I Used to be in a Cult Part Four: Sympathy for the Fascists

Social media is a collection of cults, all created by algorithms. Every social media outlet, from YouTube to Twitter, has an AI algorithm that is designed to keep you addicted to their website or app by constantly pushing content in your direction that will keep you scrolling or watching videos for as long as possible. The owners of those social media outlets have done this deliberately, because the longer you’re on their outlet, the more ad revenue they can generate. They purposefully made the algorithm to make you addicted to their outlet so you’ll be on your phone or computer for every waking second of every day. And with every algorithm, there’s a hundred people on each outlet watching what content you’re viewing so they can adjust the algorithm to make you as addicted as possible. This was discussed in Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections, and The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, the latter of which I haven’t mentioned until now. Both are great books and I highly recommend them.

The Chaos Machine goes a step further than Lost Connections. While Lost Connections talks about how social media is designed to be addictive, The Chaos Machine talks about how social media companies exploit the brain that we’ve had to evolve for real life, human connection, and uses it in ways that we’ve never evolved to handle.

Dunbar’s Number is the theory that our brains evolved to have 150 people in our lives. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, etc. This is because in the hunter-gatherer days, we didn’t have a larger number in our community. We evolved to have relationships with no more than that number of people. Social media made us into a community of billions; far greater than our brains are able to handle. Our brains also don’t know how to differentiate the real world community from the online community. When we go online and the social media algorithms create a new community for us, as far as we’re concerned, they’re the same as the people we talk to in real life.

Our brains are evolved to think like our community. If the social media algorithms determine you to be a part of a leftist community, you’ll start to think like that community. If they determine you to be a part of a fascist community, they’ll send you in that direction. Most of us don’t want to be discarded by our community. We’re evolved to want to belong to the community. So after seeing enough political propaganda from our online community, we eventually stop questioning them and just adapt their ideas. We get addicted to likes, having our content reposted, and having positive content shoved our way. And we also find ourselves wanting to do harm to those that threaten the community. It’s why when we spend our days debating politics, we don’t do so with the intention of changing anyone’s mind. We do it because we want the other person to shut the fuck up.

I got addicted to arguing with people online because I saw them as a threat to my community. I neglected my family because I wanted to purge threats from my community. It’s why I neglected my real life friends and dropped former real life friends that I communicated with online. I got more addicted to purging threats to my fake online community than I was with cultivating the relationships in my real world community, and it nearly destroyed me. Because of Dunbar’s Number, I ditched real world friendships to be a part of a fake, online community. My brain needed less than 150 people to communicate with, and I sacrificed my real world relationships so I could have those 150 relationships with strangers on a screen. On my end, I’m ashamed of myself. I’m ashamed for ending all those relationships. Some of which, despite my best efforts, will never be repaired.

On the other end, where the people that run these social media outlets caused an addiction, I’m filled with anger towards them for turning me into that person.

Nobody wakes up one day and decides to become a fascist. They don’t wake up and start hating people because of the color of their skin, their nationality, and they sure af don’t decide out of the clear blue that they want a government that just hurts people and never helps them. The world is struggling with fascist movements all over, and it’s because of social media algorithms.

Social media algorithms thrive on posting things that will get our attention. The best way to get our attention is to piss us off. Old media knew that. The old saying with newspapers was, “If it bleed, it leads”. Our brains are wired to pay special attention to threats. We don’t pay nearly as much attention to uplifting things. When we see things that are happy (like a video of a cat being cute), we enjoy it for a few seconds and then move on. But when we see something like a story of undocumented immigrants taking over an apartment complex, we pay attention. We comment on the story. We share the story. Even if we know it’s bullshit, we post comments saying it’s bullshit, and we might even post a link from Snopes saying it’s bullshit.

The algorithm doesn’t determine whether or not we’re engaging with content because we like it or hate it. As far as the algorithm is concerned, if we’re engaging with the content, we want to see more of it. It’s why I always felt like every time I beat someone in an online debate, five more people showed up to debate. The algorithm determined that whatever I was commenting on was engaging, so they showed it to more people.

Let’s say you’re some 17 year old boy who’s apolitical but likes video games. So you go on YouTube to watch videos of people playing video games. You post some comments on a video and watch the video all the way through. YouTube’s algorithm says, “Let’s recommend some more videos about gaming”. So you click on one and watch it. YouTube’s algorithm recommends another, except this gamer has some right-wing political ideas that you find weird. At first you think the ideas are bullshit, but you like the gamer despite it because you know dick about politics but watching them play video games is fun. YouTube starts recommending other videos of even more right-wing gamers. You watch and after a while, you find that their ideas start making sense. So you start watching more recommended videos. Some of these aren’t about video games at all, but just right-wing politics. And you’re agreeing with them. You’re engaging in the comments. This has become your community now. A few months later you’re on 4chan posting pepe memes, screaming about how minorities are killing this country and “illegal immigrants” all need to be murdered. If you’re really radicalized, you take it to the real world and shoot up a mosque in New Zealand or a church in Texas.

Or let’s say you’re me. A liberal in 2008 who is celebrating Barack Obama becoming the next president and on Facebook. Facebook sees you and starts pushing more political content your way to your liking. But the content makes you angry. A post about a guy saying that Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim. The Republicans trying to kill Obamacare. Mitch McConnell being Mitch McConnell. You make jokes about it or rage in the comments. Occasionally a troll comes by in the comments and you make it your life’s mission to tear down their self esteem and send them back to their own corner of Facebook with their tail between their legs. So Facebook starts pushing more of that content your way. The content creators notice that the stuff that creates outrage gets more engagement, so they post more stuff that makes you mad. You start learning about ideas you hadn’t heard before about institutionalized racism and sexism. After a few years, Facebook starts recommending more leftist pages and groups, which helps because you’ve become a bit disillusioned with the Democrats and their endless failures to enact any progressive legislation. Then the 2016 election happens and you lose your mind. Facebook starts recommending far left pages talking about socialism and anarchism. Those pages hate the Democrats, which you think is strange at first because you’ve always known Democrats as “the left”, but you don’t say anything because you don’t want to be an outsider to your new online community. You’re also dealing with trolls in the comments full time like it’s your job. And after watching Trump for the last four years and the Democrats not taking any real means to stop him, you’ve lost faith in the government. You’re now an anarchist and feel like you’re one bad day from burning the state to the ground (chill out, FBI, I’m not making any plans for political violence-just stating that for the record).

Side note: I sometimes wonder if I’d have become an anarchist if I grew up in a country like Denmark or the Nordic countries where they have strong social programs and labor protections. I know that if I lived in a government that was more concerned with listening to their citizens, I probably wouldn’t be so angry with the current state of affairs.

The hypothetical about the 17 year old that turned into a fascist isn’t a hypothetical. It’s how Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil. It’s also how Trump got elected. It’s why Trump’s followers seem like they’re in a cult. They are. The cult of social media.

When I learned how the social media algorithms work, I didn’t hate fascists anymore. Ninety-nine percent of them weren’t fascists on their own. They became that way through constant propaganda being pushed on them by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. I don’t hate them anymore. I pity them. They’re as brainwashed as I was. The algorithm just pushed them in a different direction. In the real world, they’re as human as I am. They’re motivated by a fear of the unknown, a hatred of “the other”, and think they’re doing what they need to make their community safe.

The owners of the social media platforms know what they’re doing. They see radicalization as the cost of doing business. After January 6^th Mark Zuckerberg deleted a bunch of fascist pages and groups that were pushing radicalization, but he allowed them back after a few months when he saw that engagement dropped. Twitter did likewise with thousands of followers. Engagement dropped, the value of Twitter dropped, and Elon Musk swooped in to buy it and we all know the rest. The owners of social media will do whatever they have to do to keep us glued to our screens, and if it means that an attempted coup and some mass shootings happen, that just the cost they’re willing to bear to keep their stock prices up.

The best way to beat fascists isn’t by voting, or arguing online, or even punching them in the face. We need to destroy the algorithms, and even my anarchist ass knows that it’s going to take government regulation to force their hand. Some governments and NGOs in Europe are working to build the means to make it happen. We’ll still need political pressure to do it here.

One part of The Chaos Machine stood out to me. They talked about how Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand mosque shooter, had his livestreamed videos from Facebook posted on 8Chan. While most of the commenters, in accordance with their community, egged the shooter on and praised him, one of the young men watching the video was horrified. He had started to question the community quietly because after they radicalized him into being an incel, he began a friendship through Facebook messenger with a woman. He had believed what the incel community taught him about women-that they were all heartless sluts and bitches that hated all men. His friendship with that woman caused him to realize that what he was taught was wrong and he began to question everything his online community had taught him. The cracks formed in his ideology. After seeing the video of the mosque shooting, he left the platform. He left fascism. It made me think of stories of white supremacists that left the movement not because people punched him in the face in the street, or because they raged against them online. It was because they ended up meeting other minorities in the real world and made friends with them. Along with stopping these algorithms that feed us propaganda and teach us to hate and be in a constant state of anger, we need to just fucking talk to each other. I promise you’ll find we’re more alike than different.

I Used to be in a Cult: Epilogue

 After I read Digital Minimalism I began taking steps to get off social media. As I said earlier, I still kept TikTok and YouTube because I didn’t feel the same addiction to video content as I did the mediums that use the written word. Maybe that’s because I’m less likely to argue with other people when I’m on them. I also access far less political content on them. But I’m not everyone. So many people got radicalized through YouTube, like Brenton Tarrant, who before shooting the mosque in New Zealand had spent a twenty four hour period going through the recommended videos sent to him by YouTube’s algorithm on autoplay. Yet for me, I’m fine with watching videos about why The Crow is the greatest movie ever (they’re right!), cute cat videos, cooking videos, or instructional videos on how to change the brake pads on my car.

I rejoined Reddit a few months ago. I told myself it was for research for a book I’m working on, but I think it was more because I was bored at work and wanted something to do. But the written word platform started to get me back into old habits so I’m going to have to delete the app on my phone. I don’t want to get sucked back into that cult.

I’ve spent the last few months trying to repair the real world relationships that I had lost. Friends that I had neglected. Friends that I told to never talk to me again because their politics sucked. Some welcomed me back with open arms. Some are busy and don’t have time to go out (such is life in your 40s). Others I damaged so badly that they still don’t want to talk to me. I’m even reading books that teach me how to talk to people-a skill that I had abandoned years ago and need to relearn after spending all my “social life” online.

Ironically, after I post this on my blog I’m going to return to Facebook. Not to argue with idiots, but to go to local groups to make friends outside of it. When I had to take a good hard look at myself, I had to ask what made me friends with people in the past. It was music. Punk rock, specifically. So I made a discord account for local fans of punk rock, and I’ll post on my hometown pages that if anyone else is a fan of punk rock to join the discord so we can make arrangements to meet up in real life, listen to some good music, have a few beers and some weed, and chill out. After that, my account is going to be deactivated once again. I don’t need an online community, but I will use social media temporarily to create a real one.

After my mom died, I began to take stock of my life, as one does when they lose someone close to them. I was with my mom when she died on her hospital bed, one of her hands holding mine, and the other one holding my brother’s. She was too weak to speak and even if she wasn’t, her intubation tube that was keeping her alive would have prevented it. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I can guarantee that she wasn’t thinking, “I wish I had spent more time on Facebook.” None of us are going to be wishing that we spent more time arguing with idiots, shitposting, doomscrolling, or neglecting the people that love us so we can spend just one more day in front of a screen.

One of the friendships that I ruined was a friend from high school. He was one of my Army buddies, too. I joined the Army after 9/11 just so I’d be in the same reserve unit as him so I could watch his back if he deployed. He went regular Army after our first tour while I stayed in the Reserves. So he was one of those real life friends that I was only talking to online. After Trump was elected we had an argument about politics and even though it wasn’t the final reason why I told him to fuck off forever, it did start a chain of events that led me to do so. I pissed away a twenty year friendship because the algorithm put us in separate cults. I got in touch with him last year and he said he didn’t want to be friends because of what I did, but he did tell me that he had just left the military and wanted to move some place where there wasn’t people because he wanted to be away from everyone. I knew what that meant because I had long thought about doing the same. He wanted to spend his days in isolation, staring at a screen, with a fake online community that wouldn’t even notice if he stopped posting. If you’re that friend and you’re reading this, don’t do it, brother. Don’t be like me. Go make friends in the real world and leave the cult. The cult will never love you back and you’ll just end up miserable, alone, and wondering what the fuck happened to all the friends you used to have and why you don’t know how to make friends anymore. I’m speaking entirely from experience.

My Mom Died And I Don't Know What To Write About It

 Yeah. She died on June 10th. She was 68 years old.

I keep trying to write my feelings about it, but the moment my laptop opens, I have nothing.

So that's all I have to say about it I guess. I want to say so much more, but I can't think of anything.

Did (American) Pop Culture Reach A Dead End?

I saw a tweet a couple years ago that was talking about a local radio station. The person that made the tweet said something like, "The radio station says they, 'Play the best of the 80s, 90s, and today.' Well, today has been twenty years."

Does it feel like that, though? Does music feel like it's changed in the past twenty years?

If you think about the differences between 80s and 90s music, it's very easy to tell. The 80s had hair metal, lots of synth-pop, and rap music used lots of drums. The 90s had G-funk, alternative rock, pop-punk and ska. And with the exception of Nu-Metal, there isn't really a genre of music that is any different than today when you look at the early 2000s. At least it feels that way to me. Especially as far as rock music is concerned. Even new bands are bragging that they sound like early 2000s pop punk. Rock music has stayed largely the same.

For a few weeks I've been wanting to write this post but had trouble putting my thoughts to the keyboard. But I recently watched a video from The Punk Rock MBA that said something that made a lot of sense. He said that rock music has been around for seventy years, so there's nowhere else for rock music to go and still have it be called rock. To quote:

I kinda wonder if the reason that rock hasn't been innovative is the last decade or so is because it's basically all been done. What I mean by that is you can only push the boundaries of rock so far before it stops being rock. Like at some point if you change that formula of bass, drums, guitars, and vocals too much, then at some point it just stops being rock, right? It might be great music and it might be influenced by rock, but it's still not rock.

He's not wrong. We might be seeing the end of rock music.

He also said that a big problem with rock and rap these days is that it's not offending people. And that doesn't mean that it's bad that they're not being bigots. It's that during 50s-90s, music was offending old people and establishment types. In the 50s Elvis Presley angered silent generation parents by wiggling his legs. By the 80s rock music was invoking Satan. It had offended people so much that Al Gore forced musicians to testify about their music on the Senate floor (and you should definitely watch Dee Snyder destroy the Senate on YouTube. It's beautiful). In the 90s there were congressional hearings about gangsta rap. Marilyn Manson was protested by evangelicals. But not only is modern music not offending the establishment, it's simply not possible to do it anymore. Would anyone even give a shit if a satanic metal band came out today? Not me. I don't even listen to metal. Why would I have an opinion either way? Really the only way to be offensive these days is to do it politically, and while that does piss off the MAGA types, it's not seen as anything outside of the norm. The establishment loves MAGA as much as it hates it, so it's not really anti-establishment to piss them off, anyway.

At this point the only way rap music is going to piss off the establishment is if they embrace Satanism. I only know that because folks were pissed at Lil Nas X for a few minutes. But even in the world of hip hop, it doesn't seem like things changed much in the past two decades. In Da Club could be a new song now and nobody would think it was retro. 

As The Punk Rock MBA noted, the evidence that music hasn't changed much is that teenagers are on TikTok today doing dance videos to songs made twenty years ago. Nu Metal is having what I call "our 90's disco era" in which like disco in my youth, a genre of music that was once hated is now cool again. Teenagers today are into Nu Metal. That was not on my 2024 bingo card.

Hell, my wife got my kids into Simple Plan. Made them total superfans.

I'm not sure what the future holds for music, but I started thinking about this when I realized that even in my 40s, I'm still enjoying new music. My dad didn't. One of my biggest memories of my dad was him being hurt that I hated his music because it was old. And my dad hated alternative rock. He despised Green Day and all the punk and ska I got into when I was in high school. For me, my taste in music was partly to rebel against my father. My kids won't be able to do that. I'll probably be listening to their music, too.

Movies and television haven't changed much, either. The Office was a hilarious single camera mockumentary sitcom and it was the most popular sitcom on television at its peak. Today, Abbot Elementary is a hilarious single camera mockumentary sitcom and it's the most popular sitcom on television. Ten years ago people complained that all movies are sequels or reboots. Today pretty much everything in the theater is a sequel or a reboot. Twenty years ago we were seeing Star Wars and superhero movies in theaters. Now? Same deal. The only difference now is that some jokes made twenty years ago wouldn't be considered funny today.

The only mainstream genre I've seen any change in is anime. No wonder it's gone from a niche nerdy thing for 90s nerdy kids (hello!) to an entertainment medium that pretty much anyone born after 1980 enjoys. And while there's plenty of 90s anime to love, most of the anime of that time was action oriented, and very rarely comedic. Nowadays anime has everything from rom coms to psa's about getting enough exercise (seriously, it's called How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? and it's fucking weird). I just started rewatching Chainsaw Man with my wife. It's the most original tv show I've seen since The Good Place and it's fucking great.

The only American change to pop culture I've seen is the rise of content creation. And that's probably the only genre where there's a generation gap (while anime is original, everyone in my family is watching it). I absolutely despise any and all content generation aimed at Gen Z. Fucking Christ it's awful. It is the one piece of pop culture that makes me know how my parents and grandparents felt about anything I was into. How in the hell is PrestonPlayz married when he looks like he just started middle school? And every time he makes a video talking about how he spent a fortune on Amazon I just want to scream "YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE THE REVOLUTION, PRESTON!" My kids used to watch Ryan's Toy Review and it drove me insane. Yes, our generation started content creation, but this Gen Z stuff is...well...I don't get it. And I'm smart enough to know that I'm not supposed to. I'm not the demographic for the show. 

I hope we get to the point where we will see more scripted shows being made by ordinary people through social media, though. Omeleto is leading the way on showing short movies on YouTube, and it's a great channel. There's also a few low-budget self made sitcoms with their own YouTube channels that are great. On TikTok KallMeKris got a massive following by doing a series of one-woman skits that evolved into a tv show with a continuous story line and everything. She's awesome.

Maybe there's a lesson there. While the corporate world has been giving us the same movies and television to the point where they kill beloved franchises, it'll be the people the come together and make something beautiful.

Anyway, here's The Punk Rock MBA video I cited in the beginning. Enjoy:

No One Likes You When You're 43 (What's My Age Again?)

 Yeah, I guess I'm doing yet another post about getting old.

In just a few days I'm going to be 43 years old. Last week my mom asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. I told her that I had no idea. "Nobody celebrates turning 43 years old. After 35 birthdays don't really have that much relevance, anyway.", I told her. My 68 year old mom said, "Really, after 25, for that matter." Fair enough, mom.

My wife keeps asking me what I want to do for my birthday. And I seriously have no idea. I kinda want to go out to eat, but also don't because eating at restaurants is expensive. But I also don't want to get take out because that's expensive, too. But I also don't want to eat in because it's a weeknight so I'll have to do the cooking, anyway.

So I guess I just wish that my birthday wasn't happening this year. Maybe I should wait two more years to celebrate my birthday because at least I'd be celebrating a milestone of some sort.

Blink 182 said that no one likes you when you're 23. But when you're 43? No one even gives a shit. 

Maybe that's the direction this blog is going to head in. Me trying to find that ability to grow into the middle age in-between childhood and old age that us millennials had been forced into without the "young adult" era that our boomer and Gen X predecessors were given. We were infantilized for so long and when you combine that with our economic circumstances where we had to kick, punch, and claw our way to being barely middle class, the suddenly coming of being middle aged is hitting especially hard. And that's even if you managed to make it to barely middle class. I was one of the lucky ones on that. Not all of my millennial companions can say they did.

But either way, I have no fucking clue what I'm doing for my birthday. 

Younger Millennials Aren't So Young Anymore

I started this blog when I was 32 years old. The term "millennial" hadn't even been in the zeitgeist at the time. Most of us hadn't even heard the term until the mid 2010s when our generation was suddenly blamed for killing every industry from chain restaurants to napkins. The baby boomers that were writing the articles for easy clickbait didn't seem to know or care that the reason why millennials weren't spending money on those things was because The Great Recession had left us flat ass broke.

And it was in those 2010s that the new generation gaps were born. Angry baby boomers would rant against us in the comment sections of whatever news page on Facebook they decided to like. We would tell people that we're flat ass broke and need a break only to be told by said boomers that we're entitled because of participation trophies. Being so stunned by our parents' generation telling us that we don't deserve a job that doesn't pay starvation wages was pretty daunting. It wasn't until a few years later that someone pointed out that we only had the participation trophies because boomer parents couldn't handle the idea that their kid didn't win something. For fucks' sake, if anyone was entitled, it was them for demanding that we had trophies that we never wanted in the first place just so they wouldn't feel like they had raised a loser.

All those arguments were the beginning of the online generation gap. Boomers vs. Millennials. With Gen X wondering why the fuck they had been forgotten about.

We millennials were infantilized for long past the time that the youngest of us had reached adulthood. In fact, it wasn't until an anonymous Twitter user pointed out that many millennials were already in their mid-30s that the infantilization had ended. By that time, the oldest of Gen Z had begun reaching adulthood.

Why do I bring this up? I don't know. Nostalgia, maybe? I decided I was going to use this blog to write about my random thoughts after I deleted my social media, and I have a lot of thoughts to give on aging, I guess.

I'm about to turn 43. I'm the eldest of millennials. If I had been born just two months prior, I'd be the last of Gen X. I'm getting old and it's hard to deal with.

I think that being infantilized for so long kind of makes getting old that much harder to accept. And we were infantilized for economic reasons that were well beyond our control.

The Great Recession prevented nearly all of us from owning a home. Even today only half of us have one. Nearly seven in ten of Gen X and eight in ten of Baby Boomers own one.

Did you know that owning a home is the easiest way to generational wealth in America? I didn't until I was one of the lucky ones that now owns his own home. Fucking hell, the tax breaks ALONE for owning a home are insane. Credit scores are through the roof! My wife and I have money in savings for the first time ever! 

And half of my generation doesn't get to have that. It's fucking bullshit.

So because of our economic circumstances, at least half of my generation are still forced to scrape by like we all did just a decade prior. Because we didn't all graduate high school with a job that guaranteed a home like the boomers did we've been treated like kids most of our lives.

And now it's 2024 and we're far from children. I have to continuously wrap my head around the fact that there are now people born after 9/11 that are old enough to drink. Gen Z is starting to get old now, too. The oldest of them will be turning 30 in a few years. This year is to them what 2008 was to millennials, and if you think 2008 doesn't feel like it was sixteen years ago, welcome to the fucking club, buddy! Where did the fucking time go?!

Gen Z loves to remind us that we're now the old people. Goddamn it.

You ever see Gen Z talk about us on TikTok? Kids are fucking cruel, man! You'd think we were their parents or something.

So now along with our parents' generation treating us like we're fucking infants, we got the generation below us acting like we're senior citizens at the old folks' home. Jesus fucking Christ.

And we don't even know why they're so hostile, either. It's not like we aren't in the same economic boat as them. They were born after this country turned into a dumpster fire, but we were kids when the match that set that dumpster on fire was lit! Hey Gen Z, if you wonder why we harp on the 90's so fucking much, it's because we kind of MISS THE TIME WHEN THE DUMPSTER WASN'T ON FIRE!

Sometimes I wonder if I was blinded by youthful bias as to whether or not the 90s were that great, but then I remember that both of my divorced parents moved into larger houses at that time and the worst thing going on in politics is that the president had his dick sucked. Yeah, things were pretty fucking good back then.

But we watched helplessly as the years that you were born into turned into that dumpster fire, Gen Z, and goddamn it, we did our best to put it out. We fucking tried. So now we're old and tired and we need you to take up the mantle for change because the youth are always fearless and our backs hurt and it's hard to get us to a protest unless we can get a babysitter in advance. But don't forget that we walked so you fuckers can run. We took all the jokes about participation trophies so you can scream, "OK BOOMER!" at the top of your lungs.

I'll close this out with the queen of Elder Millennials (Iliza Shlesinger) giving her take on Gen Z:

The Strange Addiction of Posting Stuff Online

This is kind of an update to my last post. Maybe I'll post more about this as time goes on. I just know that I feel like I need to put my thoughts somewhere.

And that's what this post is about. Why the fuck am I addicted to posting stuff online?

I started reading blogs and news sites to keep up on what's going on in the world, and many times after reading a story I want to post a comment about it, or post the story to a feed on some social media site with my thoughts on the article. So I signed up for one of the news sites that still has a comment section and fired away with my thoughts on a news story. It felt good to say my piece and put it into the universe.

And then the old familiar rush of getting into an online argument began again. I posted my thoughts about politics online, and like chum thrown into the ocean, the sharks took the bait. Within minutes, I was high on arguing about politics online.

I'm not kidding. It's a high. I literally get an adrenaline rush from it.

Why am I like this? I don't want to be like this. I know that the years I spent having online arguments as my primary mode of social interaction fucked up my ability to talk to people in the real world. 

While typing all of that out, I decided to Google "why am I addicted to arguing online" and found a few articles about it. I guess I'm not alone in admitting that this is an addiction.

I found this article in Psychology Today that said of trolls and what they refer to as "troll-lite" (people that just enjoy arguing online) that said of us, "they are more narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic and sadistic." But I don't feel like I'm any of those things. 

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do have a need to be right all the time. And I also feel like everyone else should also be right all the time. If not, I should correct them.

Yeah, that would explain the addiction. It's a usually safe and anonymous way to get those two needs met. I get the feeling of superiority of feeling like I'm right and telling everyone else that they're wrong.

Fuck me, that's not a characteristic I want to have. That's definitely making it hard to make friends with people.

I've been staring at this screen for the past five minutes wondering if this characteristic is from trauma or something I was born with. I think it's because of my experience with religion. I was in the Independent Fundamental Baptist church when I was a teenager and if you know anything about that church, they do feel the need to be right about everything, and letting you know that you're wrong is a matter of keeping you from burning for eternity. 

Maybe that's it. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a combination of things. All I know is, this is something I need to change.