We live in the best of times.
In the old days (i.e. up until a few years ago), a scandal could legitimately ruin your life.
Now a scandal can only ruin you if you let it.
The glut of online content means that people move on - from everything - FAST.
Current Things last a couple days, maybe a week at most before everyone gets bored.
At first, it’s all anyone can talk about. People post increasingly deranged takes and it builds up into a massive, frenzied circlejerk until, one day, it stops.
There’s a final burst where the influenzas squeeze out the last drops of engagement from the carcass of the dying Current Thing and it’s over for good.
No one talks about it any more, and the world moves on like it never happened to begin with.
This cycle of dopaminergic and algorithmic exuberance followed by a rapid decline into obscurity definitely doesn’t say anything good about our society and collective psyche.
BUT it’s a godsend if you find yourself on the receiving end of one of these social media witchhunts.
Because it means that one day the world will move on from you too…
But only if you don’t take the bait.
If you want to go from being today’s Current Thing to yesterday’s (completely forgotten) Current Thing, you need to practice what I like to call The Huberman Technique.
The Huberman Technique
I’m sure that when that journalist wrote the hit piece against Andrew Huberman last year, she was expecting that he would follow The Standard Playbook of a groveling public apology followed by a fall from grace into a life of infamy.
That didn’t happen.
While social media whipped itself into a frenzy in anticipation of his response, he did nothing.
Eventually he recorded and released another regularly-scheduled podcast episode. Then another, and another, and on and on again until the world moved on.
Did his lack of a response hurt him in any way?
Nope. His subscriber numbers kept going up and to the right without a blip.
“Post Through It” should be your motto for anything bad that happens to you.
Did a journalist accuse you of having five girlfriends at the same time? Post Through It.
Are people taking shit about your business on Reddit? Post Through It.
Did some nutjob political influenza retweet you and accuse you of being a marxist, and now their zombie followers are sending you death threats? Post Through It.
You get the point.
The key is to give the online masses ZERO things to feed on.
Remember: An apology is just another opportunity for new content. Getting mad and clapping back is just another opportunity for new content. Any attempt at sincerity and trying to explain your side of the story is just another opportunity for new content.
Social media ‘personalities’ can only repeat the same thing so many times before their engagement dies down and they have to move on.
The path is obvious, if difficult. The human brain isn’t built to handle being hated by thousands of people at the same time.
Don’t look at the comments. Touch grass, take a vacation, do whatever you have to do. If you want to look at them later on down the road when the heat dies down, ok. But not while you’re in the belly of the beast.
It also helps to remember that no one is actually mad at you.
Journalists who write hit pieces are thinking about how gaining a reputation as being ‘hard-hitting’ will help their career. That’s it.
Big accounts on social media who dunk on people are doing it to juice their engagement. They ALWAYS frantically refresh their notifications post-shittalk to see if you took the bait so they can get some more. You aren’t even a person to them, you’re just an opportunity for more likes on their dashboard and a chance to get an extra $176.70 this month in X app rev share.
In other words: you’re just collateral damage.
As for the masses: People who leave hateful comments on social media are mad at themselves because their life isn’t going the way they hoped it would, and rather than accepting that it’s their own fault they’d rather project that anger outwards.
It’s not a conscious thing. Projection is a natural human instinct that happens on autopilot. Everyone can’t be an introspective ubermensch. It’s simply impossible. Like it or not, society needs the Great Unwashed to stay mired in their own mediocre psychology in order to function.
Piling on and participating in the Five Minutes of Hate on social media relieves the low-IQ hordes of the remote, horrifying possibility of accidentally being honest with themselves and being forced to do the one thing that 99% of people are loathe to do, which is take responsibility for their current predicament. If they did that, they might rise up and start to compete with those of us at the top (don’t worry, it’ll never happen).
You’re just the Target of the Day.
Tomorrow they’ll talk shit about someone else. Don’t take it personally.
That’s how you deal with an online scandal.