I want to write this one because I feel like it’s quite on brand. Because humanity is going to a point where, well, entertainment is like the grocery shop. You know, we walk in the grocery shop for our food, and now we walk into theater rooms, into streaming platforms, into songs, into anything that carries a story to acquire personality traits, fashion style, relationship advice, and types and dynamics, dates, date ideas, names for our kids. Like the entertainment realm is literally our new— it’s our mental and emotional grocery shop, yet it is not. It doesn’t have the same health and safety guidelines that grocery shops do have. That is a big miss. That is a massive lack, because if we’re going to treat the entertainment industry like our emotional and mental grocery shop, we must make sure that it has a health and safety check, standard, challenge, supervision. Because if not, we contaminate ourselves with things that then do derail society away from what it needs to be. The healthy and safety aspect is the quality to our mental state, the quality of the conversations, the quality of the emotional management. Because if we consume, for example, shows like Baddies, we’re going to have more unstable just individuals that argue for the simple fact of arguing, with no actual sense to what they say to each other. They cannot formulate stable, clear, direct sentences. There’s no intelligence in what’s said during those interactions, and we have to be aware of that. Whereas if you have all the different types of content, I’m going to use mine as an example because I do curate it to that quality. It teaches something different to how to actually be a human being. You know, there’s some entertainment that will teach you the worst, and we glamorize it because it’s entertaining. But for something to be entertaining, entertainment is in the eyes of the beholder, not in the thing that’s actually put out. It’s whether it’s based on the priorities of those who watch. So if the priorities of those who watch change, the whole scene of the world’s entertainment industry changes with it because it follows the demand.

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Entertainment Is Humanity’s New Grocery Shop

I have been thinking about something that feels increasingly obvious to me:

Entertainment is becoming humanity’s new grocery shop.

We used to walk into a grocery shop to acquire what we needed to put into our bodies.

Now we walk into theatres, streaming platforms, social media, music platforms, books, podcasts, television shows, films, reality programmes and every other story-carrying medium to acquire what we put into our minds and emotions.

And what are we picking up?

Personality traits.

Fashion.

Ways of speaking.

Relationship dynamics.

Dating ideas.

Ideas about masculinity.

Ideas about femininity.

Ideas about friendship.

Ideas about conflict.

Ideas about sex.

Ideas about parenting.

Ideas about success.

Ideas about what is attractive.

Ideas about what is desirable.

Ideas about what is normal.

Sometimes we’re even getting names for our children from entertainment.

We’re getting places to go on dates.

We’re getting phrases to describe ourselves.

We’re getting behaviours to imitate.

We’re getting entire identities.

So entertainment is no longer simply something we watch when we’re bored.

It is increasingly one of the places from which we acquire our understanding of what it means to be human.

And that creates a massive problem.

Because we have health and safety standards around the things we put into our bodies.

We regulate food.

We monitor contamination.

We care about ingredients.

We label allergens.

We have standards around preparation, storage and distribution.

Why?

Because we understand that what enters the body can affect the body.

But we rarely apply the equivalent question to what enters the mind.

We don’t have anything remotely comparable to a universal mental and emotional quality standard for entertainment.

And I think that is a huge miss.

Because if entertainment is becoming humanity’s emotional and mental grocery shop, then we have to start asking what exactly is being stocked.

What are the ingredients?

What are the effects?

What behaviours are being normalised?

What emotional patterns are being reinforced?

What kinds of communication are being rewarded?

What kind of intelligence is being celebrated?

What kind of relationships are being presented as desirable?

What is the consumer actually learning from repeated exposure?

Because something does not have to be labelled “educational” in order to educate.

A reality show can teach.

A sitcom can teach.

A song can teach.

A romance can teach.

A villain can teach.

A character can teach.

A fashion trend can teach.

A meme can teach.

A storyline can teach.

The question is not whether entertainment teaches.

The question is what it teaches.

And this is where I think we have been remarkably naive.

We often say:

“It is just entertainment.”

But there is no such thing as just entertainment when human beings repeatedly use entertainment to construct their internal references.

When someone watches hundreds of hours of a particular relationship dynamic, that dynamic becomes part of their catalogue of what relationships can look like.

When someone repeatedly sees conflict treated as entertainment, conflict can become entertaining.

When someone repeatedly sees humiliation turned into comedy, humiliation can become normalised.

When someone repeatedly sees emotional instability rewarded with attention, instability can become socially profitable.

When someone repeatedly sees aggression presented as confidence, they can start confusing the two.

And eventually the boundary between watching something and learning something from it becomes impossible to pretend isn’t there.

Take programmes such as Baddies.

My issue isn’t simply that people watch them.

People are allowed to enjoy whatever they enjoy.

My issue is what happens when an entertainment environment repeatedly rewards chaos, provocation, humiliation, aggression and conflict for the sake of spectacle—and society consumes enough of it that those behaviours begin to feel culturally familiar.

When the argument itself becomes the entertainment, the argument no longer needs to contain substance.

People don’t necessarily need to communicate clearly.

They don’t need to formulate an intelligent position.

They don’t need to resolve anything.

They just need to create a moment that holds attention.

And once attention becomes the currency, dysfunction can become profitable.

That is something we should be conscious of.

Because there is a difference between depicting unhealthy behaviour and glamorising it.

There is a difference between showing dysfunction so that we can understand it and showing dysfunction so that we can become fascinated by it.

There is a difference between a story that says:

“Look at what this behaviour does to people.”

and a story that effectively says:

“Look how entertaining this behaviour is.”

Those are not the same thing.

And yet our culture often treats them as though they are.

We have become very good at asking whether something is entertaining.

We are much less disciplined about asking:

What kind of human being does repeated exposure to this encourage?

That is the health-and-safety question.

Not necessarily:

“Should this be banned?”

But:

“What are we consuming, what does it contain, and what does prolonged consumption do?”

Because this is where I think entertainment becomes part of the wider architecture of society.

Imagine consuming food every day that consistently left you malnourished.

At some point, you would stop saying:

“It’s just food.”

You would start asking what was in it.

Why does it affect me this way?

Why am I feeling this way?

Why are so many people experiencing the same consequences?

Why is this product so widely distributed?

What incentives produced it?

What demand keeps it on the shelf?

And, perhaps most importantly:

Who is responsible for knowing what is inside it?

We need to begin asking the equivalent questions about entertainment.

Because the entertainment industry is not operating in a vacuum.

It follows attention.

It follows demand.

It follows what people click.

What they stream.

What they replay.

What they share.

What they talk about.

What they pay for.

What keeps them watching.

And this is where the responsibility comes back to us.

Because entertainment isn’t simply something that is imposed upon humanity.

Humanity also tells the entertainment industry what to produce.

Demand shapes supply.

If humanity’s priorities change, entertainment changes with them.

And that is actually the empowering part.

We often speak about the entertainment industry as though it is this enormous machine controlling us.

But the machine is responding to signals.

When something becomes profitable, more of it gets made.

When something keeps attention, more of it gets reproduced.

When audiences stop rewarding something, eventually the market notices.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

“Why is entertainment becoming so unhealthy?”

Perhaps the deeper question is:

“What are we rewarding?”

Because entertainment is entertainment in the eyes of the beholder.

The thing itself isn’t inherently entertaining.

Its entertainment value emerges through the priorities of the person consuming it.

Something that one person considers fascinating, another person may consider unbearable.

Something one person finds hilarious, another may find deeply disturbing.

Something one person considers glamorous, another may recognise as destructive.

Entertainment therefore tells us something about the consumer as much as it tells us about the producer.

And that means changing entertainment isn’t only about demanding that producers make better things.

It is about becoming better consumers.

This is part of why I deliberately curate what I consume and what I create.

I want the material entering my mental and emotional environment to have a certain quality.

Not because everything needs to become educational.

Not because entertainment should stop being fun.

Not because every story needs to be morally perfect.

But because I understand that repeated exposure shapes us.

I want stories that can entertain me while also expanding my understanding of humanity.

I want characters that challenge me.

I want conversations that make me think.

I want emotional complexity rather than emotional emptiness.

I want conflict that actually has something to say.

I want humour that doesn’t require dehumanisation.

I want relationships that show possibility rather than simply recycling dysfunction.

I want art that doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of the person consuming it.

Because entertainment can absolutely do that.

It can teach us how to communicate.

It can teach us how to question.

It can teach us how to imagine.

It can teach us how to understand people unlike ourselves.

It can teach us how to recognise patterns.

It can teach us what consequences look like.

It can teach us how beautiful human beings can be.

And sometimes it can teach us what not to become.

That is an extraordinary power.

So I don’t think the answer is to sterilise entertainment.

I think the answer is to consciously raise the quality of the ecosystem.

Better creation.

Better curation.

Better transparency.

Better media literacy.

Better conversations about what people are actually consuming.

Better understanding of the difference between depiction and endorsement.

Better awareness of the psychological and emotional effects of repetition.

And above all:

more conscious demand.

Because when the priorities of the consumer change, the shelf changes.

When people start wanting depth, depth becomes profitable.

When people start rewarding intelligence, intelligence becomes valuable.

When people start wanting healthier models of relationships, healthier relationships become part of the market.

When people stop rewarding chaos for the sake of attention, chaos becomes less commercially useful.

The entertainment industry is listening.

The question is:

What are we telling it to make?

Perhaps humanity doesn’t need less entertainment.

Perhaps humanity needs to become more conscious about what it is eating.

Because the grocery shop feeds the body.

The entertainment ecosystem feeds the imagination, the emotions, the expectations, the language, the social references and, increasingly, the identity of the human being.

And if that is true, then entertainment isn’t merely a pastime anymore.

It is infrastructure.

And infrastructure deserves standards.

Not standards designed to dictate what people are allowed to think.

Standards designed to help humanity understand what it is consuming.

Because once we recognise entertainment as part of the environment that raises us, the responsibility changes.

We stop asking only:

“Was it entertaining?”

And we start asking:

“What did it feed?”

“What did it reinforce?”

“What did it normalise?”

“What did it teach?”

And ultimately:

“What kind of humanity are we creating by continuing to consume it?”