I’m Tired of Monster Hunting

Corresponding with some kind of transformation I can best describe as a “thaw” of some very stuck and dissociated patterns, I am feeling a creeping dread that I allowed in some of that real bad internet brainworm woo over the past few years alongside what were really rather few meaningful adjustments to the good stuff.

Reading the spiritual internet is giving me a clammy, feverish feeling like visiting a friend in a mental hospital.

This is not the first time I’ve developed this feeling over the course of those years, and indeed many spiritual internet users — some whom I respect, others whom I despise — would probably say it’s good, actually. It’s like letting your children play in the dirt instead of keeping them in an antiseptic prison. One needs to inoculate oneself and develop a brainworm immune system.

That may be true for some purposes, like waging memetic warfare on the internet, but I feel like one brainworm that can be quite dangerous is the belief that waging online memetic warfare is a good use of one’s time. Not that no one should do it; it’s literal hell out there, and those demons need exorcising. But in this time of monsters, the job of monster hunter can have an egoic appeal, and the qualifications for doing that job are far more intricate than most surviving cultures are remotely aware of (I do know a good one, though). Plus, not everybody can afford to bring a stray brainworm home with them. I sure can’t.

Being an ancestor is my ancestral full-time job, and it really doesn’t seem like the God of my ancestors has much patience left for this internet monster hunting phase. The way in which my life of late has thrown at me an increasingly relentless stream of daily emergencies seemingly precision-targeted to throw me off my game suggests nothing so much as God speaking directly to me to say that these spirituality-flavored information games amount to nothing. Nothing useful. Nothing helpful. Nothing that gets anyone anywhere. They dysregulate me, take my head out of the game, and use up the energy I need for the next emergency. I already had one this morning, and this writing is me sort of surrendering after it.

Now, it’s true that my online work is focused on active remedies for this situation. But it turns out that this still requires standing athwart the monster hell-gate yelling, “Stop!” And right now it just does not feel worth taking on these dangerous levels of brainworm exposure.

I feel surrounded. Surrounded by impure spirits. And my intention here is not to judge, it’s just that by doing sPiRItuAL stUfF alongside it, I feel implicated. And also, I am not out here to save souls; I’m out here to find the others. Being in the mix with the brainworms doesn’t just bring in the brainworms; it brings in the brainwormed, and I can’t take care of them. I have enough people to take care of.

The incentives are just wrong out there. The Algorithm commoditizes everything in its path. I can’t stop thinking about how applying commercial logic to spirituality creates an incentive in people regarded as having special access to the unseen to keep people agitated by unseen forces. That’s what algorithmic social media feeds in my neighborhood feel like to me: people whipping up frenzies to drum up business. I can’t consume that, and I certainly can’t produce that, so I’m not really sure what to do. I feel blessed by the presence of many Householders in this little haven I’ve pulled together, but now I feel like I’m competing with the Algorithm for their attention, and, God, I can’t keep up with that. My memes are not dank enough.

I guess I turn my attention to building by word of mouth one person at a time, through friends and friends-of-friends, the way community used to work, but augmented by high-trust online tools like Mastodon and hopefully Base as well. And in the meantime, I’ll just keep tending my crops here and praying for rain.