Your Most Dangerous Influencer Isn’t Online

On performed lives, unexamined voices, and becoming your own narrator

I watched Louis Theroux’s documentary about the Manosphere the other night.

If you haven’t seen it, the broad shape is familiar enough: cameras following young men who have built enormous online followings and wealth by telling other young men how to live. How to be strong. How to be successful. How to stop being whatever they currently are and become something more worthy of respect.

What stayed with me wasn’t the ideology. It was the faces.

Underneath the certainty, and there was a great deal of certainty, there was something else. A kind of restlessness. An inability to be still. The content never stopped, the performance never paused, the camera was always on. And when Louis pressed, gently and persistently in the way only he can, the certainty started to thin. Although I think Louis could’ve done so much more, it did make me ask a few questions. What did they actually believe, beneath the brand? Who were they, away from the audience?

I’m not sure they knew.

There was one moment that stayed with me more than any other.

One of the central figures, HS TickyTocky, a man with millions of followers, a vast online presence, an answer for everything — was caught off camera with his mother. And the transformation was startling. The big energy was gone. The performance had dropped. He looked, suddenly, exactly like what he was: a son, in a kitchen, with his mum. She was talking to him, trying to prepare him for when Louis arrived. Be yourself, essentially. Be real. The kind of thing a mother says when she can see the gap between who her child is and who he’s been pretending to be.

Then the camera rolled. And he was gone. The presence stepped back in, the volume came up, the performance resumed. His mother standing just off to the side, watching.

She knew. Of course she knew. Mothers usually do.

And in that thirty seconds she did more genuine influencing than he manages in thousands of hours of content , because she was trying to help him be more himself, while everything he puts out into the world is quietly helping other people be less themselves.

It would be easy to watch something like that and feel comfortably distant from it. These are extreme men with extreme views, doing extreme things for an audience. Nothing to do with the rest of us.

But I kept thinking about the mechanics of it. Not the content, but the structure. The performance built to make people approve of you. The identity assembled from the outside in — constructed for an audience rather than discovered from within. The voice that tells you what you need to do, who you need to be, what you need to project in order to finally feel like you belong.

That’s not a Manosphere problem. That’s a human one.

Most of us have a version of it running. Not on camera. Not with millions of followers. But somewhere inside, a narrator that has been shaping our story for years, telling us what we need to perform, what we need to prove, what we need to become in order to be acceptable. In order to fit.

The influencer isn’t always online. Sometimes the most powerful one is already inside.

Mine had a specific origin, though it took me a long time to understand that.

I was adopted. And the voice that formed early, quietly, persistently, in the way these things do, was asking questions.  I couldn’t put it into words at the time but felt it in almost every room I walked into: how do you fit in here?

Not a threatening question on the surface. But underneath it, driving it, was something with more urgency. If I get this right — the performance, the likability, the version of me that this particular room seems to want — then maybe I belong. Maybe they’ll keep me. Maybe the thing I’m most afraid of won’t happen.

So I performed. Not cynically. Not even consciously, for a long time. I just learned, the way children learn, what seemed to work. How to read a room. How to adjust. How to make people comfortable with me, how to make them laugh, how to be whoever the moment seemed to require. I got quite good at it.

The problem with a performance is that it attracts an audience, but it keeps them at a distance. People were drawn to the version I was presenting. But the version I most wanted, to be genuinely known, genuinely close, genuinely kept, that couldn’t happen from behind a performance. The very thing I was doing to draw people near was the thing holding them at arm’s length.

At some point, the balloon popped. The way it always does, eventually, when the gap between the performance and the person underneath it gets too wide to maintain.

What followed was uncomfortable. But it was also the first time in a long time that I was in the same room as myself.

The men in that documentary are not uniquely broken. They are doing, at volume and on camera, something a lot of people do quietly and in private. They have found a narrator, someone who sounds certain, someone who offers a clear script, someone who tells them exactly who to be and how to be it.  And they have followed it, because following someone else’s script is so much easier than writing your own.

But borrowed certainty is always brittle. It holds until something tests it. And something always tests it.

The question worth sitting with isn’t whether you have an inner narrator. Everyone does. The question is whether you’ve ever stopped to examine what it’s actually saying. Where it came from. Whether the voice you’ve been following is one you’d choose, if you were choosing deliberately.

For some people that voice came from a critical parent. For others, an absent one. From a school that told them who they were before they’d had a chance to find out. From a culture that had a very clear idea of what success looked like and handed them the script before they thought to question it. From something that happened early, something that installed a question, a fear, an instruction, that has been running quietly in the background ever since.

The narrator isn’t always wrong, by the way. Some of what it says is useful. Some of it is protection that once served a real purpose. But it needs reading. It needs examining. Because a voice you’ve never questioned is a voice you’re still obeying, whether you know it or not.

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with families after someone has died, helping them find the words for a life. And what I’ve noticed, in those quiet living rooms, is that the people I hear about who seem most fully themselves are the ones who, at some point, stopped performing and started paying attention to what was actually true for them.

They are remembered not for the version they presented to the world but for the person underneath it. The specific, irreplaceable, sometimes difficult, always particular person that no script could have produced.

That’s who people grieve. That’s who they miss.

Not the performance. The person. The real person.