The first body I saw on Everest wasn’t draped in a flag or frozen in a heroic lunge toward the summit. It was a man in a neon-orange puffer jacket, contorted sideways, one arm extended into the void clutching a selfie stick. The ring light, still velcroed to his helmet, was blinking red—low battery. He’d probably been dead for three seasons. Nobody had bothered to move him. You know why? Because removing a corpse from 8,000 meters costs more than the permit he’d bought, and the operators responsible for dragging his inexperienced body up there had already cashed his check. That image isn’t mountaineering tragedy. That is the final frame of a culture that traded reverence for relevance, and I watched it unfold in real time while the mountain I’d dreamed of since childhood was reduced to a toxic content farm for clowns who can’t even climb a flight of stairs without supplemental oxygen.

I didn’t book an Everest expedition to find myself. I’ve known who I am since I was twelve years old getting kicked in the ribs in an Austrian gym. I booked it because the mountain represented the last untouchable arena of human will—a place where the Matrix’s noise couldn’t reach, where the air was too thin for notifications, where only men and women forged in genuine fire could stand. That was the idea. The reality was an open-air insane asylum operated by algorithms, credit cards, and Nepalese tourism revenue targets. The roof of the world has become a theme park, and the rides are killing people.

Understand the scale of the betrayal. In 2019, a photograph circulated globally showing a human traffic jam on the summit ridge. A serpentine queue of brightly colored parkas stretched into the cloud line like a tailback on the M25. Climbers were standing in the death zone—above 8,000 meters, where the body literally digests its own muscle tissue for energy—waiting forty-five minutes, an hour, ninety minutes, while some influencer ahead of them adjusted their tripod. That season, eleven people died. Eleven. And the response from the industry wasn’t reform; it was more permits. Nepal issues hundreds annually because each one is a wire transfer into state coffers, and the commercial operators package the whole ordeal like a cruise with altitude sickness. You can now buy a summit package that includes heated tents, a private chef, oxygen delivered by Sherpas who have already summited five times that month, and—I am not inventing this—in-tent massages. A massage. At base camp. Before you attempt to stand on the crown jewel of the planet. If that doesn’t snap your spine with disgust, you are already spiritually dead.

The influencers have metabolized this luxury scaffolding into a new genre of content I call “near-death cringe.” Scroll through TikTok and you’ll find them: a 22-year-old with eyelash extensions filming a “get ready with me to climb Everest” video while acclimatizing. A motivational quote slapped over footage of her gasping through a crevasse crossing she has no business attempting. Summit videos shot on iPhones with captions like “I manifested this” as though the mountain bowed to her journaling practice rather than the six Sherpas who carried her gear, fixed her ropes, and literally dragged her by the harness when her quads gave out. The performative culture would be laughable if it weren’t lethal. I watched a man propose to his girlfriend at the Hillary Step—the Hillary Step, one of the most technically demanding and historically sacred sections of the climb—while a queue of oxygen-starved climbers stacked up behind him, their precious minutes bleeding into the thin air. One of them collapsed later that day. The proposal video got 4.2 million views. The dead climber got a paragraph on page seventeen of a news aggregate nobody reads.

The commercialization engine that enables this circus is a masterclass in Matrix economics. Operators market Everest as “achievable with determination and a moderate fitness level,” a phrase that should be prosecuted as criminal fraud. What they mean is achievable if you inject enough cash to turn a mountaineering expedition into a guided tour. For a hundred thousand dollars and up, you get fixed ropes, pre-stocked camps, oxygen caches, and a personal Sherpa whose lung capacity you will never earn but whose paycheck depends on getting your useless body to the top and back down again. This isn’t climbing. This is purchasing a summit like a fast-pass at Disneyland, and the mountain—the actual mountain, the one that killed George Mallory and swallowed the greatest alpinists in history—is treated like a prop. It has been neutered into a backdrop for brand deals. Protein bar sponsorships at 29,000 feet. Crypto logos stitched onto down suits. I saw a man do an unboxing of a new energy drink on the Lhotse Face. The sherpas were fixing lines above him while he adjusted his ring light.

And that brings me to the exploitation that fuels the entire grotesque machine. Sherpas—the ethnic group who call the mountain Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World—are the only reason any of these content-creating mannequins survive. They set the ropes through the Khumbu Icefall, the most objectively dangerous section of the climb, where seracs the size of apartment blocks can collapse without warning. They haul oxygen bottles, prepare meals, manage altitude sickness, and extract bodies when the inevitable occurs. They summit multiple times a season so that a trust-fund baby can summit once and call themselves a mountaineer in their Instagram bio. The disparity in risk is obscene. When an influencer posts “I climbed Everest,” the pronoun is doing genocidal levels of heavy lifting. The Sherpa climbed Everest. The influencer was escorted up Everest like a fragile parcel. And yet the glory, the sponsorship renewals, the book deals, the TEDx talks—they flow exclusively downhill to the person who paid, not the person who bled. The Matrix doesn’t just exploit labor; it erases it, and it erases it with such efficiency that the audience doesn’t even know there’s a story beneath the story.

The environmental desecration is the physical residue of this spiritual bankruptcy. The mountain is now a landfill at altitude. Oxygen canisters, abandoned tents, food wrappers, human waste—an estimated thirty tons of trash deface the slopes, some of it frozen into the ice for decades. Bodies remain where they fell because recovery is too dangerous and expensive; they’ve become macabre waypoints. “Green Boots,” the unidentified climber whose fluorescent footwear marked a cave near the Northeast Ridge route, was a navigational landmark for years before being moved. Think about that. A human being, someone’s son, reduced to a trail marker while a girl from Surrey adjusts her GoPro angle and asks if the lighting is good. The mountain is sacred to the local culture, a deity to be approached with humility and offerings. We have responded to that sacredness by treating it like a festival ground after the headliner has left, ankle-deep in plastic cups and abandoned ego.

My expedition, the one I’d trained for, visualized, and respected as a proving ground, became an exercise in biting my tongue until it bled. I’d wake in base camp to the sound of drones—actual drones—buzzing over the icefall for establishing shots. I’d watch acclimatization rotations turn into content shoots. One evening, a climber at a neighboring tent set up a portable projector to screen his own highlight reel for his team. The mountain, which had once demanded total humility from the likes of Hillary, Tenzing, and Messner—men who climbed without oxygen, without fixed ropes, without the umbilical cord of commercial support—was now hosting a film festival for a man who’d probably struggle on Snowdon. Hillary and Tenzing didn’t summit for engagement metrics. They summited because the mountain was there, and they approached it with a blend of military precision and spiritual deference that modern culture cannot comprehend. Reinhold Messner climbed Everest solo without supplemental oxygen in 1980, an achievement so far beyond the capability of today’s package tourists that it belongs to a different species of human. Those men climbed into the unknown. Today’s climber books the unknown on a payment plan and demands a refund if the weather doesn’t cooperate.

The sickness isn’t limited to Everest, of course. It’s a symptom of the broader influencer pathology, the Matrix’s most successful virus. The entire world has been flattened into content, and the flatter it becomes, the more extreme the backdrop must be to generate the same dopamine hit in the audience. You start with brunch photos, graduate to skydiving reels, and before you know it you’re shooting a sponsored post for a teeth-whitening kit in the death zone. The algorithm rewards escalation, and escalation in a high-altitude environment kills people. The 2019 traffic jam deaths were not accidents; they were structural inevitabilities generated by a system that prioritizes documentation over experience, clout over competence, and speed over safety. When you incentivize summiting at any cost—because the content only works if you reach the top—you incentivize ignoring weather windows, pushing through symptoms of cerebral edema, and leaning ever harder on a Sherpa workforce that cannot say no without losing their livelihood. The blood is on the hands of the platforms, the operators, and the “creators” who treat mortality like a lighting condition.

I left the mountain heavier than I arrived. Not physically—the altitude strips weight from you like a butcher—but psychically. I’d gone seeking a temple and found a mall. I’d gone to honor the greats and found their legacy being auctioned off to the highest bidder for a few thousand likes. The experience confirmed something I’ve preached for years: anything the Matrix touches, it corrodes. It took the ultimate symbol of human endurance and turned it into a luxury product with a body count. It took the purity of a sacred landscape and turned it into a bathroom. It took the Sherpa people, the true inheritors of the mountain’s soul, and turned them into invisible porters for the world’s most vapid demographic. And for what? So a 24-year-old “digital nomad” can add “Everest summiteer” to a LinkedIn profile between “crypto enthusiast” and “public speaker”? The exchange rate is nauseating.

If you’re reading this and feeling the stirrings of a defensive reflex—”Who is he to gatekeep Everest?”—you are precisely the problem. This isn’t gatekeeping. This is guardianship. Some achievements should be difficult to access because the difficulty is the point. When you remove the difficulty, you don’t democratize the achievement; you annihilate its meaning. A summit purchased is not a summit earned. A body dragged to 29,032 feet by a team of underpaid professionals has not “conquered” anything except perhaps the patience of the people who had to babysit it. If you cannot climb Everest without a personal chef, a heated tent, and a Sherpa who essentially carries your nervous system, you have no business being above base camp. Spend three years in the Alps. Train until your VO2 max is a weapon. Build a relationship with altitude that is earned through repetition and suffering. Then, and only then, approach the mountain with the humility it demands. If that timeline doesn’t fit your content calendar, the problem isn’t the mountain’s exclusivity; it’s your addiction to shortcuts.

The solution isn’t complicated, which is why it will never be implemented by the revenue-drunk Nepalese government. Slash the number of permits. Ban commercial guiding above Camp 3. Require proof of high-altitude experience that isn’t signed by an operator with a financial incentive to rubber-stamp it. Criminalize the abandonment of gear and human waste. Most importantly, create a culture of shame around performative mountaineering. The climbing community used to police its own. Now it’s been flooded with outsiders who don’t even know there’s a code to violate. Shame works. Publicly identifying the influencers who treat the death zone like a photo studio would do more to clean up the mountain than a thousand cleanup expeditions. But the platforms would never allow it because the content is too profitable, and the Matrix protects its revenue streams like a mother bear.

I still love the mountain. That’s the wound that won’t close. Beneath the trash and the selfie sticks and the luxury camps, Chomolungma remains what it has always been—indifferent, majestic, lethal, and utterly unconcerned with the tiny dramas playing out on its flanks. It will outlast the influencers, the commercial operators, and the entire digital economy that is currently squatting on its shoulders. But I wanted to stand on that mountain and feel the presence of something larger than myself without having to share the moment with a ring light. I wanted to earn a private victory in a world that has declared privacy obsolete. That experience was stolen from me, and from every genuine alpinist who still hears the mountain’s call. It was stolen by a system that convinced millions of people that nothing is real unless it’s recorded, and then sold them the equipment to pollute every remaining sanctuary on Earth.

So here’s your choice. You can book a $120,000 Everest package, pose at the summit for a photo you’ll caption “beyond grateful,” and return to a hero’s welcome from an audience that doesn’t know you were functionally winched up the mountain by people who will never receive credit. You can add your corpse to the landmarks, or your trash to the glacier. Or you can do something radical: find a mountain that doesn’t trend. Climb it without a camera. Tell nobody. Achieve something so pure that the only witness is your own soul and the wind. That’s the path of the dangerous Slaylebrity . The other path is a content queue in the death zone, waiting for a stranger to adjust their tripod while your oxygen runs out. The Matrix is happy to provide the footage. Your legacy is the price of admission.

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