The Script

I’ve been watching all of this unfold for a long time, since 2012, back when the smartphone stopped being a gadget and started behaving more like a silent companion that never left my side. I own one. I rely on one. And maybe that’s why I noticed something most people don’t: the feeling that my life didn’t exactly belong to me anymore.

If you’ve ever felt it, that strange sense that something is off, that your emotions feel preloaded, that the arguments in your head don’t quite sound like your own, let me tell you something that took me years to admit out loud: you’re not paranoid for noticing. You’re paying attention.

Because as deep as the rabbit hole of modern technology goes, what really shook me was realizing its roots stretch back long before social media, before television, even before World War II. Every time people talk about psychological manipulation, they jump straight to MK-Ultra. But during my research, I stumbled into a sobering truth: before MK-Ultra, there was Tavistock.

For years, I couldn’t shake the sense of being controlled. The outrage I felt online was too instant.

The dread I woke up with felt too familiar. I’d catch myself spiraling through emotions that didn’t match my day or my circumstances.

I blamed stress, work, and myself.

But over time, I began to realize there was a rhythm to it all, as if someone had found the right emotional lever to pull at the exact time. And the strangest part was that other people seemed to feel the same way.

Anxiety wasn’t an occasional storm anymore; it was the climate. Despair felt normal, and outrage felt addictive.

That’s when I started digging. And the deeper I went, the more I discovered that these psychological patterns weren’t accidental, but manipulation.

The story doesn’t begin with Silicon Valley or intelligence agencies. It starts in a quiet office in London in 1921, called the Tavistock Institute.

Publicly, Tavistock existed to treat soldiers with shell shock, what we’d now call PTSD. It sounded noble, compassionate, and necessary.

But the truth was far more complicated.

In studying trauma, Tavistock didn’t just explore how to heal people; they discovered how trauma could reshape a person. Trauma made the human mind pliable, suggestible, and open to influence, and that realization didn’t stay within hospital walls.

The theories that emerged spilled into government, media, education, and advertising. After WWII, Tavistock’s fingerprints were everywhere.

They helped design Cold War messaging. They advised NATO and influenced the foundations of mass communication and social persuasion.

And once you understand what they learned about group psychology, how fear spreads, how crowds react, how grief and confusion steer behavior, you start seeing it everywhere. And if Tavistock was the laboratory, Edward Bernays was the salesman.

Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, figured out how to take unconscious desires and turn them into levers for mass influence. He took psychology and wrapped it in marketing.

He convinced women to smoke by branding cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” and tied bacon and eggs to the American identity of breakfast. Bernays helped spin the overthrow of Guatemala’s government into a fight against communism. Bernays made persuasion feel natural, invisible, yet inevitable.

And once you realize how much of what we consider “culture” was engineered by a marketing strategist with access to subconscious behavioral insights, you cannot help notice how often desire and fear manipulate our identities in the same way today.

Then came the intelligence era.

Operation Mockingbird revealed just how effective headlines could be as tools of control. Instead of influencing journalists, the CIA directly embedded agents inside major newsrooms.

They wrote scripts, shaped commentary, and framed national narratives. Not through threats or force, just through stories.

By the 1970s, hundreds of journalists were part of intelligence agencies. Trusted voices. Anchors. Columnists. Information gatekeepers.

When I learned this, it reframed my entire understanding of media. Not in a “everything is fake” way, but in the sense that information has always been curated, and often by people whose goals we never see.

And then came MK-Ultra, the program everyone whispers about.

Behind locked doors, scientists experimented with sensory deprivation, electroshock, drugs, and psychological stress in an attempt to understand how identity could be stripped and rewritten. The goal wasn’t healing, justice, or science, but control.

Some of the most disturbing experiments happened in Canada, where Dr. Ewen Cameron subjected patients to “psychic driving,” looping messages into their ears while they were heavily medicated and disoriented. Some patients forgot their names, their families, and even how to walk.

When those documents surfaced in the 1970s, people were horrified. However, the research didn’t vanish; it shifted into something far more subtle.

Fast forward to today, and the battleground isn’t in a secret facility; it’s in our homes, our feeds, our pockets. We used to think of manipulation as physical experimentation, but now it’s digital experimentation, quiet, constant, and invisible.

Algorithms don’t just “recommend” content. It measures you, maps your nervous system by tracking every hesitation, every swipe, every moment you stop scrolling.

They learn what spikes your cortisol, triggers your anger, fuels your fear, and keeps you hooked. And once they know it, they feed it back to you in a feedback loop so tight that eventually, your emotional patterns stop feeling like reactions and start feeling like personality traits.

It is why outrage is the currency of the internet, not because people are angrier, but because anger keeps you watching. And the longer you watch, the more predictable and programmable your reactions become.

Most people think social media’s goal is attention, but attention is just the surface. The real goal is conditioning.

Everywhere I look, people are drowning. Kids are depressed before they hit puberty.

Adults are exhausted just existing. Anxiety isn’t an exception; it’s baseline.

And when you step back, it becomes painfully clear: if you wanted to exhaust, distract, and divide a population, this is what it would look like.

A mentally worn-down society cannot resist, cannot unite, cannot wake up. And numbness is the point, because numb people don’t question; they follow.

If you’ve ever felt like your life doesn’t feel like yours, like you were following some invisible checklist someone else wrote, that’s not madness. That’s awareness.

From childhood, we chase approval, aesthetics, popularity, status, and measurements that never end and never fulfill. And when we reach the finish line, what do we find?

Nothing.

That’s because the script isn’t about fulfillment; it’s about blind participation. The part that changed everything for me came the moment I stopped feeding the system.

In the quiet that followed, something ancient woke up in me. It isn’t about finding myself and never was, but about remembering me.

Beneath the noise, under the programming, through the outrage, there is a version of me untouched by algorithms, headlines, or psychological engineering. And once I felt it, once I recognized the difference between reaction and intuition, my outlook shifted.

The confusion is real because the system is cracking, and everyone feels it. The façade’s thin, and the old tools aren’t as effective as before.

And that means real life is still available. The only question left, the one I had to ask myself, is this: Who am I without their script?

And once you start asking that question, the system loses all power. And because you are waking up, even a little, you can’t go back to sleep.

Not now, not ever.