As soon as I give in to its pillow talk, the internet will be back on my case

The world wants me to buy a Blissy pillowcase. Or maybe just Blissy wants me to buy a Blissy pillowcase. But right now, it feels as though Blissy is my world. Every breath I take, every step I make, every app I open, there it is: a lovely silk reminder that my existing pillowcase is keeping me awake at night while simultaneously destroying what’s left of my face and hair.

Obviously, I’ve been targeted online by specific products and offers before. Before phones started eavesdropping on our conversations – back when they only had crude instruments like our dates of birth on which to base their campaigns of online intimidation — I used to get fabulous offers of exotic holidays and body lotions and suggestions on how to live my best life, always with an almost whispered acknowledgement that I was already more than halfway there. Then I turned 50, and overnight those breathless messages changed to dire warnings about hearing loss, bladder leakage and hip replacement, with a louder subtext that my best life had now completely passed me by and I most likely hadn’t managed to lay even a finger on it as it did so.

Then my phone started hanging on my every word and while that might be disconcerting in many, let-me-count-the ways; it did mean that at least the stuff the universe wanted me to pay for was vaguely in the same ballpark as my actual life. Frequently though, the marketing has been late to the party: I’d already bought four new mattresses before the mattress world woke up to my nocturnal needs and blitzed me with examples of how I’d just spent way too much money. Booking.com — a regular happy halting site of mine back when free movement was a thing — was a fierce one for sending me tantalising holiday properties in places I’d recently left, as if my imagination couldn’t extend beyond my actual experience. And the recent influx of ads for funeral packages in the weeks after we buried my brother was a depressing example of how algorithmic marketing really could sometimes do with a human heart. But there have been occasional little rays of sunshine. There was the boutique hotel in the midlands that so frequently reminded me that the sands of time were running out and I still hadn’t sampled their luxurious delights, that in the end, they gave me a free night’s stay as an apology for so efficiently stalking me (I’m not naming them in case it opens a whole new set of floodgates.) There was the hilarious coffee date this summer when I told my friend, literally one of the skinniest women in Ireland, about my adventures in intermittent fasting and she was inundated with ads and apps on the topic for weeks after. And last year, in an apparent complete collapse of the algorithmic universe, I was bombarded with ads for a skincare regimen designed exclusively for young black men, which cheered me up enormously.

But back to Blissy pillowcases, because truth be told, I’m rarely more than a few minutes away from the next one. When I was in senior infants (or “high babies” as we used to call it), I was troubled by a deeply disturbing recurring dream of being chased through the block of prefabs in my school by a terrible clown brandishing a smothering cushion. Now I am starting to think that may have been an early marketing initiative of Blissy’s.

They’ re not quite in my dreams yet, but the pillowcases a re in between my Scrabble turns, in my daily quiz questions, between Instagram posts and now on the websites on my laptop as well. It is partly my own fault: after the first hundred or so times of being told that a pillowcase could save my face, I eventually clicked on the link. I came out again pretty smartish at the news that a single one of these silken miracle workers cost €60, but the damage was done: now, not only is my old pillowcase dismantling my face and breaking my hair nightly, but I am being reminded of this unfortunate state of affairs dozens of times daily.

Maybe I should just buy the blasted pillowcase and have done with it. But I know that if I do, then the incoming aerial bombardment of ads for cheaper, better, different, softer, silkier, other pillowcases will make the current war of attrition look like nothing more than a minor skirmish. And all the Blissy pillowcases in the world won’t be able to save me from the sleepless nights and face-crumbling artillery of that.