I Don't Feel Real Anymore
Paranoid Beginnings
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by conspiracy theories. I loved reading about reptilian aliens, inter-dimensional Sasquatches, and UFOs/UAPs. It was all funny to me. Nothing particularly serious. Just dumb stuff I'd read about at night, laughing to myself, wondering of aliens really do exist and why do they apparently like strawberry ice cream?
But, as I grew older, I started to get more interested in the deeper chasms of conspiracy.
I was fascinated by all these wild claims of deep, worldwide, interconnected webs of deceit. Of so-called "secret" groups that were hidden in the shadows, lurking and pulling the strings that influenced our world, yet put symbols and references everywhere for some reason? How would any of this even work? Why did it seem like every theory was paradoxical in nature? Often at odds with another popular conspiracy, sometimes completely antithetical.
I began to wonder about the why and the how. I wondered why people believed in them. Wondered about how conspiracies can bring about real-world complications. How can something like Pizzagate and QAnon propagate so fast and wide? And how could they bring about real-world actions? What drove people to act on these beliefs?
I think these questions propelled me to go deeper in the inner workings of conspiracies.
Internet Interzone
I kind of have a love-hate relationship with the internet.
On the one hand, the internet is amazing. It's a giant web information at our fingertips. Full of different strata of information. Big wide open ecosystems where everyone can interact with one another and post their own stuff. And there's also small, weird corners of the internet, where people try to reclaim some sort of lost feeling or semblance of an older age. There's a little bit of everything for everyone.
And yet, I also hate it. Truly. As someone with an interest in the twilight world of conspiracies, you see a lot of stupid, often dangerous, material.
Every event has their own alternate realities propped up by bad actors. Groups or individuals with a vested interest in manipulating public perception and rewriting history in real-time.
You see a lot of this with mass shootings and events that affect large swaths of the population, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. People will create false narratives that attempt to "explain" the event. There were multiple shooters, it was a false-flag attack, crisis actors were involved, X group was involved, so was Y group, no it wasn't X and Y it was actually Z, it's all a PSYOP, and so on.
I would see this and wonder what the heck was going on. Why was there this thriving ecosystem of mis-and-disinformation? And so I dived into it. I read and read material written and propagated by these connoisseurs of conspiracy. And I hated it. It made me feel awful. There was so much hatred and venom. It's like these people lapped up at the opportunity to spew false narratives to muddy the waters and instill uncertainty.
(Un)real and (Un)certain
At a certain point, I began having these odd feelings that I could only describe as "unreal." I would feel like nothing really existed. This would be in reference to the environment around me and sometimes included myself.
I'm pretty sure that my interest in conspiracism might've exacerbated these feelings. I've had them for a while. In fact, I can pinpoint the moment when I first experienced this. It was after the Sandy Hook shooting. It was the first time where an event truly shocked me.
And then of course COVID-19 hit and it was like an explosion. I noticed a lot of people had similar feelings due to quarantine. I felt it more through this ecosystem of mis-and-disinformation. It didn't help that my interests tended to veer towards this topics. I'm very interested in conspiracies, obviously, but I'm also interested in politics and world events. These three topics create the perfect trifecta for unreality and uncertainty.
I didn't feel very real anymore.
These days I occasionally get these same feelings. It usually passes pretty quick, but it still leaves a mark in my mind. Now, I noticed it leaves a sort of "fingerprint" on everything I do. Everything I think about. Everything I write about.
In any case, my interest in conspiracies and the extended world behind it will most certainly be a life-long endeavor. Most of my papers for school has been about this web of topics. In any case, I need to be cautious. I recognized that researching/studying/writing about these topics wasn't exactly good for my mental health.
I don't really have any prescient or original analysis of all of this. I don't set out to create one. I just wanted to write down some thoughts. I don't think I was able to write about everything I wanted to write about, but it's kind of hard to put to words.