It took extensive psychedelic usage, specifically psilocybin mushrooms, to break free from the pattern based behavior I had been indoctrinated with.

Around that time I also found an online article about "exiting the matrix". At the time, it was one of the top google search results and nothing else really matched. Now you find all kinds of stuff about "exiting the matrix". It was more about network security, but also about combining psychedelics and the internet as tools.