Modern life runs hot. Everyone’s doing too much, sleeping too little, and scrolling through the gaps. The workday never ends; the inbox never empties; the bills multiply; the phone vibrates like a nervous system outside our skin. Society has become a kind of treadmill economy — fast, loud, and slightly cruel — where the reward for endurance is simply permission to keep running. And just when we think we can’t take on more, the feed finds new ways to demand our attention — tiny digital jolts that trigger us a little more each time we look.Might sound rich coming from people in the business, but the truth is we’re not immune either. We’ve all been swept along by the same algorithmic tide — higher up the beach maybe, but just as powerless against the waves.In this kind of world, irritation isn’t a flaw; it’s the expected outcome. When people are pushed together, stretched thin, and constantly measured, tempers shorten and patience runs dry. It’s not psychology — it’s pressure. And sooner or later, pressure finds a crack.We’ve tried to optimise our lives the same way we optimise our feeds. Every part of modern living — work, relationships, even rest — now runs on the same dopamine circuitry as our phones. We expect precision, speed, and personalisation in everything, from dinner delivery to love. But the more we chase the perfectly tailored life, the less we can afford it. Every year, the list of things to buy grows longer while our disposable time and income shrink. No wonder people are having fewer children — the math doesn’t add up, and it’s not something a couple of extra leave days will fix.Social media didn’t cause that tension — it just perfected it. It took the ambient stress of modern life and turned it into fuel. The platforms learned to harvest frustration the way factories burn waste heat: nothing escapes, everything gets monetised. Every sigh, scroll, or eye-roll became data — a signal to feed the next cycle.Once the algorithms learned that agitation equals attention, the feedback loop took over. The more tense, tired, or distracted we became, the more we engaged — and the more the system rewarded the emotions that kept us hooked. What began as communication evolved into emotional automation. The platforms weren’t reflecting our state of mind; they were engineering it.And once emotion could be measured, it became a target. The line between expressing and provoking vanished, and soon every industry that depended on attention — marketing, journalism, politics — began optimising for the same thing: reaction.Optimised into a corner“Engagement” was meant to prove people were paying attention. Now it’s the only language we speak. Likes, shares, comments — they’re not signs of success anymore; they are success. In a world that measures meaning by metrics, silence reads like failure.We’ve taken one of the most pressurised moments in human history and layered it with an entirely new kind of psychological strain. We built a system that tests human emotion at industrial scale, without any of the safeguards we’d demand from other powerful substances. We’d never release a new drug without decades of trials, yet we unleashed social media on billions with zero oversight. If pharmaceuticals are recalled for raising suicide risk, what do we call the platforms linked to thousands? One day, we’ll look back at this era the way we now look at heroin cough syrup — the medical equivalent of handing kids heroin and saying, “You’ll feel better soon.”Every platform, every newsroom dashboard, every campaign report boiled the value of human attention down to clicks, views, and shares. And so we tested — endlessly. Which headline makes more people click? Which thumbnail keeps them watching longer? Which tone makes them comment instead of scroll? It was the largest behavioural experiment in human history, and the result was what any decent statistician could have predicted: we optimised ourselves into a corner.It’s what happens when you climb a hill so efficiently you forget to notice the higher peaks around you — when every step forward only narrows your view. It’s like a professional who’s spent years climbing the ladder in a single career — taking every course, every promotion, every networking opportunity — until they’ve become the best they can possibly be on that path. The problem is that while they’ve reached the top of their particular hill, there are higher peaks elsewhere: different industries, new ways of thinking. Getting there, though, would mean climbing down first — taking a pay cut, losing prestige, starting over. So they stay put, even as each new “optimisation” — more hustle, more credentials, more of the same — yields diminishing returns or even backfires. That’s where marketing and media find themselves today: having maximised for outrage, speed, and virality, they’ve reached a peak that looked like success but now traps them. Climbing higher will first require the courage to descend.Social media and the industries orbiting it — marketing, journalism, politics — have spent two decades hill-climbing toward engagement. Now we’re stuck at the top of a mediocre hill built from outrage, sentimentality, and tribal dopamine. Any move toward calmer, saner communication makes the graphs dip, so no one dares move.The result is a system so tuned to emotional reaction that it can’t produce anything else. Marketing and media both run on the same engagement engine now, competing for the same psychological triggers. What used to be a handshake between two industries has become a knife fight for the same feed space. The marketer learned to provoke; the journalist learned to market. One sells products; the other sells problems. Both are just selling feelings.Sydney Sweeney’s Amazing GenesYou can see the logic playing out in campaigns everywhere. When American Eagle rolled out its “genes/jeans” campaign with Sydney Sweeney, it wasn’t courting coincidence — it was stress-testing outrage. The creative brief literally called for something that would “spark conversation,” which in marketing dialect means “let’s get people arguing.” The ad went viral, sales spiked, and the algorithm smiled. There have been countless others, each one engineered to tap the same nervous system we keep mistaking for culture. At a certain point, every brand’s “bold” campaign looks exactly like every other brand’s bold campaign — an overproduced provocation pretending to be purpose.Legacy journalism tried to resist this shift. For a while, editors held the line against clickbait and cheap outrage. But resistance came at a cost — traffic fell, budgets shrank, and new media filled the vacuum. In defending nuance and objectivity, traditional outlets lost the very platforms that once made them influential. What began as principle became paralysis. And like any system under strain, every attempt to fix it only sped up the collapse.Newsrooms have learned to A/B-test moral panic just as efficiently as marketers A/B-test slogans. We might tell ourselves it’s for the public interest — but we know that public interest without reach is useless.And yes, that includes us. We’ve written headlines that made people angrier than they needed to be, and stories that performed better precisely because they provoked. The truth is, nobody in media has clean hands here — only varying degrees of self-awareness.AI didn’t invent this mess, but it’s accelerating it like lighter fluid. We used to need agencies, crews, and budgets to manufacture controversy. Now anyone with a laptop can generate a high-definition moral crisis in an afternoon. When million-dollar ad quality costs a few thousand euros — or a good prompt — perfection loses its premium. Every brand can have flawless video, and every creator can go viral. Which means none of it matters anymore. The only way to stand out is to turn the emotional volume even higher. The gradient descent continues, but the slope’s getting steeper.System OverloadAt this point, calling it a “news cycle” feels generous — it’s an outrage economy. Attention is currency, and anger is the mint. Malta just runs the prototype at a smaller scale. A single post can set off a national chain reaction: a headline becomes a Facebook post, the post becomes a talk show, the talk show becomes the next headline. It’s not disinformation; it’s amplification — the sound of a small country echoing itself to exhaustion.It’s easy to blame journalists and marketers for this, and fair enough — we all fed the machine. But the real villains are the platforms that designed engagement as the only currency worth earning. They knew what outrage did to people long before it became fashionable to call it a problem. They just didn’t care, because rage was a renewable resource and attention was the oil beneath it. When people say “social media is toxic,” they’re describing a perfectly functioning business model.The result is a society optimised not for truth or connection or even entertainment, but for stimulation. The system rewards friction over clarity, reaction over reflection, and emotional charge over informational value. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering and a catastrophic piece of culture. And now, with AI producing infinite variations of the same content faster than we can feel things about it, the loop is eating itself. Engagement is no longer a differentiator; it’s just background noise.That’s where we are — stranded on our little hill of dopamine, clutching our engagement metrics while the ground gives way. The system is beginning to buckle under its own optimisation. And when it does, the people and institutions that survive won’t be the ones who shouted the loudest. They’ll be the ones who figured out what comes after the feed.Can you relate? •