The Dark Side of ASMR

By now most people probably know what ASMR is, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response and describes an involuntary sensory response triggered by an external stimulus such as sight, sound, or touch. The sensation is best described as a tingle that emanates from a trigger point and passes through the body in a wave of nervous stimulation.

I watch a lot of ASMR videos on YouTube, some of them with active focus where the video is the only thing I fixate on, and others more passively as a background whilst I work. They provide a sense of comfort and relaxation that helps relieve anxiety. As far as tingles are concerned, the first time I ever felt ASMR was when I was a kid and didn't know what it was. Every time I would get my head shaved I would feel a shiver wash over me when the electric razor passed by my ear. This trigger is the only one that I've never become immune to, no matter how often I hear it.

Last night as I was listening to ASMR whilst working away a thought crossed my mind that brought me to a very dark place and honestly I still don't really know how I feel about it because it's a lot to unpack. I thought about the nature of the videos and their content, the most common ASMR videos you will find on YouTube are role-play videos of cranial nerve exams which if you've never had one or you aren't familiar a cranial nerve exam is when a doctor tests your five senses, sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. It's a fairly simple diagnostic tool and perhaps the reason it's most common as an ASMR video concept is because it requires very little technical knowledge as opposed to the more complex videos, like eye exams and ear exams which feature heavily but often involve a lot more anatomical terms.

The dark though that occurred to me was the question of why so many people, myself included, find this type of content compelling and that took me to a very depressing place. When you think about fantasies and what people desire, you probably think of aspirations and life goals first and foremost, the idea of being rich and famous, or powerful, living in a large house, travelling the world, all the usual stereotypical desires that people spend their lives trying to fulfil. When you stop and think about ASMR content and what desire it fulfils the rather depressing conclusion is that it emulates a sense of comfort and compassion that we don't get from society more broadly.

Most ASMR videos regardless of the scenario can ultimately be categorised as personal attention, they involve 1 on 1 interactions, played out usually by the creator or ASMRtist as the community refers to them, assuming the attention giving role, with the viewer filling the complimentary role.

If you take a moment to research how well ASMR videos perform, those that do involve 2 people on screen don't fare well with their audiences, neither do those where the video has no personal attention but instead simply has audio unaccompanied by video or is accompanied by abstract visuals. These tend to lean towards audiences that search for ambience rather than ASMR specifically.

Thinking about ASMR as the desire for personal attention leads to the question of whether you actually feel like you have people in your life who care about you, or to put it bluntly, how dark is your personal life that your fantasy or your dream is to have someone actually pay attention to you and care for you.

I have a support network, made up of friends and family that I speak to often. My family I see everyday owing to the fact that I live with them, which is more exposure than I would like if I am honest, I did not expect to still be living at home by this age but that's a sentiment shared by many in my generation and a reality that many younger than me will also have to face as the cost of living continues to escalate. My friends I speak to every day and most of them are in similar situations to me, the few exceptions who actually have their own places came by them unfortunately by the passing of their parents and inheriting the properties in turn.

I also have a medical support network, doctors, consultants, counsellors, and advisers that I can speak to if I need to, and social workers that I can see if I need to because of my visual impairment.

To say that I am alone and uncared for would be a stretch, but I would argue the element of intimacy is missing. Most of these relationships are professional and come with boundaries; as for my relationships to friends and family, as close as you may be to them there is always an emotional distance that is maintained. Shrek wasn't wrong when he used his Onion analogy to describe the layers you have to peel back to reach someone's heart. Dante liked to put people in circles, although admittedly that was less about interaction and more about judgement and damnation but the concept is something that the likes of Google+ back in the day employed to try and give people the ability to structure their social connections on the platform based on how much they wanted to share with them.

Perhaps the reason ASMR videos as emulated personal attention are so appealing is not just because they fulfil that desire but they also require zero maintenance. There's no relationship to maintain because it doesn't actually exist - although again admittedly when that leads to parasocial relationships forming then things get a little complicated but I've made my view on those clear in previous posts, in summation, humanity has only had the ability to watch ourselves in video form on demand for the blink of an eye in comparison to the time we have spent evolving, it's unrealistic to expect our brains to evolve in such a short space of time to differentiate between regular interaction with a real person versus a video.

That dark thought still lingers, that we as a society are so starved of compassion, and empathy, that we've developed an entire genre of media that emulates it - one that is quite lucrative. The largest ASMR channel on YouTube at time of writing is GentleWhispering with 2.3 million subscribers; whilst the YouTube partner agreement prohibits disclosure of earnings, estimations based on what little information is public some ASMR creators earn up to $7 in CPM adverts on their videos which puts that one channel's income at approximately $400,000 over the life of the channel, with an estimated 500,000 YouTube channels specifically creating ASMR content it's not unreasonable to estimate the size of the ASMR Industry as exceeding $1 billion annually.

Compassion is now a commodity.