The world according to my Instagram reels

I’m learning a lot from this guy. Anyone who fails the test, it turns out, is an “NPC”: a non-player character; a person who, like the computer-generated drones that populate the background of video games, exists but isn’t real – they’re just one of the AI civilians you shoot in the head on your way to completing the level. Those relegated to NPC status include: men who don’t lift weights; men who sleep with girls with high body counts; men who wash between their arse cheeks in the shower; and, of course, women. These people are not real. Don’t waste your time feeling anything for them.

It’s 11.15pm, I am on my second Cherry Ice vape of the evening and my will to live is luxuriating in its routine tailspin. I am now watching a TikTok in which a professional therapist (well, online therapist) explains why we should be “cutting out” all “toxic people” from our lives. I wonder whether we should make Zoom therapy illegal – but, after some research, I discover that some people find it easier to express vulnerability to a screen. Who the fuck are these guys? Feels like they need therapy!

Anyway, I’m learning a lot from this woman. Turns out if a friendship “doesn’t serve” you or is “taking up too much space” then you should discard it; detach; move on. Coincidentally, this is exactly the way my mum talked about her old Henry vacuum cleaner once she got one of those little Dysons you can mount on the wall. It’s taking up too much space. How could you talk about Henry like that, I remember thinking. Look at the kindness in his eyes!

The influencer-therapist has recently had to dispose of a close friend. Her crime? Too slow at replying to WhatsApp messages. Toxic! Ever the sentimentalist, I wonder how this friend is supposed to feel having been unceremoniously left on the pavement in order to free up storage. Luckily, I find out, it doesn’t matter. “No one has the right to be angry at you for setting a boundary. And anyway, other people’s feelings aren’t your responsibility”. The rules are the rules; the law is the law; the feelings of the individual are the individual’s responsibility and no one else’s. It’s called a boundary, sweetheart! It’s a word I learned from Esther Perel’s podcast! Don’t fucking cross it or you’ll be taken to court for trespassing. Hello, police? There’s an NPC on my lawn.

It is now 11.30pm. I read the news. I see that the radical feminists have appealed to the infamously radical and unquestionably feminist criminal justice system and have emerged victorious: the law is the law; the rules are the rules; in legal terms, a “woman” is entirely reducible to her “biological sex”. Trans women may exist but they aren’t real. A columnist balks at the suggestion that anti-trans campaigners should be required to show “empathy” [scare quotes her own] to the people who, in light of this new interpretation, will, I guess, have to shit somewhere in the liminal space between two bathrooms in which they are either unwelcome or not allowed. According to an editorial in this very paper, trans people must now conjure up a third, gender-neutral bathroom out of space that doesn’t exist with money that no one has. A non-real place for non-real people. Vacuum cleaners with faces drawn on, taking up storage. They have been NPC-ed.

11.45. I take a final hit of my vape. I feel euphoric as the synthetic gas irreversibly butchers my fragile human lungs. I open my inbox. I have received an email from a guy I went to school with who has seen that I have been marching, as part of the Jewish bloc, in protest of the genocidal Israeli state’s ongoing mass-murder, displacement, and enforced starvation of countless Palestinian civilians. “No real Jew would march alongside terrorists who want us all dead,” he writes. Not even a real Jew, now! I imagine my former friend turning up at my flat, glue gun in one hand and my 26-year-old discarded foreskin in the other, ready to bring my “biological” body into alignment with this new identity.

His logic is watertight and familiar. When you can’t win the argument, move the boundaries. Redefine Palestinian children as terrorists, redefine trans women as men, redefine anti-Zionism as antisemitism, redefine a shitty arse-crack as masculine, redefine empathy as weakness. Redefine people as objects and suddenly you can do what you want with them: get out of my life; get out of my bathroom; get off my land. The law is the law and it is yours to invent: if you don’t reply to my WhatsApp messages then I’m allowed to shoot you in the head! How you feel about that is not my responsibility because you’re not real. Don’t like it? See you in court.

It’s close to midnight and I am mourning the Pope. When asked how he imagined hell, he said: “I like to think of hell as empty. I hope it is.” Oh my God, me too, Pope Francis! What is hell, after all, but the graveyard of the NPCs? The damned are beyond empathy – their suffering is everlasting; they are strapped down and flogged while an infinitely large television shows endless reruns of The Late Late Show With James Corden, for ever. The eternally toxic people.

The clock hits 12. One day bleeds into the next; the end of something bad, the beginning of something that may well be worse. Our little thumb war rages on as Rome turns to ash in the background. White smoke billows from the Vatican. Who will be our next Pope? Me? I feel like maybe it should be me? I don’t get to be Jewish any more, so I may as well throw my kippah in the ring.

I’m drifting off to sleep, my phone still locked in my hand like I have rigor mortis, artificial cherry vapour boiling my blood. I have been paralysed by my own fury. Why are other people so unable to recognise our shared humanity? Why are these freaks so incapable of empathy; of self-awareness? I hate them! I hate them! Fucking Henrys!

With my last waking thought, I imagine the afterlife. It’s one or the other, isn’t it: either hell is empty or we’re all going together. Maybe we’re already there.