From the age of 10-14, I was on the internet for hours every day. I was a lonely, introverted, homeschooled child. I loved Pokemon, books, movies, manga, and art. I made many friends on the internet with these shared interests. I was deep in fandom culture.
By the time I was 14, I was ecstatic and delusional. I became obsessed with Homestuck and the idea of self-actualizing metanarratives. I thought that through pure ideals and imagination alone, I could make myself succesful, creative, and famous. I thought that reality was lame, but that video games and comics were wonderful, and that through pure dreaming I could, in a manner of speaking, make anime real.
Meanwhile, I was also going through puberty, and becoming possessed with all kinds of strange feelings. I didn't speak to any girls on my once-weekly school day. So, as is common nowadays, I found fictional cartoon girls on the internet to become fixated on. Many young men today have a similar sob story. But as destructive as we know pornography can be, I'm speaking here in this essay specifically of cartoons. We don't just have a generation of people obsessed with images — images of beautiful people or of themselves — but also images of entirely fake, cartoon people.
Several of my internet friends became trans or furries around this time. I was a Christian, so such identities didn't seem fundamentally appealing to me. But my desires and my habits were functionally identical to theirs in many ways, even if I didn't think of myself as an animal or another gender. I basically imagined myself as a cartoon person. I was trying to become what I loved. I didn't love real flesh and blood people very much.
My internet friends and I, as we chatted for hours each day, constructed a fairly elaborate metafictional universe involving our personas, including art and comics and in-jokes. Fanfics of ourselves, in addition to the other roleplays and fanart we were making about pokemon, as animals, as video game characters.
I was able to begin making my break with fandom culture when I met my internet girlfriend in person and I suddenly realized the discrepancy between myself and the internet persona I had created. I realized that I had up to that point only liked her as a cartoon in my head. And that I only liked myself as a cartoon in my head. I came face to face with the fact that we also had, in addition to our cartoon selves, real physical lives that I couldn't even begin to understand or appreciate. That night I laid alone on my bedroom floor in a state of shock. My delusion, and its ecstasy, was shattered.
From 15 on, I became deeply depressed, and remained that way for years. Only after retooling my interests and extensive socializing in person with absurdly generous people, of learning gratitude and how to let go of bitterness and seeking sanctification from sin, have I learned to take much joy in reality. My joy is far from perfect but it does overflow.
Looking at the extreme examples of people like Chris-chan or Randy Stair, who killed other people and himself and thought he would transcend this world to be reborn as a Danny Phantom character, I cannot mock them. I see similar principles at play in my own youthful imagination, even if they're not quite so deranged or violent or shameful. It's the same forces at work — loneliness, sensitivity, imagination. And images hungry for our worship.
I too was a lonely sensitive child with too much internet time, who had all sorts of perverse culture imprinted on me by an evil machine — and, by my own malformed desires. The evil has always been both in the system and in my heart. This is idolatry. It is undue reverence given to imagined things.
Many people are willing to crusade against pornography. But I think we have a far more insidious problem than just sex stuff. Nerd types such as myself love fictional ideas too much in general. We need to pay less attention to them and more attention to real people. Real people are trickier and not optimized for our amusement. We have to get over that. We have to discipline ourselves to value what is more important.
Otherwise, you will be trapped in fandom culture forever, trapped pursuing what you think is the most pleasant in the moment, rather than what is the ultimate good. 1) Loving God. 2) Loving people.
I'm glad I was able to break away from fandom culture in so many respects, though I will always be marked in this life by it. Looking back, I see that there were even more Forces trying to get at me somehow, trying to make me theirs. Culture is alive and it wants to eat you. I'm glad I had loving parents, good real life friends, and countless opportunities to break free that I finally took. Many people don't have it so good. So they spiral deeper.
The Bible discusses this.
Romans 1:
21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
The Apostle Paul here describes furries, and he's describing you and me! We love images of men and animals, and that love leads us into impurity. We need to love God more.
We like pop media because consuming it we are both utterly passive and utterly in control. We can choose what to put on and what to avoid. We can pause and fast forward. We can can have head canons and fan fics. Meanwhile, we can avoid all the hard work of imagination that an actual creator has to put into making something genuinely funny and loveable. We let these creators live life for us, tell the story for us, desire things for us… and imprint their personality onto us.
Physical reality is tougher to control. Hardest of all to control is the invisible, spiritual world. The ultimate state of things beyond our full comprehension. We spin many tales to try to control God, but his Spirit always moves freely, regardless of what we scheme. He has spoken clearly, regardless of our inclinations. Ultimately, he controls life and death and we don't. That scares us, so we try to amuse ourselves with dolls and fake gods.
The result is that we're not just far from God. We become detached from what's right in front of our face!
As such, I think we need to abandon fandom culture. I call for mass exodus. If you have been feeling similarly, please join me in becoming a Reality Respecter.
It's hard to do alone, and it's hard to do when you've spent so much time being a Reality Neglecter. Why devote myself to a world in which I feel like I'm losing?
Because the real world is fundamentally more enjoyable, even when we don't have full control, or have to work a bit harder to know how enjoy it.
A Reality Respecter realizes that so much of this life was meant to be enjoyed, but sometimes we need to be trained to enjoy a certain aspect, because of its more chaotic qualities. Artificial entertainment is streamlined for our immediate pleasure, but it simply means less.
If you're in fandom culture right now, I invite you to leave. If you're already looking for a way out, join me in helping others quit. I think many people could appreciate being lead out of it, if they had friendship and encouragement while doing so.
You don't even need to swear off all entertainment forever, or burn all your books, or delete your hard drive (okay maybe some of you need to). You should simply choose to respect other people’s fantasies less. It doesn’t deserve the honor you want to give it. Maybe some of it is fine to appreciate. But if you like it so much that it makes it harder for you to appreciate Being In This World, you’re descending into an abyss of false desire and must get out now. For the sake of your soul, get out!
I will always be a nerd, but I don't have to be trapped in fandom forever. I'm free. I can be a nerd for reality.
Current Reality Protocols - How to begin being a nerd for reality:
These are not wellness techniques. This isn't about if you exercise or eat healthy. The goal is to discipline your imagination so that it is free, beautiful, and pure. To love what is real and to disrespect what isn't. So that your mind is oriented towards reality, visible and invisible. It is possible to be more attuned, and it is possible to be more fragmented and delusional.
This might seem like a lot, but if you spend years whittling away at these, you'll be happy that you did. We can learn from failure, as long as you're grateful to God for what he has given you and faithful with the opportunities you have right now.
Protocols 1 & 2 are the essentials:
1. You must seek the true God. You must pay more attention to your Father, who is always trying to communicate with you, than you do to dead images. You need a new spirit.
2. You must choose to openly disrespect fictional universes, fictional characters, the people who make such things, and anything else that fandoms venerate. You will seek to pay as little devotion to them as possible. You'll get rid of any collections you have that take up your time or attention — game libraries, toys, whatever. You will not dress in clothes that feature these characters. You will not build a shrine to anything.
What am I going to do if I'm not CONSUMING?
3. center your heart by praying about your goals in this world rather than calming yourself with mood altering substances or escapist media (video games, shows, youtube, etc.) as a form of mood control. Every day, I pray about being in Christ, my desires, and my gratitude.
4. find as many good friends in real life within walking distance or very brief drive. talk and hang out with them often. accept invitations to things and invite other people to things on a regular basis, even if it is just sitting and talking. DO NOT play board games with them. instead, compare notes on how you think reality works and plot about taking things over. If you're too self-conscious to these things, you must repent of your sins and then get over yourself.
5. talk to strangers near you. love your neighbor. go on walks and talk to the people in your vicinity. wish them a good day and move on if they don’t want to talk. it’s that easy.
6. seek maturity and abstain from the asexual uniformity of the zeitgeist. survey the areas in your life where you are immature or childlike, and take steps to grow into manhood, even if it's small to begin with. maybe you won't naturally be an alpha chad, but you can always find small ways to build up gravitas, and that is infinitely more valuable than money. women likewise can develop gravitas by setting aside silly, childish things and leaning into their femininity.
7. whenever possible, get sunshine. make sure you have a place nearby where you can sit or walk in the sun. go out into nature. You don't have to do long hikes if you don't want to, although the exercise is good. You can just sit in a meadow. Do field recordings to teach yourself to listen more closely at what's around you, or drawing details of nature to teach yourself to look harder at what is actually there.
8. seek out elevated culture. learn how to discipline your taste to appreciate great works of art and literature more deeply, rather than the high fructose corn syrup level content of what pop culture most easily offers you.
9. Above all other culture, read and seek to understand the Bible. Make that your metanarrative — let its ideas overrun the ones you find in modern media. The thoughts recorded form a shield to protect us from what is insidious in pop culture. (Culture is alive and it wants to eat you.)
10. learn history — if you can memorize trivia about a fake universe, why not dig deeper into the facts about what actual real people have said and have done? once you expand your mind to work at that pace, you find it's a lot more savory than fictional universe trivia.
11. make your own stories, with one rule — that they have as little to do with fantasy ideas that you've already found in a work of pop culture as possible (no elves or superheroes, at least as they're commonly understood to be — you have to make up the rules here entirely your own). Don’t subject yourself blindly to the symbols and narratives that other people offer, but always rearticulate and make your own map of the territory, and be humble about your own map.
12. in sexual behavior, avoid all pornography and fantasy. Do not entertain romantic daydreams — not that romance or daydreams are bad, but because you've proven you can't handle them well. pursue true marriage as best you can. for some people marriage might not be in practical, immediate reach — in that case, come spend a season at my commune.
13. criticize ugliness around you when you see it — in the built environment, or in a work of pop culture, or in the design of something in front of you — rather than ignoring it and fleeing to a fictional world where you think things are more beautiful. realize how ugly and plain so much of our pop culture is compared to the intricacy of detail in natural things — rocks, plants, animals, people, or even manmade things that are old.
14. sing regularly, whether a song you love or your own songs, and sing so loud that you become more aware of your whole body and how the sound fills and vibrates it. sing with other people, too. and if you really want to crush it, break out the guitar now and then.
15. Fight for self-control even of little seemingly neutral things, like where your eyes go on a screen, what you click on, or your posture. If you can't stop yourself from looking at your phone or computer, that means that it controls your body more than you do.
16. Seek to accumulate the wisdom of observation. Rather than accumulate knowledge about fictional universes and interactions, focus intently on what happens around you in this world, so that you can gain the advantage of attentiveness. Start making a list of your observations and treat that list as more interesting than wikipedia or tvtropes. Reflect on how you treat others and others treat you, what people say and what they don't say. Watch them interact with each other and try to notice patterns.
17. Eat whatever you want, but, when you eat food, really try to taste it. compare it to other tastes. seek new flavors.
18. do not lie.
19. so much of pop culture is just noise. try sitting or standing or walking for five minutes in silence, and consider if that could be a more enjoyable way to spend time than having screens flash in your eyes and characters scream at you.
20. Set yourself to enjoying the physical world and the spiritual world, of work and motion and conversation and your own personal thoughts, rather than always habitually defaulting to fiction, media, and cartoons that you can neither touch nor wholeheartedly believe in.
Mike Jones, Reality Respecter
5.2.24