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#it just makes me so depressed with the state of the internet

skitskatdacat63 · 2 months

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I wish AI images didn't make me so intensely upset. Just the existence of them bothers me a lot, because it's just clutter without meaning or emotion or any genuineness. But recently something happened that made me very upset, and I feel so irrational saying this, but it really gave me this sick, heart-wrenching feeling, and I wish it would stop. My mom was looking through Facebook, and showed me this image of birds that to me was so obviously AI. But she wasn't 100% sure it was fake, only telling me after I had told her it was definitely AI, that she had been a bit unsure about it.

I hate how intense my feelings are about it, bcs it made me want to irrationally almost infantalize her without meaning to. It just made me overwhelmingly sad that this is state of things. That people are being fed this imitation, this trash, and aren't familiar enough to recognize it all the time. Every time I think about it, it hurts my chest.

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emdotcom · 2 years

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The Mario movie thing is so funny to me. Here, look at this:

Sonic movies (1, 2, & w/ 3 on the way) come out, does INCREDIBLE in box office, decimates Marvel films, who previously had a stranglehold

Nintendo sees this, wants a piece of that pie, buckles down to make a Mario movie Incorrect order of events, as pointed out here! Mario movie announced before the public knew about Sonic movie.

(Potentially because the previous Mario movie was so out there, did poorly, & was disliked by fans & then promptly forgotten,) they pair with Illumination, a studio that is largely known for making very sterile films

Btw, is it just me that finds it weird that there is no mention from Nintendo or online of the previous movie, in all this? Maybe I'm the only one who remembers this film idk

They announce casting. Everyone immediately boos because they cast Chris Pratt as Mario.

Immediate outrage, as Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario for DECADES, was not cast in his claim to fame roll

There is a (unsourced) rumor that a test screening for the film was met with disappointment, making Nintendo unhappy

Slightly corroborating this, Nintendo buys Dynamo Pictures, to make Nintendo Pictures, with the intent to make future movies in-house

Anticipation for the movie likens it to other sterile animated movies of the last 10 years, like the Minions movies

Trailer comes out.

People continue to boo Chris Pratt, a bad cast for a beloved character who is putting 0 effort into his voice, in comparison to all other VAs putting in 110%

Chris Pratt goes to bed "depressed," at seeing the response I was incorrect, that is an older article, about when he was thanking his wife for providing a healthy child, to which people drew immediate parallels to his ex-wife's son, who has many health complications & needed many surgeries.

But with your help, we can make him being depressed after media backlash reality!

Lol, &, may I say, lmao.

#gale chatter #mario movie #chris pratt #sonic movie #btw i 100% believe that rumor you cannot tell me that ain't what happened #also it is transparent that nintendo wanted what sonic movie had #damn maybe i don't do that batim video as my first maybe i do mario movie #my hot take is they should have cast both charles martinet & the super mario bros super show va #& used them interchangeably #bc. that would own #i wanted to mention thr jack black ass thing here but i feel it's too out there & irrelevant #at first reading the quote ppl got mad at i was little like 'oh dang is this not as bad as i thought'#but then i remembered 1) it's chris pratt he says rancid shut all the time & 2)#this response of stating he feels depressed while not like apologizing is just to do nothing but evoke pity #& he easily coulda apologized & been like 'i didn't mean it that way' or 'i wasn't thinking abt it & I'm sorry'#but he's not sorry. he doesn't see anything wrong with what he said. it's the internet's reaction that is thr problem in his mind #so he wants to make them pity him & feel bad that shit is TEXTBOOK manipulation i would know lol

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feline-evil · 6 months

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As someone who, due to life factors i don't wish to detail, had turned to social media years ago as his only way to find any kind of social interaction or ability to find others like himself i find the slow, disgustingly pitiful deaths that capitalism is causing to major sites not only incredibly aggravating but also deeply sad and worrying. The internet is getting more and more sprawled out and disconnected and there are both more and more sites and yet fewer and fewer places that really feel like you can congregate on and easily find things you're into and people who are into them too, it feels like community is harder and harder to foster; and lets not even get into how hellish this is if you are a fulltime independent artist online who has yet to create a large enough fanbase to support you and follow you to wherever you have to go when the next site inevitably becomes unusable or hostile to you. And i know we like to encourage people to touch grass and go offline and make connections out in the real world and i agree that that is incredibly important, but i do feel like there's this elephant in the room of the fact not everyone can; the circumstances i have existed in have shut me off from socialization and i HAD to turn to the internet for it, and i KNOW i am not the only person who has lived their life in this position! People who are broke, disabled, live in areas hostile to them or simply devoid of community and without social events; sometimes the internet IS your best bet at socializing and i really do worry about people like this, like me, as the internet slowly rots as it is lately.

The internet was also for me, and i'm sure many others, the only place i could explore my queerness and learn about such concepts as being trans; if it hadn't been for social media sites like this one (as occasionally well meaning but clouded by discourse as it was) i would never have even known trans men existed nor that i could be one. I would have had no idea what was 'different' about me or that i could choose to be something other than that which was slowly destroying me with the grief i felt for having to be it. I never would have met my boyfriend either, nor my friends; you can scoff if you like but genuinely the amount of life changing and life saving things the internet have provided me with have ensured i am still here today. I don't know, i'm just mournfully watching as the year slowly erodes what little i've had over the years in terms of people seeing what i make or having spaces to talk to one another and I'm worried about how bad this is going to get. With every death of a social media website that's become The One we congregate on we each spread off into a million different smaller, harder to find each other on ones, and who among us can really say they have the same time to give 5 different sites that they give to 1. My world was lonely before the internet became a thing i could access, and so was many other peoples i'm sure. I'm worried about it becoming that lonely again for people.

#jay talkin #sorry this is like. a deeply depressing discussion about the state of the internet but the subject is rotting a hole in my stomach #as are. so fucking many other things that i feel far less qualified to speak on and so shant #so im just. trying to get it off my chest and out of me bc it is eating away at me this year #lol a lot of things are. shits rough out here folks. shit is rough. been a morose time as of late. anyways. we move. we keep it pushing #also first person to get snarky and tell me that ppl can just make friends through school and work is getting fed into a mascerator #Not Everyone Experiences Those Things In Their Life Chucklefuck. anyway. mascerates you #sigh. lets leave this on a positive note. im getting my first new bed in 15 years today! yay!

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 10 months

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Am I the asshole for being upset my friend made new friends?

So me (15M) and my two friends have been childhood friends for almost 10 years - we'll call them K (14F) and S (14M). We grew up in the same neighborhood and always hung out together. Me and S would butt heads every now and then as friends usually do, but I'd still consider him one of my best friends.

But one day we lost contact with each other. It wasn't any of our faults, we both moved and didn't have a way to communicate anymore (none of us had phones/internet access/etc.). It was really hard for me. I felt lost and alone, and I kinda fell into a depressive state. But despite all that, I still tried my best to try to find my friends again.

Recently, someone helped me track down S. I didn't think I'd ever see him again so I was desperate to meet up. I didn't have any way to contact him to let him know I found him, so I decided to just walk up to him while he was out in public and surprise him. Probably not the best idea, but I didn't have many other options. It ended up working out though. He seemed more shocked than angry that I was there. He even grabbed my face to make sure I was real, which honestly was kinda weird but whatever.

This is where the problem comes in. I was excited to continue our friendship from where we left off, but apparently he didn't agree. I wanted us to team up to try to find K, but I guess while we were separated, he made new friends. He tried introducing me to them, but I ended up leaving without saying goodbye. I didn't like seeing them getting along so well. How was he able to move on so quickly? Did our friendship mean so little to him?

The person who helped me find him agrees with me. She's saying he replaced me and doesn't care about me or K. She's trying to convince me to succumb to the darkness in my heart, and tbh, I kinda want to. So, AITA?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole #kingdom hearts #extra option courtesy of my partner who has a deep and abiding affection for the kh games #fandom aita #unreality #good enough to post on purpose

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spoopdeedoop · 2 months

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hi i have some disorganized thoughts/hcs abt the found family human doctor au

(one of the thoughts being i should really give it a better name. another being YES this is only the nuwho doctors atm bc that's the only series i've watched so far apologies. if i ever get around to watching classic who i will add them trust)

BEHOLD my random, not at all in-depth headcanons

nine is the only one with a car out of all of them. they all keep bugging him to drive/pick them up from places -- he has mixed feelings about being the assigned taxi driver

both twelve and eleven are teachers -- college professor and preschool teacher respectively. twelve's students love them because he will say the most stupid, hilarious shit with a straight face without even knowing and eleven's students love him because he is the only teacher at the school that will dance with them during musical chairs (he doesn't even play the game. he just dances)

i want to make one of them an actual doctor but i don't think any of them could handle it unfortunately

they all share an an apartment flat on the same level -- nine, twelve and fifteen live in one room, ten, eleven and thirteen live in the one across from them. of course there are other people in the building too but they're all used to the strange loud hyperactivity of that particular flat. i think i'm using the right terminology here. yall know what im talking about

(i'm so tempted to make some companions be their neighbors)

nine and ten are the most insomniac of all of them, so they're used to bumping each other in the dead of night on their way to raid each other's respective fridges or something. very rarely thirteen will join them and they're like "WELL FANCY SEEING YOU HERE"

twelve does sleep, but like. he's nocturnal

eleven and ten hate each other in a sibling kind of way (see: day of the doctor). they are constantly sending each other death threats or tripping each other over. everyone is sick of it

sometimes when they're out shopping you'll hear ten yell "GET OUT OF THE FROZEN FOOD YOU NUMPTY WE ARE NOT BUYING FISH FINGERS" over the aisles and you'll hear eleven whine "WHY DO YOU HATE ME SO MUCH" back

(if you're lucky you'll be able to catch fifteen mumble "why did we put them in the same apartment. are we asking for an eviction notice")

eventually eleven will pick a random stray cat off the side of the road, take her home, and name her bowtie, which is a stupid name, so everyone just defaults to calling her kitty

kitty's favourite person is twelve, to eleven's absolute despair

(my original idea for this was to initially have ten hate the idea of living with a cat, since he's stated full on in the show that he doesn't like cats, but apparently there is some very obscure doctor who comic run in which he falls into a depressive spiral and adopts a cat whom he names rose-the-cat, so he might actually like cats idk?)

anyway ten hates her until he doesn't lmao. he vents to her when there's no one else home and she will Stare at him back and it is a very nice friendship

kitty and nine watch shitty romcom together

they have a joint groupchat together -- half of it is just thirteen and fifteen assigning everyone outfits they find on pinterest and the other half is eleven asking where everyone went (he keeps getting lost when they go out)

nine doesn't know how to download pictures off the internet and so resorts to manually editing memes together to send to the groupchat and everyone's like "girl that's so much more effort........."

(yes he doesn't know how to press save image to camera roll but he knows how to use a photo editor flawlessly. such is the logic of the idiocy of the doctors)

eleven and thirteen get along very well i think. they're the only two of the group to play video games and so they bond over that. they also have ridiculously similar clothing taste

sometimes they'll succeed in getting fifteen to play pokemon with them and then they'll proceed to not see him until the next day when he comes out of his room and goes "you didn't tell me plusle couldn't evolve i've been levelling it up all fucking night"

friday is assigned movie night (it's always big hero 6)

eleven is the only one to actively seek out physical affection, usually really abruptly like clinging to thirteen's back as she passes him in the hall or bapping ten with the palm of his hand until he sighs and gives him a hug. he does expect a platonic kiss on the forehead from anyone before he goes to bed and will complain if he doesn't get one

anyway thats it i'm sick in the head and really sad. if this keeps up i may be forced to actually write a fic

#doctor who #spoop speaks #if anyone has a name for this au i'm OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS #if anyone wants to write fic/draw art for this au YOU DONT EVEN HAVE TO ASK. IM ACTIVELY BEGGING. PLEASE #might delete this post if i get too self conscious it is. just. words. ew

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kitkats-and-kittens · 3 months

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One of my favourite things to think about is the rest of the batfam all having their own ‘Brucie Wayne’ personas. So here’s me listing how I imagine the main family members would front to the public.

Dick

I think would be very similar to Bruce with the same air-headed personality. As far as the internets concerned he can’t spell orange and pretends not to know any of the 50 states let alone which one he lives in. He also uses the fact that he never officially finished college to his advantage. As a kid he was more eccentric and people just knew him as that little kid whose constantly high of sugar and lollipops. Not much changes when becomes an adult.

Of course like father like son and he is also extremely charismatic. His persona is a little more goofy than Bruce’s and he’s known as the Wayne’s resident gymnast, at least in the air. He’s made a habit of acting as though any and all fine motor skills come to an absolute stop the moment he isn’t doing some complex flip, or cartwheel. There are serval videos on YouTube of him tripping over air, spilling drinks over his shirt, and stumbling into several guests, only half of these were faked. He also has a reputation of being an absolutely insane drunk. He went viral on twitter for doing a triple backflip in the middle of a gala which resulted in a shattered punch bowl, several traumatised guests and a fake news report claiming he’d died which sent the city into a riot for the next 24 hours all because he was a little bit tipsy.

Jason

Jason was pretty young when he ‘died’. Before hand he was the happy go lucky kid. With stars in his eyes and more energy than a Chihuahua hiked up on red bull and pure, liquified blue raspberry. Of course you had the occasional leech who saw in some news report that he used to be a street kid which resulted in several rumours about his ‘horrid violent nature’ but all it took was actually meeting him for most to completely disregard this.

After his death he doesn’t hang around the rest of the family much. Especially not in public and out of masks. However there is the occasional day (once every millennia or so) where he’ll stroll up to whatever part or gala or social event the Wayne’s are hosting that day, with his foolproof, impenetrable disguise Tayson Jodd absolutely no relation to Brucies dead kid, nor the elusive red hood who has a hate account dedicated to his very existence.

His whole thing tends to be a regular upstanding member of society. He acts completely normal. This wasn’t always the case. He used to change it every time he went to the parties, either acting as some depressed, lonely rich guy or an alcoholic and on one particularly memorable occasion a closeted drag Queen. However one time he showed up without a persona pre made and ready to go and just decided to wing it.

However Tim Drakes insane paranoia meant he stayed up a good 3 weeks after that night just to make sure Jason wasn’t trying anything and when Red hood found out he found it absolutely hilarious and resolved to be as respectable as possible while also generating maximum suspicion for all other members of his family.

Stephanie Brown

Although not officially adopted by the Wayne’s most people have gotten used to seeing her just roll up with the Wayne’s and it didn’t take long for social media to realise that Brucie had emotionally adopted her, if not legally. At first Steph didn’t really understand the need for a persona. She was already fine with keeping her actual personality and not turning it off for the cameras.

It took seeing Jason, who was having an absolute blast with his public persona to open her mind to the range of possibilities and she spent a full 3 months crafting a personality from scratch (putting that psychology degree to good use).

She cycled through a couple. Rich party girl, serious career woman, ditzy idiot. But eventually she landed on scheming socialite. She saw some tabloids slandering her for being Tim’s ex and although the rest of the family was not happy she took it and ran with it. Landing herself in the circles of the most gossip loving, shit talking, hot woman she could find.

She makes sure she exudes villainy at all times and has been seen eyeing Timothy Drake from across the room, stroking a cat (though no one knew where she got it from) and sipping a martini. Although she doesn’t particularly like how cruel some of her companions are she finds no greater joy than passively aggressively remarking about how Donna is wearing the same heels she was 3 years ago and oh my is she running low on funds? She was born to instigate and takes every opportunity to do so.

Tim Drake

If Tim is known for anything then it’s his ability to appear as though everything has gone to his exact calculations on the outside while internally screaming and just completely winging whatever half brained plan comes to mind. But one forgets, he isn’t just a Wayne but a Drake. Son of Janet Drake at that.

As a kid he was very much a mamas boy and would replicate her cold calculating air to the best abilities of a 10 year old boy. As he grew up however he realised that he much preferred letting people underestimate him. So in the end he settled on the stoner.

It was pretty unexpected for most of his family. Bar Dick who embraced it with all the reverence of a chaotic older sibling. Of course Tim Drake being as meticulous as he is meant when he made this persona built it from the ground up. He gave himself a favourite drug, a fake dealer, and he methodically updates his account balance every week, taking out just enough that it looks like he’s been buying.

Not only does this have the added benefit of explaining the random times he’s passed out in the middle of a party or those random compilations of him on YouTube simply staring into the abyss for hours on end, but it also means he had to try way less than his siblings when it comes to presentation. If Dick or Bruce show up with even so much as a slightly ruffled collar the tabloids will go on for weeks about the mystery guy or girl they definitely slept with. But when Tim does it, they just laugh. He gets a pat on the head and a glass of water shoved into his hands and no one thinks anything more.

And if he can also use it as an excuse for a few extra minuets of sleep then whose going to stop him?

Cassandra Cain

Cass didn’t need to do much of anything. When she first arrived in Gotham she was small, quite and not very well versed in social customs so it was practically written in the stars that she’d become an instant fan favourite. However unlike most of her siblings most of her fans aren’t focused on her what she’s been doing, or with who, but rather on trying to spot her.

She’s some aloof, mysterious figure to them and she’s also become a bit of a where’s Waldo meme. News reporters will post overview shots of the huge hall the guest are occupying, the grounds of the manor, the well kept lawns, the roofs, and the internet will go crazy trying to find her. At first it was difficult but only because she kept to herself, you’d find her in a corner of the room, or hiding behind one of the taller guests but ever since she realised what was going on she’s been making a conscious effort to make it as difficult as possible.

Some of her hiding spots include: under the table, the roof, inside the fountain, disguised as Dick Grayson, a statue, on the chandelier, and somehow as one of the reporters, camera and all. It’s become a bit of a game to see who can find her first and she remains Gothams favourite Wayne.

Duke Thomas

Duke isn’t really sure what to make of this whole public persona thing. He finds hiding such a big part of himself a little strange, and doesn’t much enjoy the idea of putting on a mask for others. So he does what he does best and puts the rest of the Wayne’s to shame with his sound logic.

He’s just himself. And somehow manages to cause the biggest impact. The people aren’t used to rich people not being overly eccentric. This is Gotham after all! And Duke Thomas’ actual personality is not exactly something they were expecting.

This is the same man who raised an army of teenage armies in the absence of his hero. To call him impulsive would be an understatement. Also he very much enjoys ‘eating the rich’ so to speak. He used his powers to convince one particularly nasty man that he needed full psychiatric care by randomly disappearing whenever he was in their line of sight.

He hangs out with Dick a lot, but only so when the worst of the Gotham socialites approach he can make them feel as uncomfortable as possible by questioning their thoughts and feelings on the working class, living conditions and all the other stuff they usually couldn’t care less about which leaves them scrambling for an answer that won’t completely ruin their reputations. Although he’s been branded ‘the responsible one’ that’s only because he presents himself as such to reporters. Most of the people attending the galas live in fear of him ever approaching them.

Damian Wyane

Being the youngest meant that people already had expectations by the time Damian showed up. Although most had no idea where the kid came from that didn’t stop them from making assumptions, and the rumours circulating from before he was officially introduced range from a mini Bruce Wayne to raging alcoholic. And yes, these were published when reporters knew damn well he was 10 years old maximum.

When the public do finally see him for the first time it doesn’t take them long to craft a persona for him. Damian of course sees this whole thing as beneath him, he doesn’t understand why he would need to hide himself, he didn’t train with the league for years to just not show of his skills. Dick tries to get him to think of it like training, as though he were on an undercover mission. This works a little too well and now he takes it so incredibly seriously it’s hard for the others not to laugh.

He arrived, squeezed in between Brucie Wayne who was blowing kisses to the camera, Dick Grayson doing a handstand, Tim Drake who looked absolutely blitzed and Stephanie Brown who was manically rubbing her hands together. Cass nowhere to be found and Duke giving his classic sunny smile to the camera.

So of course people realise this kid must be the adult. There’s jokes about how Damian must be the one doing the Wayne’s taxes, about how he probably drives Bruce to work, and other such things. Which is only further cemented by the kid himself. But he also doesn’t talk much (Dick said if he had nothing nice to say he shouldn’t say anything), and a few (illegally taken) photos show him drawing, as well as his small army of pets and so people are torn between this kid who is clearly far too mature for his age and this cute baby of a child who likes fluffy animals and crayons.

Damian is disgusted by both sides, but there isn’t much he can do about it and resolves instead to fuck with everyone by leaning into it and alternating on a seemingly random basis between clueless child and grown adult in a 10 year olds body. It mostly ends up terrifying the rest of his family because occasionally Damian (who several of them watched kill a man) will come up smiling and demand to be placed on their shoulders, and other times the same kid (who found a cow a decided immediately he was a vegetarian) will be found sipping straight vodka and going on about the good old days with people 8x his age as though he were some drunken world war 2 veteran.

#bruce wayne #richard grayson #dick grayson #jason todd #tim drake #stephanie brown #cassandra cain #duke thomas #damian wayne #Public persona #batfam #they were born to terrorise the rich #dc comics #brucie wayne #Tayson Jodd

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fuckyeah-bears · 2 months

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not that i truly care what rando losers on tumblr dot com think about me but i did just get an obnoxious as fuck message telling me about how internet activism and sharing things online isn't actually activism, trying to shame me into not posting as much or "torturing myself" by watching and sharing pictures and videos of what's going on in gaza. and it pissed me off enough to say this:

One, Palestinians have asked people to share and boost their content. That is a direct fucking ask from people in Gaza and Palestinians around the world. I will keep watching and sharing these photos and videos because it is what we have been asked to do by the people who are themselves experiencing genocide. Yes, it is depressing, yes it emotionally and mentally fucks me up. 100%. But i will keep doing it.

Two, literally none of you have ANY fucking idea what i am doing in real life to fight for Palestinian liberation. I don't need anyone on tumblr dot com's validation or approval and i'm certainly not stupid enough to dox myself online when every zionist shitbag, the police, and every employer out there is already trying to do that. but believe me when i say i have dropped pretty much everything else in my life to fight as hard as i fucking can to stop this genocide and work towards the Palestinian liberation.

Three, everyone needs to be doing shit in real life to fight to end the genocides going on right now. Only posting online does not count as activism, true. So take your conversations offline as well. Talk to people you know about Palestine, Sudan, and Congo. Read books and learn the histories. Write to and/or call your elected officials and government leaders and even the fucking bureaucrats. Join local solidarity and action groups working towards Palestinian liberation: Dissenters; DSA; JVP; SJP; AMP; IfNotNow are all US based groups that have local state chapters (idk too many groups outside of the US, sorry international friends). Participate in BDS, personally boycotting brands yourself, demanding your schools, workplaces, organizations, institutions, and governments divest from Israel. Attend rallies and protests and disruptions and vigils. Write to your local, state, and larger newspapers and demand they cover this genocide without bias, call them out for their shitty zionist reporting; write op-eds and letters to the editors. Sign up for webinars. If you can't leave the house or attend in-person events, you can make signs and banners for people and groups who can go. Start or join a campaign to pass a ceasefire resolution in your town/city; testify at town/city council or public comment about it & write to your local elected leaders. Donate to Palestinian and and relief orgs and charities if you can. And yeah, keep fucking sharing and uplifting and boosting Palestinian posts and voices online. The media is trying to repress the fuck out of them, so you we need to do our part to make sure their voices are seen and heard as widely and as loudly as possible.

And four, don't be a pretentious dick to strangers on the internet. You don't know shit about what people are doing in their real lives. This is just common fucking courtesy

Free Palestine 🇵🇸

#free palestine 🇵🇸#free palestine #palestine #free gaza #gaza #gaza genocide #eyes on sudan #congo genocide #free congo #free sudan #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #🇵🇸

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antiporn-activist · 1 month

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I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

#phones are bad #childhood

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david-talks-sw · 1 year

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Since people were talking about it recently: is there any official reason given of why Padme forgave Anakin immediatly after the Tusken Raider massacre? I always see a lot of diferent reasons given on the internet, from long and deep analises of theirs characters to "the writers didn't think about it".

Okay, folks (or single person who messaged me three times) I'm finally talking about this XD !

I got no official answer.

That said, here's a few points that I do think merit consideration, and I haven't really seen them mentioned anywhere.

1. Anakin is more regretful in the script.

If you look at how the scene is portrayed in the Attack of the Clones July 2001 draft of the screenplay, in Scene 118, pages 83-84...

... he's sorry and ashamed. He is in absolute shock of what he did. We get a bit of this, in the film...

... but in the script it's much more explicit. It starts out with him lashing out at Obi-Wan, at his own lack of power, but it ends with him breaking down and just apologizing over and over.

He didn't just kill them, he went Wolverine-style berseker and murdered EVERYTHING in his path, and he's thinking back on it with a clear-ish head now and realizing the gravity of his monstrous act.

When it's on paper, it reads very differently, to me. He's more remorseful, so Padmé's reaction makes more sense.

But there's a big difference between what you write in a script and what comes out in the film. Once you're shooting, myriad other factors come into play. So Anakin's dialog changes as the delivery and the rhythm are narrowed down, the beats in the scene shift around... but Padmé's reaction stays the same.

And that's where you get the disconnect.

Because what sticks with the audience more is this moment, now.

The anger. Not the shock and remorse.

So why the change? Well, George Lucas had this to say:

"He's very unhappy about that. Very sad and depressed. There was some dialogue here before that I took out, because it seemed to get in the way of the emotional moment of this scene where she says, "To be angry is to be human," and he says, "But to control your anger is to be a Jedi." And so that issue was actually laid out in dialogue at one point, and I decided to pull back from it... because it seemed to me that it was pretty obvious that was what was there. And I didn't think I needed to state it quite as boldly as I did. And that issue will come up at a later time, and I just felt it took away from the moment of his sadness. And I thought the sadness pretty much said the same thing without words." - AotC, Commentary Track #2, 2002

The reasoning was: too much dialog takes away from emotion.

An audience member will have a stronger emotional reaction from Anakin crying than Anakin crying while screaming "woe is me!"

I get (and generally agree) with the reasoning. But, personally, I have mixed feelings about this particular artistic choice.

On the one hand... if the intent is to show that Anakin made a big mistake and is sorry and sad because of his actions, then I think it's safe to say that it's not what most people took away.

Which then leads to things like John Ostrander writing Anakin as thinking he'd kill them all over again.

Also, it makes the viewer question the wisdom of Padmé's judgment.

But on the other hand... whether Anakin was feeling apologetic or not, he still did it. He still effectively massacred a whole tribe, he made that choice.

And whether the intent in that specific scene is conveyed efficiently or not, Anakin's character flaws (which the Prequels are really about) aren't really impacted and still tie together perfectly.

The only real change to that scene is that Padmé goes from having a more understandable reaction to "missing a lot of red flags".

2. Padmé thinks she can fix Anakin.

Here's what Natalie Portman had to say on the scene, which I think is an interesting take.

"She's this very powerful woman, and I think Padmé is sort of intrigued by this darker side she sees to him, especially because she's such a person who tries to fix everything. She sees problems in the world and she still has that idealistic passion… to think she can change everything, and she can change people who have darkness to them. And she sees goodness in him. She sees this passion. And she sees that there's a lot of anger in that passion, that it's not just the goodness and purity of her passion. So I think that is definitely attractive for her- that there's something that she can try and help heal or mend. That might be a big surprise for her when she can't." - Natalie Portman, AotC, Commentary Track #2, 2002

A part of Padmé is intrigued by Anakin's darker side, the "handsome bad boy" part... but that's coming from a place of "I can change him".

But the only thing that can change Anakin... is Anakin himself. Unfortunately, he keeps:

indulging his darker selfish impulses because he lacks discipline, acting on emotion despite knowing better,

regretting it for a moment and acknowledging that it was wrong,

starting again, never learning from his mistakes.

Which is part of the reason why their relationship is sort of doomed from the get-go.

#Screenplay Analysis #bts tidbits #Anidala #Anakin Skywalker #Padmé Amidala #Attack of the Clones #Star Wars #Episode II #hayden christensen #natalie portman #george lucas #QnA

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diaryengene · 1 month

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୨୧ Your makeup did not turn out as expected. ୨୧

Enhypen maknae line reaction.

Enhypen x reader.

𝜗𝜚．．．pairing: Jungwon!bf ; Ni-ki!bf ; Sunoo!bf x reader!gf 𝜗𝜚．．． contains: kissing, Princess treatment, attention.

=͟͟͞⋆ ࣪.⠀Yang Jungwon ( 양정원 ) ᵎᵎ ⠀

You had spent most of the afternoon watching tutorials on TikTok about how to put on makeup. A particular makeup caught your attention so you set out to do it!

“douyin makeup” - you told your boyfriend jungwon, who had barely understood what you told him. He only saw how you passed several makeup brushes over your eyes, how every time you finished something you quickly took your phone and watched the video repetitively and copied exactly everything that was shown in that video tutorial. He looked like a confused kitten looking at his owner.

Once the makeup was finished, you quickly grabbed a mirror to see the result, which you didn't like at all. Your face was very red due to excess blush, the eyeliner on your eyes looked crooked and you didn't like how your poorly painted lips looked. you tossed the mirror to the side and made a disgusted face at your makeup.

"Are you done, love?" — Jungwon spoke, appearing in the room. — "Don't look at me, I look horrible!" you said covering your face.

"what?" he asked.

He quickly walked over to you and gently removed your hands from your face so he could see you better. — "What are you saying? You look beautiful" — he smiled and approached you to see your face better.

"You lie" - you reproached, looking to the side angrily. He shook his head and smiled. —"You look beautiful, even if you think your makeup didn't turn out well, even if you take it off, you will still look beautiful to me."—he clarified and then kissed you on the tip of your nose in a tender way.

=͟͟͞⋆ ࣪. Nishimura Riki ( 西村リキ ) ᵎᵎ ⠀

You invited your boyfriend to go to the movies which he accepted. it had been a while since you had last gone out on a date somewhere since he was mostly at work, so you decided to dress up a little more than you usually do.

You had chosen a nice outfit that you planned to complement with your makeup, which, however, didn't turn out the way you wanted it to. you were frustrated and about to cry because you knew that at any moment Ni-ki would arrive to pick you up and go to the movies.

it didn't take long for the tears to appear. You had spent half an hour trying to redo your makeup but it only seemed to get worse making you even more depressed.

"y/n?"- oh, no. ni-ki was already here.- why aren't you ready? what are you doing on the floor? - Ni-ki started asking you questions that only made you cry even more. She put her jacket aside and walked over to you, getting down to your level and started wiping your tears with her hands.

"Honey, what's wrong, why are you crying?"-he asked in a concerned tone.

"m-my makeup"- you managed to say while crying into your boyfriend's hands.

"What's wrong with your makeup? You look so pretty."

"Liar! I look awful." - You reproached angrily. Ni-ki laughed a little at your state but immediately removed his smile when he saw your angry expression.- You look beautiful, love. i mean it. my girlfriend is too perfect even if her makeup looks horrible!- he spoke proudly while nodding his head. his way of talking made it seem like he was joking. but he wasn't joking, he just wanted to make you smile, which you understood.

"You're a fool"- you looked at him angrily and then smiled a little and hugged your boyfriend.

That night you both opted to stay at home and watch a movie from the couch.

=͟͟͞⋆ ࣪. kim seonwoo ( 김선우 ) ᵎᵎ ⠀

After a long day of looking at beautiful girls with their perfect makeup and perfect outfits on Pinterest and wondering why you couldn't look like that, you decided to try to look like those gorgeous girls on the internet.

Your self-esteem lately wasn't the best. You knew your boyfriend would always be there for you and love you just the way you are, but still, the thought of not being pretty enough to be with him was on your mind.

You knew Sunoo would be here in a few minutes, so you wanted to look beautiful for him. you grabbed what little makeup you had and started applying it!

as you did so, a thousand scenarios formed in your head where your boyfriend saw how beautiful you looked and complimented you on your extraordinary makeup. you felt like you could finally look pretty enough for him and that made you excited.

Although... you didn't look it. You didn't manage to look pretty, you couldn't even get your makeup right.

You ran to the bathroom and washed your face, rubbing it several times with your hands as your tears fell and you saw your reflection in the mirror. With your eyes red from crying, your lipstick and mascara smudged and your clothes wet, you certainly felt terrible.

"Princess I'm here" - shit.... Sunoo arrived. Seeing you like this in the bathroom, he ran to you and turned you around to look you in the face - "What happened honey, are you ok, did something happen to you?" he asked totally worried and agitated. - he asked totally worried and agitated.

"I'm so ugly," you said in a whisper, dropping your forehead on Sunoo's chest, who immediately wrapped his arms around you and started stroking your hair.

"My God, what are you talking about, who said you're horrible, huh, whoever told you that will deal with me!". - He said as he cradled your face in his hands.

"I..." - You whispered as your tears fell down your cheeks.

Sunoo swallowed saliva and shook his head at what you said.

"You're not horrible, don't say that. Otherwise, you would be insulting what I love most in my life and that hurts me. do you understand?". - he gently squeezed your cheeks. "now repeat after me: I'm beautiful and my boyfriend loves me very much" - she smiled and you just stared at her without saying anything. - "what are you waiting for?"

...

Sunoo literally spent the whole day hugging, kissing and caressing you. She didn't go more than five minutes without telling you how beautiful you looked and how much she loved you. Plus, he treated you to mint chocolate chip ice cream!

Sorry if there are spelling problems!!! you can place orders if you wish! ८ ◞ ◟ ⑅ ა

#enhypen #enha smut #enhypen x reader #kim sunoo scenarios #kpop #jungwon #ni ki fluff #enhypen imagines #delulu #enhypen hard hours #enhypen scenarios #enha fics

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sirgogington · 2 months

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My Word Vomit Response on the Shelby Situation

Main Situation: Last week Wilbur Soot from Lovejoy was accused of having been abusive towards his ex girlfriend Shelby. Shelby is a live streamer and last week she did a livestream about the signs of knowing if you are in an abusive relationship. She never stated his name, but from details given people started assuming it was about Wilbur Soot. A few days later Wilbur confirmed that it was him in an apology tweet on his Twitter account. The abuse had to do with painful biting, and manipulation.

I want to start off by saying I do believe Shelby's story. I don't think Wilbur is innocent, but I do believe this situation isn't as black and white as people are claiming it to be.

Former fans after hearing the story started unfollowing Wilbur and Lovejoy and saying what a terrible man that Wilbur is, and vowing to never listen to or view any of his content ever again. He's not just a terrible man, he has to be evil too. I may be optimistic but I do think most people can change for the better if they truly want to. There are exceptions, but I truly believe that Wilbur can. The internet wants to just label him as evil and not give him any room to do that. The new thing is "guilty until proven innocent" and that's super harmful as I will go into in a different post. The way people are spreading hate in a us/them mentality is not a mature way of viewing/handling this situation and does more harm than good. Especially when it comes to death threats and doxing which have been received by both sides.

Wilbur is someone who had a hard upbringing, and has brought up at different times his struggles with mental health. On screen or on stage you would never know this about him, because he has this mask of being confident, well spoken, and joyful. Through these details Wilbur has shared we know that touring took a lot out of him mentally and put him in a bad place, but that he was seeking therapy and is probably currently still seeing a therapist to try and get better. He's shared in the past that when he first blew up on the internet he used alcohol to cope because of how overwhelming it was that so many people were consuming his content. From Shelby's stream we also learned that his living space was dirty and unhygienic and that he would make excuses for it. The details for me paint the picture of a guy struggling badly with mental illness and having a hard time caring for himself and his home. Someone who can hardly take care of themselves should not have been in a relationship. This puts a lot on the other person. It's different if he were stable and then then his mental health crashed in the middle of a longer relationship, but not if your too mentally ill to begin with. I do deeply feel sorry that Shelby had to experience that, as it truly shouldn't have happened.

I went to school for psychology and know quite a bit about different types of mental illnesses. I am by no means diagnosing Wilbur, but I do think he shows signs of someone with Boderline Personality Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder is an emotional disregulation disorder characterized by unstable mood, behavior, and relationships. People with BPD self sabotage and will frequently end up pushing people away because they don't think they're good enough for them. (In this case maybe he wanted to act so bad so she would leave him, which is very unhealthy). People with BPD also go through depressive episodes and can act impulsively. Without therapy it is extremely hard to cope with this condition but with therapy you can make great strides in changing. I think like most mental illnesses you are aware of the fact you don't like the way you're acting you just have a hard time controlling it. For instance for me growing up with anxiety I knew most of my fears were completely irrational but that didn't stop them from overtaking my life and still feeling anxious. Wilbur has written some really deep lyrics on his new solo album Mammalian Sighing Reflex and I feel like it reflects that he doesn't like the way he is and feels guilty about those he's harmed through it. Maybe I'm giving this man too much credit, but like I said I do believe most people are capable of changing for the better.

Shelby stated she did the livestream as a way to help protect other victims of domestic violence and Wilbur Soot himself. He might still be dangerous to the public, it's really hard to know. I know after my own situation with being manipulated I was worried about the guy going after other younger women like he had with me. I didn't want anyone else have to be in that situation so I understand where Shelby is coming from. I also know that if the guy in my life had ever posted an apology, no matter how good it was, that I still wouldn't believe him and have a hard time forgiving him. Bold take but I think his apology was at least decent. Could it have been better, yeah, but could it have been a lot worse, also yes. In his apology he admits to being the person Shelby was talking about. He states that her feelings are valid, and that he wants people to hold him to higher accountability, and that he was sorry for any hurt he caused. Maybe he isnt, but it's hard to know. Wilbur stated in a livestream from last October 2023 that he was going to therapy the next day, because of this we can assume that Wilbur has been going to therapy at minimum since October. In that same livestream he states that he showers once a day when he's in his "big sad", and that he has rented places all over Brighton. He is at least hygienic in this regard, maybe moreso than he was before. It could be a red flag that Wilbur has lived all over Brighton due to possible evictions whether that be negligence or noise complaints from doing livestreams.

We'll never know how other content creators truly feel about him except for the ones that made it obvious. Of course most content creators are going to jump on the bandwagon and agree that he's an evil man. If they don't then they'll lose their platform because of all the hate they'd get. I do believe some content creators will still hang out with Wilbur secretly or still even remain his friend. But we'll never know.

For the people who are posting different video evidences of Wilbur supposedly showing signs of being abusive in the past this is what is called confirmation bias. If you believe someone is abusive suddenly you can find details in the littlest things to confirm your thought process. A lot of the clips I've been seeing have been of normal everyday behavior or confirmed bits. I've seen people say that Wilbur must have bit down really hard to leave bruises. In some cases people bruise more easily than others. I know I have random bruises on my body from nothing. We can tell that what Wilbur did however was pretty painful due to have to use a safe word. Getting bitten usually hurts. I've been bitten by a 5 year old at work and can't imagine how it would feel to be bitten by a grown man who intentionally bit down hard.

This could be confirmation bias as well, but when looking at the lyrics in Mammalian Sighing Reflex and at the album art it seems to tell the story of a man (Wilbur) who really messed up in a relationship and is feeling the pain from that, and has a lot of regret due to knowing he was the cause of her pain. He poured so much of himself into the album it's like he's bleeding out in front of the audience with the amount of vulnerability.

Analyzing lyrics because why not, using lyrics from "Mammalian Sighing Reflex"

"I get so drunk I can barely see." If this album is related to his relationship with Shelby, which I think it probably is, then maybe he tried to cope with the relationship failing by using alcohol, or sabotaged the relationship through drinking.

"A lot of friends have left my life, escaping my tractor beam of woe" Having a mental illness can make it hard to maintain friendships. This could be because it makes you so self-focused on your problems, or that people get tired of hearing about your problems. If you constantly talk about how sad you are, some people are going to have a hard time dealing with that, or get burnt out from having to keep on cheering you up.

"Fuck my life, you cared when I was sick, no one ever gave a shit.....you fought this war one-sided and asked me what am I doing this for." These lyrics seem to speak about how in a past relationship (probably meaning with Shelby), that she cared that he was mentally ill/in a low point and wanted to help him get better. The fight to help him get better was one-sided due to Wilbur not helping to get himself better. If he would have helped her then they "could of stitched my mind together."

"Never been the one for romance, never thought that I'd get married. Never been the kind to give a shared life a second glance, selfish prose." In Shelby's livestream she talked about how her and Wilbur talked about the possibility of getting married and having kids until he backtracked and said that he wasn't that way and changed his mind.

The song "I Don't Think It Will Ever End" is how his mind seems to work in cycles. He'll be sad, because he feels sad he hides away for a bit, but then he feels silly for hiding himself so he forces himself to interact with people. But then when forcing himself to interact again he feels sad, which he says is not a good feeling when you're supposedly in a good phase. He says as self-sabotage he gets silly. Wilbur is known for telling a lot of jokes, and maybe this is a way he masks his true feelings. Also for Mammalian Sighing Reflex it says the songs were written by William Gold (his legal name) and performed by Wilbur Soot (his stage name). Wilbur is who the internet/fans see him as and William Gold is who he really is. Meaning the way we see him online is the extroverted, charismatic, likeable guy we know him as whereas William Gold is introverted, self-sabotaging, nerdy, and a deep thinker.

The internet gives us way too much information. We're constantly bombarded with more and more information. Before the internet and even in the earlier internet days you did not have this. People were not being as closely viewed and known as they are now. You have to be careful about every little thing you say, because God forbid you say the wrong thing and get canceled. It didn't used to be this way. The only reason you'd ever know anything bad about a celebrity is if they were in the news. I think most of the media we consume whether TV shows, movies, etc. have the potential to have us supporting "bad people". It would be overwhelming to look up every single person we had ever consumed media from and sift through what are lies and what are not about each actor, singer, etc. I get that people don't want to give a platform to people doing bad things, but it's almost impossible to know and to remove every single bad person from the content you consume. Being a celebrity in general is hard. It's easy to become addicted to drugs, and experience toxicity especially celebrities that live in Los Angeles. Most become people they regret, but some change for the better too. I'm not saying people who do serious crimes should get out of jail because they can become better people. People in jail should remain in jail for serious crimes. Time will tell what becomes of him. If more about him is released or if he's able to actually make strides in his health like he said he would. We will wait and see. I really hope he can heal and get better. Even the most unlikely ones can change their lives. You can both support Shubble and hope that Wilbur gets better.

#wilbur soot #lovejoy

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arson-09 · 3 months

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A court of frost and starlight is (subjectively) the worse book in the sjm world. Especially when it comes to mental illness

The first half of chapter 11 is fucking disgusting. I think i geniunely hate sjm a little after this chapter.

Rhysand is literally kicking a man while hes down. Tamlin is depressed. Hes not taking care of himself or his home and is clearly at rock bottom. His home is empty and as stated at the end of the chapter theres no wards around his manor to protect him

"But as I winnowed away, the dark wind ripping through me, a strange sort of hollowness took root in my stomach. Tamlin didn't have shields around the house. None to prevent anyone from winnowing in, to guard against enemies appearing in his bedroom and slitting his throat. It was almost as if he was waiting for someone to do it."

I can quote the entire chapter to point and say HEY THIS IS FUCKING GROSS WRITING! She worte a clearly depressed and ill man but hey! its okay rhysand said really bad shit to him because we LOVE rhysand in this house! to qoute feyre hes usually the bigger male so hes entitled to a slipup!

except hes not. thats not a slip up thats purposefully trying to trigger a man you know has anger issues so you have an excuse to kill him. That is quite literally what kids used to do to me when i was younger, thats being a fucking bully. Rhysand is not a good person, quite the opposite actually. Rhysand also states that "he had been given everything and squandered it." which is not completely true! (Given tamlins backstory and how he feels about being high lord so *loud incorrect buzzer*) Rhysand is an extremely unreliable narrator. Example from this chapter? Rhysand asks where "his dear friend" lucien is and Tamlin tells him hes hunting and the following happens

“Hunting for our dinner.” “No taste for such things these days?” Tamlin’s eyes remained dull. “He left before I was awake.” Hunting for dinner- because there were no servants here to make food. Or buy it. I couldn’t say I felt bad for him. Only for Lucien, once again stuck with being his crony.

Where did this come from? Tamlin said lucien left before he was awake. He didnt ask him to do that.

Rhysand proceeds to purposefully say stuff to make Tamlin angry so they can fight and is surprised when Tamlin just tells him to leave. Then chapter 23 does nothing to help this. Wow tamlin has completely isolated himself after rhysand fucked him up more. But its fine cause rhysand made him dinner and got people to patrol the border.

It really hurts. I have so many of the same mental health issues as Tamlin. Seeing sjm do nothing with this but add more stigma just sucks. Yes Tamlin fucks up in acomaf (even if i cant fully comprehend that one sjm) but that isn't excuse to do this horrific mental health shit.

I am open to discussion about this more! if we have opposite opinions that okay! if you love this series to death that's great for you! as long as your at least somewhat polite I'm chill with it. If your rude i will be mean on the internet.

#acotar #a court of thorns and roses #rhysand #sarah j maas #tamlin #pro tamlin #anti rhysand #rhysand is quite literally my childhood bullies #i mean tamlin and i became bullies too because people kept provoking us #sjm critical #book opinions #mental health rep in books #acofas #a court of frost and starlight

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bettyshoweduptotheparty · 22 days

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To the lovely person who send a DNP message about Lover.

Hope you see this. Slight disclaimer, I also wasn’t on here in 2019 (actually checked out from TS all together when it became clear all the rainbows were leading to nothing and it got depressing) so can’t tell you how gaylor internet spaces perceived the song back then. But I’ve had my own thoughts on it since. Here's what I think:

Lover is not a lovey dovey love song to me because it has definite signs of insecurity and uncertainty in it. If you compare it to the love songs on reputation, those had certainty and trust in the longevity of the relationship. 'I can take my time with you because I know how this is going to end', 'don't read the last page, but I stay', it might not all be rosey but I know that I'll be your endgame and we'll always clean up the mess together when the glitter fades so Call it what you want, because WE know what this is and where it's going.

Now, Lover expresses the exact opposite of that certainty. The word lover in itself is very generic and non-commital. It's not girlfriend, partner or wife, it's lover, which can be all or none of the above. It's just someone you love with no detail about the state or seriousness of the relationship. I saw a picture a while ago from the Lover rollout of Taylor with a lover straw that was an exact replication of the one Karlie had at her bridal shower that said 'bride'. So, very decidedly not a bride, not a wife, but a lover. (Especially in the bridge, where she uses the wedding ceremony wording 'I take this magnetic force of a man to be my....' you'd usually expect husband or wife to go there, but no, it's lover.) I think that's a choice. And in the chorus, the way she repeats the words 'You're my, my, my...' makes it seem like she's struggling to find the right word, eventually settling on lover, because she can't use any of the above labels. We can't call it what it is, and that's causing insecurity now. (Much like she can only marry this person with paper rings and not an actual wedding ring, and it's taking its toll.)

This uncertainty continues in the verses where she emphasises that they can make the rules for their home because 'it's our place', and admits how she doesn't like that 'everyone who sees you wants you' because she can't openly claim this person as her own. Because no wedding rings, no exact terminology. And the questions in the chorus (Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close?) seem sweet, but they are genuine questions filled with uncertainty. Can I actually go where you go in public or do we have to pretend in front of other people and not be as close as we actually are? It's still very much a 'forever and ever' situation, but a few years down the line it's clearly taking its toll not to call it what it is.

So, that's my two cents on why Lover (and song and the album as a whole) is not all sunshine and rainbows and has in fact quite a bit of denial about the reality of loving someone you cannot accurately label or introduce as your partner or spouse. Other people, feel free to add your interpretations!

#lover #the song and the album

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bonegloss · 9 months

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You're not a failed artist.

After over almost two decades on the internet, entering various art communities and establishing my online presence, I've noticed something.

The persistent idea that you've "failed" as an artist if you get a "real job" will not go away.

This, for the longest time, permeated my electronic meat slab and nestled in deeply MUCH to my detriment . For years I fought with myself over this idea. Self-flagellating and noisy, negative thoughts were almost suffocating because I was unable to Do Art As A Job consistently and efficiently enough to maintain a living off of it. Between navigating life for almost 30 years not knowing I was autistic (and all that entails) and trying to turn something I love into something I could make a living off of, it was a vicious and repetitive cycle of trying something new, getting burned out, entering a depressive state, climbing out of it, rinse and repeat. This is clearly unsustainable, especially now that I am more independent in my adult life; bills aren't going to wait for me to get out of my depressive funks. Even having jobs and still making art on the side today, this idea is still nestled in there, nagging me sometimes.

Would I like to make a living off of my art? Of course! Would it be even better if I was supported from making stuff from my own IP's? You fucking bet. But I know how I operate, I know I can't personally do that (yet? maybe?). Now, I realize not everyone can just go get a job, and I don't want this to come off as a rally cry to Just Go Out and Work (I know many creative people are disabled or have other reasons they cannot work), but I do want to stress that its okay if art needs to remain more of a hobby than a job. It is okay if you cannot sustain yourself solely as a living artist. Over the years, I've burned myself out so god damn hard and have watched others work themselves to (near) death or can barely scrape by because of this incessant feeling that we need to be doing art 100% of the time to have "made it". It is hurting us both physically and emotionally to keep this shit up.

Going forward, we have to do better. There is no shame in having an income that is not dependent on the things you make. I think that it can help alleviate a lot of stress and fatigue that can become associated with creating (and thus, making it hard to do something you love). We need to learn to be kinder to ourselves and unlearn comparing our experiences to what we see from other creative peers on social media. Its hard, finding work sucks ass, and no job will be perfect, but if it can help you survive a little easier and rekindle your relationship for creating the things you love to make, it'll make a world of difference.

You are not a failed artist. You're doing what you can so you can keep doing what you love.

#*Real Job is used here within the context of mainly not getting employment in a creative field #I know that many creative people are able to get jobs within creative fields #but even that can help alleviate the financial pressure of having your creative outlet be draining #because your livelihood depends on it #Also I would like to note that while it would be nice to have UBI and more support for the arts in general in the US #that is not the case in the current economic setting and I fear it won't be that way for a while so working will have to do for now.#UBI would fix me #art #artists #creative burnout

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waiting-makes-me-antsy · 1 month

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Why the KOSA Bill Should Not Pass

tw: ab0rtion talk, assault mention, su1cide mention

also, credit to @the-realest-spot-conlon for getting this strike started. i've known about this bill for a while but until she talked about it, i hadn't really researched what this bill would have in store for the united states.

this will be a bit dark because this is sort of a speech against the KOSA bill and the bill basically wants to ban any talk of abortion, protesting and the LGBTQ+ community from kids under 16- WHICH the parents have no control over controlling what their child could see and the government would basically be saying:

"oh that's inappropriate" to say something like, idk, an inclusive video

and basically sort of brainwashing an entire generation

so yeah this will be a bit dark so don't read if you might be uncomfortable with the topics this sort of speech will have

(and this is directed at the government so when I say 'you' in the paragraphs it's towards the government)

[i removed the first part because it's a bit more personal and uh i dont think it should be shared here :sob]

And while it might seem a bit overexaggerated, it’s true. There are teenagers all over the united states, countries and the globe who face problems like these. And it’s not just verbal. No, there is physical violence and assault, hate crimes happening to students everywhere.

You might now be asking: “What does this have to do with the KOSA bill?”

I hate to say it but the internet has truly been my one and only friend I can ever count on. Who I always know has my back. The LGBTQ+ community doesn’t care if I’m not super skinny or if I have scars lining my arms. They support the fact I don’t really have any romantic feelings towards other people or really just romantic feelings in general. They make me feel normal. That it’s okay to not feel inclined to have and align with the normal gender rules. That I don’t have to follow the binary.

The internet is the only place I can analyze poetry and art deeply with different interpretations and analyzations of every single line, or every single stroke in a painting or word in a novel. Where I can freely talk about my new hyperfixation and no one will stare at me weirdly. Instead, they will respond with another essay.

They won’t say it’s “fucking sad” that I like to write essays in my free time- one of the only ways I can truly express myself because no one at school wants to hear me talk.

And it’s not just a safe place for me. No, it’s a place where everyone as a whole can express their rights and their thoughts. This is our future generation- our future leaders we’re talking about. If the only things that can make us realize what we need to change are censored, how will we ever be able to fix these problems that citizens make?

Abortion laws. Yes I’m saying that. You want to censor any talk of abortion. What about all the innocent girls out there? Brutally assaulted and forced to ruin their career because they can’t get rid of a baby that’s not even developed yet. That doesn’t even have feelings or a brain yet. It’s just a tiny hint of life, not a fully classified human being yet. An embryo. And so now, they will have to face anxiety, depression, guilt, maybe even shame and ruin for the rest of their lives.

They don’t have a free choice. But America is supposed to be freedom for the people! And here you are, taking away futures. Taking away future doctors, lawyers and even presidents. Just to save a cell inside their stomachs. Just to make them risk their lives giving a painful birth that will destroy their bodies. No brain, no feelings and no heartbeat.

We need to know the wrongs in our world to stop them! To be able to protest against them! To be able to stand up for ourselves! So the older generations won't keep making votes that will ruin OUR futures.

Let’s look back at the first right for our states. Freedom of Speech. Huh, sound familiar to your bill? You want to take away protesting from the eyes of our future. From what can help them make the right decisions for our nation. So they can learn to lead. But no, you just want to raise mindless sheep that will bend to your will because they never had any exposure to what can help them break away.

This bill will ruin lives. It will break apart the nation into pieces like a glass window broken by a bullet. Because if this bill passes, I bet you this: suicide rates will go up. Depression rates: up. Without the comfort of people who you actually connect to, isolation will take over your feelings and it just leads you into a downward spiral.

Imagine you’re a 13 year old who just watched their entire future torn to shreds by a bill signed. You just took their voice away. Their rights away. Possibly their entire life away. Consider that.

#KOSA newsies strike #fuck kosa #stop kosa #kosa bill #antsy whispers speaks

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a-s-levynn · 2 months

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I'm terrified to post this. So watch me sprinting away into the distance after dropping this.

Open love letter to -in extension to the wider ST community on tumblr, but especially- to the fellowship of Sleep because without you, life would be much more lonely

My Friends,

It was today when it finally dawned on me that you gave me the most undescribably precious gift. Many of you probably going to relate to this to some degree because i am not unique in any sense but i had to get this out. And by just the sheer lenght probably not many of you will read it. But i still need to put this out there, even if i'm being obnoxious and probably sound overdramatic and maybe even cringy.

I struggle with a lot of things. Anxiety, self doubt, depression, paranoia, self destructive tendencies, self isolation and the list goes on to even darker places. All in all i have a suboptimal mental state to put it lightly. I feel inadequate in many ways. Especially with connecting to people.

To this day, i struggle every day, seeing my friends, you, talk on a daily basis, have inside jokes and wonderful conversations and whatnot and either i like it or not, thoughts intrude: "am i doing enough? Am i a good enough of a friend? Do i really have a place among these wonderful bright souls? Am i intruding? Am i inserting myself into spaces i do not have any right to be? Am i forcing myself into your circles?"

For the longest time, on most days the conclusion was no. I do not belong. You were just being nice to the pathetic little creature in the corner because by nature you are simply kind. But as the weeks went by i learned that you are also awkward people with your own stuggles and hardships which are far harder and more painful than mine. That you are choosing to be kind every day, in spite of what life threw at you. Because you know.

I started to see you also crave a particular type of companionship and you reach out with the same trembling hands, hoping that someone sees it and grabs it. That someone finally says: you are not alone. I am here. For you. With you.

And you did. You've seen a bunch of hands fumbling in the dark, desperate to hold onto something and went: yeah.. i think i'll grab all of them. Because we are coming from the same darkness. And if i can help pull you into the light than you might have the strenght to do the same for me, so we can all sit in the warmth of the fire. The fire we built together. A fire that is growing ever brighter and allowes us to see even more hands on the edges to be pulled and invited into the circle.

So we have. For a while sitting almost silently, showing the things we found along the way. Tentatively feeling out the boundries. Than we broke the silence. You even started to call me your friend at some point. I already considered you mine because i'm painfully lonely and just the gesture, that you included me among the hands you grabbed was enough for me to see you mine. But all in all, for some unknowable reason, we became friends.

The weeks turned into months and i felt a bit more comfortable to approach you on my own clumsy and awkward ways. Many of you know by now that Tiny Token was born because i was too afraid to send a happy birthday ask to someone. I still apologize regularly just for adding thoughts to posts even if i only do it in tags. I am afraid. Of so many thing.

We still don't talk daily. Yet we still call each other friend. We have actual plans now. I still stuggle with the though of not being enough. There are still days when i feel you just feeling pity towards me.

But lately there is an other thought there. Which makes me feel bad for thinking that way. A thought that's never been there before. "If i was truly bothersome or annoying or any way too unpleasent, you could simply walk away. This is the internet after all. You could just block me. You have the option to walk away but you are time and time again choosing not to. No matter how many days pass by with us not talking, you are there. I can count on you. I'm still hesitant to reach out and dump my superficial adversities on you. But i also see you keeping the door ajar, leaving the option there to be approached if anyone needs it. So it would be not just a disservice but an outright insult to you if i'd think you are just acting out of pity. But if you like me than.. there has to be something about me to actually to be worth knowing?"

And that is doing something that ten years worth of failed therapy could not. You made me question my self doubt. It is still there and will be for the rest of my life. But now there is a steady counter balance i never had this solidly in my life ever before.

I'm still afraid to ask even if anyone would be up for a talk, let alone a call because i have little to offer in conversations. I don't talk much by default and that is not a good base for conversations. I'm still terrified of overstaying my welcome. But i also know now that you probably wouldn't mind from time to time. Because you understand. Maybe one day i will get there. I don't know when but there is a hope i never truly had before.

This is something i will never be able to repay you. Thank you for understanding that we all have different levels of anxiety and fear and not holding it against one and other. I'm writing this to you with immens love and eternal gratitude i cannot truly express in any way that does it justice: Thank you for showing me hope. Thank you for being the way you are.

You gave me the biggest gift there is to give.

You gave me your friendship.

I love you.

Yours in friendship,

Levynn