The feed is hungry. It doesn't care about logic, age gaps, or the basic laws of social physics. It just wants the click, the thumb-press, the micro-dose of dopamine that comes from seeing two names that have no business being in the same sentence together.

That’s how we ended up here. That’s how a blurry photo from a state event or a stray mention in a PR-penned "spotted" column becomes a "relationship." Suddenly, Xavier Trudeau—the eldest son of Canada’s embattled Prime Minister—is being linked to Katy Perry. It’s the kind of SEO-sludge that makes you want to chuck your iPhone into a deep, dark lake.

It’s not real, of course. It’s a digital hallucination. But in the current attention economy, reality is a legacy feature nobody wants to pay for.

Xavier is seventeen. He’s spent his formative years as a background character in his father’s carefully curated political brand. He’s the kid in the hoodies, the one looking slightly bored at the G7, the one who looks like he’d rather be literally anywhere else. On the other side, we have Katy Perry, a pop star currently engaged in a desperate, expensive struggle to remain relevant in a post-TikTok world. Her latest era has been described by critics as everything from "dated" to "a cry for help." When two brands are stalling out, the algorithm likes to mash them together to see if the friction creates a spark.

I suspect Xavier’s actual "thoughts" on this relationship are non-existent. He likely views the internet with the same jaded detachment common to Gen Z, a generation that grew up seeing their own childhoods turned into content. For him, the rumor isn't a scandal. It's just more noise in a world that’s already too loud. It’s a notification he probably cleared without opening while trying to play Valorant.

But the internet doesn't let things go. There’s a specific kind of friction here that’s worth $15,000 a month in PR retainers. That’s the estimated cost for a mid-tier firm to "manage" a digital footprint when it gets stained by this kind of bizarre association. Think about the trade-off. To be the son of a world leader is to live in a glass box. To be a pop star is to live in a neon one. When the two boxes collide, the shards of glass don’t just disappear. They stay in the search results forever.

If you search for Xavier now, you don’t get his interests or his school achievements. You get "Katy Perry." You get the "relationship" that exists only in the minds of people who spend too much time on X (formerly Twitter, still a mess). This is the tax of being a public figure in 2024. You don't own your narrative; you just lease it from Google, and the landlord is constantly raising the rent.

Perry, for her part, probably loves the "engagement." She needs it. When your latest single lands with the thud of a lead balloon, any headline is a win. Even a weird one. Even one that involves the teenage son of a G7 leader. It’s a cynical play for a demographic that has largely moved on to Olivia Rodrigo or Chappell Roan. It’s a way to stay in the conversation, even if the conversation is "Wait, what?"

The real conflict isn't between the people in the headline. It's between the human being and the data point. Xavier Trudeau is a person. Katy Perry is a person. But to the platforms we use every day, they are just high-value keywords used to keep us scrolling past the next ad for a $400 toaster. We’ve stopped looking for news and started looking for "content," a word that has stripped all the soul out of human experience.

The kid probably just wants to graduate high school without becoming a meme. He wants to exist in the spaces between the pixels. But the algorithm has other plans. It saw a photo, it crunched the numbers, and it decided that these two names belonged together.

It’s not a romance. It’s a glitch. And we’re the ones paying for the electricity to keep the servers running.

Will Xavier ever comment on it? Don’t bet on it. Why would he validate a fever dream dreamt up by a bot? He’ll keep his head down, wait for the news cycle to find its next victim, and hope that by the time he’s twenty, the internet has found something even more ridiculous to obsess over.

Is there anything more exhausting than a world where your "thoughts" are assigned to you by a trending topic?