#My brain is missing entire functions that NEED to be replaced with technology in order for me to function as an independent person

[clowneryandshenanegans]

Theory time!!!!

TADC one this time, here we go go go go on an adventure

so we know that in the circus there’s three types of characters, AI’s (Caine, the moon and sun, bubble), NPCs (candy kingdom residents, gummygoo, gloink queen), and humans (main cast). (To specify: AI’s are characters who have not been created by an outside character and are not player characters, NPC’s were created by an outside force and are not players, humans are, well, humans)

But what if our main guy Caine is a part of that last group?

Hear me out. I doubt that the technology of the time when the circus supposedly takes place (probably around 70’s-90’s) would be able to support something as powerful as an all knowing, practically all powerful AI.

We know that the way the main cast most likely got in the circus was from a headset linked to a computer, which probably either made a complete perfect replica of their brain that was placed in the game while the original was killed, or their consciousness was somehow transferred into the computer.

So what if instead of Caine being an AI created by whoever made it, he was human? What if there was a human that was hooked up to the system way before the circus was even made, which then became a part of the game?

If Caine was put it the game before the circus was even there, the original human’s consciousness could have melted into the game until it seemed like an ai. Caine could have been a human placed in when the program was nothing but a void, who then went insane so far to the point his brain practically collapsed, then rewired itself to be a part of the game, to where he basically became god once his brain had been far enough melted into the code.

after all, which would be easier; develop an entire code fo years to properly run a program, or put a perfectly working brain, one of the highest quality “computers” out there, into the game, then wait it out until it became its own AI?

The circus is shown to have quite a few glitches, with clipping, character models going wack, and abstraction if it’s a glitch in the game. These could all be the results of a brain not functioning automatically like a computer would.

then there’s the theory of the NPC models. If the only thing that made the candy kingdom was Caine, and Caine is an AI, why would he have character models below the map?

character models below the map are something developers use when making a game, in order to have the models fully ready in case one glitches, goes missing, or is messed up in some way. This way, they don’t have to recreate the entire model if it glitches, and can just replace it.

but if Caine is an ai, he wouldn’t need the character models, since he could just spawn one automatically from storage.

but if Caine was originally human, the Candy Kingdom could have been one of the first things he built, believing he needed the models under the map to avoid having to redo the model.

So, my theory? Caine is a human, who was trapped in the circus for so long that his consciousness melted into the code, rebuilt itself, and embedded itself into the code to make him into the games “ai”.

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 11: The Dream

Emery fell into the Dream.

It was a fall and it wasn’t. There was no forest on the other side of the gateway, but when the light returned, Emery was collapsing back-first onto a pile of…foam? Cushions? She couldn’t see what she’d fallen onto, but it didn’t hurt. She had not come from anywhere. There was no gateway. There were no walls or ceiling or sky. For a moment, after she pushed herself off the surface of her soft landing, there was no ground.

There was nothingness around her in the way that there could be nothingness in a dream: she couldn’t focus on her surroundings. There was something in her brain telling her they weren’t important. She didn’t need to make sense of them.

She grasped at the thought. Dream logic. They did sections of dream logic every year in dreamforming class, and by their final year of school, they would have an entire class of just that. How the dream functioned while a dreamhunter was physically inside it, what it did to their bodies and minds, and the strange and unusual things it did to protect itself. The first rule of dream logic was the will of the Dream itself: the Dream wanted everyone inside to forget where they were, to unravel their memories and their lives piece by piece until they couldn’t leave. A dreamer could exit the Dream by waking up, but a physical body from the waking world, once caught, would rot away there forever.

The Dream wants you to forget.

Emery dropped to her knees and threw her arms over her head. The Dream wanted her to forget, so she had to remember. She had to remember anything and everything she could about the waking world.

Grandpa Al had a special teacup that he only used in his office. It sat beside the nameplate on his desk. Powder blue with cobalt designs and a gold rim. Grandma Juno had given it to him years ago, after they got married and before she was lost in the Dream.

The Dream wants you to forget.

Grandma Juno had forgotten and had gotten lost, and had probably died here. Emery growled and thought harder. Edgar. The sleeves of Edgar’s favorite sweater hung well past his hands. It was a hand-me-down from their father, and Edgar insisted on wearing it every time he watched A Fistful of Dollars.

Why, though?

Why?

Because their father was the one who had shown him that movie for the first time.

The Dream’s oppressive pushing against Emery’s mind let up, but she needed more to keep it away.

Her father could stand in a room full of people and still hide behind his glasses. He was Grandpa Al, but younger and taller and tealess. When she was little, when he still smoked, he gave her piggyback rides, and she felt like she was on top of the world.

Her mother could hide in an empty maze and everyone within five miles would still know she was there. They called her “the Siberian.” She came from…from…Emery cursed. She always forgot the name of it because she was stupid and had never cared enough about where her parents had come from. Khakassia! Her mother was from Khakassia. They’d first come to the Sleeping City from Moscow when Emery was eight, and her mother had let Emery hide behind the protective wall of her legs until Emery had worked up the courage to venture out.

The pressure drained away.

She needed more. Something recent.

Lewis brought Kris flowers for her botany notebook at student council meetings. He’d done it every week for two years, and Emery was no longer sure where he was getting the flowers, but he never missed a week.

Kris wore a different barrette every day of the week, always butterflies on Monday. If she forgot to put it in or wore the wrong one, her anxiety would have her flitting around the student council room in a panic until Jacqueline let her leave to fix the situation.

Joel had found Emery on her first day at Fenhallow. He’d pulled her away from her mother’s protective covering, and he hadn’t even cared that she tried speaking Russian to him sometimes. He liked her before everyone else. He liked her after everyone else. She knew where his family lived in the city, but he may as well have sprung out of the campus ground. There was no Fenhallow without Joel.

Emery thought of Jacqueline standing over her, black hair pulled back in an imperious ponytail, snapping, “Get up, Ashworth. I’d tell you to stop being useless, but that might be too difficult for you.”

Emery got up.

She had her armor and her guns. From the Sandman’s portal she’d expected to enter a forest, but she stood now on a cracked and barren plain that stretched endlessly into the distance. Purple clouds filled the sky, flashing with the threat of lightning.

“Wes?”

Emery turned in a full circle. She was alone. It was a strange kind of aloneness, like standing on an empty arena floor, looked down upon by thousands of spectators. Every mind in the world was connected to the Dream, but the people of the Sleeping City would be the closest. The air around her rippled with half-formed images, there and gone again and replaced by something new. Green fields. Dark oceans. Rooms with blank walls. The insides of homes, the outsides of homes. Schools, planets, pitch black. To her left, a the image of a jungle treehouse solidified and began to move, a window in the midst of her great barren plain, looking onto a whole other world. After a few moments, it trickled away, and Emery had trouble remembering exactly what she’d seen inside it. The Dream oriented its windows around Emery, circling her.

Her mother had always said the Dream was a living thing. It knew when a dreamhunter entered it like a body knew a virus. And like a body and a virus, the Dream resisted invaders. It rejected the waking world.

It had wanted her to forget herself, and she hadn’t. Now, it seemed like it planned to let the dreams of the Sleeping City scare her off.

The problem was, she didn’t know how to get back. The Sandman’s gateway was gone, and even if she did know how to open one herself, she couldn’t leave the Dream without Wes.

Jumping through the Sandman’s gateway had not been her best decision ever. And now that she was out of the moment, trying to catch him in the Dream didn’t sound so appealing, either.

Her first order of business was finding Wes without upsetting the Dream. She had no idea how to do either of those, but standing around wasn’t getting her anywhere.

She looked at her cuff. It had clearly been too much to hope that she could just message Wes. Hey bud, where’re you at? Around the corner from the creepy sunken ship dream-window? Cool, I’ll be there in a sec. The cuff was a no-go. Not only did it get no signal in the Dream, it didn’t even turn on. The Dream didn’t like people, and it didn’t like technology.

“Alright, Em.” She clapped her hands together. “You are in the collective subconscious of the human race. How do you find another person?”

Maybe by wishing really hard.

She snorted. The Dream couldn’t take sarcasm from her.

Professor Lenton hadn’t been any help at all when it came to the Dream. They needed a dreamhunter to teach them these things. Class Twenty got special sessions from the full-time dreamhunters, but two more years seemed like an awfully long time to wait for adequate schooling when they were already allowed out on missions.

Breathe, Emery. Marcia told them to breathe. Yelled at them to breathe, actually. You can’t make good decisions if you don’t breathe, she’d say.

Emery breathed, and thought.

She could track nightmares, dreamhunters, even minor dreamforms in the waking world. All dreamhunters could, because they straddled the line between worlds. Those things felt different, like they didn’t belong. Maybe in the Dream she could track something from the waking world. But that meant she needed to move.

All the directions looked the same—long barren plain, angry flashing sky—so she picked one and started walking. She passed dream-windows as the Dream shifted them to keep its focus on her. Maybe, if this place knew she was here, it would know Wes and the Sandman were here, too. Maybe they would also cause disturbances.

“Wes!” Her voice echoed back to her, as if there were mountains in the distance. The only answer she expected was a slight shift in her mind, that sense she had in the waking world when a nightmare moved suddenly. There was nothing except the heavy, clogging fabric of the Dream pressing in around her. Though the landscape looked arid, the air felt humid.

Nothing to do about it. She’d have to keep moving.

“Wesley Jager, you useless piece of garbage!”

Insults pulled no replies, either. Emery’s boots kicked up little puffs of dust.

“Wes, I’m secretly in love with you. Thought you should know.”

Her sensing-the-waking-world in the Dream theory was probably nonsense. Or Wes was too far away.

How far could he be, really? She’d been holding as tight to him as she could when they went through the gateway. He hadn’t broken out of her grasp before, either, because she remembered a moment of falling through blackness with him at her side, his hammer flashing in the dark.

Her stomach turned. She started to jog.

“Wesley! I am straight up going to have my grandpa fail you if you don’t respond to this!”

The only response she got was a dream-window opening in her face. She pitched headfirst into someone’s mind.

She was on the plain one moment, and in the next standing on a long gravel road in a hazy cloudbank. She started running before she knew why. Sudden, immediate fear pulsed through her legs, clawing at her chest. Something was chasing her. She knew it before she heard it on the gravel behind her, before she felt the change in the air. She knew it the way a dreamer knows it when they drop into that familiar nightmare. The thing was big and had scales and when it caught her—when, not if—it was going to rip her arms out of their sockets.

Her legs sank into the gravel like mud. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. There was no end to the path.

She tripped. Her hands came out to stop her, and she realized she was holding guns. Revolvers.

Revolvers.

The Peacemakers snapped her back into herself. She twisted on the ground. The thing chasing her was lost to the mist, shape indistinct. She aimed for the center of the silhouette.

Her bullets tore through the dream like tissue paper. Instead of bursting in a cloud, the silhouette crumpled to the ground. A dead creature. It was already in the Dream; it had nowhere to return to.

Emery lowered her guns. This creature might have been cute, if it had ever come to the waking world. She would have dispatched it like all the rest, of course, but it might have been shambling and nonsensical and cute. Now it was dead.

The Dream wavered around her. The fear was gone now. The entire span of this person’s nightmare was probably being chased; there was nothing beyond that, so when the chase was done, the nightmare ended. The cloud bank shifted and revealed a patch of cracked and barren earth, angry purple sky. Emery holstered her guns and sprinted for it. She threw herself back into the wasteland.

It was a new area. Or maybe the old area, changed. Low scrub bushes grew from the cracks in the baked ground. The terrain rolled with hills.

She looked at her dead wrist cuff and wondered idly how long she’d been in the Dream. Time flowed differently here. That was what everyone said, at least. A few minutes could last the whole night; a lifetime could be compressed into seconds.

Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten since dinner, however long ago that had been, and she was fairly certain a waking world body couldn’t survive on Dream food. Or water.

She wasn’t panicking. She totally wasn’t panicking.

“WES!”

“Emery!”

His voice came from afar, as if echoing down a long hallway. She turned. Another window exploded around her. Wes’s hand caught hers and they fell; it happened so quickly she didn’t have time to be confused. Emery grabbed the hard ridges of Wes’s armor beneath his arms before the force of their fall could drag them apart again, and the handle of his hammer slid across the small of her back, barring her in.

“We’re falling!” she yelped.

The walls—if they really were walls, they were uniform gray and too far away to touch—led both up and down into blackness.

“I’ve been stuck here.” They were close enough that she heard him over the rushing of the wind. His eyes were wide, his expression relieved. “I kept seeing you through the windows in the walls, but I couldn’t get close enough to grab you. I don’t know how to get out.”

“You sound way too calm for this!” Emery’s stomach floated somewhere in her throat. “How much time do you think has passed?”

“A few hours. My cuff is dead.”

“So is mine, but it’s only felt like half an hour for me.”

He frowned. “We have no idea.”

“I do know that we can get out of here by reaching the end of the dream, though.”

They spun as they fell, and Emery’s hair whipped upward into Wes’s face. Spitting, he managed to swing them around until she was on top.

“How do you end a dream about falling?” he said.

“Usually…you wake up.”

Entirely unhelpful. Not only were they not alseep, the dreamer wasn’t around. If they had been, Emery might have been able to slap them awake at the very least. Enough disturbance in their dream space would wake up a dreamer.

Past Wes, a window opened. A slash of bright light against the darkness, directly below them, getting big fast. There was no way to stop and no time to warn Wes, so Emery wrapped her arms around his head and braced for the impact.

They dropped through the window and hung suspended above the cracked wasteland earth for a heartbeat, just long enough for Emery to realize they’d stopped. Then they started again and dropped the last five feet with a heavy thud.

Wes grunted. Emery unraveled her arms. His head thumped against the ground.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine. I think.” He sat up, pushing her back. He shrank his hammer and hung it on the chain around his neck. When he tried to stand, he wobbled and immediately fell back, face green. “Oh. I need to sit here for a second. I was falling for a long time.” He shoved his head between his knees.

Around them, the wasteland had changed again. Now sparse grass poked up in shoots and spurts through the cracks in the ground, and in the distance, skeletal trees created a path down a long hill. The purple clouds overhead had lightened, and in the distance far at the bottom of the hill, she spotted honest patches of green.

Emery rocked back on her heels and hooked two fingers over the lip of Wes’s boot. If she fell through another window, she was taking him with her, Dream physics be damned.

“For a while I thought I came in alone,” she said.

He glanced at her fingers on his boot, then at her face. “For a while I thought you threw me in.”

“I—I mean, I pulled you in, but I came, too—”

“I know.”

Her cheeks burned with humiliation. And she’d thought, before she’d tried to fire off her flare the first time, that Grandpa Al would be proud of her. She hated it. “Sorry. I didn’t think it through.”

Wes was silent for a moment.

Then: “Well, that was better than the last apology.”

She gave him a small rueful smile. He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look angry either, and with him that seemed like a successful interaction.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I don’t really care about the Sandman anymore. How are we getting out of here?”

“I have no clue. A gateway to the Dream can be opened from anywhere, so it seems reasonable to assume that a gateway back to the waking world can also be opened anywhere. I just don’t know how.”

Dream-windows continued to fade in and out around them. Emery watched, wary. She felt Wes tense at the same time she did when one window materialized a little too close.

“We could stay here and wait for help,” Wes said, “but I don’t think the Dream is going to let us.”

Emery snorted. “Really? What was your first—”

A window opened below their feet.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> Some Dreams Are Worse Than Others)

[adryrn]

Thoughts re: gender affirming surgery

(Soooo… this entire thing is kind of preaching to the choir? And I also tend to paint in really broad strokes/refer to experiences of trans people that are not my specific experience. This was originally a journal entry but midway through I started writing it with other people’s ability to understand what I’m saying in mind so I guess now I’m posting it here. But I don’t feel like doing any extra investigating or finding sources for some of my claims, or being more careful than I already was about overgeneralizing my experiences/certain other experiences that have not been mine. Take everything I say with a grain of salt I guess? Anyway. I go into why I think gender dysphoria is a thing for some people and why reports of it are spiking presently, and how I think society needs to change if to be a more livable place for trans people specifically. I’m a white US-American, so the farther away your life experience is from that, the more likely your experience is to vary.)

I read a long, 3-part piece on how the so-called “trans agenda” fits in with the neoliberal and transhumanist agendas. And there’s a massive gaping hole in it from the missing trans perspectives (the author clearly does not understand what gender/body dysphoria feels like and is understandably getting turned around in circles by all the pseudo-scientific explanations out there, because most trans people are still very plugged into consensus reality, therefore their experiences must be quantifiable and conveniently traceable to the brain—which we presently don’t have the understanding to prove or disprove.)

That said, the society he wants and thinks would be better for trans people (and everyone else) seems to be the same as the one I want—one where gender presentation and identity isn’t a huge deal, and there’s lots of room for what he calls “gender confusion” (… which I think may be better described as gender FLUIDITY. There’s no reason it has to be confusing?)

And I do think the desperate need so many of us feel for gender affirming surgeries and HRT may be rooted in a society in which our inner experiences are denied and devalued by those around us, and our bodies are heavily policed. Which is a dangerous thing to admit because it can easily be co-opted by right-wingers and cis people who think we’re sick to reduce/restrict/deny access to surgeries many of us still need to be able to function in the present society and live complete lives—or even deny our bodily autonomy and our social needs (there are already people who seem to think misgendering us is “good” for us because I guess they think we’ll just learn to accept our assigned genders if with “tough love” or some shit?)

But that said, there’s also historical precedence for people (such as the Galli) voluntarily seeking to live as women and surgically modifying their bodies (in their case, via castration). There’s a lot of diversity among trans people. Among us, there exist people who in a different social context may not have significant body dysphoria but do in this society, but also people who would be even more likely to die (relatively) young as an indirect result of their body dysphoria in a world lacking sufficient medical technology for them to treat that dysphoria, their stories unrecorded. (Lili Elbe may be a possible modern example of this whose story was recorded.)

Of course, talking about any of this is dangerous because our collective access to gender affirming surgeries and HRT is tenuous and inadequate as it is. To get the rest of the world to listen to us and let us have what we need, it seems we need a unified story that allows no room for alternative treatment. It is very difficult to relay our experiences when those experiences are completely alien to most other people’s experiences. In order to have a chance at getting our needs met, the story has to be as simplified and easy to swallow as possible—resulting in a story with logical/scientific holes (because ours is an experience that cannot be fully quantified, and unlike that of having a mind, it is far from usual among other humans) that leaves out or sometimes even conflicts with some of our lived experiences.

Those of us whose body dysphoria has a primarily social cause can easily still NEED surgery and HRT—because the things that made us feel that dysphoria have already happened, or are not going away within our lifetimes no matter how much we work to change our society. Even if social changes that ease a person’s body dysphoria DO occur within their lifetime, why should they have to live with the burden of dysphoria for decades? It won’t help them change the world.

When the way we experience ourselves is (often violently) denied by so many of the people around us, we don’t just react by surgically altering our bodies and rendering ourselves dependent on synthetic hormones. Damage control to protect our senses of self can also come in the form of avoiding doctors in general, avoiding public bathrooms (leading to an increase in related health issues in trans people such as urinary tract and kidney infections or dehydration ), even cutting ties with our families. In many of our cases, these are the options that give us the best chance at living full and functional lives.

To fully function, many of us (the trans people experiencing body dysphoria for whatever reason—right now, in this society) need surgery and HRT. But access to that treatment isn’t enough to make the future a place where trans people can live in peace. We need to stop assigning gender at birth and putting it on ID documents and making a big deal out of gender presentation in general. We have to lose the investment so many of us presently have in being able to KNOW someone’s gender and sex just by looking at them, and replace it with unconditional acceptance of same-sex attraction and gender variance. We need to learn to accept changes in how we refer to a person on the fly—stop conceptualizing others as a name and gender and learn to pay more attention to the indescribable things about a given individual’s presence that don’t change. (This does not mean you’re not allowed to screw up when people change their name or ask you to use pronouns—building a new habit and getting rid of an old one takes time and effort. It’ll be easier to accept that if we can trust that everyone around us will in fact put in the time and effort to make those changes, out of basic respect for us as individuals.) And we REALLY need to quit treating women like inferiors or objects, and holding the threat of similar treatment over men to control them and coerce them into conforming to a narrow standard of masculinity.

And if we can make those changes, then maybe in a few generations, the number of people who need gender affirming surgery and hormone therapy will decrease. Maybe. But a society that has made those changes will still be much healthier even if it produces the same proportion of individuals in need of that kind of treatment.

(Bonus! / Regarding some people’s horror at any kind of body modification/the conflation of all body modification with “self-mutilation.” Two potential places that seems to come from:

1) Living in a world where the reality of our bodies’ needs are constantly denied (by employers trying to suck every last bit of labor possible from our bodies, a government that refuses aid to those who need it unless they find someone to do that, a tendency to deny the medical issues of women and other non-cis-men rather than investigate and treat them) and we are constantly made to feel that our bodies are not good enough (especially by advertisers). Accepting one’s body becomes a struggle for everyone, and for most people that struggle is not resolved by modifying their bodies (because those seeking to extract labor from us want our bodies to be machines, and those who want to sell us things will never let us be happy with what we’ve got—they always need to extract more money out of us.)

2) Christian (?) authoritarianism stating that whatever God gives you at birth is what you get and doing anything but accepting it is blasphemy (even if you’re not Christian, much of American culture seems tainted with some variation of this mentality.)

If the body was not treated as something that inherently needs to be tamed and turned into a productive machine and turned into a source of insecurity to drive consumerism, I suspect body modification (including medically necessary gender-affirming surgeries) would not seem so threatening to those who have no need of/desire for such modification.)

(Also would like to emphasize if you’re dysphoric none of this is in any way intended to suggest that you’re less in need of whatever procedures you need to feel at home in your body. Regardless of why you experience dysphoria, your needs are still your needs.)

(… Also if you’re one of those possibly-cis people whose gender dysphoria is not treatable with surgery for whatever reason, I see you too. That’s a thing, and you deserve better access to education re: healthy coping mechanisms that are not surgical or hormonal in nature o__o.)

[nancygduarteus]

How Twitter Fuels Anxiety

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay on self-reliance, the 19th-century writer and naturalist sang the praises of spiritual isolation and the evils of distraction, bemoaning the forces that conspired to direct his attention to "emphatic trifles." He would not be cowed, he said, but would stand resolute in the face of such bad influences: "The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity ... If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations."

Don't tell Ralph about Twitter.

I joined Twitter in 2009 at the urging of my husband, who works in technology. "What am I going to do, tell the internet what I ate for breakfast?" I asked him. Eight years later, I'm the one checking Twitter over my morning toast while he gets ready for work. Twitter has become the place where I get my news, where I check in on my friends, where I go to make jokes and read good essays. As a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, it is where I go to talk about what I’m feeling when I’m anxious, and maybe find some camaraderie. And as a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, using Twitter is also making my anxiety worse. The like-minded community I’ve built on Twitter has made confessing anxiety easier than ever, but the comparison Twitter enables has made the experience of anxiety worse. And when it comes to Twitter, you have to take the good with the bad.

Psychologists typically distinguish between two types of anxiety: trait anxiety, a persistent and lasting tendency to experience fear and worry; and state anxiety, a temporary response of fear to a threatening situation. Many forms of social media can agitate both trait and state anxiety, and perhaps none more so than Twitter, which reminds the perpetually anxious that we always have something to be anxious about and instills a sense of anxiety in even the most laid-back user. Twitter’s constant flow of new information and the fact that users tend to follow people who are more accomplished and successful than they are creates an especially potent cocktail of comparison for anxious people. "Twitter really inflames my professional anxiety," says Caitlin Cruz, a freelance journalist based in New York. "But it's also given me a lot of professional success." Cruz deleted the Twitter app from her phone a few weeks ago, which she says has made her life more bearable.

Twitter users have to contend with competing voices that yell at you as soon as you log on. You haven't written a best-selling novel yet? Here's a “30 Under 30” list of best-selling novelists! You're over 30? Here's an article about how you're a bad parent! You haven't had children yet? This bestselling author has three, and she's under 30! Twitter is a megaphone for achievements and a magnifying glass for insecurities, and when you start comparing your insecurities with another person's achievements, it's a recipe for anxiety.

"Generally speaking, the comparisons that we make on social media are more like to be 'upward' comparisons," says Azadeh Aalai, a professor of psychology at Montgomery College in Maryland. "We're comparing ourselves to the individuals who appear to be higher status and are achieving more" than we are, which can lead to feelings of envy, discontent, and anxiety. It's also not the whole story. When I was young, my mom used to warn me against "comparing my insides to other people's outsides." Using Twitter, I am constantly comparing my insides—my anxieties, fears, and insecurities—with other people's outward selves: their accomplishments, polished selfies, and edited articles. There will always be someone who’s doing better than I am in any aspect of my life. And because I, like many people, tend to follow people I admire or who are already famous, I am constantly aware of just how much better other people are. Twitter also gives me a quick and handy way to quantify my worth: this many likes, this many retweets. I'd like to think I'm more than the sum of my followers, but there are plenty of days when I don't feel that way.

Anxiety functions by constantly reminding you to pay attention to it. And so does Twitter. Twitter draws users back for more and more and more. Smartphones are designed to provide instant gratification, and many of Twitter's features depend on our biological fear of scarcity, says Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center. The push notifications, the little number next to our mentions, the bar that tells us how many tweets have been sent since we last refreshed the page—all of these details are designed to keep users coming back, afraid that we might have missed something vital. "Social media doesn't really promote moderation," Aalai says (in what could perhaps be the understatement of the year).

The desire to know what is going on at every moment is quenched when met with the firehose of information that is Twitter. But my anxiety skyrockets when I’m met with the seemingly endless amount of bad news about tragic events going on around the world—ISIS bombings, systemic racism, refugees in crisis, the threat of war, political upheaval. Many Twitter users I surveyed cited feeling powerless in the face of overwhelming fear as one of the biggest causes of their anxiety. Even if it does offer the occasional practical solution—donating to the International Rescue Committee, calling a congressperson, sharing a GoFundMe—Twitter remains dominantly focused on the world's ills in a way that can decimate a person's sense of efficacy and replace it with profound despair.

If Twitter is full of bad news and anxiety-inducing fodder for comparison, why are we there in the first place? Some people, like the writer Lindy West, have left Twitter altogether due to harassment and trolling, while the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens just announced he would leave Twitter because it had become "pornified politics," although he isn't really leaving—"I'll keep my Twitter handle, and hopefully my followers," he wrote, and an editorial assistant will update the profile for him. But the rest of users are there, presumably, because they find some value amid the constant updates and jokes and hot takes. Twitter provides a sense of camaraderie.

Twitter provides a platform for neurotic people to share their fears. And for those of us who work from home or on the road, Twitter becomes an office space and the people we interact with become our coworkers. A recent Harvard University study found that "the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same part of the brain that is associated with the sensation of pleasure"—the same pleasure center that is activated by food, money, and sex. Confessing my anxiety on social media, then, is an attempt not to feel so alone. Anxiety isolates the people who suffer from it, convincing them that they are the only ones who think in this distorted way. Bringing this kind of myopic thinking into the light and examining it can help combat it, and Twitter can actually be a useful place for doing just that. "You're anxious? Me, too!" is the kind of rallying cry that unites anxious people. But even as we find our tribe of fellow worriers, the question remains: What are we using Twitter for?

In no particular order, these are some of the reasons I use Twitter: to check the news, to procrastinate, to see what my friends are up to, to stave off boredom, to find an article I've been wanting to read, to seek out new voices to listen to, to make myself feel better by sharing what I've accomplished, to see what people are saying to me. In other words, Twitter mimics a lot of the everyday interactions I have—only without the benefit of being face-to-face. People with social anxiety can use Twitter to replicate those in-person interactions, but the anxiety can remain. Twitter users I spoke with often worried about how they were perceived online, and the need for external approval has been correlated with an increased sense of anxiety on social media. A person can find both solidarity and isolation on Twitter, which is part of the medium's magnetic pull—you never know how you're going to feel when you open it up.

Rutledge encourages Twitter users to think about why they're online. "If you're checking Twitter a hundred times a day, what are you avoiding doing?" she asks. "That's where you need cognitive override," or the ability to step out of the moment at hand and evaluate how realistic your feelings are given your use of this technology. "When we're anxious, we feel compelled to be continually scanning the environment," Rutledge says. "That's how we make ourselves feel safe." It's what our ancestors did to anticipate attacks from enemies or saber-toothed tigers, but the advantage now isn’t quite as clear. Assuming we live in a world that is connected enough that we won't completely miss important news, there isn’t a real need to be constantly scanning the feed, looking for threats.

The cycle of anxiety on Twitter use can be especially bad for women, non-binary and queer people, and people of color. "Vulnerable populations in face-to-face interactions are similarly going to be vulnerable in virtual interactions," says Aalai. These are often people who benefit greatly from Twitter because they can speak directly to the friendly audience who follows them, cutting out the potential for harassment they might receive in other places. But trolls follow, too: A 2014 Pew study shows that 25 percent of women ages 18–24 have been sexually harassed online (as opposed to 13 percent of young men), and 23 percent have been physically threatened. Fifty-one percent of African-American and 54 percent of Hispanic internet users had experienced some form of harassment online, as opposed to 34 percent of white internet users.

"You have to make a conscious decision about whether Twitter is still adding value," Rutledge says. The difficult part is that "value" is entirely subjective, and it's hard to make (good) decisions when our brain isn't working at full capacity. A recent study from the University of Chicago found that "the mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity." And a recent New Republic article asked journalists whether they could live without Twitter. The answer was uniformly "no," although many people acknowledged that life without Twitter would be "better." It reminds me of the apostle Paul's words about sin in the letter to the Romans: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."

In 1855, the poet Walt Whitman sent Ralph Waldo Emerson a copy of his newly published collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," Emerson wrote to him. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start." Emerson saw in Whitman’s moving poetry the long and careful career of devoted practice that had gone before.

Some years later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Leaves of Grass was one of the most influential books in his career, comparing its “efficiency” to great programming. It didn’t seem to strike Dorsey as ironic that Whitman took years to craft the efficiency of language that Dorsey praised. Dorsey called Whitman a “total entrepreneur,” looking, as many of us do, for the presence of his own values in the person he admired. And that is one of the reasons people are drawn to Twitter—it gives them access to the inner lives of people they would otherwise never interact with. But in so doing, they may also start to fear that they will never become the person they want to be—never be as smart or prolific or original or beautiful as the composite of people they follow. That gap is where anxiety thrives.

In the meantime, I'm itching to know what's going on in the world. Who knows what's happened since I started writing? Is there some new political scandal? Has someone tweeted something outrageous? How am I adding up to the people I follow? I know I could wait. I could go for a walk, or read a book, or take a bath. But I think I'll check. Just one more time.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/how-twitter-fuels-anxiety/534021/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

How Twitter Fuels Anxiety

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay on self-reliance, the 19th-century writer and naturalist sang the praises of spiritual isolation and the evils of distraction, bemoaning the forces that conspired to direct his attention to "emphatic trifles." He would not be cowed, he said, but would stand resolute in the face of such bad influences: "The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity ... If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations."

Don't tell Ralph about Twitter.

I joined Twitter in 2009 at the urging of my husband, who works in technology. "What am I going to do, tell the internet what I ate for breakfast?" I asked him. Eight years later, I'm the one checking Twitter over my morning toast while he gets ready for work. Twitter has become the place where I get my news, where I check in on my friends, where I go to make jokes and read good essays. As a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, it is where I go to talk about what I’m feeling when I’m anxious, and maybe find some camaraderie. And as a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, using Twitter is also making my anxiety worse. The like-minded community I’ve built on Twitter has made confessing anxiety easier than ever, but the comparison Twitter enables has made the experience of anxiety worse. And when it comes to Twitter, you have to take the good with the bad.

Psychologists typically distinguish between two types of anxiety: trait anxiety, a persistent and lasting tendency to experience fear and worry; and state anxiety, a temporary response of fear to a threatening situation. Many forms of social media can agitate both trait and state anxiety, and perhaps none more so than Twitter, which reminds the perpetually anxious that we always have something to be anxious about and instills a sense of anxiety in even the most laid-back user. Twitter’s constant flow of new information and the fact that users tend to follow people who are more accomplished and successful than they are creates an especially potent cocktail of comparison for anxious people. "Twitter really inflames my professional anxiety," says Caitlin Cruz, a freelance journalist based in New York. "But it's also given me a lot of professional success." Cruz deleted the Twitter app from her phone a few weeks ago, which she says has made her life more bearable.

Twitter users have to contend with competing voices that yell at you as soon as you log on. You haven't written a best-selling novel yet? Here's a “30 Under 30” list of best-selling novelists! You're over 30? Here's an article about how you're a bad parent! You haven't had children yet? This bestselling author has three, and she's under 30! Twitter is a megaphone for achievements and a magnifying glass for insecurities, and when you start comparing your insecurities with another person's achievements, it's a recipe for anxiety.

"Generally speaking, the comparisons that we make on social media are more like to be 'upward' comparisons," says Azadeh Aalai, a professor of psychology at Montgomery College in Maryland. "We're comparing ourselves to the individuals who appear to be higher status and are achieving more" than we are, which can lead to feelings of envy, discontent, and anxiety. It's also not the whole story. When I was young, my mom used to warn me against "comparing my insides to other people's outsides." Using Twitter, I am constantly comparing my insides—my anxieties, fears, and insecurities—with other people's outward selves: their accomplishments, polished selfies, and edited articles. There will always be someone who’s doing better than I am in any aspect of my life. And because I, like many people, tend to follow people I admire or who are already famous, I am constantly aware of just how much better other people are. Twitter also gives me a quick and handy way to quantify my worth: this many likes, this many retweets. I'd like to think I'm more than the sum of my followers, but there are plenty of days when I don't feel that way.

Anxiety functions by constantly reminding you to pay attention to it. And so does Twitter. Twitter draws users back for more and more and more. Smartphones are designed to provide instant gratification, and many of Twitter's features depend on our biological fear of scarcity, says Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center. The push notifications, the little number next to our mentions, the bar that tells us how many tweets have been sent since we last refreshed the page—all of these details are designed to keep users coming back, afraid that we might have missed something vital. "Social media doesn't really promote moderation," Aalai says (in what could perhaps be the understatement of the year).

The desire to know what is going on at every moment is quenched when met with the firehose of information that is Twitter. But my anxiety skyrockets when I’m met with the seemingly endless amount of bad news about tragic events going on around the world—ISIS bombings, systemic racism, refugees in crisis, the threat of war, political upheaval. Many Twitter users I surveyed cited feeling powerless in the face of overwhelming fear as one of the biggest causes of their anxiety. Even if it does offer the occasional practical solution—donating to the International Rescue Committee, calling a congressperson, sharing a GoFundMe—Twitter remains dominantly focused on the world's ills in a way that can decimate a person's sense of efficacy and replace it with profound despair.

If Twitter is full of bad news and anxiety-inducing fodder for comparison, why are we there in the first place? Some people, like the writer Lindy West, have left Twitter altogether due to harassment and trolling, while the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens just announced he would leave Twitter because it had become "pornified politics," although he isn't really leaving—"I'll keep my Twitter handle, and hopefully my followers," he wrote, and an editorial assistant will update the profile for him. But the rest of users are there, presumably, because they find some value amid the constant updates and jokes and hot takes. Twitter provides a sense of camaraderie.

Twitter provides a platform for neurotic people to share their fears. And for those of us who work from home or on the road, Twitter becomes an office space and the people we interact with become our coworkers. A recent Harvard University study found that "the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same part of the brain that is associated with the sensation of pleasure"—the same pleasure center that is activated by food, money, and sex. Confessing my anxiety on social media, then, is an attempt not to feel so alone. Anxiety isolates the people who suffer from it, convincing them that they are the only ones who think in this distorted way. Bringing this kind of myopic thinking into the light and examining it can help combat it, and Twitter can actually be a useful place for doing just that. "You're anxious? Me, too!" is the kind of rallying cry that unites anxious people. But even as we find our tribe of fellow worriers, the question remains: What are we using Twitter for?

In no particular order, these are some of the reasons I use Twitter: to check the news, to procrastinate, to see what my friends are up to, to stave off boredom, to find an article I've been wanting to read, to seek out new voices to listen to, to make myself feel better by sharing what I've accomplished, to see what people are saying to me. In other words, Twitter mimics a lot of the everyday interactions I have—only without the benefit of being face-to-face. People with social anxiety can use Twitter to replicate those in-person interactions, but the anxiety can remain. Twitter users I spoke with often worried about how they were perceived online, and the need for external approval has been correlated with an increased sense of anxiety on social media. A person can find both solidarity and isolation on Twitter, which is part of the medium's magnetic pull—you never know how you're going to feel when you open it up.

Rutledge encourages Twitter users to think about why they're online. "If you're checking Twitter a hundred times a day, what are you avoiding doing?" she asks. "That's where you need cognitive override," or the ability to step out of the moment at hand and evaluate how realistic your feelings are given your use of this technology. "When we're anxious, we feel compelled to be continually scanning the environment," Rutledge says. "That's how we make ourselves feel safe." It's what our ancestors did to anticipate attacks from enemies or saber-toothed tigers, but the advantage now isn’t quite as clear. Assuming we live in a world that is connected enough that we won't completely miss important news, there isn’t a real need to be constantly scanning the feed, looking for threats.

The cycle of anxiety on Twitter use can be especially bad for women, non-binary and queer people, and people of color. "Vulnerable populations in face-to-face interactions are similarly going to be vulnerable in virtual interactions," says Aalai. These are often people who benefit greatly from Twitter because they can speak directly to the friendly audience who follows them, cutting out the potential for harassment they might receive in other places. But trolls follow, too: A 2014 Pew study shows that 25 percent of women ages 18–24 have been sexually harassed online (as opposed to 13 percent of young men), and 23 percent have been physically threatened. Fifty-one percent of African-American and 54 percent of Hispanic internet users had experienced some form of harassment online, as opposed to 34 percent of white internet users.

"You have to make a conscious decision about whether Twitter is still adding value," Rutledge says. The difficult part is that "value" is entirely subjective, and it's hard to make (good) decisions when our brain isn't working at full capacity. A recent study from the University of Chicago found that "the mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity." And a recent New Republic article asked journalists whether they could live without Twitter. The answer was uniformly "no," although many people acknowledged that life without Twitter would be "better." It reminds me of the apostle Paul's words about sin in the letter to the Romans: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."

In 1855, the poet Walt Whitman sent Ralph Waldo Emerson a copy of his newly published collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," Emerson wrote to him. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start." Emerson saw in Whitman’s moving poetry the long and careful career of devoted practice that had gone before.

Some years later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Leaves of Grass was one of the most influential books in his career, comparing its “efficiency” to great programming. It didn’t seem to strike Dorsey as ironic that Whitman took years to craft the efficiency of language that Dorsey praised. Dorsey called Whitman a “total entrepreneur,” looking, as many of us do, for the presence of his own values in the person he admired. And that is one of the reasons people are drawn to Twitter—it gives them access to the inner lives of people they would otherwise never interact with. But in so doing, they may also start to fear that they will never become the person they want to be—never be as smart or prolific or original or beautiful as the composite of people they follow. That gap is where anxiety thrives.

In the meantime, I'm itching to know what's going on in the world. Who knows what's happened since I started writing? Is there some new political scandal? Has someone tweeted something outrageous? How am I adding up to the people I follow? I know I could wait. I could go for a walk, or read a book, or take a bath. But I think I'll check. Just one more time.

Article source here:The Atlantic