I ticked all the boxes in high school. Ironic-but-not-really fascist, incel, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, pick a reaction, really. Now I’m happily married, father, Kinsey-1, reading theory, with growing class consciousness and looking to build solidarity with those people that a worse version of myself once dismissed as lesser or ungodly. It took leaving home, developing positive and loving male-male friendships, and being told that I was good enough and worth love irrespective of my accomplishments for me to start to develop the capacity to love others in the same way. Those who have traveled a similar path, what did it take for you?
For the longest time I was just some vaguely anti-establishment, edgy-skeptical nihilist who hated everything and everyone; imagining himself somewhere on the left (because the right is full of intolerant assholes) but lacking any deeper systemic analysis to really verbalize my own thoughts even. Easy prey for Libertarians and AnCaps, I just had the most open mind and the most incoherent ideology but I didn't really care, politics was for dorks anyway.
What really changed me was enrolling in international business studies and realizing after a year or so, that even our lectors were all just grifting and basically we were simply 'educated' to be competent fakers of all that sounds smart and good and profitable without really giving us any kind of skillset beyond just fooling normies into giving us money or competently licking boots'n'ass of banks'n'state. At that point I dropped out, was cripplingly depressed for a year as my dream of becoming Don Draper was shattered by my own realization that Don Draper might not be the perfect role-model and then... I just kinda survived for a while. Started to study something else, humanities-related, worked with language for a while and started to read some critical media theory. That really blew my mind at the time because it was one of the first time's in my live that I simply had no fucking idea what I was reading; I felt stupid for the first time in years. I've got to say, early 'Breadtube' or 'Leftube' really helped at that stage as I understood the concepts rather quickly when they were explained to me verbally. From there on I read more stuff in all kinds of directions, radicalizing me further.
Also, climate change. That damocles' sword I've been aware of since forever, but for a long time I was hoping the magix of technology would be our saviour. Spoiler: The tech's been here for a while, the political will to actually utilize it, isn't. Realizing that probably radicalized me more than anything, but it took a while to come to that conclusion.