I Knew Luigi Mangione
I knew Luigi Mangione—who didn’t?
Last week, he was back in the news: A mural of him appeared in London, his green sweater became a fixation, and his sockless loafers sent Google searches soaring 1400%.
With his good looks and brutal crime, people have christened him as the modern-day Ted Bundy.
But unlike Ted Bundy or any other high profile criminal before him, internet sleuths dug up just about everything that could be attached to a person’s digital footprint.
Reddit posts in back pain forums, a friend’s Instagram comment about wedding commitments, reposts of hacks from self-improvement gurus like Chris Williamson.
It felt like everyone knew Luigi Mangione.
Luigi Mangione isn’t Ted Bundy—he’s the Gen Z Charles Manson.
It’s not just his celebrity that’s important; it’s the transparent trail of breadcrumbs he left behind.
Like Manson embodied the excesses of free love and counterculture, Luigi represents the downsides of my generation’s obsessive, isolated, always-online nature.
Ironically, despite everyone finding everything about him online, there still isn’t a satisfying answer explaining how he went from normal to murdered.
I knew Luigi Mangione— I’ve heard his story before.
For the longest time, the talk of young men pendulumed between the fringe and the cringe— it was either Andrew Tate or that Gillette ad.
But now, a few mainstream voices have started taking the subject seriously.
Scott Galloway, NYU professor and professional armchair sociologist, paints a picture every time he’s on air of mothers calling him, saying:
Only, it’s not the guys who didn’t get into Penn that are the problem— it’s the ones who did.
At Penn, there was a split second where I almost joined a different frat.
The brothers in that house had every marker of success: parents with Wikipedia pages, high school names I’d heard before, the ability to party hard and still land top-tier jobs.
Had I joined, I would’ve had a completely different big brother—the kind of guy who seemed to have it all figured out.
Until he didn’t.
It started after graduation. He didn’t move to New York. He didn’t go to law school or start a company. He wasn’t off traveling and posting on social media.
No one had updates. No one ran into him. He just disappeared.
Then, one night, I saw him—without even knowing he was in New York.
After years of radio silence, he walked right up to me and a friend like no time had passed, eyes wild, talking a mile a minute. The first thing out of his mouth? That he’d met the love of his life—on a 36-hour cocaine-fueled bender.
A few weeks later, his name resurfaced in the news.
He’d been arrested for assaulting his girlfriend—she called the police, claiming he tried to kill her by choking her to death. She even published pictures of her bruises.
The Penn-to-Prison Pipeline is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, I know too many capable young men who have fallen off the map—Guys who, instead of law school, joined cults. Ivy League friends already back in rehab.
Brilliant 20-somethings who cut off their families entirely.
I knew Luigi Mangione—I wasn’t so different from him.
Last week, there was (another) bat virus outbreak. And suddenly, I was back in 2020.
Everyone had their thing during COVID. Baking sourdough, getting a dog, drinking more. Mine was self-improvement.
But it wasn’t just a “read more books” kind of self-improvement. It was a hyper-rationalized, devout, Luigi-esque commitment to self-control.
At the end of 2019, I was diagnosed with epilepsy after having a seizure so public my parents heard about it down in Miami before I told them. I lost the election for my dream job of frat president. I got dumped by a girl I was seriously hooking up with.
Then it was 2020. I moved back home.
Instead of college, I was in high school again, living with my parents and siblings.
Instead of eating family meals, I religiously divided boiled chicken breast into 3.5 oz portions to count calories.
Instead of virtual CorePower with my siblings, I followed a niche home fitness program straight out of a late-night infomercial: Shaun T’s Insanity workouts.
In three months, I dropped from 185 lbs to 165 lbs but didn’t lose an ounce of my anger.
So, I moved out, imagining that living alone was the ultimate control.
But in reality, I traded everything that mattered just to be cooped up, bitter, and alone in an empty six-bedroom house on Pine Street.
When there’s no one around to keep tabs on you or keep you in check, the line between self-improvement and its accompanying delusion fades.
It’s no longer just eating healthier and how much you lift that’s within your control but your job, your future, your life.
I was bouncing off the walls, ricocheting between extremes with no one to challenge me—reading White Fragility one week, becoming a COVID anti-vaxxer the next.
When I look at many of Luigi’s tweets about self-improvement now, I see someone with a similarly arrogant sense of self-improvement.
Who, like so many, retreated from the people who could have pulled him back.
I didn’t actually know Luigi Mangione— But who’s to say I’m so different?
I have a great group of friends. I am close with my siblings, cousins, and extended family. I have superhumanly supportive parents.
Yet I still wonder—if I disappeared, would they be able to find me? Travel to wherever I was and bring me back into the bounds of normal society?
From this point of view, your outcome in life is truly in your own hands: It’s solely on you to stay on the beaten path.
Yet, at my lowest, I just happened to get a FaceTime from my fraternity big brother (the frat I actually joined) asking if I wanted to start a business.
Suddenly, I had a new, all-consuming sense of purpose. Suddenly, I had a group of people to keep me in check. Suddenly I had a new (productive) delusion of grandeur.
I wish I could go back and tell myself—and Luigi, and the others—what I didn’t realize until later: Self-improvement isn’t the answer to isolation. It’s the symptom.
It turns out, fixing yourself alone is just another delusion of grandeur. Maybe the biggest one of all.
— WKD
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky