God's community

Oh god are we talking about those surprise egg videos?


Anyways, I like this god guy's approach.

On an unrelated note I did interact with some children who often watched this genre of video. They seemed to harbor a deep restlessness and aggressiveness, different from other children, which I am quite certain was influenced by these videos. Nearly always they were either doing something insane or sleeping, and they would always try to attack things, kick and punch things, etc.

Well the trick is that they are vapid and innocuous to the minds of adults, however children do not perceive the world as adults do. Yet unfortunately, parents tend to assume that children think and perceive in the same way that they do, and so the perceptions picked up by children translate into behaviors that appear frustrating or nonsensical to the parent, but which have clear explanations when it is taken into account what exactly the child is perceiving, and how they are interpreting this and translating it into behavior.

For example, children tend to perceive everything with an extreme seriousness -- they make little distinction between the serious and the not-serious, which usually requires understanding of complex social cues (the classic example i suppose, is that they can't tell the difference between a TV show and an advertisement). For a child, the entire world is imbued with a sort of magical quality -- an unfathomable complexity, within which there is much mystery. A cute character may seem mundane or benign to adults, but a child might look at them as upon a god or a gatekeeper to some hidden realm -- the artifices through which society regulates perception are not yet understood.

Herein lies the crux of the hypnotic state induced through videos such as this. It is not watching one video once that produces the change in behavior, but once the hypnotic, fixated, glazed-eyes state is invoked once it becomes addictive, and it is within this state of watching these videos for many hours that the mind is molded. Parents, unfortunately, assume that the child somehow subconsciously understands how they are meant to perceive things. In these children that I cared for for a while, some behaviors were so exaggerated they were almost cartoonish, it was obvious they were imitating actions they had seen on youtube. The best metaphor I can give is triggered demonic possession, because they are very sweet children, often you tell them to do something and they say "ok x, i am going to do such and such" -- then, it is as though at a certain moment a program toggles or triggers in them, and they go into a frenzy, doing the exact opposite of what they said so earnestly earlier and just running and flailing around everywhere and erupting into fits, in a state I could describe as manic mindless giddy crazy joy and aggressive hyperactivity, nothing is off limits for what can happen here, and often do I see almost entirely cold-blooded violence. After this, if it ever ends, always comes immense tiredness and sleepiness, it is as though every ounce of energy is drained. You feel bad for them at that point because it really doesn't feel like they are the ones doing this, it feels as though it is someone or something else inside of them. Speaking to them while they are manic sort of reveals this, they can't explain what they are doing or why they are doing it half the time, the body is moving on its own.

The first thing I would do in this case is destroy every single ipad in the house, but I'm not the parents so I can't do this, though I have seen how much time they spend watching such videos. Yes, perhaps I am over-reacting, yet it is clear I did not ever act like this, nor do I know any other children who act in such a way.