ISC Podcast Ep. 6 - The March Not-An-Update Anti-Update (Update). [05/03/2023].
(Note: This review was originally posted on our old website, innerstrengthcheck.com. Due to the fine folks over at WordPress, that website is now toast. Henceforth, please refer to the current website for any new material! Links on socials and Youtube to be updated as I get to each one. Regards, - Brady)
Transcript (A rarity these days, seeing as I just go ahead and write blog posts to accompany episodes lol)
’s plenty of stuff I can objectively point towards coming up in the hobbyist spaces.
Music?
I’m finally feeling my first tingle of interest in new stuff after a long, long period of anhedonia. But it’s a fire I’m really scared to get close to. (example - new Enslaved today. Fucking brilliant).
Musicianship?
Too much self-criticism and confusion. Next, please.
Tabletop?
That one’s easy. I’m burnt to a crisp. All I can handle is my current campaign. I’m too fucked in the head to even read Reddit at the moment. Forget it.
Meta?
I mean fuck, three words - Open Gaming Licence.
Identifying what’s coming up this March isn’t the spirit of this post.
Identifying why we feel a need to even talk about what’s coming up, as creatives and people just posting shit, is.
I’m scared of my hobbies because I’m scared of myself and my propensity to be over the top. And I’m not sure how much of that is cautious realism for my current situation, and how much is depressogenic thinking holding me back.
So instead, I’ve just been stuck, thinking.
Like you, I literally have a brain that never stops thinking. That is how we’re designed.
I’ve got slightly different wiring, and that leads to some spicy thinking at times.
Neurologically, I don’t get enough blood-flow to the front-right prefrontal cortex, leading to a less-than-average level of dopamine (on top of chronically low serotonergic levels - yay brain emptied of good-feels juice!). This subsequently leads to constant mental activity, particularly towards exciting or stimulating things in the absence of those. That’s literally how my brain has tried raw-dogging reality prior to my ADHD inattentive-type diagnosis - it’s literally that guy from The Prodigy who just runs around on stage most yelling ‘YEAH! COME ON!’ and it seems to do the same even with medication.
The side serving of chronic and treatment-resistant depression and anxiety don’t help too much, either.
What I thought I’d discuss today kind of runs in opposition to what I think a lot of podcasts and the like do when they provide some sort of update. It’s usually served to the public less as a PSA or a droll FYI, but more of an attempt of appeasement that ‘hey, I’m still here! Please don’t reject me because I’ve taken what is essentially a probably-mentally-healthy koan of silence!’
The idea itself of perceiving a need to provide updates, itself speaks to a baseline level of anxiety and trepidation about silence. A discomfort with stillness that is endemic to life in the 21st Century. About keeping regularly well enough engaged with an audience, with ensuring people are up-to-speed on what’s going on in our lives. And this need increasingly seems to be served up with a nice big dollop of guilt and shame, as though producing the things we like to put out there is suddenly of life-threatening importance. Hell, maybe yours is.
Most of us, though? Not so much, just our anxiety around it being interpreted as a threat to our survival. Social rejection literally was an evolutionary threat and lights up the same pathways as physical pain, so it’s a strong sensation to want to avoid.
I’m increasingly concerned though, with how much I see how apologetic and shame-laden content-creators are around not keeping up with their own, arbitrarily set battery of content scheduling.
One of the things neurodivergent and/or mentally ill people are quite transparently guilty of as a habit, is pre-emptive apologies. I’m not kidding - I have had to make conscious effort to stop reflexively apologising so much, that I’m even practicing it in situations where I am objectively in the right/not at-fault.
But, dude, it’s not just me. I see so much of it in so many of you normies as well. It seems as endemic to the digital media ecosystem as algal blooms in a cesspool. We could harp on forever about how inexorably I believe that is tied into the ever-expanding pace of hustle-culture, but that’s several episodes worth.
With YouTube now having capacity to make posts for ‘communities’, it is interesting to see this feature instantly be utilised as a platform for offshoring this anxiety.
Just go have a look through any ‘Tuber who regularly posts content, especially if there’s any regularity to the scheduling. ‘Hey guys, sorry I haven’t been posting as much’, ‘sorry the post is late’, etc. People who’ve I don’t know, literally just been flung out the passenger side door during a multi-car pileup, crawling on bloody stumps, swiping the phone through the heat, fading into unconsciousness with the high hope the anesthetic won’t be days later than their scheduled Monday post-date.
Kay, maybe not that extreme. But what’s life without a bit of embellishment from time to time eh?
I get it. Oh by the Gods do I get it. That impulse is so strong and for me. It’s so richly entwined with a lifetime of othering, of being an outcast, of perceiving myself as socially inept no matter how well I do in friendships, work, relationships or life. I’m already deeply apologetic you’re even reading this tangential word-twaddle.
Like some cognitively-impaired, socially-inept and self-esteem-depleted martyr, I reflexively fall on my sword in a public display on the regular. A belly-up, submissive interpersonal seppuku with the trusty, well-used, often-sharpened blade of ‘Sorry!’.
I do it without thinking whether I’m in the right or wrong, probably just so I don’t have to feel the inevitable bee-sting of rejection, by people with a fully working frontal lobe (who weren’t worried about it in the slightest to begin with).
It’s like being one of those goats that freezes and drops at loud noises, but you’re the one doing the screaming to begin with.
But that is the me-facing stuff.
And I’m finally reaching a stage where I’m wrenching the knife-handle slowly away from myself, depression and anxiety firmly planted opposite, trying desperately to weaponise neurodivergence against me. Like the protagonist and antagonist in every very-unrealistic on-the-floor grapple in action movies where sharp objects are involved.
I’m working on it. Working on healing the trauma of being othered. Doing that in my own time with therapy, medication, relatable memes, the eye-rolling usual-suspects that I conveniently neglected for so long.
But, I really do want to highlight what seems like such a surface-level feature of content-creation and social media, that is symptomatic of an underlying anxiety-riddled, scatterbrained motivation. And that is, the urge to keep up the pretense of having a feature-rich, schedule-packed, dizzying array of things going on.
I know from a generational point of view, we’re doing that as the new Keeping up With The Joneses, seeing as most of us are bereft of economic opportunities to flash our status. Busy-ness, productivity and activity have become the new social currency, and silence, calm and equanimity have taken a serious hit for the worse as a result.
Take for example, Instagram. I’ve recently and very reluctantly rejoined the platform after a hiatus.
I’ll be honest - I actually felt a small pang of shock in realising how much many folks were consistently keeping up a steady flow of Stories, Reels, posts, pictures, memes, short videos and the like on this platform as well as Facebook. I was as impressed as I was intimidated.
I go on Facebook, and the same usernames who are highlighted as having posted multiple stories to FB that day, were also seen on Insta doing much the same there. I do get that a lot of that is simply integrated push-button cross-posting, in Zuckerberg’s vain attempt to have multi-modal attentional theft kept within his app ecosystem as he rapidly loses out to TikTok and the like. But, still - damn. It’s like another .exe file opened in the background, and I’m almost immediately reminded why I went so all-or-nothing and deleted my last profile just to save some psychological RAM. Especially since I’m on DDR3 in a DDR5 world.
But to re-enter this other completely-dogshit, garbled transmission of mostly-ads (seriously? fuck off with the ads) and see everyone’s posting all the time across more than one app...well. Relinquishing my ego for a second, remembering how powerfully effective the neurological hooks latch into in one’s brain, I can’t help but force myself to admit it. I feel the pull.
Whether I consciously defy it or not, whether I think it or not, if I mindfully explore the slight increase of intrusive thoughts (’I should post those photos from my recent holiday/that gig to Insta’), they’re there and they seem to be present automatically.
Like a Slenderman, they’ll flash past in my usual torrent of thought, only briefly. But they’ll sit there, insidious. Hidden behind such a devilishly smooth UX/UI that is just begging for you to take a thumb-swing.
(Insert Gillian oh god I want you to hit me gif)
I’m an accretion disk of shattered attention, and social media is bombarding me with Hawking radiation as I haplessly whirl around the event horizon. The constant screech of space-madness, is the featureless void of irrelevant Sponsored ads that is The Sims V: Millenial Nihilism DLC. My brain, as flash-fried a lump of Skinnerian lever-pulling ratshit as a poor rodent with a lobotomy, there’s little red icons that offer quantified solace. Islands of dopamine, pockets of breathable operant-conditioning oxygen, clarity in the endless din.
Like some dick-swinging space-trucker who decided to go visit the dual black hole anomaly because oh-so-purdy, I edge back into the ‘Gram knowing full well even my reinforced engine upgrade of past experience and piloting bravado won’t escape the fucking law of physics that is, simply put - these apps are stronger than you, than me, than us. It’s simple math.
Without faster-than-light drives, you’re at the risk of getting fucked if you get too close again. And we currently don’t have a neurological mechanism other than ‘don’t be within the gravity well that is flashing red on the goddamn screen’ (not having the app at all/attempting to mitigate the damage with reverse-thrusters such as offline-days, turning off notifications) to subvert a statistically superior force.
Complicating these matters, is getting involved in anything that even tangentially related to CoNTeNT CrEaTiOn.
A saying I’ve come to hate, loathe and despise, as the very mention of it conjures up some transparently-capitalistic nebulous cloud of hustle shit. I’ll gladly admit I’m both pretentious and idealistic, so the insincerity and disgust I feel any time I make an attempt to reach into that term just feels like an instant injection of spiritual poison.
When I reach into the godforsaken muck, I’m perpetually reminded by completely-human factors that differentiate me from the odiously-twee advice around this stuff. Make sure you’ve got a script prepared. Do your research. Post regularly. Ensure you’ve thoroughly hashtagged, and min-max your SEO.
Well, I’m recovering from depression and anxiety, and so is my partner. We’re both trying to live as two neurodivergent people in a household, in a neurotypical world. So, already, chalk up some realistic barriers.
Now add in the incredible stress of social work and the realistic amount of self-care that is required, especially for more vulnerable persons such as myself, just to turn up and do the job effectively. It’s actually gargantuan. who are only just getting to the stage of dragging my impulsivity, depression, unfair social comparisons
I have spent my entire adult life masking complex, heavy underlying shame and low self-worth behind a shiny exterior prop of ‘doing’. Neurodivergent folks have always enacted overcompensation in various forms in order to fit in, and nothing facilitates that better than gamifying literally everything and putting a metric value on anything we produce. Irrespective of how it makes us feel.
I’ve been encouraged to run myself ragged which, as someone with the underlying impulsivity I opened this post with, is a constant risk. Being less depressed actually places me at risk of burnout, as
Like I said, I spend a lot of time thinking. A lot of the time, deeply. Whereas once I brandished this as a shield of ego for the subtle deficits in my processing, I now realise is part of my condition. I can’t out-medicate, out-meditate or out-do my brain’s perpetual need for stimulus.
What I can do, is a few things.
First, practice radical acceptance and ask hard questions.
Am I posting a ‘March update’ because I’m genuinely excited to talk about what’s coming up this month (I’m not, I’m still depressed so nothing is exciting until the moment it happens)?
Is keeping up with arbitrary scheduling going to improve what I put out there? (No.)
Or is taking a radical stance against all the content-creation people-pleasing half the point of the podcast, which I now seemed to have missed?
Am I being brave or assertive in any way by slavishly apologising to myself and my audience ahead of time about not having that much on?
Am I just eating because I’m bored?
Second, I can lean into it . That shitty 80s-action-movie analogy. I can be wild, inconsistent, hurried, rushed.
A lot of my current depression is based around what I’m not doing. On a lifetime of friends, family and coworkers telling me to slow down, to stop putting so much on my plate, to relax a bit. Often, they’re right and they’re always well-intended, compassionate and concerned loving people.
Often times though, they’re actually wrong.
I have a very fine line to tread between feeling optimally-engaged by having lots of stimulation and enrichment, and following my impulsivity and hyperfixation straight into burnout. I nearly experienced that recently with gigs.
Being reflexively afraid of or downplaying my intensity leads me to not post updates. To not do episodes. To not talk about what i love, to you.
Obviously, a general middle-ground, middle-path approach is best. Consistency or not.
But I am not generally well-equipped to do this, even if i have structure, routine, strategies and the like.
I have to be given the freedom to unleash and withdraw, as is often my style.
Working around myself then, leads to a realistic notion of balance being a pathway, a general guideline.
What I can work with, actually, is stopping internalising so much and taking conscious stock of unhealthy/unhelpful barriers.
And one that sticks out to me like the worlds’ most insecure pair of quivering dogs’-balls, is a perceived need for me to keep up with you.
I don’t. You do you, I’ll do me.
You’ll get what I put out at a rate, quality and consistency that suits me at that time, and I’m not responsible for how you react to that. And that’s fine, çause at the end of the day this is just words and sound and stuff. I’m not overtly charging into this with the Sword of Damacles’ Engagement Metrics swinging over my head.
I’m just exhaust-venting and hoping it’s of some entertainment at the end of the day, but releasing myself of any guilt if it isn’t.
This is my update for March - setting boundaries in a world where the Cthulu-tendrils of our app ecosystem are constantly invasive and maddening.
Where creative pursuits come with as so conditional, so burdensome and so public that they evoke terror instead of joy.
Fuck it. Life’s tough and the world is irrevocably fucked. Let’s inject some fun back into the mix, for fuck’s sake.
Post-Script - 03/01/2025 - Dude. Wow. Gnarly. Man.
Oh believe me, I still fling out impassioned ventilation-diatribes like this on the regular, just not so often on ISC.
I’m happy to do some sort of Grind My Gears style segment if there’s interest, but I’m also happy to note that since the time of creating this episode I’ve really made a conscious decision to make the podcast …. not so much balanced, but slightly less screaming into and at The Void.
To quote the Omnidimensional Creator (actually Beav from DTP) - ‘ you gotta chill, man…’