Who the Online Spirituality Influencer Was: A Post-Mortem

What was spiritual Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and so forth, and who were these people who posted there so much?

Basically my diagnosis is that the COVID-19 pandemic drove a massive surge in avoidance. Avoidance is surely a primary driver of going online overall, and in those acutely and globally disturbing conditions, the drive was strong to get away from the real world. But since one couldn’t really look away, one needed a way to feel meaningful by engaging in the Real Problems™, which of course were not the painful human institutional problems (yuck, avoid) but the root problems: the Cause of All Suffering™.

This is the cause to which I attribute the explosion of new-age* spirituality as an online content business since 2020.

* (I may not have been fond of the term “new-age” nine years ago in my pre-postrat-Twitter postrat era [seriously, if you met me on Twitter, you need to read this, it’s like a parody of everything we’ve ever posted, although I suppose everyone’s being-27-era is like that], but I’ve begun to appreciate it. Any spirituality that posits that we are some special transitional generation between ages is a new-age spirituality.)

Personally, in 2023ish, I realized the only road out of my own pandemic-related trauma went through the rest of my personal problems — the ones I didn’t get to by meditating for hours a day during lockdown — because they required seeing the problems from a relational perspective, finding common ground with my family and community, and working through it together. And this required dumping most of the esoteric language I had accumulated over those few years, so we could understand each other.

This required shutting off the vast majority of the online input I had accumulated during that time, which was programming me with that language I needed to unlearn. When I began the audit to do this, I was struck by how these accounts had basically been posting the same thing every day for three years, having the same conversations over and over, chanting them like a mantra, in order to stay in it. That was the point. Don’t move on. Don’t change.

This is how I realized the whole thing was not only hypocritical but self-defeating, and I changed course pretty hard as a Creator™ not only to make my Content™ more relatable and relationship-oriented but also to move away from media and formats that promoted and facilitated avoidance. And you know what happened? People in my local offline network started reading and listening to my stuff, coming on my podcast, hiring my website company, et cetera, for the first time. How’s that for a sign?

And really, these shifts changed the way I spend my time online holistically. It drew me out of a creator/audience mode (which was mostly just a mentality anyway). The stuff I did became intrinsically collaborative and involved more people. It became less idiosyncratic and more approachable. And it became sustainable. Because networks, communities, relationships, are the foundation of the sustainability of human activities. Attentional warfare via one-to-many media is destroying that.

Anyway, I hope the people who are still tweeting about what level of Buddhism they beat this morning and what it means for the future world governed by the AGI messiah — and the people still posting Instagram videos about how this New Moon is the one that will activate the phase shift into the next dimension — are doing okay, and I hope someone in their life is checking on them and making them a non-Soylent meal every once in a while.