{"id":133575,"date":"2025-10-20T09:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T09:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/133575\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T09:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T09:03:09","slug":"its-like-having-a-puppet-regime-installed-in-your-head-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/133575\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s like having a puppet regime installed in your head\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty-two-year-old Carl Kinsella worries about stuff. The columnist, script writer and author of a new collection of insightful, moving and funny essays worries about his health<\/a>, about his parents<\/a>, about the world<\/a>, about how this book will be received. He\u2019s even worried about being interviewed. \u201cI kind of black out when I\u2019m speaking,\u201d he says. \u201cI come to afterwards and I\u2019m like, \u2018What? What did I say?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He needn\u2019t worry. He\u2019s thoughtful and funny and speaks in long, perfectly formed sentences, with an occasional tendency to portmanteaux words together when existing ones don\u2019t do the trick. His book, At Least it Looks Good from Space: A Catalogue of Modern, Millennial and Personal Catastrophes is about the internet, anxiety, masculinity and sleep, and veers effortlessly from the personal to the sociological and political.<\/p>\n

We meet in a cafe in Smithfield near where he lives. He has a moustache and a white T-shirt and a woolly hat. It would be tempting to label him a \u201cvoice of the millennial generation\u201d but he rejects this out of hand. \u201cI am the voice of maybe two dozen people,\u201d he insists.<\/p>\n

When Hachette first approached him about writing a book, he was \u201cwary\u201d, he says. \u201cI\u2019m a wary person. I think that\u2019s honestly a pretty defining characteristic of mine … It was very important to me to produce something that didn\u2019t feel like it was trying to pander to anyone. I really just wanted to write a book that reflected my own thoughts and to try to not worry too much about what people would think about it, which is, of course, impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first essay, Excuses, Excuses, maps out his experience of growing up with the internet. He writes compellingly about this as a digital native who first went online to visit message boards as a child. \u201cThe internet as I understood it when I was 12 was so cool. So much of it back then was hobbyists and people who were passionate about things, just sharing with absolutely no profit incentive whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n

He talks about Unfortunate Series of Events fan groups and his Bebo page and other, stranger artefacts of the time. \u201cI used to spend days on the internet when I was 12, reading this comprehensive blog about how Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by an impostor..\u201d He laughs. \u201cI loved that. For me that was what the internet was for … I think once it became the case that they all realised that there was so much money to be made from data, we just lost the thread of what made the internet good.\u201d<\/p>\n

He writes about how \u201csocial media\u201d, a place to meet people, has become \u201calgorithmic media\u201d, a place where we are all spoon-fed simplistic content by corporate algorithms. \u201cIt\u2019s really not about wishing someone a happy birthday any more, or posting photo collages or organising events. It\u2019s now designed to keep people who are not particularly internet savvy online as often as possible, watching AI slop and poorly made videos and engaging with misinformation and incendiary content.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does he think it\u2019s affecting us? \u201cI think the short-formisation of both text and video removes nuance and removes the amount of time we have to think about things. The incentives that are built into something like TikTok or Twitter are that you\u2019re going to get more engagement if you inflame people and you upset people, and so you generate engagement that\u2019s not thoughtful and not conducive to the furthering of our understanding of each other or any issue. [It] isn\u2019t designed to help you understand things. It\u2019s not designed to help you share your story in a meaningful way. It\u2019s designed to make sure that you communicate in the most easy-to-understand way. And oftentimes, if we\u2019re trying to make things as easy to understand as possible, you\u2019re losing all the things that make them what they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Has social media finally peaked? The rise of AI and decline of screen timeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

His whole writing career \u2013 in Joe.ie and then the Journal \u2013 emerged from him being slightly addicted to Twitter<\/a> in its pre-Elon Musk<\/a> days. There he made keen observations and jokes and enacted, from time to time, funny pranks. Once he spread a rumour that the Luas was free, and Transport Ireland had to release a statement. \u201cI was unemployed at the time. I was living in London. I was working on a novel. This was towards the tail end of the second year of Covid, so it was quite a nihilistic time. I\u2019m not totally sure exactly what my mind frame would have been. In the book I use the word Knoxvillian [after Jackass host Johnny Knoxville] to describe it. That Jackass impulse, to be mildly disruptive and create some degree of mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CarlCarl Kinsella: ‘I\u2019m a wary person. I think that\u2019s honestly a pretty defining characteristic of mine.’ Photograph: Alan Betson <\/p>\n

He loved Jackass. \u201cIf there was some way I could establish some sort of Irish Jackass, I would do it. With [online comedians and his friends] Michael Fry and Sean Burke … I\u2019d love if they\u2019d let me stampede them with a herd of buffalo. When I look at Johnny Knoxville getting stampeded by buffalo, I\u2019m like, \u2018I desperately want this to happen to me\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Going viral online, as he describes it, is a little like being stampeded by a buffalo. It\u2019s as anxiety inducing as it is satisfying. \u201cOnce you put something out there, it just escapes your own sphere. You\u2019re sharing it for your audience, but once you hit a different audience it changes. If you live online it bleeds into your personality … On social media I think your inside voice becomes your outside voice, and then the internet\u2019s voice becomes your inside voice. So the whole thing is just a very noxious cycle of not thinking hard enough about what you\u2019re saying, not thinking hard enough about what you\u2019re reading, and not making any progress towards any healthy goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Challenging myths about OCDOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Even without the internet, he has a tendency towards anxiety. In another essay he writes very movingly about having OCD and experiencing disturbing intrusive thoughts. \u201cI think OCD\u2019s been misrepresented on TV and in the movies,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople think that the user-end symptoms \u2013 the washing of one\u2019s hands \u2013 that that\u2019s the core problem. If someone with OCD is washing their hands a lot, it\u2019s because they\u2019ve gotten themselves into a head space where they\u2019re convinced that something truly abominable is going to happen to them or their loved ones … and for whatever reason the washing of the hands in some way relieves that anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n

He gives an example of what he was going through. \u201cMy dad gave me a driving lesson once, and I crashed the car into a railing. And that was distressing enough. It was just a railing in a council car park. There was nobody around, but I fully got it in my head that I hit a child. I would go to my mam, \u2018Could you please get dad to go back and check there\u2019s no body, no blood.\u2019 And it\u2019s just ludicrous, completely insane. I have no explanation for why I\u2019m so convinced that I had just hit a child with my car.\u201d He laughs and adds: \u201cIf there\u2019s going to be a quote in bold on top of the article that\u2019s definitely not the quote I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

He likens it to having \u201ca puppet regime installed in your head. And the bits of you that you can still hold on to are like a government in exile trying to keep the population calm.\u201d<\/p>\n

He found OCD cathartic to write about. He has, after all, been thinking about it for a very long time. Other essays in the book were more difficult emotionally, he says. \u201cProbably the most draining part was the seventh essay where I write about a friend who passed away in secondary school,\u201d he says. \u201cA big theme in that essay is the idea of losing people who are once in your life. And that ties in, I suppose, with thoughts of my parents getting older … Those aren\u2019t things that I chew my friends\u2019 ears off about. They\u2019re not things I tweet about. They\u2019re not things I\u2019ve written columns about. Writing about that kind of thing was very new for me, and that made it more of a shock to the system when you see it laid out in text in front of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

I sense people like Peter Thiel want to do away with people who live lives of quiet meaning<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Carl Kinsella<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also writes really well about masculinity and identity. He paints his younger self as a confused My Chemical Romance-loving footballer. \u201cI played for my local football team,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I remember coming back from whatever summer holiday I was on, being 13 years old, having long hair, really not looking like a soccer player at all. And I don\u2019t know why, but I painted my nails black to go to training. Even at the time, I was like, \u2018What are you doing? You\u2019re looking for attention. Everybody\u2019s going to hate this.\u2019 I felt like I was hard to categorise, and so I wanted to subject everyone else to how hard to categorise I was.\u201d He laughs. \u201cHow obnoxious.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a very good columnist, writing about Irish society and politics. But he still feels like an outsider in the Irish media environment. \u201cIf you look at the kind of people who have the privilege of commenting on what\u2019s going on, it\u2019s usually a certain type of person. They\u2019re usually over a certain age, they\u2019re usually of a certain background, whether that\u2019s ethnically or financially.\u201d<\/p>\n

He thinks Irish media needs more diversity. In his own columns, he says he\u2019s completely disinterested in discussing political tactics or realpolitik, and wants to talk about how policies affect real people\u2019s lives. \u201cThere\u2019s a traditionalist bent in Irish media where there\u2019s a level of comfort with the status quo,\u201d he says. \u201cI find the status quo very uncomfortable. When it comes to the lack of access to housing and healthcare, there are hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are being constrained and curtailed and damaged … Ultimately the overall system and order of society under which we live is not conducive to producing people-first outcomes. It is conducive to making money for a very small handful of people, and until there\u2019s a crystallisation of that for everyone, we\u2019re going to be stuck making at best piecemeal improvements to transport and healthcare and housing.\u201d <\/p>\n

He thinks this is most obvious when you look at tech chief executives. \u201cThatcher, I think, saw people as drones and as workers and as people who could be ground up in a mill and produce economic outcomes. I think the tech CEOs don\u2019t even see people as that. I think they see people as an obstacle and a nuisance who will maybe be of use to them for the next five to 10 years, after which all of the human beings will be replaced by AI. If you listen to people like Peter Thiel [the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder who is close to Donald Trump], their worldview does not include us. I definitely get a sort of primordial fear watching them, afraid of them in an almost evolutionary sense. I sense that they want to do away with people who live lives of quiet meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the history books he reads, he says, there are kings with names like \u201cLouis the Mad\u201d or \u201cCharles the Insane\u201d. \u201cAnd then you look at the cognitive decline that Joe Biden was experiencing in his presidency, and the total unreality that Donald Trump presents to the world. I don\u2019t want to make it seem as though we\u2019re living in the 1600s, but there\u2019s a through line.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listening to Kinsella, sometimes it feels like maybe he is a \u201cvoice of a generation\u201d. He shakes his head in horror. \u201cIf anyone could credibly lay claim to being the voice of a generation, unfortunately it\u2019s not someone who writes books,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you were streamer or a YouTuber you\u2019re probably better attuned to the whims and desires and inclinations of my generation than I am. I could maybe speak on behalf of some of my friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CarlCarl Kinsella: ‘I still spend a lot of time hiding, and a lot of time avoiding social interactions.’ Photograph: Alan Betson <\/p>\n

If anything, he says, he feels more of an affinity with Generation X. \u201cOne of my absolute favourite books is Generation X by Douglas Copeland. And I loved The Simpsons. I love Daria. Certainly, in terms of my physical capacities, I think I\u2019m a slacker. Millennials and Gen Zers give the impression of being quite energetic people. I definitely identify more with a slacker thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, he has a whole essay on his relationship to sleeping, which he likens to almost a \u201chobby\u201d. Has he ever read My Year of Rest and Relaxation<\/a> by Ottessa Moshfegh, which is about a young woman who takes to her bed? He has. \u201cThere have been times in my life where I\u2019ve taken maybe eight months to a year off work and I\u2019ve just hung around writing and living off my savings and dossing off. And I definitely have felt in those moments, like I am Year-of-Rest-and-Relaxationing myself. But I never really get anywhere when I take that approach to life, when I try to wrap myself up in my duvet and hide away from the world, because that is really my instinct when I\u2019m feeling any kind of distress … I still spend a lot of time hiding, and a lot of time avoiding social interactions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, his mental health is a lot better these days. He\u2019s working on a novel (as well as Douglas Copeland, he loves Donna Tartt and Eleanor Cattan). He\u2019s much more offline these days, and he collaborates with comedy writers such as the aforementioned Se\u00e1n Burke and Michael Fry. <\/p>\n

After all his consideration of identity, what does he want to be? He considers this for a while. \u201cI wish I was a human muppet.\u201d (I tell him that that will probably be the pull quote). \u201cThat\u2019s the kind of content I want to make. I\u2019m nowhere near as wholesome as the Muppets, and there\u2019s a cynicism that exists now that maybe didn\u2019t exist in [Muppets creator] Jim Henson\u2019s<\/a> time, or maybe Jim Henson was just immune to it. But I think it would be very hard to create something now that reflects those sensibilities. It still had undercurrents. Gonzo was true self-destruction. Sam the Eagle is a critique of American patriotism. It\u2019s funny and incisive and there\u2019s a degree of warmth to it. Kermit was a guy who ran a theatre and ran a variety show and had this cavalcade of freaks.\u201d He pauses and laughs. \u201cI just like that idea of an artistic collective that\u2019s pulling together. So if you ask me who I admire, my answer is Jim Henson.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Least It Looks Good From Space: A Catalogue of Modern, Millennial and Personal Catastrophes by Carl Kinsella is published by Hachette Books Ireland<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thirty-two-year-old Carl Kinsella worries about stuff. The columnist, script writer and author of a new collection of insightful,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[15978,18,117,19,17,46908],"class_list":{"0":"post-133575","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-carl-kinsella","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-ocd"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}