Thought I made some new great friends. Nope! It's Amway!

Sorry I just want to rant. This guy randomly approached me on campus. Since we have the same ethnicity background, and I have had trouble connecting with people in my community, I gladly took his offer of friendship. Not without reasonable doubts at first. I am highly cautious and paranoid, I even told him "if you are trying to sell me something, I'm not interested". So for the past three months, he introduced me to his friends group, which consists of mostly 18-24 years old. Most of them have very similar background to me. We hung out, got to know each others. I learned of their dreams, their aspirations, about them as a person. But none of them ever brought up anything about a "business opportunity". The name Amway is mentioned nowhere. His LinkedIn shows that he's working on a vague E-commerce project. Which I don't pay much attention to. If he enjoys it, then I won't inquire too much. Overtime, I let my guard down. These people seemed genuine and he seemed to really care about me as a person. Maybe this is really the friend group that I will have a long lasting connection with. Until last night, he invited me over a "watch party" to a speech his business mentors were giving. He idolized and spoke highly of them. So I thought why not, I might learn something new too. He asked me to wear formal attire, so after a whole day of classes and meetings, I dashed home, changed and drove over. I didn't even have dinner, thinking it will only last an hour. I showed up to 12-15 people also smartly dressed. After an hour of talking about #buyyourlifeback and #beyourownboss and whatnot, they played a video of a bunch of educated people talking about this great company, and BAM it's revealed, and it's Amway. And they talked about how great Amway is for another hour.

Recovering from the initial shock of the realization that I have skipped my dinner, put my own personal plan on the burner for this MLM pitch, the second wave of realization hits. All of my "friends" were there, and they were all in on it, which is even worse. They have trained, agreed and planned to never bring up this kind of business around me for a certain length of time, so I can open up to them. I felt like crying in the meeting. It felt like I had been stringed along for 3 months under the false pretense of friendship. My trust was abused on their slim hope that I will sign up and be their downlines. I have been struggling with trust issues in my interpersonal relationship, and this experience certainly did not help. I feel like all the inner work I have been practicing was shattered in a matter of seconds. I feel so hurt and betrayed. The saddest thing is that they all seemed to genuinely believe that they are giving people a real opportunity of mentorship and success. Amway, or all MLM leaders have practiced the lies so well that the self-deception in their downlines is impossible to break through. So I won't even try to reason with them, because I will just be deemed that I don't have the same "dictionary" and "vision of success". Wish the best to my friends, and I hope we never cross paths again.