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The latest video feels like something she’s encountered in therapy and now wants to share it. Whilst there is a lot of truth in what she’s saying, I also think the whole StudyTube phenomenon (of which Ruby is a part) is part of the issue. They contribute towards whipping up this ridiculous hysteria about getting the ‘right’ grades to get into the ‘right’ course at the ‘right’ university, and it’s inevitable that pretty much anything is going to be a disappointment when you’ve built it up so much.
I also think that there’s a bit more self-reflection needed here on Ruby’s part. University is what it is, it’s not always great and it’s not always the right choice (or not the right choice at 18 …) but if you spend to your entire time there wishing it was something else (like school you can sleep at, with a sprinkling of being recognised as the brightest witch of your age …) then of course it’s going to be disappointing. I also think that this goes way deeper than Ruby being disappointed with uni. She’s disappointed with having to grow up, full stop. She’s disappointed that she had to leave school and grow into adulthood, and I can’t help but feel we’re going to get the same video for every major life stage (‘leaving home isn’t what I expected’, ‘getting a job won’t be the happiest time of your life’, ‘buying a house was disappointing’) until she sorts out whatever deep-seated issues she has.
is she trying to copy the format of people like Matt d'avella (sp?). the title format reminds me of his videos.
she must be having such a huge identity crisis
Also... she talks about how people always say uni is the best time of their life and romanticise it too much, but isn't it exactly what she does? I don't remember her ever talking about how she was struggling in her first and second year, it's actually the first time we hear about it. Her videos portray this perfect/productive/"aesthetic" life, why not open up about your struggles if you think it's normal to have them?
is she trying to copy the format of people like Matt d'avella (sp?). the title format reminds me of his videos. she must be having such a huge identity crisis
This is one of the things that bothers me about Ruby, in that she seems to have so little idea of her own identity that you can almost guess who she’s been hanging around with or watching on YouTube because she seems to just take on elements of other people’s personalities so quickly. When she hangs around with Blakeney, she dresses like her and has the same interests, when she’s watching Holly she adopts her habits and mannerisms, when she watches PaigeY she’s suddenly a keen astrophysicist and so on and so on. It’s like she hasn’t got a clue who she actually is and what she actually likes and it’s no wonder that she finds everything so disappointing if she’s just doing it to fit an image or aesthetic, rather than being authentic. Honestly, her being on YouTube and having to live up to this bonkers ‘Ruby Granger’ persona that she’s created is really bad for her. She needs to drop it completely and get some support.
She says it's not hurting anyone to go home every weekend, forgetting that her parents may want some time to themselves. The home changes when children leave, it can be hard for parents to adjust to the empty nest, then your eldest turns up every weekend needing ceremonial tea and mourning the end of October.
hey, new here!
i've been reading this thread on and off and i've seen some people say that ruby is "ed-baiting" while others say she actually developed one? which is more feasible? i don't know enough details of her life or behavior to assume myself
I'm no expert on ED's but, to me, Ruby now looks very underweight (and that is without even factoring in the fact that video footage makes most people look bigger than they are). She has also visibly lost a huge amount of weight in the past couple of years, despite never looking overweight, and is always commenting on how cold she feels. She eats a very restrictive and restricted diet and consumes vast quantities of calorie-less hot drinks. I would be very anxious about her were I her parent or friend, but ultimately it's impossible to know what is going on.
There's nothing wrong with being an introvert or dealing with homesickness, but notice how all of her anecdotes of her peers having similar struggles were all from their first term of their first year. Most people continue to grow and adjust, whereas Ruby has not.
I'm autistic, so massively appreciate the difficulties with socialisation, partying and finding 'home' to be the only reliable safe space I have. But I know that even though it would not 'hurt' anyone if I left university every weekend to return home, never left my room and didn't socialise, it would hinder my growth as a functioning young adult. Most of us don't have upper-class parents to rely on, and will have to build independent lives at some point. Ruby is entirely dependent on her parents and has spent the last 4 years refusing to grow, and hence she is now left behind her peers in seemingly every sense apart from academics. Unfortunately, academics typically mean little in the grand scheme of things. I think she knows this and is trying to justify it by emphasising individual 'liberty' and that 'as long as you don't hurt anyone, it's fine'.
Ruby, you're hurting yourself.
She's now panicking because she's realising that she has spent 4 years in a good university and has very little to show for it. She's struggling under the pressure of graduation and her dissertation, and has resigned herself to depending on her parents for who knows how long. On the one hand, it's a shame that she hasn't achieved what she was so ambitious about when she was younger. However, I sincerely hope she gets some sense knocked into her and figures herself out a bit.
"It's not hurting anyone to go home every weekend" True but self care doesn't always feel good and safe, sometimes you need to do the hard things in order to grow as a person and develop properly. I'm very co dependant and anxious as well but I've realised I can't stay in my safe bubble forever because it will just hurt me further down the road.
Also just to add my thoughts on her possible ED-
I was the star pupil in school and college and when I went to uni I realised I wasn't the best anymore and it really hurt my self esteem and sense of identity. I developed as ED as a coping mechanism because I felt like it was something I was "Good at" and could do properly. Maybe something similar has happened with Ruby...
Or she's just making herself sick so she will be babied and people will feel bad for her and lower their expectations so she doesn't have to be an adult.
I wonder if we are from the same area or if this is a common occurrence. A woman at my local primary school had the same role when her BMI was in single digits. I never could understand why she was employed in this specific role and the impact it could have on students. Sadly she died not so long ago, from A, and again I wonder how the children managed that. It wasn’t her fault, but I do think it very irresponsible of the school. And I see it a lot in ballet schools too, where teachers clearly have significant difficulties with weight, which is even more dangerous and harmful, I think.
Please excuse the OT and of course we can disagree about it, but since I saw it mentioned twice I wanted to weigh in and leave my two pennies that I see nothing inherently wrong with a person with an ED being professionally involved in this kind of stuff if this area of their lifes isn't impacted. After all they are a person first with a (although very visible very private) disorder second and as long as they are not involved in teaching children disordered eating or unrealistic exercise routines they can still be a professional teacher doing no harm (a good job even) although they are themselves struggling. I think it isn't fair to judge a person's fitness for a job only by their physique without knowing anything about their actual performance.
With Rubart my problem is that her job is INFLUENCING by definition and she chooses to portray these problematic aspects of her life very prominently. If her main audience was older and / or her content was something else than her toxic productivity / ED repetitions the story would be completely different in my eyes.
If it was my child and they were coming home every weekend I’d give them an ultimatum. Come home one weekend a month, because you’ll never settle if you’re running home every weekend, or transfer to a college that’s closer and live at home full time, if that’s option.
I couldn’t deal with the constant back and forth. Being in the US and near no good colleges, if my kids decide to go, they will have to move away and they wouldn’t really have the chance to come home often at all. They’ll have to settle in or come home.
Coming home this often won’t hurt anyone but unless her parents are patient saints, it must be a little… irritating. And she’ll never get any less homesick.
In second year, she supposedly went out and socialized more, and was miserable, so she’s made a decision not to do that any more. 1) I have seen no evidence of this (she rarely left her room as far as I can tell) and 2) she’s effectively made a decision to not get out of her comfort zone ever again, which I’m sure is super healthy.
How is she so blind and stupid? How does she not see this is NOT the way forward? Good thing she has Daddy Bones’ money to fall back on, because she’s going to be incapable of ever getting an actual job, and her youtube is about to dry up. My bet is she has zero videos lined up rn, she’s running out of ideas and all her content is increasingly irrelevant. She threw this video together in about two hours because she recognized she had to post for the algorithm, but there’s really no content to it.
If it was my child and they were coming home every weekend I’d give them an ultimatum. Come home one weekend a month, because you’ll never settle if you’re running home every weekend, or transfer to a college that’s closer and live at home full time, if that’s option.
Totally agree. It's not like Ruby was forced to go to Exeter - she could have chosen universities within commuting distance. She didn't think through what being 3+ hours (?) away from home would be like, and isn't being helped by her parents allowing her to come home so often. Tough love in situations like this can be really effective. She has probably never given herself the opportunity to feel at home in Exeter because she's always counting down the days until she can come home again. She's living at home and visiting Exeter, not the other way round.
I went to uni 5+ hours from home, and planned to visit home in my first reading week; when I had been there 6 weeks ish, I was told my reading week actually had teaching sessions in it, so I couldn't really go home. And guess what: I didn't mind, because my university town had become a homely place to me. Ruby has never allowed herself to have a home away from her parents.
y'all after hearing "I think I love October and November so much because I'm in Christmas mode" I just can't do 20 more minutes of Roobee rambles. Will wait with bated breath for the @gossip_guy recap
If it was my child and they were coming home every weekend I’d give them an ultimatum. Come home one weekend a month, because you’ll never settle if you’re running home every weekend, or transfer to a college that’s closer and live at home full time, if that’s option.
I couldn’t deal with the constant back and forth. Being in the US and near no good colleges, if my kids decide to go, they will have to move away and they wouldn’t really have the chance to come home often at all. They’ll have to settle in or come home.
Coming home this often won’t hurt anyone but unless her parents are patient saints, it must be a little… irritating. And she’ll never get any less homesick.
She shows so many signs of a person who is emotionally stunted. She can't bare to be away from home, and honestly that's partly down to her parents fault.
I kinda feel bad for her in this respect, she obviously has the drive to go and do things, but not the confidence.
No wonder Martha turned out so different, Ruby was the first attempt , to work out all the parenting.
Mother and Father Bones probably pay for her therapy as a "sorry for bleeping you up mentally" I mean that's really the only way I can see her needing therapy, and for the obvious anorexia and ED she has.
Once she graduates she is going to just fade into obscurity, if not before going back to uni all over again.
I've gone from finding Ruby funny to watch, to feeling angry at her, to just feeling sad for her.
We are entering her final years of this I reckon, we are in the endgame folks.
Absolutely wheezing at all of @gossip_guy 's priceless recap but "The Curse of Chucky D" and that broken candle barely hanging in there like a limp dick truly sent me, l m f a o
"I feel like this is going to be quite a long video," Ruby says. And what better way to guarantee that her video is longer than it needs to be than to insert long chunks of recycled footage from nearly four months ago?
October 2021:
August 2021:
Ruby starts as she means to go on, by rambling incoherently for several minutes. Her first topic is fire, and how she doesn't restrict lighting candles directly on or next to fuel sources to just the month of October; fire hazards are for life, not just for Autumn as far as Ruby is concerned.
At least she's temporarily stopped using gas lighters to light her perpetually wonky candles, but Ruby "Super Sustainable" Granger still hasn't switched to an electric one, that just wouldn't be "aesthetic".
Find someone who looks at you the way Ruby looks at the fires she starts.
Ruby claimed to have read Stephen King's "Shank-Shaw Redemption" not long ago, but there's another King book that seems far more up her alley...
Nobody is safe from Ruby's firestarting, not even herself. Deciding that putting a used matchstick on the candlestick's tray or somewhere safe wouldn't be aesthetic, in her attempt to put it somewhere else, she leans across an open flame and almostsets her bleeping sleeve on fire...
(Pictured: A complete bleeping idiot.)
After rambling nonsense about candles and fire with an almost gleefully surreptitious look on her face, as if she's secretly imagining burning down the homes of anyone who ever gave her a bad grade, she moves on to rambling about how it's October, which she's been droning on about endlessly for several months. Ruby at least brings some educational factoids to the table: After October comes November. Ruby bringing her research skills out in force for that one.
But even though it's October and October is the best month ever and you should embraces the Octobereyness of it all, Ruby has already been cheating on October by celebrating Christmas for months, apparently. She obsessively rants about Christmas like it's the only signpost of joy in her future, mostly because she'll be at home, latching onto her parents for dear life again and won't have to deal with adulthood.
Ruby looks at Christmas the same way she does childhood. In reality, childhood is all the more precious for being fleeting, much like Christmas, which is a magical time of year because it's a seasonal holiday that comes once a year. Celebrating Christmas for months on end dilutes the whole holiday and waters down that fleeting magic to rote, routine, everyday nothingness, but Ruby's content to do that, just like she's happy to drag her childhood out a few extra decades.
After lots of unrelated rambling, Ruby finally starts getting to the point of the video. University isn't supposed to be the best time of your life, apparently. This is only really news to Ruby, as most people approach uni as a fun, challenging and hopefully rewarding growth experience, where you learn new things, meet new people and get some semi-sheltered experience being independent before you go on to the real world to live the rest of your adult life. But Ruby's conditioned herself to believe academia is the focal point of everything, so it isn't shocking that she felt that university was supposed to be life's high point, and she's done everything she can to push that view onto others up until now.
Ruby briefly wonders if the word "chide" is real after using it in a sentence, and looks it up to find that it is, of course, a real word. Ruby is delighted with herself, and only included this footage of her doubting her language because she believed it was another "Ruby was right all along!" moment captured on camera. She punctuates her self-congratulatory moment with her new faux-Italian "pinch the air" hand gestures:
Ruby continuously blames the system for misleading people regarding university and "adults" for telling people that uni is supposed to be the best time of their lives, while never acknowledging that she herself has been parroting this narrative endlessly, and she's not a child anymore. It's everyone else's fault but Ruby's, and she yet again admits no culpability for romanticising toxic productivity and idealising uni and academia, despite that being all she ever does.
She also never picks up on the fact that most people who graduate uni and look back with nostalgia as the best time of their life do so because they had a tonne of fun with an active social life, with a relatively easy workload, doing new things and it was likely the last time before they had to worry about working all week in an actual job, paying bills, rent, a mortgage. Of course that's going to look amazing in rose-tinted hindsight, but those people probably struggled too at times while actually at uni. Ruby has no interest in nuance or perspective, though. Lying adults sold her a fake bill of goods, and they're to blame.
(Pictured: The world's most disgusting-looking mug.)
Ruby has actively deprived herself of a social life, has never left her bubble of comfort to try the things that most people feel define the uni experience, and she's made the academic work involved take up far more of her time than was necessary so naturally she's not going to have the same fondly-remembered experience. All she'll have to look back on are the endless busywork she forced on herself and having to be away from home. She also won't have to worry about finding a job, paying bills or being a responsible adult after she graduates because of her wealth and privilege.
She claims she's not the only one who feels this way: Everyone she talked to told her that they really struggled to adjust in first year. The key part being "first year". Ruby is in her fourth year and still hasn't adjusted because she was privileged enough to be able to run home every week, or for months on end. Almost everyone else either got over that tit and adjusted through exposure therapy of sticking it out. Ruby has never adjusted because she just runs home every time she can.
She claims nobody told her in year one that they were also struggling, but it's more likely Ruby never heard about it from anyone because she actively avoided socialising and tuned out any voice that wasn't her own.
Ruby then rambles for what feels like a lifetime about nothing at all, and she breaks out the greatest hits of "I was bullied at school", "It's okay to be different, but if you're different to me, I'll passively-aggressively judge you" and "We need to normalise all the things that I want to do!"
Ruby says it's okay that she's introverted and doesn't socialise, because she has one friend who she spends all he time with. Only that's not healthy when you approach a single friendship as intensely as Ruby does with Blakeney, co-opting all her time and imitating all her mannerisms, wardrobe and habits. She even admits to "romanticising" the fact that she lives with her best friend, which sounds both obsessive and weirdly detached. It's not going to leave her in a great place when Blakeney moves on with her life after graduation.
She takes the same self-centred approach to going home all the time. It's okay to be homesick and go home if you are. Only Ruby isn't just homesick. She's obsessively reliant on her parents, at the expense of her own physical and mental health, as evidenced by the entire last year of steady mental and physical decline and her current timetable of being in constant contact with her parents throughout the entire day at uni, writing endless letters to them a day after seeing them. She claims that going home leaves her recharged and in a better mood when she goes back to uni, which we can clearly see is bullshit by how miserable she looks at uni constantly. She's not emotionally equipped for adult life by any stretch of the imagination.
She also says it's now fine that she goes home all the time because it's not hurting anyone or inconveniencing anyone - John Stuart Mills says so; it's a free country! We have personal liberties and we must exercise them! This from Ruby, who drags her parents hundreds of miles to pick her up from uni when she can easily afford to get the train if she wants to go home so much. She makes her parents take all their holidays in Devon to be next to her. She makes them cut holidays short to attend to her childish whims, then throws tantrums when they're late even if she's not ready herself .
Not only does this seem like a mentally unhealthy, massively wasteful inconvenience all around, but Martha's sat in Sheffield like chopped liver because Ruby's monopolising all her parents' time and attention. Also Ruby's lip-service crusade for sustainability doesn't hold up to scrutiny when she's having her parents drive a camper van all over everywhere every week for her. But nope, not inconveniencing anyone at all, Rubes.
"I don't know if this was helpful at all," Ruby wonders aloud. It wasn't, Ruby. It was 20+ minutes of rambling nonsense from a self-absorbed child in extreme denial. At least it wasn't sponsored, though.
Oh slightly OT but also kind of not - on ED Twitter (I’m still struggling stay off it I will admit) romanticism of academia and going to school is huge! Like they want to be the perfect student that’s also super thin - I sincerely hope ruby didn’t stumble across this googling how to be the perfect student
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