E2: Welcome to the Algorithm; S7: Non-Alcoholic Libations (maybe just a little)

One of the weirdest things about becoming visible online—even slightly visible—is discovering how quickly you start wanting reassurance from numbers.Not success. Not art. Not connection.Numbers.A graph moving upward.A little dashboard saying:“Good boy.”This episode started as something completely different. Then suddenly a few podcast episodes escaped containment and got hundreds of listens instead of seven. Which, for the record, is enough to completely reorganize your nervous system if you are used to living artistically in near-total obscurity.And what fascinated me wasn’t the “success.”It was how FAST my brain adapted.Immediately:Should I tighten things up?Should I edit more?Should I stop stammering?Should I become digestible?Should I optimize myself into a smooth consumer product?Should I become… spiritually aerodynamic?And that’s where this episode accidentally wandered into the territory of spiritual bypassing.A phrase many people have never heard before, but which is actually very simple.Spiritual bypassing is when people use “growth,” “healing,” “mindfulness,” “evolution,” “optimization,” “higher consciousness,” or pseudo-spiritual language to avoid reality instead of entering it more honestly.It’s when someone says:“I’m protecting my peace,”when what they mean is:“I refuse to tolerate discomfort.”Or:“I’m setting boundaries,”when what they mean is:“You are no longer providing dopamine correctly.”Or:“I’ve evolved past negativity,”when what they mean is:“I’ve become terrified of ambiguity.”Or:“Everything happens for a reason,”because the alternative—that existence may be partially random and horrifying—makes them want to throw up in a Whole Foods parking lot.And online culture is absolutely soaked in this now.Everyone is optimizing.Curating.Healing.Manifesting.Strategizing.Building brands around authenticity.Everyone is becoming an algorithm about escaping algorithms.Which is why the spreadsheet boyfriend in this episode matters so much.Because his orgasm spreadsheet sounds ridiculous—and it IS ridiculous—but it also isn’t fundamentally different from podcast analytics, follower counts, engagement dashboards, productivity systems, wellness trackers, or all the little charts people use to transform life into measurable reassurance.What if Spotify statistics and orgasm spreadsheets are spiritually the same object?What if most people don’t actually want intimacy?What if they want analytics that temporarily feel like intimacy?That’s the question hiding underneath this entire episode.And underneath all the jokes about gay performance art, herpes monologues, audience hostility, giant theatrical dicks, dopamine addiction, and the algorithm itself… there’s another question too:Can you become visible without slowly sanding off the parts of yourself that made visibility interesting in the first place?I genuinely don’t know.This episode is me trying to fail honestly instead of succeeding strategically.And because modern attention spans now resemble caffeinated squirrels being tased inside a cryptocurrency convention, I’m also including pull-quotes below.Partly because I’ll use them as Notes while promoting the episode on Substack.But also because I enjoy the humiliating honesty of admitting that we are all trying to grab each other’s attention now. Including me. Including you.So here are twenty little dopamine traps.Hopefully one clamps onto your nervous system hard enough that you’ll need to hear the whole episode in order to pry its fingers loose from your brainstem.Or your nuts.Whichever metaphor feels more spiritually aligned for your personal growth journey.