I took the wrong pill

Jared was a thought leader. At least, that’s what his Twitter bio said. Every morning, he woke to a phone buzzing with blue check notifications, affirmations, and hashtags. He posted sunrise photos from the rooftop of his luxury apartment, startup advice he’d copy-pasted from LinkedIn influencers, and morning routine reels—never mind that most mornings he woke up past 10, groggy from bingeing YouTube and pouring wine into a coffee mug. His real job was in sales support at a mid-tier tech company, but no one on Instagram knew that. Online, he was an angel investor, a speaker, and a disruptor. He had built his “brand” like a skyscraper made of fog—beautiful from a distance, but impossible to lean on. His biggest flex was “The Launch.” He’d posted a teaser about a stealth startup months ago. It didn’t exist. No pitch deck, no product. Just a name—Mynt—and a logo he’d made on Canva. Still, the illusion worked. People started following. A VC slid into his DMs. “Excited to see where this goes,” she wrote. Jared replied with the rocket emoji. To feed the myth, he burned through savings. Rented Teslas for a day to shoot content. Paid a Fiverr designer to mock up fake wireframes. He told himself it was seed-stage optics. “Build the hype, the product comes later.” The dopamine of likes numbed the gnawing fear that he was living in a house of cards. One night, as he scrolled through Reddit, he came across a thread that caught his eye. It was titled “Red Pill Life: The Truth About Selling Your Soul for Followers.” Jared clicked. The thread spoke to him in ways he hadn’t expected. He had read enough to know that the “red pill” was all about waking up from the illusion of the matrix. Waking up to the “truth” that society—especially social media—was a distraction, a lie. But in this thread, it was framed differently. The red pill was a tool, a weapon, a way to take control. It wasn’t about enlightenment; it was about domination. Jared saw it as the ultimate cheat code. In his mind, he wasn’t lying to anyone—he was simply playing the game better than anyone else. He was a player, not a pawn. He considered deleting the post about Mynt. It didn’t matter that there was no product. What mattered was the illusion he was selling. If he could sell it, he could win. The red pill philosophy echoed in his mind: play the game, or the game plays you. And yet, in a rare moment of doubt, he watched the opening scene of The Matrix again. Neo was offered the red pill or the blue pill. The red pill would wake him up to harsh reality, and the blue pill would let him stay in blissful ignorance. Jared didn’t want to take the blue pill—he had taken it years ago. The blue pill was the comfort of his 9-to-5 job, his ordinary life, the truth that no one would care about his startup or his brand. He’d been living with the blue pill for far too long. Now, he craved the red pill. So, he doubled down. He posted more. He made fake interviews, staged product demos, and tweeted about his "disruptive vision." The numbers climbed. He got more followers, more engagement. People started calling him a visionary. Then came the message. “Hi Jared. Saw Mynt’s beta is launching soon. We’d love to feature it in TechPulse’s founder spotlight. Can we do an interview this Friday?” His stomach dropped. Jared almost said no. Almost told the truth. But then he thought of the attention, the doors it could open. “Sure,” he typed. “Looking forward to it.” He stayed up for three nights building a fake dashboard, downloading open-source designs, creating a walk-through demo that didn’t actually work. On camera, he pitched Mynt as a game-changer in decentralized finance, “empowering users to monetize micro-engagements.” It was all jargon. But he delivered it with conviction. The article went viral. Investors began to call. He booked meetings. He promised a testable product “by next quarter.” His coworker at the tech company recognized him from the article. “Dude,” he said, impressed. “I didn’t know you were doing all that.” Jared nodded coolly. For a month, he lived in a dream. But when questions got technical—when the VCs asked for a prototype, or clients asked for a demo link—he ran out of runway. First came suspicion. Then screenshots. Then a Twitter thread exposing the scam. It blew up. His LinkedIn went dark. His company fired him. A lawyer from a startup he’d impersonated sent a cease-and-desist. Jared sat on his couch, wrapped in the hoodie he’d worn in his influencer videos, watching the views drop to zero. The emails started coming. Dozens. The angry messages flooded his inbox. The ones who felt betrayed. The “fans” who had trusted him and the investors who demanded answers. His phone rang constantly, the calls coming in faster than he could block them. And then came the message from the TechPulse editor, the one he had once been so excited to hear from. “We’re retracting the article. We will be posting a correction and a statement regarding your fraudulent claims. Please respond to the legal team ASAP.” The weight of it crushed him. It was too much. He had been living the red pill philosophy, telling himself that the game was rigged, and it was time to “wake up” and take control. But now, as the walls caved in, he realized the red pill hadn’t set him free. It had only trapped him further in a delusion that reality would never match. That night, Jared went to bed in his dimly lit apartment, the laptop still open on the table, notifications pinging incessantly. He kept staring at his phone, hoping for some kind of reprieve, a message that would make everything go away. But it didn’t. Instead, it was a final, devastating message—a message that seemed to confirm everything he had feared. “You’re a fraud.” Jared stared at the screen. The blue pill—the comfortable lie—now seemed like a distant dream. The red pill had woken him up, but there was no going back. The next morning, his body was found in his apartment. His final act was one last attempt to escape the crushing weight of a life he had created through lies, an illusion that had promised everything and delivered nothing.

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