My feed has been bombarded with the same idea worded in many different ways. The UK has officially entered a recession. All the liberal capitalists must be crying or something, but for me, a millennial born in 1991, it’s just another Tuesday. The wording regarding economic-related journalism always makes me laugh. I read only satirical columns in The Economist or The Wall Street Journal (pedantic alert) because paying attention to the wording of the serious news actually makes me sad. Sad or sick in the stomach, depending on the day I might be having.
I am talking of the wording of marvellous sentences like:

On Thursday, the Office for National Statistics announced that the UK is in fact in recession, with a 0.3% drop in gross domestic product for the last quarter of 2023 to follow a 0.1% drop in the third quarter. – The Guardian

The economy shrank by a larger than expected 0.3% between October and December, after it had already contracted between July and September. – BBC

UK economy slipped into technical recession at the end of 2023 – CNBC

You get the idea. At least The Guardian makes sure to make fun of the deranged Daily Express stating quite the opposite just the week before. And my favourite, by the CNN:

Britain falls into recession, with worst GDP performance in 2023 in years.

Britain, not even the UK, falls into. Like me when I fall on the bike and I smash myself against the concrete. Like a jar of chickpeas falling and crashing in a sticky mess. Like a pen abandoning a pocket and hitting the ground in silent protest. You know? I cannot stop imagining the UK, probably drawn like the island itself with a silly hat, a blazer and a cane, carefully walking and, oh no! casually falling into, you know, recession.

I love languages, and I am obsessed with semantics, so when I explore these themes in the media, I genuinely get scared of how powerful the language is. How we happily have normalized making metaphors and silly wordplay about something that affects so many people negatively every single day. The media machine is almost as scary as capitalism itself; needs to constantly be fed information so has an endless repertoire of things to spit on the other end. How can we not be angry when we talk about entire countries going into tough times as if it were the weather forecast?

We are constantly being gaslit into thinking that the economy is indeed like the weather or astrology. Like, Venus is in Pluto’s fifth house for the next forty days, so the numbers go down, the graphics will be all in red and fuck you all (us) porvos.I said it before and I will say it again, I lo ve to watch things I hate. Creators I don’t like, things that make me a little bit mad and things I despise. I love taming my own algorithm into liking my kinks. Lately, my hatred for late-stage capitalism has thrown me into several YouTube rabbit holes. I am, of course, obsessed with Multi Level Marketing companies. They have everything I like: cult like behaviour, ferocious marketing, and human delusion. I am also obsessed with scammers in general, and startup scams in particular. I love the desperation of a twenty-something university dropout who has just read Steve Jobs’s book and their reckless ambition to think that they will be the next big thing. Extra points if the scam has to do with the crypto boom of 2020. More Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann, please. I am not interested in actual successful startups; I tell YouTube and Instagram that I am not interested. It’s usually the same story of someone who did this and did that and then at the very end, it turns out that they just had rich parents. This is the world we live in.

How do we let them speak to us like that?
They spit at us with impunity, thinking that we won’t connect the dots. This is my fourth or fifth recession. They speculated with homes, and now I can’t buy one. They speculated with taxes, and now, the NHS crumbles while the trains get cancelled. We are systematically exploited, and our economic system happily condones people stealing millions, but then a country randomly falls into recession.
A country falls graciously, just like a ballerina. Or a Wild West prostitute with a tight corset, pretending to be grasping for air to avoid getting in bed with someone who hasn’t had a bath in three weeks.

Falls.