Tuesday night epiphany…
I had an epiphany on Tuesday night, sitting in a packed room at Shoreditch House full of young, switched-on, emotionally articulate souls: scarred, and staring into the algorithmic abyss. They weren’t there for influencer bollocks. They came because the event’s subject mattered. I listened and I learned something.
They came to hear Rosie Viva talk about her memoir, Completely Normal and Totally Fine—a title laced with irony, because the world she describes is anything but normal, and certainly not fine.
Full disclosure: I’ve known Rosie since she was a kid. She went to school with my boys. This isn’t detached commentary from a distant observer. I’ve seen the family heartbreak and the slow, staggering process of turning it into something very real.
What gives her book its visceral charge isn’t just the courage; it’s the context. Rosie isn’t simply unpacking her bipolar disorder; she’s laying bare the wreckage of a generation raised in the shadow of what I can only call the Great Social Experiment. A world where every thought, every feeling, every mistake is broadcast live and dissected by strangers, high on dopamine, low on nuance. No off-switch. No refuge from the infinite scroll.
Back when I cut my teeth in the media, fame came with filters: editors, gatekeepers, some sense of control. Now? Everything’s up for grabs. Every moment is a pitch. Every breakdown is a branding asset. Privacy didn’t just vanish it got monetised. There’s no backstage anymore, only performance. Always on.
Let’s face it, most boomers still think ‘mental health’ is a passing trend dreamt up by a generation raised outside the school of hard knocks. The fix? Simple. Google ‘stiff upper lip’ and rediscover the lost art of stoicism, preferably while swallowing feelings whole and cracking on in silence. It’s cultural illiteracy masquerading as scepticism. But here’s the rub: we’re no longer the wise elders.
If we’re honest, the one thing the old cynics could learn from hashtagGenZ is how to sit with discomfort. How to listen without interrupting, judging, or filing it under “their issue” Social media doesn’t just shape the story anymore, it is the story.
Rosie didn’t ask to be a spokesperson. She didn’t slap a hashtag on her trauma and head off on the speaker circuit. She faced the storm, wrote through it, and somehow emerged with clarity. Her memoir isn’t just brave and honest, it’s a warning flare. A reckoning. A dispatch from the frontlines of a generation trying to survive the society we built.
And we, the nostalgia-soaked generation, need to wake up. Because by the time their reality blooms, twisted and wild like a mutant orchid fed on algorithmic anxiety and digital static, we’ll be long gone.
It’s not about us anymore. It never really was. So maybe, before we exit from the feed entirely, we should shut up, tune in, and try, just once, to listen to Rosie Viva.