The Left Internet made me vain and melted my brain

The selfie is the enemy of self-esteem.

Mean Girls, 2003

Content warning for leftist readers: this is a critique of Internet feminism.

I spent fifteen years highly active on Facebook, starting in 2005, and ten on Instagram. Over that time, it’s impossible to calculate how many hours of my life I lost to scrolling, vanity, and constant fear of missing out. In 2020, ironically due to a falling out with people of my political tribe, I finally deleted everything and resisted the urge to post again until I had gained control over my brain. I’ve succeeded more than I’ve failed in the above endeavor, and my life and mental health are better off.

The analytical ground concerning the ill effects of social media on the individual and society is well-covered so I will not venture there, and will instead show how my battle illustrates a wider rot in the culture that saps women’s self-esteem and confidence, leaving the whole culture impoverished as we try, in vain, to feel better about ourselves.

Discipline and self-control as antidotes to a fragile self

At some point, the concept of discipline entirely fell out of favor. Perhaps this is the legacy of Michel Foucault and his analyses painting the entire concept as political oppression at worst or individual oppression at best. Or, we associate discipline with the nuclear family, which has been declared a tool of patriarchal domination.

But I have found discipline essential to a life well lived. This is the one aspect of mental wellness on which I will not compromise, even if it’s a struggle. A woman recently asked me how I got my mental health in order. When I shared with her that it was about discipline, I got a meandering response about how we all can do it however is best for us. I disagree. What is best for everyone is establishing some of the discipline that modern society has told us is somehow in contradiction to personal freedom. I spent a decade in therapy and psychiatry, and what solved depression, in the end, was establishing discipline and holding myself accountable more than others ever would.

No individual or indeed, democratic society, can survive a total collapse of personal discipline, because without it there is no cultivation of personal health. With an absence of personal health, how can one positively contribute to social change? No doubt people will disagree, but I’m not budging on this because it saved my life. My ability to think deeply returned once I understood the importance of personal discipline. Discipline in your life is the actual path to freedom because it begets everything else you want, and anything worth having requires hard work.

On emotions, women, and the Internet

The internet has been shown to manipulate emotions. I have always been a logically driven person with a lot of feelings. Women are more encouraged by contemporary society to live a life driven by emotion (third-wave feminism has somehow centered emotion as a “way of knowing” about the world, which it emphatically proved not to be for me). This is despite the concerns of the first two waves of feminism about women being painted as hysterically emotional - we have fallen through the looking glass on that one.

However, emotional reactions to external events and people’s actions are inherently untrustworthy, a lesson I’ve learned repeatedly. One’s first emotions are almost always to be revisited, as I found while working out of my depressive fog. Ironically, the fog and the political moment made it difficult to see myself as a person who has depression rather than a depressed person. Even though leftist language would describe me as the former, it reinforces the latter as an identity.

Not only are more women under forty in therapy, but the language of the therapy couch is an Internet sub-culture, particularly on Instagram by way of Tumblr. The leftist language encouraging self-victimization online mixes with the neuroticism encouraged by talk therapy in women to create a, ahem, toxic mix of ideas that sapped my sense of agency and confidence and taught me that events happen to me rather than my being in control of my life (no one is fully in control, but we’ve gone too far in the direction of assuming we have no control).

Feminism has an interestingly tense relationship with emotions and agency. On the one hand, women's emotionality was used to justify economic, legal, and domestic subjugation, so the first and second-wave feminists took care to eschew the impression that women are hysterically emotional by emphasizing a collective, rational demand for independence and equality. This demand for our agency was a step in the right direction because emotion-driven demands are dead on arrival with men, whether the situation be interpersonal or political. I’ve never gotten anyone to do something willingly through tears and have seen publicly aired tears cause interpersonal strife. This is because tears are weapons, and algorithms encourage using them.

Why are tears weapons?

A woman crying need not be sad or wronged. She could just be angry and frustrated and the emotions come out as tears. Tears and being wronged have been linked, even though they need not be. Sometimes, you haven’t been wronged but you’re just sad or frustrated. Emotions are by definition irrational, as is crying, but the irrationality doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel or cry.

There can be rational reasons for crying, such as having been wronged, but the crying itself is not a rational, logical response (and that’s ok!).

Fourth-wave feminism, however, has used emotions and tears as avenues for political action. What we see as mobs on Twitter is emotion run amok. Anecdotally, I suspect there’s a pattern of leftist Twitter mobs and the general negative sentiment being driven by women (and the therapy/leftist subculture) because men simply aren’t socialized to act this way. Women are, but I thought feminism would have discouraged such behavior because this emotionality was used as a rationalization to keep women out of full social participation (I don’t care to comment on right-wing Twitter; they are not my concern).

Another way to think about reaching for logical reasoning over emotion is that self-control should matter. Self-control is associated with conservatives, and liberals ignore it as a value, it seems because it is incompatible with the notion of liberalism (and feminism) as infinite choice.

Men often become alarmed when women cry. Our partners may be alarmed because they don’t want us to be sad. But when it comes to the public political arena, I’ve seen women who should know better use emotions as weapons to get men and women behind their (often false) assertions.

The feminist argument should be that women cry, as everyone does, and there’s nothing special about women crying as there should not be anything special about men doing the same. Crying shouldn’t be taken as a sign of irrational emotions running amok on its face.

But, those tears can also be weaponized, and I have both seen others doing so and done it myself, to everyone’s detriment, and it’s the ultimate move to destroy your opponent from, ironically, a self-disempowered position.

The same people who denounce capitalism are addicted to the freedom of choice provided by such a society - indeed, I see women on Instagram waxing about how feminism is about choice. But then everyone has the choice to also reject this specific kind of feminism which places a premium on emotional display and punishes the kinds of women who would make different choices given another political paradigm.¹

What happened when I stopped subjecting myself to algorithms

When I quit during the pandemic, several changes began simultaneously. My attention span improved, and I read the largest amount of books since I was in graduate school. My concentration at work and in life improved, and today I generally ignore the phone between the hours of 8 and 6 and spend more time talking to my partner in the evening. I cultivated a strong romantic relationship and a more robust social life. I stayed present and began to appreciate the little things. I rediscovered the pleasure of receding to my mind to ruminate on difficult questions about my life and the world.

One of the most significant changes was the desire to seek out opinions contradictory to the ones I developed in the Facebook echo chamber of leftism, and my beliefs are more honed and nuanced, but loosely held with the assumption that they will continue to change as I acquire new information. My mind became more malleable and I started to make stronger connections between seemingly unrelated areas of inquiry, which is why I’m writing this at all.

I rediscovered my love for deep knowledge acquisition from people who have cultivated both discipline and expertise. No one ever produced anything of high value without expertise, which requires discipline.

More crucially, I stopped scrutinizing my appearance constantly as I began to see the phone, and especially the camera, as an enemy. External validation of beauty and intellect became unnecessary, and I saw it for the mirage it is. The persistent insecurity I felt about my position - career, finances, friendships, love - vanished. Not unsurprisingly, my career took off and I finally felt comfortable in my own body, unconstrained by the dominant rhetoric about race and gender. Most importantly, I stopped objectifying myself through Instagram, which we instinctively do every time we post ourselves. We’re imagining how others would see us, and simulate others’ desiring us, and thus we objectify ourselves, opposite of the goal of feminism. The selfie is the enemy of self-esteem.

It was not coincidental that the spiritualism I had cultivated as a child left me as I spent more and more time on the internet, and it kicked into overdrive once I got a smartphone. It was as though I came under the spell of others’ opinions instead of finding my path to a higher meaning and purpose. Now that I’ve returned to Hinduism on my terms, the lessons learned through mythology opened my mind to the cultivation of virtue for the benefit of society as non-attached action (as Krishna exhorts Arjuna to do in the Bhagavad Gita).

But would I have a social death?

As a woman living with depression while being highly attuned to people, the social Internet seemed like a way to engage with them at a healthy distance. Instead, I became lonely and angry because I felt persecuted for my views by my own supposed tribe, and like a social loser without strong real-life friendships and a life far less cool than that of my upper-middle-class peers.

It took perhaps too long to realize that the desire to find a group of like-minded people was, indeed, the source of my misery.

The primary reason I was afraid to leave - would I still have friends? Would I still be able to build a social life without constant knowledge of what my friends were doing through constant documentation? Would people forget about me? Would my long-cultivated ‘network’ fall apart such that I had no one to lean on when I next needed help?

With hindsight, it should not have surprised me that my IRL frequency of socialization increased and had an inverse relationship with time spent on my phone. Having the concentration and time to cultivate the self makes for far better friendships than ones cultivated primarily over the internet. As for knowing what people were doing - it’s overrated. If the effort is made to meet with people in real life, shocker, you can both update each other on your lives like old times before 2007 with a degree of authenticity impossible on the internet.

The final concern was that my ‘social network’ would fade and people would forget about me. I am happy to report that both occurred, but it was a blessing for superficial friendships only maintained through the social internet to fall away. In the aftermath of my social death, I finally could discern real friends from weak ties who turned out to be more acquaintances than friends.

I also had more time for the people with whom I had real relationships, on whom I should have spent the fifteen years’ worth of energy I wasted arguing who are all strangers on the internet (yes, all those ‘friends’ are mostly still strangers). This was the hardest concern to overcome because I have made a handful of true friends through internet interactions. However, the social internet distorts one’s sense of how many friendships can be genuinely maintained, so one has to accept the ‘opportunity cost’ of missing out on new friendships with like-minded people. Acceptance of that fact required facing the fallacy of more always being better, with which we are indoctrinated since birth (and to which women are particularly susceptible).

Algorithmic attention drains, then, are inherently harmful (especially to women) to our higher Self and to the cultivation of true virtue that drives a person to work for the betterment of society. What we think we’re doing online is ‘fighting’ for social justice, when what we’re engaging in is an act of vanity and self-absorption (I’m including myself). On top of this, we easily believe what we see on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and then become hostile to people who disagree with the prevailing views there. This is not a way to live; it isolates you from others, acts like a leech on your attention and concentration, and encourages vanity and self-absorption, all of which are antithetical to living a good life.

It has been shown across a variety of disciplines that the primary contributor to satisfaction in life is relationships. The phone specifically disables the forming of meaningful relationships because you have to be face-to-face, and our natural social instincts are short-circuited because we aren’t so much having a conversation as putting random things out there hoping others interact with them. This is no way to build a real friendship, which is harder work than posting or sending a text. We’ve not evolved to socialize this way, and evolutionary history still matters. The smartphone is a mere seventeen years old, barely a millisecond in the history of humanity.

The bottom line: While we may think we’re doing something by engaging in Internet politics as liberals, we’re mostly just addling our brains with negative emotions and addictive stimuli. This is why it seems, I suspect, that actual political mobilization is impossible. I hypothesize that any political action is more corrupted by the incentives of social media (virality over truth) than helped by it. Additionally, it’s been shown that smartphones and social media are harmful to girls’ and women’s self-esteem and confidence, reason enough to quit. That will require us to have some discipline and fortitude, two qualities that the left has abandoned that never should have been.

1. Having tried to call women out for being irrationally emotional and bullying other women for dissenting, the accusations are usually turned back on me for ‘creating conflict’ and being aggressive though ironically no one would say it directly to me.