Just posting this cause I don't really know anybody else who has this problem. I've been dealing with it for years now and I don't know if it's an autism thing or what.
I always get really nervous when I'm looking specific things up, to the point where I get actually sweaty doing it sometimes. Particularly anything that revolves around musicians/bands that I enjoy. I have this weird deep fear that I'll find out something I didn't want to know, I guess? Like a musician I like turning out to have done something terrible, or to have died in some tragic way (which I often already know about but don't want to look into more, I'll get sad). So because of this I'm left out of the loop on most "lore" things surrounding bands I like unless I happen to stumble upon a video about them or hear things through the fandom grapevine.
... Does anyone else do this? Or even just vaguely relate to it?? Or am I just embarrassing myself a little by posting this??? My best friend who is also big on older music is the opposite of me because she will dive deep into her research, scour through websites, watch documentaries, read entire books, etc. I feel kind of jealous of her because she knows so much more than I do. Makes me feel like a fake music fan :(
If anyone has found good ways to solve this problem let me know. I suppose I might as well force myself to research at some point...
Not sure if this will help but you can hide specific things by adding negative terms.
From google: "You can easily exclude a word from your Google search by putting a minus sign (“-“) immediately in front of the term you want to exclude"
I use this when looking up fandom stuff to avoid specific characters or ships for example!!
sM0Lpupi oh gosh that too... I remember in 6th grade googling a Pokemon on the school WiFi and one of the first image results was something super nsfw. Horrifying. Maybe I'm a little more desensitized to fictional characters though, but it also depends heavily on whatever feels very personal to you. Music feels very personal to me, I daydream about it a lot, so having my perception scarred in some way is not a fun experience, even if it usually wears off after a while.
i relate somewhat, i especially have trouble googling embarrassing topics like some health related stuff or just, yknow, fictional characters im embarrassed about liking 🥲
Nah I can definitely relate, although maybe not for the same reasons as you. I guess the NSFW stuff can be a factor for it, I really don't like seeing that type of stuff, I also really don't like seeing people ship characters I like in ways I feel are inaccurate and god forbid I like a female character who has a close platonic bond with a male character or vice versa, 90% of the results will just be ship art of them and I hate it. So yeah, that can be a reason for it, but also I tend to actively avoid content relating to stuff I like because it.. overwhelms me? Like sometimes a video essay of a past hyperfixation will come up on my feed and I just can't even get myself to watch it because I don't know, it makes me want to explode
i totally relate, especially with fictional characters. my self consciousness mostly stems from how many times i look a character up and i get embarrassed when i have the urge to look up the same character multiple times.
OMG SOMEONE ELSE WITH THIS PROBLEM i relate to the fear of being hit with stuff that you dont wanna see, i think my fear has something to do with my (recently realized) intrusive thoughts, like someone else in this thread
Gingasnap Yeah I don't have intrusive thoughts (that I'm aware of) so mine is probably more like what you described. That sucks when the songs connect to it like that :( must make it even more uncomfortable to listen to. I don't know what's worse between that and something tragic happening. Either way by the time I know 5-6 albums by heart it's like I know them. One of my favorite singers had a really tragic life that ended way too soon and man the stuff my dad has told me (and one music video where you can tell she's not doing good- kept me up at night cause it was so sad to see) is more than enough. I get sad just thinking about it, I can't even imagine having to research it.
SherbetToons I heavily agree to the getting overwhelmed thing! I watch tooooons of video essays on movies or shows that I don't even watch but the moment I find a video essay about a topic I actually love I can barely get through 10 minutes of it. I don't really know what it is. Maybe my brain is trying too hard to retain a bunch of information at once.
NAH cuz like I totally feel this, sometimes I can't google things just out of some kind of... idk embarrassment? No idea, also sometimes when I start getting a hyperfixation on something I start avoiding content of it and get viscerally upset if it shows up on my feed or smth, not even necessarily to avoid spoilers I just hate seeing it for no reason also like SherbertToons said I especially can't stand finding ship content, it just crosses wires inexplicably
I write some...pretty controversial stuff (one reason I'm reluctant to share my characters in these forums lest people think I identify with such things), and of course since I have no experience with the subject, that means Googling...so yeah, I've had times I felt very ill at ease searching for certain things. Guilty, like. I grew up in an environment where if you were merely interested in something morbid, it must mean you were into it, which had never been so in my case, yet that's the mentality around me. So the guilt's never really gone away. I don't get this as much with Google anymore but I do get it when searching for reading material on Amazon, or videos on YouTube, or songs on Spotify...it keeps it in the algorithm! "Hey, you looked up this one hate video on YouTube, so you wanna watch some more? " NO!
One time I needed to know the prices of certain illegal activities for one story and I actually found a list of such things via Google. Don't know what happened to that site but that sure was an awkward search.
It doesn't even always have to be morbid. I wanted to learn about the Pennsylvania Dutch since that's in my ancestry but I felt awkward doing so as it's not like I'm part of the lifestyle or anything. If you search YouTube for this, you get loads of Amish stuff. NOT THE SAME. I was interested in Ojibwa culture in the past and had some very negative interactions with people who thought I should not be looking into a culture that was not my own, so that put me off from asking questions. Then there's stuff which SHOULDN'T be controversial, but often is, like whenever I go searching for Germanic things...ugh what a cesspool.
Once in a while I avoid looking too much into something lest I find out something that ruins it for me. For example, my favorite music artist, whom I had only recently found via Spotify, had suddenly stopped performing some years ago and apparently fell off the face of the earth. There's little info about him as a person, even his real name is iffy. Only long after he'd stopped performing, I fell in love with his music, it introduced me to a whole new genre and he speaks to me, but what if I were to find out about him and...he's some kind of bigot or jerk or something. I'm not good at separating the art and the artist anymore. I admit, his work might end up tainted at best, ruined at most. So maybe it's for the best I can't find much about him, though it mystifies me, he was so popular once, what happened to him? Eh well.
Ditto with old classmates/friends. Don't want to know what became of them, because the few I did catch up with, ended up not being nearly the friends I'd thought they were. It really hurt to search Facebook or something and learn over and over that their friendship meant far more to me than mine had to them. I'm bitter by now, I would like to pretend they're out there somewhere thinking of me and it's best I don't go looking and find out, but I figure if they really did care, they would've come looking for me by now. I just assume I'm forgotten and I don't search for my old friends anymore.