MAYBE THE ANSWER IS TO GET A LITTLE STUPID AGAIN????

LET THE HOT TAKES SHAWTY FIRE BURNING ON THE DANCE FLOOR

Over the past years, I’ve spent a big chunk of my time trying to come up with collective solutions for the absolute shit hell our human species finds itself in at this moment in history. I founded a study club on matriarchal literature, wrote enough essays to fill an entire book on future-forward thought through a lens of matriarchal theory, I even enrolled myself in a Master’s program called Future Research, which is about to start next month. You know the drill: make the world better. Fight the tech bros. Single-handedly, por supuesto. Indulging in essays and video essays and think pieces and cultural commentary and hot takes and more video essays and more academic papers. I felt like if only I consumed more, connected the dots more, seasoned it with my own life experience, and let it marinate a little longer, eventually I would be able to present a juicy dish of hopecore back to the world. Something I’ve always felt like I owed our species for the kindness I’ve received while traveling the world alone with my daughter for four years.

Last week, I went on a bender, which is a phrase I had just learned in that context but most certainly and religiously practiced before. It was my child-free week, and I had two friends who I met three years ago while traveling come visit me in Berlin. The bender we went on (am I even using that phrase correctly??) wasn’t planned but was birthed into existence by a sweet lineup of happenstances. Apparently, this is what happens when you live life. And while ignoring my responsibilities, indulging in the sweet presence of hedonism, consuming absolutely no think pieces, and yelling the most brain-rotted shit at my girlfriends from one corner of the club to the other, I realized how tired I am of internet conversation.

Like truly, tired is an understatement. I’m wholeheartedly sick of it. My own takes included. Ew.

When I accidentally logged back in, because I wanted to shove my friends the funny TikTok I kept referring to under their faces (it’s the guy doing a skit about people who do too much when having dessert—please go watch it if you want to be unable to breathe), inevitably, the hot takes were ready to attack me again. A myriad of pretty faces with little Rode microphones, layered with a bunch of pictures and the inevitable click click click CapCut audio edit, perpetuating whatever concept is currently deemed worthy of taking apart, most often without any sort of creative or personal anecdote. I’ve seen this take before. I’ve seen this video style before. None of y’all’s takes are hot anymore, and that’s okay. Mine aren’t either. We genuinely do not need to reinvent the wheel.

I’m scrolling past a post called “Feminist hills I will die on,” and the first slide says, “Girls can do anything.” As if that wouldn’t be outrageous enough, the post is written by AI, and the comments are flooded with people cheering on the creator for her bravery.

I mean this in the most urgent way possible: we need to log the fuck off. This has gotten out of hand.

There’s precisely one hot-take video that’s been living rent-free in my head for the past few months, and it’s this woman (make her UN president or something already??) saying, “No one is at the Hotel Motel Holiday Inn anymore, and that’s the problem.” And I think that pretty much sums it up. Nothing is Fergalicious anymore. No one is going from the window to the wall anymore. The club, in fact, cannot handle us right now anymore.

This isn’t an appeal to go abuse substances while operating on an average of three hours of sleep per night and cold pizza on the nasty dance floor in techno clubs like I did. What I’m saying is that the hot takes trying to analyze our society to death are ironically doing the exact opposite of what they aim to do. Our human experience, with all its gratuitous complexity, is not a fucking problem to be solved. It’s something to be lived through, felt deeply while crying on the couch at 11pm, made a mess of, and eventually discussed with your friends in the intimate little nook of a wine bar at 1am.

None of us will be able to make it out alive. Stand up for what you believe in, organize, make life better in your own communities but stop dumping your copy-pasted, lukewarm takes into the overflowing landfill of the internet and call yourself a modern day philosopher. Reflection is always great, mistaking analysis for participation not so much, and there’s a specific kind of modern misery that comes from being hyper-aware of everything except the fact that you are alive.

I’ve now trained my personal little Mark Zuckerberg application to show me more videos that bring me joy. I’d so much rather see a carousel post of a stranger being blackout drunk on the dance floor than another “become disgustingly educated” list. People keep saying we’ve entered the educational content era, as if it’s somehow better than the previous hyper-capitalist influencer era. On average, they both produce the same slop.

Now here’s my lukewarm take: I genuinely think this new era of content creation is confusing being educated with consuming educational content and you can tell by the sheer lack of nuance most people are unable to bring to any of these conversations. There is nothing inherently radical about this form of learning — if anything, I’d argue it makes us even more dumb — but there is something deeply convenient about turning learning into another form of consumption. Watch a 45-second video, save the carousel, feel vaguely more informed, move on with your day. Does being an adult in 2026 just mean watching my “save for later” folder grow exponentially while my bank account does the exact opposite? Did our attempts to understand the world have just been optimized for engagement??? What would thinkers like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Marx and Susan Sontag think about this era? Do you genuinely think they would’ve wrapped up their best ideas into seven pastel slides only for the internet to swarm the comments demanding to know why they failed to account for every possible human experience, historical context, theoretical framework, cultural nuance, and hypothetical exception that has ever existed?

Do you think Nietzsche would’ve been in Canva adding a final slide titled “but of course this is just my perspective <3”?

GIRL!!!

As somewhat of an educational creator myself I’m not fucking above it. I’m in the depths of it and that’s why I am allowed and qualified to be a hater. I do love a good carousel. I love learning shit. I spend an absurd amount of my life reading books about anthropology, feminism, matriarchal societies and the history of basically everything. We need more smart people sharing their ideas. What we do not need more of is education becoming slop. There’s a big difference between making education accessible and making it consumable, and I think we can all smell the creators who only care about the latter through the dust of our screens. Education should make us more curious, not just more confident that we have the correct take and it should most certainly send us down rabbit holes. Definitely make us uncomfortable and change our minds a little bit or a lot, and it needs to occasionally leave us with more questions than we started with.

I love the educational creators I follow who I know put an absurd amount of effort into their work and genuinely have something of substance to say. I want more of that. What I don’t want is for the internet to turn every act of learning into another fucking content category until my entire life becomes a giant classroom and every single experience in it something to analyze. Fuck, even this essay is doing precisely that. See, I’m giving myself the ick.

I crave for a big chunk of my life to stay stupid and useless. I want to see Diana’s blurry holiday photos and Chiara’s spilled drink on her short and I want to be able to crack a joke without worrying about every single possibility of how people will perceive it. I want to see videos of people twerking and I want more skits of that desert guy.

So I guess what I want to say is this: The beautiful messiness of our humanness is just as important — if not more important — to share than our perfectly packaged thoughts about it. Maybe we all need to strive a lot more towards a live filled with moments we cannot intellectualize because we’re too busy actually living them. You know, the type of conversations that never make it into a carousel because they only make sense to the five people that match your freak sitting around the table. I’m yearning to see more of the life that happens before we turn it into a lesson.

but of course this is just my perspective <3