Were you not young before/after the start of the internet? Not trying to be snarky, it’s more trying to understand perspective.
I could have been MAGA, no question. Here’s my anecdote: (edit: too lazy to correct so please don’t pay close attention to the tense of my words here, I was partially speaking from the perspective of being a kid again but I didn’t stay consistent)
- been a loner irl. Not that many friends
- most of my friends are online
- most of my friends say offensive stuff and while I don’t really mean things (at first) I want to fit in
- this can spiral pretty easily with a bunch of kids. And it did. I’ve said my fair share of atrocious things online that I wish I could take back
- as a youngster, 20+ years ago, as a loner/nerd if I’m not playing games, I’m (probably) watching YouTube or anime. Rarely hangin with friends
- now as someone who’s book smart(well, on some things, ofc), but especially at this point has absolutely 0 like street smarts & real people skills? Hooked into conspiracies.
I grew up in a diverse area, so I’ve really never believed in racist stuff. Those kind of conspiracies I used to just handwave the racism stuff away cause it wasn’t the important stuff to me that I did kind of believe in. I literally even used to watch some of Alex Jones conspiracy videos.
Really easy to get lost in this crap as a teenager alone at 4am.
Like I said I grew up in a diverse area, and in one of my first real relationships, I got a lot of pushback about certain things (I was kinda blue lives matter for a bit for example) and when that ended, one of the big things I took from it was I wanted to be a more accepting person, and I’ve been an increasingly-raging leftist ever since.
With the rising loneliness epidemic (which actually extends to both genders - EVERYONE is increasingly isolated) I can only imagine this sort of story is increasingly common. And not everyone comes to the same conclusions about wanting to be more accepting, etc.
I was very lucky to go through those experiences and learn what I did from it. There’s probably another universe where I instead got increasingly angry & further into all those things - from the cruel & crass words to the conspiracies - and am wearing a red hat
🤮🤮 at the thought of that
Haha I tried to be… mostly vague
I’m not sure either. It’s really hard for me to come up with things since it took a breakup for me to WANT to change, and of course I’m lucky that it’s for the positive.
I really hope it doesn’t take such powerful inciting incidents for a significant portion of them to change how they feel.