My first video. Don’t judge me.

Welcome to LeoScorpioLeo

Hi — I’m James. I’m the founder of LeoScorpioLeo, and if you’re here, you probably already know I believe what you wear, what you watch, who you spend time with, and how you take care of yourself aren’t separate decisions. They’re one system. This is where I tell you who I actually am underneath the brand.

The Meaning Behind My Name

LeoScorpioLeo comes straight from my astrological chart: Leo sun, Scorpio moon, Leo rising. Leo is outward confidence, creative expression, and the courage to lead. Scorpio is depth, transformation, and the willingness to look at uncomfortable truths instead of looking away. That combination — bold on the outside, honest on the inside, always becoming — isn’t just my chart. It’s the whole ethos of this brand.

Humble Beginnings

Before LeoScorpioLeo, I worked nearly every kind of job there is — counselor, salesman, delivery driver, museum clerk, bus driver, resort housekeeping, camp counselor, call center, projectionist, CNA, plant operator, plumber’s apprentice. By 2018, on paper, I was “unhireable.” Not for lack of ability — because a resume built on survival instead of stability doesn’t get callbacks.

So I became a long-haul truck driver. Five years, half a million miles, three carriers. I called the cab “the convent” — small, isolated, and the place where I quietly rebuilt myself, one podcast at a time. Somewhere around the thousandth hour of listening to people describe how they turned their lives around, I stopped hearing different stories. I started hearing the same one thing, over and over, in different clothes — something growing toward the light no matter what stood in the way. That pattern became the Overgrowth philosophy — the same one this whole brand is built on.

After trucking, I spent two years as a Convention Services Supervisor and Certified Trainer at The Broadmoor, a five-star resort, where I once led an 80-person crew through a 10,000-chair auditorium conversion and helped run logistics for PGA tournaments and VIP events. From there, I spent five years climbing the ladder in Amazon’s robotics network — from package sortation, to delivery driving, to Mechatronics & Robotics Technician, maintaining automated systems across a 3.7-million-square-foot facility. I also spent a stretch running day-to-day operations for a local community relief organization during a citywide crisis, coordinating support for 200 families a week.

That job ended the week before Thanksgiving, in the middle of a company-wide restructuring — not the holiday news I was hoping for. Not long after, a burst water heater flooded our basement and put my family in a hotel, where we still are today while our house gets rebuilt. I’m telling you this because Radical Honesty is one of our core values, and “humble beginnings” isn’t just a phrase for me — it’s literally where I’m writing this from.

What I Believe

Vines don’t fight the wall — they grow through it, until the wall doesn’t matter anymore. There’s one force behind every kind of growth: traditional medicine calls it Qi, physics calls it quantum resonance, astrology (the same lens that named this brand) calls it your chart. I call it Life. Everything I make is filtered through five tenets, developed over more than twelve years of my own life and study:

Tenet	What It Means
Roots Before Branches	Build the foundation before you chase what shows.
Reclaim, Don’t Replace	What broke you is material, not waste — growth works with it, not around it.
Grow Toward the Light	Direction matters more than speed.
Bind to Your Network	Nothing strong grows alone — roots share strength underground before anything blooms above it.
Bloom Is Not Optional	Growth that never flowers isn’t finished growing.

What I’m Building Today

LeoScorpioLeo started as a print-on-demand t-shirt brand, and that’s still the heart of it — every design built to help you look good, feel good, and do good. I’m currently a full-time Business Administration student, working toward my degree while building this brand and studying for my real estate license, all at the same time. Long-term, I want LeoScorpioLeo to grow into something bigger: my own apparel manufacturing, a media platform called Overgrowth Radio, a book, and a wellness product line — all built on the same five tenets, one phase at a time.

Want the Full Story?

This page is the short version. If you want to know exactly where LeoScorpioLeo stands right now — the real numbers, the real timeline, no spin — that’s what my Accountability Report is for. I update it as things change, so it’s always current.

READ MY LATEST ACCOUNTABILITY REPORT →

Thanks for reading this far. Look good. Feel good. Do good.

James Hanyu Smith
Founder & CEO, LeoScorpioLeo, Ltd.

FORCE Fed: A Philosophy for Building an Unbreakable Life

FORCE FED

A Philosophy for Building an Unbreakable Life

Focus • Own Yourself • Reinforce Yourself • Create Joy • Eat Something

A Research Article by James Hanyu Smith

Founder, LeoScorpioLeo

March 2026

“In my ninety-plus years, I have learned a secret. I have learned that when good men and good women face challenges with optimism, things will always work out!”
— Gordon B. Hinckley

Abstract

This paper introduces FORCE Fed, a five-pillar personal development philosophy designed to equip individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and belief systems with a practical, research-supported framework for building a purposeful and resilient life. FORCE Fed stands for Focus, Own Yourself, Reinforce Yourself, Create Joy, and Eat Something. Developed over more than twelve years by James Hanyu Smith, the framework synthesizes principles from cognitive neuroscience, positive psychology, sports performance science, contemplative philosophy, military leadership doctrine, and entrepreneurial strategy into a unified system that is as accessible to a sixteen-year-old student as it is credible to a psychosocial researcher.

At a time when adolescent depression rates have reached historic highs, when algorithmically curated media environments reward despair over resilience, and when cultural narratives increasingly romanticize suffering as identity, FORCE Fed offers a counter-narrative rooted not in toxic positivity, but in honest, disciplined, joyful forward motion. This article teaches the philosophy pillar by pillar, supported by citations from neuroscientists, athletes, monks, military leaders, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and researchers across disciplines. It is written to be understood by young people, respected by scientists, and embraced by anyone who believes that human beings are capable of more than the culture currently asks of them.

Chapter 1: Why the World Needs FORCE Fed

1.1 A Generation Drowning in Beautiful Sadness

Something is wrong, and most people can feel it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42% of American high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 28% in 2011. The American Psychological Association’s 2023 Stress in America survey found that young adults aged 18–24 reported the highest levels of stress of any age group, with loneliness, academic pressure, and social media comparison as leading contributors. These are not abstract statistics. They represent real teenagers sitting in real classrooms, scrolling real phones, consuming real content that tells them their pain is beautiful and their sadness is who they are.

The music industry has responded to this crisis not with healing but with product. A comprehensive analysis of modern “sad boy” and “sad girl” music, documented in the research paper Echoes of Melancholy (Smith, 2026), demonstrates that artists whose catalogs are saturated with themes of hopelessness, romantic obsession, and emotional dysfunction have built enormous followings among teenagers. Research published in the journal Psychology of Music by ter Bogt, Canale, Lenzi, Vieno, and van den Eijnden (2021) found that adolescents who listened to sad music for emotional validation still reported worsening mood and increasing isolation, despite feeling “understood.” The short-term reward of validation masked the longer-term harm of what psychologists call rumination: the tendency to dwell repetitively on negative thoughts and feelings.

But the problem extends far beyond music. Social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement, and negative emotional content generates more engagement than positive content. A 2022 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that posts expressing moral outrage were amplified by algorithms because they produced higher rates of interaction. The result is a digital environment in which despair is rewarded, outrage is incentivized, and quiet, steady, disciplined optimism is algorithmically invisible.

Neuroscientist Emily McDonald, known as “emonthebrain,” has built a following of over two million people by teaching the science behind this phenomenon. As she explains, the brain’s natural instinct is to keep you safe, not to help you grow. When the brain is repeatedly exposed to negative content, it strengthens the neural pathways associated with fear, anxiety, and helplessness. McDonald’s work on neuroplasticity demonstrates that whatever you consume and focus on repeatedly literally reshapes the physical structure of your brain. You do not attract what you want. You attract what your brain is wired for.

1.2 The Cost of Having No Framework

The absence of a guiding philosophy is itself a philosophy. When a young person has no framework for making decisions, setting goals, evaluating relationships, or choosing what to consume, they default to whatever the environment provides. And the current environment provides despair packaged as art, outrage packaged as justice, and distraction packaged as connection.

Fred Rogers, the beloved host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and one of the most quietly revolutionary figures in American education, understood this decades before the smartphone era. Rogers taught that every child deserves to know they are special exactly as they are, but he also taught that growing into who you can become requires daily, intentional effort. As Rogers put it, real strength is not about never having feelings of sadness or anger; it is about what we do with those feelings that matters most. Rogers’ philosophy was never about pretending everything is fine. It was about choosing, every day, to do the work of becoming.

FORCE Fed is a framework for doing that work. It does not promise that life will be easy. It does not ignore suffering. It does not demand that you smile when your world is falling apart. What it does is give you five deliberate, actionable, research-supported pillars to stand on when the ground beneath you shakes. And it is built to be used by anyone, regardless of age, faith, culture, or starting point.

Chapter 2: F — FOCUS (Follow One Course Until Successful)

The first pillar of FORCE Fed is FOCUS, which is itself an acronym: Follow One Course Until Successful. This is the foundation upon which every other pillar rests, because without a clear destination, no amount of self-knowledge, community, joy, or nutrition can take you where you want to go.

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, called this principle “Begin with the end in mind.” The idea is deceptively simple: before you take a single step, know where you are going. Define your success with as much clarity and specificity as you can. The more vividly you can picture your destination, the more effectively every decision, sacrifice, and daily effort can be oriented toward reaching it.

Casey Neistat, the filmmaker and entrepreneur whose raw, honest YouTube content has inspired millions, has framed this principle in characteristically blunt terms: if you do not have a goal, you cannot score. Neistat’s own life is a testament to the power of relentless focus. He dropped out of high school, became a teenage father, and lived in poverty before channeling every resource he had into a single obsession: making films. He did not try to become a filmmaker, an actor, a musician, and a restaurateur all at once. He followed one course until it was successful.

The neuroscience supports this. Research on attention and goal-setting consistently shows that the brain performs significantly better when it has a single, clearly defined objective. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology by Locke and Latham, building on their decades of goal-setting research, found that specific, difficult goals led to higher performance than vague goals like “do your best.” When the brain has a precise target, it allocates cognitive resources more efficiently, filters out irrelevant distractions, and generates stronger motivation to persist through obstacles.

Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of the billion-dollar company Quest Nutrition and creator of Impact Theory, discovered this principle the hard way. He spent nearly a decade chasing money and ended up, by his own account, emotionally bankrupt. When he appeared on The Rich Roll Podcast, Bilyeu and Roll explored the critical distinction between motivation and purpose. Bilyeu explained that the struggle is guaranteed but the money is not, so you had better love the struggle. He described the formula for fulfillment as working relentlessly to get very good at something you care deeply about that allows you to serve other people. That formula begins with focus: identifying the one thing that matters most to you.

In the Star Wars universe, creator George Lucas embedded this principle into the very fabric of the Jedi philosophy. The Force, as described by Obi-Wan Kenobi, is an energy field that binds the galaxy together. But accessing it requires discipline, training, and above all, focus. As Qui-Gon Jinn teaches a young Anakin Skywalker, your focus determines your reality. This is not merely cinematic poetry. It is a narrative encoding of the same principle that cognitive scientists, entrepreneurs, and contemplative traditions have taught for centuries: where attention goes, energy flows, and results follow.

The ancient proverb holds: a fox who chases two rabbits will catch none. FORCE Fed begins here, with the decision to choose one destination and pursue it with everything you have.

Chapter 3: O — Own Yourself

Every journey requires two points: a destination and an origin. The first pillar, Focus, establishes your Point B—where you want to go. The second pillar, Own Yourself, establishes your Point A—where you actually are. And for most people, this is the hardest part.

The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that if you know yourself and know your enemy, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. What Sun Tzu understood, and what modern psychology has confirmed, is that self-knowledge is not a luxury. It is a strategic necessity. The person who understands their own strengths, weaknesses, emotional triggers, habitual patterns, and unconscious biases is the person who can navigate adversity with clarity rather than chaos.

Yet self-knowledge is exactly what most people avoid. Surprisingly, the one person that people know the least about is the one person they spend the most time with: themselves. The avoidance of honest self-examination is one of the most well-documented phenomena in psychology. Research on self-deception, published across decades by scholars including Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown (1988) in the journal Psychological Bulletin, has shown that human beings have a powerful, biologically driven tendency to maintain positive illusions about themselves. While mild positive illusions can promote mental health, they become destructive when they prevent honest assessment of where you are relative to where you need to be.

Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi, headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe and a 35th-generation Shaolin master, teaches that self-mastery begins with observing where your attention lies. As Shi Heng Yi explains, if you do not control your focus, your mind will remain distracted by countless external stimuli, and to change yourself, you must first observe where you are directing your energy and shift that focus inward. He describes the path to self-mastery as having only two mistakes: not starting it, and not going all the way.

In FORCE Fed, owning yourself means conducting an honest inventory. Think of it like preparing for a road trip. You have your destination (Focus). Now you need to assess your vehicle. Is your car in good enough shape to make the journey? Do you have enough fuel? Do you have directions? Do you have money for rest stops, food, and contingencies? In life, the “vehicle” is you: your skills, your knowledge, your emotional resilience, your physical health, your financial situation, your relationships, your unresolved wounds. If you do not know what you are working with, you will be blindsided by breakdowns you could have prevented.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has taught that the purpose of life is happiness, but that genuine happiness comes not from external acquisitions but from the development of inner peace and self-understanding. He has consistently emphasized that self-awareness is the gateway to compassion, and that the person who knows their own mind is the person who can meet the world with wisdom rather than reactivity. This teaching, central to Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, aligns directly with the FORCE Fed principle that you must know your Point A before you can navigate to your Point B.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist master whose teachings on meditation and the nature of mind have reached audiences across the world, frames self-knowledge in terms of befriending your own experience. Mingyur Rinpoche teaches that the greatest obstacle to inner peace is not the chaos of the external world but our unwillingness to sit with our own thoughts and feelings without judgment. He describes awareness itself as the foundation of transformation: you cannot change what you refuse to see.

Owning yourself is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing practice. As your life changes, as you grow, as your goals evolve, you must continuously reassess your Point A. The strongest people are not those who never struggle; they are those who know exactly where they stand and use that knowledge as fuel.

Chapter 4: R — Reinforce Yourself

A healthy human body is a system of interdependent parts: bones provide structure, blood delivers oxygen, the digestive system extracts nutrients, and the nervous system coordinates everything. If any one system fails, the whole organism suffers. FORCE Fed applies this same principle to your life: you are not just an individual. You are an ecosystem. And the people, content, and environments you surround yourself with are the organs of that ecosystem.

Tim Ferriss, the bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek and host of one of the world’s most popular podcasts, has popularized the idea that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, a concept originally articulated by motivational speaker Jim Rohn. Ferriss has spent decades interviewing world-class performers across every domain, and one of the most consistent findings across his thousands of interviews is that environment shapes behavior far more than willpower does. The people around you set the standard for what you consider normal, achievable, and acceptable.

But in the modern era, “the five people you spend the most time with” extends far beyond the physical bodies in your home or workplace. Think honestly about who you really spend time with. If you spend three hours a day listening to music that glorifies hopelessness, that artist is in your top five. If you spend two hours a day scrolling social media accounts that traffic in outrage and comparison, those creators are in your top five. If you spend your commute listening to a podcast that teaches you something useful, that host is in your top five.

Research by Garrido, Eerola, and McFerran (2017), published in Frontiers in Psychology, identified a phenomenon they called “group rumination”: the tendency of people, especially adolescents, to share and collectively dwell on sad music with peers in ways that amplify rather than alleviate depressive tendencies. The study found that people with depression were more likely to engage in group rumination using music, and that this behavior worsened depressive outcomes. This is Reinforcement in reverse. When your environment reinforces despair, you get more despair.

Jocko Willink, the retired Navy SEAL commander and co-author of Extreme Ownership, teaches this principle through the lens of military discipline. Willink’s foundational teaching is that discipline equals freedom: the more disciplined you are in choosing your environment, your inputs, and your daily habits, the more freedom you have to perform at your highest level. A military unit does not allow its soldiers to consume whatever media, associate with whoever they want, or maintain whatever habits they choose during combat operations. The stakes are too high. FORCE Fed argues that your life’s stakes are equally high.

Natalie Dawson, co-founder of Cardone Ventures and author of TeamWork: How to Build a High-Performance Team, applies this principle to the world of business. Dawson teaches that high-performance teams are built intentionally by leaders who understand that the culture of an organization is created either by design or by default. If your team is unclear, untrained, or uninspired, that is not a people problem—it is a leadership problem. Applied to your personal life, the same logic holds: if the people around you are not helping you move toward your goals, the solution is not to complain about them. The solution is to redesign your environment.

Reinforcing yourself means taking a deliberate inventory of your inputs and making courageous decisions about what stays and what goes. For every “yes” you give to something that moves you forward, you are saying “no” to something that holds you back. This is not about cutting people out of your life with cruelty. It is about recognizing that if there is no change, there is no change.

Chapter 5: C — Create Joy

The fourth pillar of FORCE Fed is often the most misunderstood. Create Joy is not a command to be happy all the time. It is not toxic positivity. It is not the denial of pain. It is the deliberate, disciplined practice of finding, generating, and protecting joy even in the midst of difficulty. Especially in the midst of difficulty.

Gordon B. Hinckley, who lived over ninety years and served as the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, articulated this principle with a clarity that has resonated across religious, cultural, and philosophical boundaries. Hinckley taught that when good men and good women face challenges with optimism, things will always work out. He also cautioned against gloominess and dwelling on unkind things, encouraging people to stop seeking out the storms and enjoy more fully the sunlight. Even if you are not happy, he advised, put a smile on your face, accentuate the positive, and look a little deeper for the good. He summarized his life philosophy with the statement: “In all of living, have much of fun and laughter. Life is to be enjoyed, not just endured.”

This teaching aligns powerfully with the findings of positive psychology, the branch of psychological science dedicated to understanding human flourishing. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory, published in American Psychologist (2001), demonstrated that positive emotions do not merely feel good—they actually broaden the scope of attention, cognition, and action, and build enduring personal resources including physical health, social connections, and psychological resilience. Joy, gratitude, interest, and love are not luxuries. They are performance enhancers.

Rich Roll, the ultra-endurance athlete and host of The Rich Roll Podcast, discovered this principle through his own extraordinary transformation. After hitting rock bottom with addiction and obesity in his late thirties, Roll rebuilt his life through plant-based nutrition and extreme endurance training. But as he has articulated throughout his work, the physical transformation was merely the visible expression of an internal shift. Roll has taught that when you pursue what is in your heart, the universe conspires to support you. He has described the pursuit of excellence not as a grim obligation but as a joyful act of self-expression.

In the conversation between Bilyeu and Roll on The Rich Roll Podcast (Episode 425), both men explored the idea that the struggle itself is where the meaning lives. Bilyeu told Roll that he would rather be poor doing something he loves than rich doing something he hates. Roll’s response deepened the point: the transformation happens not when you arrive at the destination, but when you fall in love with the process of becoming. This is the essence of Create Joy. It is not about waiting for happiness to arrive at the end of your goals. It is about engineering happiness into the journey itself.

Tony Robbins, whose work on human performance has reached hundreds of millions of people, has taught that the quality of your life is the quality of your emotions. Robbins argues that we can choose our emotional states through conscious shifts in physiology, focus, and language. His research and practical demonstrations have shown that people who take control of their emotional experience—rather than waiting for circumstances to produce happiness—achieve dramatically better outcomes in health, relationships, career, and life satisfaction.

Brooke Ence, the CrossFit athlete and actress whose journey from competitive fitness to Hollywood has inspired a massive following, embodies this principle in her daily life. Ence has spoken openly about the pressure of competitive athletics and the entertainment industry, and has emphasized that what keeps her grounded is the choice to find joy in the process of showing up every day, even when the results are not visible. She has described training not as punishment but as celebration: a daily act of gratitude for a body that can move and a mind that can grow.

Sasha DiGiulian, the world champion rock climber who has completed over thirty first and first-female ascents across more than fifty countries, has articulated that the only way to get up a mountain is to think positively. DiGiulian, whose career has been marked by devastating injuries, hip surgeries, and the death of climbing partners, does not approach joy naively. She approaches it strategically. As she writes in her memoir Take the Lead, climbing teaches patience and perseverance, and often it is the journey, not the destination, that matters most. Joy, in DiGiulian’s framework, is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to keep moving despite it.

Chapter 6: E — Eat Something

The final pillar of FORCE Fed is the most literal and the most overlooked: Eat Something. This pillar recognizes a truth that Western culture has historically separated from discussions of ambition, mindset, and personal growth: your body is not separate from your mind. Your physical fuel determines the quality of your mental performance. What you eat is what you become.

Zig Ziglar, the legendary motivational speaker, famously taught that you are where you are and what you are because of what has gone into your mind, and that you can change where you are and what you are by changing what goes into your mind. In the context of FORCE Fed’s Reinforce Yourself pillar, this principle applies to the people and media you consume. But the Eat Something pillar takes Ziglar’s insight a step further, into the realm of physiology: what goes into your body—literally, the food you eat—determines the raw materials available for your brain to produce thoughts, emotions, and actions.

The science is unambiguous. Dr. Mark Hyman, a functional medicine physician and bestselling author, has taught that food is not just calories; it is information that connects to every cell in your body. Research in the field of nutritional psychiatry, including a landmark 2017 study published in BMC Medicine by Jacka et al., demonstrated that dietary improvement significantly reduced symptoms of depression compared to social support alone. The study, known as the SMILES trial, was the first randomized controlled trial to show that modifying diet could treat clinical depression.

Emily McDonald’s neuroscience research further illuminates this connection. The brain, which accounts for roughly 2% of body weight but consumes approximately 20% of the body’s energy, is exquisitely sensitive to nutritional input. Every thought has a unique chemical signature, constructed from the molecular building blocks that the body extracts from food. When those building blocks are of high quality—omega-3 fatty acids, B vitamins, magnesium, amino acids from clean protein sources—the brain operates with greater clarity, emotional stability, and cognitive performance. When those building blocks are derived from processed food, excess sugar, and nutritionally empty calories, the brain’s performance degrades accordingly.

Rich Roll’s personal transformation is perhaps the most vivid contemporary illustration of this principle. At age forty, Roll was fifty pounds overweight, pre-hypertensive, and unable to climb a flight of stairs without stopping. After adopting a whole-food, plant-based diet, he went on to complete five Ironman triathlons in less than a week and was named one of the twenty-five fittest men in the world by Men’s Fitness magazine. Roll has consistently taught that the dietary shift was not merely about physical performance; it fundamentally changed the way his brain worked, the way he processed emotions, and the way he related to the world.

The FORCE Fed principle of Eat Something is not a diet plan. It is a philosophical recognition that your body is the engine that carries your dreams. No one gets healthier in the gym. The whole purpose of going to the gym is to break the body down strategically so that, through proper nutrition, the body rebuilds itself stronger than before. This applies to your muscles, and it applies equally to your brain. If you feed the engine junk, you get junk performance. If you feed the engine quality fuel, you get quality thoughts, quality emotions, and quality actions.

Chapter 7: FORCE Fed as a Unified System

7.1 The Road Trip Metaphor

FORCE Fed is best understood as a road trip. Focus is your destination: the place you are driving toward. Own Yourself is your starting point and an honest assessment of your vehicle, your resources, and the terrain between here and there. Reinforce Yourself is choosing the right passengers, the right music, and the right route. Create Joy is making sure you enjoy the drive, because a journey taken in misery will either end prematurely or arrive at a destination that no longer feels worth reaching. And Eat Something is the fuel: the literal, physical, nutritional input that keeps your engine running.

Remove any one pillar and the system collapses. Focus without self-knowledge is delusion. Self-knowledge without supportive reinforcement is isolation. Reinforcement without joy is grinding misery. Joy without proper fuel is unsustainable. And fuel without direction is wasted energy. The five pillars are not five separate ideas. They are one integrated system, designed to be practiced together, daily, in small and large ways.

7.2 Universal Application Across Belief Systems

One of the most distinctive features of FORCE Fed is its deliberate universality. The framework does not belong to any single religious tradition, cultural background, or political philosophy. It is designed to resonate with anyone who is willing to do the work of becoming a better version of themselves.

A Christian can find Focus in Proverbs 29:18—“Where there is no vision, the people perish”—and Create Joy in the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to “rejoice always.” A Buddhist can find Own Yourself in the practice of Vipassana meditation and the Dalai Lama’s teachings on self-awareness as the gateway to compassion. A practitioner of Stoic philosophy can find Reinforce Yourself in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which counsel the practitioner to guard carefully the contents of the mind. A secular humanist can find Eat Something validated in the peer-reviewed literature of nutritional psychiatry. A Muslim can find the entire framework reflected in the Hadith tradition’s emphasis on intention (niyyah), self-knowledge (muhasaba), community (ummah), gratitude (shukr), and physical stewardship of the body.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche has taught that there is no truly original thought, only the rediscovery of wisdom that different traditions have expressed in different languages across different centuries. FORCE Fed does not claim to have invented anything new. It claims to have organized timeless truths into a sequence that can be practiced by anyone, anywhere, starting today.

7.3 Why the Sequence Matters

The order of the FORCE Fed pillars is intentional. Focus comes first because without direction, everything else becomes purposeless activity. Own Yourself comes second because, as the framework teaches, it is important to have a destination before you take inventory of your starting point. Without direction, wallowing in where you are leads to despair. The goal serves as a tether, a safety line, a drive to get out of who you are and become someone better. Otherwise, you are just a ship drifting in the sea, a car sitting in the parking lot. It does not matter how well you are packed. If you do not go anywhere, you do not go anywhere.

Reinforce Yourself comes third because once you know where you are going and where you are starting from, you need to build the support system that will get you there. Create Joy comes fourth because the journey must be sustainable, and sustainability requires that the process itself produces enough meaning and satisfaction to keep you moving forward. Eat Something comes fifth because it powers the entire journey. It is the fuel that makes every other pillar possible.

Chapter 8: The Science Behind FORCE Fed

8.1 Neuroplasticity and the Rewirable Brain

The scientific foundation of FORCE Fed rests on one of the most important discoveries in modern neuroscience: neuroplasticity. The brain is not a fixed organ. It is a dynamic, constantly reorganizing system that physically reshapes itself in response to experience, thought, behavior, and environment. Every time you practice a skill, repeat a thought, or engage with a particular type of content, you strengthen the neural pathways associated with that activity and weaken the pathways you neglect.

Dr. Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset, published in her landmark book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, demonstrated that individuals who believe their abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work outperform those who believe their abilities are fixed. Bilyeu has described Dweck’s work as one of the most transformative intellectual influences of his life, and credits the growth mindset framework with enabling his transition from a struggling filmmaker to a billion-dollar entrepreneur.

Emily McDonald’s work on neuroplasticity provides the bridge between Dweck’s psychology and FORCE Fed’s practical application. McDonald teaches that the brain’s filtering and prediction systems are reshaped by what you consume and focus on repeatedly. This means that every pillar of FORCE Fed—the goals you set, the self-knowledge you cultivate, the people you surround yourself with, the joy you create, and the food you eat—is literally building the brain you will use tomorrow.

8.2 The Psychology of Goal Pursuit

Research by psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, spanning over four decades and published in journals including American Psychologist and the Annual Review of Psychology, has established that goal-setting is one of the most reliable interventions in behavioral science. Their findings consistently demonstrate that specific, challenging goals produce higher levels of performance than vague or easy goals, and that goals function as cognitive reference points that organize effort, sustain persistence, and promote the development of task-relevant strategies.

Shi Heng Yi connects this Western scientific finding to Eastern contemplative practice: the most powerful knowledge, he teaches, is the kind that lets you see for yourself what you are capable of. The FORCE Fed pillar of Focus does not ask you to achieve someone else’s goal. It asks you to identify your own—with clarity, with conviction, and with the willingness to pursue it relentlessly.

8.3 Social Influence and Environmental Design

The reinforcement pillar of FORCE Fed is supported by extensive research in social psychology. Dr. Nicholas Christakis and Dr. James Fowler, in their groundbreaking work published in the New England Journal of Medicine (2007), demonstrated that social networks have a profound influence on individual behavior, including obesity, smoking, and happiness. Their research showed that behaviors and emotional states spread through social networks in patterns that extend to three degrees of separation: your friend’s friend’s friend can influence your health.

Natalie Dawson’s work in organizational development provides a practical application of this research. Dawson teaches that high-performance teams are built intentionally through alignment, development, and transition—three components that map directly onto the FORCE Fed principle of deliberately designing your social environment for success.

8.4 Positive Emotion and Resilience

The Create Joy pillar is grounded in Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive emotions (2001), which has been cited over 15,000 times in the scientific literature. Fredrickson’s research demonstrates that positive emotions expand cognitive flexibility, enhance creative problem-solving, and build durable personal resources. A 2024 study published in MDPI’s Behavioral Sciences further found that individuals who favored happy music exhibited greater psychological flexibility and weaker connections between depressive symptoms and meaning in life, suggesting that deliberate cultivation of positive emotional experiences has measurable protective effects against depression.

8.5 Nutritional Psychiatry

The Eat Something pillar is supported by the rapidly growing field of nutritional psychiatry. The SMILES trial (Jacka et al., 2017), published in BMC Medicine, was the first randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that dietary modification could treat depression. A 2019 meta-analysis by Firth et al., published in Psychosomatic Medicine, confirmed across multiple studies that dietary interventions significantly reduced depressive symptoms. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has identified the Mediterranean diet—rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, and olive oil—as having the strongest evidence base for supporting mental health.

Chapter 9: FORCE Fed as a Counter-Narrative

FORCE Fed is, at its core, a counter-narrative. In a culture that algorithmically rewards despair, outrage, and passivity, FORCE Fed offers focus. In a culture that encourages people to define themselves by their pain rather than their potential, FORCE Fed offers honest self-assessment directed toward growth. In a culture that allows toxic relationships and negative media to occupy the seats of influence in people’s lives unchallenged, FORCE Fed demands a deliberate audit. In a culture that treats joy as naive and optimism as unsophisticated, FORCE Fed insists that joy is a discipline, a skill, and a strategic advantage. And in a culture that disconnects the body from the mind, FORCE Fed teaches that what you feed yourself—literally—determines the quality of every thought you think.

Jocko Willink has written that there is no shortcut, no hack, no easy way. The only way is through discipline. And discipline begins, not with punishment, but with the decision that your life is worth the effort of building something extraordinary.

Fred Rogers once said that anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero. FORCE Fed is written for the sixteen-year-old who has never been given a framework. It is written for the parent who wants to hand their child something real. It is written for the scientist who demands evidence. It is written for the monk who recognizes timeless wisdom. And it is written for anyone who has ever felt lost and is ready to begin the journey home.

Chapter 10: Begin the Journey

FORCE Fed does not promise you an easy life. It promises you a structured one. It does not promise that you will never fail. It promises that when you fail, you will know exactly where you stand, who is standing with you, what fuels you, and where you are headed. And that knowledge is the difference between a person who falls and stays down and a person who falls and gets back up.

Shi Heng Yi teaches that there are only two mistakes on the path to self-mastery: not starting and not going all the way. Tony Robbins teaches that it is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. The Dalai Lama teaches that happiness is not something ready-made; it comes from your own actions. Sasha DiGiulian teaches that you will never know what you are capable of until you try. Casey Neistat teaches that if you do not have a goal, you cannot score. Tom Bilyeu teaches that the struggle is guaranteed but the money is not, so you had better love the struggle. Rich Roll teaches that transformation happens when you fall in love with the process. Gordon B. Hinckley teaches that life is to be enjoyed, not just endured. Jocko Willink teaches that discipline equals freedom. And Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche teaches that awareness is the foundation of all transformation.

Every one of these voices, from every tradition, from every discipline, from every corner of human experience, converges on the same five truths that FORCE Fed has organized into a single actionable system:

Know where you are going. Know where you are. Build a team that lifts you. Choose joy on the journey. Feed the machine that carries you there.

This is FORCE Fed. The philosophy is free. The decision to begin is yours.

Start today.

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Dawson, N. (2022). TeamWork: How to Build a High-Performance Team. Lioncrest Publishing.

DiGiulian, S. (2023). Take the Lead: Hanging On, Letting Go, and Conquering Life’s Hardest Climbs. St. Martin’s Press.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

Ferriss, T. (2007). The 4-Hour Workweek. Crown Publishing Group.

Firth, J., et al. (2019). The effects of dietary improvement on symptoms of depression and anxiety: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(3), 265–280.

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Smith, J. H. (2026). Echoes of Melancholy: The negative influence and psychological impact of Joji’s music on American teenagers. Unpublished manuscript.

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Echoes of Melancholy: The Negative Influence and Psychological Impact of Joji’s Music on American Teenagers

A Critical Research Study — Prepared for Academic Review, March 2026

Abstract

This paper examines the negative psychological, emotional, and social influence of Joji’s music catalog on American teenagers. Drawing on peer-reviewed research from psychology, music therapy, and adolescent development, as well as analysis of specific songs and lyrics, this study argues that prolonged exposure to Joji’s pervasively melancholic, lo-fi R&B content poses measurable risks to adolescent mental health — particularly for those already predisposed to depression, anxiety, and rumination. The paper traces Joji’s rise from shock-humor YouTube persona Filthy Frank to an internationally celebrated purveyor of “sad boy” aesthetics, examines why his target demographic of teenagers is especially vulnerable, and addresses common counterarguments from fans with evidence-based rebuttals. Additionally, this study explores comparable artists within the same emotional-aesthetic genre, contextualizes today’s concerns within the broader historical pattern of moral panic surrounding new musical genres, and proposes healthier musical alternatives that are proven to promote positive emotional development in adolescents.

1. Introduction: A Generation Tuned Into Sadness

Music has always served as an emotional mirror for its generational audience. From the swing jazz of the 1940s to rock and roll in the 1950s, from the heavy metal debates of the 1980s to the gangsta rap controversies of the 1990s, every era has had its defining sound — and its accompanying cultural alarm. Today, a new sonic landscape has emerged, one that is less confrontational in its aggression but arguably more insidious in its subtlety: the so-called “sad boy” or “sad girl” genre, dominated by artists whose lo-fi, introspective, heartbreak-saturated soundscapes are consumed almost exclusively by teenagers.

Among the leading figures of this movement stands George Kusunoki Miller — known professionally as Joji. A Japanese-Australian artist who reinvented himself from a controversial YouTube comedian into a Billboard-charting musician, Joji commands a massive and intensely devoted teenage following. His albums Ballads 1 (2018), Nectar (2020), and Smithereens (2022) collectively attracted hundreds of millions of streams. His breakthrough single “Slow Dancing in the Dark” has surpassed 889 million Spotify streams, and “Glimpse of Us” peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it his most commercially successful release.

Yet behind those streaming numbers lies a more troubling narrative. Joji’s music is characterized by recurring themes of isolation, hopelessness, romantic obsession, emotional dysfunction, and an almost romanticized approach to despair. For American teenagers — a demographic already facing unprecedented mental health challenges — repeated immersion in these themes, delivered with hypnotic production and whispered vulnerability, creates a feedback loop that mental health professionals and researchers have identified as psychologically hazardous. According to the CDC, 42% of U.S. high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021, compared to 28% in 2011. Into that vacuum of adolescent suffering, Joji has positioned himself not as a call toward healing but as a companion in descent.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the negative influence Joji’s music exerts on American teenagers, grounded in research, lyrical analysis, professional commentary, and historical context.

2. The Rise of Joji: From Shock Comedy to Sad Boy Superstar

2.1 Origins: Filthy Frank and the YouTube Underworld

George Kusunoki Miller was born on September 16, 1993, in Osaka, Japan, to an Australian father and a Japanese mother. He grew up in Kobe, attending the international Canadian Academy, and relocated to the United States at age 18. After arriving in New York, Miller began uploading content to YouTube under a character called Filthy Frank — a persona he described as “the anti-vlogger,” the embodiment of everything a person should not be. The character was grotesque, deliberately offensive, and designed to shock. His YouTube channels — TVFilthyFrank, TooDamnFilthy, and DizastaMusic — accumulated millions of subscribers through extreme challenges, shock humor, crude comedy rap, and boundary-pushing sketches.

Miller’s most significant viral moment came in February 2013 when he uploaded a video that launched the “Harlem Shake” internet meme. The craze swept across the internet and was covered by major news outlets, catapulting Miller to a level of mainstream visibility he had not previously enjoyed. By 2017, his main channel boasted over 6 million subscribers and hundreds of millions of combined views. In a parallel development during this same period, Miller was quietly releasing more experimental, melancholic music under the name “Joji” on SoundCloud — tracks like “Thom” and “You Suck Charlie” that sounded nothing like his comedic persona.

2.2 The Transition to Joji: Rebranding Into Seriousness

In December 2017, Miller announced the permanent retirement of Filthy Frank, citing “serious health concerns including but not limited to throat tissue damage and neurological conditions.” He revealed he had been experiencing stress-induced seizures — a consequence, he believed, of the demands his comedy career placed on him. He described the transition to Joji not merely as a career pivot, but as a personal rebirth: “It was not only a transition of career but in my life too. Now I feel as if it was a rebirth, and I get to start fresh, and I get to leave this bad stuff behind.”

Miller aligned himself with 88Rising, a music label and creative agency founded to amplify Asian voices in Western hip-hop and R&B. In November 2017, his first project as Joji, the EP In Tongues, was released to critical acclaim from music publications including Pitchfork and Pigeons & Planes. His debut album BALLADS 1 followed in October 2018 and peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200, while simultaneously reaching number 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart — making Miller the first Asian-born artist to achieve that distinction. His subsequent albums, Nectar (2020) and Smithereens (2022), continued the upward commercial trajectory. In February 2026, his fourth studio album, Piss in the Wind, was released.

2.3 Target Audience and Cultural Footprint

While Joji has stated in interviews that he creates music for himself — “Now I get to do stuff that I want to hear” — the demographic reality of his listener base is unmistakably adolescent. His content thrives on platforms like TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube, where 13-to-24-year-olds are the dominant users. His music consistently appears in teen-curated playlists with titles like “joji depression,” “sad vibes only,” and “crying at 3am.” His aesthetic, built around minimalist lo-fi production, whispered or mumbled vocals, and emotional fragility, resonates powerfully with the identity formation anxieties typical of the teenage years.

The Cornell Daily Sun noted that Joji’s lo-fi pop genre “drifted from teenage bedrooms into TikTok feeds,” and observers across music journalism have described his appeal as rooted in his ability to channel “the need to be unhappy of today’s youth into his music.” As one cultural commentary noted, he “occupies a lane that prioritizes the formulation of a particular mood — in this case, being very sad.” That lane is heavily trafficked by American teenagers, making the question of influence not merely academic but urgently practical.

3. Lyrical Analysis: The Poetry of Despair

3.1 Slow Dancing in the Dark (2018)

“Slow Dancing in the Dark” is Joji’s most-streamed song and arguably the cornerstone of his artistic identity. Commercially, it is a masterwork of minimalist heartbreak pop. Psychologically, its content and imagery deserve careful scrutiny when considering its adolescent audience.

The song explores unrequited love with an air of resignation and emotional helplessness. The chorus — “Give me reasons we should be complete / You should be with him, I can’t compete” — frames the narrator as fundamentally inadequate, incapable of deserving love, and powerless in the face of rejection. The line “I know I’m cryptic, and I’m worthless” introduces themes of self-deprecation that, when internalized by emotionally vulnerable teenagers, can reinforce negative self-image and erode self-worth.

The music video amplifies these themes visually: Joji stumbles through city streets smoking a cigarette, is revealed to be a mythological creature with an arrow in his back (symbolizing love as physical wound), coughs up blood, and collapses on a dance floor in a pool of blood. The imagery is deliberately cinematic and stylized, but to an impressionable teenage viewer who identifies emotionally with the song’s narrator, the normalization of suffering as aesthetically beautiful is significant. The song’s lyrical instruction, “Don’t follow me, you’ll end up in my arms,” ostensibly a protective sentiment, simultaneously romanticizes the narrator’s emotional destruction as something worthy of proximity — a message that may encourage teenagers to remain in emotionally unhealthy patterns because pain has been made glamorous.

3.2 Glimpse of Us (2022)

“Glimpse of Us” is Joji’s highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching number 8. The song’s central narrative is one of present relational infidelity — the narrator is with a new partner but cannot stop mentally idealizing an ex. The recurring line “But I’m thinkin’ of the way it was” presents emotional unavailability not as a character flaw to be addressed, but as an inevitable, poetic condition.

For teenagers who have experienced their first significant romantic relationships or breakups, the song models a framework in which clinging to past relationships is normal and romantic — even while actively hurting someone else in the present. The lyric “Maybe one day you’ll feel lonely / And in his eyes you’ll get a glimpse” projects a desire for the former partner to also suffer, framing romantic revenge-fantasy as a desirable emotional state. While such feelings are common, their repeated artistic glorification, unchallenged and unresolved, can normalize patterns of emotional unavailability, passive romanticism, and interpersonal dysfunction in teenage listeners who lack the life experience to contextualize the narrator’s perspective critically.

3.3 Yeah Right (Ballads 1, 2018)

The track “Yeah Right” contains the line “I’ma f*** up my life” sung with Joji’s characteristically soft, almost tender delivery. The juxtaposition of self-destructive content with gentle, lullaby-like production is one of the most consistent and concerning techniques in Joji’s catalog. Songs like “Attention” include the lyric “I don’t wanna die so young, got so much to do” — a statement that normalizes contemplation of early death as a relatable adolescent preoccupation rather than a clinical concern requiring support.

3.4 Like You Do (Nectar, 2020)

“Like You Do” is one of Joji’s most emotionally complex songs and among the most bittersweet in his catalog. The song portrays a relationship in which both parties are drifting apart, and the narrator is unable to leave despite acknowledging the relationship is deteriorating. For teenage listeners in their first serious relationships, the song’s messaging can normalize staying in emotionally stagnant or unhealthy relationships because the discomfort of departure feels worse than the dysfunction of staying. The song’s soft, enveloping production lends the emotional paralysis it describes a sense of beauty — making inaction feel like devotion.

3.5 Ew (Nectar, 2020)

“Ew” opens Nectar with a dramatically orchestral, almost elegiac tone, and the narrator’s voice powerlessly pleads for love: “I can’t believe I’m not enough / This is your world.” The repeated assertion of personal inadequacy — “I’m not enough” — is among the most emotionally loaded phrases a teenager who already struggles with self-worth can repeatedly encounter in music they identify with. When this message is delivered within a musical context that is tonally beautiful and emotionally validating, it bypasses critical examination and settles directly into the listener’s emotional self-concept.

4. The Psychology of Sad Music and Adolescent Vulnerability

4.1 Rumination and Its Dangers

Research consistently demonstrates that sad music, when consumed by adolescents already experiencing emotional distress, can intensify rather than relieve negative affect. A 2021 study published in the journal Psychology of Music by ter Bogt, Canale, Lenzi, Vieno, and van den Eijnden found that among adolescents aged 13-20 who were already struggling with mental health challenges, listening to sad music could worsen mood and increase social isolation. The study also revealed a troubling behavioral pattern: some adolescents, even after recognizing that sad music deepened their negative states, continued to seek it out, deliberately prolonging rumination.

Rumination — the tendency to dwell repetitively on negative thoughts and feelings — is a well-established predictor of depression. Studies using the Response Styles Questionnaire indicate that high rumination scores predict higher future depressive symptoms and major depressive episodes in child and adolescent samples. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology by Garrido, Eerola, and McFerran (2017) demonstrated that listening to sad music can intensify depression in listeners with ruminative tendencies, and that people with depressive inclinations may struggle to regulate their emotional responses in musical contexts.

Joji’s catalog is purpose-built for rumination. The slow tempos, minimalist production, and introspective lyrics create an immersive sonic environment that, by design, encourages the listener to sit with their sadness rather than move through it. For a teenager with healthy coping mechanisms, this may be cathartic. For the significant portion of American teenagers — particularly the 42% of high school students the CDC identified as experiencing persistent sadness — this immersion can function as a psychological trap.

4.2 Group Rumination and Social Media Amplification

The social dimension of Joji’s influence further compounds individual risk. Research by Garrido et al. (2017), published in Frontiers in Psychology, identified what they termed “group rumination” — the phenomenon of sharing and collectively dwelling on sad music with peers in ways that amplify rather than alleviate depressive tendencies. The study found that people with depression were more likely to engage in group rumination using music, and that this behavior could worsen depressive outcomes.

Joji’s presence on TikTok and YouTube has created precisely the conditions this research identifies as harmful. Teenagers share his songs, create “tribute” videos using his music as backgrounds to images of loneliness and isolation, compile playlists explicitly named for depression and crying, and build digital communities centered on collective emotional suffering. The comment sections of Joji’s songs on YouTube and Spotify are filled with testimonials from teenagers describing how specific songs perfectly match their worst emotional states — representing exactly the music-and-depression community dynamic that research warns against.

4.3 The Romanticization of Suffering

A particularly subtle yet impactful element of Joji’s aesthetic is what scholars of popular culture describe as the romanticization of suffering — the artistic elevation of pain, loneliness, and heartbreak into something not merely tolerable but beautiful. A 2024 article published in the National High School Journal of Science noted that the appeal of sad music for adolescents is largely explained by factors including dissociation, fantasy-induction, a feeling of connection, and high aesthetic value. These factors make sad music deeply attractive to teenagers even when it causes measurable harm, because the experience provides rewards — a sense of being understood, a community of shared pain, an aesthetic identity — that offset or obscure the psychological cost.

Joji’s production aesthetic — breathy, intimate vocals, soft synthesizers, melancholic guitar, sparse percussion — creates what his fans often describe as a “safe space.” But research warns that music-induced environments that feel safe but are centered on maladaptive emotional processing can prevent adolescents from developing the healthy coping skills they need. As one study published in the British Journal of Medical & Health Sciences noted, individuals with depressive tendencies may struggle to regulate their emotional responses when immersed in musical contexts, and that the combination of sad thematic music with excessive listening represents a “particularly detrimental mix for vulnerable individuals.”

4.4 Impact on Self-Worth and Identity

Adolescence is a critical period of identity formation. Research in developmental psychology consistently shows that teenagers integrate cultural messages, including lyrics, into their emerging self-concept. When a teenager whose primary musical diet consists of Joji repeatedly hears messages of personal inadequacy (“I can’t compete,” “I’m not enough,” “I’m worthless”), these messages are not merely appreciated as art — they are assimilated as descriptors of self. A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found that music education and content significantly influence adolescents’ emotional, social, and moral development, and that content expressing negative emotions requires active regulation at the family, school, and societal levels.

5. Professional Concerns: Medical, Psychological, and Social Voices

5.1 Mental Health Professionals

Mental health professionals who work with adolescents have raised increasing concerns about the cultural normalization of depression aesthetics in popular music, a category into which Joji’s catalog squarely falls. High school counselors and therapists have noted a marked increase in teenagers who describe their emotional states using the language and imagery of sad boy music. Guidance counselors and music therapists note that while music can be a valuable tool for identifying and expressing emotions, it can also function as an avoidance mechanism that prevents teenagers from seeking direct help or developing resilience.

The Children’s Hospital of New Orleans, in a 2023 health awareness article, explicitly addressed the harmful side of music for teenagers. The article noted that “when a person dwells on negative thinking or feelings, it can contribute to the development of depression and anxiety or worsen existing conditions” and that “this is especially concerning for teenagers, as music can be a powerful tool for self-expression and emotional regulation.” It warned that music-induced harm can occur when people listen to self-identified sad music during moments of psychological distress — precisely the context in which most Joji fans report engaging with his music.

5.2 Parent Concerns

Parents of teenage Joji fans have reported consistent patterns of concern in parenting communities, mental health forums, and public discourse. Among the most common complaints are: a teenager’s increasing emotional withdrawal and social isolation that corresponds with their deepening engagement with Joji’s catalog; the normalization of self-deprecating language adopted directly from Joji’s lyrics; teenagers who describe romantic heartbreak using the frameworks of Joji songs as their primary emotional vocabulary; and resistance to positive reframing, as the “sad boy” aesthetic has become so deeply tied to identity that attempts to encourage emotional growth are perceived as an attack on the teen’s musical identity.

Parents also express concern about the cumulative effect of an entire musical genre defined by hopelessness. Unlike listening to a single sad song during a period of grief — which can be genuinely cathartic — building a lifestyle and identity around perpetual exposure to melancholy content represents what researchers describe as a maladaptive coping strategy. Children’s mental health researchers advise parents to pay close attention to their adolescent’s preferred musical artists and to proactively discuss lyrical content from an empathetic but honest standpoint.

5.3 Social and Educational Concerns

Educators have observed that the “sad boy” aesthetic has permeated teenage subcultures in ways that reward emotional suffering and penalize positivity. In some peer groups shaped by Joji’s aesthetic, emotional wellness is perceived as naive or inauthentic — creating a social dynamic in which teenagers feel pressured to perform sadness to maintain belonging. This is a direct behavioral parallel to the group rumination phenomenon identified in clinical research, but operating at a sociological rather than purely psychological level.

Social workers and school counselors have noted the difficulty of intervening when an adolescent’s music consumption has become entwined with their social identity. To suggest that a teenager reconsider their musical diet is experienced as a threat to their peer belonging and self-concept, making it a particularly challenging issue to address in institutional settings.

6. Artists in the Same Genre: A Broader Ecosystem of Sadness

Joji does not operate in isolation. He is the most commercially successful representative of a broader ecosystem of lo-fi, sadcore, and emo R&B artists whose primary output is emotionally despairing music aimed at teenagers. Understanding this landscape is important because the cumulative effect of multiple artists reinforcing the same aesthetic framework is greater than any single artist’s influence alone.

Lil Peep (Gustav Åhr, 1996-2017) was one of the earliest and most influential architects of the emo-trap genre that Joji inhabits tangentially. His music blended rock guitar samples with rap vocals, all centered on drug use, depression, self-harm, and death. Lil Peep died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 21, yet his fanbase remains enormous among teenagers. His music has been directly linked to teenage emotional deterioration and substance glamorization in multiple documented cases.

Juice WRLD (Jarad Higgins, 1998-2019) similarly combined melodic rap with themes of drug dependency, heartbreak, and suicidal ideation. Like Joji, his music is characterized by accessible, hummable melodies that make its dark thematic content feel comforting. He died at age 21 from an accidental drug overdose, yet his streaming numbers have increased posthumously, and his music remains dominant in teenage playlists.

Omar Apollo and Steve Lacy represent a slightly more musically sophisticated variant of the same genre — R&B-inflected music that centers heartbreak, emotional ambiguity, and interpersonal dysfunction with a similarly teenage-focused audience.

Shiloh Dynasty is a particularly notable figure in the digital ecosystem surrounding Joji. As a SoundCloud-native artist, Shiloh Dynasty’s whispered, barely-produced vocal samples have been widely sampled in lo-fi “sad boy” compositions across TikTok and YouTube. Her music, like Joji’s, has become ambient sadness — present in the background of teenage lives rather than actively engaged with.

Artemas and sombr represent newer entrants into the same space, with Cornell Daily Sun critics noting that the lo-fi pop space became “oversaturated” with artists following Joji’s aesthetic, all targeting the same audience of emotionally overwhelmed teenagers seeking sound design that matches their distress.

The combined cultural weight of these artists creates an adolescent listening environment saturated with hopelessness, romantic dysfunction, substance references, and aestheticized despair. Even if any single artist’s influence were considered marginal, the aggregate effect of a teenager spending six to eight hours daily in a sonic environment defined entirely by these themes cannot be clinically dismissed.

7. Counterarguments and Evidence-Based Rebuttals

7.1 “Joji’s music helps me feel understood and less alone”

This is the most common and emotionally sincere argument offered by Joji fans, and it deserves a serious response rather than dismissal. The feeling of being understood by an artist’s lyrics is genuine and psychologically real. Research confirms that music’s ability to validate emotions provides short-term relief, particularly for teenagers who struggle to articulate their feelings verbally.

However, the critical distinction is between validation and resolution. Feeling understood is not the same as getting better. A 2021 study by ter Bogt et al. found that adolescents who listened to sad music for emotional validation still reported worsening mood and increasing isolation — despite reporting the music made them feel “understood.” The short-term reward of validation can mask the longer-term harm of rumination reinforcement. Furthermore, the sense of community found in Joji’s fanbase is frequently built around shared suffering, not shared growth — meaning that while loneliness may feel reduced, the underlying emotional conditions are not addressed.

7.2 “Art is just art — it’s not responsible for mental health”

The argument that art exists in a hermetically sealed space free from real-world consequence is contradicted by decades of research into media’s influence on adolescent behavior and cognition. The American Medical Association as early as 1989 released a report concluding that music is a greater influence in the life of a teenager than television. The same report found that adolescents with high engagement with dark musical genres showed higher incidence of emotional health problems.

More recent research published in MDPI’s Behavioral Sciences (2025) analyzing 1,681 college students found that individuals who listen to sad music displayed a denser network structure with stronger connections between depressive symptoms and meaning in life — showing that music preference is not merely a symptom of emotional state but actively shapes it. The notion that art has no responsibility ignores substantial scientific evidence to the contrary.

7.3 “He’s just expressing his own experience honestly”

Joji has acknowledged in interviews that his music is autobiographical and that it represents his genuine emotional experience. There is no dishonesty in his artistry. However, authenticity does not equal harmlessness. A musician can be entirely honest about their experience of depression and romantic despair while simultaneously producing content that, when consumed repetitively by teenagers in emotionally vulnerable states, causes measurable psychological harm. The intent of the artist does not determine the impact on the audience.

Furthermore, Joji’s transition from Filthy Frank to a serious musician was partly strategic — he deliberately crafted a persona and aesthetic designed to attract maximum emotional resonance from the widest possible audience. The packaging of genuine emotion within algorithmically optimized production and distribution makes its consumption by teenagers not merely an incidental cultural side effect but a commercially structured outcome.

7.4 “Teenagers have always listened to dark music and turned out fine”

This argument conflates all dark music as equivalent and ignores the specific context of today’s mental health crisis. Teenagers have always engaged with emotionally complex music — but the combination of factors in the contemporary context is historically unprecedented. Today’s teenager consumes music through streaming services that remove friction from extended listening, in solo, isolated contexts (headphones in a bedroom), with a simultaneous social media ecosystem that amplifies and rewards identification with emotional suffering. Research cited in Frontiers in Neuroscience (2023) distinguishes clearly between healthy musical engagement and maladaptive musical engagement — and finds the latter statistically associated with symptoms of clinical depression. The question is not whether dark music has always existed, but whether today’s teenagers are equipped to engage with it adaptively.

7.5 “Joji’s music discusses mental health and reduces stigma”

Some fans and even some commentators have argued that Joji’s willingness to sing openly about sadness, loneliness, and emotional pain helps reduce the stigma around mental health struggles. This argument has surface plausibility. However, research distinguishes between destigmatizing mental health — which involves normalizing the experience of difficulty and encouraging help-seeking — and glorifying mental health struggles, which involves aestheticizing them in ways that can make suffering seem more desirable or profound than wellness.

Joji’s music consistently does the latter. There are no redemptive arcs, no representations of recovery, no encouragement to seek help, and no framing of emotional health as an achievable or desirable goal. The world of Joji’s music is one of permanent, beautiful sadness — a landscape that destigmatizes suffering not by contextualizing it as a phase to move through, but by presenting it as an identity to inhabit. For teenagers whose brains are still developing the emotional regulation skills to distinguish between validation and prescription, this distinction is critically important.

8. A Pattern Across Generations: Music, Moral Panic, and Real Harm

The concerns raised in this paper must be contextualized within a historical pattern that stretches across the 20th and 21st centuries. Every generation has faced a moment in which the music of its youth alarmed the generation that preceded it, and in many cases, those alarms were overblown or rooted in social anxieties rather than clinical evidence.

In the 1950s, rock and roll was condemned by churches, parents, and politicians as “Satan’s music.” Records were burned, radio stations banned artists, and school authorities prohibited rock-related content. As ushistory.org records, “churches proclaimed it Satan’s music” and “rock and roll records were banned from many radio stations and hundreds of schools.” Yet rock and roll was, by most scholarly assessments, a fundamentally liberating cultural force — one that helped break racial barriers, give voice to youth experience, and provide an identity anchor for a generation navigating postwar America.

In the 1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), co-founded by Tipper Gore, launched a high-profile campaign against heavy metal and rock music, demanding warning labels and restrictions on explicit content. The campaign was widely criticized as censorious and was substantially driven by social conservatism rather than scientific evidence. Extensive research conducted in the aftermath found that heavy metal fans, while sometimes more likely to show signs of alienation, did not universally suffer negative psychological outcomes from their music preferences.

The 1990s and early 2000s brought concerns about gangsta rap, Marilyn Manson, and the relationship between dark media and school violence — debates that were reliably sparked whenever a tragedy occurred and reliably defused when evidence failed to support direct causation. In each of these cases, moral panic generated more heat than light, and the real social forces driving adolescent suffering — poverty, family disruption, inadequate mental health resources — were obscured by the convenient scapegoat of popular music.

These historical episodes should make any contemporary critic humble. The question being asked in this paper is not whether Joji’s music will produce violent teenagers or cause the collapse of civilization — such hyperbolic framings have historically been the enemy of productive discourse. The question is narrower and more evidenced: Does repeated, immersive consumption of aesthetically sophisticated, emotionally despairing music by psychologically vulnerable teenagers cause measurable harm? On that specific question, the answer from contemporary research is yes — particularly for adolescents with pre-existing tendencies toward rumination and depression. The difference between today’s concern and previous moral panics is not the cultural alarm itself, but the specific, evidenced mechanism of harm: the feedback loop between adolescent depression, maladaptive music consumption, intensified rumination, and worsened emotional outcomes.

9. Healthier Alternatives: Music That Heals Rather Than Deepens

The goal of this analysis is not the silencing of Joji or the censorship of emotionally complex music. Such approaches are both impractical and philosophically problematic. The goal is to equip teenagers, parents, and educators with knowledge that empowers more conscious and balanced musical choices. The following artists and genres have been associated in research and clinical settings with positive emotional development in teenagers.

9.1 Uplifting Pop and Empowerment Music

SZA (Solána Rowe) offers R&B and alternative pop with an explicitly female-empowerment perspective. While her music also addresses heartbreak and emotional complexity, it consistently positions the narrator as moving toward resilience and self-discovery rather than remaining in emotional stasis. Her album SOS (2022) became one of the longest-charting albums on the Billboard 200 in modern history, demonstrating that emotionally honest music need not be emotionally stagnant.

Olivia Rodrigo addresses heartbreak with a voice that is cathartic but also energetically forward-moving. Songs like “good 4 u” and “brutal” express anger and pain without aestheticizing passivity or helplessness. Research in music therapy has identified music that externalizes rather than internalizes negative emotion as more beneficial for adolescent emotional processing.

Hozier creates richly textured, emotionally complex folk-rock that deals with love, loss, and spirituality, but consistently frames human experience within a broader landscape of meaning — rooting suffering in a context that gestures toward transcendence rather than dwelling in it.

9.2 Classic and Timeless Music

Research consistently finds that exposure to classical music during the teenage years provides cognitive benefits — improvements in spatial reasoning, mathematical performance, and emotional regulation — without the risks associated with lyric-heavy emotionally despairing content. Artists like Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy, as well as contemporary neo-classical performers like Ludovico Einaudi, provide emotionally rich listening experiences that calm the nervous system, lower cortisol levels, and promote reflective rather than ruminative states.

9.3 Genre-Diverse and World Music

The Frontiers in Neuroscience study (2023) specifically recommended that parents and educators motivate teenagers to engage with music of high aesthetic and educational value, including classical music, ethnic music, and world music. Artists like Rodrigo y Gabriela, whose acoustic guitar-based compositions combine technical virtuosity with emotional warmth, or Tinariwen, whose desert blues connects teenagers to global music traditions, offer cultural enrichment alongside emotional engagement.

9.4 Jazz and Soul

Jazz — with its improvisational spirit, rhythmic complexity, and inherent optimism — has been identified in multiple studies as a music genre that combats anxiety and elevates mood. Artists like Norah Jones, whose catalog blends jazz, folk, and pop, offer emotional depth without despairing content. Similarly, the soul tradition — from Aretha Franklin to more contemporary artists like Leon Bridges and Brittany Howard — addresses emotional experience with a resilience and community that provides adolescents with a very different relationship to difficulty than Joji’s catalog.

9.5 Positive Impact Data

A 2024 study analyzing music preferences among college students found that individuals who favored happy music exhibited a more dispersed psychological network with weaker connections between depressive symptoms and meaning in life — indicating greater psychological flexibility and resilience. The study found that happy music preference was associated with a dispositional tendency toward positive emotion regulation. A 2023 study in Frontiers in Neuroscience confirmed that music can lower cortisol levels and that participation in music activities enhances self-confidence and academic performance. Teenagers who are actively engaged in making music — through choir, band, or instrument learning — show better emotional regulation skills than those who only passively consume it.

10. Recommendations for Parents, Educators, and Mental Health Professionals

Based on the research reviewed in this paper, the following recommendations are offered:

For parents, the most effective approach is not prohibition but conversation. Teenagers who feel their music is attacked or censored typically disengage from the conversation and increase their consumption covertly. Instead, parents should listen to Joji’s music themselves, demonstrate genuine curiosity about why their teenager finds it meaningful, and create space to discuss lyrical content from an empathetic standpoint. Questions like “What do you feel when you hear this song?” or “Does this song match how you feel right now, or how you sometimes feel?” open dialogue without triggering defensiveness.

Parents should also pay attention to the emotional ecosystem surrounding their teenager’s music consumption — particularly whether a teenager’s engagement with sad music is accompanied by social withdrawal, declining academic performance, statements of hopelessness, or other behavioral indicators that warrant professional consultation.

For educators, music literacy should be incorporated into broader mental health education. Teaching teenagers how to critically engage with the messages embedded in the music they consume — without pathologizing their preferences — builds the reflective capacity needed to use music adaptively. Schools can also provide positive musical environments through choral programs, band, and music appreciation classes that give teenagers access to a wider musical landscape.

For mental health professionals, awareness of popular music within a client’s therapeutic context is increasingly essential. Understanding that a teenager who identifies deeply with Joji’s aesthetic may be using that aesthetic as both an expression of genuine distress and a barrier to recovery can inform treatment approaches. Music therapy that gradually introduces emotionally varied content has shown promise in shifting maladaptive musical engagement patterns.

11. Conclusion

Joji’s music is skillfully produced, commercially powerful, and emotionally authentic. His personal journey from the shock-humor extremes of Filthy Frank to the hushed vulnerability of BALLADS 1 and Smithereens is genuinely compelling. As an artist, his talent is not in question. What is in question — and what this paper has sought to address through research, lyrical analysis, professional commentary, and historical context — is the effect of that talent, deployed consistently in the service of aestheticized despair, on the most emotionally impressionable consumers of his work: American teenagers.

The evidence is substantial and consistent. Repeated exposure to melancholic, hopelessness-saturated music by emotionally vulnerable adolescents intensifies rather than relieves depression through the mechanism of rumination. Joji’s catalog is among the most expertly crafted vehicles for that kind of musical immersion currently available to teenagers. The romanticization of suffering in his lyrics and visual aesthetics, the normalization of self-inadequacy, and the absence of any redemptive narrative arc combine to create a listening experience that, for a teenager already struggling, provides the comfort of recognition without the direction of recovery.

This is not a call for censorship. It is a call for awareness. Just as previous generations learned to critically examine the relationship between media consumption and adolescent wellbeing — even when, as with rock and roll, the initial alarms were overblown — this generation must engage with the specific, evidenced question of whether music that is beautiful in its sadness can be harmful in its beauty. For American teenagers facing the highest rates of depression and anxiety in recorded history, that engagement is not merely academic. It is urgent.

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