What Comes Next
I’d never tell my art-school friends that I paid for a streaming subscription just to watch Germany’s Bachelorette. I was stoned for basically the entire season, so I never really tracked the plot—something about a choice between two guys, something about Instagram announcements. Jessica Paszka was the lead, and at the end she picked someone or didn’t or maybe the system picked for her. I genuinely don’t know. But I wanted to watch it, and I did, and that was that.
The Playboy shoot made sense as a follow-up. That’s how the cycle works: reality TV appearance, Instagram growth, magazine photos, then they book you for celebrity dinner shows and jungle camps until your moment passes and they replace you with the next person. It’s formulaic, but the formula is at least honest about what it is. You go on the show for visibility, you use that visibility to get booked for other things, you ride the wave until it breaks.
Nobody involved pretends this is about finding love anymore. It’s about the machinery, the momentum, the next appearance on the calendar. You stop being a person in any meaningful sense and become a schedule, a face that can be slotted into various premium-cable time slots. Jessica Paszka knew exactly what she was signing up for. And so did I, watching from my couch, however high I was at the time. There’s an odd respect in that clarity—no delusions, no false sentiment, just people and a system that both understand each other perfectly.