Living in the town I do, being here fills me with hate, agony and rage. It brings back awful memories of the things I did and the way I treated people last year. So when school for this year finished, I was rather despondent. This year, I transferred schools and ended up getting up at 6am everyday, getting back at 5pm - or 8 30pm on nights I had work after school. And I loved this. After my childhood being very typical of what kids these days call socially anxious bedrotting, I had finally gained the strength to overpower my social anxiety and live a fulfilling life.

So when school ended, I put in a bunch of job applications. Then I played lots of video games. Then I agonized over my exam results and hated most of all, the thought that on the other end there was some uptight examiner who thought I didn't care about the social aspects of psychology just because I forgot to establish the weaknesses of CBT in treating social anxiety - like come on. That's my fucking rea of expertise - My whole life is a case study on that!

Or maybe there was an examiner who thought I didn't understand the bad morality in the government using social media to control the population just because I didn't revise the Tiananmen Square massacre before the media exam. Point is, one of my main fears was that this would be the last time in my life to get to prove myself. To get to try my absolute hardest in something. My whole life, I've never HAD to give 100% of my effort to gain 100% of the reward. It was never necessary. Despite my awful school attendance, I was always considered a "human calculator". The only other times in my life I tried as hard as I did for exams was my awful mental health scare last year - a bunch of wasted effort in the wrong way. And maybe with drawing.

To convince myself I haven't peaked in high school I continue to study psychology. It originally started with the goal of writing a literature review, but I just keep going down interesting rabbit holes. I cried watching this TED Talk. I think my own therapist used a lot of the same methods and models as he did, so it hit especially hard. But I'm on board with a lot of Hayes' ideas. I'm currently trying to learn more about Relational Frame Theory (RFT). I'm really interested in how it can account for what you may call 'Ipad Kids'. I, however, have started to take to calling them 'non-verbal children with under developed and limited relational frames, networks and stimulus equivalence'. Essentially, through social media young children have developed networks of non-arbitrary 'dopamine hit' or 'not dopamine hit' with arbitrary concepts - from politics (a concept very arbitrary to a 7 year old with no comprehension of politics) to attractiveness - consider the 'sephora kids' situation). Learning RFT has helped me understand how these kids have learnt to view the world: a series of either 'goods' - dopamine hits from the very fucking obviously predatory system of social media, from the ui to the social interaction that is far too normalized for children - Get your kids out of your fucking videos! They can't and wouldn't consent! - and 'bads' - perhaps a bit more arbitrary, but this one does admittedly encompass far more arbitrary ideas. Social Media's access to constant critique, ridicule and social disapproval allows any child to very quickly see what they should and shouldn't be thinking. It is known that young children will look to others when something happens to learn how to respond - thus spawned the joke of laughing when a baby falls to gaslight them into becoming a psychopath when they're older.

I remember recently my friend told me something her 14 year old sisters asked her (they're twins) - 'who are Palestine and Israel? Who are we meant to be supporting?'. I think this is a good example. None of us (my friend, her sisters, or even I admittedly) could point to either of these locations on a map. Nor do we know what the situation is. None of us even watch the news. None of us are particularly vested in politics. But we know there is something we 'should' believe, and something we 'should not'. Due to the fact none of us have primary experience, our thoughts have been arbitrarily developed through stimulus equivalence. With what other stimuli? Dopamine hits, constant entertainment, attractive social media influencers that the algorithm favours for having features conventionally attractive for the current trends, their 'fire fits' - TikTok is somewhat infamous for literally 'picking sides' during political crises and manipulating the spread of content to align with their beliefs. I have no hesitation in believing major social media platforms understand fully the effect they have on shaping the world of young children, and its disgusting. The way social medias are designed is utilizing these very objective, chemical based stimuli to restrict and limit the networks of relations children can form. Rather than vicariously learning about the different, unique and nuanced relations between concepts, ideas and experience from those around them, they are instead told by an app what does or doesn't initiate a rush of dopamine. What does or doesn't exist within their filter bubble. What does or doesn't get ridiculed online. Which political parties are or aren't associated with hot goth bitches on TikTok that upkeep that insane standard of beauty to promote their onlyfans. (No problem with that, I'm not calling them whores, I'm just saying the algorithm is weaponizing this to enhance it's ability to control audiences.)

Returning back to Hayes' TED Talk - I cried because "what are you going to do about it?". I could never do anything when I was younger to stop the fighting. Whether my mum and I, or my mum and my brother. There was never anything I could do about it. As I grew older I got really into LaurenZSide's RPGMaker Horror game let's plays. There was nothing I could do to help these troubled protagonists and antagonists and deuteragonists that made me believe that while every child deserves a parent - not every parent deserves a child. And so I cried, realising that at this point in my life I have so many more answers to that question. No matter what the problem is. I'm still not quite sure how RFT is strictly a behaviourist model but alas, it is fortunately not my job to prove that. There is nothing I have to do about that.