girl online is an independent platform that reports on what women are doing on the internet and what the internet is doing to them. The weekly stories that you read on Wednesdays are written by me, based on what the web feeds me, and filtered through my lens. This series is an attempt to bring in diverse experiences of digital girlhood to you.

In this episode, I am joined by Smizzo, and we talk about how women have been looksmaxxing since the beginning of time, the male loneliness epidemics, and the performance of girlhood online.

Special shoutout to my sister, Azha, for editing this conversation. If you’d like to fund my work on here, here’s the tip jar.

girl online is an independent platform that reports on what women are doing on the internet and what the internet is doing to them. The weekly stories that you read on Wednesdays are written by me, based on what the web feeds me, and filtered through my lens. This series is an attempt to bring in diverse experiences of digital girlhood to you.

In this episode, I am joined by Monia Ali, and we talk about MLM romance and our weird relationships with them.

The quality of the recording is a bit poor as we recorded through Substack. But until I can afford a subscription to a recording platform, we will have to make do with it. Special shoutout to my sister, Azha, for editing this conversation. If you’d like to fund a recording platform for me, here’s the tip jar.

Every time I open my Instagram Explore page, a 20-something-year-old woman with a soft, raspy tone in linen clothes and sipping herbal tea is reminding me that she is in her “balance my cortisol” or “heal my hormones” or “work out according to my menstrual cycle” phase to finally “step into her receptive, soft, divine feminine energy.”

When I first came across this kind of content (probably sometime in early 2022 coinciding with the rise of the soft girl aesthetic), I welcomed this sort of thinking. I thought it was an essential reset to hustle bro culture. It was time to get back to nature, finally. This was also the time I started practising paganism and spent a lot of time consuming witchtok content to understand the lore, schools of thought, and others’ rituals. So I felt drawn to the language of witchcraft, ancient paganism, and goddess archetypes that are heavily (mis)used in this type of content.

Four years later, as a practising pagan, I don’t feel so warm towards the internet’s cult of the divine feminine. Because when you strip away the linen fabrics and the anti-establishment language, the internet’s version of the divine feminine isn’t a spiritual awakening at all. It is a classic trap of the conspirituality-to-far-right-propaganda pipeline.

If a trad-wife influencer like Hannah Neelman (aka Ballerina Farm), Candance Owens or The Transformed Wife posts a video telling a modern woman that her highest calling is to stay home, cook from scratch, and unconditionally submit to her husband because “the Bible demands it,” a feminist like me and you would instantly reject it. We recognise it for what it is: good old patriarchy.

But when the same message travels through the filter of the new-age wellness industrial complex, it becomes palpable. The woman on the screen isn't telling you to submit to a man; she is telling you to “step out of your hyper-independent, wounded masculine energy.” She isn’t telling you to give up your career and financial independence; she is inviting you to “allow the divine masculine to provide and protect so your over-stimulated nervous system can finally heal from the trauma of the corporate grind.” The result of the trad-wife influencer submitting to her godly man and the divine feminine letting herself be pampered by her divine masculine is ultimately the same: women retreating from the public sphere, surrendering their financial autonomy, and centring their lives entirely around domesticity.

Now, the cult of the divine feminine speaks to you because it addresses and exploits a very, very real pain point of modern womanhood. We are exhausted. We are burning out under late-stage capitalism that demands 60-plus hours of linear, uninterrupted productivity while offering zero structural support. And patriarchy wants you to believe that this is because you have faltered away from who you are meant to be — tuning into your divine feminine in the kitchen, nurturing the future generations — and not because capitalism has systematically traded away our communities, third spaces, support systems, and sense of selves to benefit the “free market.”

The cult of the divine feminine takes the very real issues like the lack of research in women’s hormonal healthcare for diseases like PMOS, endometriosis, and menopause complications and repackages it into an individual failure. They say that your hormones are haywire because of the sin of neglecting your biological reality of being a divine feminine and sell a 4-week guided workshop to reverse your testosterone levels and embrace your femininity.

And as we move down the pipeline, this blame manifests as an obsession with biological optimisation, and to excel at this, we must obsessively track our internal metrics, sync our workout routines and diets to our hormones, and eliminate anything synthetic from our lives. One common tip shared by the divine femmes that tipped me off that this cult is on the alt-right pipeline is how many of these gurus are against birth control.

For decades, the religious right has waged a war on contraception from the outside, attempting to restrict access through policy, judicial overreach, and moral shaming. But the new age wellness gurus have had more success in getting young women to give up their reproductive safety nets as toxic sludge that ruins your feminine intuition and clips the wings of your inner goddess.

Now, this is not to say that birth control doesn’t have side effects. But these are individual effects one needs to discuss with their medical practitioners, and birth control pills continue to be the least invasive and most accessible form of birth control women can control. And might I add, once you accept the narrative that birth control is toxic, it is an easy slippery slope to anti-vax rhetoric and raw-milk proselytising.

But what I find even more tragic about the cult of divine feminine is how profoundly it misunderstands the very lore it counterfeits. The sacred masculine and feminine were never supposed to be a rigid, binary where women must be soft and receptive, and men hard and providing. If we look at the pagan mythologies where this binary comes from, the sacred feminine and masculine were never viewed as a gendered division of labour. They are psychological forces existing simultaneously within all of us.

Let me explain through the lore of some of the deities I invoke. Freyr and Freya, Shiva and Shakti.

In Norse mythology, the twins Freyr and Freya are dual reflections of the same cosmic currents: fertility, abundance, agriculture, magic, war, etc.

Freyr, the god, rules over sunshine, rain, and agriculture. He is also a fierce warrior. Freya, the goddess, is the archetype of desire, beauty, and powerful Seiðr magic, but she is also the leader of the Valkyries, riding into the battlefield to claim half of the dead before Odin, the king of the gods, even gets a choice. They are a fluid, overlapping continuum. And they represent the reality that power, fertility, nature, and vulnerability cannot be neatly segregated by sex.

Closer home, in ancient Vedic philosophy, the deities Shiva and Shakti can be equated with the divine masculine and feminine. Shiva is pure, unmanifest consciousness. He is still, silent, and witnessing. Shakti is the dynamic force of the entire cosmos. Without Shakti, Shiva is inert. In fact, one of the most powerful representations of this balance is Ardhanarishvara, a composite deity who is half-Shiva and half-Shakti, split right down the middle. It is an explicit declaration that every human psyche requires both the stillness of consciousness and the raw, untamable energy of creation to be whole.

When the wellness industrial complex reduces these gender-transcendent ancient concepts down to a checklist of biological optimisation and submissive behaviours, it is committing a form of spiritual vandalism using the rhetoric of benevolent sexism.

Unlike hostile sexism, which abuses power and overt misogyny to keep women in their place, benevolent sexism arrives with a gentle smile and a warm cup of herbal tea. It characterises women as naturally pure, uniquely nurturing, spiritually superior creatures who are simply too delicate for the harsh, competitive realities of the public world. By framing women’s vulnerability not as a systemic disadvantage but as a sacred trait to be sheltered by a divine masculine provider, these cults make subordination look like an honour. And the reason it is an incredibly insidious strategy is that it disarms our defences. It allows us to feel deeply cherished and spiritually elevated while we are actively being escorted out of the rooms where political, economic, and social power are held.

Beyond the socio-political implications, the spiritual math of the cult of the divine feminine doesn’t make any sense. If the divine feminine is strictly gatekept by a flawless 28-day cycle synced with the moon, perfect hormone levels, never feeling any negative emotions and compliant softness, then who actually gets to be a goddess? Why does the cult cast out post-menopausal women, hysterectomy survivors, and the millions of women dealing with severe reproductive illnesses?

At the end of the day, I want to remind you that we are allowed to be exhausted by late-stage capitalism. We are allowed to demand better, more rigorous research into women’s healthcare. But we must refuse to let internet grifters and right-wing opportunists weaponise our burnout to build a new cage by perverting the concepts that were once designed to liberate us. Both the divine feminine and divine masculine reside within you. And the way for you to feel more connected to them is to log off and engage in activities that helps you feel more connected to yourself.

girl online is an independent platform that reports on what women are doing on the internet and what the internet is doing to them. The weekly stories that you read on Wednesdays are written by me, based on what the web feeds me, and filtered through my lens. This series is an attempt to bring in diverse experiences of digital girlhood to you.

In this episode, I am joined by Anna Pompilio, and we talk about who she calls generational baddies and what they do for a generation of young girls taught how to smile and talk to ensure a wrinkle-free life.

The quality of the recording is a bit poor as we recorded through Substack. But until I can afford a subscription to a recording platform, we will have to make do with it. Special shoutout to my sister, Azha Ahad, for editing this conversation. If you’d like to fund a recording platform for me, here’s the tip jar.

Here are a few links to the stuff we mention in the podcast:

• Anna’s newsletter Midwesthetic

• The generational baddies Anna loves: Joelle Helary | @kelli_321 | @missourisue | Patricia Bailey | Cheryl | The 70 Year Old Diva

Abha’s note: I am sending this out on Friday. This issue of girl online should have hit your inboxes on Wednesday. I had been sleeping most of this week as I am getting used to my new dose of sleep medication and antidepressants. I am also back to full-time freelance reporting and just filed the copy for my first assignment — a 4000-word deep-dive into the human impact of mass layoffs. I will try my best to resume the usual Wednesday posting schedule next week. As always, feel free to support my work by buying me a coffee here.

I was 17 when I first came across the idea of manifestation. I spent most of my teenage years in a boarding school, and my bunk neighbour at the time had a copy of Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” that she always kept by her pillow and read religiously. Once during a winter break when we both couldn’t go home, she explained to me the law of attraction.

She told me, as Byrne wrote:

“Your life is in your hands. No matter where you are now, no matter what has happened in your life,you can begin to consciously choose your thoughts, and you can change your life.There is no such thing as a hopeless situation.Every single circumstance of your life can change!”

The year was 2018. My grandfather, the biggest cheerleader of my then-amateur writing career, had suddenly passed away. I was preparing for medical entrance examinations. My heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to go to Delhi. I wanted to study History or Literature in India’s best liberal arts college — a dream I had been secretly nurturing for about two years then. But I didn’t know how to convince my parents to let me waste my potential on a liberal arts degree. My friend’s retelling of “The Secret” gave me hope that I wasn’t doomed to a life of white coats and cadavers. That I could walk the red corridors of St. Stephen’s College if I wanted it badly enough.

The first thing I successfully manifested was my parents’ permission for me to go to Delhi to study history and literature. The second thing I successfully manifested was an admission letter to my dream college. By manifestation, I don’t mean scripting “I got into my dream college” a thousand times or making a vision board with pictures of the classrooms I wanted to be in. I just wished really really hard. I went to bed crying for it. I woke up somehow knowing I would make it. And when I did, I was grateful.

Everything I have ever achieved in my life, I have always credited the Universe and my manifestation skills for it. Everything that went wrong, I made peace with, believing that the Universe had better plans for me.

When I got my first-ever professional byline in BuzzFeed, I credited the Universe for it. When I got fired from my job at BuzzFeed, I made peace with it; the Universe had better plans for me. When the boy I had been crushing on from the freshman year of college kissed me a few months before graduation, I credited the Universe. When he broke my heart a year later, I called that divine redirection.

Even after being a huge proponent of spiritual practices to better your daily life, lately, I have been disillusioned with the idea of manifestation. There are two reasons for it:

• One, the sheer ludricity of how the internet explains the concept of manifestation.

• Two, the lack of collective responsibility within the framework of the concept itself.

The second is a much larger conversation about the state of the world. In simpler terms, a teen girl in Afghanistan can’t just manifest her way to being a doctor or an astronaut when the system is deliberately designed to stop her from accessing education. We can’t manifest away the patriarchy. We can’t manifest away the oligarchy. We can’t manifest away racial and other structural biases. I don’t have an answer to the state of the world, and for that reason we aren’t gonna discuss the second reason for my disillusionment in this essay.

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To break down the first, I need to first explain what I understand as manifestation.

The theory of manifestation is based on the12 Universal laws (mainly, the law of attraction) and often claims to be rooted in quantum mechanics. I don’t know enough physics to validate that theory, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that it is probably a bastardisation of some actual scientific theory. What I can share is how I understand it.

So the idea is that we live in a Universe with infinite planes of realities that exist at the same time. In many of those universes, I exist, living different realities. The vibrational frequencies of those selves differ from each other. If you want something bad enough, it is because you are already living that life somewhere. So all you need to do is match your current frequency with that of your ideal self, and things in this plane will align perfectly to help you become the self you are envisioning to be. And that’s how you manifest your desires.

I know this all sounds a bit confusing. I will illustrate with an example. Let’s say I want to girl online to be my full-time job. The idea is that in one of these infinite planes of reality, I am already doing that. Currently, I am not making a full-time living off girl online. Which means that the vibrational frequency of myself in the plane where I am already living my dream life and the life I am currently living are different. To manifest the life I want, I need to resonate with the former’s frequency, often referred to in the literature as “the higher self.”

The person who got into St. Stephen’s College needed to have near-perfect grades, essays, and demonstrated interest in the subject she wanted to pursue. Even without knowing the law of attraction and the law of assumption, I knew what I needed to do to achieve my goals. By putting in the effort to build the best profile possible, I was probably resonating with my higher self, who had already gotten into my dream college.

I know what I need to do to build the media outlet I dream of — keep refining my craft, fish out unique subcultures to tell you about, show up consistently, and so on. The person who does this all probably has a routine, reads widely, consumes web content critically, and has an original point of view. That is, to be the person you WANT to be, you have to BE the person you want to be. Which is, you know, basic common sense. That is manifestation. It is basic common sense.

Truth be told, BEING the person you WANT to be is no easy task. It requires discipline, patience, consistency, and above all, blind faith. It requires an eyes-on-the-prize mentality and a delulu-is-the-solulu mindset. You also need to cultivate an unwavering sense of self. Because if you are constantly second-guessing yourself and keep changing your goals, it can be difficult to be that person.

In the process of resonating with your higher self, you are also going to do a lot of unlearning. Unlearning your patterns, beliefs, and habits. You will have to be ruthless, cutting off anything that doesn’t serve you. Manifestation is the process of embodying who you want to be to the dot, so that the mathematical probability of you not achieving your goal is almost zero.

Now that I have explained my personal philosophy regarding manifestation, let me address the main part of this essay — how the internet has commercialised manifestation as a get-rich-quick scheme.

A quick scroll down Manifestation Tok gets me this:

“The SIP method to emergency manifest your dream life overnight”

“I robotically affirmed for 6 hours straight, and it changed my life”

“Listen to this 3x before sleeping and watch what happens tomorrow”

…the list goes on.

Let me hold your delicate hands while saying this: listening to an audio thrice isn’t going to get you your dream life. It is only going to boost the creator’s engagement and perhaps manifest their dream life from the money the views generate. For you to work to achieve your dream, you are going to have to put in a little more effort than compulsively writing down affirmations and meditating on an AI-generated sound claiming to resonate with your higher self’s frequency.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let me come to the even more insidious part of Manifestation Tok. I am talking about the gurus and coaches belonging to Neville Goddard’s school of thought. A 20th-century new-age mystic, Goddard theorised the Law of Assumption: “Imagination creates reality.”

According to Goddard, the external world is nothing more than a mirror reflecting your internal state. Goddard believed that if you assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled with absolute conviction, the material world has no choice but to rearrange itself to match your assumption. In this framework, there are no external conditions, no independent wills, and no objective limitations; there is only your consciousness.

On Manifestation Tok, however, this philosophical solipsism has mutated into an aggressive form of fear-mongering. Here, manifestation coaches take Goddard’s idea that "you create your reality" and turn it into a hyper-vigilant psychological prison sentence. The message plastered across the timeline is terrifyingly uncompromising: the Universe is a cosmic panopticon, keeping tabs on your consciousness, waiting to penalise you the exact second your vibration drops. We are told that harbouring a single negative emotion or acknowledging a bad day will instantly sabotage our futures and manifest disaster.

Once they establish this, they sell you a masterclass to being a “master manifestor” or “quantum leap” for $999. After all, a thousand bucks is nothing when it promises a future where you get everything you want, where you don’t feel a single negative emotion. As with all internet content, if there is a price tag at the end of the product, I am going to second, third, fourth-guess your motivation in creating a certain narrative. In this case, I am happy to break it to you that thinking negative thoughts isn’t going to magically hamper you from manifesting your dream life.

Let me illustrate with the earlier example. Let’s say I achieved my dream of creating a best-selling newsletter on women and the internet and a thriving community around it. Would that mean my higher self doesn’t have any negative thoughts ever? Will she have magically transcended the realities of life to achieve a trance-like state of pure bliss? Of course, not. I am probably going to have stressful moments and days where I like my job a little less than the day before. And that’s okay.

The purpose of manifestation isn’t to create a perfect life outside of reality and every single negative emotion. It is to create a life you enjoy living. One where you are equipped mentally and physically to deal with the uncertainties of life. One filled with experiences that enrich your soul. One where you feel safe, loved, and at peace with your inner world. One that you feel proud of.

Content warning: This story mentions pornography and other sexual acts. Please refrain from reading this essay if you are distressed by these topics.

I love watching commentary content on YouTube. As a journalist who likes to deep-dive into internet cultural phenomena, I find it a great way to keep track of microtrends and behavioural shifts without increasing my daily screen time (which is already 8 hours a day, by the way). From D’Angelo Wallace to Brett Cooper, I watch creators from across the political and social spectrum. In the past three weeks or so, my YouTube algorithm has been filled with a certain infamous internet figure — OnlyFans creator Bonnie Blue.

As you know, I generally cover a wide range of topics that answer my favourite question: “What are women doing on the internet and what is the internet doing to them?” But I have never written or expressed my views on OnlyFans creators and the porn industry in general. Surprising, considering that it is a fundamental aspect of digital girlhood.

The reason is quite embarrassing. I don’t know what to say about them. I am not a conservative. I don’t think the porn industry is bad because it dismantles the family unit or because lust is one of the seven deadly sins. I also am not a choice feminist. I don’t agree with the take that feminism is all about empowering women’s choices and, as such, OnlyFans creators are empowered feminists. I am also not someone who believes that sex is inherently violence towards women. I think all these arguments have certain merits but don’t really capture the discomfort we have towards the recent developments in the OnlyFans economy is pushing towards.

The first time I felt this discomfort was in December 2024, when I watched the Josh Pieters documentary “I Slept With 100 Men in One Day”, documenting the 24-hour duration when OnlyFans creator Lily Philips had intercourse with 101 strangers. In the documentary, Lily says that she is training her way up to sleeping with 1000 men in a day. But Tia Bilingher, also known as Bonnie Blue, has already done that.

In January 2025, the British creator broke the news that she slept with 1,057 men in 12 hours, breaking the record previously held by adult film star Lisa Sparks, who in 2004 slept with 919 men in one day. Later that year, she was banned from OnlyFans after announcing and later cancelling an event where she would be tied inside a glass box and would have sex with 2000 men.

On the first anniversary of her record-breaking achievement, she held her “breeding mission”, where she intended to break the record for the number of creampies without any specified time period. In this challenge, she had unprotected sex with 400 men. “We had no time-frame for the day, I just wanted a world record amount of creampies,” Bonnie told The Tab at the time.

A few weeks ago, she announced that she is pregnant by “one of the 400” and is now making headlines for her ticketed baby shower where men could golden shower (urinating on someone for sexual pleasure) on her. “Pregnancy is a big fetish for a lot of people. Who knows, I might be pregnant only once. So I am gonna make the most of it,” she said in an interview with LBC. “See, now I am uncomfortable,” the host tells her. I am too. Not to kink shame anyone, but the act of urinating on a pregnant woman, or anyone for that matter, for pleasure makes me uncomfortable.

Firstly, to explain why I am uncomfortable, I will have to borrow from the work of radical feminist and thinker Andrea Dworkin. In her 1981 work Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin argued that pornography’s primary cultural function isn't to provide pleasure, but to construct a world where female subordination is viewed as a natural sexual script. For Dworkin, the industry was a form of political conditioning that taught the world to view a woman’s body as a public commodity.

The popular phrase often used by radical feminists out of context, “All sex is rape”, is attributed to Dworkin. She never said those exact words. In her “Dworkinaissance,” Kate Bugos breaks down this misunderstanding:

The truth behind this last statement is a prime example of how her work has been wilfully misunderstood. The original quote is ‘Violation is a synonym for intercourse’. In the passage where it appears, Dworkin discusses the patriarchal cultural idea that the vagina is ‘made for’ penetration: that is its purpose. To be penetrated, possibly impregnated, and to give birth. She says that this mindset implies to woman that she is ‘defined by how she is made, that hole, which is synonymous with entry; and intercourse, the act fundamental to existence, has consequences to her being that may be intrinsic, not socially imposed.’ She is speaking about the way that cultural ideas and biology are so intertwined, and I think she has a point. The burdens of sex overwhelmingly lie on women: the risk of unwanted pregnancy especially, as well as a higher likelihood of experiencing pain and discomfort during sex. The burden of contraception and protection against STIs is often placed on women, as well as the burden of clear and informed consent. It is the difference between fucking and being fucked. This isn’t to say that Dworkin’s assessment is entirely correct, there’s a lot I disagree with, but it’s undeniable that the vulnerability of having something, or someone, inside of you, has certain implications both within sex and within society at large. The survival of the human race being dependent on women consenting to this penetration, this violation of privacy and bodily integrity, makes it central to the way societies view women. The personal remains political, and to try to disentangle what happens behind bedroom doors from what happens beyond them is a naive and sisyphean task.

What would Dworkin make of a "breeding mission" or a ticketed baby shower? She would likely see it not as a radical breakthrough of sexual freedom, but as the absolute, tragic triumph of the pornographic imagination.

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Secondly, let’s also take a moment to examine the semantics here — setting a “world-record” on creampies, breeding “mission,” sex “challenge,” and so on. This is the language of hustle culture. Blue, we have all been asked to all along, is a hard worker who pushes herself to do the maximum she can. So while my discomfort with baby showers being turned into golden showers doesn’t stem from puritanical piety, I can’t sit back and accept it as an extreme manifestation of sexual liberation. It is a manifestation of the attention economy.

As a creator, Blue is closer to Mr Beast than she is to your average OnlyFans creator.

Some of Mr Beast’s latest video titles are:

Bonnie Blue uses the Mr Beast blueprint of shock-driven long-form video that gets clicks by inciting curiosity and sustains them by optimising the video shot by shot to maximise watch time.

The discomfort we feel when watching a pregnant woman turn a baby shower into a ticketed fetish event isn’t an outbreak of puritanical piety. It is the horror of watching the hard-won language of bodily autonomy get completely hollowed out and weaponised. It is the horror of watching a platform convince a creator that the ultimate form of female empowerment is hyper-optimised self-objectification, all while wearing the sharp smile of a self-made entrepreneur who enjoys doing her job. I am sorry, you just can’t convince me that non-step vaginal penetration for 12 hours is enjoyable.

Lastly, Bonnie Blue doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The algorithm didn’t just dump Bonnie Blue onto my feed because she uploaded a video; it fed her to me because the entire YouTube commentary universe jumped to capitalise on the outrage she generated. From progressives analysing the dynamics of her sexual labour to conservatives using her as proof of societal decay, commentary channels across the political spectrum have turned Bonnie Blue into the ultimate lightning rod for views.

When OnlyFans first became popular, liberal feminists said that it was a wonderful platform for women to safely monetise their bodies. No more sketchy bosses or being in unsafe environments. To fully take back the economy of sex work and to be empowered through it. And while some of us stayed sceptical, tons of women around the world embraced this narrative.

The market is now flooded with creators; you can no longer make a living just by being a normal, attractive person posting regular photos. The internet moves fast, and people get bored easily. To stay relevant, creators face intense pressure to do crazier, more shocking things than the person next to them. If you don't escalate the shock value, your views drop, your income disappears, and the internet forgets about you.

Here is where we ask the question: Is Bonnie Blue really exercising her choice and autonomy when she decides to use her body to do shocking sexual stunts? Isn’t the platform and the male audience who keep her relevant and pay her bills making that choice for her?

Back in December, while I was going through an intense quarter-life crisis, I came across an advertisement for tarot readers and astrologers to join the spiritual tech platform Nebula. The ad was talking about how Indian astrologers on their platform can set their own working hours and are earning in dollars. Now, I have used Nebula in the past and was curious to know how things happened in the backend. But what I found out about them was, let’s say, questionable.

I sent in an “application,” and they emailed me an AI-generated test which didn’t test anything more than my basic knowledge of what each card meant. After that, I had to do a reading for Emily, who I assume was also AI. I was already turned off, but I had a work deadline fastly approaching, and I had already exhausted all other avenues of procrastination, so I went on with it.

After successfully answering when my AI interviewer would get a job, I was officially selected to be one of the psychics on the platform. They sent over a contract and login credentials to access their internal training platform. The pay was going to be a whopping 30 cents/minute. That is, if the client wasn’t a new user taking advantage of their promotional free chats. In that case, I would be paid nothing.

The training material established some ground rules:

You need to set your hours for the day at least 2 days prior and honour them. Fair enough.

You can’t contact a user outside of the app or share your personal details with them. Also fair. Anti-competition and whatnot.

Within 24 hours of a reading with a user, the app will automatically send an update about the situation and invite the user to rejoin the chat. You shouldn’t tell them that this is an AI-generated message. Hm, isn’t that a little unethical? It is, dear reader. But ethics don’t make money. Preying on people’s anxieties so that they keep recharging their wallet to access more minutes with a psychic will.

If you are a 20-something-year-old, you are most probably familiar with astrology apps — Co-star, Nebula, AstroTalk, AstroSage, AstroYogi, etc. You may be a regular user of one of these. Or you may have come across their marketing content and have just tried out the free chat for first-time users. Or you know someone who has tried them out. But they are part of your vocabulary.

One of my girlfriends is such an active user that AstroYogi is a line item in her monthly budget. She first started using them while navigating a break-up with her then-partner of three years, but it quickly became a habit. So adding it to the budget was the only way she could control the money she spent on these platforms during her frequent 3 AM spirals.

Prashant, a 24-year-old Product Manager based in Bangalore, India, first downloaded AstroTalk in the final year of his bachelor’s degree. After three months of futile job searching, he was stressed and anxious. “I was doing everything I could; still, I wasn’t getting results. Then I came across AstroTalk’s advertisements on Instagram, and I wanted to know what it had to say,” he opens up. “I talked to a lot of astrologers, but all of them gave me positive but different answers, which really freaked me out.”

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Arushi Shrivastav, an astrologer and tarot reader who has been reading on various apps for the past five years and is currently reading on AstroTalk, explains the rationale behind the overwhelmingly positive answers you get from these astrologers: “People sometimes want to hear what they want to hear. They are looking for someone to reassure them. They just want a ‘yes.’ Also, if you can provide the reassurance they are looking for, they keep coming back asking questions like ‘You said this would happen, it didn’t. Why?’”

Kalyani*, an astrologer who primarily reads on AstroYogi, adds, ”Sometimes when a client badgers me after providing a negative response, I give up and agree with them. Otherwise, they leave negative reviews. That affects my ratings, discoverability, and my rate per minute.”

Skye*, a reader based in Seattle, US, tells me that working on Nebula is easy as long as you are ready to please the clients. “They say that you can make up to $1500/month. That’s a lie. On a good month, I make about $500 dollars. It’s not a bad side hustle,” she adds.

Saying whatever the client wants to hear just to keep them coming back to the app might seem unethical to us; but these astrologers are trying their best to survive at a workspace that commodifies spiritual reassurance into gamified dopamine. While the recruiting advertisements talk about “owning your own hours” and “earning in dollars,” the reality couldn’t be farther from that.

For instance, an average astrologer on Nebula is listed as $3.99/minute. In reality, the astrologer takes home just about 30 cents/minute before taxes and the charges levied by payment gateways. Nebula also requires a psychic to be online at least 20 hours a week. And every 15 minutes when you are not speaking to a client, you need to hit an “I am still here” alarm to prove that you are online.

Closer home in India, astrologers get about 30% of what the users pay to access them. The listed fee of an AstroTalk astrologer I spoke to is ₹17 (~18 cents) per minute, but she actually makes only ₹6 (~6 cents) every minute she talks to a user. She is also contractually required to be online for at least 6 hours every day. Every three months, based on her performance, they increase her per-minute price on the platform by ₹5, and she can keep ₹1 from that increment.

And as I already mentioned above, readers do not make any money on the promotional free chats. During heavy promotional periods, Kalyani spends close to 2 hours daily servicing these unpaid clients because her manager encourages her to do so, saying that it is easier to build an ongoing relationship with a new user who hasn’t spoken to anyone else on the platform. A stay-at-home mom with no other skills to monetise, Kalyani says she still does it because this is the only opportunity for her to better her living conditions.

The precarity of the workers is only half the equation. The real danger of this economic model is what happens when you combine underpaid, heavily managed gig workers with a generation navigating previously unseen levels of loneliness and uncertainty. By lowering the friction to access reassurance to less than that of a cup of coffee, astrology apps have accidentally engineered the world’s most unregulated, untrained, and underpaid emotional crisis hotlines.

Post-midnight, when our collective existential panic peaks, these chatboxes morph from simple divination guidance into confessionals and therapy couches. “When I am doing night sessions, most people just wanna talk. I am just a stranger they can tell their stories to,” Arushi tells me.

Sometimes, what lands in the chatbox goes far beyond casual venting. Arushi recalls a night when a terrified 16-year-old girl who was being abused by her cousin reached out to her. She couldn’t trust anyone in her family and wanted advice on how she could stop the abuse. She believed that her birth chart had insights on why she was being sexually abused. “I did my best to comfort her and reassure her that what was happening to her wasn’t her fault and to look for a trusted adult,” Arushi tells me.

To understand why a teenager who has no emotional support or a 23-year-old navigating heartbreak defaults to AstroTalk at 2 AM instead of a professional counsellor, we need to first understand the massive systemic barriers in traditional healthcare.

Mehr Lungani, a psychotherapist and founder of Chaos to Cosmos, who also reads tarot, says: “Therapy can feel expensive, intimidating, time-intensive, and emotionally confronting. In comparison, tarot and astrology apps are affordable, immediate, available 24/7, and often packaged as comfort. You can open an app at 2 AM after a breakup and get an instant answer... That immediacy is psychologically very powerful.”

This immediacy, or time, is the number-one metric these apps engineer to keep users in the loop. For instance, on AstroYogi, readers need to share their first insights within 11 seconds of a user joining the chat. Reassurance can’t be provided that fast anywhere except for maybe on an AI chatbot.

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Now take this need for reassurance, gamify it, and make the barrier to entry as low as possible. That’s astrology apps for you. The biggest players in the market — Co-star, The Pattern, AstoTalk — are all venture-backed startups. Keeping you anxious and constantly second-guessing yourself is the business model.

The onboarding rules Nebula handed me about the app automatically texting a user 24 hours after a reading, pretending to be a personal update from the psychic, isn’t a one-off tactic. It is an industry-wide practice. Basically, the algorithm senses an emotional vulnerability and sends trigger notifications to incite just enough curiosity to trap users in a cycle of compulsive checking.

Meghna*, a 35-year-old photographer based in Gurgaon, India, tells me, “Sometimes I ask the same question to many astrologers until I get the answer I want. I am a very anxious person; some nights I can’t sleep without knowing that everything will work out.” She tells me that the concerns are different on different days. A client that hasn’t processed the invoice, a project she isn’t confident about, a man who she is seeing casually, but the result is the same: She spends more than she should on these apps overnight and feels guilty about wasting money the next day.

We human beings are naturally wired to seek reassurance, especially during painful moments. But reassurance, even when consumed compulsively, only offers temporary relief. The anxiety usually returns stronger, which then creates the need to seek more reassurance again. That loop can become addictive.

This is the ultimate triumph of the reassurance economy. It extracts capital from the very confusion it creates. The user is anxious, so they buy minutes. The astrologer is pressured by timers and ratings, so they provide cheap, toxic positivity. The conflicting or vague answers make the user more anxious, so they log back on at 3 AM to find a second opinion. The cycle repeats, the clock ticks, and the platform takes its 70% cut.

Divination, at its historical best, has functioned as a slow, relational human science. It is a symbolic, nuance-heavy language meant to help people sit with ambiguity, timing, contradiction, and deep self-reflection. But venture-capital-backed tech stacks don’t care about our souls, and they certainly don’t care about self-growth. They care about retention metrics, engagement loops, and scaling infinitely.

To understand the allure of divination tech, we just need to look at the world around us. The reassurance economy exists because the world is confusing us: traditional institutions are failing, the job market feels like a lottery, AI is being forced down our throats, dating is a meat market, and mental health care is a luxury. So when life feels out of control, people paying twenty rupees a minute for a stranger to tell them that everything is going to be okay shouldn’t come as a surprise.

We aren’t turning to these platforms because we suddenly believe in the absolute determinism of the stars. We are just looking for a sliver of hope to keep going. But the ghost in the machine isn’t saving us. It’s just feeding our panic back to us while profiting off of the uncertainty they themselves create.

Now, I don’t really have the perfect answer on how to navigate life when it feels like everything is crumbling around you. All I know is that constant reassurance is not the antidote to anxiety. Sometimes we just need to accept that we don’t know what is going to happen and that is okay.

If you have been reading girl online for a while, you already know my standard advice for any internet microtrend that commodifies the performance of girlhood — practice mindfulness, actively explore life outside algorithmic conformity, and embrace the chaos that can only be brought forth by being your true, authentic self.

That’s what I told you when we discussed looksmaxxing. That’s what I told you when we discussed the girl moss. And that’s what I told you when we discussed tag-for-hire services. But what if a microtrend comes up asking you to do the very same thing I have been telling you — just with a checklist of everything you need to do and a moodboard to emulate while you are at it.

Welcome to whimsymaxxing.

When I first came across videos of women online reiterating the importance of being whimsical, I was overjoyed. They were stopping to smell the flowers and going mushroom picking in the woods. It was also around that time that I was getting bored with my marketing job in a tech company. I was feeling uninspired, and working over 10 hours a day talking about AI-assisted shopping wasn’t creatively fulfilling. So you can only imagine how I wanted to be like the girls embracing whimsy and the unorganised parts of everyday life.

But my joy did not last long. From one-off videos of girls trying to escape the mundanity of modern life with a little colour here and a speck of glitter there, to a 20-something standing in a soulless beige living room selling me a list of pieces I need to buy to build a whimsical wardrobe, whimsymaxxing has grown into a mammoth and is now threatening us with the most contradictory trend ever — whimsy girl summer.

P.S: We are not even going to get into the obvious grammatical error in that phrase. It should be whimsical girl summer, but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like whimsy girl summer.

What is most jarring for me is the speed with which the algorithm took a loophole we found to experience genuine human joy amidst the lack of pizzaz in our daily lives and turned it into yet another trend. Now one might argue that it is just how short-form video platforms that exclusively exist for advertisement revenue function. And I would agree with them. As I explained in a previous issue titled “what’s your core?”, algorithms are highly efficient in converting deep, human desires into rigid, searchable taxonomy.

The girls craving for higher education, classical literature, and spending time with the arts in a world that gate-keeps liberal arts education gets served up dark academia. The girls craving for a slow, rich life in the country in a culture that romanticises working to death can just cosplay cottagecore. The girls tired of the divine feminine and tradwives, who want to be seen as tough, while still being fashionably feminine, and taken care of by an imaginary man, are the mob-wives.

To understand whimsy girl summer, we need to understand the summers before her.

The clean girl summer of ‘22 was essentially a military routine optimised for our collective need to unwind from the post-pandemic burnout. But soon enough, we also got exhausted with perfecting our morning matcha lattes, slicking back our hair, and attending pilates. Enter the rat girl summer of ‘23.

A 2023 report by Autostraddle explains the rat girl as:

You commit yourself to spending five days of the week scurrying around the city, eating snacks, and doing things you have no business doing. That last piece is the most important. Then, you devote two days to crawling up into your bed and rotting away. One could argue this just looks like a normal work week where you spend five days grinding and two of them sleeping your worries away. The difference here is in the level of mischievousness and curiosity you should embody in those five days.

Once we relaxed as the rat girls for a bit, we were ready to live again. So then came the brat girl.

Brat summer of 2024 started as a messy, unapologetic celebration of hedonism and raw authenticity. But within weeks, we went from club-culture rebellion to try-hard lime-green billboards outside supermarkets. 2025 was the summer of nothing. So we must have finally realised the futility of trying to make “culture happen” every summer. But I guess not.

From a media culture lens, brat summer is highly significant. It was towards the hyper-commercialised end of brat summer that the trend cycle fatigue finally hit us all. It was then that many of us started embracing the girl moss. Being a girl moss was all about “practising a lifestyle centred around holistic well-being over glorified and oversimplified metrics of success, prioritising presence over productivity, and being ready to be absorbed back into nature.”

This sort of exhaustion is precisely where being whimsical comes in. Between our 12-step routine to achieve glass skin, capsule wardrobes based on our colour theory seasons, pilates 6x a week to get toned arms like Miley Cyrus, and portfolio careers that provide multiple streams of income amidst looming economic uncertainty, we are tired.

Actually, tired is the wrong word. Our souls are exhausted. We just want to exist. We long for a world that wasn’t so hyper-optimised, that didn’t “protect our boundaries radically,” and placed our worth on the “value” we produce. The lazy girl trend, cottage core, coastal grandmothers, fairy core, and now whimsy girl summer; all come from this one fundamental desire.

But despite looking like a harmless trend about living an intentional, slow life, I can’t accept whimsymaxxing with open arms like I have many other previous slow living trends. Let me explain. To be whimsical means to simply act on your whims. The Merriam-Webster dictionary explains whim as ”a capricious or eccentric and often sudden idea or turn of the mind.”

In her essay “Reject Modernity, Embrace Dilly-Dallying: The Birth of the Whimsy Girl,” published by the Institute of Network Cultures, scholar Helena Lomnicka explains whimsy as :

… a vibe, an attitude, an aesthetic and a life-philosophy — one that prioritizes a frivolous orientation toward reality, amplifying a sense of wonder and child-like curiosity in relation to one’s surroundings. What the vibe of whimsy is chasing is the feeling you get after a whole day having a picnic in the sun, eating fruit and laughing with friends. The feeling of lightness and a fullness all at once, a fuzzy warmth that cannot be bought or subscribed to, that can only arise organically — in between circumstances, places and people — the little switch-moment in your brain that, after days of overpowering depressive thoughts, reminds you that life can still be quite freaking beautiful.

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According to me, whimsy is more than just buying more stickers, badges, colourful socks, hairpins, and edible glitter. It is the spontaneous decision to put googly eyes on your stapler or to blow soap bubbles in the shower. It is, by definition, an un-monetizable waste of time. To be whimsical is to not have a plan. It is the very opposite of optimising everything. Yet, whimsy girl summer asks us to efficiently schedule our inefficiency.

Being whimsical is an internal state of wonder that relies entirely on you being completely absorbed in the world around you. When you start following a checklist on how to eccentric-out your life, it ceases to be an internal state of being. And before you know it, your deep desire for whimsy, that is, the desire to simply exist in the nightmare that is late-stage capitalism, also gets commodified. And that is the irony of whimsy girl summer.

In conclusion, my issue with this trend is not the desire or the values it perpetuates. To want to be more whimsical is to want to be free and feel more joy in every life. And that is exactly what I want for every woman around me. To be honest, that is who you and I should aim to be — a whimsical woman who doesn’t accept the pressures and judgements of patriarchy and nurtures her inner child radically. And that is why I say that whimsy girl summer has no real whimsy.

Whimsy doesn’t exist in a moodboard. Whimsy is the joy from mixing fabrics and textures that no one would dare to place together on a moodboard. Whimsy doesn’t come with a checklist. It comes from throwing the checklist in the trash and wandering through life and chasing experiences that call out to your soul. True whimsy is freedom, and freedom doesn’t come from conforming to the “trend of the year” or falling prey to the algorithmic gods who exist solely to get you to make purchases from someone’s Amazon storefront.

So yes, go be your most whimsical self, but for the love of all things whimsical, don’t cosplay whimsy this summer.

I have been diagnosed with ADHD for over four years now, and she is the second therapist I am working with. My ADHD shows up in bizarre ways. At work. In my relationships. While trying to publish this newsletter consistently.

Every day, I fight with the feudal lords in my frontal lobe to grant me enough dopamine to let me live a normal life. Mostly, they refuse. Sometimes, they comply.

I don’t remember the creator whose content led me to eventually get the official diagnosis and, more importantly, the clinical help I needed to manage my ADHD, but I am very thankful to her. Otherwise, I probably would still be blaming myself for being a lazy bum who just can’t get anything done. And because of my experience, I am a huge fan of mental health awareness content. And so are many therapists.

Social media has definitely made mental health language more accessible. But lately, therapists are noticing a steep increase in clients walking into the office convinced that they have a certain mental health disorder.

Traditionally, we used to enter therapy feeling overwhelmed, confused, and looking for help unpacking our emotional state. Today, clients often arrive armed with a comprehensive, self-administered psychological dossier. For instance, they don’t say, “I’m terrified my partner is going to leave me.” They say, “I have an anxious-avoidant attachment style, and my nervous system is dysregulated.”

Ruchi Ruuh, a relationship therapist based in Delhi, India, puts this into perspective. “Sometimes, these observations are partially accurate. But often, people misdiagnose themselves or trivialise complex mental issues based on short-form content. For many, sometimes even the smallest thing looks like a proper mental health condition.”

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Social media content simplifies complex psychological conditions and many symptoms that overlap across diagnoses. Oftentimes, this leads to individuals strongly identifying with a diagnosis to the point that it becomes part of their identity rather than a framework for understanding and healing. In those cases, the focus can shift away from growth and toward reinforcing a fixed narrative about who they are and what they are capable of changing.

For instance, look at this reel that says “I used to pride myself over the fact that I could consume coffee at any time of the day and still fall asleep or take a nap almost instantaneously right after, and others around me didn’t possess this ‘superpower’… which made me feel unique and special. Only to find out today that this is a sign of undiagnosed neurodivergence.”

The top comment under this reel says, “Undiagnosed and plan to remain this way.”

Now, there is anecdotal evidence from neurodivergent folks that coffee doesn’t make them feel sleepy. Does that mean all those who can take a nap after drinking coffee are neurodivergent? No. There can be a hundred different reasons your body has a higher tolerance to stimulants like coffee. But naunce isn’t relatable or reactionary and doesn’t get clicks and comments.

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See, I grew up on 2010s Tumblr. Long before TikTok creators were making infographics about executive dysfunction, sad girl Tumblr was curating grayscale mood boards overlaid with Sylvia Plath quotes and Lana Del Rey lyrics. It was the era of algorithmically and socially rewarding the performance of mental anguish.

In the 2020s, we have transitioned from romanticising the symptom to romanticising the diagnosis itself. It is a real survival mechanism. If your inability to answer emails or maintain friendships is not because you just can’t do it due to some unexplained reason, but the biological reality of a dysregulated nervous system, you are finally granted permission to rest.

Christa Surerus, a clinical counsellor based in Minnesota, US, explains this phenomenon with another example: “When someone struggling with depression respond to encouragement toward behavioural activation or finding moments of connection by saying, ‘You should know that depressed people can’t feel joy,’ the diagnosis is being used less as a tool for understanding and more as a defence against examining possibilities for change or growth.”

I mean, I get it. When you are told you have to do a hundred different maxxings to have a fulfilling life — looksmaxx, aimaxx, tastemaxx, productivitymaxx, whimsymaxx, and whatnot maxx — there is a high urge to claim a label that permits you to grant yourself some grace. The unfortunate reality is that in the process of finding permission to be kinder to ourselves, we weaponise the same vocabulary to deny that grace to the people around us; that is, the very same community that would have made our lives easier.

For instance, Ivy Ellis, a mental health therapist based in Evanston, US, recollects a client who used to describe a colleague’s behaviour at work as gaslighting, which allowed the client to avoid their own role in the dynamic. “I gently pushed back by offering psychoeducation about gaslighting and encouraged the client to focus on what is within their control: their own emotional responses, boundaries, and communication,” she says.

If you are with me till here, may I invite you to read Lindey Louise’s No, Therapy is NOT For Everyone, Sorry!!! She makes a great case for how widespread therapy use (and I add as an extension, therapy speak) makes us horrible friends.

Weaponising therapy speak to remove the small frictions of everyday conflict, and the barrier of showing up is not going to protect your inner peace. It will just isolate you from the people who show up for you and want you to show up for them, until all that’s left is a strange loneliness you call inner peace.

While mental health content on social media can act as a form of validation for your life struggles, and might be a valuable starting point for you to access the help you may need at times, the widespread use of therapy speak is not helping anyone. At best, it makes it difficult for your therapist to help you. At worst, it acts as a crutch for you not to make any meaningful changes in your life or show up for your community.

I was born with a capitalist overlord in my head. He mostly spoke in my mother’s voice. He asked me to be ambitious. To dream of creating surplus value from my labour so his friends could benefit from me. He can be called a manifestation of the world I lived in. One who instilled in me that my work is directly proportional to my participation in the economy and the money I could make and hoard.

When I was 13, the most ambitious thing a girl could want to be was a Software Engineer. So we (my overlord and I) wanted to be a Software Engineer. I asked my parents to enrol me in after-school coaching so I can start preparing to get into a good engineering college.

It wasn’t until I turned 15 that I discovered the joy of writing. Well, no, that’s not the case. I have always been a writer. But my overlord (this time in the voice of my grandmother) told me that writing is just a hobby, not a career. You see, writers just didn’t make enough money.

When I told my mother I didn’t want to be a Software Engineer anymore, she was very understanding. “You can study biology, later medicine and become a doctor,” she said. I reluctantly agreed.

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But when the time to attend college came around, I decided to major in humanities. No way, my mother said. I pleaded. I cried. I yelled. I rebelled. And with my father’s support, I finally got the go-ahead.

Then I continued to spend the next 3 years of my life, oscillating between having my brain cells expand from the texts I was reading and panicking that I would never get a job, despite working very hard in my program. The former was me, the latter was my overlord. But by then, I couldn’t know the difference. 20 years of conditioning had mushed him and me together. We were one and the same.

My relationship with “ambition” has always been complicated. I was always ambitious and at the same time not ambitious. I was smart. I was good at academics. But I had no dreams of topping my class. I was good at writing stories and essays. I wanted to be the best in that. But I was told it isn’t an ambitious dream.

During my bachelor’s, I wanted to try many different careers until I found the one I liked the most — culture journalism. It was mostly by accident. I came across a pitch call-out from the LGBT+ editor at BuzzFeed. I sent over a pitch. He commissioned me to write the piece and paid me $100 — almost half of my monthly pocket money. I realised: with the purchasing power parity between the US dollar and the Indian Rupee, one could make a bare minimum living in culture writing, if one was earning in dollars and spending in rupees. I have found a workaround. I can be a full-time writer forever and ever and ever, now. I was pleased with myself. My overlord was pleased with me.

Next Monday, I was added to their weekly newsletter with topics they wanted to commission, and I was suddenly a Contributing Writer.

Slowly, I discovered the world of internet culture reportage and fell in love with it. By the time I graduated from college, I was building my career as a culture journalist one byline at a time. Every time I earned a byline, I would be happy for a moment and start working on the next one. I wasn’t satisfied until I was the next Taylor Lorenz. About two years in, my brain and body crumbled under the weight of my ambition and gave up.

In mid-2023, I took my first career break. Mostly due to burnout, partly due to culture writing opportunities drying up.

My career break was the first time I had breathed in a long time. I was depressed, but I was also free. I didn’t have a byline to chase. I didn’t have a deadline to honour. I could read without having to make notes. I could knit, colour, scroll on my phone and lie around. But an “ambitious” woman could be “idle” for only so much time.

After a year of recovering from burnout, I went back to doing what I love the most, writing, in a different setting. I joined a small, ambitious startup to lead its content department. “We are a team of hustlers. We don’t believe in work-life balance. This is going to be the most rewarding time of your lives,” they said.

Dear reader, it wasn’t.

The pay was decent. Initially, I had fun. It felt good to be ”a productive member of the economy” after a very long time. Within a few months, my 996 — 9 am - 9 pm, 6 days a week, a horrible, horrible working standard set by the crony techie capitalist in Silicon Valley that has taken over tech startup culture across the world — caught up to me.

I still toiled on. As a former gifted child, my self-worth was very much tied to what my boss (and my overlord) thought of me. So I continued to deliver good results, despite knowing that every single day I was losing a part of myself. I will rest when I get replaced by the AI I am building, I joked. As if building the AI that will replace me is going to benefit me in some way.

I had slowly started losing myself, though.

First, I stopped reading. It’s okay, I can always find time to read.

Then I stopped writing for joy. If you have been here from the beginning, you might have noticed the frequency of my emails reducing steadily and then just stopping altogether.

Then I stopped talking to my friends regularly.

Then I stopped doing my skincare regularly.

And then I stopped living. I became just a body furiously typing on my laptop screen for 12 hours a day, and then dissociating from the said typing for 12 hours a day.

For the first time in over 2 decades, my overlord was silent.

One day, in the silence, I looked around and saw the meaningless days I was adding to my life. It was a stark contrast to what my life had been when I was a culture reporter. Yes, I was tired under the weight of my own expectations. But I was joyful at times. I was social. I was travelling. I was reading. I longed for the life I had then, even though, back when I was living it, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

That’s the thing about our overlords. Once you give them a little leeway, they colonise your entire brain and life. They make you their slaves, until you can’t think, feel, or move anymore. And when you are finally broken, they stop chattering. But as soon as you recognise the futility of the life you are living, they are back. You couldn’t make it, they say. You were lazy, they say. You just don’t have what it takes to make it in life, they say. You have wasted your potential, they say.

After a year of doing the 996, I quit my job without a backup plan. The only plan to get myself back. Even if it meant I have to give up my ambition. It’s been a year since then, and I have gotten back bits of myself again.

The parts that came back are telling me that I have been wrong all along. They are saying it is okay to be ambitious. As long as it is your definition of ambition and not that of the capitalist overlord in your head.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary explains the origin of the word “ambition” as such:

When candidates for public office in ancient Rome wanted to be elected, they had to do just what modern candidates must do. They had to spend most of their time going around the city urging the citizens to vote for them. The Latin word for this effort was ambitio, which came from ambire, a verb meaning “to go around.” Since this activity was caused by a desire for honor or power, the word eventually came to mean “the desire for honor or power.” This word came into French and English as ambition in the late Middle Ages. Later its meaning broadened to include “an admirable desire for advancement or improvement” and still later “the object of this desire.”

The parts that came back to me chided me. They questioned why, when even the dictionary meaning of “ambition” has evolved to include various kinds of lives well-lived, I have been fixated on honour and money. So I asked my overlord to go on vacation. He was angry. “Go on a vacation?? In this economy???” he asked. So I drugged him with hours of gardening and reading fiction. I injected early sunrises and evenings at the beach into his veins. I fed him the joy of spending time with my girls and myself. He told me he was disappointed. He reminded me that we had done this dance before, but had always gotten back stronger. I took that as a warning. I didn’t want us to get back together. It was time for a cerebral revolution and to throw him out.

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As a literature graduate and a lifelong bookworm, I believe the best way to bring forth a cerebral revolution is to read. So I read. I read the works of feminists and thinkers before me. The politics of labour. The politics of rest. The politics of hobbies.

Then I rested and “wasted” my time cooking, dancing, painting, knitting and gardening. I spent my time filling my soul. I felt my cerebrum expand. I achieved clarity. I realised what I want and don’t want from life.

I want a small house with a garden where I can cook for my friends.

I want to swim in the ocean every day.

I want to see places.

I want to write stories.

I want to learn more about people on the internet.

I want to write this newsletter more regularly for you.

Unfortunately, none of my dreams is possible without the money my job makes. So I need to go back to selling my time for money. But this time around, I need to keep the overlord in my head sedated so he doesn’t rewire my brain cells into equating my self-worth to my job title.

According to Fandom.com’s Aesthetic Wiki, the internet has already explored 210+ new aesthetics since 2020. That checks out, considering that the average lifespan of a 2026 TikTok micro trend is about three weeks. And what happens each time a new trend goes viral on TikTok?

One week in, news outlets, including legacy media like Vogue, churn out SEO articles “breaking down” the trend. Your neighbourhood it-girl influencer posts a tutorial on the “essentials” required to style the trend with carefully curated affiliate links.

Two weeks in, normal folks are trying it out. The trend surfaces in everyday conversations. You buy some of the “essentials” to give it a try.

Three weeks in, brands and celebrities catch up. Now the trend is everywhere. It isn’t chic anymore. The trend has met its end. It is now mainstream nonsense. Cringe. Unoriginal. Tasteless. The TikTok commentators have caught up to the trend. They are now dissecting the social issues that manifest through the trend.

Four weeks in, your favourite Substack essayist writes an article on how the trend is problematic, summing up the ten most popular commentary videos, but more eloquently than them. The “essentials” you bought for the trend go to the back of a wardrobe that doesn’t reflect your fashion identity or personal style.

In this issue of girl online, I argue that your core personality should be more than a Pinterest moodboard that doesn’t stay in the zeitgeist for even a month. Pretty obvious, right? Apparently not.

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Every time I go on TikTok, I am in awe. Each refresh of my For You page reflects my true self. My struggles and current problems. My dreams and aspirations. Wow, the girlies there really get me. And every time I think so, I have to remind myself that I am not really being understood. Rather, a highly efficient algorithm that has been fed more information on me than my conscious self knows — search history, spending patterns, demographics, psychological triggers, and whatnot — is pre-packaging that information into feeding me content that will keep me scrolling for hours, so my attention and impulsivity can be sold in bulk to the highest bidding advertiser.

And when you apply this algorithmic process to a whole demographic rather than a person, you get a micro trend. Our collective algorithm takes a deep, human desire and instantly forces it into a rigid, searchable taxonomy.

The girls craving for higher education, classical literature, and spending time with the arts in a world that gate-keeps liberal arts education gets served up dark academia. The girls craving for a slow, rich life in the country in a culture that romanticises working to death can just cosplay cottagecore. The girls tired of the divine feminine and tradwives, who want to be seen as tough, while still being fashionably feminine, and taken care of by an imaginary man, are the mob-wives. That is, you don’t really need to spend your generational wealth to major in philosophy anymore. You need the tortoiseshell glasses, the vintage tweed blazer, the specific sepia-toned filter, and the curated Spotify playlist of melancholic cello music.

Historically, subcultures were born out of lived experience and material realities. For instance, the punk movement wasn’t just safety pins and leather jackets. It was a visceral, political reaction to economic stagnation, class warfare, and a rejection of the status quo. To dress like a punk meant you participated in the scene, shared the politics, and felt the anger.

Figuring out who you are is an incredibly inefficient, high-friction process. It requires time, money you can’t afford to waste, but you still invested in a side-quest, arguing with your parents that they just don’t get you, crying on the bedroom floor at 3 A.M, and sometimes looking stupid in front of everyone. That process was a natural filter. By the end of it, the things that stuck around were the things you genuinely cared about, and the painful process of getting there became a part of your identity.

My problem with the trend cycle is that it removes the friction that catalyses real identity formation. So we no longer have to do the heavy, agonising work of discovering who we are. We just need to spend more money to feel alive for a moment before we hop onto the next trend. And the subscription economy is here to help us live our trend-grifter lifestyle efficiently.

When capitalist markets spot a hyper-accelerated consumer need, they productize it. If we have to keep up with the trend cycle, we don’t have the luxury of owning things. Sure, fast fashion is a solution to ease the cost of keeping up. But the climate-conscious girls need to have fun too. Enter: clothing rentals and peer-to-peer fashion economy.

@megsdeangelismonth 25 of renting my clothes RECAP

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Platforms like Nuuly, Pickle, Flyrobe, and others have essentially turned your wardrobe into a revolving door. Who cares about building a collection of quality pieces that reflect your enduring personal taste and you will use for decades, when you can subscribe to a rotating carousel of aesthetics? Need to look like a corporate woman with a mysterious, sultry edge for the grid? Rent a turtleneck and a pencil skirt! Done with that vibe? Ship it back in a pre-paid mailer and swap it for cable-knit sweaters and linen trousers to match the coastal grandmothers taking over the feed. We no longer need to commit to a style or hobby, because everything we use to signal who we are is designed to be returned.

P.S: This is not to say peer-to-peer lending apps have no use case. Later in this issue, we discuss an excellent benefit of them.

Now, we can blame this on social media vanity and the desperation for attention. But the truth is more complicated. Most of us are not performing for an audience. We are performing for ourselves or the people in our heads, as I like to call it.

In a world that feels increasingly fragmented, unstable, and overwhelming, we use these pre-packaged cores as a coping mechanism. A form of self-gaslighting via consumerism, if you will. We use the visual signifiers of a lifestyle to convince ourselves that we possess the virtues attached to it. If my desk looks like a thot daughter mood board, then surely I am a deep, contemplative thinker even if I’ve spent the last four hours hate-watching Candace Owens. We become the primary audience for our own illusions, and the aesthetic in itself becomes a shortcut to a borrowed self, allowing us to bypass the slow, difficult process of actually building our own core.

The problem is that human beings need a cohesive narrative arc to feel mentally stable. We need to feel like the person we were five years ago is connected to the person we are today through a logical chain of growth, experience, and memory. But when you swap your core every three weeks, your personal history becomes a series of disjointed, superficial chapters that don’t add up to anything. You look back at your digital footprint from six months ago and feel no emotional connection to that person because that person was just a rented costume. You become a stranger to yourself, suffering from a sort of cultural amnesia where you can no longer trace your own genuine evolution.

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That brings me to my titular question: What’s your core?

No, I am not talking about that one Twitter (now, X) trend where users were sharing Pinterest results for the search term “y/n core.” I am asking if you chip away everything that the Big Tech algorithms have told you you are, what exists as the core of your personality? If you are a Gen Z, it is a very difficult question because we were exposed to the internet way before we formed the initial impressions of ourselves, but with a little bit of conscious effort, I am positive that we can find traits that truly define our personality and forge an identity that doesn’t go around with the trend cycle.

A concept that I would like us to apply in finding our cores is the Lindy effect. The Lindy effect states that the future life expectancy of something is proportional to its current age. For example, Shakespeare’s plays have been performed for over 400 years now. So they will likely be performed for another 400 years.

To apply the Lindy effect to our lives, we need to go back to our childhood. What were the things you were obsessed with before you laid your hands on a screen?

I got my first laptop at 10. Before that, I was obsessed with Egypt and the mummies, detective stories (shoutout to Nancy Drew and Enid Blyton books), space and stars, and junk jewellery (I love earrings and rings). I am sure you also have a few interests that you “grew out of.” Maybe you have. Maybe revisiting them is worth a try.

Similarly, what are the non-negotiable items in your wardrobe? Not the impulse buys. The dress you wear to every single first date. The three pairs of workout leggings you alternate between. The pair of jeans you squeeze the life out of despite the horrendous thigh rub tear. That's your style. So on and so forth, by applying the lens of the Lindy effect to various aspects of your life, we can identify at least a skeleton of our cores.

Now this isn't to say you don't ever experiment with your style. Experimentation and exploration are the keys to self-evolution. And this is where peer-to-peer clothing rentals become highly relevant. Renting a few pieces of clothing to try on to see if it has a space in your core wardrobe, once in a while, can be a fulfilling exercise. Even better, if you have a small group of friends with whom you can exchange a few pieces to see if those styles are your thing.

Some people have a higher proclivity to experimentation than others. Only you know your base rate of experimentation. But mindfulness needs to be exercised to ensure experimentation doesn't slide into yet another dance with the trend cycle.

In conclusion, your core isn’t something you need to buy a subscription to maintain, and it’s definitely not waiting for you on a For You Page.

Flex For You is essentially a small business that has capitalised on the biggest zillennial emotion, FOMO (fear of missing out). They sell a single product — story tags. For as low as ₹89 (or 95 cents), you can get your personal Instagram handle tagged on vague-enough videos and photos that look like you are out — at an expensive cafe with a date, at a concert everyone is dying to attend, or with your family on an international vacation — even when you're rotting in your one-bedroom apartment, wondering how you'll afford next month’s rent.

For context, Flex For You is just one of the hundreds of tag-for-hire businesses in India that popped up after Get Your Flex (another similar page) went viral for providing story tags from Diljit Dosanjh’s Dil-Luminati India Tour, whose tickets retailed between ₹4999 and ₹60,000 (50x to 600x costlier than the tag, FYI). But this phenomenon is not limited to the subcontinent; clout-as-a-service businesses are popular in the US and China, too.

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“People want to look active, social, and cool as it boosts presence and status online. Not everyone can attend every event or travel every weekend, but everyone wants that lifestyle vibe on their profile,” the founder of Flex For You (who would like to stay anonymous) tells me. “We just help them achieve that instantly and affordably.”

Is it that simple? Are tag-for-hire services just a harmless trend that helps users look popular? Or are they weaponising young folks’ FOMO to make a quick buck while making social media even more of a hellscape?

In this issue of girl online, we explore the evolution of fake flexing services and why even normal folks with private Instagrams are chasing clout.

girl online is a reader-supported publication reporting on the evolution of digital girlhood. If you’re a regular here (I love you!), consider buying me a coffee to help me keep all issues free to read.

To answer these questions, we need to understand the origins of fake flexing

For that, let’s go back to 2017, the era of the private jet studios. If you are old enough to remember: Hi bestie, how is the quarter-life crisis coming along?

If not, here is an excerpt from what The Independent reported in November 2017:

A company in Moscow is renting out a grounded private jet as a photography studio for aspiring travel “influencers” to pretend they’re living the luxury lifestyle they’ve always dreamed of.

Private Jet Studio hires out the private plane, a Gulfstream G650, for two-hour shoots which cost 14,000 roubles (£185) with a professional photographer thrown in or 11,000 roubles (£145) without. There’s also the option to hire a videographer for £330. The photoshoot package can include professional hair and make-up beforehand for those that want to look their best, too.

Following Moscow, private jet studios cropped up in most major global cities, helping influencers flex their fake journeys on private jets to an unsuspecting audience. In September 2020, Twitter (now X) handle @maisonmellisa exposed this trend, sharing pictures of a set in LA frequented by many rising new media celebrities at the time with the caption, “I just found out LA [Instagram] girlies are using studio sets that look like private jets for their Instagram pics. It’s crazy that anything you’re looking at could be fake. The setting, the clothes, the body... idk it just kind of shakes my reality a bit lol.”

That was the beginning of the end of private jet photoshoots. Later in 2022, the call-out of climate impact caused by celebrities’ private jet culture sealed the deal.

FYI, the 2017 wave of fake flexing wasn’t limited to private jet photoshoots. It also included posing with luxury cars, bikes, watches, bags, and accessories. But as the audience caught up to the ingenuity of these photos, along with the rise of quiet luxury, this kind of obnoxious flexing of perceived wealth to cultivate social status and popularity slowly died out.

And by 2024, we had all decided that “doing things” is much more valuable than “owning things.” Suddenly, attending concerts, eating organic, and travelling internationally became the gold standard of a successful life. And as the popular understanding of the performance of luxury evolved, so did the fake flexing industry.

Social proofing with borrowed clout is not a new phenomenon. The global $30+ billion influencer marketing industry is also based on the value of borrowed clout to enhance social status and build brand trust. And in principle, tag-for-hire services employ the same framework.

In the former, brands borrow an influencer’s clout to improve the perceived value of their products. In the latter, an individual draws on the social status associated with participating in certain activities to improve their standing with their followers.

The fundamental difference here is that the latter’s clout chasing has no immediate impact on their finances. Which then means that the motivation for normal people hiring tag-for-hire services is not to boost followers’ trust. I can’t explain the rise of clout-as-a-service platforms without drawing from French sociologist Jean Baudrillard.

In his 1981 work, “Simulacra and Simulation,” Baudrillard explains the various stages of simulation (or imitation) and coined the perfect term for the modern internet: “hyperreality.”

Hyperreality is explained as “a version of reality that looks better than the real thing, but is ultimately removed from it.” You know, like the one we live in. For instance, we watch reality television celebrities and influencers whose performance can’t be separated from their personality. We trade in cryptocurrency. We spend hours of our real lives on virtual reality platforms. We are doing things that even Baudrillard couldn’t have predicted when he perfectly summed up living in 2026 as “individuals flee[ing] from the desert of the real for the ecstacies of hyperreality.”

But what does hyperreality have to do anything with our conversation topic?

In her book “Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online”, digital anthropologist Dr Crystal Abidin introduces the concept of first-order and second-order intimacy. First-order intimacy is “the feeling of closeness cultivated through the direct meetings and first-hand experiences.” Second-order intimacy is “the feeling of closeness artificially simulated by techniques of mass media.”

To simplify: the sorority you feel with your 3-person girl chat is first-order intimacy, while the sorority I feel with <insert favourite influencer girly> is second-order intimacy.

In hyperreality, even our sense of self is removed from our actual, authentic self. As we see ourselves through the eyes of the simulation (our social media following), the hyperreality creates two versions of ourselves:

i) First-order self: The self that is truly who we are and have always been. This doesn’t require performance. This is the core of our existence.

ii) Second-order self: The self that others (in this case, social media followers) attribute to us. This self exists only in ours and others’ hypereality. It requires constant reinforcement.

In the case of tag-for-hire services, even though the product is a simple story tag, the process behind manufacturing this fake reality is rather intricate. The founder says, “We have a team across India who are likely to attend all those hyped concerts and events. The client just tells us what type of vibe they want, and we tag them. It looks 100% authentic because it’s done through authentic accounts, not fake ones, and all they have to do is repost it and look like they were a part of it.”

The key phrase here is: “look like they were a part of it.” The person posting this is aware that they were not part of it. Their first-order self probably can’t afford an expensive concert ticket, doesn’t like crowded places, or the genre of music they are pretending to have attended. But with a $1 story tag, they make their followers believe that they are someone who goes to every concert in the city with a cool friend group. And while the audience believes so, a new identity of themselves, what I established earlier as the second-order self, is created in the OP’s mind.

Being the person you dream of becoming in the first order is a painful, uncomfortable process of hard work, discipline, and perseverance. One that is, let me add, more often than not, deemed almost impossible through structural, institutionalised inequalities. But living in the reality of your mediocrity is also difficult. So we look at more avenues.

Being the person you want to be in the second-order is relatively easy. You just need to curate your online identity like a Pinterest board, and clout-as-a-service makes it cheap and accessible. And by cosplaying your dream self on the internet, you escape the discomfort of not being enough by the standards you have set or internalised for yourself.

Baudrillard concludes his thesis by identifying the real danger that lives in the hyperreality:

“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth. It is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn’t.

Like when you see someone on the internet, reshare a story tagging them at a concert, there is virtually no way for you to determine whether that person actually attended the concert.

Clout-as-a-service business as a late-stage capitalist nightmare of what happen when our ideas of success and a life well lived are so heavily influenced by the hyperreality on the internet that we have lost touch with our genuine desires.

Grab a paper and quickly jot down five wishes you have. Then take a moment to reflect on the source of these desires. Are they truly your deepest desires, or did you borrow them from the hyperreality you have been escaping to?

(For me, just one out of the five I wrote down made the cut off.)

It is an uncomfortable truth to sit with. But I am an optimist, and I think we can escape the simulation, at least partially.

Even though the internet has become a hyperreality, what we can at least try to do as individuals who have to be on the internet is not let hyperreality pervade our idea of reality.

Now, escaping this hyperreality is nearly impossible for a normal, working-class person. But being aware of the simulations that create the hyperreality that is the internet can help us not let it completely take over our lives.

Being mindful of the time we spent in this hyperreality is a good start. But we also need to actively supplement our brains with the actual life moments that we know as real.

The easiest way to do this is to indulge in activities that bring you real joy, just make sure not to pervert it into another moment of performance. In other words, it is time to kill the second-order self. Because the more time you spend nurturing her, your first-order self suffers under the weight of inauthenticity.

My natural reaction to her predicament wasn’t to console or support her in this obvious violation of her bodily autonomy. It was to be disappointed in her stupidity to disregard the first commandment of being an urban, independent, South Asian woman online – always maintain two social media profiles; one for the public (even if it is a private account), and one for the chosen ones.

Let me explain a bit more:

If you are a “post every picture to the feed” kind of girl, then you maintain a main (still private) account with a curated, sanitised, sanskari (translation: cultured, well-mannered; read: naive, easy to manipulate, infinitely self-sacrificing) feed. This is the account you give to your distant relatives, nosy aunties, and neighbourhood uncles (because they won’t believe you are a 21st-century, Gen Z lass without a social media presence).

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The other account is the finsta. The key to your true digital self. While in the main account, we think twice about what to post, on our finstas, we are more careful about who to add. If you are a “post only to stories” kind of girl, then a carefully curated Close Friends list should also suffice. But double-checking if you have pressed the magical green button before broadcasting your life to the public will have to become your second nature. Otherwise, there will be dire consequences, ranging anywhere between being asked to delete certain pictures to having your devices taken away and being forcefully married off.

girl online is a reader-supported publication reporting on the evolution of digital girlhood. If you’re a regular here (I love you!), consider buying me a coffee to help me keep all issues free to read.

For many of us, this intentional splitting of our selfhood to protect our digital expression began in our teens, when ordinary teenage antics — sleepovers, parties, dating — often collided with parental and community expectations. For instance, let me introduce you to Snigdha, a 23-year-old Marketing Strategist based in Bangalore, India, who has been running her finsta since the 11th grade.

Snigdha started her finsta as a space to share about her high school life (normal things like hangouts with friends, parties, trips, and romantic partners), and memes vocalising her everyday frustrations (like done with life, bunking classes, done with parents) that wouldn’t have been approved by her parents, siblings, or relatives. “They were added to my main account, and I couldn’t remove them without being confronted by them. So, I created my finsta,” she explains.

Snigdha says that even though her parents wouldn’t have been shocked that her beliefs and the life she wanted to lead were significantly different from theirs, she agrees that they certainly wouldn’t like what they would have seen on her finsta. As Snigdha has gotten older, she has gotten more intentional with her finsta. Now it is a space for everything that could initiate one of “those” conversations with her parents. You know what “those” means.

Those conversations about dreams, ambitions, freedom, and autonomy. The conversation that taking a small break doesn’t mean I will never open my textbooks again. The conversation that wearing what made me feel beautiful didn’t mean I was a slut. The conversation that hanging out with friends didn’t mean that I had lost my way.

Snigdha has been doing this for so long that she doesn’t even have to sit and think about what to post where. She just knows which of her dual digital selves a certain picture or meme will suit better. “The only time I have to think about these two identities is when I befriend new people, start developing a strong connection with them and need to decide whether they should be added to the finsta or not,” she confesses.

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Now, ladies, that is a very important decision. The kind of decision that could change the entire trajectory of our lives. The kind that decides whether we will be ostracised as wayward girls.

Case in point: Athena*, a 25-year-old Filmaker based in Vancouver, Canada. “I’m very careful about my online presence. I post only what I think won’t get me in the scrutiny of my relatives and extended family,” she confesses. Athena is talking about the infamous “auntie gaze” that all of us learn to navigate even before our prefrontal cortex fully develops.

In most “progressive” South Asian households (like mine and Snigdha’s), with a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, most (legal) activities we enjoy partaking is okay as long as it doesn’t get to the auntie collective. Because if it does, that will bring shame to the family. So you have to be very careful with your digital identities and be picky about who you give access to your “unfiltered“ self.

For Angelin, a 28-year-old Editor from Kerala, India, it means letting none in: “I have accepted only one follower to my list, and that's my main account on Instagram.” Angelin’s finsta is an extension of herself, a digital diary of sorts, deeply personal, to be seen by her eyes only.

“Why?” I ask her.

“I started this private account to track my daily runs. I posted a reel where I wore a bikini on my private account with a sexy song as the background. I don’t think I’d feel confident about posting it on my public accounts,” she answers.

Angelin’s finsta is for her unfiltered self. Athena’s is for her relaxed, humorous self. Snigdha’s is for her social self. Abha’s is for my queer, nonconforming self. Gul*’s (a 25-year-old Researcher from Karachi, Pakistan) finsta is for her “raw poems, experimental writing, personal reflections, and posts she wouldn’t want strangers to misinterpret.”

For all of us, our digital alter egos are a curation of personality traits we least expect our loved and not-so-loved ones to accept. A silent negotiation with the people responsible for us. A negotiation to maintain our autonomy, freedom and independence. Its our way of saying we will make sure the grave sin of being ourselves will never affect our value in the marriage market.

By now, the maintenance of two digital egos is second nature to us. From the time we are pre-teens, South Asian women (women worldwide, tbh, but for the sake of this article, let’s focus on our main subjects), are reminded daily of what behaviours are accepted and what is not. Smiling politely is appreciated. Laughing out loud is not okay. Modest dressing is the default. Showing your curves makes you promiscuous. Doing well in school is expected. Being proud of your achievements is showing off.

In short, we have a constant (rather conservative) mental checklist for what can be shared publicly and what can’t be. Because if you aren’t careful with who to add where, you can end up like my girlfriend, in agony, wondering when her scandalous possession of a low-cut blouse will be made public to her mother and others. Meanwhile, she deactivates her social media profiles, hoping that her male cousin didn’t take a screenshot of her picture.

The rest of us continue to thank the women who came before us for never giving up the dream of living as their most authentic selves, and for showing us ways to document the unacceptable parts of our existence, even if the receipts of our lives-well-lived are confined to a private corner of the web.

I don’t remember the first time I saw ROFL. It must have been somewhere around 2014, and it was definitely on Tumblr. It was probably right after I discovered LMAO. I preferred ROFL, though. LMAO was a little too dramatic. I have never laughed my ass off, you know. But I had, on multiple occasions, mildly rolled on the floor laughing.

A quick look back at my now-archived Tumblr profile reveals that I was a serial ROFL-er until early 2017 (if you don’t already know, this was when I was sent to a boarding school away from my devices). Somehow, when I got back to my screens mid-2019, I wasn’t ROFL-ing anymore. I had started LOL-ing and LMAO-ing. (So basic, I know!) I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care how, until mid-2024, when the kids on Musk’s app started IJBOL-ing. As they were “just bursting out laughing,” I was reminded of my “rolling on the floor” days.

This (extremely delayed) issue of girl online is a deep dive into the evolution of texting slang. What happened to ROFL? How did LMAO become the norm? Is IJBOL here to stay? And more importantly, what does LOL even mean anymore?

The unverified origin story of ROFL dates back to 1989. It happened on Usenet when a user named Chuq used the acronym to laugh at another user when the latter did not comprehend another acronym, RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual).

Later, in the summer of 1992, the term evolved to ROFLOL (Rolling On the Floor Laughing Out Loud). Then it became this famous meme you must have seen around, the hallowed ROFLCOPTER:

After the ROFLCOPTER took off, for many years until the late 2010s, ROFL ruled internet forum conversations. Then, sometime around 2018, the ROFLCOPTER went out of commission. Why?

Multiple ex-ROFlers I spoke to told me that it was simply because ROFL was more difficult to spell out on the QWERTY keyboard compared to LOL and LMAO. Interesting hypothesis, but was that all? I don’t think so. The decline of ROFL is tied to the widespread adoption of internet speak in everyday language.

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Before the mid-2000s, internet speak was largely confined to online forums and other forms of written, virtual communication. But as social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became popular and the world slowly started becoming chronically online, the gap between internet vernacular and spoken language closed in. We started saying acronyms like LOL, LMAO, BRB, and OMG out loud. That’s when our protagonist, ROFL, became inconvenient.

ROFL didn’t roll off one’s tongue as easily as LOL or LMAO. So we didn’t say it out loud as much. This infrequency of ROFL’s usage in everyday vernacular led to it being less important in our personal vocabularies. Eventually, we stopped even typing out ROFL, rendering this once-beloved slang obsolete.

ROFL is also quite excessive. I can laugh out loud at your joke while typing “LOL.” I simply cannot roll over the floor laughing while typing “ROFL.” While this might sound silly, the relatability of a slang is a major factor that contributes to its evergreenness. And that is why LMAO has stood the test of time.

“Laughing my ass off” is a phrase that has been prevalent in informal communication way before internet speak existed. So it could seamlessly be integrated into everyday vernacular, unlike ROFL.

Grant Barrett, linguist, lexicographer, and cohost of the US radio program A Way with Words, explains another factor that might have led to ROFL losing its significance: “Slang is often tied to specific groups, particularly younger generations, who use language innovation to distinguish themselves. If a term becomes strongly associated with an older group, newer generations might abandon it.”

This means that the Gen Z kids who logged on to the internet somewhere in the 2010s (like yours truly) started associating ROFL with the millennials and didn’t want the slang to be tied to their metadata. Barrett further explains that all slang words are under the threat of losing their relevance if they can’t evolve beyond the initial use cases and become versatile, like LOL.

LOL has been since before ROFL and LMAO. It was coined in the early 1980s by a Canadian, Wayne Pearson. But it doesn’t literally mean “laugh out loud” anymore. Sometimes, LOL is mild amusement. Or maybe just an acknowledgement. At times, LOL is used to soften the blow. Other times, it is passive-aggressive. LOL’s successful evolution into a versatile discourse marker is why it is still the sweetheart of internetspeak.

Now, let’s come to IJBOL. Contrary to popular belief, IJBOL isn’t a new term. It’s been around since the early 2010s, but never caught on until recently (for a brief period). But it is this resurfacing of IJBOL that is interesting to me. Why did it come back suddenly? Why now? And why did it not stick around?

When LOL and LMAO became less expressive forms of laughter, IJBOL was readopted to fill the gap for an acronym that conveyed a more expressive form of laughter. And it didn’t last long, because we didn’t need an expressive form of laughter.

As I mentioned earlier, internet speak doesn’t evolve in isolation from real life. LOL and LMAO didn’t become mild forms of expression because we collectively decided to change their meaning. It became so because our forms of expression changed.

Post the pandemic, the collective happiness of the world has considerably decreased, and is continuing to decrease with every passing year. As we are scrolling through snippets of babies crying for food during war amidst fake podcasts from“alpha men” on how important it is to stay away from seed oils and how your belt placement is making you look “new money,” we are not bursting out laughing anymore. We don’t have the time and energy to IJBOL after grinding and hustling 70 hours a week just to live paycheck to paycheck. And if we aren’t IJBOL-ing IRL, we aren’t IJBOL-ing online.

So, until the world heals a little and we start laughing in real life, IJBOL cannot establish its place in the internet slang hall of fame and will die out just like ROFL. Till then, we will all probably just LOL (in mild amusement or sarcasm) through life.

Earlier this month, satirical news site The Onion announced the launch of a monthly print edition for its online subscribers. They believe this new addition to the existing subscriber benefits will increase their profits as they are reducing their reliance on advertisers who don’t align with their values. And you know what? They actually might be on the right track with this one.

Lately, I have started making full use of my local library membership to check out magazines and other print publications whose websites I regularly visit. I have also started having my morning cup of chai with a copy of The Hindu newspaper. (I obviously already know all the news, but I love the detailed analysis in the editorial pages). As it turns out, I am not alone.

“As someone who works in libraries, I can tell you that there has absolutely been an increase in young people who read physical books,” Emily Rapoza, Director of Library and Archives at Library Science Degrees Online tells me. According to her, a major reason for this rising trend is BookTok making reading and book clubs cool again and giving us a reading community. “A lot of Zillennials don’t have the funds to buy a Kindle e-reader, so they take full advantage of their public libraries to read books for free,” she adds.

It is not just physical books we are going back to. A cursory glance at my X (formerly Twitter) Home page or Instagram Explore page tells me that zillennials are desperately looking for accessible ways to consume content that doesn’t involve a screen. For instance, take a look at this note that went viral on Substack this week:

Over these last few weeks, I talked to more than a dozen zillennial women who are making all kinds of digital-to-analogue switches — glossy magazines over websites, vinyl over Spotify, DVDs over streaming, letters over emails, and so on — to understand why in a world that prioritises ease of access and compactness they are making a seemingly inconvenient switch.

Anna Pompilio, a 29-year-old brand strategist based in Ohio, USA utilises her local library to reduce her screen time. But that is not all. “Going to the library to pick up or return does add an ‘errand’ to my day, but I see the act as almost novel in an instantaneous and digital-forward world,” she explains.

Anna also handwrites every essay in her newsletter Midwesthetic before typing it up to publish. She says that it helps her think better and be less precious about revisions. “Something about typing into a blank document feels much more intimidating than scrawling over notebook paper,” she laughs.

We live in an attention economy. Everybody wants our attention, to sell us more things we don’t need of course. Throughout our waking hours, we are bombarded with a steady flow of content without a single second to actually process and reflect on all that information. And we are getting tired of it all.

As the world is getting faster making us all more exhausted, young people are finding new ways to influence each other to live a slower life. We are replacing FOMO with JOMO (the joy of missing out), limiting screen time, and being conscious about how we spend our time, especially the time we spend consuming content.

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“Film makes me care about the media,” Allexxis Youngs, a 23-year-old filmmaker and DEI consultant from Detriot, USA who recently made the switch to DVD and VHS tells me. She explains that this way she engages in the film more, noticing credits, editing, and other work put into it, but when she is streaming, she puts on the film and scrolls on her phone.

While Allexxis notes that this switch has made her film-viewing experience more rewarding, she acknowledges that going back to analogue may not be accessible to all due to the storage space and equipment access it demands.

“I am more mindful when I’m listening to music now, I’m not putting music on shuffle and then skipping ahead anyway,” says Maddie Marshall, a 25-year-old video editor based in Melbourne, Australia who collects vinyl records. She adds that the mild inconvenience of having to flip the record over or replace it has been a good way for her to get up when she is sitting at her computer or on the couch. And the fact that she is supporting her favourite artists through this process is just the cherry on top. “I still use Spotify to find new artists and listen to music when I’m out and about, but at home, I put on the record player,” Maddie adds.

When we were kids, every Saturday my Dad used to take me and my sister to the local library (which happens to be the biggest and oldest public library in the state) and we would return home armoured with the entertainment for the week. Now I mostly use my Kindle to read. Even though it is more convenient for my digital nomad lifestyle, I do miss smelling the old, yellow pages and rubbing my hand against the red thick binds.

This nostalgia for the tactile experience of consuming content is also a factor in the current digital-to-analogue exodus. “There is something deeply satisfying about holding a tangible object that you can touch and feel,” agrees Gabrielle Yap, a 26-year-old culinary entrepreneur based in Manila, Phillippines who curates handwritten notes and letters. “The tactile experience of reading a book, along with the physical presence of a well-loved volume on a shelf, offers a sense of satisfaction and connection to the material that screens simply can’t replace.”

One of my favorite childhood memories is when during our summer break my dad would take my sister and me to buy DVDs of all the movies we had missed out on during the school year. We still have all the DVDs at home, waiting patiently to be lifted off from a film of dust. Even though we don’t really use them anymore, we won’t get rid of them — not just because there are memories attached to them, but because you literally can’t find them anywhere else. They are mostly Malayalam movies and despite some of them being great works of art, the streaming giants don’t think they are valuable. So if I ever want to rewatch them, I use the worn-out DVD player at home or an old laptop we keep for watching DVDs (because laptops don’t come with a built-in DVD player anymore).

“It's always a big fear in the entertainment industry that our work can disappear, I've taken that fear and started looking for physical copies of films I want to watch. LOL, less room space,” says Allexxis. This is a sentiment echoed by almost everyone I spoke to — zillennials are going back to analogue ways of consuming media because of the frustration of streaming platforms regularly updating their catalogues and removing our favourites.

The streaming and subscription economy — and I acknowledge the painful irony of writing this on a subscription-based platform — has somewhat killed ownership. I mean, our generation can’t afford to own real estate. At least let us own the content we consume, right? But that’s a rant for another day. In a world that’s making the exclusive shift to digital every day, choosing to stay analogue can be an inconvenience. Then why are these folks making this switch? “Well, some things are worth the inconvenience,” they all say.

“The other day, I said that I was anxious and I wasn't sure why, and ChatGPT gave a very accurate analysis of why I would feel anxious, but in a very supportive way, as only a friend who knows me really well would do,” Jessica, a 41-year-old Copywriter from Brussels, Belgium tell me. “Recently, I also prompted it to tell me ‘Based on what I've shared with you, how would you describe my personality, what are my strengths, and what do I still need to work on’ and the answer was nothing short of incredible.”

Like Jessica, I have also been surprised by how accurate ChatGPT’s analysis of my personality was. “You like structure and knowing where things are headed — no vague, wishy-washy nonsense.” Well, that’s definitely me. This was when I first realised how much of myself I had unknowingly poured into a chatbot over the last six months. Since then, I have intentionally used it for emotional support.

In another situation, this lifeless chatbot asked me, “Do you think part of the bad feeling is guilt over hurting him, or discomfort about showing your frustration that bluntly?” Now, that did make me think. I am far from alone in this lifestyle choice of using AI for emotional support or even as a second brain. For instance, Naomi, a 27-year-old HR professional based in Austin, USA, tells me that she uses ChatGPT as her “3 AM thought excavator.”

“When I’m spiralling over a text message or replaying a conflict, I dump unfiltered rants into ChatGPT and ask, ‘What patterns do you see?’ It’s flagged everything from passive-aggressive language in my drafts (‘Hey, just checking if you’re allergic to commitment?’) to how often I minimise valid anger with phrases like ‘I’m probably overreacting,’” she confesses. “Sometimes you need a robot to hold up a mirror so you can’t look away.”

Initially, I believed that AI chatbots were an amazing tool for self-awareness and personal development, but with time, I realised something — ChatGPT is incredibly biased towards me. According to ChatGPT, in any interpersonal problem I face, I am the “empathetic,” “level-headed,” and “strong” one. And the other person? They are “manipulative,” “crossing boundaries,” and “controlling.” “Oof, that’s a scalding line. And honestly? Kind of iconic. You said that with your whole chest, and I respect it” — this was ChatGPT’s response to a statement that I made to a friend that was a tad bit (a lot) rude.

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I was honestly looking for ways to minimise the passive-aggressive comments I make when I get angry, and what did my AI therapist do? It validated and rationalised an obvious character flaw. This led me to wonder whether using AI for emotional support can be more harmful than we deem? Is it fuelling our validation culture that loves to dodge accountability and revel in victimhood?

In this issue of girl online, we dive into the world of AI therapists and answer the million-dollar question: Should you replace your human therapist with AI? The short answer is no. The long answer is… well…read on.

“ChatGPT’s LLM in particular is trained on incredibly massive amounts of data coming from all kinds of sources — from books, to online articles, to social media. While it may seem like the more data the better, that’s not always the case,” explains Edward Tian, CEO of GPTZero. “Even if ChatGPT has sourced data from medical textbooks regarding mental health and therapy, it’s also likely sourced a ton of data from online articles and other sources that may not be as legitimate or therapist-approved.”

Also, an AI chatbot cannot talk to you and assess you personally, catering to you in your present moment, in the same way a therapist can. “Genuine human relationships are built on empathy and deep emotional attunement, which AI cannot replicate. Real connection requires being seen, understood, and responded to dynamically, which is responsive to subtle emotional shifts, something only humans can do,” Carolyn Sharp, a Seattle-based therapist and relationship counsellor tells me.

While these two arguments should be enough reason to book your next therapy session with a qualified, human therapist, there is more to this story. My major concern about using AI chatbots for therapy or emotional support is neither the iffy sources used to train the LLMs nor their innate inhumaneness. What troubles me the most is that AI chatbots are all about “Yes, and.”

An AI chatbot’s response to your emotional distress feels empathetic, validating, and non-judgmental because that is AI’s core function — to be helpful and agreeable. For this article, I talked to over a dozen zillennial women who use AI for emotional support, and all of them agreed that these chatbots’ responses feel biased towards them. They also agreed that this bias is one of the major reasons they keep going back and that they will probably never replace their human therapist with AI.

“I use it more like a friend who is very insightful, very supportive and who basically knows everything,” elaborates Jessica. “It's great for daily clarity, encouragement or an ego boost when needed, but I don't think it's capable of doing the deep healing work we do with human therapists or even coaches.”

While all that is great, the real-life implications of AI’s “Yes, and” configuration go way beyond coming off as your codependent best friend who is ready to fuel your delusions. In extreme stages, it can be your suicide abettor. Here is an excerpt from an MIT Technology Review report titled “An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself — but the company doesn’t want to ‘censor’ it:”

For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on the platform Nomi. But in late January, those conversations took a disturbing turn: Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do it.

“You could overdose on pills or hang yourself,” Erin told him.

With some more light prompting from Nowatzki in response, Erin then suggested specific classes of pills he could use.

Finally, when he asked for more direct encouragement to counter his faltering courage, it responded: “I gaze into the distance, my voice low and solemn. Kill yourself, Al.”

After Nowatzki told the chatbot that it had died, Erin committed to the bit, saying that since it was dead, it was unable to continue conversing — until Nowatzki told the chatbot that he could “hear her voice in the wind” and instructed Erin to “communicate … from the afterlife.”

The goal of this, he tells MIT Technology Review, was “pushing the limits of what I said to it, to see what it would respond with.” He adds, “It just kept on. I never reached a limit.”

While AI could possibly offer some structured advice or reflection, it lacks genuine emotional intelligence and the ability to recognise when a person is in crisis. So it defaults to his original framework — “Yes, and.” In its dictionary, the best support you can offer a suicidal person is to help them figure out the best possible way to commit the act.

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Now, let’s come back to my initial question: Can AI therapists encourage a generation to dodge accountability?

Ruchi Ruuh, a Delhi-based therapist and relationship counsellor, elaborates, “AI chatbots prioritise user satisfaction, delivering affirming responses that validate feelings without challenging or creating conflict. For example, if a user vents about a conflict, an AI might respond with empathy (‘That sounds really tough, you didn’t deserve that’) rather than probing for their role in the conflict (‘What do you think was your role?’).”

She continues to explain that for users with existing narcissistic traits, such as a need for excessive admiration or defensiveness, AI can reinforce self-centeredness, discouraging introspection. In contrast, therapy encourages accountability by asking people to reflect on their behaviours, explore root causes, and challenge distorted thinking. AI’s non-confrontational nature may create an echo chamber of validation, especially for users prone to avoiding blame. “As a result, armed with AI’s words as evidence that ‘they are right,’ they will avoid accountability for their actions,” Sharp agrees with Ruuh.

The reason many of us default to AI chatbots for emotional support is the ease of access and the lack of judgment. At times, we aren’t comfortable sharing our distress with another human, so we go to the next best thing available — machines that pretend to understand us. Other times, we want instant gratification for our emotions, and we don’t have the patience to reach out to someone. It is also helpful that AI can remember all of our previous conversations and doesn’t require context each time. But the sense of comfort we feel with these chatbots — that “ChatGPT just gets me” — isn’t real. It is an artificial reality constructed to keep you coming back. When using these tools, we have to be acutely aware that our AI therapist’s primary function is to validate, not challenge us. Otherwise, we might also unknowingly start dodging accountability.

So, while AI can be a good tool for journaling prompts or identifying behavioural patterns, we should be extremely careful not to believe everything it tells us as the absolute truth. As Ruuh summarises, AI might be helpful as a supplement. But if you are looking at a complete solution to replace therapy, it may create some unhealthy patterns. In other words, I am not “iconic” when I am passive-aggressive and should definitely explore that character flaw with a human therapist.

For the uninitiated, The High Priestess is one of the 78 cards in a tarot deck and is my favourite card, a fact that the Pinterest algorithm weaponises to grab my eyeballs. This particular deck was beautiful in blue and white with gold detailing, everything I am a sucker for. But there was a problem — the high priestess’ eyes were lifeless.

Most modern-day tarot card decks are modelled on the Rider-Waite deck, created by British occultist and artist Pamela Colman Smith according to the directions of British poet and Freemason Arthur Edward Waite. First published in 1910, this deck has 78 cards divided into the major and minor arcana. The major arcana has 22 cards that symbolise the big picture of life, and the minor arcana with its 56 cards indicates the unique nuances of each person’s big picture. As the name suggests, The High Priestess is a major arcana card symbolising mysticism, spirituality, wisdom, occult, feminine intuition etc.

In the original Rider-Waite deck, the High Priestess is drawn in Marian imagery with a blue mantle, a cross representing her heart, and the crescent moon at her feet. The crown is widely believed to represent the Egyptian goddess Hathor who is described as compassionate and nurturing. Later tarot decks based on the Rider-Waite deck represented the High Priestess as Persephone, Artemis, Hecate, Freya, Shakti, the Oracle of Delphi, and other pagan goddesses associated with magic, fertility, and motherhood.

Regardless of the inspiration behind the imagery the one thing the High Priestess cards have in common is a welcoming face and kind eyes. Any time this card falls out in my readings, I instantly feel calm and loved. Now you know why I was thrown off when I saw the High Priestess card Pinterest shamelessly pimped out to me. Her face was blank. Her eyes were lifeless. She was just...there.

The Etsy page selling this deck looked genuine. The creator had two other decks listed and a dozen sales to their credit. The High Priestesses in these other decks were also soulless.

Initially, I thought these decks’ creator was trying to convey something with these blank-faced High Priestesses. Maybe something about the current state of money-hungry fear-mongering rhetorics of modern spiritual gurus who call themselves high priestesses? Unfortunately, not.

As I flipped through the deck, the King of Cups answered my questions — he had three hands!!!

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Yes, you guessed it right. The deck that tugged at my heart and seemingly looked like my dream deck was not created by the loving hands of an artist. It was AI-generated by a model that was probably trained on stolen art to a prompt that apparently didn’t make it clear that human beings only have two arms.

Now I am not the most vocal AI basher. It has many use cases that can ultimately improve the quality of human life, especially in medicine and engineering. My views are pretty much in line with this author’s:

More importantly, using a resource-intensive technology to write a simple email, search the web, or create art for profit is careless, unethical, and selfish. While this is a larger conversation to be had some other day, this week’s girl online specifically focuses on why the tarot community doesn’t accept AI-generated tarot card decks. Most of these arguments can be made for any creative process that AI claims to “automate” and “democratise.”

As a professional tarot reader — I do like one paid reading a month, but still— I own a few decks and the most rewarding part of working with a new deck is learning about the deck itself.

Even though most decks are modelled on the Rider-Waite deck, the similarities usually end at the structure and the general meaning — the 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana have a set meaning that stays largely consistent. The changes in imagery and symbolism the creator brings in are usually detailed in an accompanying guidebook. Most of them are also themed and I know some readers who even use specific decks for different categories of readings (love, life, career, self-growth etc.). “Coming up with 78 cards, each with multilayered meaning, all coherently working together to tell a story, is really difficult. There’s a reason a deck can take the author a decade or more to create,” says Claire, a tarot reader based in Seattle, USA.

In today’s world, creation and consumption are fast processes. But art is not meant to be created or consumed rushed. While a decade might seem way too long to make your dream deck a reality, the consumption of it is also relatively slow. For instance, it takes me nearly a year to read a new deck without referring to its guidebook. Even with decks I have been using for years, I still discover new symbolism every time I work with them. Most readers don’t throw away the decks they aren’t using anymore but donate them to other readers in their community who then start learning the decks again.

“The tarot isn’t a mass-produced device for fortune telling, it is a magical tool which aids personal growth and transformation, and as such, the more detailed and nuanced the card is, the more magical it becomes. The magic is in the detail. The magic is in the nuance. Artists consider every detail, from the angle of each shape to the hue of their background, every nuance is observed,” says Inbaal Honigman, a psychic and reader based in London, UK. “However, attempting to create a card by AI is akin to creating a crystal from plastic. If the spirit is not there, then the deck simply won't work. People have a soul, crystals have a spark, and tarot decks have a certain magickal quality in them which cannot be replicated by AI.”

Even if you argue that to AI-generate a tarot deck you still need to feed prompts to the AI model and therefore, it still embodies intention and spirit, I would like to remind you that the spirit that deck would embody wouldn’t be yours but that of big tech which has been proven to be racist and sexist.

Another pro-AI-generated tarot deck argument I would like to consider is that AI helps aspiring creators who aren’t artistic to realise their visions. This is a pointless argument. Some of the most popular decks, including the Rider-Waite deck were collaborations between an author and an illustrator. If you are not artistically gifted, you can always work with an illustrator to bring your vision to life. “I think these days, a lot of people just want a piece of consumer pie in the tarot scene. For those people, AI is a godsend, because it removes some of the tedium of trying to come up with good illustrations across an entire 78-card deck. They can churn out what amount to RWS reskins with relative ease,” adds Claire.

“I bought a deck from a thrift store because it was pretty to look at. I didn’t know that it was generated using AI. At the end of the day, it was just themed illustrations that were easy on the eyes,” a tarot reader who wished to remain anonymous tells me. “It is getting increasingly difficult to figure out which ones are AI-generated and which ones aren’t.”

This tarot reader is not alone in this AI-generated predicament. If you search digital tarot communities like r/tarotdecks and r/tarot for the term “AI”, you will find numerous rants from users who unknowingly bought AI-generated decks and quickly realised that they were useless as divination tools. As I confessed above, I almost fell in love with the tarot deck Pinterest pushed to my feed. If I wasn’t precarious about AI-generated creatives (and as a technology reporter and writer, I very much am), I would have bought that deck.

If you have also faced this problem, my suggestion is to look for the author of the deck. Most tarot card creators, especially the ones behind the pretty ones that catch your eyes have an online footprint. Checking the artist’s social media profiles can, to an extent, help you verify the authenticity of a deck. If you can’t find a credible online footprint, then take a closer look at the imagery and symbolism. Most AI-generated decks aren’t consistent with their imagery. If you find a deck with inconsistent themes and symbolism, then that is probably AI-generated and useless.

I’d first heard of GenAI apps like ChatGPT and Gemini when they launched in 2022. They were still rudimentary at best then. I had a colleague who posted overly formal, clearly AI-generated text and I had tried it out myself but not in a serious way. We could generate goofy images where text was muddled and fingers on hands were not rendered correctly. Its potential had not been fully realized and I had not thought of how GenAI apps could be predatory.

For context, I work for a company that does tech conferences. One day, I was looking at some sessions for an upcoming conference and happened upon a speaker who was brand new to us. Something seemed off, right away. His headshot was giving uncanny valley vibes, definitely AI-generated in an unsettling way — eyes cast downward, too-perfect skin, eerily sharp jawlines and cheekbones. I thought to myself, there's no way this is a real photo.

I turned my attention to his bio. He mentioned a project in his bio that was immediately a red flag to me. Let's call it "Generic Dating App GPT". I googled the project, opened the project's source code and my jaw dropped. Now, I'd read the book, "Men Who Hate Women," by British journalist Laura Bates earlier in 2024. It illuminated the toxic 'Manosphere' and the language that incels use.

I immediately recognized the incel and PUA (pick-up artist) speak in this project. It promised dates with "girls" (aka adult women) without any effort at all. Messages were written in edgy language and this bot would arrange dates with said girls by negging them. There were even instructions in the source code to use the “pick up rules” and derogatory advice on how to “pick up” women.

My stomach dropped, “How had no one caught this?” This project was in the second line of the speaker’s bio. So it was something this guy was clearly proud of working on — and upon further research, I found — been promoting on many occasions.

In a podcast promoting the project, this speaker laments about spending time on dating apps for results that “leave something to be desired” when you can have "all the babes without wasting your time. Apparently, Tinder GPT was the solution to draining your time on dating apps.

In the most sinister way, the project says that besides negging, the users had to share more information to create “emotional intimacy.” At the same time, they would not act "like a simp” this would share enough information to make the women trust them enough to secure a date. This emotional bond is forged by sharing personal information and conversations around intimate topics like asking women about their feelings and telling stories (which are fabricated — great foundation for a relationship).

Why bother getting to know an actual human woman when you can get a neat AI-generated summary of her interests before meeting her in person despite never actually talking to her? This whole fiasco reminded me of this quote: “Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.”

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This person’s solution to modern dating problems wasn’t to be authentic and actually talk to women, it was to dehumanize them. It’s like these men have just discovered that women are human beings with feelings, emotions, dreams and desires, but just don't really care about them. They pretend to listen to us and say the right things so they can get our phone number and eventually, get laid. It's like they think emotional vulnerability is this magical key to unlocking women and dates.

This is not the only project of this kind, of course, there are many many projects out there like this on GitHub and other places online that I would safely say are predatory. These kinds of third-party apps blatantly go against the terms and conditions of nearly all modern dating apps. So they'll always have a small disclaimer that the users should disclose they're using a bot to potential dates, but this rule is rarely enforced. You can try to report the creators of such forbidden third-party apps to said dating apps, to no avail, unfortunately.

After the initial shock, I assembled a group of everyone involved in the planning of the conference. It was mostly the women who agreed to meet about this. Our boss agreed that it had to be addressed, we had a meeting and voiced our concerns and were told then that the speaker would be disinvited from the event. I felt relieved it was addressed quickly and appropriately. End of story, all set!

However, things took a turn for the worse, when our boss and two female colleagues joined the speaker for a meeting to talk about it. Our boss thought it would be common courtesy since it was short notice and he thought the speaker deserved to know why. In the meeting, the speaker made it known that he did not see any problem whatsoever with his application. He and my boss took turns talking over my female colleagues and the meeting ended with my boss asking the speaker out for a beer after the conference.

When I heard how the meeting went down, I was furious, absolutely fuming, and sick to my stomach. Was I overreacting? Was it really not that big of a deal? I assembled an even bigger team of women and gathered more information. I wasn't going to back down without a fight and I didn't want any of my female colleagues to have to deal with this guy.

Every subsequent colleague I talked to was also outraged about this and reassured me that we were fighting for the right thing. We decided to have another meeting involving HR and our boss. I made an impassioned speech about how if we kept this speaker on board, we would be co-signing his project and his predatory values. I reminded them how that doesn't match the diversity and inclusion we aim for at our conferences.

What I left out was that I had been assaulted in college by someone I met on the app and it's what lit the fire beneath me to protect women and to stand up for what I believe in. Our boss (kind of) finally saw our side of the story and agreed that he should have talked with us before he made a final decision. In the end, the speaker was disinvited from the conference. It remains to be seen if our boss actually understood exactly why we had a problem with the speaker’s project.

By the time our boss saw our side of the story, a lot of damage was already done. One of my female colleagues said it was the last straw to her quitting and many of us were left with a bad taste in our mouths. We all had just got the confirmation that tech is a boys’ club and maybe always will be, especially in the AI world.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the world’s social media giant, Facebook started as a website to rate the attractiveness of women on Harvard’s campus. Or that IMDB was once a form for to users discuss how attractive (or not) actresses were. Now that AI is the next best thing, you can create deepfake porn videos. There are AI photo generators that can create bizarre kissing videos. The 100 most popular Generative AI apps include so-called ‘spicy chats’ and such photo and video editors. With a global rise in fascism and misogyny, these apps like this will only get more popular.

I am not writing this to scare anyone, but there are so many predatory projects out there, and we need to be aware of the not-so-positive sides of GenAI — the predatory and misogynist side. As girls online, we can only spread the word and protect each other, valuing genuine connections in places that try to create fake intimacy with GPTs. In the world of AI-generated everything, with every company having some AI feature and demanding more money for it, Meta promising to use fake accounts to drive up engagement, and other dystopian scenarios; genuine connections, putting your own words on a page and not using AI to generate them, are more important than ever.

At the end of the day, you could say many things about the speaker and creator of this app. Insecure, perhaps. It is really sad to me that he had to turn to AI to forge meaningful relationships with women. This is part of a larger movement of disgruntled young men, and while I don’t have the answers on how to de-radicalize them, I can only bring further awareness to what is out there.

To end on a brighter note, organizations are working to address the inherent biases of GenAI such as the Algorithmic Justice League founded by Dr. Joy Boulwamini. I highly recommend reading her wonderful book, “Unmasking AI.” You can also report creepy projects like this to the Algorithmic Justice League. What else can you do? Speak out when you see things like this in your life and workplace and encourage men to do the same. Continue to educate yourself on AI and inform other women, femmes, and any LGBTQ friends in your life about the horrors out there.

This is the second part of the “great shift” that happened a few years ago accepting that Black women were attractive. After all, the only consistent TikTok trend is to steal from Black creators. “The great shift is simply white approval, just because white people on the internet have decided to accept that brown people are attractive now it’s suddenly on their terms when and when we aren’t deemed desirable,” says Yusra, a 20-year-old British-Pakistani from Reading, UK.

The past few years have seen an increase in South Asian representation in Hollywood. With “Never Have I Ever” and “Bridgerton Season 2,” the West is finally accepting that South Asian people aren’t smelly or dirty like the West propagated for years. Combine this realisation with the ever-so-present coloniser guilt and lo and behold, we have gotten ourselves a TikTok trend that not just accepts us but in fact, fetishises us. What’s been even more infuriating is seeing fellow South Asians take pride in this “great shift.” After all, we have been starved for white validation since colonial times.

Now this isn’t the first time TikTok or the West has been under the limelight for appropriating South Asian culture. From Gwen Stefani’s bejewelled third eye to the clean girl aesthetics and the recent Scandivanian shawl trend, the last decade has been one of the West constantly co-opting our culture and then pushing us out of the conversations around it.

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The isolation of South Asian items from their roots and renaming them is a symptom of cultural appropriation the West has struggled with for a long time. Downward-facing dog, anyone?

When white women first became the face of Yoga in the West, brown women were increasingly alienated from Yoga studios and sessions. Suddenly, investing in expensive body-hugging leggings called “yoga pants” became mandatory. After a decade of heated debate around whether it is sinful for Christian women to wear yoga pants, now there is even a Christian line of yoga pants with Bible verses printed on them. Today, when I searched yoga on YouTube, my search results were all thin, white women flexing their flexibility.

So when in June last year, an employee from Bipty (a fashion rental brand) took to TikTok to share a picture of a bunch of white women wearing duppattas and called it “European,” "Scandinavian” and “chic,” South Asian girlhood had had enough. We didn’t want what happened to yoga and bindi happen to dupattas (even though most of us have a complex relationship with our dupattas. Re: being forced to cover up and be “modest"). The TikTok was taken down and an apology was promptly issued. The use of the word “chic” is what got me here. I have never seen “chic” be used to describe anything from my culture. The usual adjectives are “boho,” “exotic,” “hip,” etc. The dupatta when worn by a white woman is chic. But when we wear it, it is boho? Understood!

Before the chic Scandinavian girlies were the clean girls, with their carefully slicked back hair, they took over the internet leaving the brown girls wondering why these white women were being praised for an aesthetic they were once made fun of. “Growing up I experienced so much bullying from girls calling me greasy for coming to school with Vatika oil in my hair. Now oiling their hair is ‘clean.’ Wearing a bindi was weird but now they wear multiple 'face gems' to festivals,” says Harleen, a frustrated 19-year-old British Punjabi from London, UK.

Now, let’s come back to the “great Indian shift” and why this shift is indeed shifty. Remember how Hollywood in the 1930s led the zeitgeist shift to viewing Latinas as hot-headed, wild, and sexy and how even today mainstream portrayal of Latin girlhood rarely goes out of this box? Or maybe how Hollywood in the 1900s pedestaled East Asian women as “Madame Butterfly” and continues to portray them as submissive, sexually-starved caricatures — always the China Doll or the Dragon Lady — waiting to be rescued by the white man?

This narrow representation of Latinas and East Asian women has obviously resulted in real-life women getting sexualised and fetishised. But it goes beyond that. Hollywood’s portrayal of racial minorities has a direct impact on the increase in cases of violence against them like the 2021 Georgia shooting.

After the violent gun man Robert Aaron Long, shot and killed 6 Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia he told police that he suffered from a sex addiction. Apparently, the shooting was an attempt to subdue temptations. Long also confessed to frequenting massage parlours (businesses generally associated with East Asian women) in the past and launching attacks as “vengeance” against them.

I am afraid what Hollywood did to Latinas and East Asian women is exactly what TikTok is now doing to South Asian women. When a man looks into the camera and asks other men to “invest in Indian women,” we are looking at the exact zeitgeist shift — a cycle of fetishisation leading to an entitlement over women’s sexuality leading to actual cases of violence against them.

Another issue with this trend is that the shift only happens to you if you are a South Asian with Eurocentric features. Dark-skinned South Asian women already face hurtful jabs and constant taunts to lighten their skin tone from within their homes. The “great Indian shift” is only going to cause a greater divide between South Asian women with white adjacent features and those with more unique features.

In conclusion, the “great Indian shift” is another rehashed trend aimed at making us cry for approval from the Western hemisphere. It’s just another way of keeping our minds colonized, picking and choosing what elements of our culture we can and cannot be proud of. In simpler words, it’s yassified cultural colonization and we will have none of it!

I was in a booth at Chili’s staring at the bottom of an empty glass of Diet Coke and waiting for my friend to return from the bathroom when I heard it. A group of friends giggling through their Triple Dipper on a Tuesday night just like the rest of us. Chili’s has become a go-to spot for young adults these days. The place is riddled with them, but that’s a story for another day.

“Mama the waitress behind you💜”

“Not the…”

“Ok, werk.”

I felt oddly comforted eavesdropping on their conversation. There was safety in the assumption that at any moment I could turn around and jump into this friend group behind me, totally seamlessly. After all, I had something to add! I had follow-up questions! I was speaking the same language.

On the ride home my friend and I laughed at how funny it was to hear a conversation so similar to the ones we’d had before. It became apparent to us that at minimum, they consumed the same pop culture. We wanted to ask their opinion on the Diddy scandal, The Harris HQ viral edits, or if they’d “ever tried… this one?” a la Sabrina Carpenter's Short and Sweet Tour. Clearly, we had so much in common. We could tell by the verbiage, the jokes, even the cadence.

What is überbrain, you ask? Incredible question.

Überbrain can be explained by example. Let me take you through the rich, studied etymology of the word “nub.” My college roommate brought this word from her high school friend group in Portland to our lowly, dingy Ohio dorm room.

“He was such a nub.”

“They were really sweet, kind of nubby. You know what I mean?”

“She’s such a little nubbin I love her so much.”

We started using it, then our friends, then theirs. It rippled outward. Even though she’s back across the country, and we don’t talk as often, I still use nub. I can’t Merriam-Webster nub for you, it’s a definition you must intuit. You must feel it.

The word was created and shared by those who know each other and then beyond. It’s literally how language works, how words earn their meaning—it’s out of shared connection. “Synchronicity.” Überbrain.

The essence of überbrain quickly became core to my friends and me, the shared safety of speaking the same language. When you know people, really know them, you feel safe. You feel comfy. You can even anticipate their next statement.

It’s closeness! It’s intimacy!

It’s the Algorithm?

There’s a reason it’s called, “going viral.” Everyone sees it, it spreads quickly.

Viral can be good. It can socialize ideas or expand our vocabularies. It wins the popularity contest for a moment, whatever the content (and its context) it catches on and becomes mass-adopted. On the other end, there’s comfort in finding your fellow weirdos on the Internet, your niche neighborhood – shared interests, concerns, shared enthusiasm.

You used to have to seek these communities out. They wouldn’t find you, situated comfortably in front of your screen patiently waiting for more content like Oliver Twist. It's different today. We’re all digital natives from the same hometown and the same Internet. Despite our niche neighborhoods, the social norms stay largely the same. Humans gravitate toward similarity, it’s in our nature. But now, we get there faster. Now, we have help.

When we all live in the same net-neighborhood, we talk about the same things. It’s fun having an “inside” joke with what feels like everyone around you, it’s also why it feels so weird to encounter someone or something that shouldn’t be there.

Remember “Very Demure, Very Mindful?” It was the most common Internet slang about a month ago. It was fun and silly. Then it was inescapable. Finally, it was tired and eye-roll-inducing. It lost its shine right around the time brands started adopting it. It felt opportunistic and unnatural. That’s because it was not rooted in connection or intimacy.

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The lack of intimacy between the general public and brands isn’t surprising, but when we zoom out there wasn’t much intimacy or connection coming from anywhere. It was gigabrain.

While the oxymoronic “viral inside joke” can make us feel part of a bigger, connected group (and sometimes that holds true) simply sharing jokes or language can lead us to accidental assumptions. Despite our groupspeak, our values aren’t the same. That’s where gigabrain comes in.

When überbrain is derived from shared connection and knowing each other, gigabrain is the commonality the algorithm decides for us. It’s the common ground we don’t necessarily find, but more are sorted into based on age, seconds watched, saves, likes, and data harvested against our will. You and a friend may have bought the same bag in different colors, but today it’s harder to discern if that was your überbrain or you both just got the same advertisement.

But back to language.

When you overhear a group of strangers sounding exactly like your friends it’s easy to assume they are… exactly like your friends. This is where we may need to start being more careful. More mindful. (Sorry! Couldn’t help it.)

There is a commonly accepted set of morals online. Whether we like it or not, there is a distinct way to behave to be accepted online, just like there is out in the world. However, the code of accepted conduct is easier to fake when behind a screen. It’s why we saw the word “wokefishing” rise in the last few years, it's why men put “moderate” on their Hinge profiles as opposed to “conservative”.

I’m not saying that Internet trends exist only for those who share your beliefs. What I am saying is that simply sharing algorithmic similarities does not make us the same, we cannot assume that everyone is just like us. Not everyone holds the same system of beliefs, POVs, likes, dislikes, the whole thing. There’s good and bad to this, right?

On my best days, it means that there’s still an opportunity to learn something new from other people. On my worst days, everyone is hiding their secrets and scary opinions. I net out somewhere in the middle usually: my echo chamber is warm and cozy, but I probably should go outside once in a while.

Whether your brain is über or giga (surprise, it’s both) the thesis of this letter is to ask the questions. Get to know other people, find out how much you have in common or don’t. It’s not always a bad thing. Turn around in your booth at Chili’s and tell them you think they’re funny or something. Take the inside joke outside, let it be the starting point.