CD34
Future o’pry
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2024
- Posts
- 7,711
- Reputation
- 10,458
thoughts after spending years status/socialmaxxing
Most people treat socializing like it’s automatically “healthy.” It isn’t. Past a certain threshold, excessive social exposure is literally a psychological pathogen: it hijacks your identity, rewires your reward system, and turns your life into an audience-performance. This is how you lose
When you socialize too much, you stop living from internal preference and start living from external appraisal.
You become hyper-conscious of how others see you. And once that happens, you’re not optimizing your life for peace, mastery, meaning, or even pleasure …you’re optimizing it for perception management.
That’s emotional sickness
When you’re constantly around people (or constantly performing for them), your brain learns a simple rule: My safety = how I’m perceived
So your emotional baseline becomes dependent on approvals, reactions, inclusion/exclusion, micro-status in the groups…That’s being governed
Not to mention that when you socialize too much, you lose your “internal signal”.
When you socialize too much you don’t just get anxious — you lose your internal signal. You stop living from first-person experience and start living from the audience’s point of view. At that point your brain isn’t asking “what do I actually want?” anymore, it’s asking “what version of me gets rewarded?” and your personality becomes a performance optimized for reactions
That’s where the self-lies start. You do things for approval/status/acceptance, but instead of admitting that motive, you rationalize it into a fake identity unconsciously: “Nah I like this,” “this is my vibe,” “these are my people,” “I’m having fun,” “I’m just living.” It’s not one big lie, it’s a thousand micro-lies per week, and after enough repetition you don’t even remember you’re coping — you think it’s you. Your mind prefers a coherent story over an honest one, so it rewrites your motives to avoid dissonance
Then social feedback becomes your mirror, and it’s a distorted mirror. Validation makes you feel real, indifference makes you feel empty, disagreement makes you feel threatened, because your identity isn’t anchored internally anymore. You’re running on external GPS: if the signal drops, you don’t know where you are. Over time you can’t even tell what’s genuine: do you like that thing, or do you like how it makes you look? Are you motivated, or just chasing approval? Are you attracted, or just chasing a status narrative? Everything is filtered through “how does this play socially?”
That’s the real sickness: not just wasting time or money, but becoming a stranger to yourself. Once you can’t distinguish your real preferences from your social persona, you become easy to steer by groups, by trends, by anyone with stronger frame. Emotional autonomy is rare precisely because most people never notice when the mask becomes the face
Most people treat socializing like it’s automatically “healthy.” It isn’t. Past a certain threshold, excessive social exposure is literally a psychological pathogen: it hijacks your identity, rewires your reward system, and turns your life into an audience-performance. This is how you lose
When you socialize too much, you stop living from internal preference and start living from external appraisal.
You become hyper-conscious of how others see you. And once that happens, you’re not optimizing your life for peace, mastery, meaning, or even pleasure …you’re optimizing it for perception management.
That’s emotional sickness
When you’re constantly around people (or constantly performing for them), your brain learns a simple rule: My safety = how I’m perceived
So your emotional baseline becomes dependent on approvals, reactions, inclusion/exclusion, micro-status in the groups…That’s being governed
Not to mention that when you socialize too much, you lose your “internal signal”.
When you socialize too much you don’t just get anxious — you lose your internal signal. You stop living from first-person experience and start living from the audience’s point of view. At that point your brain isn’t asking “what do I actually want?” anymore, it’s asking “what version of me gets rewarded?” and your personality becomes a performance optimized for reactions
That’s where the self-lies start. You do things for approval/status/acceptance, but instead of admitting that motive, you rationalize it into a fake identity unconsciously: “Nah I like this,” “this is my vibe,” “these are my people,” “I’m having fun,” “I’m just living.” It’s not one big lie, it’s a thousand micro-lies per week, and after enough repetition you don’t even remember you’re coping — you think it’s you. Your mind prefers a coherent story over an honest one, so it rewrites your motives to avoid dissonance
Then social feedback becomes your mirror, and it’s a distorted mirror. Validation makes you feel real, indifference makes you feel empty, disagreement makes you feel threatened, because your identity isn’t anchored internally anymore. You’re running on external GPS: if the signal drops, you don’t know where you are. Over time you can’t even tell what’s genuine: do you like that thing, or do you like how it makes you look? Are you motivated, or just chasing approval? Are you attracted, or just chasing a status narrative? Everything is filtered through “how does this play socially?”
That’s the real sickness: not just wasting time or money, but becoming a stranger to yourself. Once you can’t distinguish your real preferences from your social persona, you become easy to steer by groups, by trends, by anyone with stronger frame. Emotional autonomy is rare precisely because most people never notice when the mask becomes the face
