THEN I DON'T FEEL uses YouTube's most addictive content to explore what happens when trauma meets the algorithm. We can choose exactly what we want to watch, whenever we want it, making screen time the perfect dissociation tool. In the new media ecology, content farms serve up 'a few of our favourite things' on demand - no imagination required.

The work centers on toxic meditation: activities that are physiologically functional and soothing as well as being negatively triggering or activating. Smoking, for example, is obviously toxic, but also creates consciousness of breath and provides moments of reflection integral to meditative practices. This isn't theoretical for me. Childhood trauma left gaps in my memory, and my nervous system learned to seek stimulation that both numbs and activates. I find myself drawn to videos of things being crushed, cut, destroyed - not because I enjoy violence, but because my body recognizes something familiar in the rhythm of threat and relief.

This notion fits with the trauma-informed model of addiction as self-medication, but reveals something more urgent about our cultural moment. The ancient Greek pharmakon is paradoxical - "drug" meaning both remedy and poison - explaining how things work on us in opposing ways simultaneously. Traumatized bodies develop coping mechanisms that transform from protective to destructive over time, specifically the way the autonomic nervous system becomes dysregulated, veering between fight, flight and freeze without grounding.

This symbiosis of positive and negative is baked into "My Favorite Things" - not just lyrically, but musically in the consistent switching between major and minor chords, sonically oscillating between hope and despair. I've slowed the song down, exposing an unsettling, otherworldly musical space that mirrors the audio content at the heart of early ASMR.

The song's lyrics describe specific moments of sensual intensity as much as physical objects. "Brown paper packages tied up with string" immediately evokes today's ubiquitous unboxing videos and their strange seductive draw. The entire list could be a scene-by-scene description of any "oddly satisfying" video. These are presented as more than entertainment, with titles like "1 hour satisfying video under relaxing deep sleep music stress relief meditation 😴😴😴" - their capacity to affect our bodies and nervous systems rather than our intellect is explicitly promised.

When I watch hours of slime videos at 3am, I'm conducting embodied research into how traumatized nervous systems attempt self-regulation through screens. For part of this work, I fed AI thousands of thumbnails from videos designed to soothe young children. The AI creates new images based solely on existing ones, with no wider contextual information. The results often look illogical or monstrous to human consciousness with our complex web of intelligences, memories, and emotions.

We're witnessing the emergence of control that operates below consciousness. What marks this moment as different from old "bread and circuses" fears is that this content is created by individuals based on their own idiosyncratic proclivities and the clinical analysis of their viewing data. Content farms use search algorithm data to create massive quantities of videos that rank highly and generate advertising revenue. They've learned to appeal to our autonomous systems that control actions and decisions but function outside consciousness - the same systems that become dysregulated by trauma.

These platforms aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses creating politicized, monetized marketplaces of our attention. Content that can genuinely soothe and satisfy on an autonomous level appeals to various vested interests, and this form of "aesthetic technology" is being deployed for not entirely positive reasons. When the same techniques used to soothe traumatized children are deployed to maximize advertising revenue, we're not just talking about screen time - we're talking about the weaponization of healing.

I've observed clear visual themes in content farm videos that suggest unresolved trauma plays a role in their subconscious appeal: the oversimplification of the world into sickly sweet perfect versions of everyday things, and images alluding to abject violence or annihilation - crushing, cutting, falling. These aren't random algorithmic outputs. They're precise triggers that dysregulated nervous systems crave.

As someone who experiences trauma-related hyperarousal, I find highly stimulating videos both calming and triggering. This work attempts to understand what they're doing to me - and to us. Are these videos cathartic, triggering, or both? They create a toxic and mesmerizing meditation, seductively drawing us in and soothing on one level whilst activating damaging responses and physiological states.

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
When I'm with her I'm confused
Out of focus and bemused
And I never know exactly where I am
Unpredictable as weather
She's as flighty as a feather
She's a darling! She's a demon! She's a lamb!