My Friends Have Gone Insane
My friends have not slowly drifted into madness. They have sprinted. I just did not notice at first because it happened the most modern, least cinematic way possible. Text messages. Group chats. Threads that used to be jokes, logistics, and light complaining quietly mutating into something else.
It starts with a link. Then a screenshot. Then a tone shift so subtle you miss it until someone reacts way too hard to something that used to earn a shrug. The punctuation sharpens. The jokes evaporate. Capital letters start doing pushups. You reread a message wondering if you skipped a meeting where everyone agreed that every headline is now a five-alarm emergency.
Group chats are where sanity goes to die quietly. No speeches. No manifestos. Just an endless drip of certainty. People you have known for decades suddenly talking like they are auditioning to be footnotes in a future documentary about how it all went wrong.
What is unsettling is not disagreement. I am not nostalgic for consensus. What is unsettling is that everyone now seems convinced they are standing at the hinge of history. Every take arrives preloaded with moral urgency. Every event is proof. Every silence is suspect. You do not just have an opinion anymore. You have a role. And if you do not play it convincingly, people notice.
The strangest part is that these are my friends. People I trust. People who have helped me move furniture, watched my kids, shared meals, argued in good faith about nothing more consequential than where to eat. Now, through the miracle of tiny glowing rectangles, they sound like they are preparing for war. Or purification. Or salvation. It is not always clear which.
At some point I realized the problem was not that my friends believed different things than I did. It was that they were living inside stories that left no room for friendship. Stories where disagreement feels like betrayal. Where calm sounds like cowardice. Where every conversation is a loyalty test you did not know you were taking.
So I stopped asking who was right and started asking a more useful question.
What is going on here.
As best as I can tell, we are living inside two dominant narratives that interpret the same reality in opposite ways. They are not opinions. They function more like moral worlds.
In the first, the country is sliding toward authoritarian collapse. Power is corrupted. Institutions are captured. Law enforcement is a threat. In this story, resistance is mandatory. Anger is virtuous. Breaking norms is justified. Civility feels like complicity. Hesitation reads as blindness or moral failure because the stakes are framed as civilizational.
These are the Guardians. Falcons, really. Always scanning. Always alert. Locked onto danger before anyone else sees it. They believe they are protecting the vulnerable from forces that are already descending. From their altitude, hesitation looks like negligence.
In the second narrative, the danger runs the other direction. The country is being hollowed out by disorder, illegitimacy, and mass manipulation. Laws are selectively enforced. Elections are overridden. Protests are theater for destabilization. In this story, restraint looks like weakness. Enforcement looks like responsibility. Harsh measures are regrettable but necessary because order is what holds everything else up.
These are the Stewards. Oxen. Load-bearing and grounded. Slow to move and hard to panic. They believe systems endure only because someone is willing to pull weight, enforce boundaries, and keep the whole thing from tipping over. When threatened, they lower their heads and push.
Here is the part that took me too long to see.
The Guardians and the Stewards are not the main problem.
The main problem is the third population. The one nobody names because naming it ruins the game.
The Agitators. The hyenas.
They do not guard anything. They do not carry anything. They do not maintain anything. They circle. They provoke. They amplify. They feed on escalation. They turn every incident into proof, every reaction into fuel, every misunderstanding into content.
Hyenas do not care which side wins. They care that the fight stays loud. Fear is their business model. Outrage is their currency. Calm is poison. Complexity gets in the way. They live upstream of both camps and profit from smashing them into each other over and over again.
Outrage from the Guardians becomes proof for the Stewards. Crackdowns from the Stewards become proof for the Guardians. The hyenas clip it, repost it, monetize it, and move on.
Once you see this, a lot of things fall into place. Why everything feels hotter than it should. Why reasonable people sound unrecognizable. Why every disagreement feels inflated beyond all proportion. Two groups acting in good faith are colliding inside a system designed to keep them terrified and reactive.
Understanding this did not make me smarter. It made me calmer.
Which brings me to how I am navigating this.
I am no longer trying to win arguments inside other people’s stories. That game is closed. The stories do not admit partial disagreement. If I push, I become a character. If I resist, I confirm the plot.
Instead, I am optimizing for friendship survival.
I acknowledge emotion without endorsing interpretation. I can understand why something feels existential without agreeing that it is. I pull conversations back to the local and the human. What did you actually see. What worried you personally. What are you afraid of losing. Mythic language escalates. Lived experience grounds.
I set boundaries without drama. I am not required to litigate the fate of the nation every time I see someone I care about. Refusing to engage is not cowardice. It is choosing not to be consumed.
Most importantly, I remind myself that my friends are not insane. They are inside environments that reward absolutism and punish moderation. The stories feel personal, but their spread is structural.
There are two camps. Falcons and oxen. Guardians and stewards. Both trying to protect something they love.
And then there are the hyenas, laughing in the background, delighted that we keep mistaking the fight for the problem.
If this post does nothing else, I hope it lowers the pressure a little. I hope it helps you see the landscape more clearly. And if you walked in thinking your friends had lost their minds, maybe you walk out realizing that a smaller, uglier group is working very hard to make it feel that way.
Friendship is not a political position. Keeping it intact right now feels like a small act of resistance.