Logan Paul's interview on Fox Business gave me existential dread. Here are all the things you can do instead of watching it

Drink water. It’s very hard to go wrong by drinking water. Read a few pages of a book. Pretty much any book will do. Hug your significant other. Hug a friend. Hug your pet

Logan Paul gave an interview on Fox Business this week. In case you’ve lived such a blessed life that you have no idea who Logan Paul, is, allow me: he is a 24-year-old YouTuber with 19 million subscribers. His accomplishments include, but are not limited to: filming a dead body hanging from a tree in Japan’s Aokigahara forest, interviewing far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for two hours and turning the water in his brother’s swimming pool into slime.

Some thought Paul’s career would end after the Aokigahara video drew worldwide condemnation. But of course, it didn’t – he just needed a month-long hiatus and a tearful apology video. Paul is still vlogging, podcasting, and turning any available area of his life into content. That is how he presumably landed an interview as an expert on Fox Business as part of a segment on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok.

Paul’s interview went viral, of course. In seven minutes, Paul called himself an “ex-controversial YouTuber”, said he was “everywhere, baby – I’m everywhere and nowhere, I’m like a ghost”, announced that his expenses had just surpassed his earnings for the first time despite allegedly making $14.5m in 2018, made the positively Trumpian claim that he might be “the quickest man on the planet” (he was talking about running), and revealed that he had pinkeye (but was unsure of whether the condition was contagious).

The reaction to the interview didn’t go unnoticed by Paul himself. Attention is Paul’s business model. It’s how he exists online and how he makes (apparently vast) amounts of money. He commented on his own interview on Tuesday, tweeting: “It’s FASCINATING to me that I can, without fail, rely on the naïveté of Twitter as a marketing vehicle for hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of paid media, for free, every time.” Paul appears to think his business strategy is much cleverer, and much newer, than it actually is.

Like many entertainers with a solid enough following, Paul has mastered the art of failing up – a development perhaps precipitated by the Aokigahara incident. Career survival means doing things on camera. They don’t have to be good things. They don’t have to be things that require skill or passion. He can just show up and people will watch. He can give a ridiculous interview and it will go viral – for all the wrong reasons, but Paul doesn’t care about that part. All he needs to care about are the views.

Our culture insists that if someone manages to make loads of money and/or win over millions of fans, they must be doing something right. Sure, you might not agree with them or enjoy their content, but don’t you have to at least respect the hustle?

No, you don’t. If anything, Paul’s rise to fame and his presumed wealth exemplify how we, as a society, keep rewarding all the wrong things. The idea that it’s possible for content creators to hack our (very human) need for entertainment and turn it into an £8m fortune fills me with nothing but existential dread. Wealth doesn’t correlate with morality, and it certainly, definitely isn’t an indicator of talent.

I must admit that I watched Paul’s interview on Fox Business – all of it. Those are seven minutes I will presumably never get back. (Unless the afterlife has some kind of receipt system I’m not aware of? When my time comes, can I pull up at the gates of hell and demand I get seven more minutes on Earth?) It’s too late for me – I’ve fallen too deep into the YouTube rabbit hole to ever climb out fully. But you – you can still be saved.

The next time you have seven minutes or less and want to avoid contributing to Logan Paul’s business model, think about all the other things you can do: listen to this 2012 song about how to load a dishwasher; do this five-minute yoga sequence; email your grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, mother, father, sibling or whichever relative you haven’t checked in with for a while; schedule a dentist appointment (you’ve been putting it off); meditate; read this hilarious Twitter thread in which people recount the most over-the-top lies they’ve told for personal gain; or perhaps you’d prefer to entertain yourself with this thread in which a creative genius face-swapped Disney heroes and their antagonists.

Here are some suggestions which take even less time. Drink water. It’s very hard to go wrong by drinking water. Read a few pages of a book. Pretty much any book will do. Hug your significant other. Hug a friend. Hug your pet.

Logan Paul relies on us, so let’s stop inadvertently endorsing his capitalist YouTube nonsense. These above activities will hopefully bring you joy, help you learn new, free skills and even maybe make the world a better place. And none of them involve debating whether pinkeye is contagious (it is – as long as it’s caused by a bacteria or a virus, as opposed to allergies).