ASMR is deeply against the poverty of life.

A Manifesto.

Here is something devastating but true: The most painful part of having a stroke was not the collapse of my mind and my body; it was that when I was collapsing, alone in the ER, nobody cared at all.

Two front desk nurses looked at me skeptically when I came through the double doors and told them that I thought I was going to die. “What’s your name?” “Alexandra…” “Date of birth?” Silence. I could not remember. They held my arms up, firm—no sign of stroke. Temperature normal. Blood pressure youthful at 27. They told me to sit down; it would be an eight-hour wait. A man was begging for pain pills, and they told him to sit down too. I sat next to a woman playing a mobile game, and she shuffled a few inches away from me, crossing her legs. On the other side of the room, a woman was covered in blood, holding her arm, the man next to her staring far away.

Because I am too deeply socialized, I lowered my voice on the phone and tried to take up as little room as possible.

“I’ll be okay; you don’t need to come,” I mumbled to my friend on the phone.

“No, I’ll come! I don’t have anything else going on.”

“Okay, thank you.”

When I hung up, the room was shifting, and my left arm was having a hard time holding itself on my lap. Deep in my body, I knew: I am dying now. That truth was heavy and filled me with terror completely.

I must do something. I tried to get back to the two nurses up front, but in the process, I collapsed against a line of wheelchairs. My brain was forgetting how to walk. As the wheelchairs clattered loudly under my weight, a sea of tired eyes looked up at me. I was embarrassed at all the noise I’d caused and used the wheelchairs to straighten myself. As I looked at an elderly man, he looked away.

When I made it to the nurses' station again, they met me with perturbation at my grotesque show-and-tell, yet another bid for attention. They looked nervous as I leaned on the counter.

“I think something is happening to me,” I told one of them. She had a worried brow. “Like I’ve already told you, the wait is unfortunately long. We probably can’t see you until tomorrow, so you can wait here or try to go to an urgent care.”

I don’t think I said anything in return. A deep confusion was creeping in, and I was forgetting words or how to make a thought. Instead, I had a feeling, like horror, that I could not expel. “You can have a seat now.”

Soon, a doctor came in, tall in a white coat, and announced loudly to the room that we should think about going home.

“We have no beds open right now, folks. You will probably not be seen tonight; currently, it’s an eight-hour wait.” It was an eight-hour wait one hour ago. “It’s up to you, but you probably won’t be seen,” he repeated.

Some people left, mournfully clutching their crossword books and pillows. I limped over to the doctor. I must have looked mortifying, my body drooping down, holding my left arm, which was no longer able to move by itself. Like Quasimodo. I swayed and said something unreal then. Part of me hopes that he is still haunted by it.

“Please, remember me. Don’t forget what I look like. I am dying, and I need somebody to remember me.” Silence. He looked at me uncomfortably as he struggled to find his words. He eventually inhaled and reminded me of the eight-hour wait, finding his stride in his monologue about the lack of beds. “We’ll try to get you in eventually, okay? Please have a seat,” he said. When I stared off into space and did not move, he left.

As I settled back down in my chair, I could not keep myself upright, but somehow, even though the room was melting away and my thoughts were beginning to scramble, my friend had arrived. I leaned on him, and he held my hand when I told him I was scared. “I know,” he said, and as I started to vomit, he got me a bag to throw up in. He grabbed a wheelchair from the stack I had fallen on earlier and helped me into it so he could wheel me to get help. One of my last memories is the woman playing her mobile game. I see her in the shrinking ring of vision as darkness grows around me. She wrinkles her nose and clutches her phone to her shoulder as I start to vomit. She turns her head.

I slip into oblivion. More vomit. Two voices—my friend, frantic: “She’s vomiting up blood!” The nurse's voice, tired: “It looks like undigested food to me.” Then nothing.

Poverty, all poverty.
Hell is a sea of tired eyes watching you collapse. They bill you after—dozens of thousands of dollars. Bankrupt.
I am Kafka’s cockroach, moving strangely and uncannily. If the ER cannot crush me, the bill will try to.
My whole body remembers wriggling on the floor in this fluorescent apathy. It is still the only memory from that time that makes me cry on demand—a deep, unhealed kind of cry. I am crying now.

In the years since the ER, I have learned how to walk again, how to brush my teeth and tie my shoes. I learned how to squirt shampoo into my left hand and scrunch it into my hair. Maybe it’s because I had to learn the basics twice, but as time has passed, I’ve abandoned almost every old hobby and passion I used to have. There was simply no more room inside me. I quit teaching, fell radically out of love with making cartoons and comics, and stopped posting skits on Instagram.
Standing alone was my habit of speaking softly to people on the internet, whispering into a microphone and tapping on books in front of my iPhone camera. I make ASMR.

ASMR is now an entire genre of video in which a person, like myself, makes soothing content to relax and comfort the listener.
ASMR, by nature, is deeply and profoundly intimate—a gesture of genuine care and kindness. It is love manifest as an MOV file.
There are all kinds—rain sounds, gentle whispering, loving face brushing, storytelling, show-and-tell, "study with me"—a carousel of content.
Some ASMR is deeply confessional or personal.
Some offers a subversive, cheeky kind of comedy and still others, eroticism and romance.

No matter what kind, it is always intimate. But how could this be? We are strangers, the viewer and I. They don’t know me, and I don’t know them.
But the answer is obvious—being a stranger is as much and as little as love demands.
To be present at all is criteria enough for care. At least, in this world, the one we get to make ourselves.
It will not be the case in our schools, our jobs, or even our hospitals.
The poverty of the ER makes itself known across the internet too in the fatigue of Facebook, the fluorescent indifference of Instagram, the triage of Twitter feeds. Funny enough, it is fundamentally thwarted at the many gates of YouTube. Here, you will find uplifted freaks, recovery and rest, vulnerable hobbyists, and ASMR.
The nature of ASMR transitioning from a niche genre to a wider consciousness marks both the turn toward the "cozy web¹" and the shame and embarrassment that comes from untangling deep capitalist apathy. You are not supposed to be into intimacy; you are supposed to be into entertainment—typically the mass kind.

YouTube, as a platform, is hard to categorize. It escapes much of the criticism leveled at Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram. In The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet², the cumulative texts on user preference for more intimate forms of content consumption (newsletters, emails, chats, etc.), YouTube is hardly discussed.
In the dark forest scheme of the internet, the theory holds that users, sensing the predatory presence of bots and fake content, are turning to safer forms of camaraderie and expression.
Either an internet user is being sucked dry by ad- and algorithm-driven social sharing sites, or they are seeking refuge in chat rooms.
YouTube sits somewhere less clear in this morass.
On one hand, it offers people the ad-riddled, influencer dopamine-drain content. On the other, it offers a chance at profound encounters of solidarity. Some comment sections will be your ER level apathy (“I’m tired too, so just take a seat”), while others will be encouraging and confessional (“I see you, I hear you”).

Within this layer cake, the dark forest refuge is clearly visible. I would know—I am in it. ASMR, as a genre, lives here, a genuine layer beneath an advertisement. This is where I turn my camera on and hit “record.” I get comments; I reply to them. People reach out to my email, my Goodreads, my Patreon, this Substack, etc. I do the same on other people’s channels, reaching out my hand in the dark. They take it. I take theirs. Functionally, this is us engaging our full neural connections, activating our mirror mechanisms, experiencing actual full-bodied sensations through our headphones, sharing mutual chills and relaxation affirmations. It’s heavenly and healing.

As I tell more and more people about what I do, I always think of the ER. It haunts me—a lived vision of what humanity looks like when nobody cares or believes your pain, when we are all overworked and overloaded. I think of them all the time—the doctor, the nurses. Do they remember me?

As a genre, I would call it an art form.
As a practice, I would call it communal.
As a manifesto, I would lay out only one rule: ASMR is deeply against the poverty of life.

Because I cannot tell my ER story over and over, when people say that ASMR sounds a bit odd, I now say:

“Not at all. It is caring—the most natural thing in the world.”

1. https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web/

2. https://darkforest.metalabel.com/