Back to School Psychosis
Squatter nuns pre-apocalypse
Hello darlings,
Autumn is here and so are we, just on time as always.
Everybody knows that the year starts in September, and not in January. So even if we are not students anymore, we feel like we are entering a new year and we have to get ready for it. New style, new goals, new horizons.
It is hard to organize ourselves when the vibes are shifting and the world is spiralling. We know we sound like a broken record, but over TikTok (the only relevant social media even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself) the levels of delusion are no longer babygirl manifesto but rather full-on GPT-induced psychosis in the worst ways.
The internet promised us knowledge, empowerment, and efficiency. Instead, we got false promises of liberation that end up caging us instead. Call it the gospel of delusion, preached one For You Page at a time.
So we are trying to start new hobbies, new habits, grow up, but instead we find ourselves crying about time passing, having to take our Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) lamps out, and knowing what is to come in our side of the hemisphere. You know, just girls going through it as per usual.
Original video: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdGRgE6N/
What we didn’t see coming for this new term was an apocalypse.
Doomscrolling for Jesus
Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to not touch base with this hysterical side of the FYP, but there’s a corner of the internet where people are currently confessing to hearing the trumpets in the sky calling them to heaven. They’re spotting divine warnings in whathever is at hand, from weather patterns to their children snoring, and somehow calculating the exact day of the apocalypse (according to them). What used to be whispered in church basements is now broadcast in 60-second clips, optimized for virality.
There’s something both terrifying and fascinating about this. On one hand: is this online religious psychosis fueled by white supremacy? We believe so. But on the other, is evangelism culture fuelling social media? We are sure. The end of times is the ultimate clickbait: high stakes, endless suspense, and will always be impossible to fact-check.
According to this particular corner of TikTok, Jesus was supposed to come on the 23rd or 24th of September and take all his devoted followers straight to heaven. Yes you heard that right, quite literally push or lift them up to heaven, physically not methaphorically. Basically a divine VIP meet-and-great pass for all the delulu American folks. This event is called the Rapture, and @tenhourscreentime explains very well in this video:
Original video: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdGRXWvE/
But… surprise! The Rapture didn’t happen. Jesus didn’t descend, and all the RaputureTok TikTokers are in disbelief.
Original video: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdGeQnmc/
As certified Catholic school girlies, we also can’t stop wondering which of our old classmates would fall for this, and let’s just say, we know some names. If you’ve got the money and the wit, you can pay us to spill.
All jokes aside, this shook us enough to go seek comfort in one of our favorite creators, Brittney Lowe. She’s basically our go-to professor of theology, religion, and sometimes internet brainrot. In her video, she makes an important clarification: what we’re seeing on RaptureTok isn’t mass psychosis, but social contagion. In other words, people collectively reinforcing each other’s delusions through the viral mechanics of TikTok (yay!).
It’s still mass delusion, but not psychosis. Which is good news (LOL), because it means we’re not looking at an impending wave of violent “end times” acts. Prophecy spreads like a virus, though: one person posts a wild take, another stitches it, someone else adds a date, and suddenly a whole corner of the internet is counting down to an apocalypse that never arrives.
Original video: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdGeQbge/
So no, Jesus didn’t show up in September, but RaptureTok did teach us a lot about belief, panic, virality, and why the end of times will probably keep going viral, even if it never actually arrives.
Squatter nuns
Not all religious people are delusional. This month, we’re making an exception because this story didn’t happen on TikTok, we followed it on Instagram.
Rita, Bernadette, and Regina are three nuns from Salzburg in their eighties. After a lifetime in their convent, teaching children and living quietly, the Austrian church kicked them out, into a retirement home in 2023. Feeling ignored and sidelined, these divas did the unthinkable: they escaped and squatted their own convent.
What they didn’t expect was to find the convent in such bad condition. The elevator was broken, their letters and photos gone, and even the flowers on the cemetery where other nuns had been buried for centuries had vanished.
But did this stop Rita, Bernadette, and Regina from being iconic? Of course not. They built a network of support with villagers, former students, and a retired priest, and now they’re back, ruling their convent like queens.
They’re even sporty:
And turned out to be amazing social media managers:
The Austrian church? Furious. After leaving the nuns with only 150€ a month and expecting them to stay put, the church claimed they broke their vow of obedience. Share with us a more misogynist statement, we’ll wait.
Divine intervention aside, one thing is clear: you don’t mess with nuns. Saint Teresa of Ávila proved it in the 16th century, nuns don’t need men, should live independently, and must protect their own structures. Men, capitalism, and real estate greed have no place in what these women built with strength and love.
And let’s be real: maybe there haven’t been new nuns here because only non-European women were willing. In our Barcelona neighborhood convent, the few nuns left in their eighties still reject racialized nuns, simply because they’ve never had to deal with racialized people before. They’d rather die alone than face a culturally mixed convent. (Because, well, what do you expect from old nuns raised in fascist Europe?)
Still, we hope Bernadette, Rita, and Regina succeed in their squatter career and build an amazing network of love and care.
So, now that we know Jesus is not coming down and nuns are squatting houses, what are your goals for this new term? Viki wants to learn how to play the organ, and Ariadna wants to learn colour work to attempt a creation as iconic as the works of Kelly.
We will keep you updated on how the apocalypse unfolds, and if you keep receiving our newsletter, it means the brainrot is alive, we are alive.
There are many things we don’t know. But if there’s one truth in this life, it’s that men lie.
Original video: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdGdNgk3/
Let a lightning bolt strike if men lie [lightning strikes].
Keep that in mind and take care.
With love,
xx
while reading this i was honestly shocked about the whole rapture madness. iˋm relatively active on tiktok but not ONCE did a video of the sort cross my fyp🫠🫠