SEND IN THE CLOWNS
In case you’ve been living under a rock (NGL – sounds peaceful) you’ll know that Trump inserted the US into the Middle East’s conflict this week by dropping a ‘payload’ (seriously what does that even mean?) worth of bombs on Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities, in solidarity with Israel, who themselves are committing genocide against Palestinians.
And honestly guys, I’m not even going to try to explain or understand this whole conflict because there’s literal millennia of cultural nuance and context that I don’t understand. And although I’m educated, I’m no geo-political expert and you don’t need my POV on this. But I think it has something to do with oil?
Anyway, what I will say is this: when something goes wrong in the circus, they send in the clowns to distract the audience.
But as a Millenial, I’m barely mustering a reaction.
I was 12 the first time the world was ending (December 31st, 1999 if you don’t remember the Y2K hysteria).
I survived the second end of the world (December 21st, 2012 according the Mayans).
Political instability? Just another Tuesday. Economic collapse? Been there. Recession? Done that. Once in a lifetime pandemic? Pffft. Global unrest? Snooze. Climate crisis? Constant. Brink of WW3? Shock me.
Millenials have been watching the world burn (sometimes literally) since we were old enough to watch the news, and we’ve adapted to instability like it’s a full-time job.
In fact, most of us are actually juggling three full-time jobs, whilst soft-launching our burnout, choosing an outfit for the weekend, wiping our kid's bum and doom-scrolling between meetings.
We’re not apathetic. We are tired. And we’ve maxed out our capacity for outrage because every headline feels like a rerun.
There’s a kind of muted collective shrug. Tension’s high, rhetoric is heated, but public excitement is low. It feels like another rollercoaster we've been on: flashpoint 👉🏻 freak out 👉🏻 calm down 👉🏻 wait for the next once-in-a-lifetime event.
We'll watch the world burn, feel a little sick about it and share a meme or two, and then go back to our inboxes.
Because it’s just another Tuesday.
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
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