Hello, baby Marxist here!
Personally mine was reading.
When I was a liberal I loathed reading and found it hard to even read a short article. I rarely researched everything I heard, and as a teenager, I was like every other liberal, getting my news off social media.
Now I make sure to research everything, however, getting into theory is a bit hard. Most of the information I learned about communism was through fellow comrades, because like before, I got my information from other people’s comments.
Currently I’m restoring my motivation for reading by starting small. Reading long comments from comrades helped a lot. I’ve now moved on to reading information from leftist sources without effort, and I’m starting on reading the communist manifesto.
Enough about me, what were your side effects?
Well, you literally demonstrated in real time how liberal praxis is a sham: you listened, you believed, you tried to “vote with your dollars” and “consume different”, then realized how difficult it was and how inconsequential it was going to be in the grand scheme of things, and when you told other (I guess louder) libs about it, you found out they didn’t even do it themselves because of how impractical it was for a consoomer to avoid everything made in China, which made them really angry because of cognitive dissonance.
I had similar interactions and realizations as I was radicalizing myself.
Liberal praxis is to be mad and do nothing. Maybe tweet a mean tweet, give Reddit gold to a post and change a twitter handle. C’est tout.