NO MORE TRUE CRIME
Hi, I’m Thomas, and I’m addicted to true story psychological thriller podcasts on road trips.
It all started 12 months ago heading down to my wife Maddy’s family farm. (Oh, I married into some property..? Tehe, what a coincidence )
After cycling through all the Taylor Swift I could handle in one sitting, Maddy suggested an episode of True Crime to kill some time.
It was pitched to me as a ‘really interesting podcast that goes through all kinds of unsolved mysteries and murders’.
Say less, darling.
What followed is best described as two hours of complete hypnosis by this bloke with a weird Aussie accent in an unwavering deadpan voice, detailing the horrific kidnapping, torture, and eventual escape of a young lady in the US.
Ehhhh, I am what I am.
Over the next few months we listened to copious amounts of irresistibly disturbing real-life horror stories, unwilling to believe people could be so evil, but unable to pull ourselves away.
At first I laughed it off as our little thing on road trips (guys I get it we all have our vices), but then stuff got wwweird.
Maddy started dog sitting for strangers through an app called Madpaws - (where people PAY YOU to LIVE IN THEIR HOME and USE THEIR STUFF and PLAY WITH DOGS!!! Absolute chumps lol Maddy would do that for free)
So I’d keep her and her new dog friend company, make sure no crazies were hiding under the bed in the front room, and then wish her goodnight at an honourable hour.
And then I would sit
in my car
and wait.
Sometimes just a minute. Sometimes ten. Sometimes more!
I’m not a huge fan of my lady sleeping in a stranger’s empty house in a new neighbourhood on a good day, but in light of the recent psycho-thriller addiction, my paranoia grew exponentially.
My reasonably solid worldview: Australia’s a safe place, sometimes bad things happen, but she’ll be right
- factoring in my recent heavy consumption of morbid murder and unwanted intruder stories -
shifted to: HOLY CRAP MADDY’S GONNA DIE A HORRIBLE DEATH AND END UP ON AN EPISODE OF TRUE CRIME
^ a (potentially exaggerated) snapshot of my thought process
For a while, I could not figure out for the life of me where this fear grew from.
Nothing bad happened to Maddy, and there were never any close calls. But I kept having these fears… Completely unrelated, I kept listening to the podcasts…
Til one day, on a hunch, I declared,
“NO MORE TRUE CRIME.”
I was cutting us off.
My hunch: I was letting a fictional world ruin my real world.
(I say fictional not suggesting the content of the stories is made up, but that the entire show is based on preying on human fascination with the evil of mankind, curating a series of stories that feed into that tendency, and then cranking up the grotesque details to keep you hooked)
I mean, who doesn’t love hearing the gory details of a good horror story every now and then?
But obsessing over them for hours, week after week, only leads to your brain believing it’s more common than it actually is.
This is EXACTLY how social media paralyses you with paranoia.
A fictional world full of curated content on a platform designed to prey on your human instinct to seek pleasure through entertainment and obsess over comparing yourself with others. Mouthful.
Problem is, the translational effect it has on your ‘real world’ life is exactly the same as my True Crime problem.
You start to believe everyone’s better than you at absolutely everything, just like I believed Maddy and her dog were gonna be abducted the second I left.
And that just ain’t a good long term strategy for a meaningful life.
Does that mean you throw your iPhone out the window (my emails will NOT cater to Android users), move to Zimbabwe, and avoid anything involving the worlds ‘social’ and ‘media’?
I wouldn’t recommend it, because you’ll probably relapse and fall deeper in the hole than before.
But should you manage your relationship with it? Hell yeah you should.
Just like I’m managing my relationship with True Crime on the way down to Maddy’s family farm again this weekend… Totally not relapsing. Just dabbling… in a few episodes… to remind myself why I shouldn’t… listen… anymore…
Kidding. I’ve already sworn myself off late night walks in the pine trees, so that's enough horror for now.
If you don’t hear from me tomorrow, call emergency services and search in the woods, and if you wanna know more about how I go about a healthy relationship with social media, shoot me an email reply!
