Everything you believe is already entirely manipulated. Every single interpretation we all have of reality is conditioned by forces over which we had no control. So I see no harm in becoming conscious about the power we each have to make those manipulations; if each of us doesn’t make them for ourselves, they’re made for us — by our family or our country or our economy or our gender or literally anything and everything else. The “isolation” is the lived experience of realizing there is nothing outside you, and this temporal body you thought was you is not your essence because, evolutionarily and psychologically, you are literally nothing but the interactions and product of everything other than you. “So maybe don’t spend your thoughts hating yourself and instead choose to empathize with yourself and others, because living in fear feels awful and, turns out, is optional.” — the ACIM TL;DR