Unified Theory of Networked Narcissism
how and why social media makes us all into the worst versions of ourselves
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Social media makes us all into the worst versions of ourselves.
That’s a fairly uncontroversial idea. And if it doesn’t apply to you, I’m impressed! I offer you my heartiest congratulations. I hope you’ll send me an email and explain how you’ve managed to avoid the pitfalls. Thank you in advance for supplying your own “not alls”.
But why does social media make us into the worst versions of ourselves?
The easy answer is “anonymity,” and yes, that plays a role.
But I think there’s a lot more to it than simple anonymity.
In this essay, I’m going to offer my hypothesis, which lies at the nexus of anonymity, algorithmic reinforcement, and psychological fragmentation—in both the normal understanding of that term and in a way I’m going to define shortly, emotional whiplash.
Psychological Fragmentation
To begin, we must examine the concept of psychological fragmentation.
When a healthy person has multiple roles in life, they develop what we might call “modes.” These are mental states suited to their current circumstances, such as Work Mode, Parent Mode, or Friend Mode. Colloquially, we often refer to this as “putting on a hat.”
These modes may overlap at times—a doctor might need their Doctor Mode when advising a friend about a medical issue. Recently, in conversation with two friends, I was asked to “put on my data scientist hat” and explain something about statistics. But generally, these modes remain distinct.
Healthy flexibility, called adaptive compartmentalization, allows psychologically normal individuals to shift between roles effortlessly without losing a cohesive sense of self. Their core identity remains intact, and the modes do not fundamentally conflict. Even under stress, a healthy person can usually navigate these shifts, though it may take effort—for example, a father decompressing after a stressful day at work before switching to Daddy Mode to play with his kids.
Psychological fragmentation is the unhealthy extreme of this natural compartmentalization, typically caused by trauma. At its most severe, fragmentation becomes dissociation. Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder) is the farthest extreme, where one fragment is unaware of the others.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) illustrates a more familiar form of fragmentation. A friend of mine survived a tornado destroying her home at age ten. While she is psychologically healthy in most respects, certain weather conditions—hot/cold shifts followed by thunderstorms—trigger her PTSD and activate her nervous system. Her heart races, adrenaline surges, and she becomes hypervigilant.
When sirens go off, she enters a robotic state. She gathers her children, emergency supplies, and takes all necessary precautions, but feels numb and disconnected, as if observing herself from the outside. Before she had children, these moments were dominated by intrusive memories of the tornado’s aftermath, bombarding her until the danger passed.1
Social media doesn’t just fragment our psychological states; it actively nurtures and amplifies the ego in ways that distort our relationship with ourselves and others. Platforms like Twitter reward attention-seeking behaviors—whether through snark, outrage, or performative vulnerability—which can foster narcissistic tendencies even in people who don’t naturally lean that way. The lines between a healthy mode, a fragment, and a narcissistic persona blur when dopamine-driven validation takes center stage.
Complex Trauma, Complex Psychological Fragmentation
Complex trauma differs from PTSD in a critical way: it doesn’t occur in the context of a stable, healthy life disrupted by a single traumatic event. Instead, it arises from prolonged exposure to harmful environments, where the person lacks a solid foundation of love, attention, and stability to begin with. There is no “normal” baseline to integrate the trauma into.
Adults may develop complex trauma after enduring long-term situations like imprisonment or abusive relationships. For children, complex trauma often stems from environments where consistent care and nurturing are absent during critical developmental stages.
Imagine a child who grows up in a religious cult, where love and attention are conditional, and their developmental needs are systematically neglected. Or a boy raised by a single mother, splitting his time between raising his siblings, enduring beatings from her boyfriends, and being bullied for his emerging homosexuality. These children miss the chance to develop a cohesive sense of self, leaving them ill-equipped to navigate life’s challenges.
When children with complex trauma grow into adults, their struggles compound. Take, for instance, the girl raised by abusive, divorced parents who grows up splitting her time between neglect, verbal abuse, and a revolving door of boyfriends (her mother’s house) and navigating the terrors of rage and alcoholism (her father’s house). She grows up and dates someone who treats her as her father did and experiences date rape. Unlike someone with a stable sense of self, she has no “normal” life to integrate this trauma into—only a chaotic, painful existence made more complicated by new harm.
With the right support, a skilled trauma therapist might help her build a foundation of stability while addressing the traumas of both her childhood and adulthood.
Without intervention, however, she will likely experience psychological fragmentation—unable to reconcile her fractured identity with the weight of her experiences.
For adults with fragmented identities rooted in complex trauma, social media can serve as both a salve and a snare. The persona they craft online may offer fleeting relief but often inflates a fragile ego, creating a narcissistic cycle of seeking validation and avoiding vulnerability. This isn’t inherently narcissistic, but when social media rewards that craving with attention and engagement, it can inflate the ego in unhealthy ways, deepening the fragmentation it promises to soothe.
Psychological Fragmentation From the Inside
I’ve been in treatment with a trauma specialist for complex trauma for a long time, and my psychological fragmentation is much, much less severe than it once was. But it still exists, and I’ll share a few examples to make this phenomenon more concrete.
Last month, my friend
and I visited a commie puppet museum. I was triggered by grotesque, death-porn imagery that reminded me of sermons about the Tribulation I heard as a child. These sermons were designed to terrify me into compliance, with graphic descriptions of how the Antichrist would torture those left behind in the Rapture. The imagery elicited the same state of inescapable horror I felt as a child, badly triggering my PTSD.But in the moment, Josh couldn’t tell how much I was struggling because I masked it well. My body and mouth operated on autopilot, interacting appropriately, even as my mind was flooded with intrusive, painful memories and my nervous system entered a fight-flight-or-freeze state.
In that moment, I was fragmented — part of me was in the present, enjoying time with someone I love and trust, while another part of me was stuck at age eight, desperate to escape the church sanctuary and the descriptions of snake pits where the Antichrist would throw me alive if I missed the Rapture.
The version of me from 2019 would’ve had a full-blown panic attack and burst into tears, so while this is hardly ideal, it is better.
As an example of how complex the fragmentation caused by complex trauma can be: earlier this year, I got the chance to meet someone in person with whom I’d been long-distance friends for years. I was completely disassociated for the first four hours or so. I watched and listened to myself interact, very much like my friend does during tornado warnings.
Why? Obviously, my life wasn’t in potential danger, as in a tornado.
Unlike the museum scenario, this wasn’t about terror of being threatened by physical danger, but anxiety of emotional danger. My childhood was full of brutal, humiliating rejections that shaped the fragment of me that struggles to believe I’m lovable.
Meeting this friend, I was simultaneously ecstatic — living a long-held dream — and terrified she’d reject me. I was consciously afraid, going into it, that she would flee my presence as quickly as possible and that I’d never speak to her again.
The conflict between those emotions triggered dissociation. Humans aren’t built to hold opposite beliefs (e.g., “I’m lovable” and “I’m an unlovable freak”) or to expect opposite outcomes.
Dissociation is how the brain resolves this kind of fragmentation, pulling away from the impossible conflict to maintain some semblance of equilibrium.
My Hypothesis
I posit that social media turns most of us into the worst version of ourselves because it does, under the cloak of anonymity, something unique.
It creates and facilitates a situation where, in healthy people, a negative “mode”—or, in less healthy people, a destructive fragment—can operate freely, without restraint or challenge, and often with lavish dopamine rewards.
Social media not only allows these negative fragments to flourish—it rewards and amplifies them. Over time, this persona can overshadow our real selves, fracturing our identity further.
So far, I’ve focused on the positive “modes” of healthy people, to establish the infrastructure of psychological compartmentalization.
But even healthy people have negative modes, too.
Take a healthy person who enjoys snarky dunking on Twitter, particularly targeting political enemies. They might quote-tweet a politician’s gaffe with a clever but cutting remark, knowing it will earn them likes and retweets.
While this behavior may not disrupt their core identity, it taps into a combative, validation-seeking mode that social media rewards. Over time, they may find this mode activated more frequently, perhaps even outside their usual character.
For a fragmented person, the situation can escalate. Instead of dipping into snark occasionally, they may feel consumed by it. A destructive fragment—rooted in unresolved anger or feelings of powerlessness—can take over entirely. They become trapped in this mode, unable to disengage, as social media’s dopamine-driven rewards reinforce the fragment’s dominance.
Those of you who followed me on Twitter—which I’ve been off since mid-2022—probably recognize that I’m describing myself in this latter example. Twitter absolutely served as this sort of mechanism for me.
You may also have guessed—correctly—that I believe many, many more people to be psychologically fragmented than most people who understand the idea of psychological fragmentation probably think—and thus social media is especially destructive for a much larger portion of the population than might be guessed at first.
It certainly was for me, but I’m not the only one.
Most of you can probably name someone whose online presence is defined by terrifying anger—someone you’d dread being married to, working with, or co-parenting with.
And yet part of the reason you follow them is because, in many cases, their fury makes sense. Their sense of moral violation feels uncomfortably accurate, even if their anger is darker and more intense than you’re comfortable with.
Cynicism, snark, and dunking are all anger-adjacent. But they inhabit the smug, superior neighborhood of Anger Town, not the blind-with-fury ghetto.
These behaviors are even more destructive than pure rage, because they’re infinitely easier to rationalize.
I think often about the meme: “You don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don’t.” On the surface, I agree—journalists, many of whom still pretend to be objective, get away with too much.
But I also find the meme horrifying.
Why? Because I smugly and arrogantly—yes, I can own that—regard myself as superior to journalists. I know something about mathematics, a field that’s real, tangible, and rooted in objective reality. My agenda around mathematics is laudable and easy to own: to help as many people as possible become competent, even enjoy it.
In contrast, journalists like those moderating the 2024 VP debate engage in obvious, egregious, partisanship-based advocacy. And they either don’t see it or can’t admit it. Their dishonesty disgusts me.
But who in the everloving fuck am I to consider myself superior to anyone?
I constantly learn new things about myself, often things I should have seen years earlier. I regularly have the humbling experience of having my therapist point out a fact about myself as obvious as the color of the sky — something I just missed.
The smug, superior, arrogant jackass who loves dunking on journalists is not remotely who I want to be.
Most journalists, perhaps all of them, honestly believe they’re doing the right thing, even when they lie. I don’t know what that means, but it has to mean something.
I, someone who has fucked up royally an uncountable number of times when I thought I was doing the right thing, want to be the kind of person to whom it means something.
Social media is a petri dish for behaviors like mine.
It doesn’t encourage nuance—it isolates these toxic fragments, amplifies them, and nurtures them with algorithmic reinforcement.
The result? Not only are we rewarded for skipping the difficult moral nuance of considering others’ humanity, we are actively trained to turn this avoidance into a skill set.
Why is social media so effective at amplifying these behaviors? I propose that it combines anonymity, algorithmic reinforcement, and psychological fragmentation—both the traditional sort and what I call “emotional whiplash”—to uniquely activate and reward these darker aspects of ourselves.
Emotional Whiplash
Emotional whiplash occurs on many types of social media, but I have the most insight into Twitter, so I’ll use that as my example. To define my term: emotional whiplash refers to the rapid and extreme shifts in emotional states caused by consuming diverse and conflicting content in quick succession.
Twitter is a powerfully fragmenting medium. In even a ten-minute stint, a high-interaction account might respond to five people posting about good news and five people posting about bad or even tragic news; encounter three stories about genocide or other genuinely outrageous situations; view two funny or heartwarming videos; and see a couple of insider jokes and pop culture references. One can hit every emotion on the scale from rage to joy easily, and in a busy day on Twitter, might cycle through these emotions multiple times. Constant emotional whiplash is the Twitter norm, not the exception.
In the chaos of emotional whiplash, social media subtly positions users as the central figures of their own fragmented universe. Each reaction reinforces a self-centered perspective, feeding latent narcissism as users perceive the world as revolving around their responses. The only way to navigate Twitter without experiencing emotional whiplash would be to numb oneself, not actually feeling anything about the words, images, and videos you see.
But emotional numbness isn't a healthy state either—which is why a traumatized, fragmented person’s brain so often defaults to it when triggered.
For people like me, who are deeply fragmented and still working on unifying our sense of self, this emotional chaos can be especially destructive. Emotional whiplash exacerbates fragmentation, pulling us between conflicting feelings and fragments of identity, making it harder to feel integrated or grounded.
Emotional whiplash can occur in non-toxic ways. For example, listening to uncurated music on the radio for a couple of hours might evoke a full range of emotions, from joy to rage.
However, the key difference is that these emotions are personal and self-contained, focused on your own experience. You’re not interacting directly with the singer or songwriter, nor is there any interpersonal dynamic or relationship to navigate.
Additionally, there’s a predictability to the experience—no unexpected interpersonal triggers or surprises disrupt the flow. No algorithms manipulate you and there’s no need to consider another person, so the experience doesn’t feed narcissism.
But emotional whiplash doesn’t just affect people like me—it can also affect healthy people who have negative "modes" or "ego states" that are normally well-regulated. Twitter provides the perfect environment for these negative modes to surface and intensify.
This effect is intensified by the stickiness of negative emotions. Content that provokes outrage, fear, or disgust captures attention more quickly and holds it for longer than positive content. People are more likely to share, comment on, or engage with posts that elicit strong negative emotions than with those that make them feel joy or contentment.
Even healthy people, who might normally balance this negativity with other modes, can find themselves increasingly consumed by outrage or cynicism, as these emotions dominate their time on the platform.
This dynamic also fosters a subtle but pervasive narcissism. The constant cycling through emotional extremes positions the user at the center of a reactive universe: every post, comment, or interaction feels designed to elicit a response from you.
This reinforces the idea that your opinions, reactions, and feelings are the most important metric—fueling a self-centered perspective that can be hard to shake offline.
Algorithmic Reinforcement
Negative emotions dominate social media because they demand resolution.
Outrage calls for justice, fear calls for safety, and disgust calls for rejection. Algorithms exploit this innate human drive to "fix" negative feelings, ensuring we keep scrolling, engaging, and feeding the machine.
In the context of emotional whiplash, this creates a toxic cycle for everyone. Even when positive content surfaces—a funny meme or a heartwarming video—it often functions as a brief reprieve, sandwiched between content designed to hook us through outrage or despair.
For fragmented people, this reinforces emotional instability.
For healthy people, it overdevelops their negative modes, creating a lopsided sense of self that can bleed into their offline lives.
Ultimately, emotional whiplash isn’t just a byproduct of social media; it’s part of the design. Algorithms and engagement-driven infrastructure rely on it to keep us coming back.
For healthy people, this may lead to an erosion of emotional balance and an over-reliance on negative ego states.
For fragmented people like me, it deepens preexisting wounds, making integration harder and amplifying the worst aspects of our inner conflicts.
Some More Negative Complications
Being active on social media—once you’ve developed a high-interaction “platform,” anyway—requires coping mechanisms.
This could be an entire essay in and of itself, but I’ll give you just two examples.
Assumption of Good Faith: once you have a busy or active account, assuming good faith becomes a luxury you can’t afford—unless you have 15–20 hours a week to maintain your platform. Even if, like me, you genuinely enjoy exchanging ideas and perspectives with people who see the world differently, bringing that kind of wide-eyed innocence to social media will get you eaten alive.
Even if you somehow manage to dodge trolls, bots, sex pests, would-be stalkers, and other problem children, life still happens. You have to eat, sleep, and work. You simply can’t engage with everyone. And when a would-be interlocutor feels hurt by your lack of response, fights will inevitably break out among your followers. Some will defend your choices, while others criticize you. You’ll want both to thank your defenders and to stay out of the drama entirely, but either choice has consequences. You’ll deal with those, too.
Over time, assuming that most would-be interlocutors are engaging in bad faith becomes the safer, less time-consuming option. But it comes at a cost. It’s a slow, insidious form of soul-destruction. It erodes your humanity in ways I’m still trying to articulate, both to myself and to my therapist. (If I ever figure out how, I’ll write about it.)
For now, I’ll just say this: on social media, cynicism is a survival mechanism, but it comes with a massive price tag.
Parasocial Relationships: parasocial relationships, a term coined long before the internet, originally described one-sided relationships with celebrities. In these relationships, one person invests emotional energy, time, and interest in someone who is largely unaware of their existence. Historically, the non-celebrity might bridge this gap through fan letters or attending an autograph signing.
In the era of social media, influencers have reshaped parasocial relationships. The persona—the influencer—is often more aware of their audience’s existence than a traditional celebrity. They might be Twitter mutuals with their fans or respond to emails sent to a public address. But the dynamic remains largely one-sided. The persona cannot reciprocate the emotional investment of their audience.
Parasocial relationships are fertile ground for narcissism, both for influencers and their audiences. For the influencer, the constant attention and perceived intimacy can inflate their sense of self-importance. For the audience, the illusion of mutual connection can create an overinvestment in how they’re perceived by someone who may never truly know them.
Both dynamics play into a social media ecosystem that rewards superficial engagement and ego-driven interaction.
At its peak, my Twitter account thrust me into parasocial relationships with many people who didn’t realize that’s what we had. I’d sometimes receive long, heartfelt emails of contrition about a Twitter spat. And I couldn’t answer them. The only honest reply would have been cruel:
"Thank you for your seven paragraphs of reflection about our argument. Unfortunately, my Twitter life is so crowded and chaotic that I have no idea who you are or what we argued about. It simply didn’t register with me. Please send your handle so I can unblock you. I’m sorry that something that deeply upset you meant nothing to me."
I never, ever wanted to be someone who had that kind of relationship with even one person, much less many. Limiting my social media to responding to Substack comments or periodic stints on Notes has helped, but it hasn’t eliminated the problem entirely. I still occasionally get comments from people who believe they know me better than I know myself—people who analyze my psychology or emotions based on fragmented glimpses of my life online.
Correcting their misconceptions does nothing but reinforce their belief that they truly understand me.
These interactions have dramatically decreased since leaving Twitter, but they haven’t disappeared. The structure of social media, even in reduced form, still encourages these distorted, one-sided dynamics.
Real-World Consequences
It’s easy to point to some of the real-world consequences of social media. One glaring example is the dramatic rise in childhood anxiety disorders, paired with the disappearance of kids playing outside.
What did we expect? We handed children highly addictive dopamine factories, accessible only through the painstaking curation of their own obsessive self-focus. Social media doesn’t just discourage kids from engaging with the physical world; it trains them to view their lives as content, their worth as engagement metrics, and their experiences as material for an ever-watchful audience.
But the consequences aren’t limited to children. Adults are shaped by these dynamics too, often in subtler but equally harmful ways.
Take women going out to lunch. What was once a time for venting—candidly sharing frustrations, gossiping, or even just joking in private—is now fraught with caution. Anything said could be repeated, misinterpreted, or weaponized on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or elsewhere. The instinct to offer in-person emotional support is overshadowed by the fear of being exposed or judged, and venting has migrated online.
There, it often morphs into something performative. The anonymity or semi-anonymity of the internet allows grievances to spill out, but almost always in politically charged, virtue-signaling ways. Instead of truly supporting one another, the focus shifts to crafting an audience-friendly narrative of outrage or righteousness.
Men face their own version of this. Consider the decline of “poker night” or similar gatherings, where middle-class men could let their guard down, tell off-color jokes, and gripe about their jobs, their wives, or the pressures of life. The risk of being seen as inappropriate or of violating someone’s sensibilities—even in a private setting—has made these spaces rarer.
Social media doesn’t just displace these gatherings; it replaces them with a constant, public performance of identity that leaves little room for messy, honest human connection.
Beyond the erosion of personal relationships, social media has also affected how we interact with our communities. Local issues—school board elections, neighborhood disputes, or shared concerns—are increasingly filtered through a nationalized lens. Instead of engaging with neighbors face-to-face, we debate with strangers online, often projecting national politics onto local problems. The result? Polarization deepens, and opportunities for genuine collaboration shrink.
Even our downtime is reshaped by social media. Where we once had hobbies, we now have "content creation." Baking, gardening, or playing music no longer serve as private sources of joy but as potential material for TikTok videos or Instagram posts. This performative aspect strips activities of their restorative qualities, turning leisure into yet another source of anxiety.
And yes, I do it too. I enjoy writing and find it to be both the most natural and most effective way to clarify my own thoughts, but the temptation to make everything in my life into an essay is a present one. I had the best Thanksgiving weekend of my life, with several powerfully memorable experiences, and am consciously choosing not to write any essays about it. I am also, at this moment, undertaking a profound challenge of which only my closest friends are aware and about which I will not write (for publication) for a long time, if ever — because I am trying to break away from even being adjacent to these dynamics myself.
These real-world consequences reflect the broader trend: social media doesn’t just distort our interactions online—it seeps into every corner of our lives, subtly reshaping how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. The cost is not just a loss of privacy or innocence but a profound erosion of the authenticity and spontaneity that once defined human connection.
The Worst Versions of Ourselves
Social media creates an environment where our worst tendencies thrive. By exploiting the psychological vulnerabilities inherent in all of us—whether through anonymity, algorithmic reinforcement, or emotional whiplash—it pushes both healthy individuals and those with deeper struggles toward behaviors and emotional states that we’d rather not recognize in ourselves.
For healthy people, platforms like Twitter encourage the overdevelopment of negative modes such as snark, cynicism, and a combative mindset. These behaviors are not only normalized but rewarded, creating a feedback loop that can erode emotional balance and bleed into offline life.
For fragmented people like me, social media amplifies the internal conflicts and emotional chaos that we are already struggling to resolve, deepening fragmentation and making healing even harder.
Social media distorts not only our view of ourselves but also of others, especially those we perceive as belonging to an “outgroup.” These platforms thrive on polarizing content, feeding us curated glimpses of others’ lives, beliefs, and behaviors that often paint them in the worst possible light—especially, and most dangerously, as avatars for whatever “group” we may perceive them to belong to.
The algorithms are designed to prioritize outrage and division, nudging us to see the “other side” not as complex, flawed human beings but as caricatures: ignorant, malicious, or irredeemable. This dehumanization deepens existing divides, hardens biases, and makes genuine dialogue nearly impossible.
When every disagreement feels like a moral battleground and every mistake is ammunition, it becomes harder to approach anyone—even those we might have otherwise connected with—with compassion or understanding.
This distortion doesn’t just harm our perception of the "other"—it ricochets back, reinforcing the same combative tendencies within ourselves.
It trains us to react, to vilify, to escalate, creating cycles of conflict that make everything worse. The divide widens, empathy erodes, and we retreat further into echo chambers where our biases are validated, our anger stoked, and our ability to see nuance extinguished.
In the end, the worst versions of ourselves are not born in isolation—they are cultivated in environments designed to exploit our fears and insecurities. Social media gives these tendencies fertile ground to grow, trapping us in cycles of self-righteousness, disconnection, and perpetual conflict.
To break free, we must look beyond the screens that magnify our worst instincts and nurture the relationships, spaces, and habits that draw out the best in us.
For most of us, this means prioritizing “meatspace” — being around other humans in person and connecting in ways that we evolved to connect. To share meals. To hug. To laugh. To experience companionable silence and the simple comfort of knowing another human being is around.
Only then can we hope to rebuild the bridges that social media seems so intent on burning.
Conclusion: The Medium Is the Message
“The medium is the message,” wrote McLuhan, and he was right.
More right than he probably knew.
The structural dynamics of social media—its relentless stream of content, its exploitation of negative emotions, and its reinforcement of parasocial relationships and assumptions of bad faith—in and of themselves create a toxic cocktail that traps us in cycles of outrage, validation-seeking, and disconnection. It nurtures behaviors that feel justifiable in the moment but ultimately degrade our humanity, isolating us from the empathy, patience, and nuance we need to navigate relationships and the world at large.
The irony, of course, is that social media also promises connection and community. Yet, in its design, it fractures our sense of self and isolates us emotionally, even as we engage with thousands of others.
At its core, social media doesn’t just fragment or amplify the worst in us—it distorts how we see others as well. It offers a mirror in which we see not our authentic selves, but a curated version that garners the most attention.
At the same time, it feeds us equally curated versions of others: polished, performative, and incomplete. These glimpses lack the depth and complexity of real human experience, leaving us with exaggerated perceptions of success, failure, or even malice in those we encounter online.
The more we rely on this fragmented reflection—of ourselves and others—for validation or judgment, the more distorted our understanding of connection becomes, pushing us toward narcissism and suspicion, and away from genuine relationships with other humans — not online personas, not Discord avatars, but actual flawed humans.
Complex beings, with strengths and weaknesses.
People who annoy and delight us.
People we can love enough to take a bullet for and also, occasionally, want to slap.
It feeds our fragments, turns them into personas, and rewards their performance, leaving us farther from authenticity than when we started.
And the cloak of anonymity removes all, or nearly all, motivation to even try to be better.
What’s the effort toward virtue, up against a goddamn dopamine flood in your pocket, accessible at will?
Perhaps the only way to escape becoming the worst version of ourselves is to step away—to recognize the toll, disengage from the cycle, and invest in spaces and relationships that nurture our whole selves.
For me, that has meant letting go of Twitter and limiting my social media presence. For others, it might look different. But as long as the structure of social media remains what it is, the risk of its shaping us into something darker and smaller than we are will always be present.
Social media may not force us to be our worst selves, but it gives those selves every opportunity to flourish.
To escape, we must step away from the platforms that turn our lives into performances and invest in spaces that nurture authenticity and connection—places where we can be whole, not merely fragmented reflections of ourselves.
As this essay touches on related topics I’ve written about before, there are a couple of paragraphs where I plagiarized myself by copy and pasting from two previous essays.
This is what “triggered” means when used in the proper, clinical sense — not the colloquial sense of “made mildly uncomfortable”.