By Josh Gardner, who believes Secret Santa is effectively licensed stalking
WE can have either truth or social media, and if that’s a difficult choice don’t worry, it’s already been made for you. But whither Santa?
How can he compile a list of the naughty and nice when the moral boundaries that define good and bad behaviour aren’t real? Isn’t that just unacceptable behaviour-shaming?
Sadly, just like facts in public discourse, there’s no real objective reality. Once being nice meant listening in attentive fear while your parents regaled you with stories about ice on the inside of windows, and naughty meant listening to albums with an explicit lyrics sticker.
Today? Niceness, as it was once called, gets likes. But naughtiness, like calling Sydney Sweeney mid, gets engagement which is often far superior in terms of building your brand and that’s what today’s kids love.
No, we’ve left old conceptions of naughty and nice behind. The evidence is all around you. Moral vacuums land cushy jobs on the GB News desk, while felons selling their piss tapes on OnlyFans win presidential elections.
Assassins are folk heroes, James Corden is on television at Christmas, and Kemi Badenoch breakfasts on a BLT. We’re all sinking into a grey moral morass.
And as for good people… are there any? Greta Thunberg seemed alright, but Santa never brought the end to climate change she wanted. Being Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019 now means being half a Trump.
And where does that leave me? I’ve not done anything heinous like a murder, or even worse developing a parasocial relationship with Chappell Roan, but nor have I done anything virtuous like passing on gig tickets for their face value.
The whole quandary has riddled me with existential dread, which I usually only feel when I sleep in my childhood bedroom, or when my AirPods run out of charge before I’m sufficiently ASMRed.
Clearly the ideas of naughty and nice are a fabrication. They’re little more than religious oligarchy for youngsters, and adults shouldn’t indoctrinate their kids with these lies.
Thank God for AI. All we need is to feed the whole of human life since the start of history –by which I mean the founding of Facebook – in, and within minutes it will give us the definitive answer in algorithm form. I for one can’t wait to be judged.
