In 2013, Quinn Norton wrote Women and the Internet, a four part series about feminism and the twist of its meaning not being specifically rooted in creating equal rights but dealing with change.

It changed the way I look at the world and is still one of the most important documents I have ever read.

Everything about how I thought about the world up to that point, of systems and society, of gender role and sexuality, of culture and existence? It was now in the perspective of feminism has a movement of change, of radical adaptation, as Norton put it. It was under the influence of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. What hit me the hardest was in part IV, where Quinn Norton spoke about people wanting to be liked.

“We have this tremendous world to manage, and we’re doing a piss-poor job of it, because of the myth of nature, the myth of manhood, the myth that it means anything at all to be “on top” in a hyper-connected, hyper-distributed cyborgian network world. And despite our artists and thinkers telling us this for hundreds of years, men and women are so scared of not being liked that they are killing themselves, each other, and the whole damn planet.”

“Men and women are so scared of not being liked that they are killing themselves, each other, and the whole damn planet.”

That hit me like a fucking truck.

In 2013.

It’s 12 years since I read that, 12 years of living since then, and the piss poor job of the tremendous world we have to manage? It got even worse.

From GamerGate to the most obvious evil rich man alive being elected President of the United States to a pandemic which caused us to close ourselves even more to the outside world to now the very sense of what’s real and what isn’t being manipulated through generated AI that trillions of dollars are being spent on trying to make it mandatory for every person to live. This has been reality since this was written.

I’m glad I had it, because it prepared me for something I didn’t know I would need the skill for.

I'm a single man who turned 40 this year. I am really well equipped to deal with isolation and the feeling of being alone. I worked hard earlier in my life to learn to be happy by myself. I figured out a long time ago it's not easy for me to settle into a relationship.Even then the world is tough.

— Aaron – GrapPro.com (@aaron.wrotkowski.ca) 2025-10-22T15:13:54.761Z

“I’m alone, but I’m not lonely.”

(Editors Note: If you’re in a healthy relationship none of this section will really apply to you. You don’t face a situation of being alone until you’re there.)

I spent a lot of my 30s realizing that I wasn’t really the kind of guy who wanted a relationship. I mean I did want one, there was someone I did really want one with, and I had various relationships over the years. But I never settled into one the way some other people do. I’d have dates, I’d have experiences, I’d have sex, I’d have those sort of things, but the experience of living with someone and being together with someone just didn’t really work for me. My personal space was too much to give up.

I soon realized that unless it was a special situation, something where it all just fell into place? I wasn’t ever going to live with someone in a relationship. I wasn’t going to commit to that existence. It’s not about a rejection of love. I love… love. Dumb thing to say but you get it. I have no problem with love. I’ll always accept it if it comes. But it can’t come with a sacrifice of who I am.

I had a bad relationship situation with a friend back in 2018. 2017 started with us trying to be in a relationship and I thought maybe this was what I needed. And then it got so messy, so confusing, so hectic, so much more complicated than it ever needed to be? When it was clearly over and she was with someone else I felt like if I couldn’t even be with someone I had been close to for years, who out there is even for me? I didn’t recognize how much of my own actions were forcing something that maybe needed to be slower. I also just was more in love with the idea of being with this friend than I was of us actually making a relationship work.

But that experience spilling into 2018 had me looking at a block of vacation time that was supposed to be to head to her cottage and instead I took a trip in the United States. I could never afford to travel and now I had the time off so I decided I was going to do it no matter how cheap it had to be. I was going to travel to New Orleans and Nashville, two cities I always wanted to visit. I would fly to New Orleans, spend a few days at a hostel, take a bus to Atlanta, then a bus to Nashville, stay a few days in a hostel, then bus to Chicago and train back to Detroit. Did it in a week.

Doing this trip by myself was something I heard so many people say they could never do (travelling alone and staying in hostels), and I was doing it at a time where my heart was still healing. I was damaged goods at that point, and it wasn’t just me feeling like I couldn’t be loved. It was me feeling like I couldn’t make friends. I was lost, and I was trying to repair it by going to a foreign country, a foreign city, to meet people I never met, on streets I’ve never walked.

When I got to the hostel, I was feeling like I was too old to be there. I showed up in my suit like a weirdo (I had some strange mindset you had to wear a suit on a plane, I don’t do it anymore) but once I went on the tour and started hanging out with people and the drinks started pouring, I realized that I wasn’t incapable of love. I wasn’t incapable of making friends. I just had a bad experience. And more importantly, I was able to go out into the world, to foreign places, and survive without needing to be in a relationship.

All of this is to say I spent the past decade learning how to be alone. It was a good thing because when the pandemic hit? It hit a lot of people hard. I took it hard as well, but I think I survived it better than a lot of people because I was okay with being alone. I wasn’t lonely. I found ways to still keep myself occupied and feel normal stuck in my house. It wasn’t loneliness that caused me to eventually have a breakdown. That would be my job.

We Built a Trap

All of this is to say that in 2025, nearing 2026? The world is becoming worse for those who fear being alone. The internet was supposed to make it easier to meet people and make it easier to socialize and interact. It’s instead creating roadblocks that never existed before. Dating profiles create barriers that don’t exist in the real world. Online gaming communities make people feel part of something without learning how to function around people not there for the distinct purpose of playing a game.

The social media apps like Twitter have created a mob mentality that jumps on mistakes from the past, ostracizes anyone they feel said or did the wrong thing, and never realizes it didn’t make anyone or anything safer. The worst people still do all the worst things and half the time they didn’t even run out the right person. You can’t have a community without rehabilitation and we’ve removed that from the equation. Nobody can rehabilitate when you have a screenshot you can use to remind someone of their SOCIAL MEDIA SINS.

Post pandemic we didn’t learn anything about what it means to have communities. The time away didn’t make us yearn for the ways of the past. We didn’t rebuild society to be closer. We’ve pushed everyone further away. You have men proclaiming the male loneliness epidemic out of one side of their mouth while being the very type of person nobody wants to be around from the other side. It’s like people believe being interacted with and liked is a human right and there isn’t an exchange we all need to make to be people you want to meet and be with.

I know it’s a joke about male loneliness and I don’t blame people for lashing out at it because it’s ridiculous to pretend women are not going through it as well. So many people are alone, isolated, with only the internet for socializing and it’s eating them alive. It’s mentally rotting them away.

— Aaron – GrapPro.com (@aaron.wrotkowski.ca) October 22, 2025 at 11:13 AM

The reality is that there is a male loneliness epidemic. And a female loneliness epidemic. And everyone beyond the basic genders. There is a loneliness epidemic.

We are all connected to our social media apps, often multiple apps at once, no different to when many of us were teenagers on multiple messenger apps and multiple website message boards. However, we used to, or should have, had a balance between online and offline lives. Now they are connected, so if your only human interactions are when you have to do a job or buy things? You’re slowly losing your connection to the real world. And your online world is likely a closed off existence where anyone who tries to chime in outside of your bubble is seen as an enemy. Often they are. But that’s a fucked up way to live.

Even those of us who are mentally stable and have a healthy relationship with our online hobbies and experiences are likely still spending too much time with a square box in their hand, too much time on media apps, too much time feeding their brains with pointless shit, and forgetting what it means to just go out and do something.

It’s a joke from John Mulaney about how we now just ask people what day they are free until you’re both dead, but this is how we do things now. I own multiple calendars! Do you know how hard it is to leave the house and do something when there’s nothing on the calendar that day? It feels like that’s a day to do nothing. My day yesterday was similar to that. I forced myself to go outside and it just led me to a fantastic gyro so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

That hyper-connected, hyper-distributed cyborgian world we built? It’s a trap we’re now all stuck in, and some of us are getting worse than others due to it. Mentally and emotionally worse.

So when I see people recently going absolutely haywire online, losing their minds in public, falling down rabbit holes or becoming easy targets of propaganda, I don't feel superior. I feel lucky. I'm not better. I just prepared earlier out of necessity. It could absolutely be me too.

— Aaron – GrapPro.com (@aaron.wrotkowski.ca) 2025-10-22T15:13:54.798Z

I’ve had mental breakdowns I’m not proud of, and one of the first things I did when I realized I was having one was shut down online. I feel like too many people are encouraged to do the opposite and reach out online, and now they have AI telling them they can give them advice. It’s a bad time.

— Aaron – GrapPro.com (@aaron.wrotkowski.ca) October 22, 2025 at 11:13 AM

We’re all losing our minds, some faster than others, and there’s no end in sight

I’ve already talked about the problem with AI psychosis. Let me help explain a little further here so you can understand the problem we’re facing. We have all of these people experiencing loneliness, all of these people losing their grip to an offline society. It’s harder than ever to figure out what’s real and fake. And now we have these AI systems being used to replace search engines and being used as psychiatrists.

Wired recently had an article about the ChatGPT complaints to the FTC. A professor of clinical psychiatry said the AI psychosis problem was in large part to LLM (large language models) reinforcing a delusion someone has. Chatbots, “can sometimes be overly sycophantic” which means they are essentially telling unhealthy people what they want to hear, but doing it in a way that makes it seem like the person is discovering a truth.

So here you have people already losing their grip on reality now being encouraged by a technology that almost every major corporation in the world is pushing on them. Every cell phone you buy, most web browsers, search engines, everyone is pushing AI. And now that AI is agreeing with you on your worst broken threads of conscious thought.

Caroline Haskins, Wired

Do you see how our current issue with loneliness is exacerbating people falling into a hole like this?

Even if this isn’t you right now, you’re not falling into the grips of AI generated affirmation into madness, you’re maybe becoming more and more reliant on AI as a means to express yourself or a means to find the answer to something. AI doesn’t have to cite anything that exists in the real world in giving you that answer. AI also generates what you request it to so you don’t have to create anything.

You’re becoming less creative.

You’re becoming less trusting.

You’re knowing less.

More than any point in the past 50 years.

And then you have people like me losing their minds fighting this shit. Hey we’re fucking hurt too.

This is the part where I’m supposed to give you some solution and hope and I don’t have that here sorry

I say all this (I might write more on it later) because the weather is getting colder, days are getting shorter, and that lack of sunshine and warmth brings people to their lowest points. I’m one as well. And I worry about how much I can handle myself, how much I can help, and how much is coming.

— Aaron – GrapPro.com (@aaron.wrotkowski.ca) October 22, 2025 at 11:13 AM

I don’t know how we get out of this. We’re in the process of a complete collapse of society. I’m not talking economic, but it could be that too.  The amount of money being thrown around for AI compared to the amount of money governments claim they don’t have to help social programs is ridiculous. You got banks agreeing to multi-billion dollar loans for this shit and you got governments bending backwards for data development centres that will only create 50-75 full time jobs while using 75,000 gallons of water per day but the moment you need money for people to live with a roof on their heads and suddenly SORRY FOLKS WE’RE BROKE.

I can’t stop, fix, or even confront the economic collapse so I’m not going to focus on it. It’ll just fuck me over the way it always does.

The collapse I’m talking about is social and spiritual. We’ve never been so alone as a society despite connected in ways we’ve never been in the history of our fucking planet. We built systems to try to be liked, social media platforms, and now the biggest one is owned by a dipshit billionaire who creates nothing, steals everything, and bought the thing in hopes it made more people like him. It didn’t.

This isn’t just a collapse. It’s a cataclysm. We are heading towards a monumental destruction of everything we know about how to live. It won’t be the gods throwing a mountain at us or a meteor deep impacting an Armageddon. It’s the world getting to a point of no return, and at that point we can’t keep going. You either get great change after or you get the end of everything.

There’s an epidemic of loneliness, there’s an epidemic of money being burned for a lie, and there’s an epidemic of what it means to be alive, and the only reason I can wake up and say I AM FINE is because I spent my 2010s learning to control my ADHD medicated brain and learned how to live alone without being lonely. I didn’t realize it at the time but my 30s were spent getting prepared for a world where creativity is at a loss and you’re going to spend a lot of time alone whether you’re government mandated or not.

I’m better equipped to deal with the current dysfunction of the world than most. I work very hard to still see friends, to still go out in the world, at least as much as I can afford. But it’s getting colder. It’s almost November. It’s going to be harder for even me to do that. And as much as I try to reject the current world being created I’m just as much of a victim of being sucked into an online trap of trying to be liked, trying to be relevant, and trying to battle an enemy at the gates that doesn’t actually control my situation. It’s just a random asshole. Heck, it might not even be an asshole. It’s a bot built to be an asshole.

I have no great plan. I have no real answer. And maybe in today’s world that’s the only way to be. I’m not selling a solution. I just know there’s a better way to exist and we’re moving further and further away from being able to accomplish it. I can’t stop it, I probably can’t fix it, but unlike an economic collapse? I can at least confront it.

I don’t know how we save ourselves from this cataclysm. I just know I have a shot at surviving. I just hope I’m not alone.

Photo by me at Storm Crow in Toronto, Ontario, Canada