Editor’s Letter September Issue 2025: Can I Have Your Attention Please…
Olivia Phillips on the great dopamine addiction of 2025, and importance of cancelling out the noise
In the era of brain rot, slop content and the Great Flattening of culture, it’s an act of selflove to fill your cup – and algorithm – with things to fight back with. A pretty urgent act, at that – and not just one of self-love, but fundamental self-preservation. We’ve blithely doomscrolled our way to the death of discernment, our dopamine addiction tightening its grip to where virality passes for value and borrowed opinions drown out individuality. One Labubu, one Stanley cup, one Dubai Chocolate at a time, we’ve become a culture drifting about in a giant Pumpkin Spice Latte.
Delicious, perhaps – but flimsy. After all, the validity of something can’t – and shouldn’t – be measured by likes alone. We can’t just believe something is good because it caught the right tailwind on TikTok.
“One Labubu, one Stanley cup, one Dubai Chocolate at a time, we’ve become a culture drifting about in a giant Pumpkin Spice Latte.”
This zombification has huge repercussions for literally everything, not least the corrosion of media, art and fashion. As music and culture critic Ted Gioia warned, “The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction… it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.” Our brains are being rewired to chase micro-hits of dopamine at the expense of richness, critical thought, taste itself.
But here’s a truth worth holding onto: culture isn’t dead, it’s just buried under noise. If distraction is the currency of now, then attention – deliberate, discerning, deeply felt – is the new luxury. And that is where this issue begins: as a rebellion against the flattening, and a celebration of depth, beauty, and the voices still daring to create against the current. This is the point of magazines. To be the arbiters of taste, to spark conversation, to offer something far deeper than a 15-second hot take on Instagram. It’s why I will always love them. This one in particular.
From the September 2025 Issue of Harper’s Bazaar Arabia