I Used to be in a Cult: Part one in a Five Part Series

Hello. I almost called this series of posts “I Used to be Woke”, but I didn’t want to give the impression that I went alt-right or did a total 180 in my politics. I also think my title is more accurate of the things I’ve written about here. I’m still very much on the left. However, there’s a lot of stuff I’ve had on my mind the past few months. I wanted to write this out sooner, but some of what I’m writing has to do with me losing my mom this year, and if I didn’t write something about that first, I felt like this writing wouldn’t have the right vibe, if that makes sense. I’m going to be talking about social media, its negative effects, and how I started to take a bigger look at my life since my mom died.

I’ve written extensively about politics on here, so you probably know that in the late 2010s I was the wokest woke motherfucker that ever woked. I spent all my time on social media, soaking up whatever leftist politics were pushed on me by Facebook and YouTube algorithms. Mostly Facebook. I argued about politics online for pretty much every waking moment I had, making sure to jump on every comment I could to tell someone that they’re at best wrong, and at worst, a piece of shit for not thinking like I did. I was addicted to it. Citing facts and statistics and the not so occasional insult towards right wing mouth breathers made me feel like the smartest person in the room. I never changed anyone’s mind, but I didn’t care. I just enjoyed the rush of debating people and feeling like a very stable genius for it. It came at the expense of my real world friendships, as I wasn’t spending time with them anymore, but I didn’t care. Who needs real world friends when you have Facebook?

I hated my job back then, and working a shit job that I hated along with not maintaining real world relationships caused me to drink myself to sleep almost daily. When I had time off I’d be up until three in the morning arguing about politics with idiots while being drunk as a skunk. Sometimes I’d cross a line while doing so and wake up with a hell of a hangover and finding out my account was suspended.

I talked about this in previous posts on here. My social media addiction was very, very real. And like my drinking, my physical and mental health were suffering for it. I started to wonder if I would have been happier if I wasn’t woke; if I didn’t care about politics at all maybe I could be happy. I felt guilty for feeling those things.

On social media, I started to drop friends. A lot of them former Army buddies, because they didn’t share the same politics I did. One of them messaged me when they saw I unfriended them and messaged me asking why. When I told them it was over politics they called me “fucking ret*rded”. All I could think at the time was, “Glad I’m dropping your ableist ass.” I also saw that a lot of my apolitical or right wing Army buddies has already unfriended me, which I can guess was the same reason, as I was posting so much about politics that they probably got tired of it. I don’t blame them, tbh. Nobody wants to have a friend that’s always on their soap box.

I was too addicted to social media at the time to realize that this was taking a toll on my marriage, too. If my wife wasn’t as ride or die as she was, she would have left me. She cried herself to sleep at night as I spent my nights off getting drunk and screaming into the online void instead of cuddling with her. She was frustrated that I spent every waking moment on my phone or computer. I ignored her as she would talk and I would mindlessly scroll and find someone online to scream at and argue with.

Despite isolating myself from the real world, I did have two friends on Facebook that I considered my best friends after I had ditched all of my real world friends and traded them for my internet community. They loved to argue about politics as much as I did. We would tag each other regularly to jump into political arguments and we made a game out of baiting other people into saying something that would get their account suspended. We would collect screenshots of notifications when we were told the person’s account “violated community standards” and post them in a private Facebook group like they were trophies.

 

There were times when I was afraid to call them out on things, though. Like when all of social media decided to make Steve Martin “the main character” when he called Carrie Fisher “beautiful” on Twitter when she passed. Social media tore him to pieces for it. How dare he objectify women like that! One of my friends went all in on the bashing, and even unfriended someone who dared say that it wasn’t a big deal and there’s more important things to worry about. I thought the same thing but didn’t dare say it. I didn’t want to go against the woke consensus. And I didn’t want to lose a friend over it, so I kept my mouth shut even though I thought the outrage was really weird. Ironically I found out later that the outrage was manufactured by Russian trolls. I also found an old interview where Carrie Fisher bragged about sleeping with Steve Martin. I’m pretty sure that if there’s only one time when it’s acceptable to comment on a woman’s appearance, it’s when you’ve already fucked.

 

In 2019 Bernie Sanders announced that he was running for president again and I was happy about it, but one of my friends was not. She was still mad about Hillary Clinton losing the election and blamed Sanders for it. She was determined to post as much hate about him as possible to convince anyone that would listen to not vote for him. I still had memories of how bitter the primary in 2016 was, so I asked her to not do that. Having a second Trump term would be unbearable. Her response was to tell me that because I’m a white man, my feelings were irrelevant.

 

We had a few disagreements prior to this, but being told by someone that my feelings didn’t matter hurt like crazy. And I don’t care how woke you are, you don’t reduce your friends to their race and gender to determine their worth. And you sure as shit don’t call yourself a feminist and then tell a man to repress his feelings. I had become a feminist because I had learned about how the patriarchy hurts men because it makes us suppress our emotions; that we’re not allowed to show vulnerability or have any emotions other than to be horny, happy, or filled with rage. I learned that as I had left the Army and was dealing with a lot of repressed emotions, so the idea resonated with me. And here was my supposed best friend, telling me that because I’m a cisgender white man I don’t get to have feelings. After I told her that since after all our years of friendship she only saw me as a cisgender white man, I wouldn’t bother her any longer. I said goodbye and promptly unfriended her. I didn’t intend on cutting her off forever. Truth is I just wanted time to cool off and I figured in a few days I’d message her again. But her response made sure that I’d never talk to her again.

 

Her response was pure, unfettered rage. About an hour after unfriending her she left me four voice messages on Facebook messenger, which I didn’t listen to because the first thing I heard was her screaming, “YOU HAVE SOME NERVE”. She didn’t realize the pain she was causing me. Or she just didn’t care. I don’t know which. She blocked me to keep me from responding. Then she went on her kids Facebook account to message me again, screaming that because I’m a cisgender white man I’m evil. It didn’t matter that I was “one of the better ones”. I was evil. She ended it in all caps, saying, “I HOPE YOU DIE!”

That last part stung the most. She knew that I had almost killed myself a few years prior. She was one of the few people that knew about it. My wife was the only other one. And now she was wishing death on me. I wrote a response telling her how hurtful she was, that she had wished death on me when I had been struggling to not kill myself before. I blocked her kid’s account because I didn’t want her to be able to write back and be even more hurtful.

 

The next day she decided to message my wife instead. I hadn’t even told my wife what had happened. My wife has never been nearly as political as I was, and I didn’t want to involve her in Facebook drama. So she was as shocked as I was that she had reached out to basically call me a piece of shit and wrote a whole novel about “men being in their feelings”. She said she’d only be friends with me again if I apologize to her. When my wife got home from work and asked about it, I told her that I unfriended her and she should just block her and not respond. So that’s what she did.

 

At that time my hurt got replaced by anger. I wanted to write my former friend back and tell ask her who the fuck she thought she was to involve my wife in this. I wanted to ask her what in her sick, sad mind made her think that crossing that kind of boundary was okay. That she was fucked if she thought I’d beg her to be my friend again. After all, I dropped her. She should be apologizing to me! But I didn’t. I just wanted to be free from the drama. So I let her get the last word in the end.

 

The second friend I ended up unfriending a few months later. While I had gotten disillusioned with the Democratic Party, he was still a die hard follower of them. So when he saw that people further to the left of him (which included me) no longer had much love for the DNC, he began to bash leftists constantly on his feed. After a while I told him that he was being hurtful because I was one of the people he was talking about. He told me he didn’t care and that he wouldn’t stop doing it.

 

Normally that wouldn’t have been enough to make me stop being friends with someone, even as I had been dropping real life and online friends alike over the years, further isolating myself to the darker parts of social media. Part of me knew he wasn’t talking about me specifically and didn’t regard me as being “like those other leftists”. But a year or so prior he put out an ultimatum that I had to drop another friend on Facebook that he didn’t like, or he would drop me. I did unfriend that person because I didn’t want to lose our friendship. So here was, once again, my supposed friend not caring that he was saying things that were hurtful. He controlled who I could talk to on Facebook or even just be friends with, but he wouldn’t even stop posting certain content to spare my feelings. He wouldn’t even make his posts unreadable for me. He simply didn’t care. So I unfriended him as well.

 

I really want to be clear that I’m not telling these stories to gossip about online friendships gone south. I left their names out for a reason. There’s a greater point that I’m making here about the harm that social media does to all of us, and I can’t make that point without telling the whole story about how I got out of the cult of social media. I hope my ex friends got out of that cult as well. And if any of you are reading this, I sincerely hope that you’re living happy lives with good, real world relationships.

 

Side note: If you’re wondering why I’m referring to social media as a cult, it’s because it’s very much a secular cult. More accurately, it’s a collection of secular, very political cults. You don’t get to choose which cult you’ll be in because social media algorithms will choose it for you. And once you’re in, you don’t get to question the cult. You’re not allowed to make requests to be reasonable, to have nuance, disagree with the cult in any way, or else be labeled an apostate. To be an apostate means that you’re what they call on Twitter, “the main character”.

 

I learned from these incidents a big lesson, and that lesson is that online friends are not real friends. They’re easy to dispose of. When I learned that lesson, I started to ask myself, “What the fuck happened to me?” Something felt very wrong about who I was and what I’d become. I was never so quick to drop friends, never so quick to end a relationship, real world or otherwise. But at the time, I wasn’t sure what it was that was causing me to be like this. I knew something was wrong, but I still hadn’t realized that social media was the reason why I was so fucked in the head.

 

And then the pandemic happened.

 

When the entire world was forced to make social media their only means of communication with people outside their home, I saw everyone else turn into me. Turn into my former friends. We were all terminally online now, and I watched as comment sections on Facebook (which were already toxic before this) turn into all out shouting matches, as everyone on any side of the political spectrum was spewing all sorts of vitriol at each other. I joined in as well, as arguing with idiots was nothing new to me. But watching the entire world turn into me forced me to see how I had been acting for years and I hated what I saw. This kind of hatred and outrage isn’t normal. It’s not mentally healthy. Up until the pandemic my isolation was voluntary. Well, not voluntary in the sense that I was in control of myself (I’m referring to social media as a cult for a reason), but at least I didn’t have a government ordering me to not have a real world social life. It was like the entire world had joined different, warring cults. I felt like I was like looking into a mirror, and I hated the reflection. I finally saw what my wife saw in me. What the real world friends saw in me when I kicked them to the curb. I was an angry, hateful monster who thought he was a good person simply because he had the “right kind” of politics. But we were in the middle of a pandemic and even if I had been a member of the other social media cults and was screaming, “PLANDEMIC!” at the top of my lungs, it wouldn’t have mattered because everything was still closed down. I couldn’t even go to the gym anymore. And dear God, did I miss the gym. So I did what I had always done. Rage in comment sections. At least if I raged I was talking to someone, and without even my online friends to confide in, I felt like it was the only way to communicate with anyone. And apparently, the rest of the world felt the same way.