youtube, glp-1s, and the humiliation ritual called life
most nights i go to sleep to the sound of mindless youtube chatter. right now, i’m obsessed with this girl, cora shircel. she’s 25 and lives in chicago and posts about her friends, running on lake michigan, doing orangetheory, visiting her long distance boyfriend in san francisco, eating at nice restaurants, and going out and getting drunk. it’s totally inane. vapid, even. the shit she gets into is entirely typical for a 25 year old girl living in a major us city. she’s pretty, in a girl-next-door kind of way. she’s reasonably funny. she’s palatable, and relatable, and a certifiable normie. in the hours and hours of her content that i’ve watched, she’s never once made a comment i’d consider remotely cancellable or even controversial. and yet, i cannot look away. it’s not despite of her aggressive normieness that i can’t take my eyes off of her, but actually because of it. she is, as i’ve been told it’s called, my comfort creator.
cora and her youtube channel have a special place in my heart, and i get excited each week when she posts a new video. the content i get from her vlog though is just the long form version of tens of thousands of similar influencer posts on instagram reels, which i’m embarrassed to admit i’m also totally addicted to. what i eat in a day, get ready with me, a day in my life as a 28 year old living in chicago, my 5-9 before my 9-5, my 5-9 after my 9-5… i love it. i love it all.
am i aware that i’m wasting my one wild and precious life consuming this internet slop? absolutely. but i don’t consider it a waste. not totally, anyway. i’m a neurotic person. i find it hard to get out of my own head. i spend a lot of time wondering whether or not the things i’m doing — the way i live — is normal.
i’ve written about this before, but i find it incredibly frustrating to be limited to a single consciousness. as a writer and neurotic both, i enjoy — no i need — to observe the mundane rhythms of the daily human experience. i seek out opportunities to be a fly on the wall in other people’s lives. it’s why i love to babysit. why i wrote a novel (that’s sitting in google docs currently, doing nothing) from the perspective of a live-in nanny. it’s fascinating to me to observe people in their most natural and vulnerable states.
existence is unrelenting. every single day, we wake up the same damn person and have myriad needs and desires to attend to. we need to eat. to drink. to go to the bathroom. to work to make money to support those wants and needs. things arise. problems. headaches. carnal desire. we get dirty and need to shower, every single day. isn’t that kind of crazy? there’s a lot of upkeep that the human animal requires, and it never stops.
the reason i love my youtube girlypops is the same reason i love to watch people in their homes. in restaurants. read private text exchanges discreetly over shoulders. i’m gathering data. data to answer the question sheila heti first posed: how should a person be?
i’m seeking an answer to the question that pings over and over again in my mind as i attend to my own human animal. is this normal? is this? is this?
i fantasize about transcending desire. my own wants and needs often revolt me. they reveal weakness. i can’t believe i need to eat, multiple times every single day. i’m mortified to want things. to want people. to actually admit my own carnal desires of the flesh.
and yet, in other people, i see the beauty in these fundamental requirements that make us human. that make us animals. we sweat. we bleed. we eat and shit and fuck and die. god, i’m such a prude. i’m kind of cringing as i type that. but it’s true! we aren’t floating orbs of intellect divorced from the physical world. we aren’t artificial intelligence. as the algorithm improves, our bodily reality is largely what separates us from chatgpt.
i find comfort in my comfort creators because they allow me to observe another human in their all-too-human process. this is me when i get out of the shower. this is what i look like with wet hair. with no makeup. this is me drunk at 2 am, ordering taco bell. me with an excrutiating crush on a boy. me with my girls. with bad news. with an insatiable hunger. it’s all edited and polished of course for the internet, but it’s the closest i can get to watching someone — really watching someone — in every possible state of being.
in other people (in my friends, my family, the people i pass on the street, the cora shircels of the world), i find beauty in appetite. it’s not only fundamental to being human, but fundamental to the process of writing as well. it’s essential to come to an understanding of what your characters want, what they need. these are the very building blocks of a story. and yet in myself, i fantasize about crushing those appetites. i cringe very easily. i would like to squelch my hungers. to become perfect. needless. to photosynthesize.
earlier this year, i read a book by the british reporter johann hari called magic pill: the extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight-loss drugs. in it, he explores that very question, and true gonzo journalist that he is, goes on a glp-1 himself in the process. overall, hari presents a fairly balanced view of this drug class. what was most interesting to me in the book was his exploration of how these drugs work by flattening desire. they repress the pleasure we receive from eating, but in the process, also repress pleasure across the board. it’s the reason these medications work so well not only in curbing our appetite for food, but for drugs and alcohol as well. one surprising benefit of ozempic, wegovy, and their ilk, are that they’re effective treatments for addiction in addition to being a silver bullet for weight loss and diabetes. by reducing the pleasure we get from these substances, they lose some of their power over us. not only does food become less fun, but so does booze, and drugs, and sex, and life.
in short, there’s now a drug that does exactly what i claim to want: it tamps down our all too human appetites, making us needless. wantless. and yet, in so doing, it paints our world several shades greyer. it mutes the pleasure we derive from those daily rhythms of life that i watch so studiously on youtube. what kind of content would cora even make if she didn’t get hungry? if she didn’t need anything from her boyfriend, her friends? if she were to transcend her earthly desires as i claim to want to do, there would be no driving force behind her content. if the characters in my stories were to take a drug that inhibited their wants, there would be no storyline. if i were to shoot myself up with glp-1s, slowly, a low grade hum of depression might descend on my daily rhythms as the joy i get from life’s little pleasures decreased.
our appetites are what make us vulnerable. to be vulnerable is to risk embarrassment. failure. to want something from another person can be mortifying. to be hungry is to admit a certain neediness. to express desire is to put yourself out there, is to potentially humiliate yourself. this the cost. the cost of being alive. of being human. of seeking pleasure in the world around us. nothing comes for free.
i watch cora to remind myself it’s normal to have wants and needs and express them. i’m uniquely embarrassed by my own because mine is the only human process i’m forced to witness, day in and day out. plenty of people might write off so-called content creators as fake and superficial. frivolous. who cares about what you do in the hours before work. what your makeup routine is. what you ate today. some might argue it’s all a big waste of time. but not me. to me, it’s access to another person’s consciousness. the ins and outs of days and weeks, months and years. it’s okay. it’s okay to eat. to want. to sweat and bleed and do all the things that humans and animals alike do. we are, after all, simply animals. and in a world of ozempic and chatgpt and deep plane face lifts, it’s a beautiful thing to be a sweaty, bloody, desirous, pleasure-seeking human.