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reality tv as performance art | wellness as a recipe | inquiry as improvement

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  • 🗣️I Can’t “Take” It Anymore!!!: The Back and Forth Scandalization of the Everyday

    Somewhere between the fifth stitch and the tenth take about a stranger’s face was when Tiktok finally lost me. Takes, ”a user’s opinion, response, or creative interpretation of a trending sound, video, or trend on the platform”, were flooding my For You page about “Wedding MakeupGate”  and one too many opinion videos on the topic finally pushed me into IcantmfTAKEitanymore territory.

    For those unaware, WeddingMakeupGate, despite the vocabulary implication of presidentially large stakes, actually refers to one of the least scandalous and painfully relatable events of all time: paying for a service that you ended up fucking hating. MakeupGate, as the title suggests, refers to this scenario played out on a wedding day—bride gets makeup done, bride hates makeup (fair, it was cakey IMHO), bride makes TikTok wiping it off and talking about how ugly it is. Enter: the internet promptly suited up for battle.

    • Should the makeup artist have asked and offered to re-do it????
    • Was the bride’s video just another example of people-pleasing’s sinister undertone?????
    • And most importantly, was the makeup even ugly in the first place??

    And as much as I normally would want to get in on the social media scrap and raise my flag of discourse allegiance (Team Makeup Artist—don’t rob someone of the chance to fix something just because you want content about how much you hated it), that day I just snapped. Suddenly all I could think about was just how utterly non-juicy and pedestrian gossip and drama now had to be to warrant a chorus of yays and nays from thousands of selfie cams around the world.

    I found myself asking as I often do: why do we even care about this? Like, TRULY. Why?

    I set my phone down and genuinely told myself to go touch grass. Because since when did cowboy caviar, a coloring book, or simply not enjoying a restaurant become the stuff of a Greek chorus?

    What really put me off the app for good(ish) wasn’t the excess. It was the misshapen equity. Every situation, no matter how minor, was being escalated with the same intensity and fervor.

    Over the months leading up to this departure,  it felt more and more like I was swimming in an ecosystem designed to rev people up to the same piercing emotional pitch no matter what the content was. Not the important stuff. Not the literally presidentially large stuff. Just… whatever was available that day.

    It used to take at least a cheating scandal. A group chat leaked to a journalist. A wardrobe malfunction. But now? A mild inconvenience and a ring light is all it “takes” to be the producers of our own dramas and the raging audience “pick a side” culture to match.

    Take Culture Is Reality TV If It Was Actually Real

    Shows like Survivor are pros at designing an experience so betrayal and alliances on a remote island can still strike a chord with anyone who’s had a friend turn on them or been humiliated whilst doing physical activity. But TikTok distributes an endless-scroll feed of should-be-but-aren’t boring micro-conflicts we can project onto. Like anxiety winning the war against telling your hairstylist they fucked your shit up, or that guy who ghosted you still liking your instagram story (WHY DO THEY DO THIS).

    And TBH? I guess this is what reality TV would be if it were actually real. People love to complain that reality TV is fake, overproduced, and unrealistic (I’d counter with the liberatory spirit of “yes, and?”)—the fights are too extra, the friend groups are too fake. But TikTok said, “ok cool then what if everyone starred in their own low-stakes, emotionally overcharged, low-budget personal main character docuseries and the drama was just existing as a human?

    And what’s wild is that it works.

    Take culture has shown me, shockingly, that people are extremely emotionally invested in the mundane. And not in spite of its unremarkable everyday ordinariness but because of it. In the year 2025, salaciousness no longer has to live in the extremes to draw a fuck or 20 out of an audience. In fact, it’s in the deeply familiar that the most juiciness is squeezed. 

    And what’s doubly fascinating is that the passion and rage and audience loyalty behind it isn’t any lower than what you’d find from viewers arguing in r/bravorealhousewives. People will RIDE AT DAWN for the someone’s Uber driver whose car smelled weird or against the Southwest gate agent who made them check a bag they swear fit just fine in the overhead. We stitch it, narrate it, diagnose it and make the everyday interpersonal events of someone’s unremarkable life relatable, creatable, and consumable. 

    Now there is a rabid fandom for everyday life.

    So at a certain point I had to ask myself: if the stories aren’t Jersey Shore extreme, and the characters aren’t celebrities, and the stakes are objectively low… then TRULY why do we care this much?

    Takes Are Just Trauma Responses with Ring Lights

    I knew I needed to take a screen break when I found myself ready to throw virtual hands for this makeup artist in the name of Restorative Communication. As someone who takes people at face value and prides myself on being receptive to requests for changed behavior when given the CHANCE AND INFORMATION TO DO SO (sry i’m activated again), my wounds of being punished for something I didn’t even know I did were gnawing at the bars of my emotional enclosure. 

    Our strongest takes about the smallest things are often just raw emotional wounds looking for a ride. 

    The take is just the container of an emotional backlog that’s desperate to catch up and have its day in the sun. It carries all the receipts of emotional leakage happening under the guise of “having an opinion.” The take isn’t wrong but it is often inflated by layers of personal memory disguised as commentary. 

    By the time a take reaches the internet, it’s carrying ten other moments it never admitted were still sore. It’s the emotional residue we never journaled about, never talked to a friend about, never even admitted we were still sore from. And, then presto:  finally the stage appears and you are heard. 

    As a mental health academic, catharsis enthusiast, and water sign, I can see the value of letting that shit out and sharing one’s voice.  But ~I couldn’t help but wonder~:is the exercise of “take-ing” actually moving us through a process of healing or getting us stuck in a combative opinion chamber of more harm? Is it just a more eloquent version of yelling into the void?

    What gets missed is the awareness of what’s been prodded at or tenderized in the first place.

     The pause between receive and response is pre-natal. No “wait—why did this hit me so hard and why do I give a fuck?” No sitting with the sting before sounding off. Instead of journaling. Instead of texting a friend that that thing from 5 years ago got brought up again and has you feeling some typa of way. 

    When a moment hits you hard enough to make you pause, or post, or go on a 3-minute rant—it’s not random. Something in you recognized it. And the question isn’t “what’s your take,” it’s “what’s the memory and what needs tending to?” Instead of tracing the outline of the emotional bruise to figure out where it came from, we just react, film, and externalize; we upload an emotional charge straight into the For You page and name it ~objective commentary~ in the name of what’s right.

    Instant transmission: wound to opinion piece, pain to post.

    But if that’s why we GET activated, why do we stay activated and deep in the TikTok take collective?

    The Customer Base for Take Culture Is Actually Your Inner Child

    Take culture isn’t just where pain gets exposed and debated – it’s also where pain gets soothed. Take culture’s most loyal employee is actually our inner child. Once strangers start validating a take that once made us feel crazy or alone, it creates a kind of emotional relief we didn’t even know we were chasing. And it’s not just sharing to a friend and or talking to a 10-person group to AA. The sheer numbers and volume of comments on our side of the story allow emotional mass of our personal stories to finally get mirrored back to us in a way that feels proportionate.

    Every day I thank *gestures vaguely* for the fact that my career is not dependent on my willingness to have thousands of strangers weigh in on my life. That being said, there are injustices in my life that I do believe deserve the anger or indignance of a mid-size following. A lot of the least scandalous stuff that shaped us (ruined us) the most—the group hang invitations that never came, the friendships where you’re always the one reaching out, the hairstylist that fucked your shit up—didn’t come with a single impassioned megathread or comment section rallying cry.

    And then someone drops a video with exactly that thing. FINALLY thousands of people are weighing in on the right side of your history, breaking it down, defending it, validating it—and it hits. The experience is being reflected at the scale it actually felt. Like it was worth the pre-sleep thought spirals or the days hiding tears at work. The chorus of “that was messed up” that your inner child never got to witness on your behalf has arrived and you are HERE FOR IT.

    Our pain largely exists and stays huge only for us. 

    Quietly humongous. Secretly formative. At times permanently warping our sense of trust, or self-worth, or safety in the world—but they happened in the kind of everyday settings that the average person doesn’t get full-scale series made about.

    As adults, we live with the awareness that the world can’t be up in arms in accordance with our grievances and our emotional state (booooooo). We know cognitively that the coworker who left you hanging with a deliverable on Friday afternoon doesn’t actually deserve to be berated by the TikTok grand jury via counterpoints, drags, and doxxing. But what we often feel emotionally is that not enough people cared. And that fucking hurt.

    But with takes, finally, it feels like the way it hurt is the way it’s being treated.

    And there’s something deeply validating about finally seeing a version of your own unacknowledged pain get the overwhelming reaction it always deserved. 

    So I wonder—when we’re scrolling and stumble across a take war with one side that sounds just like that one thing that never got the time of day it deserved, if it’s a balm to unresolved pain.

    And maybe that’s why take culture can feel so cyclical sometimes—because most of the time, we don’t want resolution. We just want witnesses.

    It was never about the makeup. 

    Our nervous systems are remembering things we never got to name and then we end up making digital monuments to our pain instead of digesting it. But what we end up with is performance and picking sides, not processing 

    When enough people are stuck in a loop of unvalidated harm, of shouting into the void just to feel like their pain matters, what gets lost is our capacity to build something beyond it. In takes culture, are different views in the conversation giving us new information to approach familiar situations differently? Or is this just two wounds in a boxing ring and nobody gets to heal.

    What can come of soothing oneself in these circumstances and affirming:

    • “I can name what this reminds me of without having to prove it to strangers.”
    • “The story behind my reaction is worth knowing.”
    • “Naming it to myself might be enough.”

    Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is just not having a take.

    Not every sharp feeling needs to become a sharp take. Sometimes it just needs a place to land, to be held by our own arms, and to be led back home to where it lives in who we are.

  • 👀 Reality TV: Control in a Cocktail Dress or a Blueprint for Liberation?

    Welcome to the Program

    And production said “let there be light” and there was light. You awake trapped somewhere that looks vaguely like Calabasas with a dozen half-dressed strangers. The abrupt click on of a fluorescent light from some unknown power that be signals that your day has begun. You have no phone, no outside communication, and no clocks. There’s unlimited champagne but a suspiciously little amount of consumable food. Unclear whether it’s 2 PM or 2 AM. Privacy is long gone, what food exists is rationed, and every week, someone is executed (banished to the sound stage 30 ft outside of frame).

    These are the dystopian imaginings of the 90s kids with cable we couldn’t tame. It’s the Saw-adjacent house arrest premise of Big Brother, the pre-frontal pickled liver petri dish of Jersey Shore, and the prison visit inspired relationship building of Love Is Blind. And it’s designed to make people crack and spill their mess into the living rooms of audiences around the world..

    Alchemists of the Unhinged

    Reality TV producers  are some of the most creative and intentional designers in the world. They engineer, with psychologically depraved precision, environments to encourage tables flipped in rage, romances of convenience, or total psychological breakdown, whichever makes the best television or has the most meme potential. The splendor of the Bachelor mansion? A pressure cooker for disorganized attachment and competition over an anti-prize of a man. Love Island? A clockless void where contestants form deep bonds as the only alternative to doing literally nothing all day. Even Cake Boss is a masterclass in pressure as performance art, stripping people down to stress responses in tear-stained aprons.

    These shows have always fascinated me from a sociological perspective, not just because of their micro-reflection of the larger world, but because they force me to constantly wrestle with (and often lose to) the existentially not-so-chill awareness that our environments are never neutral. Just like the Survivor island withholds food to create shitshow fertilizer, the space we exist in, our workplaces, our cities, our social media feeds, is never designed by accident.

    Who Produced Our Fuckass Society and Why Wasn’t the Showrunner Fired Years Ago?

    On reality TV, the answer is obvious. Love Island producers benefit when contestants fall in love under false conditions. Bravo benefits when its Housewives get into fights on Scary Island stocked with free alcohol. But the real designers of our spaces—our offices, our cities, our institutions—are often behind the curtain.

    Take workplaces. Just like reality TV shows, offices are designed to influence behavior. Open office plans encourage visibility (read: surveillance). Strict schedules dictate when we eat, how long we pee, and how many exact minutes we can dare to take for ourself during the 9-5 hours. Remote work? A fundamental reshaping of the workplace “set,” one that has caused pushback from the people who benefit from keeping workers on-site and overworked.

    Or think about public spaces. Urban design determines who feels welcome in a city. A park with plenty of seating invites people to linger, gather, and covertly day-drink. A bench with armrests every two feet? That’s not just a design choice—that’s an anti-human measure, meant to prevent anyone from sleeping there. Algorithmic design works the same way. Social media platforms tweak our feeds to maximize engagement, not necessarily our well-being.

    The parallels between reality TV and real life are everywhere. The question is, how often do we realize we’re living inside someone else’s design?

    The Cameras Are Rolling – We Just Can’t See Them

    Spoiler: design isn’t just about production—it’s about power. Who gets to shape the environment? Who gets to set the defaults? Who benefits from those defaults being left unquestioned? 

    When we look at reality TV, we know it’s produced. Real life on the other hand? We’re conditioned to treat it as natural, normal, expected, and inevitable.The edit happens before you even show up. It’s baked into the system. The expectations. The assumptions about what winning looks like and who gets to have it. We are in the scene, hitting our marks, following the script and we never even realize the cameras are rolling.

    That’s the thing about power when it’s done well, it’s invisible and insidious. It doesn’t need to shout. It doesn’t need to coerce. It just hands you a sparsely decorated megamansion and a storyline and lets you perform yourself into compliance, contention, or chaos.

    None of this is neutral. It’s not just how things are. These are decisions—made by someone, and almost always very far removed from the people most affected by them.

    You ever watch your show and scream at the screen because you know the producers set someone up? Because the game was rigged? That same instinct – we need to bring that to our institutions. If someone keeps getting cut out of the story of success, maybe it’s not because they lacked initiative. Maybe the whole edit was built to minimize them. To flatten complexity. To make it easier to sell a clean narrative to advertisers, the network, or their millions of mid-western white viewers. 

    In media, we know who the edit is for. But in our everyday institutions, we’re still pretending there isn’t one.

    But what happens when we see the set and refuse it? What if we treated the world like a show in mid-production—something we could recut, reframe, or scrap and rewrite completely (Clare Crawley, liiberatory resistance icon)?

    Because if the environment can be designed to shape us, then we can shape that shit right back.

    The Power of Intentional World-Building

    The good news is that just as these environments are designed, they can also be redesigned. We already see this in action.

    • Unions are a form of world-building. They redesign workplaces to prioritize worker rights, rather than just corporate profit.
    • Mutual aid networks are world-building. They create safety nets outside of government institutions.
    • Cooperative housing and community-led urban planning are world-building. They challenge the idea that cities have to be designed around developers, rather than residents.

    If Love Island can manufacture a setting where “the Honda Civic of male attractiveness” are coveted by multiple women, then anything is possible; we can design environments that encourage trust, collaboration, and liberation instead of stress, burnout, and scarcity.

    Reality TV isn’t just a guilty pleasure. It’s a mirror, a hyper-curated social experiment that lays bare just how profoundly how quickly human behavior can shift and marbles can be lost and gained under the right (or wrong) conditions. It’s proof that simple tweaks, no clocks, no outside world, all attention funneled toward one goal, are all it takes to create an entirely different reality. 

    The environment is the manipulation. The drama is the design. And that’s why no amount of personal development can outpace a rigged production. You can’t out-rehearse a script that was was structured to keep you small, drunk, angry, or crazy.

    So What to Do Other Than Spiral?

    We notice and we resist. We break the fourth wall. We stop playing for the cameras and start asking who’s in the editing room. Who gets to make meaning and tell the story here? Who gets to choose what counts as progress, professionalism, or even possibility?

    The level of scrutiny and precision we use when dissecting the latest group trip-induced meltdown on Bravo to the hyperproduced antics of the world around us -is critical to apply to the systems we move through every day?

    Take Survivor. On the surface, players clash because they’re “untrustworthy” or “manipulative.” But if you zoom out, there was a meticulously engineered recipe for mistrust: chronic hunger, isolation, the constant threat of elimination, secret ballots. The game is rigged to breed suspicion. And it’s not a flaw of the design, the dysfunction is the premise.

    So the real work isn’t just noticing the design. It’s saying “fuck the producers” and rewriting our role in the story. We start producing a new season where the plot twists come from our values, not their agenda. Where collaboration isn’t bad for ratings, and care isn’t cast as weakness.

    Because if one small change in the conditions can send people spiraling into chaos, then maybe one intentional shift can move us toward wholeness.

  • 👑 Do We Know This Diva?? 4 Fascinating Femmes We Moved On From Too Quickly

    Quinn | Unreal Seasons 1-3

    Memorable Quote: “Be your own woman, not somebody’s else bitch.”

    On my list of “shows that molded my personality and feminist politics at an early age“, UnReal sits comfortably near the top. It landed right in the sweet spot of my burgeoning collegiate obsession with the social conditions for liberation, so of course I was drawn to a deep dive into the forces that manufacture mayhem, distrust, and unsustainable intimacy.

    UnReal arrived at a moment when former Bachelor contestants were starting to lift the curtain on just how Stanford Prison Experiment-adjacent their reality TV experience really was. And fittingly, the show was created by a Bachelor alum herself. At its core was Quinn King—played to unhinged perfection by Constance Zimmer—who sat at the helm of this emotional abuse empire as the executive producer of Everlasting, the Bachelor-adjacent dating show within the show.

    Quinn heard gatekeep, gaslight, girlboss and sprinted a marathon with that shit. With her hands-on leadership style (see also: “do what I say, meat puppet”) and a razor-sharp eye for the demented, Quinn turned every moment into an opportunity for character development on-screen and off. She was the master of manufacturing drama, the ultimate architect of controlled chaos, and an icon of toxic efficiency.

    Britney Haynes | Big Brother Seasons 12 & 14, Traitors Season 3

    Memorable Quote: “Here, Have An Apple Pie… Made Of Arsenic!”

    Dearest Britney: , Impersonator Extraordinaire, Queen of Snark and Narrator of the Realm, First of Her Name, Before Gabby Windey, there was Stassi Schroeder, and before all of them was BB12 breakout star of commentary Britney Haynes. This was the first season of Big Brother I ever watched, and Britney was the literal ROI queen for how that tiny nibble of reality TV turned into hundreds of hours of me watching it. Her colorful and appropriately judgement-filled descriptions of house happenings injected actual sanity into the madness.

    Part of, at least, my enjoyment reality tv, especially ones that span longer than a quarter at university, is just how unaware the big brother bubble of the house becomes. The psychologist in me understands that the brain is fully capable of creating a new version of normalcy where and a room en suite bathroom is worth new oohs and ahhs each week. Thank goodness for Britney, reminding us through her well-timed asides just how fucking utterly bizzare and meaningless everything was outside of the sound set. Her snark broke the bit and the show was better, sharper, and infinitely more enjoyable because of it.

    As a fellow face-hides-nothing queen, watching Britney react was often funnier than whatever was actually happening. And for that, I thank her. For finally and bravely declaring—on behalf of us all—THAT NOBODY CARES ABOUT WHAT’S IN THE DAMN HOH ROOM!!!

    Cookie | Empire Seasons 1-6

    Memorable Quote: “God, please do not withhold your blessings, even from ho’s that hire skunks to spy on me.“

    Cookie truly gave Empire its flavor and thank GOD it wasn’t sweet. She was the neck, the head, the fists, and the brain, all wrapped up in one unstoppable and fur-caoted force. The fear she struck specifically in men? Truly inspirational and a pleasure to witness.

    Cookie was a reckoning and snatched power right out of the hands of men who thought they could erase her contributions with a thank you and forced prison time. She kept her designer heels on her enemies’ beck and was the blueprint for ~I THINK THE FUCK NOT~.

    Heavy on the DEMANDING respect, Cookie relentlessly defended her stake in the patriarchal empire that had the audacity to try and shut her out of what she built. She was a walking reminder that there’s no need to play nice when you’re fighting for what’s already yours.

    And a formal petition to bring boo boo kitty back into the lexicon of the 2020s. It’s what we deserve..

    Olivia | Fictional Pig

    Memorable Quote: “[Olivia] is very good at wearing people out.” – Ian Falconer, author of the iconic early 2000s Olivia picture book series

    Olivia!!! My weird queen! My special-interest icon! The undisputed ruler of independent play and a legend in wearing out her parents, Olivia is “too much,” and that’s exactly what makes her incredible.

    Olivia arrived in my bookshelf at age 8 in all her eccentric, chaotic, and wildly creative glory. Olivia, like all 2000s girl icons, also invites a philosophical reflection on the nature of existence:

    “Olivia is “very good at wearing people out… even wears herself out,” inviting a dialogue on finding the right balance between idleness and action, activity versus reflection in discovery and innovation.” (Falconer, The Prindle Institute). Powerful reflections to unpack with your local elementary schooler.

    It’s also a reminder that being a cool, interesting person starts with doing cool, interesting shit—and how beautiful that is when it’s encouraged from childhood. Olivia was embraced in all her weirdness, sometimes celebrated, sometimes appropriately ignored, but always left to her own devices just enough to become iconic.