Shortly after watching the Carabao Cup final on a free Twitter link, I half-completed a 10-minute workout on the Apple Fitness app, easily defying the effervescent American PT’s demands for more effort, and later watched the fake boxing match between Jake Paul and Tommy Fury via a live TikTok stream of someone filming the fight on his flat-screen TV. To the sound of my host breathing through his mouth as I piggy-backed his Sky Sports subscription, I suddenly had one of my now weekly existential revelations: my life is in Cheat Mode.
Video games always have a Cheat Mode where you can breeze through, allowing you to complete them in about five seconds without any pressure — well, that’s my life now. Of course, I could still be hit by a bus or bundled into a van and tortured by a gang of Andrew Tate-obsessed primary school children, but other than that, my day-to-day life is so smoothed over digitally that I’m essentially an avatar of myself and therefore barely alive at all.
