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.”

Share

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.

Share

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.

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.

Share

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.”

Share

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.

girl online is a reader-supported publication on what women are doing on the internet and what the internet is doing to them. If you’re a regular here (I love you!), consider buying me a coffee to help me keep all issues free to read.

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

girl online is a reader-supported publication 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.

Buy Me A Coffee

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

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

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.

Share

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.

Share

“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).

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

“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.

Share

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.

Share

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!!!

Share

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.”

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

This dino chips fiasco was not my last escapade with snark subreddits. They have ruined the parasocial relationships I have with multiple influencers and I am better for it. I have never actually participated in any snark subreddit but have visited them now and again to satiate my thirst for good old gossip.

As the name suggests, snark subreddits focus on critiquing celebrities, usually influencers. If you dig enough you can find snark subreddits of all kinds — location-specific (like r/NYCinfluencersnark), genre-specific (like r/parentsnark that snarks on mommy and daddy bloggers), and if you are influential (derogatory; also a code word for pissing people off) enough, you can even get an entire subreddit dedicated to you.

Snark subreddits are the meeting point of anonymous netizens who rant about how out-of-touch and entitled some influencers are. These rants can range anywhere from calling out their lies and undisclosed ads to body-shaming and cyberbullying. If you haven't had the pleasure (or displeasure) of using Reddit, here is a little context on how the platform works.

On Reddit, you can find subreddits (communities) with thousands of members and threads (posts) with hundreds of comments on literally every niche subculture under the sun. But what makes the platform unique is its content distribution system. Unlike other major social media sites, Reddit is decentralised and democratised — users upvote or downvote threads and comments under them which ultimately decide if they get shown to more people. Reddit also heavily relies on user moderators of subreddits to do the heavy lifting of drafting and enforcing the community guidelines of their respective subreddits. So ultimately, the users decide what kind of content they share and consume, not an algorithm made to maximise profits.

In the past few months, snark subreddits have been in the news for all the wrong reasons — Reddit banned multiple subreddits, including the ones dedicated to influencers Lily Chapman and Trisha Paytas for doxxing the subjects of their discussions. These developments have ignited conversations about cyberbullying, influencer culture, parasocial relationships, and more importantly, the power imbalance of the internet.

Before Reddit took down the subreddits snarking on Lily Chapman, she posted a series of TikToks calling out the harassment she was facing on Reddit. “Snarking communities are unhealthy, they’re obsessive, they allow lies to be posted, they don’t moderate the lies, they indoctrinate new people to believe these lies and go way too far,” Chapman says in her TikTok post. “And most people don’t even know that this is happening.”

Chapman also said that taking them down wasn’t easy, Reddit didn’t care, and she sent a cease and desist notice to the subreddits’ moderators after hiring a private investigator to find their identity. “These people should all be registered as NET OFFENDERS and should have their WiFi shut off permanently. The list should be sent to cell phone providers and the providers should cut them off. They should not be able to get on the internet. Like, at all lol. And all of their WiFi should be rerouted to Lily so that her WiFi is even faster,” a comment under her video responding to her snarkers reads.

How true are Lily Chapman's claims? Are snark subreddits indoctrinating people to actively hate poor celebrities? Should the snarkers’ WiFi be cut off and rerouted to the flag-bearers of the creator economy? This issue of girl online dissects the relationship between influencers and their snarkers and how it all leads to the big question — the power imbalance of the internet.

Modern-day snark subreddits are modelled off their early internet predecessors, the snark forums of the early 2000s such as Lipstick Alley, Oh No They Didn’t, Get Off My Internets, Guru Gossip etc. While these forums were vicious with little to no boundaries and rules, snark subreddits have better guidelines in place. For instance, r/blogsnark has rules that specify that the snarkers can’t reveal information posted on a private or deleted account, not to mock how the subject of discussion is processing their grief or their health conditions, and about posting gossip without proof.

Other subreddits dedicated to a specific influencer have guidelines that mandate that the users don’t make direct contact with the influencer or body shame them. The moderators also ban users who make homophobic, racist, or sexist comments. They also ensure the influencers’ boundaries are respected. For example; if a creator doesn’t share pictures of their kids or family online, the snarkers also don't.

“We aren’t faceless jealous netizens tearing down a public figure for no reason. Granted, a minority of communities do fit that bill but are promptly taken down by Reddit when complaint tickets are raised,” the moderator of a snark subreddit who requested to stay anonymous clarifies with me.

A major positive impact of snark subreddits is that they challenge the internet's existing power dynamics. Influencers earn their bread by selling us their lives, which are at worst fabricated and at best curated. The existing framework of social media platforms helps them create and maintain the image they desire for themselves, in other words, the image most profitable to them. There is nothing social about how we interact with creators on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. It is a one-sided relationship — the influencer sells us their lives and we either buy it with blind faith or question them by screaming into the void.

The curation of influencer selves doesn’t end with how they present themselves online. By turning off comments, deleting the comments calling-them out, and restricting users who disagree with them, creators also curate the dialogue that happens within their communities. This is where snark subreddits come into the picture. They provide a platform for people who feel betrayed by a celebrity who previously made a living off their attention and time.

Share

Snark subreddits call out celebrities and influencers for being out of touch, profiting off their children, and undisclosed ads, revealing their scams and dishonest practices and reviewing the products they recommend or sell. “Most snarkers start snarking when something feels off or disingenuous with an influencer they follow,” another anonymous snarker told Defector. “A lot of times it is criticizing the privilege of influencers, how they advertise the beauty standard to a vulnerable following, and their blatant consumerism.”

A snarker who fell for body editing and diet culture rhetorics on social media and ended up deleting all platforms told me that snark subreddits helped her realise the truth behind the content she used to expose herself to, “It was literally lifesaving to learn about the dark side of social media. I had no idea.”

For some, snarking is pure entertainment — “This is my version of reading the New York Times” while others aren’t happy with the creator economy and bring a sort of eat-the-rich attitude to the table — “Influencers do not deserve as much praise as they get and should be humbled once in a while.”

While snarkers initially come together because of their shared distaste for an influencer, they usually stay for the community. For instance, even though r/blogsnark is all about snarking on bloggers and influencers, they have a weekly thread to share “the joy, misery, and just daily stuff.” In this thread, they share their wins and failures, and rant about their not influential (non-derogatory) lives.

“I am a bit miffed at my sister for not warning me her kiddo was sick when we went over Wednesday to help my other niece set up a new computer,” a snarker shares. Another snarker promptly declares solidarity, “So annoying. This seems to happen to us every time we visit my family for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I keep asking them NOT to bring over sick kids when we’ve travelled 400 miles for the holiday, but no one listens! Last Thanksgiving, my brother was popping Dayquil at the table!!”

Snark subreddits have their own vernacular, inside jokes, and memes that might not make sense to outsiders. This exclusivity makes the community an escape, a little corner of the internet where you hang out and make mostly harmless jokes about your favourite out-of-touch-with-reality influencer. That being said, there are snark subreddits with little to no moderation that sometimes go out of control becoming a real problem for the subjects of their discussions. This is where Reddit should step in and strictly enforce its community guidelines.

At the end of the day, influencers and snarkers are two sides of the same coin. Snarkers are anti-fans, just like the hate-watchers. The fame of the influencer is directly proportional to the popularity of their snark subreddit and snarkers are often as obsessed with their subjects as much as their loyal followers. But they have different functions to perform. While followers fuel influencer culture and strengthen the creator economy, snarkers — with a little bit of personal discretion and better moderation from Reddit — can hold influencers accountable and to an extent, balance the internet’s power asymmetry.

Does he give you a list of things to do in order to please him? What angles he finds sexy? What number on the scale is acceptable to him? How to protect your femininity? Does he watch you pretend to care about things you don’t and ignore things you do?

Don’t worry. You aren’t alone.

I have a man inside my head too.

When I was 12, he watched me dry-shave my legs and leave wet tissue papers over the cuts.

When I was 15, he told me I wasn’t like other girls. That I was different. And I’d continue to be different if I distanced myself from them.

When I was 17, he watched me cry as I bled through my school uniform pants and told me I had to make sure nobody knew.

When I was 19, he watched me go to bed hungry and work out for hours. He told me it was okay. He liked me better lighter.

When I was 21, he told me I was disgusting and impure when a man forced himself on me.

He watched me speak. He precisely measured out the amount of sweetness I had to inject into my tone to be womanly. He watched me cross my legs as I sat down holding my skirt in place. He watched me cover up voluntarily. He told me my hair had to be long and pretty. That my tan wasn’t the sign of a happy child but that of a woman who has lost herself. He watched me defend him. He watched me tell other girls they were too girly and that’s why nobody takes them seriously.

All my life, through my eyes, he looked at other women and told me I had to be different from them. That they were my competition. That I had to be jealous of them. That being feminine is bad but also what I was supposed to do. I believed him. Everything I did, I made sure I had his approval. It was exhausting.

The man in my head was the personification of the misogyny I had internalised. He was the agent of patriarchy assigned to me. He was also a family heirloom.

His father was inside my mother’s head until she murdered him. His grandfather still resides inside my grandmother’s head. I ask her to kill him. She says he is not like other men. He keeps her in check. She loves him more than anything. My grandmother explains to me that without the man inside her head, she will lose her way, culture will crumble, and society will collapse.

The man inside my head made sure he kept me in my place. He made me believe that patriarchy didn’t hate all women. They just hate the ones who loved themselves. The women who thought. The women who questioned. The women who rebelled. The women who had killed the men inside their heads.

As I grew up, he started making less and less sense. I noticed that his words were contradictory. I noticed he was a liar. The women around me were nothing like what he had taught me. They weren’t attention-seeking. They weren’t bitches. They weren’t opportunists. They weren’t fake. They were sensitive. They were empathetic. They were resourceful. They were kind. They were beautiful. They were smart. They were me. I was them.

So, I decided to kill him. It wasn’t easy.

Every day I poisoned him a little bit. I fought with him. I confronted him. I asked him to leave me alone. I told him God is a woman. I told him he can’t control me. I told him I wanted to be like the women around me.

He told me he hated me. Then he told me he loved me and missed the old me — the misogynist me. I cried, screamed, and questioned my existence.

But the women around me helped me again.

They told me that the first step to killing the man inside my head was to accept his existence. “Yes, there is a man inside my head. Yes, I have internalised misogyny. But I will kill him,” I told myself.

They told me to be kind to myself. They told me to sit with my feelings. Did I feel personally attacked when a feminist made a perfectly valid argument against a double standard? Why was that? What made me think that she was coming for me?

They asked me to read feminist thinkers and make decisions for myself without consulting the man inside my head. Oh, how refreshing was that!

They asked me to believe in myself. That I was smart and resourceful. That I didn’t have to prove to the world that I am good at what I do. That I was entitled to take up space.

They told me to unlearn the language I was brought up with. For instance, they told me that women don’t give men sex. It wasn’t theirs to take. It was a mutual activity that both should derive pleasure from.

They told me that femininity wasn’t bad. They told me that it was okay to enjoy the things I liked. That I wasn’t better for not enjoying cooking. That I wasn’t better because I liked watching sports. That I could exist as both. That being feminine wasn’t being a woman. That being masculine wasn’t being a man. They encouraged me to explore my androgeny.

They told me all they wanted for me was to find myself, think for myself, and act for myself.

And do you know what I got in return?

I got myself. I got a community. I got my biggest cheerleaders. I got my harshest critics. I got people who would defend my name in rooms I haven’t been to. I got people who hold my hand as I go through this journey called life. I got to experience the purest form of love — platonic female friendships.

After all this while, the man inside my head isn’t dead. He is merely dormant.

On the days I have my guard down, he wakes up and tells me that the girl with leg hair is gross. That the single woman in her 50s must be sad. That the single mother doesn’t value herself. That the unapologetic woman is a slut. That the fat woman is unloveable. That I need to make myself lighter again. That my nose is too big. That my tummy is too jiggly. And I believe him. Just for a moment. Until I bludgeon him to comatose once again.

“Tumblr becoming the cool, fun, healthy place on the internet is the funniest shit that ever happened online,” earlier this year author John Green shared on X (formerly Twitter). If you have been online for as long as I have, you must have come across the infamous John Green cock post at least once. Green was very active on Tumblr in the 2010s and was publicly bullied off the platform in 2015. So he has experienced Tumblr trauma as much as your friendly e-girl next door.

Note: Green did not write that post. For a while, there was a feature on Tumblr where anyone could edit others’ posts. Yes!!! Wild. I know.

In an interview given to The Miami Student a few days ago, Green confirmed that he is back on Tumblr, “It’s sort of a sane-ish place on the social internet, which is very, very funny to me because I definitely lived through some times when it wasn’t.”

In late 2022, there was much chatter about 2014 Tumblr aesthetics making a comeback and what that means for our body image issues. Many then-teenagers on 2014 Tumblr and now-adults, wrote letters laden with traumatic nostalgia appealing to the audience not to let 2014 Tumblr aesthetics make a comeback. “I hope 2014 Tumblr can be en vogue without the need for it to be followed by eight years of recovery. Praying that this time a character can just be a character rather than a devil on their shoulder, a skirt just a skirt rather than feeling like a personal attack, a song not a testament,” Lucy Harbon wrote in a Polyester article.

So what was so wrong about 2014 Tumblr that even people who are so nostalgic about their teenage Tumblr girl selves refuse to log back on? Well, the answer to that is complicated, but stick around to find out.

Disclaimer: The term 2014 Tumblr is more of an umbrella term that encompasses 2012, 2013, and 2014 Tumblr. In this essay, I have used 2014 Tumblr and 2010s Tumblr to refer to the period.

I was active in fan communities on Tumblr and Google Plus from 2012 onwards. I was a chubby child who was bullied in school and fandoms were how I found those who understood me. To them, I wasn’t a nerd. I was smart, witty, and creative. Until 2017 — when I was sent to boarding school — my virtual friends (and maybe my younger sister) were the only people I actually cared about.

The school I was going to had a no-personal-device policy. I remember sending long, sad personalised letters to my mutuals on how I wouldn’t be able to talk to them every day and promised to catch up when I came home for summer breaks. But by the time I graduated in 2019 and logged back in, all my friends had already logged out forever and that was the end of my Tumblr girl era.

While my exit from Tumblr was rather undramatic, it was not so for most ex-Tumblr girls. For them, saying goodbye to the platform was the culmination of years of bullying, harassment, and exposure to problematic content. The final straw for many was Tumblr’s policy against NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content enforced in December 2018, along with what The Verge called “a comically inaccurate takedown system.”

While the policy in itself was meant to make it a safer platform, and more importantly, please investors and advertisers, the problem was with how Tumblr enforced it. The site’s auto detectors inaccurately flagged innocent posts as NSFW and took them down. Unsurprisingly, this negatively affected LGBTQ+ users, the backbone of Tumblr.

Some of these rules were reversed in November 2022 after Tumblr and New York City’s Commission on Human Rights — who investigated Tumblr and found that their content moderation system was, in fact, biased against LGBTQ+ content — came to a settlement that stipulated that Tumblr revise its discriminatory policies around NSFW content and user appeals.

“So many of my favourite creators and friends left during the NSFW purge, so after 2018, there was no reason to be there,” Hannah, a 26-year-old from Scotland who was active on Tumblr from 2009 through 2018 tells me. “On top of that, there was an influx of bots. All the friendly creative people who used to share the space had been replaced by automated sexbots. Not very SFW, if you ask me.”

Now, let’s look at a few of the events that lead up to this exodus.

Share

Even though, Tumblr wasn’t created to be a platform for fans and fandoms, over the years it had become a sort of haven for fans, especially for people who left LiveJournal (a long-form blogging platform that used to be pre-Tumble fandom, haven). Tumblr’s unique tagging system made it easier for fans to connect and hang out. This tag is also what led to the downfall of Tumblr, but more on that in a minute. Fandoms thrived on Tumblr sharing art, fiction, theories, and ships. Even today, fandoms are the few active communities on Tumblr.

Fandom critic and creator of Fandom Exile, Monia Ali defines 2014 as Tumblr’s banner year, “It marks a break between the utopian vision of Tumblr and fan culture and the clash with the reality that things were not that great,” she explains. Ali notes that the failure of Dashcon was a defining factor of the 2014 Tumblr culture.

For the uninitiated, Dashcon was an independent fan convention that happened in July 2014, catering to Tumblr’s fan communities. It was the first large gathering of Tumblr users. Dashcon was a massive failure, both in terms of mismanagement of attendance. “The failure of Dashcon is often used to mark the shift away from the fun idealism of the user base, and Dashcon happened in the middle of the year. Along with SuperWhoLock [Supernatural-Doctor Who-BBC Sherlock crossover] and Glee fandoms flaming out, these were soothsayers for the future of fandom on the site,” adds Ali.Post-Dashcon Tumblr was a feverdream. Fandoms got aggressive and creators were bullied and driven off the platform.

In a Kotaku article titled “In 2018, Tumblr Is A Joyless Black Hole,” a lot of this change in the site’s fandom etiquette is also ascribed to Yahoo’s 2013 acquisition of Tumblr, the platform’s lack of a meaningful Block feature, and the site’s content distribution structure. The article explains:

Though Tumblr has a messaging feature, the easiest way to talk to another Tumblr user is through reblogs. A user takes another person’s post and appends a note to the bottom to the original poster. The original post and the comment then appear on the reblogger’s Tumblr and in the feeds of anyone following the user who reblogged the post. The post gets longer and longer as it’s reblogged, making it hard to follow conversations that involve more than two people or that go on for a long time. Being unable to really talk to another person means that conflict on Tumblr escalates quickly, sometimes over things that seem inconsequential.

The Kotaku article also shares the story of a user :

“It actually happened to me once,” Elana, a Tumblr user who has been on the site for about five years, told Kotaku. “Nothing super bad, but I complained about [Dragon Age: Inquisition’s] Vivienne’s writing being kinda racist. The wording was bad and made it difficult to back up when a few people jumped on it to call me an SJW [social justice warrior] snowflake. At the time my follower count was pretty low and I ended up getting a few thousand notes, which was waaaaay more than anything I had posted before.” Elana deleted the blog in question, but because of how Tumblr works the reblogs of it still exist.

Tumblr’s content distribution structure, specifically tags is also what made it a breeding ground for posts that glorified eating disorders, self-harm, and other mental illnesses. For context, on Tumblr, posts are organised by tags which are added both manually by the users and automatically by the algorithm. If you want to participate in a community, you simply follow the tags and reblog the tagged posts with your thoughts. While this feature de-centralized the hierarchy of content distribution and made having a huge following less important, it also meant that you regularly came across stuff you didn’t sign up for.  

“One of the big differences between Tumblr and previous blogs and forums where this [harmful content] was common is that Tumblr is self-directed and was primarily a media feed rather than a social feed. You didn't join Tumblr to join a pro-ana [anorexia nervosa, a type of eating disorder] community, but you found pro-ana content, and because of the site's infrastructure, you perpetuated it,” explains Ali.

Share

“I had no idea what depression or self-mutilation was before joining the platform. I will never forget the Tumblr trend at the time #cutsforbieber where girls my age [12 - 14 then] were cutting themselves for Justin Bieber,” shares Katelyn, a 24-year-old from the USA who joined Tumblr to be a part of K-pop and anime fandoms. “I couldn't tell you why, but I remember so many girls my age coming into school with cuts on their arms after this trend surfaced.”

Tumblr in the 2010s — not unlike any other social media platform — glorified thinness with its #thinspo and pro-ana communities. While some of us were more actively engaged in these communities than others, it has to be noted that the constant exposure to this content made us all dissect our teenage bodies and question our worth. Now, I am not saying this was a Tumblr-specific issue. The glorification of thinness is heavily ingrained in our culture. #edtwt (ED Twitter) and #edtok (ED TikTok) are very active even today.

What I am saying is that Tumblr was where my generation — zillennials — got their first exposure to people who glorified eating disorders and provided a community where you’d be accountable to each other if you eat, where slogans like “Hungry to bed, hungry to rise, makes a girl a smaller size” and “Keep calm and the hunger will pass” reminds you to that being thin is the most important thing to be alive for.

“I think the most problematic aspect of Tumblr was the lack of monitored content. You could get away with posting anything on Tumblr before it introduced a level of content monitoring after 2013-2015ish,” says Katelyn. “From eating disorder content to porn, to self-harm and the glorification of drug use, there were so many young minds on Tumblr who shouldn't have been exposed to harmful content, and that could have been prevented if there was some level of content monitoring from Tumblr.”

Katelyn’s opinion is also echoed by Ria who opened up to me about her experience of being groomed on Tumblr. A now 22-year-old from India, she was active in the SuperWhoLock fandom in the 2010s and ran a studyblr till 2021. “It took me a long time to realise or admit that I had been groomed, it was around that time I decided to step away from the fandom aspect of Tumblr. Dealing with the impact of all those things took several years and it still affects my sexual and romantic relationships,” Ria said adding that this is more of an issue on how fandom used to operate at the time than Tumblr itself. Even then, she is precarious about ever logging back in.

In the early 2010s, Tumblr was also very aesthetic-driven. You had to look a certain way, act a certain way, and dress a certain way — sad, thin, white, seemingly disinterested in life — to get popular. This aesthetics is also closely associated with the music genre indie sleaze and pays homage to the ‘90s grunge aesthetics, hipster fashion, and 80s electro-rock music.

Madison Huizinga elaborates on the 2010s Tumblr aesthetic in her newsletter Cafe Hysteria:

It was the dawn of edgy, self-described “aesthetics,” featuring blogs plastered with images of knee-high socks, Doc Martens boots, American Apparel skater skirts, and vinyl records from The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys. Fandom culture was flourishing, as fan blogs for John Green novels, One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, Doctor Who, and more abounded. Everyone was streaming “Boom Clap” by Charli XCX and memorizing the “It’s a Metaphor” monologue from The Fault in Our Stars. You just had to be there.

Huizinga continues:

Discussions of depression, in particular, abounded, accompanied by photos that enhanced their gloomy tones. Among images of fishnets, chokers, and flannels tied around waists, were striking photos documenting evidence of self-destructive behavior. Pastel pills spilled out of canisters, cigarette burns, and images of self-harm were scattered across blogs alongside despondent screencaps from American Horror Story and Lana Del Rey music videos. All of which was cloaked in a black and white, grainy filter. In many ways, this moment of blatant, artistic expressions of sadness paralleled the young countercultural grunge era of the 1990s.

According to Dr Natalie Ann Hendry, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, and co-author of “Tumblr: Digital Media and Society,” another reason why Tumblr became a breeding ground for such problematic communities was the incoherence of the platform, unlike Instagram, which at that time had easily defined accounts, posts, hashtags, and so on. “This digital experience produces small boundaries or barriers for people to participate which makes the platform a little more obscure and this allows it to act as a place for subcultures or alternative ways of doing digital life,” she explains.

“The communal aspects developed over time in the form of identification and in-or-out-group dynamics taking off,” Monia Ali adds. “When you feel in control of the content you're consuming you let your guard down and it feels like a more ‘authentic’ experience. It feels more intimate and more honest. You can be more vulnerable, a space where your ‘true self’ is on display. But that’s the thing — being on display means it has to be maintained and constructed and perpetuated. This entrenches behaviours, feelings, and patterns as you consume and perform, you don't realise you're trying to conform as you’re doing it. You can get stuck in spirals that become part of your identity and develop attachments to a community depending on your obeisance to the established norms. You're not as in control as you think you are.”

What is interesting about Tumblr is that people had and have very strong connections to the platform. Just like this was the place so many of us learned about depression, porn, eating disorders, and self-harm; Tumblr was also the place we first learned about Queerness, feminism, self-acceptance, and safe spaces. And this is why you will find so many of us being nostalgic about it or even wishing we could be our teenage Tumblr girl selves again.

“Being interested in anime was not something I was open about when I was younger, but Tumblr gave me a safe, anonymous space to explore my interests and build relationships with people around the world with similar interests to me that I didn't have outside of Tumblr. It reassured me that I wasn't strange or weird for liking the shows and music that I enjoyed,” confesses Katelyn. “I also learned about feminism for the first time through Tumblr. While some topics I was too young to fully grasp, it did give me a sense of power and pride at that young age, being exposed to content that uplifted women.”

Hannah says, “Despite all its problematic aspects, Tumblr helped me grow a moral backbone and, as stuffy as it sounds, made me a better person. My views on the world and how it must be improved for the good of all people are built on what I learned on Tumblr. I learned about the fight for queer rights, the limits of women’s suffrage and the intersections of Queerness and race in feminist issues, and was introduced to powerhouse Black thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and so on. I learned about the struggles of indigenous peoples all over the world. I learned about disabled rights and the struggles of trans people. I watched the #MeToo movement unfold there. I grew up in a small Scottish town, where else would I learn all these things?”

Even though it took Ria several years to heal from the grooming she underwent on Tumblr she credits the platform for equipping her with the language to grapple with her Queer awakening. “I was a lonely teenager who otherwise felt misunderstood,” she confessed. “I was the only Queer person I knew in middle school.”

According to Dr Hendry, there is an additional reason behind the love-hate that Tumblr receives, especially in recent years. “The years of 2014 hatred line up with the things that people often recall in my interviews — that really strange time when you’re not a child, not an older young person or adult,” she explains. “There’s been enough time to reflect on those years now. Those 13-year-olds in 2014 are now 23, maybe finished university or moving on to other parts of their lives. They’re old enough to talk about their digital challenges without still being in it. Nostalgia works in waves – you need enough distance from something to then have space for intense feelings and memories to emerge.”

So then, is Tumblr making a comeback?

Firstly, Tumblr never actually went away completely. Fandoms still thrive there and there isn’t an alternative platform that caters to Tumblr’s active userbase. So it definitely isn’t going anywhere. In Monia Ali’s words: Twitter has declined, Instagram's algorithm is hurting everyone, TikTok is video-based, and Discord is entirely walled-off/private. 

Secondly, I don’t think it is making a comeback either. Tumblr is fundamentally different from other platforms — Reddit, Twitter, Instagram — that we are used to. Tumblr doesn’t necessarily function with a robust algorithm that pushes content to your explore page. For instance, if you like a post that doesn’t boost the post’s visibility. All it does is act like a save button. To amplify a post, you need to reblog it. It is a very user-interactive algorithm that we are too spoiled to appreciate.

For what it is worth, I believe both the hate and love Tumblr has received in the past few years is justified. Tumblr in the 2010s was very black and white. You either felt extremely seen or completely invalidated. You were showered with love and support one day and bullied the other. With constant arguments about what is in and what is out, we all wanted to be in, which means we strived to please strangers on the internet who at that were the only community we all had. As Dr Hendry says, a platform with such intensity is not a platform we can expect people to talk about with nuance ten years down the lane.

Last week, a friend shared the link to a YouTube video titled “Get cancer ASAP” and asked me, “Dude, WTF.” A few days prior I had introduced her to the practice of meditating using subliminal audio. As she started searching for them on YouTube, she came across this particular video — the worst nightmare of the subliminal community.

Subliminals are a lesser-known tool used for affirmation and manifestation purposes. The idea of it is simple — instead of repeating an affirmation aloud or writing it on paper, you hide it under a song or a soothing sound and listen to it on the go.

Some believe that this is more effective than other manifestation tools like scripting or visualisation. Since you do not actively hear the affirmations, they can bypass your sceptic conscious self and directly affect your gullible subconscious self, bringing you better results.

Subliminals draw from the power of suggestion and cannot dramatically change your DNA or physical features but some isolated studies have shown them to boost users’ self-confidence and motivation to pursue their goals.

If you search “subliminals” on YouTube you will find hundreds of thousands of videos curated for specific benefits like clear skin, healthy hair, dream job, good grades, ideal partner, and good luck.

Now if you are a non-believer, I totally get it. But don’t stop reading because of that. Today’s newsletter is not about the law of attraction or how you can manifest your ideal life by saying “I am healthy, wealthy, and beautiful” a million times. It is about the insidious underbelly of YouTube's subliminal creators — underground subliminals creators, more popularly known as ug creators.

Underground subliminal creators make subliminal audios to help you manifest the worst possible scenarios you can ever imagine. As the name suggests, they are not widely accepted in the subliminal community but do have their own smaller communities where you can find tips on how to manifest a stalker, an eating disorder, or even sexual assault.

Some users claim that ug subliminals “work better” because of the use of exaggerated affirmations. For instance, in a subliminal meant to lose weight and achieve your dream body, they add affirmations like “I feel repulsed at the sight of food” or “I am losing weight every time I breathe” to help you reach your goal faster.

Even though this might seem pretty harmless at first, especially when you are discontent with life and looking for a quick fix, they can have harmful after-effects.

“I remember using a study obsession ug subliminal for a month, where I thought the benefits were just exaggerated and my mind could handle them but no I ended up studying 16 to 20 hours every day. I became obsessed to the point where I didn't want to do anything besides studying — not even leave my house or eat,” an anonymous user shared on r/subliminal. “This went on until my exam and afterwards I got depressed for months because I didn't have anything to study for and the benefits were literally ‘get miserable and depressed when you don't study’.”

Share

Most popular underground subliminals on YouTube have hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments congratulating each other on their results. This is a comment on a video for manifesting getting raped:

Disclaimer: I don’t think you can get cancer from listening to a subliminal but the people who use it definitely think so and I think it is worth exploring why.

Saner people in the subliminal community (including yours truly) have voiced their concerns on the existence of underground subliminals that claim to help you manifest depression, psychosis, and other mental illnesses. The answer we usually get is that we simply won’t understand. That’s true. I don’t understand.

After all, the foundation of manifestation is built on the idea of becoming your best self and creating a life that you are proud of, right? How can depression be somebody’s ideal state of living? I was curious. So I went searching and I found some answers for why people are manifesting the worst possible scenarios.

For instance, rape fantasies. In a culture that shames women’s sexual desires, they are caught between wanting to experience sexual pleasure and feeling guilty about their desire. Fantasising about being coerced or forced into sexual contact absolves them of this society-induced guilt while experiencing pleasure.

Another explanation given by people using underground subliminals is that they are already suffering from mental illnesses and they want to make it worse so somebody takes them seriously. It is a cry for attention. I assume that people using subliminals to get cardiac arrest are those who suffer from suicidal thoughts and are looking for ways to absolve themselves of the guilt associated with killing themselves.

My heart goes out to them. These are people who need real medical attention. And advising these people to just stay away from such content is pointless. These users aren’t in the right state of mind to make an educated decision for themselves. They are helpless. They don’t see another way out. So they try to cope in the ways accessible to them and a free 3-minute video on YouTube is inarguably the most accessible way of coping.

The real culprits here are the creators of underground subliminals. They are capitalising on their viewers’ pain and agony for clout and money.

Note: Most subliminal creators aren’t monetised through the YouTube Partner Program. This is because they usually don’t have the copyright to the songs or other audios used to mask the affirmations. They usually monetise their content by selling other affiliate products to their subscribers or through subscriber-model platforms like Patreon.

These creators also remove any comments calling them out and warning others to not use these subliminals. So the only way to go about it is to report these accounts and hope that YouTube takes them down. But the larger subliminal community including the well-meaning members have reached a consensus not to do this.

In early 2023, YouTube started cracking down on the accounts of subliminal creators because they didn’t meet YouTube’s community guidelines. Some of the widely-respected creators lost their accounts because of this crackdown (RIP Rosemary subliminals, you will be missed). Due to this, most creators with a large following have stopped posting on YouTube and moved to paywalled platforms like Patreon.

A large section of subliminal users believe that this is because people started mass-reporting underground subliminals causing the YouTube algorithm to associate the word “subliminal” with breaking community guidelines and eventually leading to the mass crackdown.

A more possible scenario would be that a begrudged user who didn’t get results from a creator’s subliminals reported their account. Most of these creators have audio to help people lose weight and YouTube flags it as promoting eating disorders, which in a way it is. So when a user reports them, their accounts get taken down.

Previously, there was an unwritten rule that underground subliminal creators would add the keyword “ug subliminal” to their video titles so people who aren’t actively looking for them can stay away. But since the YouTube crackdown, creators have started removing the word “subliminal” from their descriptions altogether making it very difficult for the untrained eye to identify an underground subliminal.

The subliminal community should stop normalising ug creators. It is not “you do you” when the well-being of the community members is at stake. Report them whenever you come across them. YouTube does a great job of actually taking down problematic content when it comes to subliminals. A little too great if you ask me but that is the only option available currently.

If you are new to using subliminals, make sure that you trust the creators. Trustable creators provide the list of affirmations used and you can verify them. Even better if you make your own subliminal audio. The process is fairly simple and you can find guides all over the internet.

At the end of the day, subliminals are just tools to help your spiritual practices and should be used as such only. Your dream life doesn’t come to you just because you listened to an audio or wrote down an affirmation a hundred times over. It comes when you take intentional steps towards creating the life you want. It is a complete mindset and lifestyle shift. Don’t fall prey to modern get-rich-quick schemes — get-lucky-quick schemes.

The post was written by a woman lamenting about how being ADHD can make dating, especially situationships difficult to navigate. “I’m very selective with who I date, I never go out with guys I would consider a**holes,” she clarifies before proceeding to ask whether her ADHD made her personality too intense and why she invests too much emotional energy into random hookups.

“I always feel like I’m in love after I have sex, so I spend the next few days wanting to cuddle and kiss and snuggle with whoever I was with. It feels like whichever man it happens to be that time doesn’t also feel that way. Then they text me after two weeks again after I’ve essentially gone through all stages of heartbreak for them,” she confesses. “I am on a rollercoaster of ‘happy from sex’ to ‘depressed and waiting to be texted’.”

Okay, Abha, but why do you care so much?

Well, I am a situationship veteran with ADHD. In the two years I was active in the dating scene, I have been in six situationships and OP’s experience has been pretty much mine.

I had always thought that I was wired differently — which is technically correct if you have ADHD — and wasn’t meant for casual flings which my friends were so adept at. When you have ADHD, things that seem like common sense for neurotypical people feel foreign to us — caffeine makes us sleepy, self-control is a myth, and motivation is an urban legend, except if it concerns that one task I’ve been hyperfixating on all week.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Our dopamine-deficient brains do give us some superpowers, or like author and entrepreneur Peter Shankman calls us, we are “faster than normal.” We are great problem-solvers, super adaptive and creative with new perspectives about mundane things. It is just that we need to figure out our own ways around some things that come naturally to others.

Situationships are one of those things.

I do not claim that everyone with ADHD has trouble navigating situationships or casual flings. If you don’t, good for you! If you do, I feel you and read on. If you don’t have ADHD but would like to take back the power in your relationships anyway, you can also stay back.

The thing with me is that, when it comes to situationships, I am not “too emotionally invested” in the person, but I do need constant validation from them, which makes me confused — am I in love with them?

“The intense need for validation from your partner comes from your neurobiological need for dopamine regulation. If your partner isn't able to give you consistent attention, your brain perceives it as a sign of rejection,” Ruchi Ruuh, relationship counsellor and therapist based in Delhi, India answers my question. “ADHD brains are wired to seek dopamine. Relationships — particularly new ones — provide a surge of that neurotransmitter, making them incredibly stimulating.”

This is also why we feel like “we are in love” after sexual intimacy. After sex, everyone experiences the release of oxytocin, the hormone that creates emotional bonding. However, those with ADHD might feel this bond more intensely because our brain chemistry is already wired to seek emotional and sensory highs. Sexual activities provide instant gratification — the feeling of high we chase all our lives. This tricks our brain into misinterpreting it as a deeper connection than it is.

So basically, if you have ADHD and you catch yourself mentally chasing that mediocre man after a moderately pleasant first date, don’t beat yourself over it. You are not in love with him. You are just starved for dopamine and your date is the new dopamine-inducing drug in town. The chances are, you could replace them with an iron rod and you’d still feel the same way. This is also why after the first few weeks you get bored and leave them high and dry. The drug isn’t fun anymore.

If any of my ex-situationships are reading this, it seems like a good time to say “It wasn’t you, it was me.” Except if you are that one a**hole — it was totally you, I was basically an angel.

Share

Now that we have an explanation for why we seem to fall in love every Tom, Dick, and Harry, let’s move on to the more important question — “Am I too intense?”

This is a question we ADHDers ask ourselves a lot. Partly because we have been told we are. As kids, we were too active, too talkative, too energetic. As adults, we are too emotional, too forgetful, too sensitive. So why are we like this and how does this affect our chances of getting casually laid? Ruuh explains that emotional dysregulation can lead to behaviour that others might perceive as “too much.” This can result in love bombing or feelings of falling for someone too quickly, even when the relationship isn’t serious.

If you have been diagnosed with ADHD for a while, you already know that the key to managing your neurodivergence is to be as aware as possible of your triggers. If not, it completely takes over our life leaving us feeling miserable about ourselves. We have so far established that new relationships are generally a trigger for us. Learning to deal with them is important to both managing our ADHD during our casual flings and possibly having a serious relationship in the future.

In his book, “Faster Than Normal,” Peter Shankman explains the importance of setting boundaries with ourselves to manage our triggers. “To truly thrive with ADHD, you simply have to have rules,” he writes.

To take back the power in siutationships, you need to set some rules with yourself. The rules you set for yourself should be customised to deal with the specific situations in a situationship that trigger you. Here are some things to try. These are based on my personal experience and Ruuh’s expertise:

• Turn off text notifications: If your source of cheap dopamine from your situationship is the ding notifying you of a new text, turn it off. I have disabled all notifications on my devices — emails, WhatsApp, and social media. I check them regularly throughout the day and answer them on my own time, but I don’t want them distracting me when I am engaged in focused work.

• Understand your feelings: Learn to understand the difference between the transient feelings you have about your partners and their actual compatibility. Journalling is a great way to do this. Writing it down may help you give a reality check of the actual relationship. If these feelings tend to change with sex, write a note about how you feel about them generally versus after sex. The more you are in touch with yourself, the less your brain can trick you into being addicted to your fling.

• Create a routine: Now this is advice you have heard way too many times, but I am truly sorry to tell you that a routine is the first step in managing your ADHD. When it comes to your situationship also, this is an important step. Create a structure or ritual for yourself and them. Try connecting at the same time for a call. Decide on the number of times you both want to get together. These agreements and boundaries will help you both to feel more secure in the time apart and help with pacing the relationship intensity.

• Find quality sources of dopamine: If you truly want to regain the power in your relationships, you need to replace it as your primary source of dopamine with a more quality source. Work towards creating an active, sustainable system to fulfil your dopamine requirements beyond temporary romantic/physical relationships. Exercise and cooking help me.

At the end of the day, managing our ADHD-specific triggers is a life-long endeavour, and I hope this little insight from me helps you navigate your relationships better. Remember, you’re not broken. You are just different — not scary different but good different. Now go and take back the power in your situationship.

For the uninitiated “good facial features but bad facial harmony” (or vice versa) is a TikTok trend where creators, mostly young women, zoom the camera onto their facial features to point out their good/bad features. Sometimes this is to prove that despite their bad features they have good facial harmony. Other times it is to mourn that their facial harmony isn’t up to the mark despite their good features.

Even if you haven’t come across this trend, you certainly must have crossed paths with facemaxxing videos, where creators superimpose a celebrity’s face over a “perfect” template to make their features more attractive (read: euro-centric). It is the more insidious child of “looksmaxxing,” the trend birthed by the manosphere — a collection of websites and online forums promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny, and meninism — which advises men to become their “best selves” in any way possible.

From going to the gym and following a skin care regimen (softmaxxing) to getting limb lengthening surgeries and cosmetic procedures to change their facial features (hardmaxxing), looksmaxxing is all about hitting a certain set standard. What’s that I hear? Body dysmorphia and eating disorders? Yeah, that sounds about right.

In this essay, I shed some light on how TikTok (and other short-form video platforms in extension) is repackaging the rhetorics of eugenics as “becoming your best selves” pills.

To unpack the dark underbelly of facemaxxing and allied trends, we need to understand its origins. The term “facial harmony” originated among cosmetic surgeons. If you Google the term, you can find hundreds of blogs on how to achieve facial harmony, all from the websites of cosmetic surgery clinics. While the cosmetic surgery industry’s capitalizing on women’s bodies via strategised marketing and trend-peddling is something I have a lot of thoughts on, today’s endeavour is different.

In cosmetic surgery, facial harmony translates to the size of various facial features and overall facial symmetry which is often achieved by following the golden ratio. Apparently, faces that follow the standards of this measurement are perceived as more attractive than others.

The concept of the “golden ratio” was first introduced by the Greek mathematician Euclid in his mathematical treatise The Elements (308 B.C.). Now Euclid never attached psychological properties to this ratio. He merely stated that such a ratio exists.

So then who created the myth of the golden ratio? The answer is Adolf Zeising.

In the 19th century, German philosopher Adolf Zeising set out to prove that the “golden ratio” was the key to all beauty in nature. He wrote that the golden ratio is “the universal law in which is contained the ground principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art.” He said that the golden ratio is present in everything “whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical” and that it “finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.”

Over the years, there have been multiple attempts to prove that the Parthenon in Greece and the Pyramids in Egypt are aesthetically pleasing because they follow the golden ratio. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

“Attempts to demonstrate diagrammatically that any of these structures fit a golden rectangle or otherwise are speculative and appear to be due to extreme persistence in attempting to fit the golden ratio onto the structure,” Orthodontist Dr Farhad B. Naini writes in his paper “The golden ratio — dispelling the myth” clarifying that these monuments don’t actually follow the golden ratio.

He also dismisses the theory — popularised by Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code — that Leonardo da Vinci employed the ratio in his works featuring the human form, including the Mona Lisa.

The earlier mentioned facemaxxing template you see on social media is said to be based on the golden ratio and is supposed to make you look more attractive. But if you take a closer look, you can see that all it does is make your nose and lips smaller, your eyes almond-shaped, and your face thinner. In other words, completely butcher your ethnic features and make you look like a sun-burned Caucasian.

Share

For instance, take a look at the results of this facemaxxing done to American Rapper GloRilla:

But when it was done on Angelina Jolie there was hardly any change:

Look at the “perfect version” of Zendaya’s face:

You get the gist.

Facial harmony achieved through following the golden ratio is actually just repackaged featurism — the prejudice against Black and Brown features and preference for Euro-centric features.

Arguing that the golden ratio is rooted in science and that it is inherently found in all forms of nature, is a way to establish that the features of non-white people are “unnatural.” When you call your features “bad,” you are falling prey to this racist rhetoric. Your features aren’t bad, they are beautiful, they just aren’t European.

In the 19th century, Nazi eugenics made us believe that the shape of our skulls was a window to our personalities and mental health issues. This pseudoscientific theory — phrenology — was later used to justify white supremacy, slavery, and even the Holocaust.

In the 21st century, we use the same theories repackaged as harmless girly pop trends to microanalyse our faces and come to the conclusion that we are sub-humans, that we aren’t our best selves until we have achieved a certain racist ideal of beauty.

Conformity is a slippery slope. While in the beginning, it can provide a sense of community and belonging, soon it will lead to turning a blind eye to the horrors in our society.

In the case of beauty standards, conformity leads to cementing the racist, white-supremacist, Euro-centric idea of beauty. It leads to many large-scale issues, including what we call Snapchat dysmorphia, a disturbing trend where young women are seeking cosmetic procedures to look like their filtered faces. Another example of the real-world problems of conformity in beauty trends is the phenomenon now termed the “Love Island effect” — young viewers of the reality show “Love Island” getting cosmetic procedures to look like the participants in the show.

According to a 2018 study, 40% of the show’s audience felt inadequate in their bodies after watching the show with 30% considering cosmetic treatments to rectify this inadequacy. In 2021, when the show aired the search volume of “Botox” increased a whopping 82% times (in the UK where the show is based).

The after-effect of these phenomena is Instagram faces — faces with cat eyes, small noses, large lips, and high cheekbones featuring a blank emotion popular among Instagram models and influencers, usually achieved through plastic surgery and fillers; and Botox Paradox — a term coined by Beauty critic Jessica DeFino to explain how conformity and Botox faces are leading to a decrease in sexual activity among young people.

“Loneliness is on the rise and so I do wonder if there’s a link between the rise of Botox in the same demographics experiencing feelings of disconnection and sexual frustration,” DeFino tells Dazed in an article titled “Has Botox killed eroticism?”

In the full interview DeFino shared in her newsletter, she says, “[Botox] change the way we connect and communicate with others — even reducing our capacity to feel empathy — by freezing our muscles and eliminating our ability to make microexpressions and mirror other people’s expressions.”

All this is to say that our differences don't make us weird. It makes us unique. Embrace it. Because when we embrace our unique features, we also embrace our heritage, ancestry, and the fundamentals of who we are. Conformity is not the answer, learning to accept yourself is.

Let’s also relearn the notion that social media trends are harmless. Granted, not all social media trends need to be analysed. But when a trend tries to tell you something is wrong with you, think critically: “Are they trying to sell me something?” If yes, RUN!