Last week, a viral post went viral about a man who confessed to cheating on his girlfriend, with whom he had been since his university days.
“My reasons for cheating were not at all noble,” he wrote on LinkedIn after writing in The Times, honestly admitting that he predictably committed adultery at the age of 36.
This fragment is part of the promotion for the article in The Times under the headline: “Illicit sex and secret affairs: the truth about our infidelity”.
With everything going on in the world, where does this craving for the private, the banal, even a little pathetic come from? Why does the story of one man who felt that “the future before them was not in a good way” provoke thousands of reactions, while tragedies in Gaza, Sudan or Afghanistan do not?
Emotional Clickbait as Currency
Platforms, whether LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok, are now driven not by facts but by emotions. A confession of infidelity is easy to understand: it is a story that millions encounter. It does not require context, it is intimate, and “safe” to discuss.
The story of how a man got tired of stability and cheating is a universal dramatic code that does not need geopolitical explanations, instead offering plenty of room for gossip than division.
In contrast, tragedies in Gaza or Yemen require effort: understanding the history to navigate the events, to empathise with people a person has never met, and to appear educated on issues that often cause more divisions than unity.
They are mentally exhausting and posts about them rarely have a viral effect. According to the Reuters Institute (2024), 43% of users avoid the news “because it causes fatigue and stress”: a phenomenon called 'news fatigue.'
Microstories versus Macropains
Personal infidelity has the structure of good storytelling: hero → problem → twist → result.
It is simple, it is “about me”.
It is a mirror of life in a three-paragraph format. However, a post about another airstrike on Gaza holds pain, complexity, and guilt… some of which is collective. It is more like a mirror, reflecting humanity’s failure to treat everyone with human dignity and more often or not: a conscience.
This contrast makes people wonder. Has the culture of confession really become a modern alternative to political responsibility? It seems that people are more willing to discuss private psychological dilemmas than global catastrophes. Involuntarily, we have stopped “noticing” tragedies that seem too big to be fixed by a repost or a comment.
Why is this Dangerous?
Substituting the agenda has real consequences.
When the media space is captured by stories about infidelity, dating, and personal crises, the sense of urgency regarding real threats disappears. We turn away from The Hague, where international courts prosecute war crimes; we ignore refugee crises; we forget about the climate catastrophe.
In 2024, more than 5,000 children were killed in Gaza yet these deaths did not go viral unlike the confession of one adult man who was simply tired of his girlfriend.
This is not a comparison of pain, but a comparison of perception. We live in a world where attention has become a commodity and unfortunately, the pain of the weak and oppressed loses in the battle for clicks.
What Does this Say about us in 2025?
Therefore, this viral confession is a symptom of our time.
People live in an era of “emotional ease”: stories that do not require us to think are convenient. They do not force us to choose between a petition, a protest, or money.
Paradoxically, it is this revelation that offers an important insight: not everything that is viral is essential whilst not everything that matters is viral. People forget that social media algorithms are built not on value, but on reaction.
It is with this in mind that our choice to read, share, and discuss stories is our way of voting for what really matters.
There is a sort of democracy in liking a post, which you should all be aware of.
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