Written by Julie Telgenhoff
I've been thinking a lot about mass psychosis lately, not as an abstract theory, but as something I watched unfold in real time. I watched it from inside the early social media trenches.
When I woke up in late 2011, everything changed for me almost overnight. Before that, I hated the internet. I was not someone who sat online all day digging through information. Back then, I didn't even have a Facebook page, but my kids forced me into creating one. Then one day I saw someone post something about 9/11, and I walked through the information like I had entered one doorway and came out another person on the other side.
Whether someone agrees with my conclusions or not is not the point of this story. The point is what happened to me. Something opened up inside me. People around me could not believe how much information I absorbed in such a short amount of time. It felt less like I had found a hobby and more like my spirit had taken over and given me meaningful work to do.
Soon after, I became an admin on the huge Facebook page Exposing The Truth. I became one of their top posters. But the person running the page had different ideas about where to take the media and we had conflict. At least that is how it felt to me. Eventually I was banned, and I was crushed.
My son Jordan saw how depressed I was and told me to start my own Facebook page. But, with my spirits so down, I couldn't think of a name and had no creative energy going. Then, he came up with A Sheep No More, meaning I was no longer asleep (a sheep) anymore. That name came from him, and it still means something to me.
Back then, social media was different. This was before everyone was an expert, before every person with a phone became a broadcaster and influencer, before one-minute clips trained people to mistake stimulation for knowledge.
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| Source: 2013 The Hegelian Dialectic by A Sheep No More |
Jordan used to sit with me and watch what happened when I posted. I would put up a meme, and within minutes there would be thousands of likes and shares. It was instant. You could feel the machine light up. I bought Photoshop, started editing images, tweaking messages, making my own visuals, and that became part of how A Sheep No More grew so quickly.
I would go onto other large pages and post my memes in the comments. The likes and follows would come. It was time-consuming, but the competition was not what it is today. The alternative media world had not yet become the crowded, monetized, dopamine-driven circus it later became.
In a very real way, I helped build the early meme culture in the alternative media space. And then I watched what it did to people.
At first, memes felt powerful. They could wake someone up in one image. They punched through people's denial systems, and they could say what a long article might take two thousand words to explain.
But over time, I started seeing the downside. People began reading less. They were sharing more. Verification mattered less than the emotional impact of a post. If something looked true, felt true, or confirmed what someone already believed, they would pass it along without any investigation. The meme became the message. Then the message became a weapon.
I decided to test what I was seeing. In July of 2014, for one month, I deliberately posted more sensational conspiracy content. Illuminati this. Puppets of the Illuminati that. Symbolism, fear, New World Order information about control, all the things that triggered people’s curiosity and outrage.
And guess what happened?
The website views went up and so did the ad money I was making off Adsense and other ad platforms. And I was so disappointed about what it proved.
It proved that the audience was being trained to respond more strongly to fear, symbols, and sensationalism than to deeper research. It proved that the machine rewarded escalation. It proved that if I wanted more traffic and more money, I could get it by feeding the very thing I believed was harming people.
And after that month-long experiment, I couldn't do it anymore and made a decision to forfeit the money that could be made and go back to living my moral truth.
That was one of the first times I truly understood that the alternative media world had its own sickness. It was not just mainstream media lying to people. It was not just politicians, corporations, or governments manipulating perception. The so-called truth movement had its own dopamine economy, its own ego traps, its own grifters, and its own mass psychosis.
I watched people I knew take political sides because it made them more money. Some even admitted it to me and didn't understand why I would not participate in it. I watched pages become brand experts. I watched truth become weaponized, and I watched awakening become performance driven.
That was deeply disturbing to me because I had come into this from a soul calling. I believed truth had to be handled with integrity and care. If I did not know something, I wanted to say I did not know. If something was only my theory, I wanted to say it was my theory. I respected real journalists and independent researchers who did the work, and I often showcased their articles with permission because I wanted to promote serious work.
But integrity is not always rewarded financially. And this is where the conversation about mass psychosis becomes personal for me.
Mass psychosis is not only something that happens when governments use fear, confusion, contradiction, and repetition to pull entire populations into a shared perception. That is all real. But there is another layer. The platforms themselves became psychological conditioning machines. They trained people to react instantly, to skim instead of study, to share before verifying, and to confuse emotional arousal with truth.
The mainstream media did it. The alternative media did it, and social media perfected it.
Then came the influencer era, where everyone had a brand, everyone had a take, everyone had a theory, everyone had a product, everyone had an audience, and too many people with no real depth, discernment or wisdom were suddenly treated like authorities.
By the time the TikTok-style short clips took over the culture, it felt like the final insult. Humanity’s attention span had been chopped into pieces, and people were now being fed reality in one-minute bursts of outrage, trauma, comedy, propaganda, and ego performance. This was an unknown insult to people's nervous systems.
It made me nauseated because I remember when things felt different. It wasn't easier back then, but it was different from what it's become today.
Back in 2012 and 2013, people still read and digested the content. They dug. They debated. There was still a sense that information mattered. By 2018 and 2019, I could feel the shift hardening. It seemed like everyone was becoming an expert, everyone was chasing social media reach, and everyone was posting to feed the algorithm, the audience, and themselves.
And now AI has made it even worse.
AI comments. AI videos. AI articles. AI voices. AI images. People trolling other sites to get traffic. People pretending to research when they are really just recycling content. The information field feels polluted beyond anything I could have imagined when I first started. And it's producing another problem of information overload for the central nervous system.
That is why a random comment I noticed under one of my blog articles bothered me so much. Because I know the pattern. Someone programs AI to see a keyword like “mass psychosis” and drops a whole manifesto that barely responds to the article. It is not conversation. It is a payload for them. I recognize the tactic because that is what years inside this world taught me.
The real issue is not whether people are awake or asleep. That language is way too simple now. Some people “wake up” only to become addicted to exposing everything outside themselves while never facing what is happening inside themselves. They leave one trance and enter into another.
I know because I went through stages too.
There is grief when you first wake up. You're angry, shocked and then the obsession hits and that need to tell everyone about it takes over. A need to prove it. A need to shake people. But eventually, if the awakening is real, it has to turn inward.
Around 2015 or 2016, something became clear to me. The only way to combat what was happening in the outside world was to work on myself. To calm my own nervous system. To stop letting fear and anxiety of the future own my body. Yoga became part of that for me and so did studying the Kybalion and the Hermetic principles. The more I understood the inner laws, the less interested I became in living inside constant external chaos.
That does not mean I stopped caring about the world. It meant I understood that an unregulated person can become another carrier of the very madness they claim to oppose.
That is the part so many people are missing.
You cannot expose manipulation while being manipulated by your own fears and anxiety. You cannot fight mass psychosis while addicted to the emotional rewards of the crowd. You cannot claim to be free while needing likes, shares, followers, money, or outrage to tell you who you are.
I was an influencer before “influencer” became a career. But I did not want to influence people into worshiping me. That is why I stayed with the A Sheep No More avatar back then, and decided not to disclose who was behind it. I wanted to influence consciousness and wanted people to think, question, read, feel, and grow.
Today, my work is barely seen compared to what it once was. And honestly, I wouldn't want the responsibility of that kind of reach right now. I know what it costs, I know what it can do, and I know how easy it is for the machine to turn even sincere people into performers and payload operators.
But I also know what I saw. I saw the meme become a doorway, and then I saw it become a drug. I saw alternative media rise as a response to deception, and then I saw parts of it become another deception.
I saw people wake up, and then I saw many of them get trapped in the dopamine maze.
So when I talk about mass psychosis, I am not speaking as someone who merely watched a video or read a theory. I am speaking as someone who was there when the social media mind-war was still young, when memes could move thousands of people in minutes, when the hunger for truth began being redirected into the hunger for stimulation, dopamine, money, and fortune.
That is why I still believe discernment, integrity, and wisdom matter. And that is why I believe real awakening is not just seeing through the world’s lies, but having the courage to turn inward and do the work on the self. Some call that the dark night of the soul. I call it the part of awakening most people try to avoid.
