To follow up on what I said upthread about the rat king as cult…
When you put too much of your personal life onto social media—Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, whatever—your life is left open for commentary. Those comments can really get to you if they are your only source of social interaction, and before you know it, you’re not even living your own life anymore; you’re living a life someone else is telling you to live. This type of pressure isn’t explicit either, it can come from a desire to make your peers like you or continue to like you. It still gives you that same dopamine rush, and if you’re used to not having a lot of positive social interactions—like so many lolcows do, because of autism, social anxiety, or general weirdness—you do not want to lose that rush. So you compromise more and more of yourself, unless you’re living a life that you barely recognize anymore.
Lots of people talk about how drug addiction can mess you up, and I think this follows a similar pattern of destroying your life in pursuit of relief from your own demons. It’s sad. But the worst part about this lifestyle is how the people in it actively drag others in, and how they try to stop them from escaping by using emotional extortion. While a lot of them aren’t consciously aware that they are doing this, there are some who are and do it deliberately to feed their own ego and sense of self-importance. These are the ones who are truly dangerous.
