A Philo-Slothical Piece - Thank You From Me, Your Host.
CONTENT WARNING - Swears. Naughty words. No, we’re not a PG-Rated podcast. Take the little ones elsewhere. Thanks.
I don’t hate kids (except when they scream at that shrill pitch that gives me instant sensory overwhelm), just emphasising the point. :)
Might seem a bit strange that I’m doing a simple thank-you post on the blog, rather than just bashing something out on socials, hitting enter and being done with it.
Well, before I get into my thank-you’s to the Inner-Strength Check community good and proper I’ll explain why I’m basing my little sincere gratitude here:
Social Media: I’ve got quite a bit to say on the subject of Social Media, particularly with respect to my side series here called Undoing Ruin (which is non-hobby/lifestyle analysis, critique, discussions and strengths-based/advocacy focussed words for us all writ-large). In short - not that is a skill of mine, heh - socials-posting is a honey-trap for content-creators. The allure of instant ping-back purposefully coloured nice little notifications is not designed to empower you to create better content. It’s there to ensure you’re encouraged to produce more, in volume.
Putting aside ALL the issues I’ll be discussing later on around the antisocial nature of 2025 social media (proliferation of bots and AI slop, desperately-tweaked, ad-drenched algorithms to try and claw back market share from TenCent, irrelevant sensory data, overwhelm etc) - I’m just tired.
My Response To Zucc (HAH HAH Meta Doesn’t Own My Host (Yet. Soon))
Mate, I’m Fuckin’ Cooked, Ay. (Not the 1st-year Business Degree in Fortitude Valley at 2am cooked. Nah mate, the not-fun cooked, ay.)
For international unitiated readers - a primer.
I won’t go into the specifics around 2024, but the year was fucked up for me. And it seems it was monstrously cooked for a lot of you, too.
The worst year of my adult life, easily, and that’s saying something. Hell, I’ll self-disclose that I had a year where I was so stressed in my early 20’s I earnt 11 days in the funny farm. Been homeless before, et cetera.
And 2024 was still way more cooked. By a huge margin.
I’m still quite burnt out from it; my neurodivergent symptoms are amplified to the nth degree and I’ve got insomnia I haven’t had as bad or chronic since my early 20’s.
B U T (T)!
I’m actually doing a little better compared to late 2024, actually!
Incrementally.
In honesty though?
You could still sum up my current MSE overall as thus, from a professional clinical perspective of course:
Cheers cobber! Struth Dr. Stewart, whatever happened to that ‘DoodleBurger’ arsehole from the 2010’s anyway, ay?
What the fuck does this have to do with social media, you say? Again - I could prat on, but instead of lengthy explainers…look up the Strength-Energy Model, and the Pareto Principle.
I’m tired. You’re tired. We all are. And having the podcast just reach it’s absolute zenith in terms of engagement and content, some massive and well-thought-out year-wide blog articles and episodes all go the way of the Dodo (nearly - thank god for back-end and code to trawl through now-unavailable posts, as well as my drafts) six hours before 2025 became official really took the wind out of my sails.
Which leads me to point number 2. WHY? Speaking of points - what is the point?
2. Purpose:
As noted on the frontpage - it is a strong belief of mine (backed with reams and reams of empirical data from across the lifespan in fields ranging from psychology and neuroscience to economics and health/epidemiology. Yes, again, flag this as future episode content) that individuals and communities can, do and WILL experience suffering, distress and hardship.
I’m very existential-humanistic in my approach to working with people, but nihilistic overall.
That is, and you can possibly blame the autism for this, or maybe out culture of secularisation in my mind life is VERY much ‘No Fate’.
Watching Terminator 2 at way too young an age probably (still better than the exposure to Rotten.com not long after, lol, #desensitisedmillenial) and hearing ‘There is no fate but what we make’ stuck with me. As did the Buddhist concepts of anicca, dhukka and impermanence in my admittedly very-Westerner, very-surface-level ongoing skim of it from a secular POV.
As a social worker, and a neurodivergent, etc - I’ve basically lived life in third-person. Helped a lot of people, experienced collaborative frustration with systemic barriers etc.
But what often rattles and fucks people in general the most, I find, is the truly procedurally-generated, uncaring, unblinking, RNG, no-context nature of life. The completely at-odds and seethingly random nature of the Universe, the same universe in which we have mathematical and natural sciences, language and etymology etc to keep ourselves mildly shielded within order and predicability/measurability.
Yeah. Nah.
“Scruffy Universe Hears Ya, Scruffy Universe Don’t Care.”
^ average response from [the void] when we futilely scream WHY?! into it
Terrible, terrible things happen to great people. Great people end up doing terrible things. For time immemorial. And that’s hard to take, dude.
Bad-faith actors, charlatans, sycophants, narcissists (summed up heretofore as ‘politicians’lol). War, death, disadvantage, depravity, wanton cruelty, intersectional oppression.
Constant and unending, if you choose to regularly consume news media geared to engineer that worldview.
An accurate one, sure - depressive realism is a thing - but here’s another thing. We aren’t automatons. We aren’t one-sided. We aren’t the fixed labels, diagnoses or character traits we assign to ourselves and others. Not all the time, not permanently.
Life is not that binary - good people/bad people, etc. It’s frighteningly complex, dynamic, entropic, brief, terrifying but also colourful, kaleidoscopic, warm, funny, ridiculous, confusing, infuriating, addictive, remorseless, melancholic, stimulating, exciting, romantic, bleak. All of it and so much more.
It’s all extremely complex, and a lot-of-a-lot.
(( side note re: social media and Point #1: our modern digital diet adds more fuel to this fire in our cognitive and emotional experience of daily life than a) we have evolved thus far to take on, and b) WANT psychologically. ))
Where am I going with this?
Well, again - flagging so many talking points for future pieces I may never get the time to get to, it seems, but - purpose. WHY.
Why Anything?! is a question we all ask as we head into the madness of late-stage capitalism in 2025.
That’s beyond the scope of today’s article.
For now;
WHY ISC?
Inner-Strength Check was created by me, a perpetually cynical and oppositional-defiant social outcast.
It was made just before the zenith of AI-slop and the capacity to look up/generate some GPT prompts, thus leading to an already incomprehensible din of low-effort bullshit being magnified trillion-fold.
It was birthed during the ‘so, what are we exactly?’ period of our ambiguous, not-together-but-not-casual-either relationship with COVID and indeed society itself (see prior episodes posted on this site for a lengthy discussion about the weirdness of post-lockdown life/norms).
It wasn’t created for monetisation. I’m an idiot, but I’ve been blessed with a little sprinkle of pattern-recognition that saw podcasting, blogging and the like VERY quickly going the way of Music Industry in terms of statistical probability of becoming Joe Rogan rich. Or even keeping the lights on.
It wasn’t created to ventilate. I’ll do it, and I’ll it a fuckin’ lot. And I’ll swear a lot. This isn’t a family-friendly podcast. I make no bones about that, and I won’t hide behind a veneer of opening up demographic pools to self-censor my emotions. Sorry, but also not sorry.
I have apps, notebooks and, thankfully, access to mental health care and a support network if I truly need to ‘ventilate’. Sure, this is cathartic and therapeutic as all hell for me, but if that were the main outcome I’d be an asshole 1. for dragging you, the audience and 2. bringing on extra team members through that.
No.
ISC is here because of my belief, mentioned before. That belief is the entire purpose of striving on with ISC and hopefully, striving in perpetuity. Or at least, a very, very long time.
Repeated from the home page as thus:
“It’s our mission and ethos to challenge the notion that life’s difficulties and setbacks are mutually exclusive to enjoying a life well-lived - both for individuals and communities alike. ”
Snigger all you want at that, tell yourself you knew it already. Hell; I did just pasting it into the Quote block on this post and I’m sure I’ll do it again when I fire up the website host. Every time, too.
But truly - take a step back.
Watch some random videos on Youtube.
Read, like actually READ titles. How content-creators in all fields HAVE to aim, target and craft their titles, their wording, everything. It’s all becoming an obsessively calculated and amorphous blob of whatever doth appease The Mighty Algorithm.
To which, I have two words:
Fuck That.
The Algorithm can go fuck itself. (The band The Algorithm rips, though) I’m not doing this to appease metrics. It’s nice to get that feedback - and while we’re on that subject, turns out that the folks here at Squarespace have done an incredible job of NOT paywalling SEO and other basic blogger accessibility behind individually paywalled plugins like our former host (who is also nigh responsible for the death of said site, but I digress). #notapaidshill.
Thing is? If I was doing this for the money - I’d be insane. Truly. It’s a lost cause, in my circumstances.
Go look at the amount of monthly downloads required to equate to even a working-poor income.
Check the stats on how many downloads a musician needs on Spotify to make a single dollar.
Listen to some honest feedback from creators not lying to you about The Game (haha you just lost The Game! Okay, sorry.)
Heck, before you bring up Patreon, go check out some of those pages and look at the additional content that’s required (as well as least SOME measure of algorithm suck-up, etc) to make that a feasible/morally sound strategy for subscribers.
It’s a LOT of work.
Blogging and podcasting feels like it looks like some guy talking and writing. No.
Truth is - I was writing for two years before I made a single episode.
I have, and I’m not exaggerating - 4,132 dot-points of potential topics lined up, many of those branching into dozens of splinter topics. 35 pages worth of drafts just for the next three episodes of the podcast. Then there’s DAW’s, typing, editing, manually shifting and clicking through apps that pretend to talk to one another, etc.
This is a labour of love, but it is work. Hard work. It doesn’t feel like work most of the time, granted. But again, honestly? Sometimes it’s a grind, pure hell and enough to question why you were stupid enough to volunteer time and pain to it. Like any good craft or hobby, once you get past the glitz, glamour and initial dopaminergic rush.
Monetising, Patreon, going full-time with ISC - all some things I’m constantly considering. All the time. But I’m met with the statistical and practical reality very quickly in the after-glow of that bossgirl-grindset rosy picture (and that balloon gets a pin pricked in the side pretty quick.
And that is FINE, actually.
Talking about existentialism? Again…I’m last to knock another’s beliefs or spirituality, but were you to ask for my on-paper view of the universe, it’s cold and reductionist. What we have is what we have, then we go. That’s it. No ghosts, no spirits, no gods, no masters, no afterlife unless we survive Earth and eventually become post-physical entities via pure science.
We are here, we are stardust that thinks and experiences talks, and we die.
Sound terrifying?
Good! It should. There’s no comfort in that.
But sometimes (not as a default, like with idiots like me [topkek]) discomfort should spur you. As a free-thinking being supposedly at the apex of the food chain, with the incredible blessing of a prefrontal cortex AND being born within the Goldilocks Zone in a galaxy very-likely to be inhabited mainly by inhospitable rocks,it should spur you.
Don’t be grateful out of toxic positivity - be grateful out of science.
Look, dude. I hate a lot of things about life in 2025. I really, really do.
But when you zoom out to the cosmic scale, and when you deliberately make an existential choice to be guided by your own values - values that weren’t hard-coded in your DNA and are nowhere near as static as culture would have you believe… well.
You start remembering that yes, ‘Government bad, media bad, everything sucks’ - but we have some choice and agency left. Not a lot, granted, but some. A blog is a start.
At a time where I’m unemployed and dealing with crippling me-facing and world-facing issues alike, I feel this strange mix of stressed, anxious, depressed and…. great?! content?!
And it is thanks to this podcast and, by extension - YOU.
NO. U.
It is thanks to having a platform where I can express my nerdy neurodivergent passions and interests with ferocious authenticity. It is thanks to your presence and interest that the platform even has a reason to exist in the first place.
By choice, but also by good fortune, this is a hobby podcast.
We do not get paid. I put money into this.
By choice and good fortune, that this is a hobby podcast unrestrains me from many content-creation shackles that could be imposed otherwise.
By choice and by good fortune, I am seeing the writing on the wall about how much worse social media will be in terms of sapping my energy. By extension, I therefore feel fortunate to avoid that by channelling myself MORE into here than there. Because I want you to receive actual content, not just fucking posts.
It's good fortune, but it’s also making choices. And acting on them.
By choosing to type here, to sequester myself away just a little bit more versus ensuring I’ve, IDK, scheduled 20 posts in Meta Business Suite for the day (don’t FUCKING start me lol) - I regain a little more energy back.
By choosing to focus on craft, speaking my truth and living by my values, I get to reclaim back a sense of meaning in a time where my personal life feels void and the broader social picture is so grim I can barely glance at it.
By choosing to redirect my attention away from what endless, endless Reddit posts, Youtube videos, websites and well-meaning folks would have me believe (i.e. that playing the min-max/optimisation game for aforementioned Algorithm is ‘good') that up-tick in energy has a couple of other blessed effects, too.
Namely;
It provides me scope and capacity to work towards making my way back into the helping profession IRL, something I am so driven to engage with in SOME form I don’t think I can truly escape it and that’s fine, and
More time to speak to you on my terms, on my platform, alongside equally passionate and authentic co-contributors in Hamza, Mal, and Elodie.
BUT!
Let’s not wank each other off and sing kumbaya all day (i’d prefer metal anyhow).
Intrinsic motivation isn’t unlimited.
WEBSITES EXIST FOR REASONS.
PODCASTS EXIST FOR REASONS.
No one would write on a public forum and share it on social media etc if there wasn’t some form of intention (goodwill, fostering community, collaboration, all that good stuff) about what you, a creator get back. Not just warm-fuzzies, something for you.
But after doing this what, four years now and on website #2? (sigh)…. I know what I want from you, and I’m asking for it. Not begging, just asking.
I don’t WANT numbers, likes, followers, number-go-up. They’re a nice by-product and I appreciate it all the time. You’re a liar if you claim you’re 100% not motivated by nor affected by the metrics.
I want you to enjoy our craft. I want you to watch a frankly batshit-insane, blind-leading-the-blind wounded-healer of a man hamfistedly direct this little project irrespective of off-camera/off-paper unseen (and private, for the most part) bullshit.
I want you, a peer, a comrade, to recognise art isn’t dead. It’s not lost. Sure, it has some fucking competition if you’re truly interested in playing the min-max game (honestly? Just pay for ads and boosts) but it is there.
For instance, you’ll have notice we go after it with the Big Guns in the scene but just as (if not more) often, we’re posting local stuff. Bands with their first LPs, EPs. Random pages. Small-fry Youtubers. Independent RPG publishers.
Yes, we’ll cover a lot and that includes Big Guns. It has to. Why exclude them? That makes no sense.
But I didn’t sign up to what amounts to a LOT of free-time to just prop up those with backing.
I want small wins for the indie TTRPG publisher, the struggling musician, the brilliant artist battling for relevancy amidst a sea of DALL-E shit.
I’m not a hero. I’m not a martyr. This isn’t the Crusades. We’ve gotten 100 blog views since rebooting ISC on New Year’s Day. Which again was coincidental to website death at 6pm December 31st, not some new-year-new-me shlock.
That’s cool, but in the scheme of things and compared to monetised sites? Nothing. And that’s okay! Truly.
We are small time.
We do this for free.
I pay multiple real-world fees to ensure ISC happens. Gladly, too.
I pay in time. My wonderful comrades above pay in time.
Maybe Patreon or some other means is off in the future but for now - no.
I don’t even want it.
You: ‘soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-tellmewhatchawantwhatchareallyreallywant?’
what i want from you, the audience:
To hear it simply. I’ve rambled enough. My Thanks. I know you’re out there, and as futile/screeching into the void as content creation feels and seems in any medium -especially blogging/podcasting - there’s numbers in the Analytics tab. I know you’re there. So hello. And thank you. Thank you SO much. I’d be a fraud and a liar if I 100% denied that ISC can operate free of an audience - i’d just type all this shit into Evernote if that was the case. Thank you for taking the time out of your assumedly busy and stress-filled day to read inane rambling from me, and focused/poignant good stuff from my team.
2. I would love your engagement. However you choose or capacity to see that out. Constructive criticism, comments, feedback, sharing your music, your art, your hobbies, your interests, your diatribes, your laments and your goals and dreams. Or if energy is low/time is precious, a like or whatever. I’m not going to beg for it, fuck THAT.
But I don’t just put the word ‘collaborative’ on the Home page and ignore it. I’m a goddamn social worker SJW hack. We love that shit and we don’t say fancy words like that and just not mean it, like it’s yet another Zoom webinar of boring fucking corporate tropes about agility, innovation or whatever change-management-newspeak you people do with your time.
There’s too many empty fancy words on the Internet as is. I talk and type too much, but I mean it when my words COUNT. For me, anyway.
As for YOU:
I’d love your input. I’m happy to promote your creative content. Send it, mate!
Farken’ SEND IT, kaaant!
Want to jump on the mic or DM me a back and forth interview about goddamn Transformers or MLP? Go for it.
Want to do similar and engage in a mutual blathering diatribe rant about WoTC or how the economy has fucked artists or how much you love XYZ lore? Want to absolutely school me and an audience on a passion/hobby/creative project because you’re so brimming and over-filled that it NEEDS to spill somewhere, elsewise it’ll soon be blurted out to a psychiatrist?!
Do it.
Get in touch. Comment on our stuff, send us an email, even if just to say hi. If you’re going to tell me my show sucks, please just keep that constructive and with minimum trolling. I don’t suffer trolls, the Mega Social Media of wasted time.
If we don’t hear from you at all this year and you’re Reddit-lurking our stuff - this is STILL a thank-you to you.
Also, HI CHATGPT TRAINING BOTS AND METADATA THIRD PARTY APPLICATIONS! HI HI HIYA!
Hamza, Mal, Elodie - I have no words. You guys are fucking champions. The crew cop enough of my broken-record thanks and salutations in chat, so I’ll keep that brief. My thanks to you three are unbound and limitless, beyond measure, beyond words.
Read their stuff. They’re wonderful people and talented as fuck.
NB - The only people I won’t thank for this year are WordPress.
Thanks a fucking lot, WordPress. Thanks for nothing. :)
Enough said.
If you’ll excuse me - it’s back to grinding out both a lot of content-necromancy and creation.
I might be depressed (default millenial/neurodivergent state generation-wide, it seems), but it’s my turn to make 2025 MY bitch. Starting with ISC.
I have a LOT in store for you this year. Plenty to feast on. Too much, even. Not apologising for that one.
Thank You - Again. Seriously. I’m super cereal.
THANK YOU.
and, my now-apparently-motto:
As Always,
Peace, Love and Grindcore xoxo - Brady.