A man describes a secret late-night arrangement with a woman who belongs to someone else, calling her only in the small hours and only for sex. He says it flat out, that he wants the body and not the person, and the version of him that shows up wasted is the one he calls real. He mentions the other women from earlier that night, sets the terms at his own pace, and brushes off everyone trying to pull him out of the drugs.

Taking this in, you get nihilism made to sound seductive, the idea that being hollow and high is a kind of honesty and that wanting a body and nothing more is just being upfront. It makes detachment look cool and recovery look like nagging, and it frames a man at his most wrecked as his most authentic. It speaks to anyone numbing something, and it quietly tells them the numbness is who they actually are.

Run by millions, this puts a seductive face on emptiness, the picture of a man who has traded connection for a drugged, secret arrangement and calls the wreckage his real self. People take up the cool of detachment, the sense that wanting only a body is honesty and that the intoxicated version of a person is the true one. Recovery gets cast as other people's nagging, and being hollow gets styled as depth.

A population running it grows more fluent at treating intimacy as a 5 a.m. transaction and more suspicious of anyone offering the emotional kind. Self-destruction gets glamorized as authenticity, so the people sliding into addiction hear that the numbness is who they are and that help is the enemy. Secrecy and using each other start to feel normal, and the plain hope of being known by someone loses its pull against the easier thrill of being wanted at arm's length.