this is gonna be a pretty disorganized blog post, bear with me. something something more time shorter letter
i just got around to watching Andrew Kelley's talk "don't take the black pill". it's a great talk and i'd recommend it to pretty much anyone. and i mostly agree with everything he says. mostly.
this blog post is about the stuff i disagree with. or, rather, the stuff i feel conflicted about. again, to be clear, i really liked the talk! i just don't have nearly as much to add about the stuff i agree with.
(i'm not gonna give an overview of the talk cuz i don't feel like it, writing is hard enough as is. if you haven't seen the talk you should watch it. if you watch it at 2x speed it's like 17 minutes of your time, it's worth it)
after watching the talk, i thought of a couple times in which i've "chosen the black pill". and it got me thinking about how i feel now, looking back at those choices:
discord
it was early 2019 (9th grade) when i started my "privacy phase". i realized that privacy is important and we're being taken advantage of by corporations, and i wanted to take back control, so i made a bunch of really big decisions: i deleted my google account and migrated everything to other "private" alternatives. i started using alternative frontends to services like youtube. i deleted all my social media, including stuff like snapchat, and, notably here, i deleted my discord account.
i read stuff online in the "privacy communities" i was lurking in, about how your real friends will follow you elsewhere if you delete discord. your friends will want to stay in touch with you, regardless of the platform. and people who want to reach out will find ways to reach out.
i also felt pressure from free software advocates, talking about network effects. the message was that i had a moral imperitive to not use proprietary services like discord, because by using them, i was encouraging others to also use them.
at the time, i thought i was making the right decision. i thought that i was taking back my digital sovereignty.
looking back, deleting discord was the single most detrimental thing i've ever done to my social life. it changed me as a person. i'm still feeling the effects of it 7 years later.
i lost so many connections. i left nearly all online communities i was a part of. the friends who did follow me over to other platforms were suddenly more distant, like we weren't talking as much. and i certainly wasn't making any new friends.
because, like, human relationships are complicated. a centralized service which everyone uses (like discord) makes it easy to talk to people, especially with group chats and stuff. any friendships which weren't, like, really close friendships, pretty much became severed off entirely.
and that's not to mention that, especially in 2019, there were no viable alternatives to discord. i didn't realize this at the time; i believed that matrix was the thing that was gonna replace discord. now it's 2026 and matrix still sucks, can you imagine me trying to make it work in 2019?
anyways, in october 2025, i took the black pill, and i redownloaded discord. i made a new account. i messaged some old friends and told them about it, and i joined some public servers and stuff.
in some sense, this was me "giving in" to big tech overlords. giving up my own "freedom", because it's the ""easy"" way out.
but in a much more real sense to me, redownloading discord was freeing. finally, i could fucking Talk to people again.
now, in july 2026, i have absolutely no regrets about redownloading discord. actually, no, i have one regret, that being that i didn't do it sooner. i guess i could also say that my second regret is that i ever deleted it in the first place.
in some sense, i don't think this is exactly what Andrew was talking about in his talk. but he also directly brings up discord multiple times in the talk. he brings up how he lost contact with a group of friends because they were organizing events on discord. immediately after this, he says: the black pill offers relief, in the same way that submission offers peace.
that's a quote that i would probably agree with in any other context, but putting it in a context which i can directly relate to, where i took the black pill... i mean, i don't regret it at all. i fucking hate discord, don't get me wrong, but... why wouldn't i take the relief here? i guess i prioritize my social life more than i prioritize ideals about choosing non-exploitative software. i wish i didn't have to make that choice, but, as experience has shown, i do.
at the end of the talk he briefly mentions how he's helping to build a discord replacement for his community. this is great, and i genuinely wish him and the rest of the team good luck; i want this project to succeed, and honestly i have reasonable confidence that it probably will, in the sense that it will fulfill the needs of their community, and likely other communities as well.
simultaneously, i think this is an example of trying to fight a systemic/cultural issue through technological means. like, he's almost saying that you can just build a new thing and it'll fix the current problems plaguing our society. and like, there is some truth to that. programmers wield a lot of power! but also... a lot of people have built discord alternatives. there's larger issues at play here. i feel like i have a more well-formulated point in my head, and i'm not expressing it very well here. i know this isn't what Andrew was trying to say. idk this point isn't super important i'm gonna move on
hinge
this section will probably be shorter, but this is another thing that happened recently.
this past april, i downloaded some dating apps. i decided i wanted to put myself out there, because i was tired of being alone. i downloaded hinge, and the very next day, i was banned from the app. no reason given. i don't even think i'd even messaged anyone at that point. i can only suspect that there was some anti-bot thing that flagged my behavior as suspicious.
i had also downloaded bumble, and bumble just straight up wasn't working for me. like, it kept showing me a "something went wrong" error message. this eventually resolved itself, but i suspected (and still do suspect) that the same thing was happening; it thought my activity was suspicious, and so it temporarily "shadow banned" me.
there wasn't really anything i could do about bumble, but with hinge, i could appeal the ban. there was one caveat. doing so required me to send them my ID. my ID would be analyzed by some sketchy AI startup. they pinky promised to not store my personal data for any longer than necessary, but like, be for fucking real.
i didn't want to do that. but, well, here, i'm gonna get really emotionally vulnerable here. on april 16th, i wrote this entry in my reality log:
im alone and i dont want to be alone and if changing that requires me to sell my soul to an ai firm then fucking whatever so be it
i used to care but im so exhausted and tired of caring
it does not get any more black pilled than that.
here's the thing: it worked. i "sold my soul" by sending them my ID, and shortly after, i was unbanned. still no reason given for why i was banned in the first place, but like sure whatever that's fine. and now i can use the app like normal. i also get a "verified" badge of shame next to my name, but like whatever.
the negative effects of "selling my soul" are, at least right now, completely invisible to me. but i'm now able to use a dating app.
getting on dating apps was something i had put off for a long time. finally doing it was a big fucking deal for me. i was trying to "take back control" of my life. which is ironic, i guess. but ultimately... i don't regret it. because, at least to me, the alternative was Giving Up. there are so few outlets for people my age to seek out romantic partners in the real world. Andrew's talk is about how we need to not give up. "giving up" is what the black pill is. so i was kinda presented with two pills which were slightly different shades of black, i guess. i chose the one that Andrew is pleading others to not choose.
conclusion i guess?
those are just two examples, but they've made me think more critically about the rest of the talk. because, like, it sounds paradoxical, but sometimes "giving up" can be freeing. if you go out of your way to avoid using software/services that take advantage of you, you lock yourself out of a lot of shit. and sometimes that just isn't worth it.
again, it's a great talk, i do highly recommend it, but i guess i just wanted to write down some of my experiences.