Where I’m at mentally

God I fucking hate the internet. It killed me. It killed my soul. I feel like I did it to myself, but shouldn’t there have been safeguards? I know I went around the safeguards, but that makes me think that they were carelessly installed in the first place. I think the internet has shot my attention span, I can’t focus anymore because my brain is wired to achieve pleasure and humor as fast as possible. I started watching porn in the fifth grade and, despite my desire to quit, I've been hooked ever since. I'm also addicted to video games and the internet. I would sit on the computer for hours, trying desperately to get that dopamine hit, cycling between meme sites, YouTube, video games, and porn. I think the lawyers and executives and politicians who allowed this to happen should be fired and thrown in jail.

Looking at the internet now, it seems so disgusting. It’s full of influencers, conspiracy theorists, idiots, haters, pop culture worshipers, and so, so much porn. Why does the internet feel so soulless? I feel like nothing is happening there, like no one is actually engaged in the meaningful discourse I used to hear about. Meme culture is so vapid, it’s just humor based on shallow pattern recognition that gets reposted to death over and over by bots and middle schoolers. I blame politics. I blame capitalist greed. I blame the men who make the profit model for porn viable. I blame children on the internet masquerading as adults. I blame adults on the internet masquerading as children. I blame the big data engineers who lacked ethics. I blame the uneducated who contribute nothing meaningful to the world. And I still keep watching, because I am a hopeless fiend.

I am a child raised on entertainment. I made a letterboxd and a goodreads account recently to track how many movies I watched and books I’ve read. I have watched almost a thousand movies, and several dozen TV shows. I have read hundreds of books. I have listened to thousands of hours of music, not just in the background but as the direct subject of my attention. I have probably played well over a thousand hours of video games. I think these things made me extremely media literate, but at the cost of my sanity and social skills. I remember, when I was elementary school, always having my nose in a book. I would walk the hallways looking down, reading some novel, and when people would call out my name, I would have no idea who the person was. I think my brain is better at reading letters than faces, I can’t watch a movie without subtitles. I would walk the halls in middle and high school with ear buds in, listening to music that none of my peers listened to because I wanted to feel original and different. Now I don’t want to be different.

I learned my social cues from cliches. I remember embracing the identity of a nerd, and projecting a false dichotomy onto the world around that there were jocks and idiots, and then me. I thought being socially awkward was a personality trait. I never truly tried to become a more sociable person, I leaned into reading and math and video games and nature. I don’t know how to play social games with people, I only have super close friends who I tell everything to, or acquaintances that I forget the names of sometimes.

My parents didn’t help. They’re both outgoing sociable people, and they dealt judgement onto everyone they saw as weird. I learned that from them. I learned to hate different people, even though I was different, and it led to me hating myself. I hated nerds. I hated fat people. I hated losers. I hated winners. I hated idiots. I hated jocks. I hated attention seekers. I hated myself.

AND NOW I’M SO FULL OF HATE. I HATE IT HERE. I FUCKING HATE IT. I JUST WANT TO LOVE, I JUST WANT TO BE LOVED, I JUST WANT SOMEONE TO TELL ME THAT I’M WORTH SOMETHING AND IT CAN’T BE MY FAMILY BECAUSE THEY DON’T COUNT. I FINALLY FOUND SOMEONE WHO FELT THE SAME WAY, ABOUT PORN AND THE INTERNET AND MEDIA AND CULTURE, AND I LOST THEM, AND NOW I’M BACK TO BEING ALONE. DOESN’T ANYONE ELSE HAVE THESE THOUGHTS? PLEASE GOD HOW DO I FIND MORE PEOPLE WHO FEEL LIKE ME?

I can't do anything that isn't for someone that I want. I just want to live for someone else. I'll be at the gym, or washing dishes, or working my job, or cleaning my carpet, or folding my clothes, or making a healthy and well balanced dinner, or trying to go to bed and wake up on time, and I get fucking exhausted. I need someone's approval, someone to pat me on the back and say "good job, i like how much effort you're putting into getting that last little smudge off the counter, i like how you controlled that last rep to really get the muscle burning, i like how nicely you organized your kitchen, i like how you really thought about this movie or book." Why do I need this? I like doing these things, but I've been folding my laundry since elementary school, driving myself around since I was 15, maintaining my finances since freshman year, and I like to do these things and feel strong as an independent person and I know that everyone else does them too but I've been doing it alone for so long and I can't fucking take it anymore. I would do someone else's taxes if it just meant they would sit down and snuggle with me while we watched TV.

I worry sometimes that I'm a psychopath. If I was a normal person, wouldn't I be able to do these things without expecting something in return? Why do I want something in return for doing something for myself? I worry that one day, I'm going to figure out that no one is going to give me an attaboy, and I going to stop caring and just lose the plot. I want to be owned by someone. I want a girl to tell me what to do and where to go and how to dress, because I'm tired of doing it for myself. I want to be her psychopath, I want nothing to do with the rest of the world unless it's what she wants for me. I'll go help starving children in Africa and like it if it pleases her. I would kill other men if she told me that's how I could prove my love. I would prefer for her to ask me to do good things, but I'm really not that picky if it meant that, at the end of the day, someone would hold me that could've chosen not to. I don't want to be a bad person, but if it results in love, then that really shakes the goalposts of morality.

Morality is relative, and I've been basing mine around a society that has given me the bare minimum for so long. I don't feel the love from the world, so I'm happy to base my morality in a person that can love me back. Hah, I guess this is how cults get started, like the Mansons, or Christianity, or the Military Industrial Complex. I guess we all need something outside of us, something to have faith in. Faith is a concept that allows us to take whatever we perceive as our sins and get repentance from somewhere. We can never really know another human being other than ourselves, a la Plato's cave, so we put faith in things that we think will make us feel better. I'm tired of thinking for myself and feeling like nothing good is coming in return.

And now I’m posting these thoughts on this wall. I need the validation of strangers, because it feels more genuine than the validation of people who are closer to me and bound by social conformity. I hate that I need that. I don’t know how to love myself. I try and I try, I have an objectively attractive body, I’m actually quite good at sex, I know that I’m intelligent, funny, and athletic, I know that I have things going for me in life, I know that I have the capacity for love, but it’s not enough. I hate that I need this validation, but I’ve been starved of it my entire fucking life, and I really need someone (who isn’t obligated to, like my therapist or my family) to hold me and tell me that I’m enough and that they want to be a part of my life.

Things I think are toxic and have killed my brain:

Short form media (tiktok, cable news, memes).

Ironic, insincere, or self-deprecating humor (funny in small doses but I think they killed my self-esteem).

Video games without plot that never end and are just designed to hook you.

The stress of our economic climate that makes me greedy and overvalue wealth.

Pornography and smut (made me a sex fiend and unable to self-regulate).