I really can and will blame the 9-5 for everything. "We're in a loneliness epidemic" well, we have to spend a third of our day interacting with people in a professional way that makes forming real friendships difficult and then we're peopled out by the time we're done. "People are eating more and more unhealthily" people have to spend more than a third of their day doing work related tasks and they don't want to spend their tiny amount of free time making food. "People aren't involved in their local communities" after spending more than a third of their day doing work related things people are tired and also all those community events take place during normal working hours. "People need to get more hobbies" after spending more than a third of their day working, people are TIRED and don't want to do anything that takes yet more energy. "Literacy is dying" to maintain your critical thinking skills you need to read/watch things that make you think and after spending more than a third of your day doing work related stuff you are TIRED and don't want to expend even more brainnpower. "People need to get outside more" People. Are. TIRED. Because they have to spend all of their time working or preparing for work or recovering from work or doing all the chores they couldn't stay on top of because of work. I can blame fucking anything on having to work, it is truly the root of all fucking evil.
Hey OP, love your scalding take here; don't forget about commutes.
Once you factor in commute times (which even for short distances can be grotesquely inflated due to the fact that so many people are all commuting at the same time, but that's a different conversation) many people are actually devoting upwards of 10-12 hours a day on "work related tasks."
"someone who really has pOCD would be disgusted and horrified at their intrusive thoughts" or maybe i'm in therapy & am going by the books, being radically ambivalent to my intrusive thoughts instead of wasting energy mentally washing my paws of sin. i'm not going to perform my rock bottom for you for the sake of being believed.
Making him wear the remote controlled aneros all day long. Teasing him and edging him at random. Have him shaking and bouncing in line at the store or whining into my neck and rutting against my thigh as we sit in the park. Leaking in his trousers. So hard he could tear the zipper from the inside. Begging me to stop. Begging me for more. On again and off again. Fast then slow. Over and over. Keep playing with him when we get home. As he carries in the bags, as he does the dishes, as he works in the garden. Watch him quivering and gasping out of nowhere. Doubled over and whimpering uncontrollably. Then stopping again before sending him to reshelve the books upstairs. Only to switch it back on when he least expects it, and enjoy how the air fills with his yelps and curses. The sounds of hardbacks crashing to the ground above me as I laugh my heart out at his troubles. Poor darling.
MINORS & AGELESS BLOGS DNI ! YOU WILL BE BLOCKED !
I once tried to explain depression to someone as like if one day you gradually started to lose both your sense of taste and your ability to feel full. And you don’t know why, but now everything you eat tastes like mashed potatoes and nothing you eat is satisfying. You keep eating because you must eat to live, but the effort that it takes to prepare food is taxing and there is no pay off. You just know it will taste like mashed potatoes. You just know you will still be hungry. So you stop bothering with seasonings. Then you stop bothering to use ingredients you used to like. Then you start to wonder what the point of eating is because there is no payoff. You still feel hungry and you’re sick of the taste and you don’t know if you will ever enjoy food again and you don’t know why this is happening.
If someone comes up to you in this scenario and says, “Well have you tried spicing your food? Using different ingredients? Eating foods you used to love?” It isn’t necessarily helpful because the reason you stopped doing all that in the first place is that everything…tasted…like mashed…potatoes.
one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they'd have jobs throughout the show's entire run... but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.
and none of these people wanted to walk away from a guaranteed job, so very few of them ever quit. they just kept doing the same show eight nights a week... for twenty or thirty years... and by the time it finally closed last year most of these musicians (who had been working together for DECADES) hated each other and really really fucking loathed phantom. I can't stop thinking about it. it's indescribably hellish to imagine but also the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.
[ID: excerpt from an article reading: One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has every played in a band crazy-- there’s this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She’s convinced he plays half a note4 flat on every note he’s every played. He denies this. /]
i love learning about animals ive literally never seen or heard of before. what amazing diversity of life on this planet earth. what the hell is a japanese serow
I'll be an avid shipper of something until someone walks in and says "there is NO platonic explanation for this" and suddenly I've never shipped it before in my life and they're just friends and I can't lie i can't really see them being in a romantic relationship with each other yeah sorry I just don't see it
You find a cave that's underwater, don scuba gear, and then dive in the cave. If you get stuck, injured, lost, break your gear, run out of oxygen, encounter a gas bubble that makes you temporarily insane, the guideline to the cave opening breaks or comes loose, or anything unexpected that you didn't account for happens, you get to spend your final moments with an absolute certainty that you are going to die.
Cave Mouth perfec t size for put monkey in to p\lay! inside very Soft and Comfort monkey play fun put monkey in Cave Mouth. Put monkey in Cave Mouth. no problems ever in ccave mouth because good Shape and Wet adventure for big monkey brain of need fun and adventure. Cave Mouth yes a place for a monkey put monkey in cave mouth can trust cave for giveing good fun for monkey. friend cave
Consider following political and social justice tumblrs under a different login than the one you use to find cool art / cat pictures / fandom stuff / kink stuff / etc
Or like just in general, if you're getting most of your political news in the same apps where you do most of your fun / sexy shit,
pls give some thought to where and when those streams get crossed, esp if you haven't really thought about it before
For some people it doesn't matter much, but for some people it does.
There's a concept in psychology called "overcoupling," which is basically when a person's trauma is super cross-wired, so to speak, with the present or with a certain topic
Overcoupling can both cause and worsen intrusive thoughts and depression, especially for people with a history of trauma
Or, more simply: If you're mentally whipping back and forth between cute animal, funny joke, porn, genocide psa, and hate crime footage at the speed of scrolling, that can really mess with your head, and sometimes it takes people quite a while to pin it down
Or, if the place you go to relax and look at fandom shit is also where you get all your news about ongoing global crises, that's gonna seriously mess with your ability to actually relax and rest
That sort of thing, if that makes sense. It's not "Don't do this or else!!" It's just kind of a "hey make sure you didn't accidentally frogboil your stress responses or something"
#craaaaaaap. #fuck. #fuuuuuuuck. #i gotta do smth about that. # thank you twin # but WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH #CHANGING ACCOUNTS IS SUPER HAAARD WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH #how do I know if this shit is even messing with me anyway #how did YOU know this shit was messing with people #what book did you get your strange eldritch knowledge from???
Oh! So funny story but I actually edit psychology books for a living lol
So, many books, but the knowledge isn't eldritch - it's evidence-based!
Also, before I go into it:
This isn't something anyone needs to stress over or especially panic over, especially if you don't really feel like it's affecting you personally.
I simply was having a thoughtful night and wanted to share a nudge/tip/data point to help people be more intentional
Best of luck!
But yes, further explanation!:
The concept of overcoupling specifically comes from Somatic Experiencing, which is a type of therapy and bodywork. It was invented by a psychologist and trauma survivor, Dr. Peter Levine, in the 1990s. The idea behind Somatic Experiencing, as well as other somatic ("body-based") healing practices, is that, as we know, trauma is stored not just in the mind, but also in the body - and therefore SE says, in order to heal after trauma, we must work with the body too. They have some really cool articles and theses on the org's Research page here
But the reason I know isn't specific to somatic experiencing itself, I just know a lot about trauma, psychology books, and "mind, body, spirit" publishing (kind of a genre tag for a lot of these books, especially for alternative and non-Western healing practices).
Sooooooo,
If you want specific book recs for the eldritch-evidence-based knowledge, I highly recommend:
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
by Stephanie Foo
and
In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness
by Peter Levine
Also major publishers in psychology and healing that I really like and respect:
New Harbinger Publications (huge leader and force in evidence-based psychology publishing)
North Atlantic Books (Peter Levine's publisher, they have a lot of really awesome and innovative books, and are the main publisher for somatic experiencing) (Ironically, they're on the Mid-Pacific Coast tho lol)
(Note since I've been asked before: This is in no way an ad or an affiliate link. I have never used either of those on reasonsforhope/directactionforhope, and I never plan to bc I believe in eliminating perverse incentives in my activism, etc. I do trust both those publishers bc I've personally worked with them, but they're in no way paying me to say this (or paying me rn in general; I'm on medical leave / sabbatical); I chose to work with them because I really like and respect them and their books.)
--
On a different type of note, in terms of how I figured it out:
I figured it out because it messed with me a lot when I was in college. And I was in college during the start of the Black Lives Matter movement and the first Trump presidency - there were a LOT of horrifying things on social media.
I'd go on tumblr, or facebook, to relax and see some cute animal pictures - and then I'd end up seeing them sandwiched between genocide PSAs, and every new #MeToo announcement, and videos of unarmed Black people being murdered
It did, indeed, lowkey frogboiled my stress responses, which I noticed bc every time I ended up going on tumblr, I ended up feeling way worse than I started. And it was specifically messing with my sleep a lot bc I'd be scrolling before bed, as we all do, and then - BOOM ! DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS HORRIFIC WAR CRIME?
like every 3 posts
and I was actually in a city with that was targeted by a lot of right-wing extremists, so there wasn't like, a lot of space between "horrifying news shit" and "my life" and things like "is it safe to walk to the store right now?"
It wasn't great for me!! I ended up quitting tumblr for like 6 years, until the COVID pandemic started and I was hella bored in lockdown, and in all that time I continued to be glad I left tumblr. Honestly, if I didn't run reasonsforhope on here, I would've deleted my account on here again a couple years ago lol
I will say tumblr is actually in many ways far MORE chill about politics and social justice than it used to be. But that's because the bar was subterranean!!!!
But yeah, at the time, what I did was start by filtering things a lot better and blocking tags and using social media less.
It helped, but ultimately I decided I just didn't want to deal with any of that shit anymore. So I quit tumblr for years, and I deleted Facebook off my phone and just kept Messenger (this was like 2016; young ppl still used facebook), and it helped my mental health a lot
So I went "Great, awesome, clearly that worked, keep it up." And now I periodically just reassess to make sure that I engage with politics and triggering shit in a more intentional way
So, if you want to check if it's messing with you, you could try things like:
making a new account for a few days, and curating a new dashboard, and see how using that feels / start there
take a break from tumblr or switch to like exclusively social media playlists of cat videos for a few days, and see how that feels
filter a bunch of tags or unfollow a couple blogs for a week or two, and see if that makes a difference
take a few days to make a conscious effort to use different social media for fun than you do for serious shit / news / triggering shit. see if that feels like it's worth exploring more
And, psa just in general. Not because I think people can't take care of themselves or can't make their own decisions, but because sometimes these things really can frogboil you before you realize:
If you see a post that makes you spiral or triggers you, please take at least one step to make sure you won't see the post again
e.g., block the tag, filter a term, unfollow the blog that posted it, click "no interest in this post" on the dropdown. you can also go to tumblr settings and tell it to show you fewer posts from people you don't follow and communities you're not in, which can help a lot, esp since posts with a lot of engagement are often more controversial or upsetting
Anyway, yeah - this isn't something to panic over, especially if you don't think it's affecting you just a data point to help people be more intentional
@oyavaski i think the funniest part of this is you thinking that this is fake because.....some of us are the same age and we have normal tumblr names i guess lmao????
