Manufacturing Fear

Nuclear war is not Reality TV

Nuclear War is not a dress rehearsal

I worked on reality shows for years. You know what I learned? There's no reality in reality TV. None. It's all manufactured drama, scripted chaos designed to keep people glued to their screens. I used to watch grown adults have complete meltdowns over nothing—fights that were staged, emotions that were coached, conflicts that were carefully orchestrated by producers who knew exactly which buttons to push.

Back then, I thought it was harmless entertainment. Stupid, maybe, but harmless.

Now I watch the news and I see the same damn playbook being used, except this time it's not some dating show or survival competition. It's our actual government. We've got a president who runs the country like he's producing a reality show—create conflict, escalate drama, keep everyone watching. The problem is, this isn't a soundstage. This is real life, and the stakes aren't TV ratings.

America has this twisted talent for turning everything into entertainment, even our own destruction. We make movies about nuclear war, zombie apocalypses, alien invasions—every possible way the world could end except the most likely one, which is us just being incredibly stupid about it. I learned, hiding under my desk during duck and cover drills, that this was my future. The apocalypse.

And here's what really gets me: the guy with his finger on the nuclear button lives in complete fantasy. He sees himself as some kind of superhero, the John Wayne of international relations. He's surrounded by AI-generated images of himself looking strong and heroic, and he actually believes that's reality. It's like he's the star of his own reality show, except the show is about potentially ending human civilization. And when this show ends, there won't be anyone left to strike the set.

This is what decades of turning everything into performance gets you. The kids who practiced hiding under desks during the Cold War grew up and had kids, and those kids grew up to elect a reality TV star president. We've been rehearsing for disaster for so long that we don't know how to do anything else. And we think it’s inevitable.

I don't know how this ends. I really don't. What I do know is that we're living through something unprecedented—a moment where the person making life-and-death decisions for the entire planet operates from a reality that doesn't actually exist.

But here's the thing that keeps me going: every day, despite all of this madness, people still get up and make coffee. They still hug their kids. They still choose to be kind to strangers. They still act like tomorrow is going to happen, like love matters, like there's a point to all of this.

Maybe that's not naive. Maybe that's the most important thing we can do right now—keep living like life is worth living. Keep treating each moment like it matters.

Because it does.

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Image ©2025Gael MacLean