You don’t watch reality tv, do you?
Um, why would you ask? And also, I’m now wishing there was a secret trap door underneath you could activate with a button on my phone because why would you even ask me that.
And yes, it's not that deep.
But it also kind of is.
Because that entire ecosystem is a toxic, extractive machine designed to farm human misery for ad revenue. Yet, my refusal to watch the actual broadcast has proved completely useless against the modern algorithm.
My entire feed has been ruthlessly hijacked by creators dissecting the show. Reacting to the clips. And arguing with other creators who are arguing about the contestants.
The digital walls are closing in, and they are covered in villa wallpaper.
But whenever a stray clip inevitably slips past my internal blockages, I am struck by the exact same unsettling realisation. The show isn't actually about romance, like, at all. It's not about connection, or human pairing or even the friends we all made along the way.
The content that achieves maximum velocity on our timelines is almost exclusively focused on the most toxic, manipulative, and jaw-droppingly sh*tty behaviour imaginable. We are watching young, vulnerable people systematically stress each other out. Gaslight each other in real-time. And inflict genuine emotional harm on international television.
And it raises a deeply uncomfortable psychological question about our collective cultural sanity: why on earth are we so profoundly addicted to watching human beings treat each other like absolute garbage?
The default defence from television executives and media buyers is always the same narrative: it’s just harmless, trashy escapism.
But let’s call it what it actually is: The Commodification of the Public Whipping.
Nobody is watching these shows to be entertained by love; duh. they’re all watching them to participate in a coordinated and algorithmic mod mentality.
The internet has made us feel incredibly passive and powerless in our real lives. So we look for spaces where we can collectively exert absolute control. A reality TV villain provides the ultimate lightning rod for that repressed frustration.
The moment a contestant displays a shred of toxic behaviour, the entire internet forms an immediate, unyielding hate train.
We jump on it because it feels intoxicatingly cathartic. It allows us, the audience, to perform a twisted kind of moral posturing. Because by banding together to collectively destroy a stranger’s reputation in the comments section, we get to convince ourselves that we are the good guys.
We outsource our ethics to a trashy television set. And we use their unedited, low-IQ manipulation tactics to validate our own superior moral compass.
But the reality is even more sinister.
We have also developed a deeply voyeuristic appetite for raw, un-simulated human distress.
We have been conditioned by short-form video algorithms to respond exclusively to maximum emotional volume. A healthy, respectful, and functional relationship doesn't generate watch-time metrics. It doesn't cause a comment section to erupt. And it certainly doesn't trend on X for forty-eight hours.
The machine requires conflict to feed the pixel. It needs someone to cry. Someone to lie. And someone to experience a full-scale emotional breakdown. Because that is the exact raw material required to spark the outrage that drives corporate ad placement.
To me, it feels like we’re hitting a tipping point of empathy depletion.
We can only pray that audiences are starting to notice the hollow, manufactured nature of these rage-fuelled engagement loops. The brands that continue to sponsor, align with, or mimic the aggressive, adversarial tone of reality TV commentary are playing a highly short-sighted game.
The ultimate luxury asset in a hyper-cynical digital economy is going to be Relational Sanity… i.e.refusing to participate in the public stoning of individuals for cheap metric spikes.
Society has progressed past the point of cheering in the stalls of a bloodied colosseum (or so I thought). You need not resort to digital savagery borderline salivating over the pain of other actual humans.
Take up yoga or maybe even go to therapy :)
-Sophie Randell, Writer
