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#I will not let my internet anxiety get to me. i will not
darcydoesfuckall · 2 days
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Why you should write that AO3 comment:
Hello! I am an AO3 author and professional fandom dipshit. This is an "essay" on why you should leave that comment on the fanfic you just read.
Table of Contents:
"Commenting is too much effort!"
"I don't know what to write!"
Do you want more fanfic?
Fan creators are human beings, not AI content generators.
You can count it as charity work on your metaphysical taxes.
"Commenting is too much effort!"
Yes, writing a comment takes energy. I'm an introvert, I get that. I have two counter arguments to this point.
AO3 comments are not the SAT:
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This is a comment from my latest fic, Quantum Entangled.
Three words and a heart. It requires zero consideration, it isn't specific to the fic, it's something you could copy-paste, even. A comment like this is better than nothing. I'll let my reply from AO3 explain why:
"You know what, I appreciate this way more than you'd probably expect. The temptation to lurk is a strong one, both for social anxiety reasons and internet content-consumption culture reasons. But when people lurk, I can't tell that they've enjoyed the story. The more people that lurk instead of interacting, the more I assume that my work wasn't good enough, irrespective of the reader's actual feelings. So this was a very welcome comment to read. Thank you for indicating your enjoyment. I will endeavour to write more stuff for you to lurk on in the future. :)"
A comment like this, one that is as thoughtless and low effort as possible, is still a comment. Something that denotes a reader's interest. Because, and I can't be clear enough about this, I HAVE NO OTHER WAY OF KNOWING THAT YOU LIKED IT. Kudos and comments are my only window into the reader's experience.
Sure, I'd love more detailed and thorough comments on my work, but, if that expectation is the thing that's going to stop you from commenting at all, I'd prefer the bland copy-paste appreciation.
Onto my second argument.
Do you know what also takes effort? WRITING THE DAMN FIC:
You do not get to complain about being forced to type a congratulatory handful of words after reading that 200k slow-burn fantasy au. Do you know how many hours went into that thing? Do you? Because I can guarantee that it was A LOT. All that writers are asking for is a single emoji. A kudos, at the very least. Consider the effort that went into the creation that you've just experienced and give just a thimble full of it back.
Authors lay out a feast for you to devour. They're only requesting a "thank you".
"I don't know what to write!"
Like in the previous example, an AO3 comment can be as simple as three words saying that you appreciated it. Just an acknowledgement that you were there. It doesn't have to be fancy.
But if you want fancy...?
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Here's one of my comments, from Tishae's Better Together.
Let me break it down for you.
"Stunning. This au is so well developed. I love how you managed to maintain tension after the point that they discover that their feelings are requited. This was brilliantly paced, and the action (esp the ending) was so engaging."
The comment opens with appreciation. (Think of it as a sandwich with love as the bread. It starts and ends with my enjoyment.)
There are specific details about what I liked.
"If I may ask, what was the crime that the Metatron committed? Maybe I'm bad at reading between the lines or maybe I missed something, but I'm really curious as to what dirt they have on him. Victimless? Bad enough for imprisonment, but not so morally reprehensible as to make Anathema reveal it? Did he embezzle? That's all I can really think of."
Continues with a specific question about the story and plot.
Shows that I was critically engaged and actively considering the story.
You don't have to have questions about every fic that you read, but don't be afraid to ask them if you do. I love it when people ask me about my work.
"Thank you for the delicious food. I honestly thought that you were going to have Crowley's final look be something in grey (black and white being the theme of the show, metaphorically representing separation/binary, so Aziraphale was uncomfortable with it due to the implications. Grey, symbolising unity/shades of grey as an idiom, would then be the biggest middle finger to the Metatron) but I do really like what you came up with."
Gratitude.
Thoughts about how I read the plot. (This is something I particularly love to read as an author. Please tell me what's going on in that funky lil' brain of yours!!)
"I'm hoping this comment provides plenty of dopamine. If the task activation and instant gratification parts of your brain light up, you might be more likely to write GO content again. Love your work, thanks for sharing it. I hope you gain 3 inches of metaphorical dick length. Please keep writing."
Encouragement to keep writing. (This is the best way to ensure that creators remain in the fandom)
A funny comment to sign off.
Now that you know what to comment, let's start on the real reasons why you should.
Do you want more fanfic?
Fun fact! Fanfictious Authoria are a species that sustain themselves entirely on a diet of brain worms, unfinished WIPs, and kudos. As one of the three fundamental food groups, removing kudos from the fandom ecosystem causes a complete collapse of the natural order. In times of unprecedented scarcity, entire populations of Fanfictious Authoria can die out completely. This means that the production of fanfiction, in that particular region of fandom, stops entirely, often causing major ecological damage, and the subsequent deaths of fan species in the same genus. (Like the Fanfictious Artia, or the Fanfictious Editour, both of which subsist on fanfiction based diets to survive.)
In conservation efforts, experts are imploring readers to donate kudos and comments toward any fandom region that they want to stay alive.
But I digress.
When I want more content, I tell the author. Ask and you shall receive; it's the best way to convince an author/artist to make more.
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My comment on @mrghostrat's And They Were Streamers
You liked it? Then COMMENT! Not for the author's sake, but for your own. You want to see the ending of a WIP? Well, it'd be a terrible shame if the author gave up on it because they thought no one was reading... They don't know that you enjoy their work until you TELL THEM. They're not psychic, you have to help them hear you. Commenting on the things you like influences the creators of said things to attribute the act of making content (and, notably, making the type of content that specifically appeals to you) with the dopamine hit of reading your reaction. Treat them like Pavlov's dogs. Ring the kudos-bell.
Fan creators are human beings, not AI content generators.
They have real human feelings and real human egos. The contemporary attitude towards media engagement is skewed towards algorithmic, instant, and uncritical consumption. This is pumping straight gasoline into the beautiful lakes of our fandom ecosystem. Fandom cannot afford to treat its creators like mechanical text generators. We are not an unfeeling assembly line, only there to produce content. We are enthusiasts, engaging in our hobby. No fan creator has to show you anything. They are fully within their rights to keep their works hidden in their computer files, never to see the light of day. Every fanfic on AO3 is only there because someone had the grace to share it with you. You are not entitled to an author's work, just as they are not entitled to your kudos. We have a mutually beneficial arrangement. Do not forget your part in this symbiosis.
It's a problem that extends beyond AO3. Tumblr is a less enthusiastic place than it used to be. Fandom as a whole is drifting towards a consumption mindset. I, for one, am sick of it. Reblog things, like them, share them. Make fanart of fanart. Who gives a shit? Do the cringy thing. You don't have to cultivate your blog aesthetic. Be who you are, like what you like, and have enthusiasm about all of it. Fandom should be an expression of radical self acceptance. Embrace it. Leave essays about fics that you liked. Reblog the essays of other's when you see them. Exist in the mutual joy of seeing and being seen. You are not just an external observer, absorbing content from a distance. You are here too. Wave back at us. Say 'hi.'
You can count it as charity work on your metaphysical taxes.
My final appeal is a moral one.
Commenting on AO3 is just a kind thing to do.
You are your actions. Are you the kind of person who does the kind thing when no one is watching? When no one will care?
Fanfiction is a hobby, and I'm not here to guilt you about how you spend your leisure time. I'm only here to say that there is a kindness you could be giving the world.
If you are one of the people that performs this kindness, I thank you.
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I thought y'all should read this
I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.
Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.
End the Phone-Based Childhood Now
The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.
By Jonathan Haidt
Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.
The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.
The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.
As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.
Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.
Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.
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What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.
I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.
As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.
But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.
The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.
My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.
1. The Decline of Play and Independence 
Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.
Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.
Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.
One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.
Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.
And then we changed childhood.
The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.
In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.
2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves
The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.
The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).
The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).
Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.
It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.
3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood
The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?
In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.
You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.
Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.
It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.
We had no idea what we were doing.
4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood
In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.
The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.
In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.
The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.
But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.
You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?
Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.
First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.
Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.
Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.
Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.
These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.
Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.
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A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.
5. So Many Harms
The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.
Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning
Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.
It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.
Addiction and Social Withdrawal
The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.
Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?
The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.
Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.
I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?
The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning 
During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.
This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.
All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.
When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today. 
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Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.
6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives
How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.
An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.
Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:
Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.
Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,
"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."
A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:
I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.
Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
7. Collective-Action Problems
Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.
Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.
A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.
Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.
This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.
Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.
8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps
Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.
No smartphones before high school  
The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.
No social media before 16
The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.
Phone‐free schools 
Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.
More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world
Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.
It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.
The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.
9. What Are We Waiting For?
An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.
In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.
There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).
Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.
The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.
We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.
This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
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erythristicbones · 9 months
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i think making my own discord server for my original stories was one of the best decisions ive made in awhile tbh
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angrylesbianstereotype · 11 months
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Real talk tho I don’t think we’re actually going to get anywhere in terms of destigmatizing mental illness until we start accepting that A) some mentally ill people really are not fully in control of their actions and this does not make them monsters bc they are not actively choosing to hurt others, and B) that does not mean that you are obligated to take shit from them bc you’re foremost obligation is to protect yourself, and bc there are shitty ppl out there who will feign being out of control so that they can get away w hurting you w/out suffering any of the natural repercussions that come w acting like a jerkoff. Also! Bc that person who really was out of control does not really want you to put yourself in the line of fire for them, bc they don’t really want to hurt you! And I think of these things are really hard for ppl to come to terms w bc it’s a lot harder to feel in control of a situation when there is no one person to blame, then it just feels really doomy and like there is no right response, which there really isn’t on an individual level, bc the reality is that the only constructive response to any of this is for the system to stop making it impossible for ppl to get the help they need, which… isn’t going to happen anytime soon :(
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steakout-05 · 9 days
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eeuuaghh i would like everyone to know that i apologise if i have not responded to your reblogs/mentions/posts on tumblr, i have really terrible social anxiety and for some reason people talking to me makes my nervous system think i'm being hunted for sport by a resident evil boss. sorry if i havent responded i'm not being rude i'm just having a panic attack :P
additionally: social anxiety is actually the reason why a lot of my old posts from late 2022 had weird spacing and spelling mistakes. i was too anxious to type properly
#sorry this seems like a random thing to post but it has been bugging me for a little bit now and i want to post it#and by a little bit i mean the entire time i've been on this website#as for the reason i have social anxiety: i went to a really terrible high school full of dangerous people-#-who were literally like. the worst most bigoted people ever. not everyone there was bad of course but 90% of them were-#-and that stunted by social development by 5-6 years and now every time someone talks to me i feel like i'm about to get murdered#also primary school was. bad. the other kids could sniff out the autism in me and didn't like me for it#this post isn't directed towards anyone specifically but also it kinda is because there's a DM from someone-#-that i haven't responded to in literally 8 months and every time i think about it i get anxious#i'm sorry!!! i'm not trying to ignore you on purpose and i want to say something but my brain literally will not let me out of fear :(#i'm not used to getting talked to directly so every time i do my entire nervous system starts screaming and running in circles#it's kinda ridiculous because it's like. come on. why are you having a panic attack over a message on tumblr it's LITERALLY just words on-#-a screen what are you freaking out about. but also it's like hhhhh unfamiliar social situation scary. help.#unrelated to that but i am very worried about what people will think of me and like i know i really shouldn't worry about that-#-because i can't control what other people think of me and it really shouldn't be any of my or their business. but also-#-i have legitimate trauma that backs my fears up and every time someone is even slightly critical towards me my brain just goes-#-''see? it happened again i TOLD you it would happen again. idiot. you shouldn't have said anything''#and then i hide and cry and lay in bed thinking about how i'm going to die until i suddenly snap out of it and think-#-''wait hang on why should i care. i love being a weirdo on the internet why should i let my anxieties stop me''#and then it happens AGAIN and it's just a viscous cycle at that point#be silly on the internet -> detect slight criticism -> think everyone hates you again -> go back on your bullshit after 3 days of crying#and it makes sense because that exact same pattern happened to me countless times as a child.#be silly in school -> get made fun of for it -> get hated for it -> rinse and repeat until you think everyone is dangerous and they hate yo#if i could put it in a metaphor it would be like me being a little rabbit who thinks everyone is a scary wolf because of their big shadows-#-even though they're all also rabbits and i'm just paying attention to the scariest parts of them because i only know what wolves look like#trauma does fucked up things to your psyche lemmie tell you#social anxiety#anxiety disorder#i'm literally the ''too scared to order food'' stereotype except it's not a stereotype because it's real and every time i look at the 7/11-#-at my campus i go ''hm but what if they hate me for the food i buy there'' even though they're LITERALLY SELLING IT what is WRONG with me#anyway um. social anxiety sucks and i don't mean to not reply ro everyone who talks to me i am sorr y
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I'm exactly in the same spot you are with KOSA. If it passes, I am automatically deleting any and every account I have ever had. I'm a closeted transbian—need I say more? On top of that, I reblog a lot of kidcore aesthetic stuff because it helps me cope with childhood trauma. I'm totally going to get falsely accused of some heinous shit despite everything being 100% SFW.
I mean, fuck, I've seen adult Bluey fans get accused of some horrible things for literally no other reason than they enjoy watching a children's show with their kids. People are so goddamn unhinged.
right 😭 i absolutely feel you on being an LGBT adult(?) with a bright red target on their back for daring to breathe around kids. i used to want to be a preschool teacher, but those plans are halted for the foreseeable future. not to pat myself on the back lmao but i feel so sad that many other adults feel like they need to stay away from kids for their safety when they may have had an extremely positive impact on children's lives (like me honestlyyyyyy i am very good with not just kids but people in general, irl). i just watched a youtube video about the lgbt history of peter pan, and the youtuber had to briefly address popular allegations against j m barrie because he was an adult children's author. 😒
this is really not a bill created to keep any children safe, but to control people. i'm trying not to feel anticipatory grief about how much educational information and completely sfw works will be censored (as well as the nsfw ones that also have value but are even more obvious targets for the alt right). it feels like a giant library is going to be burnt down. the impact this will have on society is going to be at least a little tragic.
still, trying to stay optimistic and not assume the world is going up in flames irreversibly. this kind of mindset helps me not to fall into despair:
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at least there will still be physical books and people to ask for help offline, even if it will take longer to find answers. obviously some people are physically disabled and it may be harder for them to do extensive research irl and LGBT minors (...and adults) will have a much harder time finding community and resources and that's heartbreaking, but i believe that people will find a way to make things better. we've come this far in society. there will always be some setbacks as tyrannical leaders find ways to pressure people into compliance, but we still came up with the internet in the first place, you know? idk i just woke up so i don't think i'm wording this very well but while this feels devastating (possibly), i'm sure it's going to be okay again even if it may take a chunk of time out of my lifespan i don't want to think about lest i trigger another existential crisis lol
getting involved in your community is really helpful in times like this, and it helps with stress a lot to find safe people and places to retreat to if you can, even if they're just mental visualisations. sending hugs or good vibes to you in solidarity 🏳️‍🌈🩹
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sureuncertainty · 8 months
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officially covid negative!!
#win rambles#that experience was godawful and not because of the actual covid symptoms but bc of my ocd#and it made me realize how many people are developing ocd and other anxiety disorders for themselves with this pandemic#the way everyone is assigning morality to covid is honestly disgusting#i had some of the worst intrusive thoughts i have ever had in my LIFE due to the attitudes of people about covid that i see online#and it also made me realize that i need to really limit my time on the internet#i really do think everyone on this site (and the internet in general tbh) just hates people with ocd#anyway i'm over it now and covid is around and here to stay and i know it sucks but getting mad about it is literally not productive#some people are just REALLY pressed about things they ltierally can't control#which is yknow where anxiety and ocd stems from#it's much better to just. try your best to let it go#and live your life#i wanna make a more in depth post about this and all the thoughts i've had#but the truth is that there aren't protections or precautions being taken at large for covid anymore#and you can get really upset about it and live your life with debilitating anxiety or you can just. accept that it's here to stay#and make the choices you need to make to live with that#if there's one thing i've learned from having emetophobia my entire life it's that overanalyzing everything you and others#do in order to avoid getting sick is literally like. not a way to live. not a good way to live anyway#anyway this is funny that i'm writing this after the drama with my mask post that i deleted#but you know what. i've grown. i've learned. i've changed#i still hold to that original point but the thing is?? most people aren't masking anymore. and that sucks#but i literally cannot control what they do! so i'm not gonna give myself more anxiety stressing about it!#life is hard enough as it is
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corgifruity · 8 months
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if a person has a "don't dm unless we're friends/ close" in their bio, its *not* an invitation to start talking to them unless you both are friends.
please learn to respect boundaries
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quaranmine · 2 years
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i feel like im a pretty anxious person but my powers of repression are so good that whenever something sets me off i can almost always distract myself from it completely. the end result however is not that i feel better, but that i still feel bad like an hour later but now no longer remember what happened to set me off
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citricacidprince · 1 year
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I finished Inscryption recently and, surprisingly, at the moment the one I have the most thoughts on is Luke of all characters and they are buzzing around my brain at max speed
#like god the game is overall pretty eerie (like a thriller movie) but can be verg funny as well#but if your someone like me tries to shove themselves into the MC's shoes and imagine what they must be going through in that moment#Luke's whole situation is literally one of my anxiety daydreams that keep me up at 3am#He got an creepy onimous game that no ones ever heard of and it definitely is deeper than it lets on#he tried to talk to the game developers and they immediately told him to send it back or they'll sue hi#leaving him to either hand the game over never find out what the fuck is wrong with it; or break the law and get to the bottom of this#A lady who worked for the company just shows up at his door; knows his addresses and full name and asks for the game#she felt vaugely threatening near the end of their talk and made me nervous#Luke gets exposed to horrors after horrors and deep dive lore after deep dive lore and since he doesn't have time to analyze a lot of it#hes just as lost as we are; im fact hes DEFINITELY more lost than we are#this game on a floppy disk can connect to the internet and browse his files#the game KNOWS his name and is aware that its a game and only Luke can help them#while dealing with this hes still trying to understand the lore of the game; and live with the constant knowledge that#by all means he SHOULDN'T have this game and that people are willing to break into his house to get it back#And as fucking nuts the ending was i like to think Luke felt some sort of kinship with other card players at the end;#shaking their hands as they were deleted from the game#imagine how shocked and horrified he was finding out whatever the old data was; considering he broke the floppy disk over it#he called someone to confess to all the insane things he witnessed and then he never got to have a happy ending cause he was shot dead#left alone to bleed out on the floor of his house (assumedly far away from people considering how close he lives to the forest)#how long was he there? did anyone ever find him? how long until his YouTube subscribers get really concerned?#they must have already caught on that something weird is happening but how long until it hits that something is downright wrong?#if his death gets wildly covered since he seemed like a decent youtuber; how many fans are gonna sit in dread knowing something happened#they just dont know what and they NEVER will know#it really sucks because he seemed like a genuinely nicd guy; sure he seemed to have a certain YouTuber personality but he was NICE#inscryption spoilers#inscryption#luke carder#inscryption luke
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bo0zey · 2 years
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i am the stupidest dumbest bafoonist bitch alive. send tweet
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snekdood · 2 months
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idk how or when i got 700 followers but cool and hi i guess
#why are you here#im literally just here yelling#i was at like 200 last i checked#gotta be a lot of bots bc idk#its just that i hate this website so i dont understand how theres a portion of this website that wants to follow me#either its bots or cowards taking screenshots of my posts w/o saying shit to me directly#or ig the rare few of people that genuinely like me ???????????????????????????????#but qhy#i am starting to get anxiety about this revelation. i fear power.#one of the worst fates i'd hate to fall unto me is becoming powerful and misusing it. becoming what i hate.#so i try to push power away all the time. its why im so nasty on here dsjhbvdhgfbs im trying to get people to HATE ME#pls dont do this. i Will just hide away from humanity if i have to#*begins stabbing in the air violently in all directions as if trying to fight off a very quick small ghost*#yelling on the internet about your problems is all fun and games until ppl actually follow u and start to like u and become somewhat#swayed by what you say through no real attempt of your own and thn its a decision if you're going to let a drunkenness for that power to#over take you or reject it like the hideous manipulative shit it is#and then i end up deleting my social media accounts for a while bc the responsibility of power is too overwhelming and it keeps#trying to fucking come bACk to me and i DONT FUCKIN WANT IT#google how do i make people hate me and unfollow me so things can go back to normal and i can be a nobody yelling online#people who are following me and especially young people listen up: you do not have to be like me or do anything like me#you can be disgusted or annoyed with some of the ways i operate and generally like me anyways#dont feel pressured to do anything i say ever im yelling to what i was hoping was the void but ended up being 700 entire people#im literally just some guy who sits inside and thinks all day and likes to garden and do art sometimes and im only 26#i am not someone who knows everything or anything like that i share from my own experiences and thats it#and i am not always correct on anything ever and im always open to being wrong and i especially love it when people ACTUALLY#directly point out to me when im wrong and correct me and please oh god please do not try to be like me sdfbhfsdvhgfsdhgc#you are your own person with your own life i can be a guy you look at and be like 'how can i be more like or less like this dumpster fire#of a man' but dont be like me in every way or think like me in every way just dont please have your own opinions#okay im glad i got that off my chest sdnjfsdhvgsdhvgfhvgfsd#also if you're a minor you SHOULDNT be following me anyways
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sunnybabybun · 8 months
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This is Tortilla (Tilla for short)! She’s my bedtime bestie 💖💕
Her job is to hold my binky for me so I don’t lose it while I’m tossing and turning all night.
She’s had a busy week (‘cause I’ve been so stressed I feel like I can feel my hair growing and I sleep like absolute garbage when I feel like this) but she’s way better at keeping it together than I am!
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pearl-kite · 1 year
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Sitting here watching the halfway point for my six-month final term of my master's degree approaching like
I'm gonna do it again aren't I. I'm gonna just watch the deadline get closer and closer until it's too late
And then I just keep playing I Love Hue on my phone with old b-rate horror movies on in the background
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konigsblog · 4 months
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‘smile for the camera, mäuschen’
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pornstar könig and his little, naive plaything.
mdni - tw: dubcon (coercion), toxic relationship, manipulation, guilt tripping. photo credit @ave661
you knew könig was a pornstar, he made sure you knew before getting into a serious relationship with you, so that it wouldn't cause any issues. you had no issue with this, only feeling slightly jealous at the thought of him having sex with other women for content... ‘til könig perked in.
“you could always join me instead, dear.” he comments, leaning back on the couch with his thick thighs spread out. the thought of being on the internet recording yourself having sex with your boyfriend wasn't exactly something you wanted to do. but, könig pushed. he wouldn't let go without the answer he wanted.
“please, mouse... it'll be fun, it's how i earn my money. do you want me to go get it elsewhere?”
his wording made your jaw drop slightly. of course you didn't want him sleeping with other women! but, this was his job; how he earned his money. he couldn't just drop it. “if you were committed to this relationship, you wouldn't have such an issue with either me having sex with women to earn my money, or becoming a part of it. what would go wrong? you're with me, safe in my arms, liebling...”
from then, he'd constantly pushed, manipulating you into saying yes, even if you were on edge. he had you on your back with the camera recording slightly from above, just over his shoulder. the flashing red light reminded you that it was there, that there were people watching. you were reminded könig was also there when he slapped his thick, meaty shaft down onto your clit, rubbing it with his tip. pearly beads of precum spilled onto your stomach, making you gulp nervously. he pinched your nipples, twisting them before angling his cock and pushing deep inside.
your mouth fell open, back arched and your body jolting with nerves. your bottom lip quivered, anxious as he continued to grind himself deeper, cursing under his breath at the tightness. you held back the tears that filled your waterline, gulping and bunching your hands into tight fists the more he filled your hole. you couldn't stop pulsing around him; squeezing his big dick with your gummy, tight walls. he furrowed his eyebrows together, eyes shut tightly as he bucked inside, filling you to the brim with his huge size. a small tear slowly rolled down your cheek, not visible to the camera from the angle.
“smile, mäuschen.” he threatened, wiping away your tears and rocking his hips slowly. your breathing picked up, became laboured and heavy and desperate the more he pushed inside. you gasped quietly, biting your bottom lip while rocking your hips in harmony. truthfully, you'd rather be anywhere else than on your back with your boyfriend's huge cock inside your cunt, for the internet to see. but in this moment, you couldn't do anything but freeze and take whatever könig decided to give you, no matter how rough or gentle he made it.
a low and guttural chuckle left his lips, with his dick throbbing inside your wetness and seeping out thick drops of cum. each thrust könig made knocked your body forward — probably due to the size and the impact his broad hips would make against your ass, his huge stature enveloping and curling around you. you gasped when he wrapped his arms around your body, picking you up into his arms and fucking you whilst standing. only drilling you deeper onto his massive size. you sobbed out, gripping his shoulders firmly and burying your face in his chest as he bucked and drove his hips up and into your slicken, wet folds.
“keep going for me-ja... good girl...” you could feel the wet head of his dick rubbing against your gummy cervix, smacking against it with each thrust, impaling you on his length.
broken sobs became muffled, drowned by your moans as he continued to fuck you harder. your eyes wet with your orgasm and anxiety, and the tightness in your stomach threatening to release, for you to coat and cover könig in your sweet, slick cum. you felt lightheaded — perhaps from exhaustion, maybe from anxiety, but the more könig rutted thrusted his hips against you, the wetter you became, leaving you now hot and flushed.
“that's it, my dear. you're doing well--look at the camera for me--ja... that's it, good.” maintaining eye contact with the camera, the live comments degrading you for getting fucked like a dirty whore.
könig breathed heavily beside your ear, growling out german while you grinded and rocked your hips down against him. you couldn't help it anymore. the tickling sensation of his pubes against your clit and your slit swallowing everything whole was driving you utterly crazy. you squirted down his shaft, lifting your hips off of him, your legs still wrapped around and clinging to his waist for support while he carried you with one, large hand cupping your ass, the other on your waist.
your cunny dripped with euphoria. juices dribbling onto his big dick while he groaned at the tight pain in his balls. “come on... your turn, then.” könig smirked a cruel grin at you, placing you onto your feet and sitting down on the bed, his bare body inviting and his thick, muscular thighs wet with his hot cum smeared along the skin.
“what?” you let out, a stuttered cry for help and support. the viewers watched as you nervously took a step closer, straddling his hips and easing yourself down onto his huge length. the veins on his shaft prominent, grazing against your walls at an agonisingly slow pace. two large hands guided your hips and you sobbed needily, anxious as he began fucking you down, showing you how to ride him.
“just like this, liebling...” your eyes rolled back at the sound of his accented and low voice, moaning out at the texture of his dick against your cunny. your pussy weeped cum, drooling with ecsasty. he spanked your tight ass, his other hand tugging at your hardened nipples while he kneaded the flesh and fat on your ass between his fingers, slapping you whenever your pace faltered.
“gutes mädchen, es geht dir so gut.” you panted, eyes drunkenly looking into his, filled with lust and piercing into yours. his silver eyes growing darker the longer and faster you rode him, ‘til he was pushing you down, making sure you took every single drop of his thick and hot cum like a good girl. you cried out, feeling as he stuffed you full of his semen, with your stomach tight and your hole gaping with his seed oozing out.
“all of it, my dear. take it all.”
translation: gutes mädchen, es geht dir so gut. (good girl, you're doing so well)
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writersblog20 · 1 year
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High
Pedro Pascal x (curly hair) reader
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Credits to the gif maker!
Summary: After a very shitty day, your neigbour, Pedro helps you to relax in every way possible
Warnings: Smoking weed, drinking alcohol, age-gap, sexual tension, reader gets picked up, smut, p in v, no condom (please do use a condom), mention of panic and anxiety (just one sentence or so)  oral Female receiving, squirting, daddy kink, dirty talk, pet names, Pedro being called: Papi, creampie, blowjob, soft sex, soft Pedro, overstimulation, aftercare and fluff
Words: 4K
High
You angrily placed your bag on your table when you arrived home. You were beyond pissed. You were finally done with some part of the exams for now but god did your professor test your patience today. This was your final exam and you’ve been preparing very good for it but you had to give a presentation with two of your teachers and your professor tried everything he could think off to dismantle your arguments and it worked. He got right underneath your skin, pissing you off to no end. There was no winning here for you. You did well though, very well even but you and that professor always buttheads together. So you came home, pissed out of your mind and couldn’t wait to smoke a joint and drink some wine or well, anything will do if it has alcohol in it. You quickly put your oversized hoodie on before going outside.
You let out a deep, frustrated sigh, got your joint and sat down on your porch as you put some music on. You lit the candles that were on the table of the porch. It started to get dark outside and you were more than ready to forget about this day as if it never even happened.
You inhaled the smoke and let it rest in your lungs. You started to feel the tension loosen up a bit until you heard the door open from your neighbour, the one and only Pedro Pascal. The daddy of the internet, the famous actor and your neighbor. You had a crush from the moment he moved in the house next to you. Yeah it wasn’t helping your daddy issues in any way here. You panicked a little because you didn’t want him to know that you smoked weed. He walked up to your porch with a bright smile that already made you forget about your day as you smiled back. You could say by now that you and Pedro were good friends.
“Hey neighbour!” he said with a smirk. You smiled but felt your heartrate pick up. He held up a tray of corona’s and a bottle of tequila. “Want to have a beer with me? Heard you had a bad day.” He told you, awaiting your answer. “Sure why not.” You smiled. “How do you know I have a bad day?” you asked him once you realized what he said. “Your mom texted me, asking if I could check up on you. Besides, it gave me a reason to see you again.” He told you with a teasing smirk which made you feel flustered. Pedro’s charm always worked on you and made your crush grow stronger.
He sat next to you. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell her that you smoke weed.” He told you casually and your face fell from being caught but you also felt the tension leave your body “As long as you share this one with me.” he told you with the same smirk and held up his own joint. You chuckled slightly and relaxed back into your chair. “Deal.” You giggled as Pedro handed you a shot of tequila and clinked it together “Salud” Pedro said, making you repeat him. You took the shot and groaned slightly when you finished it. Pedro opened the corona bottle and handed it to you and lit the joint after.
“So… Want to talk about it?” he asked you a bit more serious now as he handed you the joint. You took a big hit and held it in your lungs for a bit. “It was my teacher. He tried to fuck me over in every way he could find.” You told him and Pedro frowned, not liking what he heard. You told him about your day and let out a deep sigh when you were done. “He sounds like a first class dick.” Pedro told you, making you nod and stare in front of you while taking another hit before passing it to Pedro.
You were finally high and relaxed, not really wanting to talk about your day anymore. You started to get more comfortable in the chair. You looked at Pedro who already looked at you with his big brown eyes. You couldn’t look away as a rush of excitement went into your tummy. You see, you weren’t used to this weed and some have a… well an effect on you. You were horny let’s just keep it on that and the hot man sitting next to you, who you had a big crush on wasn’t helping this case at all. But you weren’t even sure if he ever thought of you in that way because of the age gap.
You looked in front of you again, feeling the heat creeping up. Some curls fell in front of your face, placing them back behind your ears only for them to jump back in place so you just blew them out of your face, not noticing how mesmerized Pedro looked at you right now. You heard the familiar tune of The Weeknd with Lost in the fire and got did the air around you two tighter.
Pedro got the shot glasses and poured another shot of tequila in it, giving it to you, looking directly into your eyes. You saw something in his eyes that you haven’t seen before, it was a lustful look yet adoringly. For some reason you started to feel very confident and gave him your best flirt look. A soft smirk with siren eyes as you leaned towards him a bit. “Salud.” You told him seductively. Pedro swallowed and looked away from you, shifting in his seat a bit, making you grin. “Salud.” He cleared his voice before he spoke and looked at you again as you took the shot. His eyes scanning every feature on your face, the way your curls were bouncing a bit while his heartrate started to pick up and his pants got a bit too tight for his liking.
You heard the familiar tune of the neighbourhood with daddy issues and all of your confidence flew out of the window while you felt your whole face heat up and a bit of embarrassment flowing through your body. You felt too embarrassed to put on a different song at this point. You tried to take a sneaky look at Pedro but was met with his brown eyes. He had a smirk, feeling that your confidence passed on to Pedro. His eyes were darker and filled with lust. You quickly looked away. You were wondering if this was the effect of the weed or if he was always just like that.
Flashes of that TikTok edit came to your mind with all of the sinful thoughts you had right now. You couldn’t shake the images out of your head. You would never tell him that you watched endlessly TikTok edits of your hot older neighbor that was at least 24 years older than you. “What’s going on in that pretty little head of yours sweetheart?” he asked you. You realized that you were deep, very deep in thought.
You played with the label that was placed on the corona bottle. You shook your head slightly. “Nothing important.” Pedro took a sip of his bottle, keeping eye contact with you and you felt the heat moving somewhere else as you squirmed just a bit in your chair. The silent that Pedro put in the conversation was unbearable as the air thickened around the two of you. “That’s good weed.” You commented with a slight chuckle. Pedro chuckled  “Yeah definitely” he looked at you and you couldn’t get enough of his eyes as you felt butterflies. “Oh I love this song! Dance with me!” Pedro’s excitement made you chuckle as he was already standing and held his hand out for you.
You giggled and took his large hand in yours and stood up. Pedro’s smile was contagious while his arm was around your waist and the other holding your hand. You felt like you were going to black out at this point. Your heart beating against your chest and it felt like your skin was on fire where he touched you. You grew very shy and couldn’t even look at him focusing on your shoes. “Hey, look at me, I’m right here.” He told you and placed a finger underneath your chin, looking up at him. His kind brown eyes connected with yours and you felt yourself go into a trance, all mushy. He smiled adoringly at you. “There you are.” He told you softly with a smile. “use your hips more baby.” he commented “I know you got it in you.” he told you with a slight wink.
You were officially a puddle in his hands right now. Did he know about your crush? Does he like you? He must if he says these things. And the pet name? Are you kidding me?!! You were completely lost in your head but yet still very much in the moment.
You knew how to use your hips but you didn’t feel that confident yet. “I’m afraid I need more tequila for that.” You giggled slightly, embarrassed while you looked at his chest, not able to make eye contact. Pedro let go off you with one hand, the other still tightly around your waist while he grabbed the bottle. He took a sip straight from the bottle while looking at you with a grin and passed it to you after he was done. You took some good gulps, hoping that it would work soon. Pedro probably mistaken your nervousness for uncomfortable and he let go immediately off you, never wanting to make you uncomfortable. You frowned a bit and looked at him confused. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I thought…” He told you and shook his head not wanting to finish his sentence and was ready to take his stuff and leave but you stopped him by grabbing his arm and letting your other hand rest on his chest.
Pedro looked at your hand that was on his chest and back to you. “I didn’t feel uncomfortable… I felt nervous…..” you told him shyly. It was silent and you looked up at him, a bit of fear visible in your eyes and Pedro’s eyes soften at you, turning his body completely towards you. His fingers softly going over your cheek before placing a curl behind your ear (or tried at least). “Nervous for what?” Pedro almost whispered as the air started to tighten around you again while his hand covered yours on his chest, taking your hand in his. You tried to look down but his finger was underneath your chin again, pulling you up. “I…. I ehhh think you now why.” Pedro’s eyes held more lust again. “I want you to tell me.” his voice still holding that gentleness.
You looked up, goosebumps covering your body. You made eye contact with Pedro and felt a rush of confidence going over you and you quickly placed your lips again his. Pedro knew it was going to happen but was still a bit shocked. You sighed in the kiss and held his shirt in your fist. Pedro sighed in the kiss as well. His arms around your waist, pulling you against his body while his other hand found your cheek, cupping it while he deepened the kiss. His hand that was resting on your hip dug into your skin causing you to moan in the kiss.
Pedro walked backwards, his hand searching for the doorknob without breaking the kiss as you both stumbled inside your home. The kiss turned into a lot of lust while your hands went over his body as well. His hand found your ass and he tightly grabbed it and you jumped into his arms as a reaction. “Bedroom?” he broke from the kiss, his lips plump just like yours from the heated kiss. You pointed to the door while you started to attack his neck and your hands going through his soft hair.
He opened the door, letting out a shaky breath as you sucked a spot in his neck. He carefully laid you down on the bed, hanging above you. You were both out of breath while you held intense eye contact. You wanted to grab his face so you could kiss him again, it was addictive but Pedro pulled back, making you frown. “Are you sure?” he asked you, looking intently into your eyes. “Yes” was all you could say as you lips crashed against yours again.
Your hands were in his hair and your body started to move on its own, pushing your hips up so you could grind against him. You were completely intoxicated by the man above you. He attached his mouth to your neck while his hand went over the curves from your body. God this man did things to you that he had no idea of. Finally Pedro let his body go closer to you and you grinded against his still growing bulge in his pants. You whimpered slightly, you were so needy for this man and he knew it.
His hands going slowly over your clit over your pants, making you whimper. “Daddy please.” You murmured, whines evident in your voice as you begged him. He stopped sucking the sweet spot in your neck and you felt shame and panic growing in your stomach. “what did you call me Chiquita?” his eyes looked amused by your sentence. Shame and panic left your body but shyness got in their space. “Come on, repeat it baby. What did you call me?” he had a smirk on his face as you whispered out “Daddy.” Pedro’s eyes went darker again while he leaned towards your ear, his breath on your cheek. “That’s right. I’m your daddy.” You turned your head a bit so you could kiss him again.
His hand going where you needed him the most but still over your pants. “Please daddy please!” you pleaded. Pedro had a smug smile on his face, fully enjoying this. His hands roamed over your body again before his hand finally disappeared into your jeans. Your hips grinding against his hands. Pedro felt how wet you were and groaned into your ears and he could feel the reaction his moans had on you while you clenched on his finger. He smiled and softly bit your ear lobe while you whimpered. His hand coming from your jeans and showed you how wet you were. You felt the heat creeping up your cheeks. “Is this all for me Chiquita?” He whispered in your ear. Your brain was so mushy that all you could do was nod.
He smiled and kissed you passionately before Pedro took your jeans off gently. His lips on your leg slowly going up while his hand caressed your leg. When his mouth got attached to your thigh, he made eye contact with you, his hot breath against your thigh while he torturously slow went up to your core which was covered by your panty. His thumb over your panty, circling your clit. You moaned out and arched your back. You wanted him, needed him. “Tell me what you want baby girl.” He whispered his voice still laced with comfort and softness. You whimpered out almost beggingly “I want you, papi.” The moment called him: “papi” his grin grew like you’ve never seen before and he took off your panty.
He placed a delicate kiss on your clit while looking at you with mischief. You let your head fall on your pillow, moaning out. You were sure that you were dripping at this point. You felt his tongue over your whole pussy, giving it a good lick before sucking on your clit. Your hand went through his hair, holding it carefully while he held your other hand, letting it rest on your stomach while he intertwined his fingers with yours. He looked up at you with his big brown cow eyes while he ate you out was enough to make you cum.
Pedro noticed that you were close and slowly put his finger in your entrance and curled it, playing with your g-spot. You gasped out and squeezed his hand tightly, your other hand clutching on his hair, making it messy. “Daddy, I’m close, please don’t stop.” You begged him. Pedro let go of your hand and held your hips a bit up in a tight lock, making it unable for you to move while his eyes watched your expressions close and intensely. Before you knew it a rush of ecstasy washed over you as Pedro kept going, almost overstimulating you.
His grip loosened and Pedro hang above you again with an adoring look as you tried to catch your breath, looking mesmerized at Pedro, his hair all messy from your hand in it. You pulled him for a kiss. His hands roaming over your body again. You pushed Pedro softly on his back and sat on his lap, kissing him again. Pedro gently cupping your cheeks. Some of your curls fell onto his forehead and he pulled it back. You started to grind on his dick through his pants. Your orgasm left a wet spot on his pants while you kept grinding. Pedro held your hips tightly and let his head fall on your pillow, letting out a groan. “There you go mamacita. Keep doing that.” You felt your stomach flutter from the nickname. “I had some other things in mind.” You told him and got off from his lap.
Pedro looked at you while you undid his pants. “Let me take care of you now daddy.” You told him, knowing it got to him. He groaned when you pulled his cock out and didn’t waist a second before going down, slobbering all over. God this man was build differently and it made your mouth water and your pussy clench by the idea of him in you. It definitely was a sloppy blowjob and from the sounds Pedro made, he enjoyed it very much so. He cursed underneath his breath with gasps. His hand found your hair and held your curls in his hand, holding it away from your face. You made eye contact with Pedro and he let out a moan and let his head fall on the pillow from the amount of pleasure that you were giving him.
“Fuck…., Baby if you keep doing that I’m going to cum.” He told you and got you off from him, carefully laying you on your back again and Pedro above you. He kissed you passionately like he had never done before, taking your breath away as you both moaned in the kiss. “I need you Papi, please, please.” Your eyes begged him and Pedro had to control himself so he wouldn’t cum by just your begging already. “God you are something else baby girl.” You crashed your lips against his again.
You took his sweater off and he took your oversized hoodie off as well, softly undoing your bra and the moment you were completely naked in front of him, he looked mesmerized at you with a smile before laying above you again and pulling you back in a passionate kiss. Your hand slowly going over his chest, belly and towards his cock. You held his cock in your hands and Pedro gasped slightly when you guided it to your entrance. Pedro stopped kissing you while you guided him into your entrance. His thumb softly rubbing your cheek for comfort. You put the tip in and you were dripping on the sheets when you pushed him in slowly before Pedro took over.
You whimpered, your eyes tightly shut from the pain and pleasure. He was stretching you out but he did it slowly while he groaned out as well. When he was fully in he waited so you could get used to his size. “Look at me mama.” He told you and you opened your eyes carefully. You saw Pedro looking at you with all the love radiating from his eyes. “You’re going to be okay. If it hurts, you tell me okay?” you nodded and Pedro kissed your forehead, making you feel all fuzzy and clingy. “Please daddy, I want to feel you. I want you close.” You begged and Pedro slowly started to move while he kept looking at you to see if you were okay.
His cock was coated by your juices, making him moan out. You put your arms around his shoulder, pulling him closer to your body. You craved the skin to skin contact. He sat up with you still hanging on him as a koala. He sat up straight, his cock deep buried inside of you. “Ride me baby, show daddy what you can do.” He told you, your arms still wrapped around his shoulders while you started to grind on his dick. His hands on your hips, pushing you deeper on his cock. You started to grind faster, feeling the euphoric feeling coming closer. “Papi…” you whispered out, followed by moans as you clenched on his dick. Pedro placed his arms tightly around you, pushing your chest against his in a hug. You started to shake on his cock, Pedro moaning out as a reaction while you clenched on his cock. “There you go princesa” Pedro grumbled out.
He laid down on his back, you still on top of him. You kept riding him while he took in every part of your body. “My god, your angelic.” He told you and pulled you down as he cupped your cheeks and kissed you deeply before putting his arms around you again and started to pound you out. You gasped at the sudden speed and the way it hit your g-spot perfect. Pedro cursed underneath his breath when he felt your juices flowing out of you. You were squirting before you could even realize that it happened. Pedro moaned and tried to catch his breath, feeling you shake above him.
You collapsed on his chest and kissed him while you were still out of breath. His hair sticking to his forehead from sweat and you brushed them gently out of the way while
Pedro’s eyes followed you, completely intoxicated by you. His hands caressing your waist and curves. Pedro moved his hand to the back of your neck and pushed you down so he could kiss you. You heard Pedro moan in this kiss which caused you to clench around his dick again. Pedro grumbled and pushed you softly over so he could fuck you on your back.
His eyes were a bit darker, connected with yours as he pushed his cock back into you, causing you to gasp. Pedro held your legs as he pounded into you. Pedro was close to while you chased your own orgasm again. “Come in me, please come in me, daddy” Pedro grumbled out and laid on top of you, holding you close. The way he moaned in your ear, pounded you out and held you so gentle at the same time made you cum in no time again. “That’s it baby, come on papi’s dick. Clench on my cock Chiquita” You felt his own cum shooting deep inside of you. Pedro cursed in between grumbles, getting down from his own high. His head buried between your neck and shoulder until he calmed down and let it rest on your shoulder while you went with your hands through his hair, trying to catch your own breath.
Pedro rolled on his back, pulling you with him so he could hug you. You went with your fingertips over his chest, Pedro kissing your head and massaging your scalp. “So I was right? You really do have a crush on me.” Pedro said chuckling as you pushed him away as a joke and rolled your eyes but your smile said enough. Pedro pulled you back into his chest while laughing. “I’m sorry baby, I’m sorry. If it helps, I have a crush too….” Pedro whispered the last part in your ear, making you look at him. You both just watched each other for moment until you both chuckled. “Can you please stay tonight? I don’t want to be alone right now.” you told him and Pedro smiled lovingly at you. “I’ll stay as long as you want and need me to, princesa” you smiled from all the butterflies in your stomach.
Pedro held you tighter and you let him, craving his comfort. “Let’s stay here for a bit longer.” He told you, making you look up and kiss him gently. After a gentle and loving make-out session, both clinging to each other as you closed your eyes, happy that the shitty day didn’t end shitty
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