I want to show you my TikTok saved folder but I'm slightly embarrassed by it and we're going to work through that together.
The folder has 187 saved videos. I just counted. Of those 187, approximately 170 are some variation of: fluffy animal. Baby duck following a human. Kitten discovering a paper bag. Corgi running toward camera at full speed with the complete conviction that this is the most important journey it has ever undertaken. Hedgehog eating a single tiny piece of watermelon. Sheep in a sweater. I did not plan this folder. It evolved. It is what the algorithm has learned about my stress responses and it is uncomfortably accurate.
The "fluffy video" trend is everywhere right now and it's just what it sounds like: people posting the soft, silly, tender animal content that exists as a specific counterweight to everything else the internet is doing at any given moment. I posted about it @vixenraefr this week and the response was, people sent me their own folders. Their own collections of saved baby animals. The internet has a secret fluffy video infrastructure and it runs very deep.
I want to make a genuine argument for this. Not ironic, not apologetic. The deliberate consumption of soft, gentle, fluffy content is a legitimate form of nervous-system maintenance and I want to talk about why.
what a loud life does to a person
I make music that is, let's say direct. HEATHEN HYMNS is not ambient spa music. I write about doubt and rage and the specific grief of walking away from a community you loved. The performances are physical and emotionally demanding. The rollout, the press stuff, the social media presence, all of it involves being "on" in some capacity, being the version of myself that is articulate and present and able to represent what the work is about without dissolving into a puddle of feelings every time someone asks me about it.
Even the positive stuff is loud. Great reviews are loud. A song going somewhere unexpected is loud. A DM from a stranger that says "this album saved me" is the most wonderful loud thing I can imagine, but it still requires me to hold something big and feel something big and stay present inside it. I cry about that stuff. I'm not made of stone. But emotional intensity is intensity either way and your nervous system doesn't entirely distinguish between the kinds.
I also have insomnia. Have had it since I was a teenager. My brain does not reliably shut down on schedule. It likes to recap the day at 1am, run hypotheticals at 2am, and compose long mental letters to people who have not asked to receive them at 3am. This is a known condition. I manage it with varying success.
All of which means: my default state is overstimulated. And an overstimulated nervous system needs a specific kind of input to regulate, not more stimulation, not distraction, not productivity content. Something genuinely low-stakes and warm and soft.
the science (which I know is real even when I can't cite it)
Look, I'm a musician, not a neuroscientist, so take this as the well-informed layperson's version: there is actual research suggesting that watching cute animal content measurably reduces physiological stress responses. Heart rate slows. Cortisol drops. The specific visual cues of "small, round, large eyes, helpless" trigger a caregiving response in humans that has something to do with evolutionary wiring around infant care, we're designed to find those features disarming. Baby animals hit that same set of cues. So your brain goes: care, protect, soft, safe.
That's not nothing. That's your nervous system being told, at a biological level, that the threat level has dropped. That you can breathe. That whatever was tensing your shoulders can let go for the duration of a hedgehog eating watermelon.
I notice this in real time when I use it deliberately. The closet booth has been stressful lately, the rollout has a lot of moving pieces and I'm deep in the part where everything requires attention simultaneously and my brain won't stop listing the things I haven't done yet. I'll open TikTok specifically looking for the fluffy stuff, watch three or four videos, and something actually shifts. I'm not fixed. But I'm regulated enough to go back into the work without the same jagged edge.
the shame question
Why would I be embarrassed about this? This is the question I've been sitting with, because there's clearly some part of me that thinks having a folder of 170 baby animal videos is something that needs explaining or defending. And I want to push on that.
There's a cultural script, especially for women, especially for women who are trying to be taken seriously as artists, especially for women who make music about serious things, that says soft interests make you less credible. That the same person who writes about Numbers 31 and the absence of God and the machinery of spiritual manipulation should not also be deeply invested in a corgi running toward a camera. Like those things are in tension.
They're not in tension at all. The capacity to take hard things seriously and the capacity to find a fluffy duckling genuinely delightful are not opposing forces. They're both just being alive. If anything, the willingness to let yourself be moved by small, gentle, uncomplicated things is part of what keeps you from going fully brittle when the hard things come. You have to have somewhere to put the softness. Otherwise everything gets hard.
The musicians and artists I find most interesting are the ones capable of both registers, the ferocious and the tender. Not alternating between them but holding them simultaneously. A person who only has access to intensity will eventually burn. You need the fluffy video folder. It's part of the infrastructure.
my current favorites (an unscientific report)
In the spirit of full transparency: here is what is currently in heavy rotation in my saved folder and why.
There is a specific genre of video that is a large fluffy dog being reunited with its person after some separation, a trip, a hospital stay, whatever. The dog doesn't understand time but it understands "you were gone and now you're back" and the response is total, unguarded, full-body joy. Every single time. I have watched variations of this probably forty times total across different videos and I am not over it. The dog doesn't moderate its happiness for an audience. The dog is not performing. That's the thing. That's what gets me about it.
There's also a hedgehog account I follow that posts dinner content. The hedgehog has a tiny plate. The food is a miniature portion of whatever it is. The hedgehog approaches with what I can only describe as determined appetiteness. I don't know why this is soothing. It just is. Biscuit once watched this account over my shoulder and I think he was also soothed.
And then there's the genre where someone rescues something very small, a mouse, a bird, a baby rabbit, and documents the whole recovery. Weeks of tiny progress. The creature gradually becoming stronger and less scared. These videos are objectively about care and patience and the slow work of making something vulnerable feel safe, and they are, I notice this every time, extremely relevant to the same themes I'm writing about in my music, just without the words. Same emotional content. Different delivery.
go find your version
I'm not saying fluffy videos are for everyone. Maybe your nervous-system maintenance is woodworking content or cooking channels or golf. I've seen compelling arguments for the calming properties of golf ASMR and I'm open-minded. The specific content matters less than the intentionality. Are you actively building in moments of low-stakes gentleness, or are you just marinating in intensity from morning to night and wondering why you're exhausted?
The album rollout right now is the most professionally intense period of my life. More people are paying attention than ever have before, more is happening in more places, and the emotional stakes of it are genuinely high. I'm in my feelings about it in a way that is both wonderful and sometimes overwhelming.
And every night before I try to sleep, I watch a hedgehog eat dinner on a tiny plate. And my heart rate drops. And Lazarus the pothos doesn't need watering but I check on him anyway, and the city is doing its city thing outside, and Biscuit is visiting this weekend, and everything is, loud and tender and loud again, but for about four minutes there's just a very small animal with a very small plate, and it is enough, and it is good, and I wouldn't trade it.
Here's the other thing I've noticed: the people who share fluffy content most freely are often the ones doing the hardest work elsewhere. The nurse who films herself crying at a compilation of puppies after a long shift. The teacher who has a folder labeled "emergency videos" for when the day has been too much. The activists and researchers and people in genuinely difficult jobs who are also absolutely, unguardedly obsessed with a hedgehog eating a mini watermelon slice. There's no contradiction there. The harder the work, the more you need the counter-programming. The fluffy video folder is not a sign of frivolity. it is evidence of a person taking seriously the need to replenish what the world takes out.
I've started thinking of it as maintenance rather than indulgence. The same way the body needs food and water and sleep, the nervous system needs regular doses of low-stakes gentleness. Not optional, not a reward for productivity, maintenance. The album exists because I'm capable of sustained emotional work, and I'm capable of sustained emotional work partly because I have Biscuit and Lazarus and a hedgehog account and the understanding that I am allowed to be soft as well as fierce. The fierceness lands harder when you're not running on empty. Feed the soft parts. They do load-bearing work.
Send me your fluffy content. @vixenraefr. I am building the infrastructure.