I need everyone to understand something: This doesn’t matter.

Dhole Moments is not the official outlet of anything that will affect you or your daily life. It carries no financial weight or political power. It doesn’t represent any company, organization, or government agency.

To be a little more blunt: It’s overwhelmingly likely that nothing I write here will ever directly be on the final exam for any course you study. Your academic, career, romantic, and life success will not depend on my musings in any significant way.

Even if one of my blog posts should become popular, it will be (at best) a blip on most people’s radar for a fleeting moment, and then promptly forgotten about, because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter.

The same can be said about its author, of course!

Let me emphasize: That’s not a depressing statement, it’s simply reality.

I don’t matter.

The world was here for billions of years before me, and it will continue for a heck of a long time after I die.

There are billions of people on Earth and an utterly unknowable number of life-supporting planets in our universe. (With any luck, it’s a large number!)

Even among the people alive here and now, I consistently fail to muster any significance or impact on the world. If I had never been born, the world be largely indistinguishable from how it appears today.

Profound Disagreement

Sometimes I encounter people that behave as though I do matter (usually not for good reasons).

In some instances, they believe I hold any significant status to the technology or furry communities, and hope to influence matters by changing my mind on something.

Nevermind the furries with hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and YouTube that go to several big conventions every year, let’s bother some guy with a WordPress blog that talks about cryptography!

How misguided fools make decisions

Some malicious people even seem to think successfully attacking me will somehow hurt furries as a whole. Not so!

If I were so influential or important, I’d have put an end to the endless cycle of furry discourse years ago.

(While I’m at it, I’d also make proper hygiene and deodorant use mandatory for furry conventions, and put a stop to the jerks that use Bluetooth speakers to annoy everyone else. None of those things have happened, so at least you can know I’m utterly powerless here.)

“Well, nothing matters then, right?”

No, that’s not what I’m getting at.

Like, sure, from a purely objective perspective, you could argue that nothing truly matters. But this sort of nihilism creates a vacuum from which you are free to decide what matters to you, since “mattering” isn’t pre-determined before you make that choice.

You may decide that humanity matters to you. You may decide that equality matters to you. You can also decide that sex, money, and popularity are important to you. But it’s your choice to make, and it’s your life to live.

But to be clear, when I say ,”I don’t matter,” I’m not being depressed or a nihilist.

It’s nothing so extreme.

I just don’t have the unwarranted self-importance that people sometimes project onto each other online.

When I wrote, Furries Are Losing the Battle Against Scale, I was tempted to analyze how the growing pains of the furry fandom (as exhibited by the explosive exponential growth of furry convention attendance) would exacerbate the risk of parasocial relationships.

But let’s be real: The problem has already manifested years ago, and too many furries seem unwilling to confront it before it hurts people.

Here’s two YouTubers talking about extreme examples:

Humans are a social species. It’s natural to want to want to bond with people that like the same things you do. It’s inevitable that people will generally be drawn towards “popular” accounts, due to the sheer orientation of the social graphs that we exist on.

But some people utterly fail to keep things in context.

As I mentioned previously, I occasionally receive communications from someone I don’t know that expect me to wield some imagined, profound influence over others.

This comes in many forms, from “since you helped stop a bigoted mayor from killing a library over LGBTQ+ books, I need you to push my crowdfund for something wholly unrelated” to “you should write about [topic] because it’s important to [specific community]” to, most recently, over 100 queries about the security of esoteric messaging apps that virtually nobody uses (I wish I was exaggerating).

Individually, these range from harmless to mildly annoying. In aggregate, they’re exhausting because they’re predicated on a false premise that I have some sort of power or influence anywhere, which implies on some level that I must matter at all.

This is demonstrably false.

My blog regularly discusses cryptography topics, so if that sentiment had any truth to it, you’d expect me to come up in any cryptography papers, ever.

Yet, if you try to search for “Soatok” on the IACR website, you will not find any results.

It’s not just that I don’t have any papers written, it’s that nobody has cited anything I’ve written in an IACR paper, either.

Though my blog provides mild entertainment to some cryptographers, it doesn’t actually matter to the cryptography community one bit.

“But what about papers published under your legal name?”

There are none, but it’s difficult for anyone to verify without me disclosing my legal name–which is a bit of information that certainly doesn’t matter.

Nobody with half a brain would give a shit if they knew it anyway.

Over the years, I’ve had several people try to dox me, because they project some imagined importance onto me that simply doesn’t exist.

Though I may be biased here, I can’t help but feel like their time and energy would be better spent trying to unmask the people who are actively causing harm to others, rather than an unimportant tech blogger.

After all, their reward for success would be a resounding “meh” from anyone that has even heard of Soatok before.

I’m nothing special.

Most of the people reading this right now could, with a few years of focused study, get to the point that you can run circles around me in my own field.

And that’s to say nothing about the fields you might find your talents more naturally align with than mine.

Nothing I do requires being a genius or uniquely talented in any way.

I am not someone that anyone should look up to. It’s a level playing field. The only difference between us is that I’ve put in the time to be near the peak of my career, and many of you are just starting out.

With enough time and focus, you can cross that distance too. And if you do, rather than look up to me at all, you can gaze laterally to see just another peer in the industry.

This is true of everything I do, not just tech stuff! There are a lot of furry bloggers worth tuning into. I highly recommend perusing that list, and seeing some of the writing from other furry bloggers. Many of them are friends of mine.

And that’s not to mention all the things I’m bad at. You can throw a stone at any random sampling of furries and hit at least one artist that completely obliterates me in any contest of talent or skill.

If you think about that for long enough, it becomes comical. The Furry Fandom wouldn’t exist without artists, yet there are people that think my untalented ass matters?

Look inwards.

Over the years, I’ve expressed this sentiment of not mattering to a few people, and eventually they concluded that not mattering doesn’t actually matter because they still think I have some admirable qualities that they enjoy.

And that’s valid, but consider this: Any admirable trait you think I have is something you could easily cultivate in yourself.

Furthermore, anything admirable that anyone thinks they’re seeing in me is really just them identifying what they value–whether in themselves or in others.

At that point, why not cut out the middleman and just work to develop those traits in yourself?

You certainly don’t need me for that.

Why write about all this?

There were a few unrelated incidents recently that prompted me to think about these topics.

As mentioned above, I’ve received a lot of queries from complete strangers that made varying levels of demands to me. Some of these unsolicited pokes, I would later discover, were from the Matrix developer community. They also weren’t very respectful of boundaries.

Presumably because I wouldn’t tolerate being harassed by strangers like this, someone suggested that I was a narcissist.

On an issue totally unrelated to messaging apps, I was also recently accused of being a “clout-chaser” by someone whose last interaction with me was nearly a decade ago and involved demanding I deal with a user saying dumb and hurtful things in Furry Technologists group.

This last contact came during a time that everyone on my team was working 17-hour days to resolve a security issue at work ahead of a 90 day disclosure deadline. This security incident led to a coworker I deeply respect to burn out of the tech industry, and is just now starting to recover from it (from the best I can tell, anyway).

When I told this person I was busy (a bit of an understatement) and suggested they should talk to a different admin, they left the group, concluded that I endorsed those dumb and hurtful things, and insisted that I’m “comfortable with racists and transphobes” to anyone that would listen to them.

So, obviously, it’s tempting for me to discard their words as the ignorant ramblings of a hater, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least consider the possibility that I come across as egotistical.

There’s a bit of a pattern here, but it’s not all in the same vein.

Some of my friends fall vaguely into the “content creator” bucket, and they’ve been talking about parasocial relationships a lot lately. One of them expressed a wish that more people talk about it.

But, y’know, it’s hard for a somewhat-famous person to talk about parasocial relationships, since, if you boil the entire idea of “fame” down, parasocial relationships are its fundamental component.

How do you even respond to that?

Full disclosure: I’m not really sure what the venerable “normal” person would do when confronted with the notion that they’re arrogant.

I’ve seen a lot of people pull the ostrich defense, usually under the guise of “touching grass and disengaging” (and never again confronting the issue).

I’ve seen others beat their chest to “disprove” the accusations (which never goes how they want it to), presumably out of some sort of desire to protect their reputation.

My reaction was to laugh, because of how strange the idea is to me. I’ve long since come to the understanding that I don’t matter.

Consequently, I took some time to reflect about what it would look like if I were totally egocentric, and then contrast that with my own recent behavior to see if there was any overlap.

One thing I discovered is that I’ve held my own insignificance too close to the chest, out of fear of miscommunicating and leading people into assuming I’m depressed. So, this post strives to correct that error.

And it isn’t just that I don’t matter, it’s that I shouldn’t matter to most people.

Limits

I’ve mentioned Dunbar’s number before, back when I wrote on Medium. The linked article also discusses the word “popufur” a lot.

I have many close friends, and virtually none of them read this blog; not because they aren’t supportive of me, my hobbies, etc. but because they get the same information and experience in person, so it’d be sort of redundant. (Also, most of them aren’t furries! They respect my hobby as something that’s not their cup of tea, and that hasn’t been a problem.)

As a flawed, mortal being, I cannot maintain hundreds of close friendships. Sorry, it’s far beyond my capabilities.

Look at the people in your own life that matter to you. Your families (chosen or hereditary), friends, romantic partners, neighbors, people you work with, etc.

I don’t belong in that picture.

Neither do most “popufurs”, “influencers”, or other synonyms for “minor celebrity”. And a lot of those people actually have credentials or accomplishments that society values.

TL;DR

This blog doesn’t matter. Its author doesn’t matter. Pretending otherwise is a regrettable error. It’s also okay to not matter.

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The header image combines furry stickers made by CMYKat and AJ.