TL;DR

Parakeet’s viral essay uses a Skittle factory as a metaphor for personality and how our core thought loops shape us—especially visible in dementia. The convo blends humor, productivity hacks (like no orgasms until publishing), internet weirdness (monkey titties), and deep reflections on identity, trauma, and rebuilding your inner world. Strange, smart, and heartfelt.

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Some thoughts:

Somewhere between the high-gloss, dopamine-fueled TikTok scroll and the rot of your lizard brain’s last unpatched firmware update lies a factory. A real metaphorical one. A factory that makes Skittles. Not candy, but you—tiny, flavored capsules of interpretation, meaning, personality. And like all good industrial operations, it’s slowly being eaten alive by entropy, nostalgia, and monetization algorithms.

In this world, your brain is a Skittle factory.

1. You Are the Factory Floor

Think of yourself as a Rube Goldberg machine fed by stimuli: offhand comments, the vibe of a room, Twitter flamewars, TikTok nuns pole dancing for clicks. These are raw materials. Your internal factory processes them—whirrs, clicks, overheats—and spits out the flavor of your personality that day.

This is the “core loop.” The thing you always come back to. The mind’s default app when idle. That one obsession you never quite stop orbiting.

And as the factory ages, wears down, gets less responsive to new inputs, the loop becomes the whole show. Which is when dementia doesn’t seem like a glitch but the final software release of an overused operating system.

Dementia isn’t random. It’s just your loop, uncut.

2. Core Loops: Software You Forgot You Installed

In working with dementia patients, one pseudonymous writer-phenomenon noticed something chilling: their delusions weren’t new. They were echoes—exaggerated, grotesque versions of traits that were always there. Paranoia became full-on CIA surveillance fantasies. Orderliness became catastrophic OCD. Sweetness calcified into childlike vulnerability.

Dementia reveals the loop you’ve been running all along.

You are not what you think you are. You are the thing you return to when you stop thinking.

And if you do nothing, that becomes your terminal personality.

So what can you do?

3. Rebuild the Factory (Yes, It Sucks)

Editing the core loop is like tearing out a nuclear reactor mid-meltdown and swapping in a solar panel. No one wants to do it. It’s easier to meditate, optimize, productivity hack your life into sleek little inefficiencies than go into the molten pit of who you are and rewrite the damn code.

But sometimes—via death, heartbreak, catastrophic burnout—the whole Skittle factory gets carpet-bombed. What’s left is the raw loop. That’s when you get a choice.

Do you rebuild the same factory, or do you install a new core?

It’s a terrifying, often involuntary freedom. But the interesting people—the unkillable ones, the truly alive ones—have survived multiple extinction events. They know how to rebuild. They’ve made peace with collapse.

4. Monkey Titties and Viral Identity

And now the monkeys.

Or more specifically: one monkey. With, frankly, distractingly large mammaries. She went viral. She hijacked a man’s life. His core loop, once maybe about hiking or historical trivia, got taken over by monkey titties and the bizarre machinery of internet fame.

This isn’t a joke—it’s the modern condition. A single meme can overwrite your identity. It’s a monkey trap: fame, absurdity, monetization all grafted onto your sense of self like duct-taped wings on Icarus.

It’s your loop now. Congratulations.

5. Productivity As Kink, Writing As Survival

The author who shared this factory-mind hypothesis lives in contradiction: absurd, horny, brilliant, unfiltered. She imposed a brutal productivity constraint on herself: no orgasms until she publishes something. Every essay is a little death and a little birth.

It’s hilarious. It’s tragic. It works.

Because constraint is the only thing that breaks the loop. Not infinite freedom. Not inspiration. Not waiting for your muse to DM you at 2 a.m. with a plot twist.

Discipline, even weird kinky discipline, is the fire alarm in the factory. You either fix it, or it burns down again.

6. Your Skittles Taste Like Algorithms

The core loop is increasingly programmed by the substrate we live on—feeds, timelines, ads. Our mental Skittles aren’t handcrafted anymore. They’re mass-produced by invisible hands. We’re all getting the same flavors, in slightly different packaging.

AI writing now tastes like tapestry metaphors and elegant platitudes. Your thoughts start to echo the style of predictive text.

But deep inside you, beneath the sponsored content and doomscrolling, the loop persists. Still waiting for you to acknowledge it. To reboot it. To deliberately choose a different flavor.

7. What to Do With All This

Stop optimizing. Start editing.

Reject the fake productivity gospel. Burn your to-do list. Read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. Re-read Atlas Shrugged if you dare. Dance. Fast. Suffer. Change. And when the factory explodes, use the rubble.

Rebuild.

And maybe, just maybe, make better Skittles.