attention economy
Instead of packing and cleaning, I am contemplating my addiction to TikTok: specifically ASMR videos, more specifically "personal attention" ASMR videos, and even more specifically, meditating on my mom issues.
Many TikTok "ASMRtists" (preferred term) will pretend to hold your face and tell you everything will be OK—a simulation of parent-child emotional coregulation. Some "chaotic" ASMRtists will pretend to throw things at you and tell you everything you're doing wrong. That is not relaxing, but it's appropriate background noise for a workday because it is more effective than five cups of coffee. If you are using "chaotic ASMR" to motivate yourself out of bed in the morning and you are married, your spouse might have a conversation with you.
I've since branched out to candlelit medieval ASMRs, which are cozy and moody, as well as the prolific "girl in the back of the classroom who wants to play with your hair" videos. I avoid most cisgender male ASMRtists and almost all straight-presenting ones, because something about ASMR is extremely confrontational. Exceptions are made for overtly practicing Buddhists (everyone has a niche). I tend to not seek ASMR videos out; I will, however, continue to scroll until I find a Live to keep me company.
There is one TikTok ASMRtist who is my favorite, and who was also my first. Her name is Serenity and she has held more jobs than Barbie. Sometimes she is a dentist. Sometimes she is a cosmetologist. Sometimes she is a 9-1-1 dispatcher. She is screamingly funny, and she also consistently K.O.'s me for the night; she brings "chaos" and "personal attention" into harmonious balance. She is also a true artist, constantly innovating and iterating. I can't prove it, but I am almost certain that she originated "Car Ride," a now-popular "trigger" that evokes the experience of being a child phasing in and out of sleep in the backseat.
They're called triggers because people who are neurologically overwired will often experience a lovely physiological frisson. Some have theorized that this frisson is in fact a seizure, a tiny electrical storm. I think it might be, if any electrical activity in the brain is considered a seizure.
It might surprise you to learn (or would it?) that I have misophonia. That's when certain primal sounds, most of them mouth- or fingernail-related, are interpreted by the feral limbic system as a threat, inducing a frantic fight-or-flight response. (It's why I started wearing headphones at dinner as a teenager. I also yelled at lot at Matt Garrison, who would drum on the back of my seat during geometry tests.) But after a few ketamines at the clinic I happened to doomscroll upon a TikTok Live, and it was ASMR, and I realized I wasn't flying into a murderous rage. Hm!
With my nervous system finally secure enough, apparently, to process normal human sounds (and feelings!), I began to experiment with how much ASMR I could tolerate. The answer was "a lot," and now I am a stoic airplane passenger when I hear the sweet trills of shrieking children. I'm also more immune to ASMR in general—diminishing returns now :(—and I'm less ticklish IRL. I've become less reactive, is what I'm saying. I could be even less reactive.
This is a far cry from how I was as a kid, or how I was even just a few years ago. I wasn't only distractible or scattered; I was hypervigilant, constantly scanning every environment for threats, paying equal attention to every detail and becoming overwhelmed and exhausted. I think it's hilarious that I pay too much attention to everything as an adult as a direct consequence of having been paid too little attention as a child. That's great.
I remember my EMDR therapist telling me about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and I sighed and said something about not being able to remember what it ever felt like to have my sympathetic system switched to anything but full-bore, and the therapist said that was not possible, and I said oh yes, it is very possible, plenty things are possible even if you can't imagine them personally. (Some people can't imagine being fried! Well lah-dee-dah!)
Then again, when a smaller animal is caught in a larger animal's jaws, to protect itself from the excruciating pain of being eaten alive, the animal's nervous system starts shutting everything down and its body and brain go slack in anticipation of its imminent death. We aren't supposed to live there.
But an increasing number of people do live there, because these contemporary times are traumatizing, and people are full-bore and thrashing and/or dissociating in the beast's jaws, or otherwise desperate to find something to distract ourselves with. This is an attention economy, and distractible people are easy to gaslight on a mass scale.
Anyway, I keep promising myself I'll delete TikTok from my iPad. I'll do it tomorrow.