Blog / 2025 / Everyday Curiosity

We’re being manipulated in a hundred tiny ways on a daily basis. A lot of it is fairly benign:

• I’m talking about when an email update from an artist starts with “Hi [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE]!” The use of your name piques your interest immediately. In fact, it’s so good at grabbing eyeballs that the artist’s newsletter manager automates it, placing each recipient’s name in that spot.
• I’m talking about the background music in videos, shows, or even the news. These melodies impact your mood, giving what you’re consuming a particular feel.
• I’m talking about the way some individuals’ social media pages are carefully curated to display the trappings of wealth, a flex of their success that’s meant to give the impression that they don’t need your attention even as the very existence of the profile reveals a longing for it.

This stuff isn’t necessarily harmful and the people doing it don’t always have bad intentions. They want you to read their newsletter, watch their video, and buy whatever they’re currently being paid to sell.

Still, these manipulations are worth noticing. Honing an awareness of these regular attempts at influencing our emotions can help us understand ourselves better. Plus, I like how the practice of searching for and spotting these little manipulations keeps me curious.

This is a painting I made for a supporter on Patreon, where you pay $500 over ten months for an original image of an animal of your choosing, and the manipulation in this case isn’t from another human so much as from humanity in general.

As I got ready to paint an otter, I immediately thought of the charming and seemingly surprised expressions that these animals make, with their front paws on their cheeks. I’d seen images like this again and again in memes online, but, until it was my turn to make one, it didn’t occur to me to wonder why otters actually do this.

In other words, my humanity obscured the meme-ified otters’ utter otteriness. It left me uninterested about what’s actually happening when these animals make this face, because, unconsciously, I guess I figured otters like to be cute for humans.

These animals live in cold waters, and they have thick fur to keep them warm—so thick, in fact, that their skin stays mostly dry. But, for the fur to do its part, it needs to be clean. Otters spend around five hours a day grooming themselves, including by rubbing the grease from their meals out of the fur on their cheeks.

I still think otters are adorable and I’m not above projecting human feelings on them for the sake of a meme—or a painting—but I’m also glad to get outside of my own limited perceptions for a moment. I like that my curiosity revealed the otters’ vulnerability, their need to groom assiduously in order to thrive in their environment.

In the same way, I like that my curiosity unmasks the vulnerability of the artist with an automatically addressed newsletter, of the maker of the video with music, and of the owner of the polished social media account. When I recognize the yearning in these everyday manipulations, it makes me feel more grounded in my own vulnerability.