The Best Thing About Getting Older — Not Caring What People Think

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You can feel it everywhere at the moment. Conversations that start lively and then just… fade. People who suddenly mention “getting a few bits in” as if they’ve taken up cooking, rather than quietly stockpiling tins like it’s a hobby. Markets lurching about like a drunk trying to find their own front door. Tariffs flying around. And artificial intelligence being described, in the same paragraph, as both the cure for everything and the reason we’ll all be living in caves by Thursday.
Everyone’s frightened. Everyone’s loud about it.
And that’s the bit that makes me suspicious.
Because real danger, in my experience, doesn’t behave like this. Real chaos doesn’t have a logo. It doesn’t come with a theme tune. It doesn’t arrive with a rolling ticker and a panel of experts doing that special modern dance where they disagree aggressively while somehow saying nothing new. Real trouble is quieter. It makes people precise. It strips the performance away because there isn’t time for it.
What we have now is the opposite. It’s dread with production values.
And once you notice that, you start to see the machine behind it. Not a conspiracy. Just a business model. Uncertainty has been monetised. Fear is the most reliable fuel on the internet because it keeps people clicking and scrolling and refreshing like there’s going to be a magical update that says, “Good news. The world is sensible again.”
Apparently this is normal now.
The people selling the panic aren’t always wrong about the facts. But they are on a performance-related contract with your nervous system. They need you jangly. They need you tense. They need you permanently braced, because a relaxed person might close the app and make a brew.
Here’s the part that actually worries me, though. If this level of noise isn’t the real crisis, then whatever comes next will be quieter. The thing that matters won’t trend. It won’t be announced. It won’t arrive with a fanfare. It’ll arrive when everyone’s too exhausted to notice, and that’s when the serious stuff tends to slip through.

There’s a particular modern illness that doesn’t even bother to present symptoms properly. It just turns up, sits on your chest, and starts reading the news out loud in the voice of a man who sells second-hand cars and has very strong feelings about “what’s really going on”.

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