This weekend, millions will tune in to watch a YouTube celebrity named KSI step into a boxing ring against a man he’s been feuding with online.
The pay-per-view numbers will be enormous.
The clips will flood every feed for days.
And when it’s over, we’ll all go back to our lives having spent money and attention on a spectacle that means absolutely nothing.
I’m not here to tell you that watching two grown men punch each other for entertainment is a moral crime.
People have enjoyed combat sports for millennia.
But there’s something distinctly hollow about the way we’ve industrialized this particular version of it—where the fight isn’t even the point.
The point is keeping you scrolling, reacting, and buying.
We’ve built an economy where a person can become famous for being loud, then parlay that fame into a boxing career they never trained for, then sell that fight to kids who think this is what competition looks like.
Meanwhile, actual boxers—people who spent their lives in gyms, who sacrificed their bodies for a craft—get paid a fraction of what an influencer makes for a single night of awkward swinging.
The disease is that we’ve decided attention is the only currency that matters.
We’ve decided that skill, patience, and mastery are less valuable than virality.
We’ve decided that if enough people are watching, it must be important.
And the impact on daily American life is real.
Kids now grow up thinking the path to success is to be controversial online, not to build something lasting.
Parents shell out for pay-per-view events that cost more than a week of groceries.
Families spend Saturday nights watching strangers perform fake hostility for real money, then wonder why their own relationships feel thin.
It’s not tanks in the streets or a single catastrophic event.
It’s when we stop asking “Is this good?” and start asking “Is this popular?” It’s when a boxing match between two people who don’t really box becomes a cultural event, and nobody blinks.
We used to have shared rituals that meant something—sports seasons, town fairs, church potlucks, whatever your community did.
They’re designed to extract, not to connect.
They leave us emptier after we’ve consumed them.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person if you watch the fight.
But I am saying we should be honest about what this is: not sport, not competition, not even really entertainment.
Your attention goes in, money comes out, and the culture gets a little more degraded.
We keep waiting for some big moment to fix things—an election, a movement, a leader.
But the fix starts with the small choices.
What we teach our kids is worth admiring.
But maybe ask yourself why a stranger’s fake feud is more interesting than anything happening in your own neighborhood.
Final Thoughts
Because that question—asked honestly—is where the real work begins.