Just to clear the air: I haven’t watched Love Island. And I don’t know much about universal basic income, but I’m sitting in an overpriced one-bedroom apartment I can’t afford, nervously watching forgotten monthly subscriptions drain my bank account faster than a paypig’s on Valentine’s Day. So let’s just see how this goes.
Love Island, and shows like it, aren’t popular because they’re particularly interesting, they’ve captivated the attention of the public precisely because they don’t require attention. When work leaves us exhausted, and free time shrinks by the second, our waking hours are spent smiling at deadlines, going on runs with people who ghost us and doomscrolling when the world’s out the window.
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But when we unmute the Teams call we can hear the rustling sound of a life burning out. We romanticise slow collapse in fast cities, and convince ourselves that hard work still works well. In this way, our work ethic is culturally protestant, where we grind for the sake of grinding, unaware that sometimes we’re just dry-humping a corpse.
Long hours of work render us depleted and short on attention, with no energy left to live a meaningful life. And when time slips through our fingers, so does our critical thinking. Gluing our nose to the gooch of hustle culture; we send polite emails, log work about work and translate common sense into corporate copy. Everything piles up on us, and every workplace fumble feels fatal until the weight of each micro-decision becomes death by a thousand incisions. And we have to put in a request for stress leave, to spend most of our break preparing a LinkedIn post about ‘The top 5 things I learnt on stress leave’.
Gainful employment is extractive in nature. It forces us to sell most of our waking hours for a wage, and when they let you inside company HQ it’s hard to fight for a better life when you’re clocking in to afford groceries. So keeping quiet becomes a strategy of survival, because a steady pair of hired hands can’t shake the system with safety gloves on.
Under these pressures our tired bodies and minds can’t even think about self-actualisation. Instead, in what little free time we have left, running on fumes and the fear of being replaced, we yearn for the slop. The slop doesn’t ask questions, or challenge authority. Its role is to sedate, and to smooth over the jagged edges, so you almost forget: that a level playing field is impossible when the economy was built to be structurally unstable.
