Remember February 28th, 2026? That was the day the Iran conflict kicked off and petrol prices spiked like someone had just announced the end of the internet. We all nodded knowingly — of course fuel would cost more. Of course. Everything costs more now. Everything is worse now. That is simply the operating system we are running on.
Except petrol just went backwards.
Fuel has now fallen back to pre-war levels, which means we have officially entered the part of the dystopia where the commodity that powers civilisation is cheaper than it was before we added another active conflict to the pile. Your morning coffee is still £5.50. Your rent is still climbing. But the thing that moves you between these two unaffordable locations? That is actually a bargain.
This is what living in an alternate reality feels like. Not the sci-fi kind where aliens show up — the kind where the fundamentals are so broken that the only thing that makes sense is petrol being cheaper than a subscription to a mental health app. You are paying more to process your anxiety about the world than you are to drive through it.
The irony is not lost on anyone paying attention. Oil supply disruptions usually stick around. Prices usually find a new equilibrium somewhere north of where they started. But geopolitical instability, it turns out, is no match for the global economy’s sheer determination to make everything feel simultaneously terrible and bizarrely affordable.
So fill up your tank. Enjoy the one thing that got cheaper. Everything else is still broken, but at least you can drive there faster on the cheap.