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antiporn-activist · 8 months ago

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I thought y'all should read this

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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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icedbatik · 7 months ago

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I saw this opinion piece in the New York Times and, while I don't normally copy and paste entire newspaper articles, this is an excellent (if scary) read.

Aside from the sections on how much lack of consent there is in today's sexual landscape, hockey fans -- who should be well aware of the dangers of concussions -- might take particular note of the section in which "choking" during sex is linked to brain damage on par with concussion damage.

The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex

April 12, 2024

By Peggy Orenstein

Debby Herbenick is one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior. The director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and the author of the pointedly titled book “Yes, Your Kid,” she usually shares her data, no matter how explicit, without judgment. So I was surprised by how concerned she seemed when we checked in on Zoom recently: “I haven’t often felt so strongly about getting research out there,” she told me. “But this is lifesaving.”

For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk Q. and A. at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, “How come boys all want to choke you?” In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” They do? Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.

I started to ask more, and the stories piled up. Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be “properly educated” — pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea. (Note: There is no safe way to strangle someone.) A male freshman said “girls expected” to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a “simp.” And a senior in high school was angry that her friends called her “vanilla” when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her.

Sexual strangulation, nearly always of women in heterosexual pornography, has long been a staple on free sites, those default sources of sex ed for teens. As with anything else, repeat exposure can render the once appalling appealing. It’s not uncommon for behaviors to be normalized in porn, move within a few years to mainstream media, then, in what may become a feedback loop, be adopted in the bedroom or the dorm room.

Choking, Dr. Herbenick said, seems to have made that first leap in a 2008 episode of Showtime’s “Californication,” where it was still depicted as outré, then accelerated after the success of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” By 2019, when a high school girl was choked in the pilot of HBO’s “Euphoria,” it was standard fare. A young woman was choked in the opener of “The Idol” (again on HBO and also, like “Euphoria,” created by Sam Levinson; what’s with him?). Ali Wong plays the proclivity for laughs in a Netflix special, and it’s a punchline in Tina Fey’s new “Mean Girls.” The chorus of Jack Harlow’s “Lovin On Me,” which topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for six nonconsecutive weeks this winter and has been viewed over 99 million times on YouTube, starts with, “I’m vanilla, baby, I’ll choke you, but I ain’t no killer, baby.” How-to articles abound on the internet, and social media algorithms feed young people (but typically not their unsuspecting parents) hundreds of #chokemedaddy memes along with memes that mock — even celebrate — the potential for hurting or killing female partners.

I’m not here to kink-shame (or anything-shame). And, anyway, many experienced BDSM practitioners discourage choking, believing it to be too dangerous. There are still relatively few studies on the subject, and most have been done by Dr. Herbenick and her colleagues. Reports among adolescents are now trickling out from the United Kingdom, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand and Italy.

Twenty years ago, sexual asphyxiation appears to have been unusual among any demographic, let alone young people who were new to sex and iffy at communication. That’s changed radically in a short time, with health consequences that parents, educators, medical professionals, sexual consent advocates and teens themselves urgently need to understand.

Sexual trends can spread quickly on campus and, to an extent, in every direction. But, at least among straight kids, I’ve sometimes noticed a pattern: Those that involve basic physical gratification — like receiving oral sex in hookups — tend to favor men. Those that might entail pain or submission, like choking, are generally more for women.

So, while undergrads of all genders and sexualities in Dr. Herbenick’s surveys report both choking and being choked, straight and bisexual young women are far more likely to have been the subjects of the behavior; the gap widens with greater occurrences. (In a separate study, Dr. Herbenick and her colleagues found the behavior repeated across the United States, particularly for adults under 40, and not just among college students.) Alcohol may well be involved, and while the act is often engaged in with a steady partner, a quarter of young women said partners they’d had sex with on the day they’d met also choked them.

Either way, most say that their partners never or only sometimes asked before grabbing their necks. For many, there had been moments when they couldn’t breathe or speak, compromising the ability to withdraw consent, if they’d given it. No wonder that, in a separate study by Dr. Herbenick, choking was among the most frequently listed sex acts young women said had scared them, reporting that it sometimes made them worry whether they’d survive.

Among girls and women I’ve spoken with, many did not want or like to be sexually strangled, though in an otherwise desired encounter they didn’t name it as assault. Still, a sizable number were enthusiastic; they requested it. It is exciting to feel so vulnerable, a college junior explained. The power dynamic turns her on; oxygen deprivation to the brain can trigger euphoria.

That same young woman, incidentally, had never climaxed with a partner: While the prevalence of choking has skyrocketed, rates of orgasm among young women have not increased, nor has the “orgasm gap” disappeared among heterosexual couples. “It indicates they’re not doing other things to enhance female arousal or pleasure,” Dr. Herbenick said.

When, for instance, she asked one male student who said he choked his partner whether he’d ever tried using a vibrator instead, he recoiled. “Why would I do that?” he asked.

Perhaps, she responded, because it would be more likely to produce orgasm without risking, you know, death.

In my interviews, college students have seen male orgasm as a given; women’s is nice if it happens, but certainly not expected or necessarily prioritized (by either partner). It makes sense, then, that fulfillment would be less the motivator for choking than appearing adventurous or kinky. Such performances don’t always feel good.

“Personally, my hypothesis is that this is one of the reasons young people are delaying or having less sex,” Dr. Herbenick said. “Because it’s uncomfortable and weird and scary. At times some of them literally think someone is assaulting them but they don’t know. Those are the only sexual experiences for some people. And it’s not just once they’ve gotten naked. They’ll say things like, ‘I’ve only tried to make out with someone once because he started choking and hitting me.’”

Keisuke Kawata, a neuroscientist at Indiana University’s School of Public Health, was one of the first researchers to sound the alarm on how the cumulative, seemingly inconsequential, sub-concussive hits football players sustain (as opposed to the occasional hard blow) were key to triggering C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease. He’s a good judge of serious threats to the brain. In response to Dr. Herbenick’s work, he’s turning his attention to sexual strangulation. “I see a similarity” to C.T.E., he told me, “though the mechanism of injury is very different.” In this case, it is oxygen-blocking pressure to the throat, frequently in light, repeated bursts of a few seconds each.

Strangulation — sexual or otherwise — often leaves few visible marks and can be easily overlooked as a cause of death. Those whose experiences are nonlethal rarely seek medical attention, because any injuries seem minor: Young women Dr. Herbenick studied mostly reported lightheadedness, headaches, neck pain, temporary loss of coordination and ear ringing. The symptoms resolve, and all seems well. But, as with those N.F.L. players, the true effects are silent, potentially not showing up for days, weeks, even years.

According to the American Academy of Neurology, restricting blood flow to the brain, even briefly, can cause permanent injury, including stroke and cognitive impairment. In M.R.I.s conducted by Dr. Kawata and his colleagues (including Dr. Herbenick, who is a co-author of his papers on strangulation), undergraduate women who have been repeatedly choked show a reduction in cortical folding in the brain compared with a never-choked control group. They also showed widespread cortical thickening, an inflammation response that is associated with elevated risk of later-onset mental illness. In completing simple memory tasks, their brains had to work far harder than the control group, recruiting from more regions to achieve the same level of accuracy.

The hemispheres in the choked group’s brains, too, were badly skewed, with the right side hyperactive and the left underperforming. A similar imbalance is associated with mood disorders — and indeed in Dr. Herbenick’s surveys girls and women who had been choked were more likely than others (or choked men) to have experienced overwhelming anxiety, as well as sadness and loneliness, with the effect more pronounced as the incidence rose: Women who had experienced more than five instances of choking were two and a half times as likely as those who had never been choked to say they had been so depressed within the previous 30 days they couldn’t function. Whether girls and women with mental health challenges are more likely to seek out (or be subjected to) choking, choking causes mood disorders, or some combination of the two is still unclear. But hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation — judging by what research has shown about other types of traumatic brain injury — could be a contributing factor. Given the soaring rates of depression and anxiety among young women, that warrants concern.

Now consider that every year Dr. Herbenick has done her survey, the number of females reporting extreme effects from strangulation (neck swelling, loss of consciousness, losing control of urinary function) has crept up. Among those who’ve been choked, the rate of becoming what students call “cloudy” — close to passing out, but not crossing the line — is now one in five, a huge proportion. All of this indicates partners are pressing on necks longer and harder.

The physical, cognitive and psychological impacts of sexual choking are disturbing. So is the idea that at a time when women’s social, economic, educational and political power are in ascent (even if some of those rights may be in jeopardy), when #MeToo has made progress against harassment and assault, there has been the popularization of a sex act that can damage our brains, impair intellectual functioning, undermine mental health, even kill us. Nonfatal strangulation, one of the most significant indicators that a man will murder his female partner (strangulation is also one of the most common methods used for doing so), has somehow been eroticized and made consensual, at least consensual enough. Yet, the outcomes are largely the same: Women’s brains and bodies don’t distinguish whether they are being harmed out of hate or out of love.

By now I’m guessing that parents are curled under their chairs in a fetal position. Or perhaps thinking, “No, not my kid!” (see: title of Dr. Herbenick’s book above, which, by the way, contains an entire chapter on how to talk to your teen about “rough sex”).

I get it. It’s scary stuff. Dr. Herbenick is worried; I am, too. And we are hardly some anti-sex, wait-till-marriage crusaders. But I don’t think our only option is to wring our hands over what young people are doing.

Parents should take a beat and consider how they might give their children relevant information in a way that they can hear it. Maybe reiterate that they want them to have a pleasurable sex life — you have already said that, right? — and also want them to be safe. Tell them that misinformation about certain practices, including choking, is rampant, that in reality it has grave health consequences. Plus, whether or not a partner initially requested it, if things go wrong, you’re generally criminally on the hook.

Dr. Herbenick suggests reminding them that there are other, lower-risk ways to be exploratory or adventurous if that is what they are after, but it would be wisest to delay any “rough sex” until they are older and more skilled at communicating. She offers language when negotiating with a new partner, such as, “By the way, I’m not comfortable with” — choking, or other escalating behaviors such as name-calling, spitting and genital slapping — “so please don’t do it/don’t ask me to do it to you.” They could also add what they are into and want to do together.

I’d like to point high school health teachers to evidence-based porn literacy curricula, but I realize that incorporating such lessons into their classrooms could cost them their jobs. Shafia Zaloom, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, recommends, if that’s the case, grounding discussions in mainstream and social media. There are plenty of opportunities. “You can use it to deconstruct gender norms, power dynamics in relationships, ‘performative’ trends that don’t represent most people’s healthy behaviors,” she said, “especially depictions of people putting pressure on someone’s neck or chest.”

I also know that pediatricians, like other adults, struggle when talking to adolescents about sex (the typical conversation, if it happens, lasts 40 seconds). Then again, they already caution younger children to use a helmet when they ride a bike (because heads and necks are delicate!); they can mention that teens might hear about things people do in sexual situations, including choking, then explain the impact on brain health and why such behavior is best avoided. They should emphasize that if, for any reason — a fall, a sports mishap or anything else — a young person develops symptoms of head trauma, they should come in immediately, no judgment, for help in healing.

The role and responsibility of the entertainment industry is a tangled knot: Media reflects behavior but also drives it, either expanding possibilities or increasing risks. There is precedent for accountability. The European Union now requires age verification on the world’s largest porn sites (in ways that preserve user privacy, whatever that means on the internet); that discussion, unsurprisingly, had been politicized here. Social media platforms have already been pushed to ban content promoting eating disorders, self-harm and suicide — they should likewise be pressured to ban content promoting choking. Traditional formats can stop glamorizing strangulation, making light of it, spreading false information, using it to signal female characters’ complexity or sexual awakening. Young people’s sexual scripts are shaped by what they watch, scroll by and listen to — unprecedentedly so. They deserve, and desperately need, models of interactions that are respectful, communicative, mutual and, at the very least, safe.

Peggy Orenstein is the author of “Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity” and “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.”

#off-theme #and long #but worth the read

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ihearthes · 3 days ago

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Abbey Road Studios:

A Harry Styles Meet Cute

Author: @ihearthes

Pairing: Harry x Original Unnamed Female Character

Rating: Fluffy Meet Cute

Word Count: 3439

“You’re shitting me?” I gaped at my manager. “THE Abbey Road Studios? How did you…? When am I…? What the actual fuck?”

Her grin across the desk was wider than a grand piano. “When I talked to the publishers about the audiobook, I assured them that being in the quintessential studio where the Beatles recorded The End would lead to a more inspired audiobook recording of your book The End.”

Leaping out of my chair, I rushed around her desk and hugged her tighter than a guitar string nearing its breaking point. Her laughter was rich, the hearty kind that could be served with both a spoon and a fork. Maybe even a knife thrown in for good measure.

“I’ll make you proud,” I vowed before releasing her and returning to the other side of the sparse wooden desk with its ornate carvings on each of the four legs.

“You already have,” she grinned. “After all, you have the most popular music podcast in the world.” Her statement was a major overstatement. Although my 2 year old podcast Time Machine Tunes was growing, it was barely in the top 100 music podcasts. Maggie was convinced the book would drive more listeners my way. “This book is going to be the icing on the cake of your popularity. You’re going places, kid.”

While I could have managed without the ‘kid’ tacked onto every sentence the 72-year-old American dynamo spoke about me, I was keenly aware that I still had a long way to go in establishing my career as a historical music writer. Without Maggie fighting on my behalf, I would still be shopping my manuscript to publishers. Meticulously researched despite the subjects not honouring me with an interview, my book was garnering buzz from the musical world before the final manuscript was even sent to the publisher.

“If you’ve heard the author’s podcast, you’ll understand her fascination with the greatest band of all time. You’ve heard the stories of how they ended, but this book delves more deeply into the stories surrounding their breakup,” read the promotional blurb written by Cameron Crowe.

Maggie never would tell me how she managed to convince the great Cameron Crowe to write a blurb for my book, but I suspect it had something to do with the past she never mentions, likely involving a stint as a groupie in the late sixties.

Days later, the popular zebra crossing was laid out before me with a steady stream of fans lined up to record their personal rendition of the most famous band photograph ever taken. I took a deep breath. In one tote bag, I carried my favourite teas, biscuits, and a bag of fresh fruit. The other tote bag held a copy of my bound manuscript with notes written in the margins of how I want to sound when I read certain parts of the text aloud. Places to pause were marked in pink highlighter. Sentences to be spoken with more emphasis were underlined. The usual.

This is how I prepare for my podcast, so I shouldn't have felt as strange as I did. At the bottom steps of the studio, I took a deep breath, closing my eyes and whispering to myself, “Just act normal.”

My fingers pressed on the wooden door, and it surprisingly opened at my touch. Inside was a reception desk with a stony-faced twenty-something female sitting behind it, tapping lightly on the keyboard keys, and a security guard wearing a uniform that must have weighed double the young man wearing it.

“No tours. The shop is next door, Miss,” the receptionist politely used her pen to point the way.

Gulping air, I nodded, then spoke in a rush. “I’m here to record. I mean, I have an appointment. I mean I’ve – my manager, really – has reserved a studio for me.”

So much for acting normal.

“Which studio?”

“The Front Room?” I ventured.

She tapped her pen on the book in front of her before shrewdly surveying me from head to toe. “Oh yes. Hand over your ID please so we can verify your identity.”

I fumbled my way through my pocketbook, seeking the one item that always seemed to fall to the bottom, no matter how large or small my bag might be. Just as I felt the leather of the small wallet touch my fingers, it slipped away again until I finally had to set the bag on her desk to more effectively dig through it. In triumph, I finally withdrew the offending item, raising it above my head.

The security guard simply stared at me until I freed my licence from its card slot, handing it over with a flourish. With a brusque nod, he took it from me with two fingers, exiting the room to another office.

“Should I – follow him?” I inquired, my voice a combination of shaky and firm.

“No.” Her reply was curt.

Minutes later, he emerged, handing me back my licence before directing me to another door. “That’s the Front Room. The team is waiting for you.”

My insides quivered like a bowl of elderflower jelly as I took the steps necessary to walk to the identified door.

“Ta!” I waved to the front office team before opening the studio door and stepping inside. Closing the door behind me, I slumped against it, eyes closed, and whispered, “You daft git.” Because of course I would see them again. Soon probably. And every day for the week while I would be recording.

“Excuse me?” The voice caused me to stand up straight.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you.” My eyes took in the slight man standing before me in blue jeans and a cosy oversized jumper. His curls were ringlets that reached his shoulders, and his beard was neat and trim.

“Who did you mean?”

Wincing, I frowned, my face cycling through about five different expressions before settling on a smile that, I hoped, lit up my whole face. “Me. I meant me. I’m —” Freezing, I held out my hand to this man, briefly forgetting my name.

“I know who you are. I’m Sean, your engineer.”

“Oh! It’s so nice to meet you. Thank you for helping me.”

Sheepishly, he shuffled his feet. “Don’t thank me too profusely. This is my first time doing this on my own.”

“Congratulations!” My voice squeaked out a little too loudly. “This is my first time recording in a real studio. My podcast is normally recorded in a tiny room at home that I’ve converted into a studio.”

“I’ve heard your podcast,” Sean reveals. “My partner and I never miss an episode.”

Grasping my hands together, I hold them over my heart. “Really? Thank you so much. It’s my baby.”

“One of these days you’re going to need a producer, you know. You can’t keep doing it all on your own. Not if you want to get bigger. And you’ll need a recordist. And an engineer too.”

“Oh.” My voice was tiny. His words felt like a scolding and a dismissal of my teensy podcast and my dream to grow it into something larger.

“No, no. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He was quick to correct my assumptions. “You’ll continue to expand your audience, and more people will want to be part of your team. It’s the natural evolution of recording. Unless you’re not any good – which I’ve already said you are.”

Choosing to take him at his encouraging word, I set my totes on the sofa in the control room. “Sean, I’m confident we’re going to get along just fine this week.”

“I’m sorry that you’ve just got me. It’s usually a bigger team here for the Front Room, but…” His voice trailed off, and I focused on his face.

“But?”

“It’s nothing.” He mindlessly picked some lint off of the immaculate sound board. “Some of the rest of the team thought it was sacrilegious for you to come into Abbey Road Studios to share your book about how THEY ended.”

The emphasis on the pronoun made it clear who he meant. “Ah, I see. They refused to work with me even though they had no idea what the book actually says or how much research I did?”

His shoulders raised and lowered, and his eyes roamed the floor. “Like I said, I’m sorry.”

The reluctance of the rest of the team set like a stone in my stomach, but I shook off the negativity. Oh well. Fuck them.

“Their loss,” I grinned.

He smiled back at me. “Agreed. Let’s do this.” Sean gestured around the space, pointing out everything I needed to know, and I unpacked my totes in preparation for the day. “Nice selection of teas,” he commented.

“My throat gets dry sometimes.”

As if he needed my explanation. He had worked with loads of people who probably needed tea to lubricate their throats, so it couldn’t be unusual. Why I felt like I needed to justify every bit of my practice was beyond me. I was a professional after all.

A professional who had no idea what she was doing in a fancy studio like this.

Apparently I was feeling a twinge of imposter syndrome.

“Shall I heat some water now?” Sean asked as I unpacked the manuscript with all of its sticky notes resembling the jagged cliffs of Dover. It was really sweet of him to offer, so I agreed. The control room wasn’t very big; other than the sofa, it housed a couple of plants and, of course, the prominent sound board. Sean flicked the switch on the electric kettle to the left of his console and turned back to where I was standing, my manuscript tucked to my chest as though it contained a pirate’s treasure.

“Let’s get you into the booth,” he said, leading me through the only other door in the small studio. “We mostly do music here, as I’m sure you know. But I think I’ve got things set up well for an audiobook. I brought in this small desk and a chair. If you don’t like the chair, I can find another one. Oh, and I found this.” He directed my attention to a book stand. Sheepishly, he smiled. “I was worried a music stand would be too flimsy.”

His simple preparations were touching, and my gratitude was boundless.

My arse settled into the chair, and I sighed at how luxurious it felt on my bum. “Perfect!” I proclaimed, placing the first chapter of the manuscript on the book holder.

“Great! Let’s try some different microphones and test your voice.”

An hour plus a few minutes later, we had finalised the microphone choice as well as the calibration of the sound board controls with my voice. My cup of tea was to my right and my coloured pencils were to my left so I could easily grab them to indicate changes to my delivery.

To record, Sean closed the door between the control room and the booth, but I could see him through the full sized soundproof glass inset on the door between us. During the first couple of hours, he would encouragingly nod to me at times. Or he would grimace, and I would know I had to read a section differently. Or louder. Or softer. Or with more expression.

“Uh, this first chapter will probably take a long time to record,” Sean shuffled his feet as we finished our morning tea. “Don’t panic. Once we get into a groove, the rest of the book will go much faster. It’s just that we have to, you know…”

“I understand,” I commented, nodding graciously. “It’s fine. As long as we get finished with the book by the end of the week…”

“Oh, that won’t be hard.” He flapped his hand at me. “We might even have time on the last day to record a few of your upcoming podcasts.”

“Really?” I was intrigued at the thought.

“But only if we don’t get too distracted.”

Ha! What could possibly distract me from my work?

I found out the answer to that question that very afternoon.

Sean and I were finally recording chapter two, our bellies full of the lunch he’d convinced a studio runner to take away from a nearby Indian restaurant. The remnants, half-full boxes of rice and curry with naan bread, covered the top of the coffee table by the sofa.

We had switched out the comfy chair for a wooden stool so that I could sit upright, practise my best posture and, most importantly, not fall asleep after the heavy meal. Sean played the roles of engineer, recordist, and director with joy and a skill that I came to both appreciate and disparage as the early afternoon flew by.

When I looked up from the script in front of me as we were in the middle of chapter three, I was surprised to find Sean turned towards the main studio door, his lips moving as though he were talking to someone.

“Hey!” My voice expressed my gentle offence in his headphones. “I thought we were a team, but you’re not even listening!”

He shook his head, removing his headphones and punching the button for his microphone.

“Take five. There are a couple of fans of yours out here who want to meet you. I think you might recognize one of them.”

Ugh. Fine.

Standing from the stool, I stretched my arms over my head, my vintage Beatles t-shirt rising and revealing my belly button. Through the large window between the booth and control room, I watched as Sean stood, his head bobbing up and down and a grin on his face.

When I could stall no more, I opened the door, leaning against the door jamb as I examined the two men standing by the studio door.

“Hi,” said one.

My jaw dropped as the other man’s face came into focus. Holy shit. How was he here? Had Sean joked about him being a fan? He must have been because there was no way…

“Jeff Azoff,” I breathed, attempting to speak coherently. “You’re Jeff Fucking Azoff.”

“Yes” was his smooth answer. “And I’m sure you know who this is…” He gestured to the man with him, and I shifted my gaze briefly to him. While extremely handsome, his face didn’t ring any bells, but I decided I’d better be polite and go along with the implication that I should know him by sight.

“Nice to meet you,” I muttered, quickly turning back to THE Jeff Azoff. “How did you…? I mean, holy shit. The number of times your father’s name has appeared in my research is staggering. Did you grow up surrounded by all of those musicians? REO Speedwagon? Dan Fogelberg? The fucking Eagles?”

“Yes,” he nodded.

Man of few words.

“What was it like? Oh wow. What I would give to pick your brain. Did I hear Sean correctly? You’re a fan? You listen to my pod?”

Once more, he bobbed his head in answer to my multiple questions. And then he tried to hoist me off on his friend again.

“Harry has worked with some other great artists,” Jeff began, nodding towards his companion.

Dismissively, I waved my hand in the direction of the handsome man who simply grinned, an extraordinary dimple appearing.

“YOU know my podcast?” I demanded of Mr. Azoff.

“Yes.”

Holy shit. Confident I would need to pry any future responses out of him, I placed my hands on my hips.

“You’ve heard my series about the Eagles then?”

“Indeed.”

“And? What did you think? Are you going to tell me everything I got wrong?”

“No, but I really think you might want to talk to Harry about…”

I interrupted. Whoever this Harry was, I was much more curious about this man’s take on my podcast. “Has your father heard my podcast?” My voice may have squeaked a little when I asked the question.

A nod was the only reply I got before he turned back to the bloke with him.

“Is this weird for you?”

“No.” The handsome man appeared to be amused as his lips twitched to the side, and his eye crinkles magically appeared. “Unique, but not weird.”

Narrowing my focus on the handsome one, I squinted. “You’re a musician recording here?”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” he grinned. “I’m Harry.” When my face still showed no signs of recognition, he added in a smooth voice with a northern accent, “You might have heard of me. My music has won a few awards. Harry Styles.”

The blood drained from my face. I had been freaking out over Jeff Azoff when the muse to Stevie Nicks was standing in front of me? It was Harry who grasped my elbow when I started to fall over from a lack of oxygen, gently guiding me to the sofa.

“Maybe some water?” he asked Sean who rushed into the booth to grab my water bottle, handing it to Harry quickly.

“Sip it slowly,” the Grammy winner said, and I ignored his instructions, nearly choking as I sucked water into my lungs. “Hey, hey. Easy there.” Glancing at Azoff, Harry laughed, “This feels more normal.”

“You –” I choked, coughing between words. “You – know – Stevie – Fucking – Nicks.”

Curiosity furrowed his brow. “That’s why you nearly passed out? Because I know Stevie?”

“You not only know her.” My voice was filled with incredulity and awe. “You’re her muse. You’ve performed with her – and with Fleetwood Mac. And you were the one who inducted her. Holy fuck. You must have done something right in life.” Stopping, I swallowed. “Holy fuck. I must have done something right in my life.”

He had settled on the sofa next to me, his face a mass of confusion. His head was tilted, and his lips were pursed as he scratched at his head.

But I didn’t have time to wait for him to catch up. “You can introduce me! Fleetwood Mac is my next podcast series, and if this book does well, I might write a full book about them. I’ve been engaged in a deep dive of reading about their time as a band. I’ve read everything I can find – official or not. In fact, there is a stack of books on my nightstand about Stevie and Mick and the rest. You have to introduce me. It would mean the world to me.”

My pleading must have broken through his confusion, and he cleared his throat. “You want me to vouch for you to Stevie? I don't really know anything about you.”

“But you listen to my podcast, right?” My head swivelled between Harry and Jeff. “Oh! You could read my book. See what my style is. I swear I would do right by Stevie. I’m so disappointed that I didn’t get to meet Christine before she… Anyway, I’ll do anything for an introduction. What do you need from me?”

“Anything?” Harry humoured me.

“Yes.” Swallowing, I nodded eagerly.

“You’re saying I could read your book? The one that’s not yet published? The one you’re recording now?”

My head bobbed like a cormorant.

“The one that’s about The End? That book?”

I hadn’t stopped my silly affirming as my head continued to move in the same up and down pattern.

“And maybe Jeff could read it too? And my friend Paul?”

My head froze, mid-bob. “Paul? Sir Paul? Sir Paul Fucking McCartney?”

Harry laughed, a delightful tinkling sound, his head rearing back with his joy. “Does everyone in your world have the same middle name?”

“Huh?”

“Fucking. Jeff Fucking Azoff. Harry Fucking Styles. Stevie Fucking Nicks. Sir Paul Fucking McCartney.”

Slapping my hand over my eyes and forehead, I groaned. “Please don’t tease me or joke with me. I’ve been trying to get Sir Paul to talk to me and read the manuscript since I started writing it. Not a single response to my queries.”

“Hmmm…” Harry murmured, tilting his head to one side. “So if you would do anything to meet Stevie, what would you be willing to do to meet Paul?”

“Name your price.” I was hoping he wouldn’t ask for much. All I had was the flat I shared with a friend from uni and a wardrobe of vintage clothing I’d carefully culled from a variety of charity shops.

“I get to be there when you meet them.” My head whipped up so that our eyes connected. “Plus five dinner dates with me.”

My eyes narrowed, “In addition to any meals we share with Stevie or Paul?”

Nervously, he licked his lips and glanced at Azoff who shrugged, seemingly disinterested.

“Yes.”

Author's Note: This really is just an introduction to these characters as part of a series on Meet Cutes. Who hasn't dreamed of meeting Harry Styles somewhere? Live vicariously through these women who randomly run into Harry Styles as part of their normal lives. How might one chance meeting change their lives forever?

#harry styles #harry styles fanfiction #my writing #harry styles fanfic #original writing #harry styles meet cute #harry styles imagine

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onegayastronaut · 19 days ago

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Loyalty and Justice Part 1 (JJ X Reader)

Requested by anon, wanted a longer fic. This is going to be a multi part series because the description was long and I wanted to break it out into parts lol

Standing at the edge of the rooftop, you surveyed the bustling city below, taking note of everything that took place. Your eyes narrowed, focusing on a nondescript sedan parked across the street. The target had arrived.

You touched your earpiece, speaking in a low, controlled voice. "JJ, I have eyes on the subject. Moving to intercept."

"Copy that," came JJ's steady reply. "Be careful, this one's dangerous."

A ghost of a smile played on your lips. "Aren't I always?"

With practiced ease, you scaled down the side of the building, years of training evident in every precise movement. As your feet hit the pavement, your demeanor shifted. Gone was the warmth in your eyes, replaced by a cold, professional detachment.

As you approached the sedan, your hand instinctively rested on the concealed weapon at your hip. As you drew closer, the driver's window rolled down, revealing a face you hadn't seen in years, a face you never thought you’d see again. Your breath caught in your throat.

"Hello, (Y/N)," said the woman behind the wheel, her voice a mixture of warmth and wariness. "It's been a while."

You fought to keep your expression neutral, even as your mind raced. It was Elena, your former fiancée, the woman who had left you to rot in prison. "Elena," she replied, her tone carefully measured. "This is... unexpected."

Elena's eyes, once so familiar, now seemed foreign. "I need your help, (Y/N). I know I have no right to ask, but—"

"You're right," you cut her off, her voice sharp. "You don't."

But even as the words left your mouth, you felt the old pull. The years of training and discipline warred with the memories of love and betrayal.

"Please, just hear me out," Elena pleaded, her eyes darting nervously to the rearview mirror. "I'm in trouble, real trouble. And you're the only one who can help me."

Your hand tightened on your weapon, mind racing through possible scenarios. Was this a trap? A ploy to lure you in? Or was Elena genuinely in danger?

"You have one minute," you eventually answered, your eyes scanning the street for any signs of a threat. "Make it count."

Elena took a shaky breath. "It's about my father's old associates. They think I have something they want, and they're willing to kill to get it. I've been running for weeks, but they're closing in. I didn't know where else to turn."

Your eyes narrowed. "And what exactly do they think you have?"

Elena hesitated, then reached into her jacket pocket. You tensed, ready to draw your weapon, but Elena slowly pulled out a small flash drive. "This. It contains details of all their operations, their contacts, everything. My father left it to me before he died. I didn't even know what it was until they came after me."

You eyed the drive warily before finally taking it. If Elena was telling the truth, that tiny piece of technology could bring down one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the country. But trusting Elena again could be suicide.

"Why come to me?" you asked, voice barely above a whisper. "After everything that happened?"

Elena's eyes met yours, filled with a mix of regret and desperation. "Because I know you, (Y/N). Despite everything, I know you'll do the right thing. And... because I never stopped loving you."

The words hung in the air between you, heavy with unspoken history. You could only imagine what JJ was thinking, as memories of your past threatening to cloud your judgment. She took a deep breath, centering herself.

"Love isn't always enough, Elena," you said, your voice low and controlled. "You taught me that."

Before Elena could respond, your earpiece crackled to life. "(Y/N), we've got movement. Three SUVs approaching your position, fast."

Your training kicked in instantly. "Time to go," you said, reaching for the car door. "Move over."

Elena's eyes widened in surprise, but she quickly complied, sliding into the passenger seat as you slipped behind the wheel. With practiced precision, you pulled out into traffic, your eyes darting between the road and the rearview mirror.

"Who was that?" Elena asked, her voice tense.

"My team," you replied curtly, taking a sharp turn down a side street. "And right now, they're the only reason you're not in handcuffs."

The SUVs appeared in the mirror, gaining ground rapidly. Your mind raced, formulating and discarding plans in seconds. You needed to lose their tail, but you also needed answers.

"Start talking," you demanded, swerving to avoid a delivery truck. "Everything you know about who's after you, what's on that drive, all of it. And Elena," you added, your voice dropping to a dangerous whisper, "if I find out you're lying to me again, it'll be the last mistake you ever make."

Elena nodded, her face pale. "It's the Moretti family. They were my father's biggest rivals, always trying to muscle in on his territory. That drive contains evidence of all their illegal operations - money laundering, human trafficking, assassinations. Everything needed to take down their entire organization."

You processed this as you wove through traffic, the pursuing SUVs still visible in your mirrors. "And how did you end up with it?"

"My father gave it to me right before... before the FBI raid," Elena said, her voice catching. "He told me to keep it safe, that it was insurance. I didn't understand at the time. I hid it away and forgot about it until the Morettis started coming after me a few weeks ago."

Your jaw clenched at the mention of the raid - the day everything had fallen apart. You pushed the memories aside, focusing on the present. "Why now?" you asked, taking another sharp turn. "Why are they coming after you years later?"

Elena hesitated. "Because... because I started looking into what happened to my father. And to you."

Your hands tightened on the steering wheel. "What do you mean?"

"I never believed you betrayed us, Lex," Elena said softly. "It took me too long to realize it, but I know you would never have turned on us. On me. I started digging, trying to find out what really happened. I must have tripped some alarms, because suddenly the Morettis were after me."

Alexis's mind raced. If Elena was telling the truth, it could change everything. But years of betrayal and hurt had taught her to be wary.

"JJ, if I’m taking her to the location that we agreed on if anything were to happen." You waited for a response, but none came. “JJ?” You pressed on your device again, but received nothing in return. It seemed as if you were on your own again, only this time, you had your ex with you.

#jennifer jareau #jennifer jareau x reader #jennifer jareau x you #criminal minds #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds imagine

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tapwater118 · 3 months ago

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by the voters’ choice, here’s d-side freesmart!

(just copying and pasting book and icy from the other post)

book is a crazed conspiracy theorist who doesn’t have as much of a hold on reality as she probably should. stays up late looking through “the deep web” (the third page of google search results) for the things the government doesn’t want you to know. she thinks her friend taco is an alien sent here to survey earth for her alien overlords

dry ice (renamed from ice cube) is very sweet, if overly conflict-avoidant. she is absolutely a follower and was (is?) pencil’s go-to yes-woman for a while. she’s become more of her own person as time’s gone on, but still very much relies on others for affirmation

sugilite (renamed from ruby) is that “punk-ass kid” your over-bearing dad always told you to stay away from because she’s “a bad influence.” always looking to get into mischief for the sake of it, she does stupid things not because she is stupid but because she is legitimately trying to stir trouble

pencil, the leader, lives a very rigid and regimented lifestyle, and expects those around her to do so as well. she will not hesitate to criticize even her closest allies for the slightest of errors, and will offer (often unwanted) suggestions for how they can “improve themselves”

match is a goth 4 lyfe. she’s constantly annoyed with pretty much everyone around her, though that usually translates to taking charge of a challenge when everyone else is either goofing off or paying to much mind to the little details. she and pencil actually don’t like each other all that much (at least not at first)

bubble is one of those daft fools that actually believes in world peace. she’s a friend to all, and is more than willing to do what it takes to put a smile on someone’s face (read: very manipulable). she’s honestly the glue that holds freesmart together. she swears she got match to smile once, but no one believes her

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teeefftwoarts · 8 months ago

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TF2blr Survey

I have never got to collect information Raw from people like this in my life, so I hope it makes sense and is alright...

The purpose of the TF2blr survey is (copy-pasted from the survey form): "...to provide a snapshot of the common preferences, trends and beliefs inherent to Tumblr's TF2 fanbase." If you could take some time to fill it out, that'd be lovely! It's anonymous, using a question-key system if you want to withdraw; it is rather long, though. :/

[Edit: I filled it out myself to guage the time, it took me about 15-20 minutes.]

I'll probably leave this open for about fortnight, and then close it, crunch the data a little, and then drop the results on this blog :)

#tf2 #literalshadowtag

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bellsartblog · 1 month ago

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Sept-ingo day 23: different universe with ingo and ingo and ingo and emmet hop the multiverse by @subway-boss-jericho

ok so, part of this post was made when my thumbs was still healing. i thought if my thumbs couldn't work, i still had my other fingers so i gonna try writing sth >:"))) but i'm like really ass though so :"))) tell me how i do :))) i wanna improve this skill of mine as well for future uses.

𖨠──··· At the train station ···──𖨠

no beta read :"))) it's a reunion fic :)))

This place was.... very familiar. It's circular in shape and crowds of people and trainers were rushing to and from the large arches surrounding this space. How Ingo know which person were trainers and which were not was beyond him.

Chimes were going on and off every now and then with rumblings of something big going by in between each interval. all of which was behind the wall he was leaning on. Ingo stands to the side of this strange circular place, preferring to stick to the brick walls so that he won't get swept into the crowds of busy people. being in such a chaotic and strange space but he can't help but find himself at peace.

He stood just a bit taller than he would usually and allowed himself back in Hisui. Peering through the crow, he tries to search for a girl in the similiar survey corp uniform and a white bandana on her head. Akari was the one that brought him here in the first place, but she ran toward the tall pillar in the middle to try and buy some tickets for them both. No, not Akari. It's Dawn now.

"I'll be back! don't go anywhere" and she was off before he could deliver his own message. but it has been a while since then so he was getting a bit anxious. Nothing had changed much in the last minutes or so and the anticipation was eating at him. maybe he should go look for her... but going off the established place would make it hard for her to find him if she was already going back-

"Hello sir!"

a booming voice shocked him out of his almost spiral. the source of which stood just an arm length from him. Someone that wears the same coat as his! but it was shinier and more well-kept. And his face bored resemblances of his own but.... if he was younger. Was he that old already?

"May I help you?"

"Most certainly! I'm Subway Boss Ingo" The man gestured to himself then to his side where another man who looks like his matching copy stood. "And this is my brother, Subway Boss Emmet! We were hoping-"

to be honest, most of what this fellow said went over ingo's head because Emmet was all he cared about right now. It was him, the man in white! His hand reached out on its own but with closer inspection, ingo slowly noticed and he withdrew his hand.

There were smaller inconsistencies, the strips on his coat were cyan when it was supposed to be brownish-red like his. And the emblem, one of the signifiers that helped him identify himself, was different also! Two arrows, one pointed up while the other pointed down. There were more, like his tie and his hair. It was all different! All... wrong?

“You aren’t listening” Emmet stated. Though his smile didn’t change much, and his tone was even as ever, but somehow Ingo just knew this man was being cheeky with him, "too much on your head, perhaps?”

“Ah yes” ingo blushed a bit “my deepest apologies, I thought you were someone else.” he nodded toward Subway Boss Ingo. To which he gave a short wave.

“No worries, Sir! It hasn’t been the first time” the man gave him a small smile. Wait, what did he mean by not the first time? “But to summarize, we were wondering why you were standing here all by yourself and we wanted to ask if you would like some assistance.”

“Thank you but there would be no need.” Ingo stood straight, mirroring the bosses’ posture,” I came here with my niece, you see and -” realization came to him like a freight train. His niece! He was about to go look for her when the duo interrupted him.

“Apologies but I have to go!” Ingo pushed past the bosses and dashed for the pillar in the middle of the room. But he was pulled back before he could enter the crowd. He glared at the hand holding him, it was Emmet’s. “What do you think you are doing? Unhand me!”

Ingo shooked his hand to break free of the man’s grasp but to no avail. “i must go get her. She could be lost herself!”

“Nope.” Instead, with a smile, Emmet pulled him back to them and closer to the wall. Letting his arm go, Ingo pulled his hand back. Emmet and his Ingo stood in front of him, blocking his way to the pillar. Subway Boss Ingo said “Please stay behind the yellow line! you’ll get lost if you join the line with that train. And about your niece, it’s Dawn, correct?”

“h-how did you know?” the air must not be traveling to his head because did he just hear the man spoke her name?

“Like we mentioned, it hasn’t been the first time.” The Subway Boss gave him a small smile, one that only he could make from his own frown. “Now, if you’ll please follow us, we’ll help you reach the ticket booth.”

As promised, the bosses and him weaved through the crowd with no fanfare, though somehow the road to the booth was a long one.

Along the way, they didn’t talk much but he did get to see more people that dressed like him. More Ingos and Emmets, some were traveling in pairs, some were with companions! Pokemons and humans alike (he noted that the black hair woman seemed to appear a lot), some were traveling alone, waiting like he was.

All of which didn’t help reawake any memories for Ingo but among the sea of self, ingo didn’t felt that lonely in his lost and confusion. For once in a long time, the hope in him was reignited and maybe he would get to go home.

The pace slowed and stopped all together. Being closer, the size of the pillar finally dawned on him. It was enormous, ingo couldn’t see the top floor eve when craning his head up all the way. At the front of the pillar were a grand arch and neat queues of people lining in front of it.

“we are here!” Emmet said, “Now to find your niece.” he climbed on his brother back, placed his hand above his eyes and gleamed over the lines. His older brother, while bend over, let out a deep sigh.

“UNCLE INGO!”

All three men looked over to find the girl they were looking for running at them. She ran straight to Ingo, giving him a big hug. So big that it almost toppled him over. “i’m sorry for making you wait for so long” she said not lifting her head from his stomach. “i was lost”.

“it quite alright Dawn” with one hand pulling her tight and the other patting her head, he hoped he had conveyed to her enough of his relief. “Everything is alright”

“Oh! I almost forget!” Daw pushed herself off her uncle and stood up, pulling her uncle with her. “Look! Look!”

Following Dawn’s pointed finger, Ingo thought he was looking into a mirror. A true reflection, another him, with same worn coat and hat, the same tired face and the matching goatee, looking at him with his hand crossed behind his back. The reflection nodded at him and by instinct, he mirrored the action.

“Warden! So that’s where you have been!” the subway bosses came over to “Warden’s” side. He smiled at them; they conversed quietly among each other which was quite a feat because the whole place was noisy already.

“i thought he was you so i was lost.” Dawn explained, she quickly added” But then i noticed that the button on his head was different! And then he led me back to you!”

“Then we must thank him, yeah?” with a nod from Dawn, the niece and uncle duo hold hand as they went over to the three men. Ingo bowed deeply and Dawn copied him. “Thank you for leading miss Dawn back to my station.” he spoke.

“Thank you, mister warden.” Dawn cheerily added.

“no need to thank me for it’s a duty of the warden to lead the astray back on the path of safety.” the Warden deeply bowed in turn. This “warden”, was he like him also? He looked like him, but his demeanor was different, calmer and more content. He also wore the same emblem as the other two bosses as well.

“you must be pondering over our similarities, am i correct?” the Warden said as he stroked his goatee, thinking up a way to explain this whole ordeal “i would be too if i was in your position.”

”You and i and this fellow over there” he pointed at the subway boss “are all Ingos. unlike him though, you and i were both displaced, lost in the vast space and time, but unlike me, you are on your way back to your original station now and I am very happy for you.” the warden came over and patted him on the shoulder.

“but what about you? With those two’s help, you should be on your way too, right?”

“correct! But we haven’t found where that is yet” he retreated his hand “We are still searching for it but we also help conduct anyone we encounter on our way to find their way back!”

“that’s right!” the subway bosses finally joined back into the conversation “after finding mister Warden and learning about his decoupling from his family, we had made it our new objective to help those in similar situation. And this station is one of the many points that the universes intersect with each other. A stop of many where we try to look out for a line leading back to mister Warden’s station.”

“with that all settled, i think it is time for us to depart. “Emmet said while also gesturing toward Dawn who was hang off his side, looking bored out of her mind but she was being quiet out of polite.” let us get back to our track.”

“Right. Again, thank you for conducting miss Dawn here back to me and we wish you luck on your journey.”

“Of course! Now Emmet, is there anything you’d like to add?” the subway boss asked. His back facing his brother’s, ingo knew what he was about to do.

"Follow the rules and drive safely! We're headed for victory! All aboard!" The subway boss in white strike the old so familiar pose, with his left arm straight and pointing at him while his right arm straight to his side and point down.

“All aboard!” subway boss ingo said their phrase in a voice full of excitement and mirrored his brother’s pose. They truly looked like a complete set, black and white, a two-car train. Looking at them, ingo got a glimpse of what home could be like. That, hopefully, when he finally reached his destination, returned to his rightful place, he would be able to do this with his brother as well.

Dawn tugged at him to do the pose with her also. Ingo smiled and so they did. “All aboard!” The duo returned their excitement in full. The trio of universes hoppers waved them goodbye as Dawn led them through the arch in front of ticket booth, to where they would be waiting for their train to go home.

When they reached the platform, it was just in time, a train had just pulled in. They quickly went in and settled themselves. Dawn was knocked out practically the moment her head hit the cushion. Ingo repositioned her so her head was on his shoulder and his arm was securing her to his side. Slowly enough, ingo began to drift out too.

In the final moments of his consciousness, he thought over the encounter he had had. To think that out there, there was a family waiting for him at home and that there were also people and versions of him and his family helping people finding their way back home. All of it gave him such a warm feeling in his heart. His chest tightened and he brought his unoccupied hand up to muffle his hiccups. Some tears were building up on the edge of his eyes and some were traveling down his cheeks already, leaving a trail of warm wetness.

“Please wait for me...” ingo crooked, his closed-up throat made it hard to talk, let alone be quiet about it. But he needed to say it, in the hope that his words would travel through space and reach its intended recipients. “...I'm almost home.”

And with that, his eyes closed, and he let himself be lured to sleep by the rumble of the train, the comfort of the cushion and the warmth of his niece at his side.

......

............

..................

somewhere, in a small office, deep in Gear station, a man laid under a big pile of paper. surrounding him were more papers, diagrams, maps and large symbols. he rose up abruptly, making the papers flew ever where.

“ingo?”

#sept-ingo #sept ingo #submas #pokemon ingo #subway boss ingo #emmet #ingo #month of ingo #subway master ingo #subway boss emmet #subway master emmet #pokemon emmet #subway bosses #submas au #fanfic

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cameronspecial · 6 months ago

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Begging for more Zach content pookie

What Is Love?

Pairing: Dad!Zach MacLaren x Reader

Warnings: Really bad science

Pronouns: She/Her

Word Count: 1.7K

Masterlist

Zach stands in front of the hot oven and reaches in to grab the finished pizza from the oven. He has no idea where his children are in the house, but he knows his wife is having dinner out with friends and that his eldest son should be home from his girlfriend’s house soon. Right on cue, the front door opens and in comes Isaac. The teen boy's normal quick pace is replaced with a slow one. This causes the father to turn toward the kitchen entrance with worry. “Are you okay?” The son doesn’t answer right away. There is a lost look in his eyes that tells Zach Isaac is lost in thought. “Are you okay?” he repeats his question. Isaac finally snaps out of his head and looks at his dad with a straight smile. Silence falls over the pair. Zach assumes he isn’t ready to talk about it and goes back to get dinner ready. “How did you know you were in love with mom?” Zach freezes, not expecting that question. It’s a hard question to answer because it is impossible to explain. “I… I guess I just liked her,” he tries to explain. His carbon copy tilts his head, “What does that mean?” Zach strokes his chin in thought of how to make sense. “Let me tell you about when your mom and I first said I love you,” he elucidates. “Well, more like when I told your mom I love her for the first time…”

———

Her hands were a little cold as she took the nods off of his head. He stared up at her with wonder in his eyes. Her study had been going on for three months now and while he found it to be a useless study, he was thankful for it because it led him to meet her. It is ironic for him to find love during an experiment meant to demonstrate that love is merely a rush of endorphins that fool one into doing crazy things. Her belief in love parallels what she was researching and he accepted this view, much to his disappointment. It was the small things he noticed that made him fall for her. The way she played with her earrings while examining his brain scan. The way she always tried her best to go past small talk. The way her jokes were always so corny, yet her laugh was contagious. “As you know, this is the last test we need for this experiment. I would like to thank you for participating in the study and you will get your payment when you do the exit survey,” she got the protocol out of the way before continuing. “I want you to know that you were my favourite brain to observe.” A blush reddened his cheeks at her flirting.

“I bet you say that to all your participants,” he brushed off, looking down with his palm on his neck. She shook her head, “Nope, you are a great conversationalist and you are the one that proves the hypothesis of her study. You said you weren’t in love and you didn’t have any brain activity.” His smile dropped at her words. He may not be great at science, except he understood what a hypothesis is and what hers is. He didn’t like that he confirmed her disbelief in love. “Ooh,” he huffed out. She looked down at him in concern as she put away the pads that were scanning his brain. “What’s wrong?” she worried. He took a wild chance he didn’t know he was going to take, “I love you.” She reeled back, stepping away from him. “Wh-what? What are you talking about?” she questioned.

“The time we’ve spent together all these months has made me fall in love with you.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about. That can’t be true. Your brain scans didn’t show any endorphin activity. It’s impossible.”

She is backed up against the desk with her arms crossed. “Maybe your test is stupid then,” he argued and quickly regretted. Anger flushed her. He just called her an academic career stupid and being nice didn’t mean she would let him talk to her that way. She scoffed, “I guess it is a good thing you don’t need to participate in it anymore.” She stormed out of the room, commanding that one of her peers finish taking care of Zach.

———

“Wow, that did not go well for you, Dad,” Isaac comments, shoving the guac-smeared chip into his mouth. “If you and mom have such opposing views on love, then how did you guys get together.” Zach cringes at the memory. Worry takes over him as he imagines what could’ve happened if it didn’t go the way that it went. “I would say it was when I went on a date with Becky,” he thinks out loud. His son raises his hand, “Hold on, Becky. As in Aunt Becky, Becky?” The older man raises his finger to his lips. “Let me finish my story. So it all started when I went on a date with your Aunt Becky…”

———

It probably wasn’t the best idea to go on a date with the best friend of the woman he loves; however, she asked him and he let out a panicked yes. So now, he was sitting in front of the black-haired woman, tapping his foot like crazy. Her eyes met his over his glasses and she laughed. “I only asked you on this date as a cover. I need to talk to you about Y/N,” she informed. Zach’s eyebrow raised, “What is there to say about her? I love her, but she doesn’t love me or even believe in love.” “That’s because she is scared,” Becky explained, boring her green eyes into his. “Her home life sucked, so it led her to use science to explain away a sensation she never experienced. She may not think she loves you, but I know otherwise and I’m here to help you two idiots.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she gets all flustered when you come up in the conversation and I have been to more soccer games than I have ever been to in my life in this past semester alone.”

“Really?”

“Yes, so listen. This is what you are going to say.”

———

“So you didn’t actually date Aunt Becky,” the listening boy verifies. The storyteller nods, “I suppose I never did. It could be better explained as a friendly meet-up. Can I finish my story?” The teen stops talking and indicates to continue. “I followed Becky’s advice and tried to confess my adoration to your mother again…”

———

He knocked on the door with uncertainty, holding the tulips up in front of his chest. The front door swung open and the person of his desires stood there shocked. The shock turned to anger. “Are you here to continue the discretization of my academic career?” she grumbled. Her right arm crossed over her left one as she leaned against the door frame. “What is love?” he began the conversation in the manner he was instructed. His face scrunched once he realized he didn’t address her question. He wished he could restart to avoid the embarrassment. He couldn’t. “What?” she puzzled, head tilting at an angle. He pressed on, “You say that love is only a chemical reaction in your brain. I say that it is simply a feeling that you have for a person. It’s just liking someone. Simple as that. No explanation. No physical correlation to your brain. Even though we have different views on love, there is one thing in common between the two. Do you know what that is?”

Her head moved from side to side and he stepped forward, handing her the bouquet of flowers. “We both have a definition of what love is, but we’ve never experienced it before. So scientifically speaking, how can we know if either of them is true,” he contended. Her hand flew to her earring and she began tugging on it. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to show you why we are meant to be together.”

“Why are we?”

“Because we can use each other to learn what love is and once we determine a definition, we can compare and determine who is correct.”

She chortled, “That’s ridiculous. If we go into an experiment with the expectation of falling in love, then it would be biased and-.” “Um, can we stop with the science analogy? I’m not going to lie, I can’t keep up,” he interrupted. Her eyes rolled in their sockets. “Fine. We can’t be in love because it’s just not possible.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because it isn’t there?”

“What isn’t there?”

“The science!”

He groaned, “Science doesn’t have all the answers. It’s why people still have to do research, right? So why can’t love be something you can’t explain?” At this point, tears had begun to well in the corner of her eyes. “Because if love isn’t something scientific and it is something that just is, then how come my parents didn’t love me? How come I never got to feel it? If it is something so easy to have, how come I was deprived of it.” A pain shot through his heart at the sight of her distraught. He finally understood her resistance to the idea and stepped forward, dropping the flowers to the flower so he could pull her to his chest. “The universe hasn’t been fair to you. This made you decide that you had to use science to explain why it wasn’t unfair because it made it easier for you to process. Nevertheless, it’s okay to admit that you don’t know something and I’m here to help you learn.” She cried into his shirt. “What if I’m not capable of love?” He could sense the worry she felt and smoothed down the hair on the back of her head. “Then I’ll have enough love and endorphins for the both of us because I know that love can simply be there and doesn’t have to be anything physical.”

———

“In that moment, I knew what love was. It isn’t one thing or another. It is in the eye of the beholder and up to you to figure out what you define it as. If you are questioning whether or not you love Kira, then listen to your heart because it will tell you what it thinks,” Zach guides, getting up to call his other children for dinner. He leaves his eldest child to think over the story he just recounted. He is glad for the question because it gives him a chance to go down memory lane.

Taglist: @winterrrnight @loves0phelia @thelomlisrafecameron @wickedlovely121 @thepatriarchykeychain @drewsmusee @starkowswife @maybankslover @forstarkey @loving-and-dreaming @magicalyoura @rubixgsworld

#drew #drew starkey #drew starkey x reader #drew starkey one shot #drew starkey imagine #drew starkey fanfiction #drew starkey fluff #zach maclaren #zach maclaren x reader #zach maclaren x y/n #zach maclaren fluff

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