Are you someone who hides behind a pseudonym while demanding absolute ideological purity, lashing out at anyone who doesn’t echo the exact phrasing you’ve decided is righteous today about an issue that does not actually impact you?
Do you pounce from issue to issue, showing little sustained care until a social media mob hands you a new script?
If you’re older than, say, 25, this isn’t just youth or childhood’s last gasp. It’s a pattern of behavior that’s sabotaging the very movements you seem to care about.
Clean Up or Skill Up.
As Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.” If you actually want change, learn the systems you’re trying to influence. Read more. Engage with people doing the work. There are countless free, credible sources to help you deepen your knowledge. Smart people do their homework—and you’re smart enough.
You’re Not Helping.
Eric Hoffer warned us that “the true believer is everywhere on the march.” But belief without strategy is just noise. Ask yourself why is it that nobody with your exact position is shaping policy right now? Is it really because they’re all sellouts—or could it be that you’ve mistaken alienation for activism?
If You Can’t Be Known, You Can’t Be Heard.
Movements are made by people brave enough to show their faces. If you engage only through anonymous rage, expect to be ignored by those doing the hard work publicly. Worse, as Hannah Arendt observed, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.”
When you act like a parody of activism, you feed the far-right narrative that progressivism is irrational and dangerous.
Here’s What Actually Happens When You’re a Jerk:
People trying to move the needle avoid engaging with you. Not because you’re wrong, but because:
A) You’re down a purity spiral with no off-ramp.
B) You attack the innocent and powerless, making yourself a liability.
C) It’s indecent to call you out mid-crisis or to kick down, so we wait for the world to do it for us.
And yes. if your dream is to someday hold a position or have a voice where your words shape outcomes, acting badly ensures your dream dies quietly.
Final Thought
There is probably no “shadow ban.” You’re just being muted by the very people you wish would listen. Because rage without insight doesn’t lead movements—it ends them.
As an engineering student years ago an important and humbling lesson I was taught is that “Perfect Is The Enemy Of Possible“.
Note that I am not speaking to/about persons in a mental health crisis. People who are unwell should be helped.
Morgane Oger 
Leave a comment