My son is holding forth at the kitchen table. He says lasagne is A-tier, but spaghetti and meatballs are B. My wife and I had entered this conversation ambivalently, but things get heated when he declares bangers and mash to be C-tier at best.
He’s taken to ranking everything in lists, a practice he’s borrowed from his favourite YouTubers and is now applying offline to every object, animal and phenomenon he can think of. Right now it’s ‘dinners’, but he’s done dozens this week – ‘animals’, ‘dinosaurs’, ‘modes of transport’, ‘local dogs’ – and attempted to do ‘family members’ before we stopped him.
We encourage such pen-and-paper tasks, not least because it fills the gaps left by our drastic reduction in his YouTube access. It needed doing. I’m usually less pessimistic about YouTube than my wife, who abhors the platform with a passion. I’ve paid the for the ad-free version, am mindful of harmful content, and have toggled our YouTube Kids account so that anything I don’t like is flagged and similar content gets blocked from our algorithm.
In practice, this means he is never recommended anything that glorifies violence, cruelty or adult themes, or indeed anything that might traditionally be termed ‘distressing’ content. But even I will admit that the definition of ‘distressing’ is an elastic one. Roughly half of the perfectly suitable, non-harmful content he gets recommended on YouTube is just extremely annoying people ranking their favourite playsets, builds and in-game characters, and almost universally made by 22-year-old theatre kids who possess just three passions; Lego, Minecraft, and screaming. There’s also the fact that these videos, whatever their subject, are such sophisticated engines for dopamine release that the more he watches, the more he kicks and shouts if they’re turned off.
So in 2025, for a while at least, we’ve banned YouTube completely. He’s adapted by creating lo-fi versions of that same content for himself, and us. This is how we’ve found ourselves drowning in billowing scraps of A4 paper, striated with graded tiers and puzzling over the relative merits of, say, lasagne, buses, or our nextdoor neighbour’s labradoodle.
The top tier is not A, as you might expect, but S. This, too, is a holdover from YouTube, since gaming culture has long borrowed Japan’s school grading system, in which S stands for shū or ‘exemplary’. After S comes A, B, C etc, before coming to a hard stop at F. He can go at it for hours, creating increasingly prolix pyramids of quality, a pastime which should be a boon to us, but which has begun to break our brains as much as any short form video content.
‘How are you putting bangers and mash below mac and cheese?’ my wife says, surprised by her own vehemence. I quibble with his choice to grade ‘vegetables’ an F. ‘It isn’t even a meal,’ I add, now fully incensed by his crimes against formatting, “you can’t put it in its own category”.
We tell him his dinner rankings are the most specious and ridiculous list he’s made yet. ‘I think it’s my best!’ he says with full ebullience, grabbing a fresh sheet of paper, over our howls of dissent.
We watch, helpless, as he assembles a grid and writes ‘dinner rankings’ in the S-tier slot. Maybe we ban pens next, I say to myself.
