The National Archives in Kew, London—a brutalist concrete tomb usually reserved for the dry-rotted records of tax codes and failed treaties—has decided to pivot into the lucrative business of state-sponsored voyeurism. Their latest exhibition, a sprawling collection of love letters spanning five hundred years, is a masterclass in the human habit of confusing biological imperatives with cosmic significance. It is a 500-year timeline of human desperation, curated for a public so spiritually vacuous they find it necessary to rummage through the emotional trash of the deceased to feel a flicker of existence.

From the Tudor era to the mid-20th century, these artifacts represent the same repetitive biological malfunctions we suffer today, albeit with better penmanship and fewer emojis. The archives are presenting this collection as a 'poignant look into the human heart,' but if you strip away the romanticized veneer of aged parchment and fading ink, what remains is a catalog of evolutionary bait. Whether it is a sailor writing to a wife he will never see again or a monarch negotiating the terms of a royal mistress, the underlying theme is the same: the pathetic, sweating panic of a primate trying to secure a mate.

Naturally, the Right-wing traditionalists will flock to these halls, clutching their pearls and weeping over the 'lost art of courtship.' They will gaze at a letter from 1750 and pretend it represents a more 'civilized' age, conveniently ignoring that the author was likely suffering from scurvy and that the 'romance' in question was often a transactional arrangement involving livestock. They see 'heritage' and 'decency' in these scribbles; I see a collection of illiterate peasants and overbred aristocrats whining about their loins while the world outside their windows was a plague-ridden nightmare. To the conservative mind, a letter is only 'sacred' if it’s old enough to have belonged to someone who didn't believe in germ theory.

On the other side of the aisle, the performative Left will descend upon the archives to 'interrogate' the texts. They will frantically search the margins for intersectional subtexts, desperate to find a queer narrative or a subversive critique of the patriarchy in a merchant’s grocery list masquerading as a poem. They want to 'humanize' the past to justify their own current neuroses, oblivious to the fact that 'human' is not a compliment—it is a diagnosis of a terminal condition characterized by irrationality and self-delusion. They will celebrate the 'voices of the marginalized' while standing in a climate-controlled building funded by the very state structures they claim to despise, blissfully unaware of the irony.

The sheer arrogance of the preservation itself is the most offensive aspect of the exhibition. We spend millions of pounds maintaining these scraps of paper in high-tech, humidity-regulated vaults, as if the drunken scrawls of a Victorian clerk have some fundamental cosmic value. It is a collective delusion. We preserve these letters because we are terrified of our own obsolescence. We hope that by cataloging the 'eternal' nature of love, we can trick ourselves into believing that our own digital footprints—our 'u up?' texts, our thirsty DMs, and our ephemeral Instagram stories—won't eventually be sucked into the black hole of time. We want to believe that someone, five centuries from now, will care about our mundane desires. They won't. They will be too busy fighting over the last remaining gallons of potable water to care about your Tinder history.

This exhibition is a monument to the Great Lie: the idea that human emotion is something noble and enduring. In reality, these letters are just the residue of chemicals. Dopamine, oxytocin, and a desperate need for tax-sharing status, frozen in ink. The National Archives isn't showing us the beauty of the human spirit; it’s showing us a 500-year-long loop of a species that refuses to learn from its own repetitive mistakes. We are a race of creatures that would rather read the private correspondence of a dead soldier than acknowledge the futility of the wars that killed him.

As the crowds shuffle through the gallery, peering at the 'devotion' of long-dead strangers, they are participating in a grand act of necrophiliac narcissism. They aren't looking for love; they are looking for evidence that their own trivial lives matter. They don't. The letters are yellowed, the authors are dust, and the sentiment is a lie. But please, pay your entry fee and enjoy the display. It’s the closest thing to a soul you’re likely to see this decade.