Unchanging Hearts

Have you ever thought you could change someone for the better? What if we can't?

One of my greatest fears with this newsletter is that the reflective, deconstructionist, creativity-oriented, problem solving geared nature of what I pitch as fighting a good fight will be interpreted as self-help. I’m not an expert in anything other than perseverance and falling down. I do want to offer insight, and advice, but I don’t want to be a guru. Meanwhile, I want these entries to be tailored and curated in a way that they have good narrative flow, and make sense as to where I came from and where I am going.

With all of that in mind, I want to share a story of social failure that has recently closed a chapter in my life.

I’m not perfect, but I’d like to think that I’ve become someone more developed, beneficial, and mature, than I was. Sure, that comes with age. But I’ve changed more than I notice in my day to day life. I used to be convinced of the supernatural. I used to believe in frequent alien visitation so much so that I filed reports with Bigelow Aerospace and NUFORC. I held firmly onto notions that magic existed and was just ever so out of reach. I’ve gained many new skills and tools in my growing skeptical toolkit that has made me less credulous.

As a kid, I loved the idea that magic could be real. Who wouldn’t love that? It’s what every YA fantasy novel offers: a chance to be a very special boy who actually is the main character. For me, magic wasn’t just about reuniting with the dead, flying, or casting spells. Imagine how powerful it would be to cure disabilities? Of course I’d cure mine, but I’d cure anyone and everyone who wanted it. I would do unimaginable good.

These dreams were easy to cultivate with the right friendship, and I found that in second grade. We’d just moved to Sioux Falls and I made a friend, we’ll call Stephen, who remained one of my very best friends until high school. He lived just around the block from me, which made spending time with Stephen convenient. We loved Nintendo, and movies, and explored a lot of the same music.

By middle school, we’d discovered The Shadowlands, a website dedicated to the supernatural, and we started calling ourselves investigators. We walked streets at night imagining ghosts and monsters like hellhounds. We’d cast spells and collect odd artifacts. We knew we would be the ones to unravel all sorts of magic. We were close to the answer, so very close.

Middle school brings changes like puberty, which made Stephen and I more like oil and water. Stephen grew through a lot of challenges in his life, and we were drifting apart in school, too. Everything built up to us splitting as we were headed to different high schools. But, instead of a simple drift, my foul and unkind mouth met the blunt end of his knuckles and we declared one another enemies. Frankly, I’m sure I demonized him more than he did I.

Flash forward to our mid-twenties, I find myself dealing with a reckoning. Relationships were falling around me and I was starting to work on who I was as a person. Because I manage guilt in a really rough way, and because I’m stuck on television, I decided it was only right to take up the Earl Hickey path to reconciliation: I made a list of people I needed to apologize to.

Stephen was at the top of my My Name is Earl list. I wasn’t necessarily looking to rekindle lost friendships. But, I needed to put fires out on burnt bridges in order to strive to burn fewer of them moving forward. Stephen accepted the apology quickly, and things went quiet for a while. We’d added one another on Facebook and that seemed like that. There were a few exchanges here and there, until a few years after when we agreed to get drinks.

It’s always nice to reminisce and laugh about old times. I think most old friends do that. But, at this point I was becoming a more responsible person, a version of the person I’d like to think I am now. I let go of all the magic and was less convinced of most things in my life, especially less convinced of trying to rekindle anything from the past. A night of laughs and memories wasn’t something that was going to steer me into patterns I’d been working to separate myself from.

In hindsight, I think that night should have been the end of that relationship all together. We walked away on healthier terms. I could hardly ask for anything better. However, we kept a distant social media connection, and that led to the failure in question.

To be frank, I hate social media. I am certain it’s deeply unhealthy for me, and I don’t think there’s anything genuine to be found in the vast majority of what we put on our socials. But, I am a public figure who gets paid a pittance by Meta for stirring the pot on Facebook. Self-promotion and events don’t get attention like politics and rage. With the following I have, and the community I have built, I feel it is incumbent on me to stand up and place myself shoulder to shoulder with my most vulnerable neighbors. Because of that, it’s extraordinarily easy to post anything perceivably political and have people come out of the woodwork at me.

I agree that echo chambers are a huge risk for us as we interact with the world. However, I am not convinced social media is, or ought to be, the world. It’s supposedly for connecting with people, so I view it as a space to cultivate a community. It’s okay to block, unfriend, and moderate an online community. As a matter of fact, I think it’s important to moderate a community if it’s going to have any standards. But, I digress.

Love bombing and aggressive hatred make an awful cocktail

The moment we entered the MAGA era, Stephen came roaring back into my life. Stephen was the master of making me the center of attention by bombarding my content with hyperbole and emotional attacks. I tried evidence and appealing to his better nature. I tried throwing him to the wolves, so to speak, and letting the community argue with him. I eventually found myself deleting and hiding his comments in order to have some semblance of sanity. The arguments flared no matter what I did, or what I posted.

I could have blocked him right away. I could have accepted our relationship as concluded and moved on, but I didn’t. My reasoning came down to three points: 1) I didn’t want an echo chamber, 2) I made more money when he raged, 3) I thought I could save him. That was the most important part. I thought I could change his mind.

Over the course of years, I attempted to have one-on-one text conversations with him about what he believed and why. Through these conversations, I was impressed by his phenomenal skill to Gish Gallop. Stephen could throw out wild ideas after unfounded claims over and over. He leaned impeccably on whataboutism, always confronting questions with more, “what about this?” and “what about that?” He often failed to recognize that I strived to align with values and principles instead of political figures. But he seemed to run off a script that was blind to my perspective.

What struck me most was how quickly he brought things back to magic and faith. Stephen seemed to hate the fact that I’d become open in my atheism. He offered me claims that he did connect with real, undeniable magic. Stephen assured me that he had harnessed clairvoyant techniques that could predict the future and even steer him from harm or help him find missing items.

I exhausted myself attempting to build tests for him to provide evidence, channeling my inner James Randi, but I could never keep up. Health issues, time crunch, and living my life kept me from holding him accountable. I found myself covered in his, “I pray for you,” sentiments, and his Q Anon-like viewpoints every time we interacted.

The internet is a miserable tool for meaningful discourse. The humanity that is found talking in person is sucked away into the vacuous engines of outrage we’ve constructed. Eventually, I found myself at the receiving end of endless comments and videos from rightwing TikTokers, apologists and their evidence for the validity of the Shroud of Turin, and uneducated little graphs that called me a Nazi. I found that begging people to love each other and stand with their neighbors only lathered me in vitriol. It sucked.

I miss that night Stephen and I had drinks. I wish that was the last time we’d ever interacted. Every interaction since has pointed to the fact that no amount of truth, evidence, and reasoning can lead someone out of a world of bullshit. It wasn’t that way for me, why should I expect it to be that way for him? I had to work for years to improve my perspective and to accept the many ways in which I was, and can be, wrong. I had to leave everything I knew behind, when — from my point of view — Stephen had only ever become more ingrained in what he’d always embraced.

I couldn’t change someone’s heart by arguing with them online. It hurts and I hate admitting it. I’ve blocked Stephen recently. It’s both a loss and a relief. And, I’ve told myself that if his magic really does work, he’ll find a way to reach me psychically. Do I believe he can? No. But I’ve got the line open just in case his multiverse of magic really does exist.

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Today’s Tune