Internet Bullies

There is a strange sickness that has become normalized in modern life: people attacking strangers on the internet with a ferocity they would never dare express face to face. It happens daily, ritualistically, almost compulsively. Someone posts an idea, a piece of art, a personal reflection - and out of nowhere comes the swarm. Accusations. Moral outrage. Claims of “danger.” Warnings that the person must be silenced, corrected, destroyed.

But if you look closely, you begin to see something else beneath the justifications. These attacks are rarely about the message. What they’re actually  about is the state of the person doing the attacking.

Most people who behave this way are deeply unhappy. I don’t mean just situationally frustrated or temporarily upset. I mean Structurally unhappy. Their lives lack direction, meaning, and momentum. They wake up with a low-grade agitation humming in their nervous system and go to sleep without having done anything that required courage, discipline, or presence. That unused energy doesn’t just disappear or evaporate. It turns inward, ferments, and becomes resentment.

Energy always seeks expression. When it can’t move forward, it moves sideways. When it can’t be transformed, it becomes destructive.

Social media gives this energy a perfect outlet. It offers distance, anonymity, and the illusion of righteousness. You can discharge aggression without consequence. You can feel powerful without building anything. You can feel morally superior without changing your own life. The screen becomes a pressure valve.

This is why the attacks are often framed as concern. “This message is dangerous.” “This person is harmful.” “Someone needs to speak up.” These are not conclusions reached through careful discernment. They’re  stories created after the emotional surge, not before it. The body reacts first…tightness, anger, hostility…and the mind scrambles to justify it. The ego cannot tolerate seeing itself as petty or cruel, so it recasts the attack as virtue.

This is classic displacement. Instead of facing the pain of an unlived life, the person projects that pain outward and tries to destroy its reflection.

If someone is building something real - training their body, mastering a craft, raising children with intention, sitting in disciplined practice, creating art, refining their character - they simply don’t have the surplus psychic energy for this kind of behavior. Their attention is anchored. Their days have weight. Their energy is being used.

But when a life lacks gravity, the smallest provocation feels enormous. Someone else’s clarity feels like an accusation. Someone else’s discipline feels like judgment. Someone else’s joy feels like theft.

So the attacker tells themselves a story: I am not miserable…I am vigilant. I am not resentful…am morally awake. I am not attacking…I am protecting.

None of it is true.

What they are really protecting is their identity. Their excuses. Their stagnation. The fragile structure that allows them to avoid the most terrifying question a human being can face: What am I doing with my life?

Zen has always understood this. Long before social media, it warned about the dangers of mindless reactivity. Not because it is immoral, but because it is unconscious. When awareness collapses, behavior becomes compulsive. When presence is lost, people become possessed by their own unresolved energy.

This is why real practice emphasizes stillness, restraint, and responsibility. Not as moral virtues, but as forms of hygiene. You don’t lash out when you are centered. You don’t attack strangers when your life is aligned. You don’t need enemies when you are engaged in the work directly in front of you.

The internet has made it easy to confuse agitation with conviction. Loudness with clarity. Cruelty with courage. But none of these things hold up under scrutiny. If you want to know whether someone’s outrage is genuine, look at their life. Is it ordered? Is it disciplined? Is it producing anything of value? Or is it a mess propped up by constant commentary on what everyone else is doing wrong?

People who are actually dangerous…truly dangerous…are rarely screaming online. They are usually quiet, focused, and busy building power in the real world. Meanwhile, the loudest moral enforcers are often the least capable of sustained effort, personal responsibility, or self-mastery.

This doesn’t excuse the behavior, but it does explain it. And understanding the mechanics changes how you relate to it. You stop taking it personally. You stop arguing with it. You stop trying to reason someone out of a state they didn’t reason themselves into. You see it for what it is: unprocessed suffering seeking a target.

The tragedy is that the same energy being used to tear others down could have been used to transform the person’s own life. That anger could have fueled training. That obsession could have built skill. That vigilance could have become self awareness. But transformation requires humility, patience, and sustained effort…things that reactive minds avoid at all costs.

So instead, they choose the shortcut. The hit of righteousness. The brief feeling of power. The illusion of meaning.

It never lasts.

And that is why the attacks keep coming. Because nothing was resolved. Nothing was built. Nothing moved forward.

A life without practice will always look for someone to blame. A life without direction will always mistake destruction for purpose. A life without presence will always try to control the outside world instead of mastering the one thing it actually can: itself.

When you see this clearly, you stop being surprised by online cruelty. You stop being disturbed by it. You recognize it as a symptom, not a verdict. And you keep doing the work…quietly, steadily…while others exhaust themselves fighting shadows on a screen.

That, in the end, is the real danger they are trying to avoid: encountering someone who has actually done the work, and in doing so, reminds them of everything they have not.