Essay  ·  August 2026  ·  10 min read

Everyone Is a Professional Now

“AI makes stupid people feel smart and smart people feel stupid.”
An angry Reddit mascot with its mouth censored, on an orange background
Pretty much the vibe.

The migration to nowhere

People will delete their social media and create a Reddit account thinking “yeah, this is better,” without realizing that platforms which let users hide behind anonymous profiles with next to no bot mitigation ultimately end up infinitely more toxic. You did not leave the machine. You moved into a worse room inside it.

Anonymity has always made people crueler. That is not a new observation. What is new is that anonymity now comes with a weapon. Anyone hiding behind a profile can talk to AI, and AI will hand them the authority they never earned.

Everyone is a professional now

In a world of AI, everyone is a professional in everything, and everyone’s opinion becomes validated.

You post something you actually know about, something you do for a living or have done for years. An hour later someone replies with five confident paragraphs, clean structure, a couple of numbers, a closing line about how you should have known better. It reads like expertise. It was produced in nine seconds by a person who had not heard of the subject before they read your post. And it will get upvoted over you, because it is longer and it sounds better.

That is the line at the top of this article. AI makes stupid people feel smart and smart people feel stupid. The person who actually knows the subject hedges, because they know where the edges are and they know what they do not know. The person who knows nothing now has a machine that never hedges, never says “it depends,” never admits a gap. Confidence has gotten cheap. On a platform that ranks by votes, cheap confidence wins every time.

I have seen it so many times. A person appears out of the woodwork, another social media professional here to step on you. They are able to do this because of anonymity. They can hide behind a screen, they can talk to AI, they can pretend to be anything. And to a miserable person running from their own life, this is exactly what they do. They run.

None of the anonymity half is new, it is just armed now. In 2004 a psychologist named John Suler wrote a paper on what he called the online disinhibition effect, the reason people act online in ways they never would in person. The first factor he listed was dissociative anonymity, which he summed up as “you don’t know me.” When you feel anonymous you no longer have to own your behavior. He split the outcomes into benign disinhibition, where people finally open up, and toxic disinhibition, where they flame and bully and threaten. That paper came out two decades before a chatbot could write your side of the argument for you. Suler described the disinhibition. AI supplied the ammunition.

Why so many people took the offer

Cruelty needs volunteers, and the last few years produced plenty of them.

Misery. Misery loves company. People are struggling, and their mental health has been degrading since the pandemic. This is not a vibe, it is measured. The World Health Organization reported that in the first year of COVID alone, global rates of anxiety and depression rose 25 percent, driven by isolation, loneliness, grief, and money stress.

And it never bounced back. In June 2025 the WHO published a report from its Commission on Social Connection finding that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, and that loneliness is now linked to roughly 871,000 deaths a year, around 100 every hour. Vivek Murthy, who co-chaired the commission and served two terms as US Surgeon General, has compared the health toll to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The hardest hit group is not the elderly, which is what most people assume. It is adolescents and young adults, about one in five, with teenagers reporting the highest rates of anyone. The most digitally connected generation in human history is the loneliest one. And a study published in 2026 across eight countries found nearly half of the young adults surveyed reported loneliness.

So we are six years past lockdown and the numbers are not recovering. They are settling in.

Pair that with doom scrolling, which brought out short attention span, ADHD-like symptoms in a lot of people. That is not to be confused with the adequate and justified increase in ADHD diagnoses that comes from better testing and awareness. Those are two different things and they get mixed up constantly.

Doom scrolling exists because someone built the infinite scroll. Aza Raskin, widely credited with inventing it in 2006, has spent years apologizing for it. He built it to save people from clicking “next page” and now says he was blind to how it would be used to capture human attention. He testified against Meta in New Mexico about exactly this. His own proposed fix is almost funny in how small it is: put the friction back. Add a speed bump. Make people click to load the next page. Kill autoplay. That alone, he says, would do a lot.

Then the pandemic left everyone self absorbed. Everyone is impatient, entitled, and turned inward after having just had to fend for themselves and their families through an awful time in history.

So that is the person. Anxious, impatient, attention wrecked, out of practice at treating a human like a human. Now give them a profile with no name on it and a machine that will argue anything for them.

Reddit is what it looks like running

You pair this current mental state with the ability to hide behind a profile, the ability to be someone else. Many took it. But after being inside for the pandemic, after becoming self centered and impatient and forgetting how to treat a person in person, you end up with some of the most negative places on the internet: Reddit, Discord, and the rest.

This is why I think the anonymous platforms are worse than the ones people quit to get to them. Instagram wants you to feel behind. Reddit wants you to feel wrong. The damage on a normal social media platform is comparative and impersonal, a scoreboard, and nobody is coming for you by name. On Reddit and Discord, someone read what you wrote and then chose to come after you specifically. That is a different injury and it lands harder, and the anonymity is what makes it possible.

Reddit also has doom scrolling. Reddit has the infinite scroll. So now you can sit there and chase dopamine forever, except all of the content is negative, so you are inviting negativity in and then indulging in it. You cannot opt out of it inside the platform either. Your home page has suggested content inserted into it, so even if you came for one specific thing, the algorithm keeps walking you back into the pit. That immediately breaks the magic.

My answer

Spend more time in nature. Cut back where you can. Block the news if that helps, or just stop opening Reddit, or cut the time you give it in half. LinkedIn is hard, because the economy is tough and that one is tied directly to your ability to get a job. But most of the rest can go, and none of it has to go all at once.

I think the less tech in 2026 and beyond, the better. As humans we need to return to our roots. Go outside. Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses so much. Remember that our neighbors are not so bad. In fact they are probably exactly like you, especially in a place like Minnesota.

Nobody has ever handed you five AI generated paragraphs about why you are an idiot while standing in your driveway.

So, in the words of Mark Wheat, a DJ from The Current: “Be kind to one another.”

Still sounds like a decent plan to me.

Sources

Note on attribution: credit for the invention of infinite scroll is disputed. Aza Raskin is widely credited with creating it in 2006, but a team at Microsoft filed a patent covering the technique earlier, and NPR has appended an editor’s note to its own reporting acknowledging the competing claims. This article says “widely credited” for that reason. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_scrolling

More like this

About AuthorBlogContact