflexible way of existing. If you ask them to support you, they will violently collapse.

If someone reaches their mid-forties and has never had to compromise on which way the toilet roll faces, they’ve had sole executive control over the thermostat for twenty years. hasn’t had to endure a single family Christmas with a mother-in-law who judges their gravy-making abilities, they are functionally untrainable. They are, and I say this with love, functionally feral. They are not single; they are undomesticated.

Right next to those kinds of people on the table, you find an even more dangerous category: Spares and Repairs Only. These are the traumatised survivors of the Great Relationship Wars of your thirties. Data shows that the average age for divorce in the UK and US sits precisely between 40 and 45. This means the over-40 dating pool is heavily populated by people who have just been through the multi-year emotional and financial meat grinder of a bitter legal separation.

And many of them don’t want a new partner. They say they do, but not really. They want an unpaid, pro-bono therapist, or an accomplice to help them commit administrative revenge against their ex.

They want an audience. Someone to hear, for the eighteenth time, why Michael’s solicitor was “an absolute giga-whore.”

Their dating profiles are built like defensive military architecture. They write things like: “No drama. If you don’t know what you want, swipe left. I know my worth.” The moment someone writes “I know my worth” on a dating profile, you know exactly what they are worth: approximately three weeks of intense emotional labor followed by a sudden Sunday night text message explaining that they “aren’t ready for anything serious right now because their energy fields are misaligned.”

Or Mercury is in retrograde. It’s amazing the things you ladies will blame on a planet 48 million miles away.

They are flashing their hazard lights before you’ve even turned the ignition key. And just to be clear to the men watching, this is us as well, I know a few spares and repairs only myself.

And finally, ooh finally, you have the most tragic category of all: The Missing Components. These are the people who seem genuinely flawless. They are charming, successful, attractive, and contextually hilarious. You go out for dinner. The conversation flows. You laugh at the same jokes. You start secretly calculating what you might name your future golden retriever.

Then, right around the arrival of the second glass of Pinot Grigio, the missing component reveals itself. They casually mention that they still live with their ex-spouse or that they aren’t technically divorced, Or they casually mention the mild inconvenience that they actually live in Australia. True story.

And all of this would be amusing if the targets of this market weren’t real. Lonely people suffering from what I call The Paradox of the Bagged Item. When you buy something at a car boot sale early in life, you take it home, you clean it up, and it integrates into your house. It becomes part of your domestic landscape. But when you try to integrate a new human being into your life after 40, you aren’t just bringing home a new item—you are trying to jam an entire, fully formed, highly opinionated household into an already crowded room.

By 40, we are all carrying an immense amount of luggage. And it’s not neat, matching luggage either. It’s those massive, blue checkered IKEA bags that are splitting at the seams, held together entirely with duct tape, resentment, and hope.

We know this about ourselves, and we know it about each other. So we don’t go in with our hearts open; we become romantic auditors. Psychological studies on midlife dating behavior show that older singles display significantly higher rates of “relationship skepticism” than younger demographics.

And that makes sense because we’ve been burned. We sit across from a potential match, and instead of listening to their stories, we are running a risk assessment matrix in our heads. We’re not on a date anymore; we’re surveying the site in hard hats.

“Ah, they mentioned their mother three times in the first ten minutes. That indicates an unresolved attachment dependency.”
”They didn’t offer to split the bill, which implies an entitlement complex.”
”Asked the waiter for the wifi password - needy.”
”They use an Android phone; clearly, they are a psychopath.”

We are so busy looking for the cracks in the porcelain that we don’t even notice if the item can still hold water.

III: Facing Facts

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It’s the most enduring romantic fantasy in human history.

No, I am not talking about finding a partner who remembers to put the lid back on the toothpaste; I’m talking about communism.

The political philosophy that simply refuses to die. No matter how many times it’s tried, no matter how many economies it liquefies, and no matter how many millions of people it systematically destroys, it keeps coming back. It’s like herpes, or The Fast and the Furious franchise. And like the Fast and the Furious, each new installment is more costly, makes less sense, and still somehow involves Cuba.

Just when you think, “Surely, we cannot possibly endure another one of these,” a new generation turns up, slaps a sickle emoji in their social media bio, and screams, “But that wasn’t real communism, Francis! Real communism has never been tried!”

It’s the only ideology in history that needs 200 million dead beta testers before the product is ready to launch. Just think of it - the sheer, Olympic-level hubris one requires to look at the trail of hungry corpses that define the twentieth century’s various attempts to secure Marxist nirvana and say,

“You know what? Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Kim Il-sung, and Robert Mugabe, maybe they all just lacked my specific nuance. If I had been in charge of the agricultural collectivization of the Ukraine in 1932, they’d be dying of obesity in satin beds instead of malnourishment in bread lines, and the aesthetic would have been brilliant.”

The only thing standing between Stalin and utopia wasn’t economics. It was Poppy from Surrey’s 2:2 Sociology dissertation.

It is an extraordinary delusion. According to the most conservative demographic and historical consensus, including data compiled in The Black Book of Communism by Harvard University Press, the twentieth century death toll of communist regimes sits somewhere between 85 million and 100 million people. I’ll say that again—between 85 million and 100 million people. A couple of teething issues. Nothing a few minor tweaks couldn’t fix.

That’s the equivalent of wiping out the entire modern population of the United Kingdom, plus the entire population of Australia, and then and then looking at Denmark and thinking, “Fuck it.” That is not a hiccup. That is not ‘a poor policy’. That is a century-long human meat grinder, running at all costs. That is the policy.

Yet, if you walk onto a university campus or have a scroll through TikTok today, you will find a thriving industry of wealthy, Western, upper-middle class influencers, whose only experience of famine is a 16:8 intermittent fast, getting all misty-eyed at the prospect of gulags and death marches. They see the Soviet Union like it was a historical Glastonbury only with more queues and, admittedly, better toilets.

We have entered the era of the Champagne Bolshevik. The revolution will begin immediately after brunch. No gluten, obviously.

The generation that hates capitalism so passionately, they take to the airwaves to stream their outrage twenty-four hours a day, deploying an electronic device built by slaves while telling you that Global South exploitation must end. Distributing their diatribes over Wi-Fi provided by the free market they’re trying to abolish, adorned in a $1,200 designer t-shirt that was shipped to their luxury apartment with Same Day Prime delivery. The revolution has never had better broadband. Workers of the world, you-like.

II: What It Is (And Why The Kids Love It)

The young comrades that make up the modern Left seem to think Communism was invented by a trendy graphic designer on Pinterest in 2018. As far as they’re concerned, Marxism began when someone put “tax the rich” on a dress, and charged $18,000 for it. Ironically, tax deductible.

The concept traces back to the 1840s, entering the public consciousness in 1848, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Marx, famously, never held a job and sponged off Engels for decades; he literally needed a sugar daddy to abolish capitalism. The two argued that all of human history is defined by a class struggle between the bourgeoisie, the wealthy who own the factories and the land, and the proletariat, the working class who sell their labor. To break the cycle, the workers must violently overthrow the owners, abolish private property, seize the means of production, and hand everything over to the state, which would temporarily manage society until the state magically withered away into a classless, moneylender-free paradise. Don’t worry. The state will manage everything temporarily.

Like airport security. Like emergency Covid powers. Like the BBC licence fee. Like income tax.

This, the writers thought, was the inevitable result of capitalism. Their followers couldn’t be bothered to wait around.

It sounds deeply altruistic when you’re reading it in a university library. In practice, it’s a paradox. The classless society requires a ruling class. It might not be a monarchy or a democracy, but someone needs to be in charge. To make sure everything’s divided evenly, and that nobody overthrows the communist system. And once that’s installed, then what?

The state never withers away. The state is your mate saying he’ll only crash on your sofa for a couple of weeks. Twelve years later, he’s still borrowing your phone to check his ex’s Instagram Stories, whines about the thermostat settings, and has killed all of your most productive farmers.

When you give a centralised bureaucracy total control over food, shelter, jobs, and life itself, you don’t get a paradise. You get HR with Nuclear deterrents. You get an all-powerful, totalitarian regime that has to build walls and gun down its own citizens to stop them from fleeing the workers’ utopia.

And we’ve seen it time and time again. Remember that 85 million number? That’s not collateral damage. That’s the brochure. That’s how many fell into the jaws of totalitarian murder in the pursuit of vegan buffets, drum circles, and open mic poetry.

Yet, despite this unblemished track record of absolute failure, we keep leaping into the jaws. Specifically, young people. And if you think it’s just a few edgy teenagers on the internet, you aren’t paying attention to the actual data.

Look at the political trends over the last few years. Polling from organizations like the Institute of Economic Affairs found that a staggering 67% of young people in the UK say they want to live under a socialist economic system, with a significant portion openly identifying capitalism as the source of all modern evil. Despite it being the reason they can get a Deliveroo, vape, and a weighted blanket delivered to their anti-capitalism hug-box.

Ironically, that sentiment has created a massive, highly profitable industry of radical political consumerism. Walk around London or any major university town, and you will see advertisements for Marxist Walking Tours, where young people pay £20 a ticket to walk past historic capitalist banks while listening to a guide explain why money shouldn’t exist. We’ll finish in the gift shop. Capitalist currency pays a commercial business for a guided penny-dreadful through the evils of commerce.
Egg on face, while we still have either.

We see membership numbers spiking for organizations like the Socialist Workers Party and radical youth communist leagues. Week-in and week out, you can find twenty-one-year-olds standing on high streets outside tube stations, eagerly handing out copies of The Socialist Worker with the same predatory energy as a religious cult or a multi-level marketing scheme selling weight-loss shakes.

And why are they falling for it? Because the human brain is hardwired to love a shortcut. Communism promises an end to the brutal, exhausting anxiety of the capitalist marketplace. It converts the natural, healthy frustration of youth into a religion of institutionalized envy. It hides the gulag behind a wall of promised utopia.

III: The Law of the Vital Few

Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s not my fault that the communist dream of absolute equality always shatters upon impact with reality. It’s basic arithmetic. It turns out, the universe does not care about your manifesto. Gravity, to my knowledge, has never once attended a diversity workshop.

There is a mathematical law in economics and nature known as the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. Discovered by Vilfredo Pareto, it states that in almost any system, roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. Twenty per cent of your apps use eighty per cent of your battery, twenty per cent of your friends are responsible for eighty per cent of your regrets and that one crazy girl you brought home one night is responsible for 80% of all the terrifying texts you get. It’s maths.

The reason nobody is listening to your avant-garde podcast about post structuralist poetry hosted by you and three people all called Rowan isn’t because the capitalist bourgeoisie is actively suppressing your signal, it’s because the Pareto distribution dictates that a few entities will always capture the vast majority of the audience’s attention. It happens under every system.

It’s also completely outside of our control; the fatal arrogance of the Soviet Union was believing they could legislate this law of nature out of existence. They looked at human nature and went, “nah, fuck this right off.” When Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin liquidated the Kulaks, the relatively wealthy independent farmers during the early years of Soviet rule, they claimed they were destroying a corrupt class of capitalist oppressors.

But they weren’t destroying an artificial political class; they were destroying the top 20% of the farmers who produced 80% of the agricultural output. You can redistribute land. You can’t redistribute competence.

Because even in a group of entirely socialist farmers, the Pareto distribution still applies. Some farmers are naturally more competent, some are harder working, some have slightly better soil, and some don’t spend their afternoons drinking dirty-bathtub moonshine.

When the Soviet state shot or exiled that productive 20% in the name of “fairness and equity,” what happened? The remaining 80% didn’t magically step up production. Why would they? So they could be liquidated too? Congratulations, Comrade Ivan, you grew the most potatoes this month! Employee of the Month. You’re fired. It’s like that Rush song about the trees - “And the trees are all kept equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw.” They couldn’t create excellence. They could only punish it.

The entire agricultural system collapsed, resulting in the Holodomor, the catastrophic man-made famine where over 3.5 million people starved to death in Ukraine alone.

They could only fix inequality by making everyone equally hungry.

IV: Lessons from Venezuela

Let’s leave the air-conditioned penthouse rooms of West Hollywood and the Marxist walking tours of East London where revolution always finishes with a Q&A in a coffee shop, and look at the real-world stakes of this ideology. And I’ll admit, this is deeply personal for me.

As I might have mentioned, my mother is from Venezuela. I have watched, in real-time, over the last two decades, as one of the wealthiest, most resource-rich nations in South America, a country sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, was systematically brought to its knees by the “Chávista” socialist revolution.

Today, more than 7 million Venezuelans have fled the country. That is a refugee crisis larger than Syria’s, generated entirely by economic mismanagement and ideological arrogance. Seven million people don’t abandon their homes because “the vibes were off”.

And if you want to know how the system truly treats the working class, you only have to look at how it responds to natural disasters. Just recently, northern Venezuela was struck by a catastrophic doublet earthquake, a 7.2 magnitude foreshock followed 39 seconds later by a massive 7.5 mainshock. It was the strongest seismic event to hit the country in 125 years.

The official statistics from the ground are horrifying. Over 1,700 people are confirmed dead, thousands are injured, and more than 46,000 people are currently missing beneath the rubble in Caracas and La Guaira.

Venezuela didn’t collapse because of a sudden, unpredictable shift in tectonic plates. It collapsed because the state nationalized the industries, destroyed price mechanisms, printed the currency into oblivion, and replaced competent engineers with loyal party bureaucrats.

And when a disaster like that strikes a socialist state, who pays the ultimate price? It is always, without exception, the poor who get the worst hand.

While the ruling elite, the military generals, and the “Boligbourgeoisie” live in reinforced luxury villas in protected pockets of the capital with private generators and imported food, the working class live in poorly constructed, concrete-brick houses stacked precariously on the hillsides of barrios like Petare. Socialism always promises to abolish class. What it actually does is make the class system more apparent. When the earth shakes, the hillsides liquefy, and the homes of the poor collapse like stacked cards. Why? because twenty years of state corruption means there are no building codes, no infrastructure investment, and no functioning emergency response. Concrete can’t “identify” itself into structural stability.

When the Red Cross and humanitarian teams arrived on the ground, they found hospitals without running water, without antibiotics, and without basic trauma supplies. This isn’t because of the natural disaster; the hospitals were empty before the earthquake.

That is the true face of the ideology that Western influencers romanticize on Twitch. In West Hollywood or Brixton, communism is an edgy lifestyle brand, like being into crust-punk or New French Extremity. In Caracas, it’s a collapsed roof over your head, and an empty medicine cabinet. It’s the death of your family and friends. But that doesn’t look good on a shirt.

VI: The Only Real Alternative

I’ll concede that capitalism isn’t perfect either. Like communism, it’s backed by beautiful, well-intended principles that, in practice, don’t always create the most desirable outcomes. For most of us, it’s a rat-race where the cheese is dynamically priced. Very little is guaranteed and your life is defined by your work. It’s inherently inequitable, often ruthless, and produces an ambient anxiety that’s so omnipresent, it’s easy to forget it’s even there.

It’s no surprise that people go looking for an alternative. But if communism is a catastrophic human meat grinder and capitalism is a hyper competitive, high-stress casino that leaves people feeling alienated, overworked, and broke, what do we do? Other than become a Labrador.

Winston Churchill captured the brutal, unvarnished reality of the democratic-capitalist condition perfectly in his famous 1947 address to the House of Commons.

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...”

Which is the most British endorsement of anything, ever. It’s shit, but it’s the best we’ve got. Capitalism, for all its faults, has one mathematical, foundational saving grace that no collectivist regime can ever replicate: It is the only system in human history that treats you like an individual. One with choices, agency, and unique attributes.

Under capitalism, you can fail. Often through no fault of your own. But at least nobody made you fail. At least, the universe’s whims stitched you up, not the government’s. Adam Smith - the theory’s main man - famously said that poverty was a state of nature. Even at its worst, capitalism is only as bad as no system at all. Communism, on the other hand, is worse; it takes from you the things that you made yourself.

Under a capitalist system, you have the freedom to be a complete hypocrite. And millions do. You have the right to log onto a corporate social media platform, access high-speed privately owned broadband, wear an expensive designer garment, and spend your evening selling the concept of Marxist revolution. It’s the only ideology confident enough to stock its own critics. Waterstones has a Marx section. Pyongyang does not have an Adam Smith table. Freedom is weird like that.

But history has proven, with terrifying, bloody consistency, that the moment you trade that flawed individual freedom for the grand collective fantasy, the trap snaps shut. The utopian vocabulary evaporates, the borders are locked, and the tyranny begins.

The next time you see a young person standing outside a tube station handing out communist leaflets asking if you’ve got a minute to abolish private property, or a multimillionaire streaming from a luxury gaming chair about the glory of wealth redistribution, look past the aesthetic. Peel off the sickle emojis and smack away the designer berets.

Remember the empty hospitals of Caracas, remember the liquidated farms of Eastern Europe, and remember that the most valuable thing you own isn’t the means of production—it is your right to stand up, go nose-to-nose with the people in people, and say “No.”

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Last month, a 32-year-old software engineer from Birmingham spent £450 on a completely empty box.

Why? Because it was briefly touched, for approximately four seconds, by a 19-year-old Instagram model. For his hard-earned money, he also got a ten-second voice note from her: “Thanks for being such a special boy, Kevin.”

Kevin is no freak. Well, he is, but not as much as you think. He’s merely one of millions who participate in the Simp Economy.

“Simp”, originally short for simpleton but mutated across chatrooms and forums into a devastating slur, refers to a man who provides excessive attention, unreciprocated financial capital, and desperate validation to a creator online in a tragic, one-sided quest for emotional or physical intimacy.

Now if you happen to be a normal human being, you might think it’s no big deal.

“It’s just lonely blokes sending a few quid to pretty girls on the internet. Live and let live!”

No. It is not harmless, you sweet, naive summer child. It is an industrial-scale financial extraction machine that makes Las Vegas casinos look like a charitable church bake sale. We have quietly constructed an entirely new digital infrastructure specifically engineered to commodify human isolation, financialize male loneliness, and turn the basic human desire for romantic connection into a hyper-monetized, direct-to-wallet subscription funnel. It’s basically The Matrix, but instead of harvesting our bodies for electricity, they’re draining our Monzo accounts and our balls for feet pics.

And it’s not just desperate girls in their room; Hollywood actresses are in on the racket. Drea De Matteo, Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth, and more of the honeys you once had plastered on your bedroom walls have turned to OnlyFans. Think of that - these women, to rescue their dignity, have turned to pornography.

How did we get here?

This economic explosion is happening precisely because we are currently navigating a massive, global “loneliness epidemic” or “friendship recession.” Study after study shows that young men have fewer close friends, fewer romantic relationships, and less face-to-face social interaction than at any other point in modern human history. A recent survey found that over 25% of men under 30 report having no close social connections. A quarter. Stalin couldn’t isolate people this effectively, but to be fair, I hear his tits were mid.

But why pay? Since the advent of free and easy online pornography, nobody’s had to pay to see a sideboob since the early 2000s. Why are men in their millions dipping into their pockets for it? Forgoing luxuries and necessities for something that exists elsewhere free of charge?

This economic engine relies on a psychological concept known as a parasocial relationship - a one-sided relationship where one person extends immense emotional energy, time, and financial capital, while the other person has absolutely no idea they exist, or treats them purely as a line item on a spreadsheet.

In the days of yesteryear, this affliction would amount to little more than some harmless stalking and Peeping Tommery, hiding in a bush with binoculars like a respectable British pervert. In the digital age, there are no limits. Modern tech platforms didn’t just exploit this dynamic, they industrialised it.

I: The Pyramid of Geezer

At the very bottom of the pyramid, you have The Masses. Those who get suckered in by the free content. The TikTok dances, the Instagram gym selfies, the Twitch streams. This is the bait. The creator looks directly into the lens of their phone, making eye contact with millions of guys simultaneously, creating the subconscious illusion that she is looking directly at them. Young men, alone and right-handed, with the forearm strength of a Bulgarian shot-putter, respond accordingly - her affectionate gaze, aimed at both millions and nobody in particular, inspires them to reach out. But how?

Easy; they’ve already set up Tier 2 - The Subscribers. The creator says, “Hey, if you want to see the real me, the unfiltered me, join my private platform for just $9.99 a month.” The young man joins. He enters the gate. He thinks he’s now part of an exclusive club.One with only 47,000 other members.

The creators make vast wealth of Tier 2; a few thousand men giving you 10 dollars a month adds up quickly. But it’s still not where the real money is made. The subscription fee is just the cover charge to get into the casino. The house always To rub salt in the wound, you’re not even his only boyfriend wins, and in this case the house is wearing cat ears.Industry data reveals that standard monthly subscriptions only account for about 35% of a top creator’s revenue.

For the real dosh, you gotta keep climbing: The Pay-Per-View Messages and Tips.

Once a guy is inside the platform, he enters the third tier: The VIP Churn. This is where the creator sends a mass, locked direct message to thousands of subscribers simultaneously that says: “Hey babe, I made a special video just for you tonight, pay twenty dollars to unlock it.” An exclusive club with ninety thousand other members - the most crowded VIP room in history .To the lonely guy sitting in his flat at 2 AM, that message arrives in his inbox looking like a personal, intimate DM sent just to him by his better-half. His brain/dick overrides logic, his credit card comes out, and the transaction is complete.

At the absolute apex of this pyramid sit the most prized benefactors of all: The Whales.

In the tech and gambling industries, a “whale” is a high-net-worth user who spends astronomical amounts of money. It’s the old lady throwing away her grandchildren’s inheritance at the slot machine, occasionally being gifted a free prawn cocktail by the casino that’s putting her family into generational debt. In the Simp Economy, they are the lifeblood of the entire system. Financial breakdowns of top adult platforms show that a tiny fraction, just 4.2% of all subscribers, generate the overwhelming majority of the platform’s revenue. And things haven’t even gotten weird yet.

II: The Bazarr of Bizarre

When a parasocial relationship reaches a fever pitch, normal human logic evaporates, and men will pay premium luxury-car prices for things that are legally classified as biological waste, and in any other context, you would pay to be taken away by a man in a hazmat suit.

The patient zero for this trend was Belle Delphine. In 2019, this nineteen-year-old internet personality decided to sell small glass jars of her actual, used bathwater to her fanbase, labeling it “GamerGirl Bath Water.” She charged $30 a bottle.

Thirty fucking dollars. For a jar of lukewarm tap water that had briefly commingled with her skin and soap residue. And the terrifying thing is, it sold out in three days. She cleared a staggering $90,000 in profit from a single batch of bathwater. Men were buying it to display on shelves like a priceless Ming vase. Well at least, some were. Others, contrary to the instructions on the jar, drank it, inviting us to ask “Was the Industrial Revolution worth it?” Did we invent antibiotics, split the atom, and build the combustion engine just so some degenerate redditor could willingly give himself cholera from an E-girl’s runoff?

Belle Delphine was just the opening act. The Simp Economy, quickly bored of her paddling pool of fluids, was headed for the deep end.

Or see Alexia Grace, a former minimum-wage barista from Derbyshire. She realised that making lattes was a terrible way to pay a mortgage, so she pivoted. She started going to intensive boxing sessions, wearing heavy hoodies, and afterwards, wringing her sweat-soaked clothes out into tiny glass vials. She sells these sweat vials to her OnlyFans subscribers for huge sums, pulling in up to £10,000 a week. She literally bought a two-hundred-thousand-pound house in cash, funded entirely by her blood, sweat and tears. Hey. At least it wasn’t piss.

And if you think that’s still a bit tame, let us look at reality television star Stephanie Matto, better known as “Fart Jar Girl”, who like the name suggests built a highly lucrative enterprise selling her own flatulence in glass jars. She charged $1,000 per jar of jarred flatulence!

A self sustaining economy for selling wind?! Ed Miliband must be bloody loving this.

She made over $200,000 doing this before she had to be hospitalized because her diet of beans, protein shakes, and hard-boiled eggs gave her such severe chest pains she thought she was having a cardiovascular event! She literally gave herself a medical emergency trying to keep up with the market demand for her intestinal gas!

After that, the requests get hyper-specific. Creators routinely report men paying hundreds of dollars for:

• A jar of water they have gargled and spat back out.

• Used gym trainers

• And a massive, booming industry known as SPH: Small Penis Humiliation, where men pay $100 just to have a woman look at a picture of their dick via DM and send a voice note telling them they are pathetic.

Men are opening their banking apps, authorizing the transaction, and losing a hundred quid just to have a stranger on the internet call them a disappointment! My friend, your parents are already doing that to you for free at Sunday lunch!

III: The Farm-Raised Catfish

The parasocial facet of this enterprise is no accident. If you happen to be one of the lonely men we’re talking about, throwing their savings into the void for a glimmer of ‘attention’ from the Fart Jar Girl, you need to hear this.

My friend. I say this with the utmost compassion, from one human being to another: she isn’t there. You are not talking to her. You have never talked to her. You are talking to a thirty-four-year-old bloke named Ivan, fat and sat at his desk in the Soviet Bloc. You’re not even his only boyfriend.

Welcome to the world of OFM: OnlyFans Management Agencies. It’s essentially just Deloitte for prostitutes. Sorry, that’s just Deloitte.

Despite what’s promised, OnlyFans is not a ticket to the big money; an independent, unmanaged creator on these platforms earns an average of just $130 a month. That’s not exactly ‘fuck you” money. It’s more ‘for fuck sake’ money. The reality is that the top 0.1% of accounts capture a staggering 76% of all the money on the site. To break into that elite tier, creators hand over the keys of their digital identity to these corporate agencies.

And how do these agencies operate? They use a strategy known within the trade as “Ghost Chatting.”

The creator’s only job is to provide raw photos and videos. Once the media is uploaded to a shared Google Drive, the agency takes complete control of the account. They hire armies of professional chatters, working in rotating eight-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. These chatters are armed with comprehensive training manuals, psychological profiling tools, and detailed internal spreadsheets tracking every single subscriber’s financial history and emotional vulnerabilities - you’d swear it was a real woman!

Look at this actual text from an agency training manual leaked online. Look at how calculated it is. It’s a guide for exploitation.

“If the subscriber mentions a hard day at work, do not send a generic reply. Validate his role as a ‘provider.’ Make him feel strong. Once the emotional connection is established, immediately lock the next message behind a $50 Pay-Per-View barrier and label it ‘A little something to help you unwind, baby.’”

The agency typically takes a massive 30% to 50% cut of the gross revenue generated by the account. The lonely guy at home thinks he is building a genuine connection with a beautiful woman, but he is actually playing high-stakes financial chess against a professional corporate copywriter whose sole metric for success is maximizing the average revenue per user. This is an industrialized catfishing operation. You aren’t paying for love; you are paying the salary of a predatory marketing department. In summary, it’s horny guys in India, paying to message other guys in India.

IV: The Catfish of the Future… Today!

But if you think human ghost chatters are dystopian, brace yourselves, because the Simp Economy is, as we speak, crossing into a terrifying new frontier: Artificial Intelligence.

Human chatters are effective, but they come with major liabilities. They require sleep. They require shift pay. They can get burnt out. But an AI large language model? An AI can chat with one hundred thousand men simultaneously, in eighty different languages, with flawless contextual memory, absolute emotional consistency, and zero overhead cost. Bargain.

Over the last twelve months, we have seen the explosive rise of the AI Companion and Virtual Influencer market.

Tech startups are now creating fully synthetic, entirely digital models using advanced deepfake technology and generative AI. These models do not exist in the physical world. They are entirely lines of code inside a server farm. Yet, they have verified social media profiles, millions of followers, and thousands of paying monthly subscribers.

‘Human creators’ (what a bleak combination of words) don’t see these cyber-whores as competition. Instead, they’re learning from them. Thousands of creators are now partnering with tech firms to train AI clones on their voice and text history to create interactive “AI Girlfriends.” For a monthly fee, users can text these AI entities in real-time. The AI will send them instant voice notes, ask them how their day was, generate custom selfies on demand, and engage in hyper-personalized conversation.

A human chatter at an agency is a financial scam, yes, but at least there is a living human brain on the other end of the wire. With AI, the illusion is complete. We are providing a generation of isolated men with a perfectly compliant, endlessly available, synthetic relationship that requires absolutely no social skills, no mutual compromise, and no personal growth. She never has a headache. She never says, “Can we talk?” She never asks you to meet her parents. She never looks at your flat and says, “Francis, Is this actually how you actually live? Use a plate for fuck sake!”

Why would a lonely, socially anxious young man go through the terrifying, vulnerable process of asking a real woman out on a date, risking rejection, navigating real human flaws, and building actual mutual respect, when he can pay twenty pounds a month to an algorithm that is mathematically optimized to tell him exactly what his ego wants to hear? Real dating involves eye contact, compromise, listening and occasionally having to use plates in your own bloody flat. No thank you.

The path of least resistance inevitably leads to ruin. It doesn’t cure loneliness; it insulates you against reality. It takes the most fragile part of the human condition, our intrinsic need to be seen and valued - and turns it into a closed-loop algorithmic profit engine for a venture capital fund. Somewhere, a man in a patagonia fleece is looking at your loneliness on a graph and hoping it’s not a bubble.

V: How To Rescue The Men In Your Life (Including You)

Look, if you’re one of the guys we’re talking about, are feeling a bit defensive, or even just recognize some of these habits in your own life - or the life of a friend, a son, or a brother - don’t beat yourself up.

The desire for connection, for intimacy, and for validation is not a weakness. It is the most fundamentally human thing about you. There is no shame in wanting to feel seen. The tragedy is that you are being offered a plastic, corporate, counterfeit of that desire and being charged premium monthly rates for the privilege.

The antidote to the Simp Economy is simple, but it requires a massive amount of courage: We have to log off and step back into the real, messy, terrifying world. The one with eye contact, bad dates, being judged, and women who can’t be paused when they start talking about their day.

And hey, the graphics out here are incredible, even if the NPCs can be a bit rude.

Take the money you are spending on digital validation and reinvest it into your actual life. Spend it on a gym membership where you actually talk to people. Spend it on a hobby, a class, or a pint with an old mate you haven’t seen in months. Go through the agonizing, beautiful process of building real relationships with real people who have flaws, but who can actually love you back. Who don’t cynically call you a “provider” when you talk about your day at work. Who don’t try and sell you their farts and bathwater. People who, when they look you in the eye, really do.

And if you know a young guy who you suspect is falling down this digital rabbit hole, trapped in a parasocial loop, wasting his wealth on an algorithm or a ghost chatter, do not mock him. Do not lecture him. Show him the corporate gears behind the curtain. Let’s pull the mask off the machine and understand exactly how the trick works. Because the second you realize that your deepest emotional needs are being treated as an optimization problem by a software company, the illusion shatters completely.

Hello reader. This article is part two of a furious screed on the subject of subscriptions, tech supremacy, and the atomising effect of disownership. I recommend you read the first part before you get ‘round to this one.

Done that?

Lovely. Let’s crack on.

Part 4: The Hardware Hijack

Everything we have discussed so far—as invasive and irritating as it may be—has largely existed in the digital world. It’s software, streaming services, cloud storage. And however much I may dislike some of it, I can at least understand the economic argument. Netflix today is a different service to what it was a year ago, and you’re paying for those updates along the way. I wish I didn’t, but I can accept those terms.

But that wasn’t enough for the fat cats. Corporations looked at the physical world - actual objects made of metal, plastic, leather, glass, and copper wiring - and asked a question so breathtakingly audacious that it deserves to be framed and displayed in a museum of pure corporate villainy: “What if we made them pay every month for a thing they already own?”

A business model only previously attempted by the Mafia.

Nobody did it better than BMW.

A few years ago, BMW rolled out an infamous experiment. They sold customers luxury cars physically fitted with heated seats. That is to say, the heating elements were already installed. The wiring was already run through the chassis. The button already existed on the dashboard. The hardware was physically sitting inside the vehicle. BMW had already spent the factory capital to manufacture it. The customer had already paid for the weight of the car. The seat was, in every meaningful sense, fully capable of warming your backside. The arse-warming technology was present. The bum infrastructure had been completed. The cheeks were standing at the border, ready to receive aid.

But if you wanted it to actually do so? That would be an additional monthly fee.

You would open an app on your phone. You would enter your credit card details. You would subscribe. And then, and only then, would a server in Munich beam a digital permission slip to your car allowing the electricity to travel four inches onto your ass. Electricity you already paid for when you filled the thing up with petrol.

Call me old-fashioned, but generally, when I buy a chair, I expect the chair to perform all of the chair-related activities immediately! I do not expect to discover that one of its cushions has entered into a separate contractual relationship with a German conglomerate!

I don’t want to find out that my left buttock has a direct debit set up with a Bavarian board of directors just to avoid frostbite on the M4 in February.

When it came time to derive the findings of this experiment, BMW’s team came to a shocking conclusion: people absolutely hated it. And I mean genuinely hated it. Consumers will tolerate a surprising amount of nonsense. Price increases? Unfortunately, yes. Complicated financing packages? Apparently yes. Paying extra for metallic paint even though the car is already made of metal? Yes. The salesman giving you a nipple cripple and calling you a pussy if you don’t want the turbo charged engine?...well maybe that’s just me, but anyways…

Consumers instinctively understand the difference between paying for an ongoing service and paying a ransom on an object they already bought. But tell someone their heated seat already exists and they must pay rent on the button? Suddenly you’ve recreated the French Revolution with leather upholstery.

So, BMW eventually backed away from the idea. One of the few remaining examples of modern consumers collectively saying: “No. Absolutely not. Fuck right off.” “Fuck Nein.”

But it’s not just BMW. You can buy motorcycle jackets now with subscription-based airbags; you pay £12 a month every month for the luxury of your airbag deploying. Cancel the payment, or run out of money, and they are more than happy for you to cartwheel to your death and smear yourself on the tarmac like a big fleshy crayon. The punishment for cancelling your service is death. Where’s the “double thank-you” there?

The automotive industry is hardly alone. Everyone’s at it. The home-printing industry has spent years trying to perfect its own version of subscription dependency. Customers of HP have repeatedly found themselves in a Mexican stand-off with their fax machine, where if you cancel your monthly ink subscription, the printer will actively lock the cartridges you already have in your house, refusing to print your documents.

Your printer has become a tiny plastic tyrant. It sits in the corner of your spare room going: “Lovely boarding pass you’ve got there. Shame if someone refused to print it unless you… restored your subscription.”

Think about that! What should be a simple home appliance somehow develops the hostile complexity of an international hostage negotiation!

And once you start noticing this trend, you see it everywhere. Smart thermostats. Security cameras. Fitness trackers. Doorbells. Products that once performed a straightforward mechanical function are increasingly connected to accounts, memberships, renewals, and terms of service documents longer than Tolstoy’s first draft of War And Peace.

A doorbell used to be a button that went ding-dong. Now it’s a surveillance weapon employed by the CCP.

Your fridge needs an app. Your hoover needs Wi-Fi. Your toothbrush is sending analytics to California like, “Geoff’s gums are underperforming this quarter.”

The goal is to transform ownership itself. To create a world where purchasing something is no longer the end of a transaction, but merely the beginning of a billing relationship. Because the modern corporate fantasy is that you never actually buy an appliance—you spend the rest of your life paying a subscription fee to your own toaster. And when you’ve had enough of this, you can’t even take it in the bath with you because that feature requires a premium tier!

Part 5: The Vampire Economy

We know why they do it. The question is, why do we let them?

It’s called The Vampire Economy.

Long ago, corporations recognised a fundamental, irrational aspect of human psychology: we are 1) lazy and 2) forgetful.

When you buy a physical item for £50, your brain registers the pain of that transaction immediately. You see the cash leave your wallet. It hurts. That pain registers as a “Don’t do it again.” However, when you sign up for a £7.99 monthly subscription, your brain processes it as a negligible, trivial expense. It’s “just the price of a coffee a day,” as the marketing ghouls love to tell us in their promotional emails.

Everything is “the price of a coffee a day.” Spotify is a coffee a day. Netflix is a coffee a day. My gym is a coffee a day. According to my bank statement, I am drinking forty coffees a day. I should be dead. From anxiety. My heart should have detonated in Pret A Manger weeks ago.

7.99 sounds pretty good as a one-off, but a one-off 12-times a year? It adds up, and you don’t even realise it.

Studies show that a supermajority of consumers underestimate how much they spend on subscriptions each month, often by a significant margin. Official UK government data shows there are around 155 million active subscriptions in the UK, with roughly 10 million classed as entirely unwanted. That means millions of people are actively paying for services they no longer use, or never intended to keep after a “free trial.”

“Cancel anytime” means: “Cancel anytime, provided you can find the hidden button after completing our online escape room.”

I’m talking about you, by the way. You are paying for fitness apps you haven’t opened since Liz Truss was briefly in office. You are paying for premium news websites you only clicked on once to read a single article about a stranded whale. You are paying for premium cloud storage for photos of an ex-partner you haven’t spoken to in seven years!

You’ve got a meditation app making you anxious, a sleep app keeping you awake, and a budgeting app charging you £6.99 a month to tell you you’re poor. Even though you still think about her every day. Just me…

Yes, Gary, she left! She’s not coming back! Delete the iCloud backup of the trip to Center Parcs, Gary! It’s over!

You’re not preserving the relationship. You’re paying Apple to keep a digital shrine of a woman called Emily who now does paddleboarding with a man named Ollie. Steve Jobs has cucked you again.

It is a passive, silent drain on your wealth. It is a vampire with fangs so sharp you don’t even feel the bite. A few times a month, he sneaks in while you sleep to suckle just a few drops of your blood, praying that you never wake up and look closely at your bank statement.

But you feel it. It’s called Subscription Fatigue. Industry data shows that nearly half of all consumers have actively cancelled a subscription in the last six months simply because they are entirely overwhelmed by how many they are paying for. We are suffering from pure subscription burnout.

Fortunately, governments are finally starting to crack down on subscription “traps.” In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has stepped in to completely strengthen rules around transparency, mandatory renewal notices, and simplified cancellation processes. Regulators are actively pushing the principle that exiting a subscription must legally be exactly as easy as it was to join. Finally, maybe our government can do something right.

But even here, you know companies will find a way round it. “To cancel your subscription, simply click this link, upload a scan of your rectal cavity, solve a CAPTCHA showing every traffic light in Belgium, and defeat our retention goblin in single armed combat.”

But don’t wait for them. Here’s what you can do today.

Part 6: The Radical Act of Owning Your Stuff

Laws can only protect us so far. We have to change how we live. Because if we do not draw a line in the sand right now, the fat cats will win. They have designs on your life already: you will live in a rented apartment, sleeping on a subscription mattress, driving a car with paywalled steering, watching fragmented media on a leased television, while an AI assistant you rent for £30 a month manages the cancellation dates of your other eighty subscriptions.

And when you die, you’ll be in your pay-walled coffin, your grandkids huddled around the grave, frantically updating the card details, because if the payment fails, up you come.

If this mass-surveillance hell stresses you out, maybe Claude’ll give you a handjob. But nothing more; that’s exclusively for the premium enterprise tier.

There is an antidote to this madness. And it starts with a radical, almost revolutionary act: Buying things and keeping them.

Go out and buy physical media. If you love an album, buy the vinyl or the digital download from an independent site like Bandcamp. If you love a book, buy the physical pages bound in cardboard. Hey, buy my book for God’s sake! It’s printed on actual paper, it doesn’t require a terms of service update, and it works perfectly even if your Wi-Fi router catches fire!

You can drop it in the bath. You can use it to level a wonky table. You can even throw it at the police during the next inevitable summer riot. That’s real functionality.

And best of all, once you’ve bought it, I can’t charge you £4.99 a month to access Chapter Three. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.

Try this. Audit your bank statement tomorrow morning. Look for the vampires. Find the apps that are bleeding you dry for services you don’t use, and hit that cancel button. After that, hang garlic on your door and never, ever sign up for their bullshit again.

But seriously, buy my book!

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Today, we’re talking about subscriptions.

Specifically, the fact that absolutely everything in modern society - the art you enjoy, the sports you watch, the software you use to work, those cheeky videos you watch in the dark - has been dragged behind a paywall and turned into an eternal, blood-sucking monthly bill. Because God forbid you can just own a DVD of Busty Wenches XII like a respectable Victorian gentleman.

And look, I know exactly what some of you are typing in the comments section right now:

“But Francis, it’s just the modern world! It’s convenient! I like not having physical media cluttering my Scandi-minimalist apartment! It fits neatly into my monthly automated budget tracker!”

No! Stop it! You’ve been lied to! This was never about convenience, or minimalism, or your Swedish decor! And let’s be honest, your flat isn’t minimalist because you’re sophisticated. It’s minimalist because you can’t afford a bookshelf. Convenience was just the sales pitch; it’s the rag that smells lovely, until you wake up in a bathtub with your kidneys gone. This is about your life.

We haven’t just stopped owning things. We are increasingly living in a world where the most intimate corners of our daily lives exist only under the thumb of temporary licenses, revocable permissions, and endless, automated billing cycles. It doesn’t start and end with streaming apps - that would be too normal. This culture is everywhere. There’s no escape.

Your phone, your music, your films, your software, your dating app, your cloud storage, your meditation app - even inner peace is now £8.99 a month! Am I gonna leave? Nah-mastay.

How did it come to this?

PART 1: THE REVENUE MONSTER

To understand how our lives became a series of never-ending micro-transactions, we have to travel back to a mythical, ancient era known to historians as “The Year 2005.”

A simpler time. Tony Blair was in Number 10, ringtones cost £3 and savaged your parents’ phone bill, and the only thing you subscribed to was the belief that dressing like an Emo made you an outsider and deeply interesting.

Back then, capitalism operated on an elegant, fundamentally honest transaction: the double thank-you. A series of one-off trades where both parties benefit. If you wanted something, you walked into a shop, you handed over a crisp twenty-pound note, they gave you a physical object, and then (crucially) it was yours. The shop could not rescind your purchase or make you pay again. If you bought a Microsoft Office CD-ROM in 2003, you could still install it on a laptop today and type a scathing letter to your local council, and Bill Gates couldn’t do a single thing to stop you!

Although this was pre-super villain Bill Gates, before he tried to spike his wife’s drinks with antibiotics so she wouldn’t find out he was best mates with a nonce.

It was great. We didn’t know how good we had it, until the fat cats discovered a metric that completely broke the brains of every CEO on earth. A metric called ARR: Annual Recurring Revenue.

Which, fittingly, is also the sound you make when you open your bank statement. “Arrr”

ARR may sound boring, but to a CEO, it’s crack. You say “annual recurring revenue” to a boardroom and suddenly six men called Hugo start sweating profusely. And it’s not from the cocaine they took the night before.

You see, from a modern corporate perspective, selling you a high-quality product once is an operational failure. If Apple sells you an iPad, and you keep that iPad for six years because it still functions perfectly, you might as well be dead. You are a financial parasite, refusing to upgrade your perfectly fine screen! You’re supposed to drop it in the toilet after 18 months like a good little consumer! They have to spend millions advertising to you all over again just to trick you into buying the next one.

They’d rather not. So instead, they sell you a subscription. It’s a corporate wet dream: instead of selling you a piece of creative software once for £100, Adobe charges you £10 a month, forever. If you stay subscribed for ten years, they’ve made £1,200 off you for the exact same software that still crashes when you try to open a PDF. They justify it to you by offering updates, but how many Adobe users - who just want to sequence videos of weddings and nana’s birthday - are putting things in 4K 3D? James Cameron, and that’s it. Still, you’re all paying for it.

Most people use Photoshop for one of two reasons: making a flyer for a pub quiz, or removing an ex from a holiday photo. Neither of those requires “AI-enhanced neural rendering, unless your ex is really, really fat. In which case it’s probably best to destroy all evidence of your relationship.

And the data shows just how victorious the fat-cats were. Across all sectors, the global subscription economy market has exploded to over $500 billion, and corporate forecasts project it to skyrocket past $1.5 trillion by 2033. If these trends continue, by the year 2050, you’ll be renting your shoelaces. £1.99 a month for the Lace Premium tier. Cancel, and they unravel remotely while you’re legging it from whichever race riot is happening that week.

It turns out, unjustly extracting wealth from human beings with no say in the matter is a very lucrative business model! Who knew?! Well, the East India Company knew. But they at least had the decency to offer a free trial of that sweet, delicious opium.

Which brings us directly to the many-headed sanguivore that is modern entertainment.

PART 2: THE LEANING OF STREAMING

A decade ago, the tech elite stood on stages in black turtlenecks and told us that cable TV was an evil, bloated, anti-consumer monopoly. They said: “Cut the cord! For just £5.99 a month, Netflix will give you everything you could ever want, ad-free, until the end of time!”

And we did! We cut the cord. We tasted freedom. It was great. One big streaming service, making quality entertainment, ad-free, beamed into your living room. It was beautiful. You’d open Netflix and there’d be actual films on there. Films you’d heard of. Not just something called Buggery Yacht 3 starring a miscellaneous Hemsworth cousin. 5.99 for Stranger Things and Making A Murderer? Why not? I could do this forever.

Or so we thought. Until every single media conglomerate on earth realised they were letting Netflix eat their multi-billion-dollar lunch. Disney pulled their movies to start Disney+. Warner Brothers built Max. Paramount built Paramount+. Comcast built Peacock. Apple built Apple TV+.

The half-priced utopia fractured into a feudalist nightmare. If you want to watch three popular shows right now—say, The Bear, House of the Dragon, and The Boys—you need three different accounts, three different passwords, and three different monthly direct debits. For most of us, the only financially viable way to watch television anymore is to stay trapped in a toxic and loveless relationship purely because our partner has the premium tier HBO login.

I don’t care that you text your ex, Katie! The new season of the dragon show starts on Sunday and I am not paying another £15 a month! I will tolerate your emotional unavailability, gratuitous infidelity and inability to emotionally regulate for the high-definition bandwidth!

You think I’m leaving a woman with Now TV Sports? In this economy? I’ll raise another man’s bastard child before I pay for Paramount+.

And this is no secret - we all know it. Nearly half of all consumers openly admit they pay way too much for the streaming services they use, and they still don’t cancel. And if you think narrative television is bad, let us take a moment to pray for the most abused, financially-violated demographic on the face of the planet: the modern sports fan.

PART 2.5: THE SPORTS SHAKEDOWN

If you are a football fan in the UK, you know what it’s like. You just want to watch your team play throughout the season. And for that, you’re treated like an ATM with legs. To watch the Premier League, you cannot just buy a ticket or a single channel. No, no, no; you need Sky Sports. But Sky doesn’t have all the matches! So, you also need TNT Sports. But wait! Amazon Prime bought a specific package of December fixtures, so you need Amazon Prime too! Oh, and if your team plays in the FA Cup, that might be on a completely different platform, and if they play in Europe, you better check who holds the broadcast rights this particular Tuesday!

Supporting a football club used to require loyalty and a scarf. It now requires the administrative skills of Andrew Huberman managing his roster of bitches. Now there’s a podcast I’d love to listen to.

You don’t need a TV guide anymore, you need a corkboard, some red string, and a degree in contract law just to figure out what channel the Arsenal game is on.

By the time you have finished subscribing to every single corporate platform required to watch twenty-two multi-millionaires kick a piece of synthetic leather around a field of grass, you could be spending well over £100 a month. You are paying more for the right to sit on your own sofa and watch football than you are to heat your house. Which is why I now watch football matches in a coat and flat cap while drinking Bovril. If I’m doing poverty, I’m doing it properly.

Even the Champions League final can only be watched if you’ve got the right subscription. And here’s the kicker: they recently moved the kick-off time for this year’s final from 8:00 PM to 5 PM under the corporate guise that it’s “so families can watch it together.”

Which family is watching the Champions League final together? Dad is shouting obscenities at the Bosnian ref, Mum’s asking which one’s Judie Bellingham, even though he’s not playing and the weans are on their iPads watching Ms Rachel teach them about shapes, bunnies and Zionist black-magic.

And after all that, after spending four figures a year to watch a literal game, they brought the ads back anyway.

Yes! The entire selling point of streaming, the literal fucking reason we agreed to this model, was that we were paying a premium to escape commercials. But now? The dynamic has inverted. Market analysis reveals that Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD) is one of the fastest-growing sectors in media.

And this goes back to narrative TV! Everyone’s in on it! Every major platform has introduced “Ad-Supported Tiers.” They didn’t lower the price of the original plan; they just rebranded your original price as the “Ad Tier” and raised the price of the “Premium Ad-Free” tier. You are now paying the exact same amount you paid five years ago, except now, during the heartbreaking final act of Kes, the mourning Northern boy is being interrupted by an ad for Fairy Liquid.

“His kestrel is dead. But are your plates truly alive? Try new Fairy Platinum Plus.”

You’re trying to have a profound emotional experience and suddenly a woman in a spotless kitchen is sexually aroused by dishwasher tablets.

This is cable television all over again. This time we have the indignity of wiring it ourselves.

We cut the cord, then they sold us each individual strand back separately for £9.99 a month.

That was part one. Part two is even more piss-boiling so subscribe now to avoid missing out.

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