The Internet Tried to Kill My Spark. I’m Rebuilding It.

Ajouté : 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Ah, you're here. Thank God because I've been desperate to talk to someone about when exactly it became fashionable to be spiritually beige. We've been talking extensively about brain rot, losing our focus, how we feel flatter, less curious, and over stimulated and all that all that jazz. But I I don't think enough of us take ownership of I'm rotating slowly. I don't think enough of us take ownership of how we created the beigeness of our soul in this environment and we certainly haven't talked about retraining ourselves into formulating an alternative way of being and existing because I think if we were honest with ourselves a lot of us feel like part of us have slowly rotted away and it's high time I think we employ our privilege and reclaim them whilst also confronting the fact that it's a bit scary to change the norm. So technically this discussion requires multiple chapters. Uh but in this one I wanted to talk about specifically losing one's spark uh because I don't think I can really talk about say like rebuilding an intellectual life if I don't address rebuilding of the self first. And I do hate the term spark. I don't know why.

[00:01:16]It just gives me the icky vibes but it's it's the only thing I can think of. So, over the past few years, I've noticed that I've completely lost my spark, my appetite, my zest, my glorious, unnecessary enthusiasm for random things. And it really only came out when I started making a few shorts of me reacting to opening books and then suddenly commenters were telling me very kindly how contagious my happiness was or that it was nice to see me happy. And initially I was taken aback because believe it or not, despite my existentialism and casual depression, I'm actually rather a cheerful person.

[00:01:55]But then I realized that no one would know that because everything about me suggests otherwise. Unless you've been watching me for a long time, because when I started making content online, I was I was my normal bubbly persona. I was really excited about talking about books and I was giggly and enthusiastic about whatever I was interested in. And then over the years I received subtle messages that in order to be taken more seriously in life, I had to become more serious. I needed to become more static and severe. And under the intense scrutiny of strangers online, I casually chopped away at my quirkiness or odd mannerisms. I cut out my random tangents and I started consuming only that which I could reconfigure into a pre-formulated infrastructure of this is what is acceptable and this is what people like. And that makes sense. You know, people like severity. You know, they like heavy dramatic controversial topics. They like getting angry and expressing their frustration online because doing so creates a catharsis which is otherwise lacking in the offline world. because there's nothing that we do that seems to matter and everything is out of our control and and in the hands of some small select elite who quite frankly are monstrous and thus in that context unbridled joy is far too silly and privileged. You know, tangents are not whimsical but wasteful because everyone should just get to the point and the video starts at 7 minutes 30. No one cares about this but everyone should care about that and the world is falling apart continuously. So, no wonder none of our friends have been free to meet up for the past like 2 years because they're too busy or emotionally drained and exhausted and then they retreat further online and their only form of socialization is sending random memes and funny videos instead of having a conversation and wondering why they feel more uninspired and motivated and disconnected than ever. And despite the immense opportunity the internet creates for us to express ourselves, it also creates an immense opportunity for people to feel oppressed and further forced into small boxes. Because now self-exression and selfhood is not just contained to your hometown or city or family or friends. It's being analyzed by millions of people across the world who reinforce their agendas and oppressive opinions onto others from inside one's own home. you know, you don't have to leave the house anymore to feel judged and ostracized. Such a sensation can happen from within our pockets. And yet, it didn't always feel this way. You know, when I was younger, I was basically drunk on the excitement of creating freely. You know, I was unashamedly myself. I shared my book opinions, not just on YouTube, but on many, many, many, many blogs. I had too many blogs, so many blogs, so many websites. Uh, I took pictures that weren't perfect and I shared them online. I ran two web comics on different websites that I owned and then I wrote stories on another website.

[00:05:00]Basically, give a teenager free access to websites and she's going to build all the websites he likes. Yes, I was a website fiend when I was younger and it was rather intense, but no one was reading them. No one was reading any of them. But I was dizzy on the freedom that I I had to publish my imagination in many different formats without any the barriers to entry of traditional media. And I think I've taken that for granted um as the years have gone on.

[00:05:26]But also I haven't really ever recaptured that delicious feeling of invigoration since the heavier implementation of algorithmically driven content. Though, I should say whilst I'm talking about this, um, if you're also sort of itching and you're feeling like, "Oh, this is hitting my nostalgia nerves, then today's sponsor may be of interest to you, it's Porkburn." And they may be just what you need because if you want to return to old school blogging days to showcase your love and passion without the restriction of fitting into an algorithm or chasing a trending topic just for the joy of expressing yourself in your own domain, you know, you can control the algorithm there. you can own your own content. You need a blog domain from Porkban because you can get a blog domain for up to 90% off your first year, which is so perfect for new writers, new creators and journals, you know, newsletters or anyone who just wants to start their own corner of the internet that's wholesome and just for them and maybe their friends and family, which is ever so sweet. What I love about Porkman is that it keeps renewal pricing transparent. So rather than luring you in cheap and then charging loads later, it's completely transparent. And if you need hosting too, they offer fast, reliable cloud WordPress hosting powered by the people behind WordPress.com. Plus, they have an AI website builder which will help you launch within minutes. And you also get useful extras that are included for free like who is privacy and SSL certificates and DNS management, which are things that some registars charge extra for.

[00:06:59]And if you need any help, their support team is available 247 and they're real humans, which is very useful. So, if you've been meaning to start something online, this is your excuse. Uh, you can use my link down below to grab your blog domain from Porkbun whilst the offer lasts. I keep twirling. This is like my nice new chair, but it doesn't stay still, which is a real pain. I could put my feet on the floor, but I don't want to. So obviously I can't speak about other experiences of this than that of my own. But I don't think such an experience is reserved exclusively for particular genders or sexualities or races. It can be but not always. So for myself in my tiny area of the internet, I became aware of narratives that criticized me as an intellectual woman for not conforming to the dry, controlled, composed idea of what a woman should be in such circumstances.

[00:07:51]And any enthusiasm I had was labeled as unstable, manic, annoying, pretentious, tryhard, fake, which is not too dissimilar to the labels asserted to hysterical women who express any form of displeasure such as sadness or anger.

[00:08:08]But despite me knowing this, despite me seeing the red flags, I still began to perform a more sanitized and emotionally stunted version of myself to gain legitimacy. And I found myself becoming more unhappy with how I was creating and experiencing my selfhood particularly when I'm doing my own job. And it got me thinking about nature. So nature proposed the idea of the eternal recurrence in order for one to truly evaluate their ideal life. And the premise of this in a painfully oversimplified way was that if you had to relive your entire life, every joy and sorrow, every triumph and defeat for all of eternity, would you still choose the path that you're on? Now, this principle, he argued, should come from identifying what truly brings you joy and fulfillment, for they are the activities that you wouldn't hesitate to repeat for all eternity. Um, now this is a far more complex idea than I just gave. I really enjoyed reading Mark Hickens's essay on it, which I'll link down below, but I love how he explained it. He wrote, quote, "Eternal recurrence is the basis for continual self transformation as you attempt to craft life that warrants repetition, shaping your life through the certainty of eternal recurrence is to transfigure it into something compelling and dramatic like a homeriic epic worthy of its own endless echo. Now, in many ways, we can kind of relate to this eternal recurrence in our daily lives, but we call it Groundhog Day. We know there are things about our lives that make us feel drained or really miserable, but instead of changing, we just get up and do the same thing over and over. We will oversleep or go to bed late. We don't change the type of material we consume.

[00:09:57]We spend too much time on our phones. We talk about the same things with the same people and visit the same sites and scroll the same apps. And this is a cycle that we have created for ourselves. And whilst we know it makes us unhappy, we rarely feel comfortable in making the change to live an alternative life because that's terrifying. And then sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking well this is just a temporary version of ourselves.

[00:10:21]We will restart a new cycle on Monday or on New Year's and we consider this pattern you know just temporary failure.

[00:10:28]it of the present self. It's not the right time to change. I'll do it later.

[00:10:33]But if we were to consider the possibility of niche's eternal recurrence, would we still choose to spend our days like this for risk of spending all eternity reliving these days over and over again whilst we try and get our butts into action? And I don't know about you, but for me, the answer is absolutely bloody not. I don't want to keep reliving the same patterns and helpful patterns over and over again. It's not so easy to change. I understand that. I know that more than many people out there. But I know that I have to change and I don't want to keep contributing through submission to a social narrative that autistic joy is unprofessional or unladylike because somewhere along the way I learned that enthusiasm stopped feeling safe. But that's a faulty logic because you know Senica would say that we suffer more in the imagination than we do in reality.

[00:11:26]And it's only the fear of being perceived negatively for our authenticity that keeps us stifled in our selfhood. Obviously speaking from a very privileged idea here. But even the narratives that we tell ourselves can be more tormenting than that of the outside. Epictitus believed that philosophy's main task was to respond to the soul's cry to make sense of and thereby free ourselves from the hold of our griefs and our fears. And so I have been turning to a lot of philosophy at this stage of life. And I'm using philosophy in order to navigate and return to all of this this broad range out here because I've been talking about this for years. I have held myself back so much for fear of external judgments of my selfhood. I just stopped trying because it was so terrifying. My fear of being seen as too stupid made me stop researching. My fear of being perceived as too slow a reader made me stop reading. My fear of being seen as too immature made me stop talking about books with excitement. And my fear of being seen as too much made me stop speaking and creating freely. They were all fears in my head. It's all in my head. Like yes, there is a reality to it. It all stems from a past experience or some kind of trauma. But I really need to stop retraumatizing myself and reliving this basically eternal recurrence in my mind for the fear of this eternal recurrence being a reality.

[00:12:53]I will live every day this way if I continue to have this like mental eternal recurrence playing in my head.

[00:13:01]Who cares if there's some, you know, misogynists out there who consider a woman's joy as being, you know, unstable or manic? And who cares if it's not popular to talk about Chaucser or Shakespeare or medieval manuscripts or ancient texts and translated fiction or even academia itself? They're the things I love. Why have I allowed myself to be so swayed by social narratives that benefit from me just doomscrolling and subsequently investing in marketable and profitable conformity than they do my individuality? And I've used the term rebuilding myself rather than finding myself because I don't believe a self can be found. I I agree with uh what the poet Robert Penn Warren wrote. uh he challenged the idea of people, you know, going away to go find themselves uh by writing quote uh in the phrase to find myself lurks the idea that the self is a preexisting entity, a self like a platonic idea existing in a mythic realm beyond time and change. No, rather than an object like a nugget of gold in a placean, the Easter egg under the bush at the Easter egg hunt, a fourleaf clover to promise miraculous luck. Here is the essence of pacivity, one's quintessential luck, and the essence of absurdity, too. For the self is never to be found, but must be created. Not the happy accident of pacivity, but the product of a thousand actions, large and small, conscious or unconscious, performed not away from it all, but in the face of it all, for better or for worse, in work and leisure rather than in free time.

[00:14:46]I miss just existing as I am. I miss reading voraciously without a care if I am not getting it right the first time.

[00:14:56]If I forget bits now and then, if I need to look things up in my dictionary, if I need to re-evaluate or reread a chapter now and then to fully grasp it. I feel like the the the way the internet is functioning has become my sense of reality that I should function similarly. You know, I should get it right the first time. I should be able to memorize everything when I read it one time only. I should understand everything the first time. Um, I should have read things already. I should have had a preface for the things that I'm learning about already before I've learned about it. I should be able to produce quickly. I should be able to research really efficiently. I should just get it right the first time. The kind of navigation of how the internet produces and is and how other people perform on the internet has just gotten into my head and made me just break apart in terms of like what's useful about me, what's not useful about me, what should be likable, what should be profitable, what should I put forward in life rather than just be, you know, just rather than talk on my podcast that I really enjoy doing without overthinking about if it's, you know, completely relevant, if it's scripted well, if it's incredibly philosophically profound.

[00:16:04]around just experience creating things.

[00:16:07]I I want to go back to talking off the cuff, talking about things I'm interested in, and maybe even filming those videos on my second channel, which I call footnotes, and you know, putting some of my podcast episodes as videos on there and then producing more freely, responding to people, like being part of the community. My god, I I haven't been able to have time to breathe into it because I'm so busy trying to like hit the metrics of it all that I'm not part of anything. Like I created my YouTube channel to to talk to people and I want to feel that connection. realizing what my values are, what my values when I started this were talking about books, but also talking about how literature can be accessible and breaking down the ivory towers and talking about the things that seem mystifying when I was younger from everything from like Shakespeare to poetry uh to theory to criticism. all these exciting things that I have enjoyed sincerely and had the privilege to learn about because I got access to higher education that you know none of my family had ever experienced before and I never thought that I would experience before and probably would not have ever experienced had I been born in another country when the fees were at a different price in my country born at a different time like I have so much privilege as a lady at this time of period in my country to have learned and thanks to the internet that kind of accessibility makes it available for more people and I can use what I've garnered to inspire other people to try and seek it out themselves too and give people the courage and the bravery to look at certain texts that may be like oh you could only learn or read that at university. I would love to make courses of foundations of literature and make them fun and entertaining and even hold seminars with members where I could h have a seminar with people who read a text and they can talk about their ideas. I can navigate that space and give people a kind of like mini version of what it feels like to be in academic intellectual spaces that are curated and safe and make sure that you know people are engaging with the material and just enjoying the experience of learning because there's very little opportunity to feel joy today unless we just give ourselves permission to and yes it's incredibly privileged but what a privilege like when when do we have to deny privileges of learning and reading when we actually say like Thank I am so lucky to be this privileged. Like I own my privilege and I am so grateful. I'm going to use it to my ability. I'm going to be enthusiastic about it and do the best with my privilege and the privilege to be able to read and talk about literature and to talk it to you. I'm just I'm so I'm so grateful. Thank you.

[00:18:40]And I'm sorry I've allowed my fears to get in the way for so long. Um hopefully that will change. And so thank you so much to you. If you watch this, if you like it, if you if you boost it, if you share it, I really appreciate it. And thank you so much to my patreons and my main also my my main tier patronons, my Holly is autistic, uh Joshua Heredia, Gil the Gilded Dragon, Lady of the Labyrinth, Ellen Eric Taylor, Ivonne and Ivonne, Jenny Edane, Marina We Lauren, Nicholas Reed, and Andy Brazil. Thank you ever so much as always. I really truly appreciate you like sincerely and I will see you soon for another video and I hope you are happy and healthy and remember books save lives so keep reading.