It's probably insane of me to mention this but I naturally connect the dots between people making money off of effectively manipulating me and personally feeling confused and lost. I hear voices in my head all the time and they are not the stock kind that most would refer to. It occurs on the level of cognition that a reading voice or internal monologue would usually reside so it's not something that I confuse for physically hearing with my ears.
I do not have a name for any of these voices and they never refer to me by name or speak to me directly. The closest way I could describe it is like you're a psychic that can hear distant conversations about you from what feels like a mile away in a closed room where they talk about you like a novelty test subject. It's almost like I'm being gazed at from a one-way mirror at every waking moment of the day and I have to act natural as though I don't know what's going on so I can rally myself up into figuring out an exit strategy. Have you seen that disclaimer I've linked on the 'About' page on this website? That's no joke.
This is a tough subject to pull up out of nowhere but every time I masturbate I feel compelled to say out loud 'I do not consent to be recorded or surveilled at any capacity.' so that I don't have a panic attack. Everything I see with my eyes and intuit with Occam's Razor implies that I am absolutely alone in my room in those moments but I'm still terrified that there's something I just simply haven't thought of yet. It's almost as though there's some creator writing me into existence based roughly on their own reality who's think tanking with themselves on what to do next. I feel like a fictional character at the whims of a story I cannot comprehend and sometimes it makes me want to kill myself. Absolutely everything I do or say has to have some level of exit strategy or I'll have a panic attack over implications. I'm looking through glass and I'm looked at through glass everywhere I go and it's killing me.
How safe am I to say any of this? How safe am I to admit that any time I'm in a group of people I can intuit that they are speaking in code? Is there some fictional metaphor being coaxed out of interactions I'm supposed to be seeing plainly for the story to flow? Imagine I'm wandering around outside where I'm suddenly accosted by a 40 something trying to sleep with me on the surface but on a metatextual level he's metaphorical for the concept of alcohol in relation to me. How do I live knowing that could be the case? It's almost like it's all as real as it isn't.