The Human Danger of Living a Digital Life

A friend recently told me that one of our oldest friends had vanished. No argument, no warning, just an unfollow, an unfriend, and radio silence.
The only “offense”? She had voted the wrong way.

She wasn’t loud about it. She didn’t post memes, didn’t argue at Thanksgiving, didn’t try to convert anyone.
But her quiet vote was enough to erase decades of friendship.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many conservatives, and even quiet moderates, have watched long-term relationships collapse under the weight of political tension.
It is painful, confusing, and profoundly isolating.

This Isn’t Just About Politics Anymore

When I wrote about this a few months ago, the focus was on the heartbreak of losing friends over a vote.
Now it is bigger than that.

The problem isn’t only what we believe.
It is how we have learned to treat people who believe differently.

Social media has turned emotional reactivity into a kind of currency.
Every platform has one goal: to keep you engaged as long as possible.
It does that by learning what provokes you. Not what informs you. Not what calms you. What provokes you.

Anger is predictable. Outrage is sticky. And both keep you clicking.
The algorithms track what raises your pulse, what makes you comment, and what drives you to check back to see who agreed or disagreed. That cycle releases dopamine in short, shallow bursts that mimic connection but never satisfy it.
The longer you stay in that loop, the more your nervous system learns to equate anger with engagement.

The longer we scroll, the less human our “friends” become.
We stop seeing them as people with complicated lives and start seeing them as opponents to be corrected, mocked, or defeated.
We read tone into posts that were written in seconds.
We assume motives based on headlines.
We stop listening altogether.

Before long, the friendships that once existed offline start to feel foreign or tense.
We begin rehearsing arguments in our heads before family gatherings or dreading a simple text thread because it might turn political.
The screen has trained us to expect conflict, and the absence of conflict starts to feel unnatural.

That is not politics. That is conditioning.
And it is breaking more relationships than ideology ever could.

The Psychology Behind the Unfriend

Cutting people off over ideology is not new, but the speed and scale of it are. From a clinical perspective, it looks like avoidant coping. When discomfort feels unbearable, we delete the source rather than learn to tolerate it. It is a behavioral choice that trades lived engagement for immediate relief.

A useful comparison is how modern warfare changed moral decision making. In hand-to-hand combat, the enemy is proximal and human. There is sensory feedback and moral friction. Killing another person that close creates cognitive dissonance, which forces the fighter to reckon with the cost of their action. By contrast, launching an ICBM is remote, surgical, and sterile. The distance removes the human face. It makes destruction a button press rather than a moral transaction. That physical and psychological distance reduces the friction that usually keeps people accountable for harm.

Unfriending functions the same way in social life. The block and delete buttons are our remote weapons. They let us “eliminate” a relationship without seeing the immediate human consequences. There is no grief, no messy conversation, no chance to be misunderstood or to reframe. The action feels efficient and clean. In reality it is corrosive. It trains people to resolve interpersonal complexity through removal rather than repair.

Psychologically, this pattern also taps into dehumanization and moral licensing. When someone is reduced to a voting choice or a headline, they cease to be a person in our mental model. That reduction makes it morally easier to cut them loose. The algorithmic environment encourages that reduction. It rewards clear targets and quick resolutions because those behaviors generate engagement. Over time the block button becomes a default conflict strategy, not an emergency measure.

The result is short-term emotional relief at the cost of long-term relational integrity. Deleting someone may feel like power in the moment, but what it really signals is an avoidance of discomfort. It is surrender to emotional dysregulation rather than skillful conflict tolerance. The friendships that survive real-life stressors are the ones whose people stayed and worked it out. When we make remote removal our norm, we lose practice at doing the harder, morally messier work of staying and repairing.

The Quiet Conservative

You didn’t make politics your identity.
You voted quietly, based on your values and life experience. You assumed your friends did the same.
Maybe some of them were quiet liberals, people who believed differently but shared your decency and respect for boundaries. You thought that mutual restraint was what kept relationships strong.

Then came the surprise.
Some of the people you trusted turned out to be far more radical than you ever knew, on both ends of the spectrum.
People you once laughed with suddenly sounded like activists. Every conversation became a test of moral purity. The same friends who once stood beside you through breakups, funerals, and hard years started treating disagreement like betrayal.

It used to be that friendships ended over money, bad business decisions, or romantic scandals.
Now they end over hashtags and social topics. A post about a flag, a stance on a court case, or a sentence that someone interprets the wrong way can end decades of shared history.

That realization hits hard because it feels like waking up in a foreign country.
You start replaying memories and asking yourself if the friendship was ever real, or if it was conditional the entire time.
You start to see that for some people, ideology replaced intimacy. They didn’t just change opinions; they changed operating systems.

If that has happened to you, it isn’t proof that you are unworthy. It is proof that emotional moderation has become a lost skill.
It takes strength to stay calm in a time when outrage is seen as virtue. It takes patience to remain relational when others choose purity over connection.

The quiet people, conservatives, liberals, and centrists, are often the ones still trying to preserve the middle ground. They are not silent because they are weak. They are silent because they are tired of watching decency turn into division.

We Weren’t Built for This Much Noise

Human beings were not designed for constant noise or constant access to pain.
Our nervous systems evolved to process one crisis at a time, inside communities we could touch and faces we could read. Now we absorb a thousand crises before noon, most belonging to people we will never meet.

Every swipe keeps the body on alert. Cortisol spikes, empathy drains, and the brain begins to equate scrolling with surviving. We call it staying informed, but it is often just self-inflicted stress.

Then something like the Charlie Kirk assassination video floods the internet. Millions of people, in seconds, watched a man die. Not fiction, not filtered, real violence, unedited and immediate. We were never built to witness another human being’s final seconds on a phone screen while eating lunch. That kind of imagery doesn’t just disturb the mind; it brands the nervous system.

When you see death in real time, the body reacts as if it is in the room. The heart rate rises, muscles tighten, breathing shifts. The mind tries to file it as information, but the body records it as trauma. Even people who only saw a fragment of that video carry a residue of it now, whether they know it or not.

The problem is not just what we see; it is how often we keep looking.
We scroll from horror to humor to politics without pause, stacking emotional spikes like sandbags until our system burns out. We call it escape, but it is really addiction to stimulation. We chase another hit of distraction, another flash of outrage, another headline to argue over, and call it normal.

We were not made to live this way.
We were built for silence, conversation, work, laughter, faith, and community, human rhythms, not digital ones.

The antidote is not apathy. It is refusal.
Turn it off. Step away. Let your mind recover enough to remember what peace feels like.

Steps Toward Recovery

1. Your identity isn’t your feed.
   You are not defined by what you post, what you scroll, or how others react to you online. The algorithms do not know your character, your humor, or your private decency, only what keeps you engaged. When you start to measure your worth by digital approval, you lose track of the reality that actually shapes you, your daily choices, not your clicks. Log off before a screen full of noise starts telling you who you are.

2. Grieve what was lost.
   Losing friends or peace of mind over cultural conflict hurts because it is real loss. Pretending it doesn’t matter only drives the pain deeper. Take time to name what’s gone, the comfort, the familiarity, the illusion that connection was unconditional. Grieving that openly isn’t weakness; it is a reset that makes room for new, healthier attachments.

3. Recognize the design.
   Outrage and addiction are not bugs in the system; they are the system. The platforms you use are built to exploit attention and reward emotional volatility. Understanding that fact puts control back in your hands. When you realize you are being played for engagement, not enlightenment, you start choosing when to participate instead of reacting on command.

4. Guard your mental space.
   Attention is the new currency, and you only get so much per day. Spend it on things that build you, a workout, prayer, cooking, reading something longer than a headline. Curate your inputs the way you would curate your diet. If it poisons your mood, delete it. Your peace of mind is not optional; it is your operating system.

5. Reconnect offline.
   Real strength is built face-to-face. Join spaces where people still talk, laugh, and disagree without deleting each other: a gym, a veterans’ group, a church, or a local business network. Offline life has friction, but that friction sharpens character. It is where trust grows, where humor returns, and where you remember that disagreement does not have to mean distance.        Final Thought

   You shouldn’t have to hide your values to keep your friends.
   You also shouldn’t have to live inside a system that profits from keeping you angry. The modern world teaches constant vigilance, to react, to defend, to prove. Therapy teaches the opposite. It teaches stillness. It helps you sort what belongs to you from what has been projected onto you by culture, politics, or algorithms that know your impulses better than you do.

   If you have found yourself anxious, distracted, or distrustful and you can’t pinpoint why, it might not be your personality. It might be the noise. Constant exposure to conflict rewires the nervous system and convinces you that the world is unsafe even when your life is stable. That chronic alertness doesn’t make you informed; it makes you exhausted.

   Therapy isn’t about picking a side. It is about learning how to reclaim sovereignty over your own mind. It is about remembering that calm is not weakness and silence is not surrender. The ability to stay grounded in a world addicted to chaos is not a passive skill; it is discipline.

   If you are ready to get back to clarity, Common Man Therapy offers telehealth for Vermont adults who are tired of being misunderstood and want a structured path forward.
   You are not broken. You are simply overloaded.
   You do not need a new ideology; you need a reset.