ICYMI: Lost in the Mindscape

I’m traveling for work this week so forgive me for recirculating this longread piece that I wrote for Fairer Disputations (and loved!) but which never got much attention.

Fairytales and children’s stories brim over with characters animated by the ardent belief of their creator: stuffed tigers and rabbits brought to life by a child’s love, puppets who cut their strings and dance, fairies that live as long as you believe (and not a minute longer), chickpeas converted by a mother’s wish into longed-for children. During games of make-believe, monsters lurk in every shadow and bedsheets billow into sails.

It’s attention that animates. Under an eager eye, oil paint breathes and blushes. Characters spring from the pages of books whose authors have been in the grave a hundred years. Turn away, and living beings wilt like cut flowers. Withdraw from life, and the color drains out.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what happens when our attention shifts from the world outside to the world inside. I’ve been thinking about the curious practice of tulpamancy: the conscious cultivation of a sentient being—a “tulpa”—believed to live in one’s head. Tulpamancers—who find each other online on sites like Reddit—create “a willed imaginary friend,” with the expectation that this creation will take on a life of its own, with its own interests, beliefs, and preferences. That is, tulpamancers believe there will be a moment in the process where the tulpa ceases to be “produced” by the host’s imagination and begins to produce itself.

The world of tulpamancy is stranger and lonelier than most. Yet it’s an extreme example of a ubiquitous phenomenon: people looking for meaning and belonging online. Middle-aged moms swap fanfiction about teen TV dramas, while communities of cosplayers, graysexuals, Sephora enthusiasts, babywearers, neurodivergents, ex-Mormons, and tea aficionados form and grow. But when do these identities—these worlds we create, these stories we tell about and to ourselves—help us and when do they hurt us?

What do we learn from lurking in these online spaces?

I believe tulpamancy can teach us something about how the Internet changes how we experience ourselves, how our inner worlds interact with our bodies, and what happens when we try to replace real-life ties with electronic—or wholly imaginary—ones. The very strangeness of tulpamancy lays bare what remains buried in other online communities.

In particular, there is a strong parallel between tulpamancy and another, more common belief about the self: the belief that one is transgender. In both cases, we see people who describe their lives as being enriched by their devotion to their new identities. Yet around the edges of their accounts, the evidence looks more equivocal: more isolation, more misunderstandings, severed relationships with “unaccepting” friends and family members.

The Internet has broken thousands of silences and shortened the greatest of distances. But the Internet can create silences and distances, too—by feeding lonely fantasies that feast like parasites on one’s real life.