Over the past five years or so my political identity has shifted from "Radical Leftist" to "Neoliberal who hasn't told anyone in their life yet", and as I come to terms with this transition I've been finding myself dealing with surprising feelings of sadness and loss.

These feelings are surprising because from a certain perspective my life is better than it's ever been - I've been sober for years, my career is in a good place, my relationships are meaningful and supportive, I generally feel empowered to get what I want out of life and to contribute to my loved ones and friends. When I was a radical leftist my life looked a lot different than that - I was very new in sobriety, I drove for Lyft and barely made enough to cover car payments, and Donald Trump had recently been elected US President and had as such proven that the Dems were useless and full of shit and that capitalism was doomed to collapse into fascism and that this collapse was in fact happening in real time before our very eyes. I ran a Marxist reading group in my local DSA chapter and recommended Chapo to everyone I knew. I shouted "LENIN HAD SOME GOOD IDEAS" into megaphones at rallies. I had direct knowledge about who the good guys were and who the bad guys where, I knew where to march and who to vote for, I knew what to post. I had clarity. If I didn't know how to answer a challenge or counterargument I had faith that somewhere somehow someone would be able to back me up. All right-thinking and right-feeling people agreed with me, since I was tuned into the capital-T Truth, so all I really had to do was state the capital-T Truth (over and over again) and in doing so wake people up to the reality of what is so and what bold revolutionary actions must urgently be done.

I don't think or feel that way anymore. I learned how to write code and got involved with a small web-app development company and couldn't apply any of my Marxist categories to my lived experience. My friends had saved up enough programmer salary to start their own business and I couldn't figure out if they were economic good guys or bad guys, and nobody at DSA had satisfying answers either. As part of my recovery I took direct responsibility for getting my life together, and it worked - I got myself out of self-induced poverty without my upward mobility requiring the upward mobility of any social category I supposedly belonged to. I marched, and I met people who were obviously there less for the justice of a cause and more so because they wanted an outlet for righteous violence. I experienced friction and frustration with leftist groups that were way more concerned with infighting than with having any discernible impact beyond the boundaries of the org. I read political books written by non-socialists and found that I could not dismiss their intelligence and humanity as easily as I thought I could. I found out that my family had a lot more money than I'd believed growing up, even though they're artists and never made a huge income - they'd just stashed money away in index funds for a long time, no matter what else was going on in their lives, and that the financial moves they'd made were not some kind of expensive hidden knowledge but were actually widely available possibilities. I found myself at a point in my life where all the guillotine memes I'd posted were direct threats against my loved ones and family and even myself.

The lives of my old comrades haven't changed very much. People post the same catastrophe-declaring memes, starting with stuff like "friendly reminder that - " or "it's almost as if - " and then making some extreme and questionable claim. Many have removed me from their social media channels without telling me. I feel increasingly and strangely isolated as my life improves - the stuff that works for me, like cultivating gratitude and optimism, seems to be met not only with rejection but with outright hostility and contempt. So many people I used to connect with feel that the world is the worst it's ever been and that it's only getting worse, that happiness and a good life are impossible in the heart of a rotting empire.

So with my post-radical growth and change has come the loss of clarity, community, and political self expression, and I experience a lot of mourning for that loss. The change has also come with a lot of guilt, since the radical drives have retreated without fully going away, becoming a voice in my head haunting my moments of peace and joy and telling me that I've forsaken the truth and have deliberately become part of the problem, which is even more reprehensible than never knowing the truth at all. Sometimes I can't tell if I've grown up or if I've just lived long enough to see myself become the villain.

I'm posting this here because I've been looking for a new political project and political community, or at least a space where I could express this stuff with a lower risk of a bunch of people reacting angrily to me. If you've lived through similar experiences or feelings I'd love to hear about them. If this is the wrong forum or format to post this then that's ok too- writing this all out was cathartic and meaningful in its own right, and I appreciate you reading it :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/peku9c/postradical_sorrow/