Somewhere between the screaming and the phone lights, the American concert stopped being a show.
It became a group therapy session with a cover charge.
The performer becomes the therapist, the audience becomes the patient, and the merchandise table becomes the pharmacy.
Troye Sivan, the Australian singer who built a following by being disarmingly open about his life, now headlines arenas where thousands of young people sing along to songs that read like diary entries.
On the surface, it looks like connection.
Look closer and it's something stranger: a generation paying premium prices to feel understood by someone who has never met them.
The economics are brutal if you think about them for more than a minute.
Tickets, travel, hotels, the outfit, the friendship bracelets.
A night out can run a family several hundred dollars.
A few hours of shared feeling with strangers, and a performer who will be in another city by morning.
We've turned emotional intimacy into a subscription service, and the renewal is automatic.
Here's the part that should bother us more.
The young people flooding these venues are the same ones reporting record levels of loneliness.
They are surrounded, connected, and streaming, and still starving for something real.
The concert promises that real thing, then ends.
Everyone files out into the parking garage, holding a feeling that has nowhere to go.
Nobody is saying Sivan is doing anything wrong.
By most accounts, he's earnest, generous with his audience, and genuinely good at what he does.
That's precisely what makes the trend worth naming.
It's what we've quietly outsourced to artists, and what we've stopped expecting from the people actually in our lives.
There's a version of this that's just harmless fun, and plenty of it is.
But when the deepest emotional experiences of a young person's year happen in a rented arena, in the dark, in unison with thousands of strangers, something in the ordinary world has gone missing.
The community that used to hold people without charging admission.
We keep telling ourselves this is community.
The difference is whether anyone notices when you don't show up.
Maybe the real question isn't why so many young people adore performers like Sivan.
It's why the rest of us have made ourselves so hard to adore in return.
Until we answer that, the arenas will keep selling out, and the parking garages will keep filling with people who felt everything for two hours and nothing on the drive home.
Our take: the appeal of a performer who seems to see you is a symptom, not a cure.
If the only place a teenager feels truly known is a darkened stadium, the failure isn't in the music.
Final Thoughts
It's in every living room that went quiet first.