I open my YouTube homepage and start scrolling through it. I’m bombarded with takes on the Honey Scam, Healthcare in America, and even John Deer’s maintenance policy abuse. I finally click on something: Johnny Harris (whom I have many issues with) “apology” video, as unique and genuine as any other apology on the platform.

I’m feeling nauseous, but I keep scrolling for videos. They are all fighting for my attention, trying to sell me something, to tell me something… to hell with all this. I close YouTube and open the FT.

“Citi and BofA exit UN-backed global climate alliance for banks”. Lovely, let me close this app down before my climate anxiety gets worse. I will watch something on Amazon Prime.

As I watch the load screen I remember that Squid Game has a new season out. I like that show, despite its popularity stemming from what is, in my opinion, a strong misunderstanding of its social critique. 

Maybe people get it, and it’s just overlooked as washed-up and overdone…

Amazon loads up. The home page has an ad: Mr. Beast is running a real-life squid game show but like, without the social critique. Watching people in financial distress have little to no fun, fighting for money. We don’t go as far as killing them though (not legal, apparently).

Maybe I don’t want to watch season 2 of Squid Game. Or read the news. Or watch YouTube.  Be a ‘consumer’ of ‘content.’ A consumer. That’s quite a funny role actually because for me it feels like I’m the one being consumed.

But maybe the world will be better. it will be better when we have more podcasts making more money next year, or the third season of Squid Game. Maybe things will be better when Amazon’s market capitalisation increases enough...

Or maybe growth by itself isn’t inherently better. How it comes about, how it’s distributed, and how it serves its participants is just as important for policymakers, right? Right…?

It is baffling how, in a world with a vast, nutritious, and appetising menu of policy solutions, we somehow fail to order and serve the ones that benefit us. We too often end up with a plate that is more ready to eat us than we are to eat them. 

With no shortage of good policy ideas but a massive shortage of political capital and the will to enact them, world politics is unfathomably tiring sometimes.

But this is not the conclusion. I don’t want to be just a pig in a cage, on antibiotics. I want to choose to consume something else. We are the wealthiest and most educated assortment of humans to ever exist, and life today is better than it has ever been. I hope we will eventually learn to translate that into designing cages societies that we deserve. Maybe we would all be a bit happier as free-range chickens.