Global Madness Goes Viral: How Collective Insanity Became the World’s Most Successful Export

There is a quiet, bureaucratic madness spreading across borders with the efficiency of a Swiss train timetable and the charm of a tax audit. From the fluorescent-lit corridors of Brussels to the neon karaoke bars of Seoul, the same symptoms appear: grown adults earnestly debating whether pineapple belongs on pizza while their pension systems collapse like badly-made soufflés. Madness, it turns out, is the one export that never needed WTO approval.

Take Finland, a country so sensibly organized that even their suicide rates come with an Excel spreadsheet. Last winter, Helsinki city officials launched a €2 million campaign to stop people from walking while looking at their phones. The initiative included LED floor lights at crosswalks, presumably so citizens could continue scrolling Instagram uninterrupted on their way to being run over by a silent electric bus. Progress, Finnish-style: eliminating natural selection one taxpayer at a time.

Meanwhile in Argentina, inflation hit 276% and the central bank’s solution was to introduce a 10,000-peso note worth roughly eleven dollars on a good day. Locals now use the bills as bookmarks, conversation starters, and occasionally—when the mood strikes—actual currency. The truly mad part isn’t the hyperinflation; it’s that the rest of the world still pretends sovereign debt is anything more than a polite fiction we all agreed to believe in, like Santa Claus or the nutritional value of kale.

The contagion has gone fully digital. In Singapore, a city-state that runs with the precision of a luxury watch, citizens now queue virtually for everything from public housing to the right to have children. The government’s new dating app—yes, really—requires users to submit their education certificates and tax returns before swiping right. Nothing screams romance quite like having your romantic compatibility algorithmically determined by your CPF contributions. One can only imagine the first date small talk: “So, what’s your marginal tax rate?”

Over in the United States, a country that treats mental health the way it treats the metric system—acknowledging it exists while refusing to engage—politicians now campaign on platforms of sanity restoration. The irony, of course, being that the same officials who can’t keep the government open for more than six consecutive months are promising to fix the collective psyche of 330 million people. It’s rather like hiring a pyromaniac as fire chief because he promises to think about water occasionally.

But the true masterpiece of modern madness is how we’ve globalized it through social media. A teenager in Jakarta can now experience the same existential dread as a stockbroker in Frankfurt, thanks to TikTok’s remarkably efficient despair-distribution network. We’ve democratized insanity; no longer the exclusive domain of artists and philosophers, it’s now available to anyone with WiFi and a willingness to dance badly in public.

The World Health Organization, in a move that would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing, recently classified “burnout” as an occupational phenomenon. This is rather like classifying gravity as an aviation phenomenon—technically correct, but missing the broader point that we’re all plummeting toward Earth at terminal velocity.

In the end, perhaps madness isn’t the exception but the operating system. We’ve built a world where it’s considered normal for billionaires to rocket themselves into space while children learn arithmetic in parking garages because their schools flooded—again. Where we hold climate conferences in air-conditioned hotels built on reclaimed land, then fly home to tell everyone else to bike to work.

The international community, that mythical beast that exists primarily in press releases and expense account lunches, responds to this insanity with the same measured tone it uses for everything else: deep concern, followed by strong words, followed by a buffet lunch. Meanwhile, the madness spreads, politely ignoring borders like a well-heeled tourist with diplomatic immunity.

Perhaps the sanest response is to embrace the absurdity. After all, in a world where reality TV hosts become presidents and cryptocurrency millionaires preach about decentralization from their Silicon Valley mansions, maintaining one’s sanity might be the most irrational choice of all.