At a dinner a few weeks ago, someone said everyone was obsessed with a show I'd never heard of. A few years ago that would have embarrassed me a little; this time it just slid past. Nobody else at the table had seen it either, as it turned out, and none of us thought it worth remarking on — each of us, it seemed, had our own everyone, our own obsession, our own lane we'd long since stopped apologising for.

I went home and looked for proof, the way you do. I pulled up the most-streamed songs on the planet, the way you'd glance at what the whole train is reading, and didn't recognise one of them. Not a title, not a name, though each name carried its casual hundreds of millions of plays. I waited for the usual sting, the one where you realise the party moved on without you, and it never came. Because there was no party. Only a long list of strangers, each trailing a crowd of millions I would never see, and not one of those crowds aware the others were there.

There was a stretch of the last century when none of this could have happened, and the reason isn't flattering: not because we had better taste then, but because there was nowhere else to look. On a February night in 1983, the last episode of MAS*H drew something like a hundred and six million people — more than half the households in the country, seventy-seven percent of every television that was switched on — all of them watching the same thing in the same minutes, because that was the only way to watch it at all. When it ended, the water flow under New York jumped so sharply the city's engineers said they'd never seen anything like it: close to a million people had held out through two and a half hours and got up at once. You can't assemble that number today. Plenty is still loved that much, but never by everyone at the same minute.

It has happened to every screen we once shared. The year Titanic swept the Oscars, the film had been seen by nearly everyone with the price of a ticket, and it took its statues on the largest screen we owned in common. The ceremony still runs every spring. But the films that win it now are mostly ones almost no one saw, and you meet the result, if at all, as a clip the next morning. The glamour survived. What drained out from under it was the assumption that we were all, for one evening, facing the same way.

We remember that arrangement as a golden age, which is the part I'd handle with care. It wasn't an achievement so much as a bottleneck. The commons we're nostalgic for was a side effect of having no choice, and its accidental gift was this: you didn't need to love what everyone was watching, only to know it was there. We never built shared culture. We just couldn't get out of its way.

Then, very fast, we could. The platforms arrived promising each of us exactly what we wanted, and they delivered. The feed learned us. It stopped reflecting the world and started reflecting us, flattering and frictionless, and we took the mirror for a window.

What I can't get over is that the mirror never looks like a mirror. We know our feeds are tailored to us; we'll say so cheerfully if you ask. But knowing a thing and feeling it are different, and mine doesn't arrive stamped with my name. It arrives looking like weather, like the plain neutral fact of what's going on out there, the way the sky just looks like the sky. So the loss of the shared thing never registered as a loss. It registered, if anything, as proof. A few billion of us wake each morning to a private edition of the world, printed for an audience of one, and read it straight through as the front page.

Which is why that dinner stayed with me. Whoever said everyone was obsessed wasn't performing or exaggerating. In their edition of the world, everyone was — it was just the news, the plain fact of what people were into, no more in doubt than the weather. And it was wrong, the way each of our editions is quietly wrong: confidently, in its own private direction. We have never been more sure of what the world is watching, or less right about it.

You can measure how far this has gone by how rare the opposite has become. In December 2022, close to a billion and a half people sat down to the same ninety minutes: Argentina and France, Messi finally lifting the trophy, the most-watched final the sport has produced. Something near five billion of us touched that tournament one way or another. The World Cup has barely flinched while every other shared screen quietly emptied, and that's exactly why it has come to feel less like a broadcast and more like a thing the species shows up for. Many of them couldn't name a single player. They're not there for the football. They're there for the part that's gone scarce: the feeling of a real crowd, of a stranger on the far side of the planet holding their breath on the same beat as you.

That feeling is what got taken and never given back. The thing sold to us in its place was never really the content; the content is the hook that holds you still long enough for the real product to land — the sensation that your sliver is the whole. Consensus, built one lonely person at a time, handed back to each of us separately as the world.

There's a lesson in this for anyone whose work is to put something in front of people, and it isn't the one the trend reports keep selling. You can't buy your way into the conversation, because the conversation came apart into millions of them while everyone was looking at their own. The brands still chasing whatever's trending are warming their hands at a fire that went out years ago and broke into a thousand smaller ones, each lighting a face with no idea the others are burning. What travels now doesn't aim for the middle of the culture, because there's no middle left to aim at. It belongs completely to one of those fires instead of faintly to all of them, and that is almost always the work that lasts.

The same mistake has a quieter cousin, and it lives in the room where the work gets made. That room runs a feed of its own. Mistaking the timeline your team is all sharing for the world outside is the same error the rest of us make every morning, except this one leaves the building with your name on it.

I keep returning to that dinner, and how easily the whole table admitted we'd each missed the thing everyone was supposed to be obsessed with. We weren't behind. There was nothing to be behind. We were doing the most ordinary thing there is now: taking the sliver we're given for the whole. That we each see something different, we've more or less made our peace with. The stranger fact, the lonelier one, sits just underneath it: that every one of us, alone in our own edition, is quietly certain we're reading exactly what everyone else is reading.