‘Quitting is a disease,’ says Jordan, a 25-year-old ex-marine construction worker when his teammate Dawn has been vomiting for several hours after drinking from a boggy stream. He fears she will take the team’s flare gun and shoot a flare into the sky, signalling that she has given up and wants to be removed from Outlast, the Netflix reality series in which sixteen contestants attempt to survive winter on a remote Alaskan delta for a million-dollar prize. Losing a teammate puts Jordan’s survival at risk: one less person to find food, water and firewood, one less source of body heat that the contestants must share, like spooning lovers, to endure the sub-zero nights. A few days later, Jordan starts to feel dizzy from lack of protein, and passes out while chopping wood. Speaking to the camera after being medically evacuated – and therefore disqualified – from the show, Jordan’s bravado is a husk of itself. He’s not a quitter, yet his body quits on him regardless.

I am in a flare, a bad one, when I binge watch Outlast. It is the kind of show that is buried so deep in the bowels of Netflix that finding it serves to amplify how extremely bored or extremely desperate you must be. Its Google reviews average 1.8 out of 5 stars. Viewers say they dislike how the show is designed to bring out the worst in people, and they are right: contestants often resort to stealing sleeping bags or destroying other teams’ camps to get ahead. Such tactics pay off, and the contestants become ciphers of cut-throat individualism as they tell the camera they have no choice – it’s the only way to look after ‘their own’ back home. This Hunger Games–aspect of the show is yawningly familiar, but I keep watching. Not because I expect good or evil to triumph in the end, but because there is something about the show’s combination of banality and extremity I recognise.

Day in, day out, the contestants monitor each other’s bodies. Conversations orbit how they are digesting their food, regulating their temperature, whether or not they are shitting or sleeping, dizzy or dehydrated. I realise, through the fog of my flare, that the contestants are cosplaying living with a chronic condition. The endless talk of calorie expenditure on Outlast is maybe the best dramatisation of the spoon theory metaphor I have encountered: contestants must strategise how best to use what precious energy they have. If they choose unwisely, they will be out of the spoons they need to get through the following day. ‘Flare!’ They shout excitedly when they see a streak of red in the sky. ‘Flare!’ I tell my friends when I crash out of the world again. Yet unlike the lone sick or disabled person counting their spoons at home, the contestants discuss symptoms as a group. Pain is their common denominator, to the extent that it becomes boring: of course they are cold, hungry, thirsty, infected, exhausted. Tomorrow’s pain will only be a minor variation on today’s, but they will still need to tell each other about it.

The coupling of boredom and intensity is constitutive of crip time, which is warped time, which is a weird black hole to get sucked into alone. You at least want a companion so that you can witness each other being stretched out like pasta dough. ‘Flare!’ You might mouth in sync as your jaws dislocate. I feel this keenly while watching Outlast, and more so while reading In the Land of Pain, a fragmentary memoir of living with late-stage syphilis by the French novelist Alphonse Daudet. Published more than thirty years after his death in 1897, the book documents Daudet’s descent into excruciating pain and paralysis, his treatment by Jean-Martin Charcot, the French neurologist famous for his work on hysteria, and time spent in various sanatoria and thermal retreats among contemporaries who also lived under the star of pain. In the Land of Pain understands that its own drama and high personal stakes are also banal, which means its reportage of pain is often funny. Daudet is in on his body’s sick joke; he knows that histrionics fall flat when they are also a broken record. From the book’s opening page:

In the Land of Pain documents the isolation of pain, but also the value of being among the pained, of having pain in common. Daudet describes the beginning of the season at the thermal baths of Lamalou:

This figure of the loner is the daily reality of the chronically sick and disabled in a post-sanatorium world. My pain bores me and the ones I love, and I crave the commune of the sick that Daudet describes. In the Land of Pain reveals the sanatorium as a site of petty squabbles, envy and gossip – just like the real world, except one in which the omnipresence of pain is taken for granted.

Maybe that’s why I find Outlast paradoxically soothing: it is a temporary community in which it is normal to talk unendingly and repetitively about symptoms and bodies and conditions. The contestants simply do not have enough spoons to endure what the world demands of them, and in this way the show is like the real world, in which the sick are pitted against one another for diminishing resources. Outlast is undeniably bad TV, but I would recommend it to the sick as a way to visualise a ‘whole agglomeration of pain’, a reminder that our own isolation is produced rather than essential, and I would recommend it to the healthy as a simulation of spoon theory. Seen as crip cosplay, the deployment of flares on Outlast is its own sick joke. One contestant tells another: ‘just shoot a flare and all this – all the pain and sleepless nights – will be over.’