These past few years, especially, have felt like being locked in a theater where the only actor on stage is holding a gun and telling us to clap. Attention is being demanded, and the person demanding it doesn’t really think of any one of us as being on the same level of personhood as they. We have little choice but to suffer them, to some degree.

And so we analyze them. We dig deep into their personalities, their backstories, their psychology. It’s like doing a Rorschach test on a picture of a circle. There is, in truth, so little to consider, but the stakes have been inflated to such a degree that there is real incentive to try. It almost makes me appreciative of Jeff Bezos, whose existential crisis has mostly taken the form of putting on a cowboy hat and sending himself to outer space.

Ours is a system that exists to produce a handful of extremely wealthy people who get to stomp around like God-Kings once they make it to the top. This status, the ubiquity of their reach that capitalism affords them, is in truth the only thing that distinguishes them. They are only interesting because they have no choice but to be interesting. They can impose themselves on everyone below them, and everyone below them has little say in the matter.

There is a specific and unnerving discomfort that accompanies having to think about these people. I don’t want to have to roll my eyes at Elon’s memes. I don’t want to hear about Trump’s attraction to his daughter. I don’t want to have to go about my day wondering if some idiot with garden-variety pathologies and too much money and power is going to throw a fit and mess something up for everyone.

It’s distracting. It’s irritating. It’s the system we have.