Why I'm not eating the Dubai-chocolate-Labubu-Moonbeam slop

There’s a new genre of post that’s been quietly dominating the internet.

It's not the flex, but rather the anti-flex. It’s not “here’s what I’ve bought,” but “here’s what I’ve proudly never done.” You’ve probably seen it, and it probably sounds like this: I have never bought a Stanley. I have never eaten a Crumbl cookie. I do not know what Labubu is, and I do not care to find out.

Welcome to what Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick calls The Great I Haven’t Economy™, where the latest status symbol is not being part of the cultural moment at all.

Instead of flaunting what you do have, the clout now lies in what you’ve managed to resist.

You are not a consumer; you are an un-influence-able god. You are above consumption. You are algorithm-proof. A digital monk. You have never tasted a strawberry matcha, and you never will. Except, you probably have. Or at least, you’ve posted about not tasting it, which, and hear me out, is basically the same thing.

This is the mood going around the internet right now. And it's… a little tired. A little smug. It’s a bit “I’m not like other girls” repackaged for the TikTok economy. Pick me, choose me, love me. It’s the vibe shift from dopamine dressing to digital detox, from #dupe to #decline.

We’ve spent the last few years drowning in slop.

Trends that last six minutes. Products that feel AI-generated. Every week, a new crumbly, sparkly, pastel-coloured obsession that suddenly takes over your feed like a sponsored fungal bloom. The Crumbl cookie. The Labubu doll. The Poppi soda. The Stanley Cup. The [insert beige aesthetic brand here]. So sweet it’ll make your teeth rot.

At some point, the cycle broke us, and we got bored. THEN we got resentful. So now we perform restraint like we’re all in a f*cking barre class and the teacher has a whip. We wear our refusal like a badge of taste. The less you’ve engaged, the more culturally pure you must be.

But excuse me while I burst your superiority bubble.

Your rebellion isn’t exactly anti-capitalist. It’s just a new kind of performance. A way to position yourself as someone the algorithm can’t touch. “You can’t sell this to me. I’m built different.”

It’s the aesthetic of unreachability. Curated indifference, if you will. The vibe is “above it all,” but in a very visible, content-ready way. So like, even if you’re not consuming the product, you’re still producing the take, sweet pea.

And the irony, of course, is that in not participating, you’re still participating. Still performing. Still feeding the machine, just with smug commentary instead of affiliate links. Much of this has to do with the fact that, and I say this with love (and a little heartache), we are in a culture recession.

Not because there’s no creativity in the world, but because most of what gets traction is product-shaped.

Culture has been flattened into content and identity has been outsourced to aesthetics.

Trends have become commodities with two-week lifespans and my head's SPINNING. I know I’m not discovering something new here. This phenomenon has been here.

But it is getting harder to ignore. It’s become clearer than ever that so much of what we call “culture” is just a series of micro-purchases and micro-performances. You don’t just like something. You have to build a starter pack for it. You don’t just try a product. You have to position yourself morally in relation to it.

And while it’s easy to make fun of, while the memes are, frankly, f*cking hilarious, there’s also something quietly devastating about the whole thing. About how deeply we now define ourselves in relation to products. Even the refusal of consumption has been made into a commodity. It’s all a branding exercise. It’s all a bit... empty.

So, what's the answer?

Well we all know we can just log off, right? We can actually opt out. Build a house in the forest. Sink into a creek. Become a pretty rock covered in moss. But we won’t. We don’t. Because culture is still happening here, even if it’s soulless. Even if it feels like chewing on a Polly Pocket shoe.

We keep performing because that’s how we signal belonging now. That’s how we connect. We post through the brain rot because posting is the only language we have left. And even when we’re calling out the performance, we’re doing it on platforms that turn our critique into content, our content into data, and our data into ad revenue.

I’ll be real with y’all: I’ve posted roasting Labubu owners. I’ve shared the memes. But I’ve also had one sitting on my dresser for eight months. We all live in the slop, even when we pretend not to.

So, where to from here?

Honestly, I don’t have a tidy conclusion. There’s not necessarily a fix for this. I just think it’s worth noticing and talking about - the ways we’ve tried to outsmart the system, and how the system always finds a way to monetise the outsmarting.

How we keep trying to fight capitalism from inside the content machine. How even “logging off” becomes a genre of content in itself.

Maybe the real flex isn’t not trying the thing. Maybe it’s knowing that trying the thing doesn’t define you. Maybe the real cultural resistance is accepting that you are, in fact, a little bit cringe and that’s so okay.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here, posting this take online, from inside the house that’s burning. Labubu and all.

-Sophie Randell, Writer