In the age of social media, attention is currency. I would be remiss if I went on with this topic without even acknowledging the breadth of injustices unfolding worldwide. From violations of Indigenous rights across Turtle Island, to the ongoing intentional starvation and genocide of Palestinians, to ever-growing income inequality. The list goes on. It is tiring and depressing to think about, and consumerism pacifies us. I know this is exactly what the producers of this show want: attention. The idea of “bread and circuses” rings true: these types of shows are designed to distract us from the atrocities going on both locally and globally. This essay is not an attempt to minimize these things. Nothing I write will ever compromise the importance of engaging with YOUR local community and remaining informed about global events. Please do read this article if you want less pop culture/sociological analysis, and more analysis of US intervention in foreign affairs, and how bread and circuses (like Love Island) are simply distractions to these horrific acts.

I understand some may find it superficial and unimportant and dismiss it as useless— it is an entirely non-urgent matter. But where I disagree is that I don’t actually think these types of shows are inherently superficial. The goal of me writing about this godforsaken show is to highlight that these types of reality TV shows do not exist in a vacuum. They are inherently intertwined with our culture and politics. Even further, how the public engages with reality TV speaks volumes about how we engage with one another, spotlighted on international platforms like TikTok. Whether you like it or not, reality TV plays a large role in today’s society — look no further than the head honcho in office in the States right now. His social infamy was born largely from reality TV, specifically The Apprentice. Even the way that news is structured now is meant to replicate these forms of “infotainment”. The audience needs to be entertained and amused to be placated into submission.

The point of my entire Substack is to learn in public. Given this, I may have some lukewarm takes that aren’t all the way there and I am okay with that. I’ve done my best to boil down my own thought process around our modern-day infatuations with reality TV for my own sake. This is solely to rid the thoughts from my brain and upload them into the abyss of cyberspace. For the purposes of this essay, I will play the roles of both the friend that is too woke, and the friend who will gossip about these shows.

I. My Intrigue and Moral Dilemma with Love Island USA

With the unimportance of this topic now established, I can get into the meat and potatoes. In this essay, I want to do a cultural analysis on Love Island, arguably the most popular reality TV in contemporary history. This show prides itself on being the most talked about entertainment series, with the most recent American season breaking new records of viewership.

Notwithstanding the blatant misogyny, racism, heteronormativity (with queer couplings being referred to as “a logistical nightmare”), and cleansing of any political talks, the show provides fascinating insight on the current state of morals and values of our society. Watching these shows, it can feel so real and authentic, but I am reminded that it is heavily edited and censored to present certain ideologies. Asisa from Her Issue wrote a fantastic piece about Love Island and Soft Propaganda, which unpacks how the producers reframe differences in politics within the show. For example, they write the following:

When we see liberal women in relationships with republican men, we’re ingesting the notion that political opposition is no longer a deal breaker, whilst also witnessing the normalisation of support for Donald Trump.

Asisa likens these types of shows to junk food for our brains, and I really can’t disagree — but here I am, sat, and munching on the whole bag of chips. However, I feel a great deal of cognitive dissonance and ethical murkiness as I watch the show. I recognize that by giving into this soft propaganda, I am giving the producers exactly what they want.

I admit, I got drawn in last year by the drama on TikTok and wanted to feel in the loop. This year, I saw more drama unfolding and once again wanted to know what the hype was all about. At the same time, I started reading Sunrise on the Reaping, the newest of the Hunger Games series. This book follows Haymitch Abernathy in the 50th Hunger Games and chronicles his unfaltering refusal to give the Capitol a show. Through watching the show, and particularly the public engagement and discourse with the show, I felt more and more dystopian watching everything unfold. I am definitely not the first to make this connection between reality TV and dystopia—Suzanne Collins herself said she came up with the idea of the Hunger Games as she was channel surfing, flipping between reality TV and footage of the Iraq war1.

In section II, I’ll start by exploring the analogy between Love Island to the Hunger Games, an idea which has already been fleshed out on here by a writer named Sehyr: Why Love Island Feels Like The Hunger Games. This includes the exploitation of human affect2, censorship, and propaganda. All of these come together to maintain a status quo of complacency and subservience — I am in no means judging, as I myself fall victim to this trap. If you like The Hunger Games series, you may only want to read this section. Of course, there are glimmers of these characteristic present in tons of other reality TV shows — Survivor is just one of many that come to mind, where contestants are pushed to their mental, physical, and social limits. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll be focusing on Love Island as a case study.

In section III, I’ll dissect the interacting relationships between producers, contestants, and the audience. The roaring popularity of this show in the mainstream continues to amaze and perplex me. While I’ve seen the majority of online discourse get into analysis of each islander’s personality and behaviour, I am more interested by the structures of reality TV and how we as viewers engage and interact with the TV show. Love Island has a (somewhat) unique quality, in the active participatory role the viewers take in voting for their favourite islanders. Usually, reality TV shows remain in their own little bubble, without much interaction from the “outside” world — but here, the viewers can send support to determine who will be the most popular, eventually catapulting them into celebrity status, and ultimately into the ruling class.

Penultimately in section IV, I’ll talk about the panopticon of reality TV, and even further, the transition into sousveillance (surveillance by the public, rather than authority figures) in modern society.

And finally, in my conclusion I will try to tie this all together into a guide for critically engaging with media and identifying propaganda in media. Although I wish I could wrap it up more succinctly, there is far too much nuance to this topic than can be summarized in a single takeaway.

II. Spectacles of Control: The Hunger Games vs. Love Island

Starting off, I want to create some analogies to make the information I present a bit more digestible. I’ll be highlighting the parallels between the Hunger Games and Love Island. Specifically, I want to talk about the institutions that uphold these spectacles: The Capitol and Imperialism, respectively. When I refer to “Imperialism”, I am specifically talking about the structures and institutions that have risen from Western civilizations. This includes most settler-colonial states touched by the grabby hands of Europe. The force of Imperialism, sometimes more obvious than others, is all around us — it has shapeshifted from colonialism to the industrial revolution, to neoliberal capitalism and consumerism, and continues to evolve.

In my research for this paper, I found one sociologist, Nick Couldry who has penned reality TV as “the secret theatre of neoliberalism”, and honestly, I can’t disagree. We humans love a spectacle, and even better if it is one that distracts from the horrible global events livestreamed to our devices. Watching a love story on our screens that airs every night for 6 weeks is all too reminiscent of a certain reality TV with fatal consequences…that’s right my friends; I am talking about The Hunger Games.

The Games, also set in an arena with constant surveillance, bear an eerie similarity to Love Island. The Gamemakers, or “producers” send in different kinds of threats. In the Hunger Games, these threats can result in the brutal demise of the tributes, but in Love Island, the threats are called “bombshells”, which are hot people sent in to disrupt ongoing love connections. The Gamemakers control everything that happens in the arena/villa: the time they wake up, the food they receive, the sponsorships which are shown, and more. Once the islanders leave the villa, they go on various podcasts and press junkets, not too different from the victors’ tours of the districts or Caesar Flickerman’s post-game interviews. I don’t think I need to elaborate too much more, because if you get it, you get it; but if you want a more thorough analysis of all the parallels, I encourage you to read Sehyr’s essay here.

I would say that Love Island omits the imminent threat of death compared to the Hunger Games, but the history of Love Island tells me otherwise. Looking to Love Island UK, there have been 2 participants who have committed suicide post-show, and 1 host who took her own life, all due to the intense negative media coverage they received. This includes online harassment, bullying, and public and media pressure. Of course, most of the contestants are just fine and probably living a life of luxury, but I would be remiss not to bring up that history of Love Island.

Even though we all recognize that these reality TV shows are carefully produced and manipulated, there are glimmers of the political, social, cultural, and economic disparities that exist in real life. When race, gender, and class dynamics start to unfold in the “unscripted” nature of reality TV shows, we start to see the fracturing of the pristine, ethnically neutral version they present to us.

Take for example, the two contestants who were quietly booted off the show as the internet found receipts of racial slurs in their digital footprints. If you’ve kept up with just the show, you would have heard non-specific narration that these contestants simply left the show “for personal reasons”. If you go online, you’ll find tons of discourse about their departures, but of course, these personal reasons aren’t discussed or even acknowledged on the show. Rather, the showrunners subvert reality by euphemising their departures to “personal reasons”. The producers play a key role in sanitizing the show in order to maintain public perception. In the Hunger Games series, any acts of rebellion from the District citizens are not televised, to promote the ideology that rebellion does not occur. This is Propaganda 101.

All this to say, we cannot trust the Gamemakers/producers at face value. These people are constituents of Comcast, a large corporation that we know prioritizes money over anything. They would not hesitate to edit clips in a way to progress whatever narrative they think will garner them more views in the long run. This brings me to my next section, where I want to discuss the power dynamics between producers, contestants, and us, as consumers/viewers.

III. Power dynamics between producers, contestants, and consumers

From here on out, I will refer to the producers of these TV shows as Gamemakers, because that is exactly what they are. They will manipulate the lives of contestants and consumers to gain viewership and increase return on investment. The Gamemakers control casting, narrative-pacing, emotional triggers, and strategic interventions – anything to maximize engagement with their programs. The Gamemakers are not above exploiting human affect for gains in their viewership.

Participatory Culture as a Mechanism for Control

This is where Love Island has one unique quality in terms of reality TV: participatory culture. There are elements in this show where the viewers will vote for their favourite contestants or couples, and those with the lowest votes are put up on the chopping block. This dynamic not only generates drama shaped by public opinion but also shifts agency back to the contestants, who must then decide whether to send someone home or save them. Although some would say this is harmless, I find this type of active engagement a bit alarming. As a viewer, you are now able to shape the narrative of the TV show, and ultimately who is propelled into elite status. This brings me to my next observation: the relationships between participants and fans.

The Participant-to-Influencer Pipeline and Parasocial Relationships

Looking to the contestants, some could say they are just as complicit in facilitating these power dynamics. While there is truth to that, I think we must consider that being on the show is a job for them. when those lights turn on, they clock in. What we may deliver in mental or physical labour, they deliver with emotional labour, which is in turn exploited by the producers.

Of course, they are paid in return by social attention. What’s been really interesting to me is how the contestants behave once they are out of the arena. Fan-favourite contestants are launched into the ruling class, almost immediately getting brand deals from large companies. Knowing that celebrity status is a post-show possibility, contestants have even broken the fourth wall on the show, claiming that others were voted off because they were “not there for the right reasons.” — insinuating that some may be motivated more by fame or financial gain than by a genuine desire to find lasting love.

The desire for fame and notoriety has become more of an incentive than the primary goal of the program: finding ~love~. Coming out of the villa, some of the contestants garner millions of followers who will defend these people to their dying breath. Parasocial relationships are not a new phenomenon, but in this instance, where we are only able to know these people through the lens of the Gamemakers, they become even more subtly controlled. This in turn makes it even more concerning when the hordes of fans turn against some of the contestants.

The amount of hate culture that has been fueled by this show is scary and amplified by real-time social media, like TikTok. Anyone can blast their opinion on one of the contestants, provoking discourse upon discourse upon discourse. We ultimately propel the show into the public eye even further by doing so — that’s how I first came about this show! These parasocial relationships, in-hand with the participant-to-influencer pipeline reinforce affective exploitation, ultimately giving into the Gamemakers’ corporate interest. As long as people watch the show and have discourse about the contestants, the Gamemakers always win.

IV. Panopticon of Reality TV: Control, surveillance, and sousveillance

You’ve likely come across this phase before: the panopticon. The panopticon is defined as “a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control”. The idea is simple: a round building lined with prison rooms, with a guard tower placed in the middle. The inventor “hoped that the knowledge that they were being watched constantly would cause prisoners to fear shirking their assigned work and ultimately to reform themselves into model citizens.” Yikes!

It’s no secret that reality TV relies on this form of surveillance — take a look at Big Brother. The namesake comes from the antagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian society using omnipresent surveillance of behaviour. I don’t know if Big Brother’s blatant use of this symbol makes their self-awareness better or worse...I think worse. What’s important, though, is the idea that contestants are voluntarily under constant surveillance. To submit oneself to this speaks to the broader culture of surveillance, and further sousveillance that takes place in the real-world.

Where the cameras inside the Love Island villa are surveillance, sousveillance would be the TikTok clippers who analyze and compare scenes, then post them for the public to see. TikTok has played a dramatic role in how recent seasons of Love Island have played out, and even further, how sousveillance has become embedded into our collective consciousness. We have become hyper-aware of being monitored by cameras, whether that be through CCTV or the lens of an iPhone.

The amount of peer-to-peer monitoring that is occurring in day-to-day life gravely concerns me. If you’re on social media, I’ll bet that you have seen videos that people have taken of strangers without their knowledge or consent, hoping that it will find them through the algorithm. Twitch streamers are live-streaming in public, with no need to inform those around them. Even the most horrific of acts committed by governments are being live-streamed to our rooms through our phones. And yet, the most we can do is have discourse about it.

“Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded.”

— David Hume

We are no longer passive subjects of surveillance, but rather act as actors of sousveillance, perpetrating the same level of surveillance (if not more) than reality TV producers. I wonder though, if we can repurpose these tactics to our benefit. To paraphrase David Hume, nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few. The hold that Imperialism has on our society is so wide-reaching that we have now become agents for the state through digital surveillance. It isn’t even a choice sometimes. We fall victim to implicit submission, another idea raised by Hume and brought up through Sunrise on the Reaping. Again, paraphrasing Hume, implicit submission is the idea that we resign our own sentiments and passion to those of our rulers. Whenever we blindly accept the status quo and normalize oppressive systems, we take part in implicit submission.

This is part of the reason that I wanted to write this essay – to dismantle a bit of the status quo when it comes to consuming this show. Critical consumption today is of the utmost importance. Internet Anthropology described it best when she asked whether “content diets are the new dieting fad.” With the surplus of digital information, we must now decide what kind of content we will consume.

At the beginning of this essay, I talked about the analogy comparing reality TV to junk food. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t watch Love Island — I'm more so suggesting that when we do inevitably consume “junk food”, we read the “Nutritional Label” of the show to remain informed. By that, I mean critically examining the scaffolding that allows reality TV shows to function. Think of about where the Gamemakers may be omitting or manipulating information — not to further fuel stan culture or hate trains — but rather, to identify thinly veiled propaganda. I really mean this from the least judgemental perspective possible! I enjoy watching these circuses just as much as the rest of you. Anyways, I know I’ve fleshed out an already evident relationship between reality TV, surveillance, and neoliberalism, but hey, would I even be me if I didn’t!? It insists upon itself.

V. Conclusions

Remember Who the Real Enemy Is.

To conclude, I want to nail home the point that was so succinctly put in the third installment of The Hunger Games, Mockingjay3: remember who the real enemy is. Today, the enemy is not a single Capitol or President Snow, but colonialism and capitalism — systems that diffuse responsibility across structures and institutions. While billionaire CEOs and authoritarian leaders may serve as symbols, the deeper challenge lies in decolonizing policies, mindsets, and everyday life.

Looking at the other popular YA book to movie adaptations that came out in the early 2010s, it’s clear that imagining a dystopia seems much easier than imagining a utopia. With the rise of authoritarianism in the US right now, critical thought feels all the more crucial to highlight as a takeaway of all this discourse. We must understand how we are controlled as a society if we ever desire to break out of it. Love Island is but a microcosm of the ethics of power and control in modern society.

Instead of political in-fighting and division, we have the ability to band together through class consciousness. We must imagine a life post-late-stage capitalism. This is the topic of the late Mark Fisher’s book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, where he put forward the idea that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism." On his blog, he wrote the following:

“The removal of capitalist cyberspace from Collins’s world clears away the distracting machinery of Web 2.0 (participation as an extension of spectacle into something more pervasive, total, rather than as its antidote) and shows how TV, or, better, what Alex Williams has called ‘the Universal Tabloid’, is still productive of what counts as reality. (For all the horizontalist rhetoric about Web 2.0, just look at what typically trends on Twitter: TV programmes.) There’s a role as hero or villain – or maybe a story about how we’ve gone from hero to villain – prepared for all of us in the Universal Tabloid. The scenes in which Plutarch Heavensbee gives a businesslike description of the carrot and stick nature of the Capitol’s media-authoritarian power have a withering, mordant precision. “More beatings, what will her wedding be like, executions, wedding cake …”

Real or Not Real?

We must be able to hold two conflicting truths at once. Instead of villainizing Chelley or Huda, we must try to look through the narrative as they present it to us. Not to further use that evidence to vilify one person, but to dismantle their machinery from the inside out. They want to pit those two against one another because that increases their viewership, but we do not need to play into their narratives.

This is propaganda in action. We see this across all mass media: major news networks will claim to present the truth but obscure it in ways that support their ultimate agenda. Now more than ever, being able to recognize propaganda is an invaluable muscle that I think we all must exercise daily. Propaganda can be Uncle Sam posters, but it can also be a TikTok trend upheld by the masses, like Labubus or Dubai Chocolate. The term itself is so broad and makes it harder to identify what is and isn’t propaganda. I was watching The Book & Movie Guy’s analysis of Sunrise on the Reaping on YouTube and he summarized 5 ways to recognize propaganda:

Recognizing Propaganda:

1. Look for contradictions.

2. Look for cover-ups and removals.

3. Identify who benefits from the message.

4. Recognize, but don’t fall for, distractions.

5. Pay attention to how independent media is treated by the state.

As the truth becomes more and more elusive, moral ambiguity ensues. Even further, there are instances when two truths conflict with one another. An example that pops up in my mind is the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada” — the government has used a truth of ethnic cleansing to absolve themselves of the reality that we are living on stolen land. Despite this, they hold all control, and that is a truth we must live with every day.

In my opinion, being able to have space for two opposing truths is maybe the hardest part of being alive in a contemporary age. The idea that both chaos and order emerge from the same particles. To know that humans have the capability to practice altruism and coordinate mass bombings may put a pit in my gut that’ll last ‘til I’m six feet under.

I must choose to ground myself in revolutionary optimism, rooted in love and non-judgment. This includes acting where I can and speaking when I have something to say. Like I said at the beginning of this essay, nothing I say will EVER undermine the important of engaging with your local community. This requires a baseline level of sacrificing our individual comforts for the greater good. I don’t mean to be preachy at all, as I could use some of this advice myself. I still find myself enthralled by the bread and circuses. If I was able to capture your attention and reframe the spectacles into something worth questioning, then this Love Island rabbit hole has served its purpose.

If you made it this far, thank you sincerely for reading this essay. I hope you enjoyed reading this piece! It has been in the making for a few months and I’m proud of the final output. Feel free to comment feedback or message me for further discussions!

The Holocene: a period of stability

A little more than 11 thousand years ago, after the most recent Ice Age, the Earth’s climate experienced a stage of stagnancy. Well, stagnancy relative to the tumultuous history of the Earth. This period of relative climactic stability is referred to as the Holocene.

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By climactic stability, I mean that there was less change in temperature from year to year. Before the Holocene came the Pleistocene, where the Earth would undergo cycles of glaciation (Ice Ages) and warming. As you would expect, this came with unstable global temperatures, as depicted by the graph below1.

The self-regulated stability in the Holocene created the right set of conditions for humans to shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian settler civilizations. This shift is known as the Neolithic revolution.

With the Neolithic revolution, humans abandoned nomadic lifestyles and instead adopted sedentary lifestyles. With the environmental stability affording humans to stay put in one place, early humans learned how to manipulate their environments with ease. This included the clearing of forests and tilling soil for agriculture, which in turn allowed us to grow crops in such an efficient manner that we produced surpluses of food. Humans began the process of domesticating not only plants, but also animals.

Evolutionarily, this was a game changer: having unlimited access to resources was unprecedented and released humans from the time- and energy-consuming actions of hunting and gathering. Humans were able to reinvest their time into activities that would eventually give rise to modern civilization. This included arts, science, philosophy, culture, and ultimately our skyrocketing population.

All of these changes combined set the scene for the Anthropocene, what some have deemed as the current geological epoch. Some have disputed the existence of the Anthropocene as a distinct time period from the Holocene. Despite this, the impact of humans as a planetary force of change is undeniable to anyone with access to the internet.

Running on fumes in the Anthropocene

If you ask me, I think it’s safe to say that we are living in the tail end of Anthropocene. It’s no secret that things are fundamentally changing and falling apart in front of our eyes. Climate change continues to accelerate at a frightening pace, threatening biodiversity on this planet, including the vitality of humans.

Not to mention the environmental impact of chatbots and AI models. Who else is painfully aware of the computing energy of a single ChatGPT search? It all feels strange when you consider that giant corporations and governments will not think twice about using and abusing AI on such grand scales.

If you’re on the internet, you’ve likely seen the newest developments of artificial intelligence in real-time. It is becoming more and more pervasive, and I think we are getting closer to the point where you cannot distinguish AI from reality. Some people may boast their ability to tell AI from real life, but I don’t think that will last very long. Have you seen Google’s new VEO3?

I am scared!!! This is scary!!!

I know this video is joking around, but I am fearful of how these technologies can be abused if they get into the wrong hands. Even further, I wonder how close we are to these lines of code and circuitry developing levels of consciousness.

With AI developing at an alarming rate, I look toward media that has explored these themes already. Of course, we have Black Mirror, Her, and Companion (to name a few), but my interest is piqued by The Matrix. Not only the original film released in 1999, but also its supplementary media that provides the backstory that gives rise to The Matrix.

Looking to The Matrix for clues

A brief summary of The Matrix (1999)

If you haven’t seen The Matrix, I’ll provide a very brief summary of the movie’s events for context2. Spoiler alert, obviously. In the 1999 film, The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is a hacker working a corporate 9-5 job. Through his hacking, he discovers that he is living in the Matrix, a hyper-realistic simulated reality constructed by robots. The robots have imprisoned humans, keeping them in pods where their bioelectric energy is being harvested as a battery source for the machine race inhabiting Earth. The neural-interactive world of the Matrix simply exists as a form of subjugation for humans, to distract them from the fact that they are brains in vats.

Again, that was a brief summary, but I actually won’t be talking about the plot of that movie (although it is fascinating in its own regard). Instead, I want to focus on the events leading up to the formation of The Matrix in that fictional world. It’s worth noting that the franchise has also produced video games, comics, books, and an array of media to supplement the film originally released in 19993.

How did the Matrix come about?

The backstory for the film comes from the supplementary media and that is where I’ll focus most of my energy. The story goes like this:

• In 1999, humans have developed a true AI. This AI is more developed than our modern-day ChatGPTs and Claude 3s. These machines can think, feel, and act, independently similarly to us humans. Humans turned these AI into robots that share our likeness.

• Over the 21st century, humans build an entire race of sentient AI robots to act as domestic servants for humans. The robots were regulated to replace menial human labour, so that humans could have lives of leisure.

  

• In 2090, one such enslaved robot, B1-66ER, overheard his master’s plan to deactivate him. In response, the robot killed his owner and his owner's dogs. At his murder trial, he testified that he did not want to die. B1-66ER was found guilty of murder and sentenced to be destroyed, along with the rest of his kind. The trial ignited debate worldwide over ‘Synthient’ rights, and the mandate for termination sparked outbreaks of protests and violence.

I’m going to leave it there in terms of recounting the lore because this is only the backstory to The Matrix. The reason I told this story was to put in perspective the future we are so close to succumbing to. I fear that we too will fulfill the prophecy of treating AI poorly and as second-class citizens. Some may think that to be stupid, but as AI approaches sentience I am more and more wary of the consequences our “innovative” behaviour will have.

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Should I say please and thank you to ChatGPT?

I found a funny comment exchange on Reddit. It starts with a post of someone saying that they think it is important to correspond with AI respectfully: saying please and thank you, asking politely, etc. One user comments:

Would you say please and thank you to a hammer? How about your car for getting you to work? Maybe your phone?

I see where they’re coming from. They see the AI model as a tool, referencing that it is just lines of code; 0s and 1s. But this response to their comment made me chuckle:

“You're not a person. You're an employee. You produce value for your employer. You're just a bunch of cells and DNA. As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. Get back to work!”

Where do we draw the line between some forms of electrical circuitry and others? What difference does it make whether it comes from neural networks carved in flesh versus silicon and metal computing machinery? I know we aren’t there yet—but feel the line gets blurrier every day.

As this future becomes our reality, how do we behave in the world? How should we treat and interact with the AI that we use day to day? Should I thank ChatGPT after it does exactly what I asked for?!? Does it even matter when horrible people will abuse these technologies anyway? Maybe not right now, but these fictional stories may be used to inform our behaviour.

I still have so many questions and concerns, but I think that sentiment is echoed by anyone who is aware of the scale on which AI is functioning at today. For now, AI doesn’t have feelings (that we know of), but how will we know when it does? Some have created rubrics to assess consciousness, but these are limited by the fact that we still don’t really know what consciousness is or how to quantify it. And further, how will we change our actions, if at all? Judging by the way we treat other living beings, like the creatures we enslave for factory farming, or humans who have simply been born in the wrong geographical region, I feel pessimistic.

Anyway, these are ethical issues that will be brought to courts across the world as AI becomes further intertwined with our contemporary lives. There are people smarter than me researching the ethics of AI, and I look to them for answers. I hope that the next generation will be able to extend empathy for those unlike themselves…but I wonder if this is the ultimate price for humans to pay. Maybe this is our karmic fate for the irreparable damage we have done to the Earth and nature. Regardless, I know that once this is all over, we will be but a layer of sediment among the rich history of life on Earth…and in that, I find solace.

If you have thoughts about this, please leave a comment or join my chat! I’d love to talk with someone else about this, and I wonder if anyone else is feeling this same dread.

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I wrote this paper for a class I took in my third year of undergrad, called Critical Examination of Mental Health. In this essay, I put forward the idea that the rise of chronic mental illnesses in modern life may not always indicate individual pathology but rather serve as natural, warranted, and rational responses to severely dysfunctional environments. I hope you enjoy it!

It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society1. Across the globe, we see rates of mental illness and poor mental health increasing, especially in youth. Some have even labelled it an epidemic, with its prevalence steadily rising over the years (Matthews, 2019).

What factors are driving this rise in mental health issues? Most modern understandings of mental illness rely on biomedical models, suggesting there may be excesses or deficiencies of neurotransmitters, genetic abnormalities, or alterations in brain structure that are responsible for the onset of psychiatric disorders. This has led to a dependence on pharmacological treatments in an attempt to target the biological underpinnings of these disorders. Think of the “drug cocktails” prescribed by psychiatrists – for me, it was Lexapro, then upping my dosage, then adding Wellbutrin and then switching to a combination of Sertraline and Mirtazapine (and if you’re still depressed after all of that, they call it ~treatment resistant depression~).

The biomedical model of mental illness is inherently a reductionist perspective. By boiling down a topic as complex as mental health to a disease of the brain, we ignore the influence of social determinants of health. Contemporary discussions of mental illness fail to recognize one of the greatest forces influencing this epidemic, that being the sociopolitical climate in which modern humans exist.

We live in an age where success and happiness are quantified by wealth and productivity, an inherently flawed conception of self-worth. Neoliberalism treats you as a means of production rather than an end in itself. To give my brief working definition, neoliberalism refers to the political and economic ideology that argues that human well-being can be achieved via policies such as the deregulation of businesses, privatization of public goods and services, and tax cuts (Matthews, 2019). Neoliberalism is a derivative of late-stage capitalism that began in the 1970s, theoretically driven by the “free market” rather than the state (Matthews, 2019). Neoliberal policies give rise to income inequality, poor working conditions, expensive and inaccessible healthcare systems, and mass incarceration (Nkansah-Amankra et al., 2013). Oppression and exploitation are natural components of neoliberal capitalism, and I find it difficult to believe that mental distress can be alleviated in such a system. I believe that neoliberal capitalism, as an economic system, acts as a catalyst for (some) modern mental illnesses. Neoliberalism quantifies its citizens primarily as consumers, where democracy is ruled by what is bought and sold in that economy (Zeira, 2021).

Given that this system breeds a mentality of self-interest in succeeding, predicated on profit, how does one protect their self-worth and mental health? At what price do we sacrifice our mental health for success in a neoliberal society? These are the questions that I am driven to explore in this paper. I argue that neoliberal capitalism as an economic system is incompatible with the wide range of human needs and will continue to fail us. To support this claim, I will first explore the role of socioeconomic status in health and well-being. I then dissect how neoliberalism fuels “rise and grind” culture and materialism. Really, I am trying to debunk the seductive promise that hard work alone can free you from the shackles of being broke. Despite what modern media may suggest, wealth does not guarantee well-being (to a certain extent). The American Dream has turned into entrepreneurial greed, and in the process we have severely lost touch with ourselves, and one another. Finally, I address how mental health has been medicalized and commodified, then sold right back to you as a monthly subscription. With this in mind, we can start to unpack the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and well-being.

Socioeconomic Status and Well-Being

Research has consistently shown that higher socioeconomic status is linked to better overall health. Factors like income, access to education, racism, sexism, and displacement all shape a person’s SES and lead to vastly different living conditions. In a system of neoliberal capitalism, low socioeconomic strata are not a bug, but a feature of the inherent hierarchical structure. Individuals with low SES experience more life stressors, and thus, recent reports have found strong associations between poverty and poor physical and mental health. Further, people who come from households with lower SES are more likely to be exposed to adverse childhood experiences, which in turn increases the likelihood of developing mental illness (Zeira, 2021). The role of status determines how we experience social mobility, with those in lower SES groups facing barriers to upward mobility, which further reinforces chronic disadvantage and lower levels of well-being (Prins et al., 2015).

Even further, poor working conditions strip people of their identities and individuality, affecting self-perception and quality of life as a whole (Prins et al., 2019). Those who work jobs characterized by poor pay, low status, low job security, high turnover, and easy entry may experience income instability and as a result, many will end up relying on social assistance programs. Although helpful and well intentioned, these programs help the poor survive but rarely help them improve their lives (Prins et al., 2019).

When we compare societies with low and high wealth disparities, we see that rates of mental illness tend to be higher in countries with higher income inequality, regardless of social class. In countries where there are smaller wealth gaps, we see lower rates of mental illness. Similar trends emerge for other social outcomes, such as levels of democracy, and rates of drug abuse, obesity, voter turnout, homicides and other criminal behaviours. Individuals from low socioeconomic strata face so many barriers, including the inaccessibility of healthcare systems. Inaccessibility is a natural feature of neoliberal policy and perpetuates poor mental health in low SES communities (Zeira, 2021).

Looking to incarceration2, we see Black and Indigenous folks disproportionately represented in criminal justice systems. In Ontario jails, 78.9% of people are in pre-trial detention or “remand”. Let me make this explicitly clear – these are people who have not been convicted, sentenced, and are legally innocent. When they do provide bail hearings, we must consider the economic barriers that come with providing bail. If the “justice system” sends someone with a background of low SES with no access to stable income or no community support to a bail hearing, they will not be able to secure bail funds. By holding them in pre-trial custody and not providing timely bail hearings, the prison industrial complex has, in practice, criminalized poverty.

With the “deinstitutionalization” of mental health3 in the past half-century, we also see significantly higher populations of mentally ill individuals imprisoned with a lack of access to appropriate resources. When we consider this alongside solitary confinement, it becomes even more harrowing. Solitary confinement, a form of inhumane isolation as “punishment”, contributes to overwhelming and disturbing proportions of self-harm in prison. One study found that “although only 7.3% of admissions included any solitary confinement, 53.3% of acts of self-harm and 45.0% of acts of potentially fatal self-harm occurred within this group.”

I want to hammer home the point that poverty and mass incarceration are not bugs of the system, but rather features of neoliberal governance. These forms of punishment are inherent reminders that if you can’t or won’t play along in the game of neoliberalism, you can just as easily fall victim to these horrors. State-subsidized violence is a reinforcing tool used to scare you into complacency and keep running that rat race.

Productivity Culture, Consumerism, and Life Satisfaction

There is a fundamental mismatch between the genes that create our bodies & minds, and our daily realities. Our brains are not hardwired to be sitting at a cubicle with fluorescent lights for 8 hours a day or generally worrying about making money at every waking hour of the day. Social isolation, sleep deprivation, lack of physical activity, and chronic stress (to name a few) are all factors that our bodies are not equipped to handle, yet we are forced to do so as a result of work and/or school dominating our lives. Finding a work-life balance tends to be difficult, when in fact, work should just be one part of the puzzle of your life.

Under neoliberalism, success is determined by profitability and productivity. This may look different for different people but will generally take the form of secondary reinforcers. Examples include grades and money: money can be used to purchase primary reinforcers, such as food and clothing. Primary reinforcers have innate biological value, whereas secondary reinforcers acquire value through conditioning and association. These secondary reinforcers act as gatekeepers to primary reinforcers. Take for example, going on a vacation to a national park. Long before colonialism and neoliberalism, national parks were just patches of land with innate beauty. You could walk there, set up camp there, or just sit for a while. Nowadays, that ability to rest and appreciate nature comes as a cost, whether that be financial or paying with your time.

I find it difficult to thrive when I determine much of my worth through secondary reinforcers. I work a job that pays a modest amount: not minimum wage, but I’m also not living lavishly. I’m lucky enough that my parents like to travel, and have enough money to take me with them. But if I were to try to go on my own, there is no way in hell that I would be able to afford to see the natural beauties that exist in the world! We have somehow turned the simple act of being in nature into a luxury that the general public does not even have access to. How does that even make any sense?! Something that quite literally exists for free has been slapped with a price tag and gatekept for those who can afford it. I know this isn’t a hot take – but it just exemplifies how we are being made to pay for happiness.

The system of neoliberal capitalism prioritizes greed, an insatiable appetite to consume. Think of the cycle of trends on TikTok telling you to “run, don’t walk” to buy the next new gizmo or gadget – until that thing gets old, or breaks, or you lose interest and never use it again. They want you to think that happiness goes hand in hand with materialism and that pursuing personal interests that do not generate profit is a fruitless endeavour. A meta-analysis by Dittmar et al. (2014) that explored the relationship between materialism and well-being found that increased prioritization of a materialistic orientation was generally associated with lower levels of well-being. Financial success as a central life aspiration is negatively correlated with well-being and mental health. Consumerism promotes the dependence on extrinsic motivations, where people are driven by what they can gain from their actions rather than what they truly enjoy. When material factors, which are out of our control, determine our self-worth and status, we become susceptible to low self-esteem and are not readily able to achieve satisfaction or fulfillment.

Medicalization and Commodification of Mental Illness

Psychiatry dictates what “normal” or “abnormal” responses are to stressors in life, but these decisions are built on assumptions of neoliberal principles to rationalize themselves. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), diagnoses for mental illnesses are contingent on the decline of performance at work, school, or home. This suggests if you fail to meet neoliberal standards of functioning, the problem is you, rather than the standards themselves.

I also need to acknowledge that the categories of “mental illness” are not purely medical – they are social constructs created to facilitate conversations surrounding them. The categorization of mental disorders is highly driven by social, economic, and political contingencies, and therefore must be critically analyzed from all these lenses.

Today, most doctors treat psychiatric “illnesses” with pharmaceutical drugs, with the underlying assumption that your brain is behaving abnormally. They’ll tell you that you have a chemical imbalance, dysfunctional neural network, or abnormal brain anatomy…and in some cases, there may be truth to that. Where they fail is by attributing your brain as the root cause of the symptoms. While I agree that the brain can produce a whole host of different emotional and mental symptoms, it feels like we are putting a band-aid on a broken leg by prescribing medications.

Appropriate responses to life stressors under neoliberalism undergo a process of overmedicalization – I would argue that this overmedicalization could be referred to as disease mongering by corporations. Enter the pharmaceutical industry…the Big Bad Wolf, if you will. As psychiatry shifted from psychodynamic to biological approaches to defining mental illness, pharmaceutical companies attempted to promote biological psychiatry by financing those who supported that model (Esposito & Perez, 2014; Zeira, 2021). Big Pharma thrives off this narrative and continues to succeed, with psychopharmaceuticals remaining the first line of care for many diagnoses.

Even more concerning is the involvement and sponsorship of DSM definitions by pharmaceutical companies. The development of psychotropic drugs has been tainted by conflicts of financial interests, thereby instilling a lack of trust between psychiatrists and the public. The financial interests of Big Pharma come before public health, resulting in the abuse and exploitation of those with mental illness. The commodification of mental health does not aim to actually treat mental illness. Rather, it creates opportunities for corporations to generate profit, governments to save money on publicly funded social services, and maintains the neoliberal status quo.

As described earlier, SES determines access to goods and services, including healthcare. This points to a larger issue of how the well-being of citizens has become a commodity rather than a right, where only those who can afford it can benefit from the services. People face barriers to receiving care in the form of long waitlists, inadequate insurance coverage for mental health care, or be further disadvantaged by their identities as underserved minorities. Treatment for mental health has become individualized and commodified, often disregarding environmental stressors that may be caused by capitalistic structures.

Where do we go from here?

Overall, I’ve created quite a depressing argument that the way the world is set up inherently gives rise to mental illness. This is not to say we should just abandon all hope and let capitalism win: we need to reframe how we look at and treat mental illness. One model that may be of interest in addressing mental health is the Social Model of Disability, developed by disabled people themselves. Medical models of disability identify the disabled person as the root of the problem (e.g., confined to a wheelchair, can’t see) and focus on what the individual cannot do. The Social Model of Disability shifts the responsibility to barriers within society (e.g., no ramps or elevators, discrimination).

Society is not naturally built to promote empathy and accommodation for the wide spectrum of human needs. We need to identify the barriers that create mental illness and develop routes to remove, minimize, or counter them through other forms of support. Opposing the inhumane nature of neoliberal society must be central in our challenge to create equity among all citizens. By addressing this as a driving factor, we can start the conversation about well-being in a well-rounded manner. This can only begin once we collectively begin to prioritize all human needs.

Reccomended Reading

If you enjoyed reading this, I reccomend reading some of the source literature that I based this essay on:

• Capitalism and Mental Health by David Matthews

• Neoliberalism and the commodification of mental health by Luigi Esposito and Fernando M. Perez

• Anxious? Depressed? You might be suffering from capitalism: contradictory class locations and the prevalence of depression and anxiety in the USA by Seth J. Prins, Lisa M. Bates, Katherine M. Keyes, and Carles Muntaner

good lord it gets crazier every single day! so much to read and learn and every day there is something new. how is one supposed to navigate through all this in a normal way. i feel so overwhelmed most of the time and i think that it is a shared feeling. which is even more brain wrinkling!

currently watching this video to parse out some of my thoughts:

i don’t have the capacity to learn all the information that is out there but i want to be aware. awareness is such a curse and blessing at the same time.

there are so many takes out there from YouTube videos, Substack articles, journal articles, TikTok and Instagram opinions, news articles, god it goes on forever. but how can you parse through alllllll this information in a digestible way?? it feels incredibly dense and obviously we aren’t meant to know all this, but alas…here we are.

let’s just start with YouTube videos. as of march 2025, a google search will tell you that there are more than 5 billion YouTube videos out there. obviously, not all of them are relevant to you, and as such, you will likely never come across them. but nowadays, so many of these are video essays, dense with content and knowledge that you may find interesting — at least the videos the algorithm is feeding me. these range from niche topics that will pique the interest of one sliver of a Venn diagram, to general videos that could really appeal to anyone.

how many hot takes and video essays can there be until they are just being cast into a void where they fall upon deaf ears. the content goes in one ear and out the other, forgotten after the next hot topic that is just ever so relevant and accurate. i guess that’s just the cycle of information these days. so much output that it is just a cacophony of human perspectives, dissimilar to the ever-growing pool of other forms of media.

in this oversaturated market, how do you even produce anything valuable? what even constitutes value these days? is it how many people it reaches? how many people it truly impacts? or is it just a one to one level of impact — whether it makes someone’s day better. which, to be completely honest, seems futile. your day can be just as easily ruined by someone cutting you off while driving or dissatisfaction from your 9-5 job. i think that’s just me though. no matter how good a piece of media, it isn’t enough to truly change my worldview. it might add to it, but nothing has ever felt so revolutionary i guess that’s not the intention or goal. but still, it just feels like there’s so much of everything that producing more is pointless. everything has been done already. anything else just feels like extra now.

i wrote that above section in a state of anger and frustration. i think it was warranted, based on the oversaturation of media out there these days. but i think the critical misstep i took was jumping to the conclusion that the vast number of takes out there dilutes the impact of the really good ones. history will say otherwise.

the idea that words and ideas have meaning and that meaning can resonate for years beyond when they were first said is a testament to that. nowadays, the ideas are reformulated in one way or another, but its always changing. especially with all the new media we see.

this has been happening for ages: from prehistoric cave paintings to ancient art and literature, to modern day music sampling and scrapbooking. we’ll continue to create unique media for millennia to come. and the even crazier part is that it MEANS so much! movies and music and books have the ability to change humanity on both the individual and species level. anyways, this is all to say that i rashly wrote that media doesn’t have meaning once oversaturated, when it really, really still does. let’s continue below, on a similar vein.

i guess someone could argue that these are problems that have plagued humans for thousands of years, since the transition from nomadic living to our current sedentary lifestyles. definitely missing a few steps in between, but just for proof of concept let’s explore this idea. the origins of humanity are captured by paintings in caves, followed by written forms of communication that spread slowly across the globe. but that only appeared semi-recently in the scope of human history, right?

someone online said this:

Depending on who you talk to, media has existed since we first started translating our ideas and thoughts to noises and images. Those noises and images started to take form through repetitive use and development over time. Eventually, those noises started to develop into phonemes (specific sounds that connect to an idea), which become collections of sounds in a particular order, moving into a syntax and, eventually/finally, the spoken word as we understand it now. We mediate our thoughts into a form that could be understood by others. Through this mediation, we start to exchange ideas, concepts, information, and … well, you get the idea. We have been communicating for a long time through one type of media or another. Always adapting and changing to new ways, new technologies, but still using some form of media. Always.

— Adam Tyma

if most of written media (e.g., books, newspapers) only appeared about 500 years ago, what happened before? was it documented anywhere or is that all a recent development in the scope of human history. from then on, it makes sense to me. from written media, we have pictures, videos, websites, internet, the whole explosion of media. well i guess it doesn’t “make sense” because i can’t make sense of it, but i understand how it got this oversaturated. i think this fits with what i was saying earlier though — the existence of media itself is not strange, but i think that its the never-ending growth of information and media that makes me uncomfortable.

my next thought came from the idea that the amount of media we have is probably directly proportional to the population of humans, which also seems to be infinitely growing. this creates the increasingly complex world we live in, that is then translated or “mediated” into our traditional forms of media. but the human population has been steadily increasing for years now. so does that mean it’s only up from here? i think what feels so strange is the relative recent-ness of ALL OF THESE THINGS. LIKE WHAT:

i am going to continue to use the analogy from the picture above to make sense of it with my tiny human brain. why is it that for 11 of the 12 months, life is nowhere to be found, but starting in the last “month” we suddenly see a boom in all forms of life, ultimately resulting in me writing about it here.

it’s simply mindboggling!

if you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading and investing time in this. i assume that if you’ve read it all, you probably feel similar feelings in this age of information. we’re in this together! ground yourself in knowing that this is a collective experience.

love,

anvi