She does this and all the while never leaves the house, other than to go to work. She doesn't share her actual thoughts and gets angry when asked about it. You might be reading this and thinking that there's more to it, but sadly there isn't. It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.

But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning. It's one thing to have an issue and work through it slowly, but it's something else to isolate yourself and live your life through others - while those "others" prosper from your own ignorance.

I'm sure her past experiences are playing a role in this behavior, but the whole cosmetics things - I know for a fact there are a lot of influencers who peddle this crap, and if you lack self-awareness then I can see how easy it is to get stuck in this cycle. I just wish there was an easy way out of it.

That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

> It's bizarre.

Is it, though? Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression. People like to be around beautiful people – or at least so it appears to those looking from the outside in, right? If that doesn't work, then you can easily fall into a cycle of thinking "maybe this next surgery is the one that will make me beautiful enough!"

I think the actual biggest problem with "Redditization" is not hostility, but instead the fact that there is really no dialogue. There's no back and forth discussion, at least not with the same actual individual. You post a comment and (maybe but usually not) get a reply, then if you reply to that reply, the next reply in thread will be from someone else. Very very rarely do you go back and forth with one person. And regardless, you'll never ever interact with that person again (except maybe if you're on a tiny sub).

It's such a odd and distorted version of conversation. I'm not talking to any specific "you" -- I'm submitting thoughts to a "mass-you" and hoping with fingers crossed that the mass-you will reply or at least nod in approval with a single upvote.

For hn, it's even more interesting because the "wrongthink shutout" is packaged in intellectualism. But you see it more pronounced on the edges. Good examples are posts that discuss climate breakdown.

Those on Mastondon are a self-selected group who have opted out of Xitter and Reddit.

Any new social media platform is always better than the previous by self-selection. And then it gets popular and becomes just as bad as the previoius. Lather, rinse, repeat.

* Does Anyone Else foo?

* Pretty sure I'm gonna get downvoted for this, but foo.

* Unpopular Opinion: foo.

...and many more such patterns.

This is something it's taken me a while to come to terms with. I used to want to fully engage with everybody and everything. It was anathema to me to just "broadcast something into the void" and ignore replies. But over time I came to realize that a. I don't scale to engaging with every single person who replies to something I say online, and b. I don't owe those people a response or any of my time/attention; especially the trolls and bots and other lamers that are so prevalent these days.

So now I'm more comfortable (albeit maybe not 100% comfortable) with treating things in more of a "fire and forget" fashion. I say what I want to say, and people can do with it what they will. I just can't be arsed to engage with the trolls and other randos. But... if somebody has a mature, reasonable, professional response then I am willing, on a selective basis, to dig in deeper and have a longer discussion.

That's why I don't speak my opinions to anyone other than people I'm close with.

1. Being colored 2. Doing recreational marijuana 3. Being a specific faith (like wearing Hijab for women) 4. Heck, just being a woman

Society seems to always have reasons to fire people or deny people a job that seem silly in retrospect, but enough people seem to think it's reasonable enough to do en masse.

Edit: I'm not saying any of those reasons, or being fired for holding "controversial" opinions are good, I'm just pointing out it's nothing new.

In what way are these opinions, controversial or otherwise?

Are you suggesting that people of colour, for example, were fired only if they were of the opinion that they were a person of colour? If they were visibly a person of colour, but adamant that they were caucasian, a promotion was in order instead? They just had to believe?

My point isn't that opinions get people fired (though religious beliefs certainly are opinions), it's that people have always been denied work for a myriad of reasons. People have always had to hide certain aspects of their identity for fear of being fired. Opinions, controversial or not, just seem to be the newest way people get fired. Once cancel culture goes away, bad management will find a new way to fire people they don't like.

It used to be that people would never dare talk about smoking Marijuana at work for fear of retaliation. Now in some US states employers can't retaliate against recreational drug usage, and employees will talk about it casually with no fear.

All in all, I think it's up to us (as a society) to just be accepting of differing opinions. Everything is polarizing now and anyone outside the collective groupthink is ostracized and called names like bigot or monster or supporting genocide or supporting terrorism, etc, etc. I think the current problem stems from members of that groupthink being put into a position of power (IE becoming employers or managers, or even politicians).

There is no simple solution because society is hard to change, but individually we can't judge people because of one "shitty opinion" they may have. That's personally why I like going to large events like concerts; everyone is there for one reason: to have fun listening to music they like. Instead of hating each other because of a shitty opinion, we're united because of a common hobby. That's what we should be looking for in each other imo.

When has a society ever been accepting of different opinions, past a certain threshold? I can't think of any examples to be honest.

In the pre-internet past, it wasn't that much of a problem, because there wasn't much diversity, and highly differing opinions were isolated from each other because of geography. People only talked with other local people, who usually didn't travel much, and wider dissemination of ideas came from the press, which was controlled by a relatively small group of people and didn't just publish every person's opinion willy-nilly.

Now we're exposed to opinions from people all around the globe. We've never had to deal with this before.

On 4chan sure, on Reddit absolutely hecking no. On the main subs in French wrongthink comments get deleted super fast, and on one English-speaking about a hobby it's an immediate ban.

I don’t post anywhere but HN so my profiles are always bare. Starting something like 5 years ago I’d follow someone and within a day, flip a coin, on tails I was banned or blocked.

I eventually deleted the last of my social accounts. They turned into places where strangers were just there to torment each other or receive unconditional praise.

How do you filter out the stuff that's clearly coming from insecure teenage brains?

I don't mean literally filtering it as in censoring it, I mean how do you read/navigate this forum in a way where you don't constantly have to read over childish shite?

True, I also feel that HN overmoderates genuine critical debate, and the high barrier for allowing downvoting has always confounded me. There are some very smart people around here though. I understand the need for rules to avoid the kind of silly trolling you get on 4chan.

I'm just a few years from 40 and I can still vividly remember a time not too long ago where this was not at all how I thought.

Another game that is like this is our very own economic system, at least when it comes to aesthetics, money is yet another "upvote"/"like" game. The impact and similarities more clear and apparent.

One should hope. Disagreement is how you learn. It is why we talk to each other.

But that's not what we're talking about here. With 'Reddit' behaviour transcending beyond Internet forums, we're losing the disagreement. Now we see ostracization. There is no: "You are wrong because X." or "That is an interesting thought, but have you considered Y?" it has become "There is something wrong with you." and in the extreme "Say goodbye to your job/friends/family."

> The fact is, every person occupies unique physical space and thus has unique life experiences and a unique perspective of each “event”.

#000000 and #000001 are unique, but most would simply call both colors "black", and not lose any advantage whatsoever. The fact we can communicate using common words and obtain desired effects most of the time disproves that uniqueness created by differing perspectives makes truth an "illusion" or meaningless.

Now, I notice that I use "we all agree" and "vast majority," which is no way to explain an objective fact, but what we all agree on as a community or society _is_ reality. A society or community that has a different reality(s) than us is probably not a society or community that we would associate ourselves with.

This operates on several levels and dimensions; the common realities I share with my local Islamic community are different realities than I share with my tech community, or Toastmasters community, or even family.

Going back to the original point, yes, there are no realities that the entire global community can agree on, not even something as seemingly incontroversial as medicine (Christian Science for example https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/case-studies/mi... ), but no individual is part of the global community. We choose our communities based on the realities that we accept to be true.

You're confusing rationally concluding something with feeling morally righteous for believing it. It's not irrational to disbelieve something that people only believe because they'll feel like a bad person or be punished for doubting. See religion, for example.

The only reason most people believe the holocaust happened is because they heard about it from general society. Same way they believe God created the world. Almost no layman has actually studied it. It's just a kind of common faith where being a believer is what's important rather than the content of the belief.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that the vast majority of believers aren't believing out of rationality but out of indoctrination.

Same is true of all sorts of beliefs in things that don't directly affect us. We believe them because everyone assures us they're true, not because we sat down and worked out the conclusion for ourselves.

Sure, truth is in some senses unknowable (in particular in the 'The Map is not the Territory' sense), but we can have increasingly accurate and useful enough models that improve our lives. It's also the case that most human matters need specific answers, potentially extremely specific to their situation (and hard or impossible to know things, like what's going on in their minds), as well as some ethical and aesthetic frameworks that allows one thing to be good while other thing is bad. It's not obvious at first that ethics could be based on truth and science (and hence have somewhat-universal rights and wrongs), but I've come to believe that's the case indeed. Ethics really derives from fundamental truths about existence, like the reality and nature of suffering (and the nature of the workings of our minds), the nature of existence (for example, work is ethical insofar as it supports us existing at all), and so on.

If you think about it, the notion that anything goes, is really absurd: surely there are things you wouldn't accept essentially no matter what. It's much more absurd than the counterpart that there are true things, even about the nature of existence, that we can approach. The human mind (and minds in general!) can be studied using similar methods to the study of nature (with some necessary generalizations), and I believe that's what the 21st century is going to be all about :)

Edit: That's not to say 'vibes' are not important as well! From Goethe[1]:

"Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him: he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us: what should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rarely found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps to it do not: with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain. It is but a part of art that can be taught: the artist needs it all. Who knows it half, speaks much, and is always wrong: who knows it wholly, inclines to act, and speaks seldom or late. The former have no secrets and no force : the instruction they can give is like baked bread, savory and satisfying for a single day; but flour cannot be sown, and seed-corn ought not to be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter. Action can be understood and again represented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing while he acts aright, but of what is wrong we are always conscious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be together. Their babbling detains the scholar: their obstinate mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true artist gives us opens the mind; for, where words fail him, deeds speak. The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and approaches more and more to being a master."

[1] Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) Book VII Chapter IX

I think you nailed it on the head here, though. At a young age, we often don't carry the self confidence or self awareness to stand by our thoughts or opinions (and really, for good reason -- it's a good time to learn!). We have no sense of self or conviction at that age, despite the very unfair way popular media portrays teens (e.g. as mature adults with fully formed sense of self).

But the net result of what GP was mentioning is this lack of self confidence + an overly hostile online conversation definitely makes the resultant introversion/misplaced self worth make a lot of sense.

I regularly throw my opinions in discussions online, and often (not most the time, but often), get "downvoted" into oblivion. Part of that is that I like to play devil's advocate or I engage folks who don't agree with me, but part of it is also being a 41 year old person who honestly doesn't give a shit if they have a "popular" opinion, just a well-reasoned one. I chock that up to being roughed up by the world for a bit.

Very easy to say when you aren't going viral and 100,000+ people aren't trying to get you fired or hurling insults at you ranging from calling you an idiot to telling you to die. I'm not saying you're wrong but it's much easier said than done.

You can't mean someone physically disconnected their power cables?

How is that possible (aren't players in different cities, even countries, don't know each other's IRL identities?)

1) The disconnect between people that allows for such othering. Anecdotally, I can't imagine but a small handful of people I've met who would be willing to walk up to someone and verbally wish for the other person's death. I know we can point to many times in history where that attitude has resulted in the death of many people, but I view those as exceptions to everyday life. Not saying my view is correct, but only explaining my approach with this statement.

2) Scale. Imagine a group of 100,000 people showing up in the real world to yell, scream, and chant death threats at one person. That would be a massive event. Even gathering 1,000 people against a single person would be noteworthy in many locations.

So the The Internet, which is mostly comprised of Social Media at this point, has moved to be able to allow people to disconnect others from humanity and gather in vitriol spewing hordes, and a single individual would be hard pressed to deal with such force against them while still trying to engage with their reason for being there.

And that's what's happening right now, today. It's short circuiting any possible counter-reaction we could have to abuse. This is why everyone's sort of worried about cancellation, but we're also a little reluctant to talk about it too. I see no evidence that the problem is about to correct itself and end up being no big deal. I see alot of evidence that it's only just stumbling around and will become an even bigger problem... the people participating in this stuff, they're learning new tricks, learning to self-organize better. We'll have shit like anonymous tutorials about how to look someone up and ruin their lives perfectly efficiently ("Then, call and ask for the HR department between the hours of 10am and 11:20am local, because that's when they're most receptive. Please use this verbiage, in a slow and calm voice."). Even my example's bad, I can't keep up with the state-of-the-art.

Especially for people who run in youthful circles. Older people at least have the benefit of generally being around people who learned human compassion before the social internet became prevalent.

You can't have a discussion with someone who wants to "gotcha" you for clout

The fact that they cannot discern if I'm giving them agreement or the side eye is delicious.

1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead of long conversational openings and explorations of topics. Those require a lot of social trust-building and responding to feedback when you do them IRL, which is difficult on social media because...

2) Other people on social media just feel less real than those you encounter in real life, because you can't feel that bad feeling in your gut as strongly when you upset them, or the good feeling when you make them laugh. That same social distancing means you have a much easier time either idealizing them in that parasocial influencer-guru follower style, or feeling comfortable with being very harsh and combative with them. AKA the toxic gamer lobby phenomena, where people say the most heinous things you've ever heard to eachother, all the while being mostly fairly ordinary kids and adults IRL.

Both of these are kind of inherently tied up in the way we are ordering more and more of our (para)social life, so it seems very difficult to escape.

To paraphrase a point somebody made about content generated by machines purely to tug on your attention - everything feels increasingly meaningless because you have a finite amount of attention, and more and more of the 'social' interactions that your brain deals with in a day ARE meaningless and intended solely to mine your attention and keep you scrolling on ads.

I don't know how to fix that.

One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow such culture around us though.

Now that Discord is apparently opening up to ads, it remains to be seen whether that cultural shift will be able to hold or if people are going to be driven into even deeper hidey holes, like the freed humans in The Matrix who have to hide out deep in the earth from all the robots ;)

You can't leave everything up to individual decision making or the results are collectively irrational. Notably, dieting and alcoholism are major problems we haven't had much success in addressing on a cultural level. Smoking is probably a better guide given how much rates have dropped in the last century.

We can lay down the foundation for such a culture for the future but it might be too late for most of us to right the ship.

What if we removed the profit driven attention seeking behavior by not charging for any digital content, and not consuming profit driven content?

Everything would be free under some kind of UBI scenario, similar to FLOSS but with other things too, like all media.

Take X, for example: its access to capital allows it to eclipse most other social media and build network effects that are difficult for other startups to disrupt; after the Musk acquisition, advertisers began withdrawing from the platform; and as the Twitter files have claimed, its collusion with the U.S. government in the promotion/demotion of certain viewpoints.

If you want to see genuine viewpoints, you'd best seek out media that are largely independent of these three "filters" over what messages are permissible on the medium.

Thanks for asking the question and spawning the conversation threads!

Part of the problem lies here, and I'm doing it right now too.

In online public spaces we never have a conversation with another person, and rarely even then within a small group like enthusiast forums of yesteryear, we comment to the lynch mob. We reply to someone's statement with our own thoughts but it is not judged by the original poster if it was a good or insightful reply to what was originally said, it's judged by the mob with upvotes and downvotes and being flagged, misconstrued and nitpicked in fifty different ways. It happens here, Reddit, Facebook, YT, and any popular venue where comments are allowed. Even Github issues and pull requests.

I think it's why Discord is a popular alternative choice for many people. If you're not actively present, you can't chime in with your two cents and derail the conversation into some energy draining defense against someone's insane straw man attack. Comments needing to be in real time and the conversation being locked away and lost are a virtue for some folks.

With that a strongly regulated social media place can be just as hostile as the most vulgar forum you can find. By experience, it can often be even worse.

Nit picking is a form of communication as well, perhaps often chosen because users want to share something difficult to do on the medium. That said, nit picking often doesn't carry hostility. Especially on tech platforms it is just meant as a contribution. Maybe there are carry over effects and miscommunication.

So as a matter of caution we tend to impute bad motives to people we can't 'feel' clearly which means any textual claims made are subject to unnaturally high levels of scrutiny and demands for evidence/documentation.

Also the internet is forever whilst IRL conversation is throwaway.

Older folks like myself (GenX) learned the "classic" way...face to face. There were checks and balances. If you said something that skewed hostile you found out it could have immediate direct negative consequences. It could literally leave a mark.

Similarly if you went too far some other way...you found out immediately and directly how that could work out (we were just as cringy...we just didn't have it preserved digitally for prosperity).

Kids today (even writing that makes me wince) have less accountability for what they write than what we had to have for what we said. Also due to scale the effects are amplified. And also you are in a digital bubble that allows you to ignore anything that isn't positive. If you piss someone off by what you said so what? You'll never interact with them directly and there will be 1000s who agree w/ and encourage you.

Also old man shouts at clouds.

I think that's slightly different to what was said in GP:

> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

IOW, `kids these days` are required full corporate PR level accountability whenever and whatever they express, (and zero when cancelling others following social codes). There absolutely won't be thousands at your side unless you're in a straight up proper conspiracy theory circle full of actually schizophrenic people until the entire circle is going to be cancelled dead.

You can't label your opponent as belonging in a category and encourage making harmful gases in a toilet and get 127 upvotes. At least not anymore. Your comment will be deleted, and one below yours that explains why you're automatically doubly stupid will. You can't even say, literally orally voice, the word "die" in some parts of YouTube without algorithmic penalties. Saying "died of injury" can be a soft violation.

That is what GP is explaining by "you have [to] carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say", ironically the phenomenon I'm ending up being a contributing factor by typing this very comment, and part of what's making teens sick. I think it has to do with being correct being a cost and having huge unfortunate abuse potentials.

Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints.

if there was some way to just start arguments about nothing in real life and then pause them at will to go and cherrypick stuff that supports your argument, then come back and act smug about it (or not come back at all if you don't find anything), people would incessantly do it in person too.

So I'd like to point out something I've not seen mentioned yet. That is what I call 'small down behavior', that is nit picking on those that don't fall into some small group that is acceptable.

It seems that social media has not caused any new behaviors, but instead given a new and expansive venue for the behavior to spread.

Just because you don't care about something doesn't mean it doesn't affect you.

For example with many websites, high karma posts/users show up at the top of the feed. This means those addicts messages are the ones you're getting subjected too every day.

Social media is a highlight reel of people’s lives. It’s the best part hand-picked out of our mostly mundane lives.

Until these teenagers understand this, they’ll never feel “good enough” to share their own situation. Instead, they’ll remain on the hamster wheel trying to live up to the ideals peddled by influencers.

The advertising industry is fundamentally about intruding into your lives, and by that measure, the % of attention it can command.

The advertising industry (which is social media is that isn't colossally obvious) has relentlessly pursued increasing this percentage, and the smartphone was the physical means to achieve it, and newfound social addiction feedback loops the nitro turbo boost.

Even modern/new humans can't adapt to this. Older minds are crumbling into echo chambers, or withdrawing entirely. Paranoia takes hold.

Or is it paranoia? Or are your every move, thought, and action collected and categorized into a profile which is currently used simply for "advertising optimization", while in China it produces a worse-than-1984 dystopian system, and likely there are population profiling projects in US three letter agencies?

My internet profile is set in stone from my 20 years. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm purgeworthy whenever the totalitarianism grips the USA. Elections are becoming existential now, and that likely isn't paranoia.

While I've given a rational probability to all this, most people do not, they respond emotionally, especially to relentless stress and burden of processing unending perpetual advertising.

And as we all know, here comes the AI.

I'm more worried about the Linkednization. Where people share terrible views and nobody criticizes it because they don't want to be seen as someone that criticizes things.

Actually for me it's quite difficult sometimes to write thoughts on topics here. I'm just being afraid not to be understanded

Obviously this is not the context you're talking about, but I find this issue with brainstorming type sessions these days as well these days. Not just work sessions either, as another example, I'm on the advisory board for a local club, and the first meeting was really barren for quite a while.

It's gotten to the point that I always make sure to voice my philosophy early on - "not all ideas are good, but many good ideas start out as bad ideas and become good through conversation" - and proceed to throw a few incredibly stupid ideas to the group to break the ice. It seems to help.

I understand this fear when posting on reddit (or other social media) itself, but I am absolutely confused where this idea that this applies to reality comes from.

The problem is that the real world is increasingly not understanding that the internet and the world are not the same place, and they are treating software and people the same way. It turns out that people are not software. This leads to problems. Those who confuse you with software don't apply the compassion that people would otherwise normally receive, and, as a result, will be quite happy to put you in a bad place.

You know, the 'Redditaization' of the world. Its funny that even here we see the internet and the world being seen as the same thing; emblematic of the exact same confusion that the comment is about.

I would expect this to some extent when conversing with strangers IRL too. If it was a chat between friends, a rant here or there is OK because your friends know the real you and understand where you're coming from. Strangers won't be as charitable.

Imagine being out in public at a party and you say something slightly 'spicy' and someone walks up to you and puts duct tape across your mouth. You can move to another party (or comment thread in this example), but you already were basically told "your input is useless, now leave".

I should mention that I don't see it that way, but a lot of people don't know how to separate real life from the internet - Especially Gen Z. The internet is NOT real life.

Bonus: Moderators locking threads with a condescending comment like "Locking this comment thread since some of you refuse to behave".

Reddit is the new Twitter, only the censorship isn't thinly veiled. It's not veiled at all.

People have lost jobs, college admissions, and more based on their posts online. I understand the sentiment but what we do on the internet most certainly has an impact on real life.

Because people make the mistake of using their 'real life' identity online. Remove your real life attachments from the internet and you're untouchable.

Just because people willingly 'dox' themselves doesn't make the internet anything more than a collection of webpages sitting on a blade server somewhere.

That's all well and good if you never leave your mother's basement, but for everyone else going outside from time to time, hiding your identity is much more difficult.

Herein lies the problem: We used to be 'hard' on online accounts because they were anonymous – everyone understood the account did not represent a real person and that was just for fun. That's fine. We maintained compassion for real people with real identities with a desire to treat them as being human. But over time we stopped recognizing a difference between a real person and an internet account, now treating the people out in the real world like they are anonymous internet accounts.

This is uncalled for. People like me live an extremely healthy and social life without any traces of our identity online (excluding voter registration databases, people search websites, etc).

>But over time we stopped recognizing a difference between a real person and an internet account, now treating the people out in the real world like they are anonymous internet accounts.

I see where you're going with this, but I'll have to disagree. Most of the people being behaving like animals online are some of the most soft spoken and shy people in real life.

The article which sparked this discussion stands adjacent to my claim, as well. I've noticed a lot of people who are online a lot and using it as an escape are pretty socially awkward and neurotic in real life. Those people I just mentioned often use the internet as an escape, but don't realize it.

If there were no separation between the internet and real life, then those people would behave the same way online (shy, timid, avoiding confrontation). These people just don't realize the separation thanks to the "Please enter your first and last name" trend started by Zuck in the late 2000s.

With respect, I think you've failed to grasp what is being discussed here. 'Attacking' people who post ill-conceived content anonymously on the internet has most definitely grown tired (case in point), but is not really a problem. It's not a person, it's just an internet account. It doesn't matter.

The problem is that the same behaviour has started moving out into real life, where you find real people with real identities. There is no hiding from it beyond an anonymous username. Your face is out there for all to see when you step outside. Certainly you may run in circles of older people who established that compassion for real people while the lines were still clearly divided, thus not feeling it as much, but there is a generation coming up – you know, the one the article is about – that do not know the world before Reddit. They fail to grasp that there is a difference, treating real people like they are Reddit accounts.

If your internet account is a fictional identity it doesn't matter, but you're posting as you but just behind a pseudonym and someone attacks you it can be very upsetting.

Therein lies the challenge, though. Some people, especially people who didn't grow up before the likes of Reddit, fail to understand that people and software are not the same thing. The things that fly online don't fly the same way in person, but there is a prevailing shift, particularly with the younger generation, towards treating the in-person experience the same as the online experience; to see them as the same thing. That's where we see problems emerge.

That's exactly correct, and now we are one step closer to understanding the precession of simulacra of identity.

The crude maps of the 16th century cartographer were of such low fidelity and accuracy that it became impossible to confuse them with the territory, with all its contours and nuances elided from the scribbles of ink on parchment. Contrast with Google Maps, that has captured the earth in such exquisite detail, down to the meter, that we now regard it as a more or less one-to-one representation of the Earth in itself; a simulacrum of the "first order," which "is the reflection of a profound reality" (Baudrillard 1981).

But the representation does not stop there; now with things like listings of local businesses, we have progressed to a simulacrum of the "second order," which "masks and denatures a profound reality" - does your business even exist, if I can't find it on Google Maps? If your road has signage calling it one thing, while Google Maps calls it another [0], which name is correct? How will your GPS navigate such a world when the map and the territory have diverged this far from one another?

The end game of the precession is the creation of entire virtual worlds and maps (think, de_dust2) that represent no territories at all, but are a territory in their own virtual right - a simulacrum of the "fourth order," or "the hyperreal:" "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Alan Watts spoke of a similar phenomenon in one of his lectures on meditation [1]:

    The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth,
    and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.

If it happened with God in the quarrels between the iconoclasts and the idol worshipping iconolaters, it can happen with mere mortals, too:

    This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
    millennial quarrel is still with us today. [...] that
    deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever
    existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own
    simulacrum-from this came their urge to destroy the images.

    - Baudrillard, 1981.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYp-mWqB1w

I’ll add that people addicted to social media become insufferable to share novel (often silly) thoughts around because the focus becomes dropping a zinger versus meaningfully engaging with what was said.

Once the child grows, why would it look to family to help? It has already been institutionalised - it believes that government agencies, psychiatrists etc will help - the 'brokenness' is normal. The grown child won't look to those that would normally step in (family) - they have their own issues. In all honesty, its hard to say whether looking to institutions for help that is a bad decision anyway - how much harm do families cause?

There’s an unspoken burden of past Child Traumatic Stress that, consciously and subconsciously, tints individuals’ resilience and the way the now-adults view the world.

I’ve been fortunate to have a happy, normal childhood. However, based on the number of people that I’ve spoken to, I’m starting to think I am in the minority. Friends have casually talked about facing suicide, complex family dynamics, neglect, and crazy religious experiences in early life like it was nothing, when it was/is a big deal.

It’s devastating to hear, and realize that the “silent majority” are likely maladapted individuals who are not even close to unpacking their traumatic past (i.e. things like “the friendly uncle” and “the cool youth group pastor”) that got swept under the rug or repressed.

It's worse than that. At the same time families were broken, the children also stopped having freedom to roam around and make friends on their own on the real world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1c0nuy6/it_is_impos...

It's infinitely sad that there's no place to just connect with people on the internet anymore. My post got 6 comments and a DM within the first minute, before the post got taken down. These people could have been new friends.

I've been through this cycle so many times I have long given up on trying to post on the internet. Logging on to find people and share thoughts only to be met with this massive wall of context and janitorial standards. I gave up like five years ago.

This is to say that the whole debate between "social media causes anxiety" and our landscape of social media causes anxiety makes this debate way too coarse. Getting on the internet between 2005-2012 felt happy, free, and was just a wellspring of community and connection. Post-2013 it's been a nightmarish hellscape on every platform.

Back in real world, I could never do it. If you could, that just means you lived in a bubble of like minded people.

This is certainly not the only anti-intellectualism, anti-education movement we've ever experienced as humans, but we had progressed forward. This regression leaves a lot of people in bad places.

You just described HN perfectly. I can shrug it off because I remain anon here and don't care about my rating, but I see other people being traumatized by this dynamic in other social media platforms.

I'm not sure what switched but I remember being on Slashdot and having people go off on me or others, and it was just hilarious. These days it seems like people are genuinely being traumatized regularly by the engagements.

> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.

I think that's an important point, that I think is partly due to culture of the spaces. For example, I almost never downvote anyone, and in particular not for them being wrong, unless it's something particularly harmful whose visibility would be damaging, or just a troll (quite rare usually). The downvote button seems important for those rare situations (maybe just a mod button would be enough?), but in general it should rarely be used.

Not only I've come to believe asking questions is important for beginners to learn, but also it's an important medium for everyone else (and in particular experts or more advanced learners) to exercise their knowledge by teaching stuff and learning to fill gaps in their knowledge.

I actually think reddit is pretty good in this regard, specially w.r.t. what we had before and other media like StackExchange. In SE, you're expected to search the site and often questions are met with arrogance. In oldschool forums, which I do like, there was (in almost every case I remember) an even greater air of elitism; although, on the other hand, it created a healthy eagerness to learn the norms and participate in a careful way. I tend to prefer the lower-stakes communication of HN-style boards though.

I think as with everything massification is a significant problem. I encourage everyone to participate in communities whose size feels 'just right'. Also, at least some of your interactions should be highly participative, and not just mindless consumption.

I think a final problem is that any activity of too narrow scope can be dangerous. If people are confined into extremely narrow interests and spend all their time on that, as opposed to learning everything about life, that can (and probably will in most cases) paint a distorted picture of reality and be very unhealthy. Broaden your curiosity :)

This is an immense impediment to writing for the academically-inclined, or merely one who still has some shred of epistemic integrity left, and a huge boon to the dogmatic mob of believers eager to strike down anyone who dares question their orthodoxy. For one, it takes time and substantial research to compose a thought that is both "true" and unique, buttressed by citations to other works or accepted facts; for the other, it is much easier to reply with a five-second thought in 280 characters with thought-terminating cliches branding the "other" as a deplorable undesirable whose ideas aren't worthy of an audience or a platform. That is, if you even get that far - these days it's more likely you will simply be downvoted into oblivion, your thoughts swiftly evicted into the memory hole, never to be seen again.

> Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression.

Issues of "Redditization" and scorn aside, we are progressing into a post-literate society where the written word and other literary media are being eclipsed by audiovisual media such as YouTube or Instagram. While much of the western world is "literate," in that they understand how to read and write (basic) words and phrases, much of our life - especially online - takes place in a highly visual world of filtered photos and staged videos. It becomes increasingly difficult for one to represent themselves in a written, literary form, when the culture demands "pictures, or it didn't happen."

McLuhan in "Understanding Media" has written on how the preference of one sense over another (e.g. sight over sound) in differing societies has profound cultural impacts over the ways we think, act, and what we find permissible:

    The printed form has quite different im-
    plications in Moscow from what it has in Washington. So with the
    telephone. The Russians' love of this instrument, so congenial to
    their oral traditions, is owing to the rich nonvisual involvement it
    affords. The Russian uses the telephone for the sort of effects we
    associate with the eager conversation of the lapel-gripper whose
    face is twelve inches away.
    
    Both telephone and teleprinter as amplifications of the un­-
    conscious cultural bias of Moscow, on one hand, and of Washing­-
    ton, on the other, are invitations to monstrous misunderstandings.
    The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural.
    He is outraged by our visual spying, however, finding this quite
    unnatural.

I talked so many times, tried to get an idea of what might drive him: travelling, learning, walking around in the mountain, making money, wasting money, drinking, smoking, drawing dicks on wall, anything! honestly, like "give me something to work with"...

He's been seeing a psychiatrist for a few years now... far as I can tell that is doing nothing...

He's a broken individual. I honestly do not know if there is a way back to reality for him (and so many others, these days)

Not that you shouldn't try. I hope you find a way.

Don't get stuck ruminating on the past , possibly infecting yourself with the same disease. Instead maybe pour that love and attention on those still around you. Care for those still with you. You are not at fault, you can't change the past, but you can change the future.

At the time, I quit everything I had on my hands and reorganized my life to be much more present. Living around for a while, trying to engage and be a part of his life as much as I could: sometimes in innocuous forms (“hey, wanna do that thing you love this week?”), sometimes straight up suggesting therapy.

You know what? No matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work. I wasn’t able to connect more with him at the time, nor to change his viewpoints. The simple act of getting in touch with him became extremely hard, to an extent none of my friends, or relatives that weren’t part of the nuclear family, were able to comprehend. Ultimately, I just think he had decided things wouldn’t just stop there, or something inside him held him back among us mortals, and that’s about it.

All I’m trying to say is don’t blame yourself for this.

We’re all doing our best and it sounds like you were already being a great brotherly figure. Blaise Pascal once said: “The heart has its reasons which reasons knows nothing of”: the inner workings of one’s mind (God’s, in Pascal’s case) are too difficult to penetrate for our logical reasoning. We’re just out there on this planet trying to figure out how to help our loved ones, and sometimes it’s not up to us.

You’re not at fault, and I hope you’ll soon find peace.

It "takes a village" to fulfill a human's social needs. No one's brother can, on their own, fulfill all another's needs. His deep thoughts, his poop jokes, his pillow talk, his watercooler chat? We need whole communities for which no individual can substitute. You might do well to recognize your own social poverty.

I'm sorry that you blame yourself. I tell my siblings not to blame themselves for my depression, isolation, and alienation. The fact is that these are statistical trends evidencing large, multidimensional social structures. They're unassailable by individuals. There was nothing "you" could have done.

It doesn't sound like your brother is exactly an addict (although maybe...), but this snippet sure sounds like he has an enabler in his life (emphasis mine):

> no job, no interest in work, no interest in getting out of the house

I heard something interesting on a podcast recently - Kara Swisher was interviewing her son who said that if you're Gen A, it's sort of hard not to be a nihilist. For me personally, I sort of look at how fast the world is heating up and do some basic math about life expectancy, and I'm sort of expecting to see some shit, but I can't imagine tacking on a decade or three to that.

Psychologically, what you're describing is anhedonia, but as someone with these tendencies myself, I sometimes wonder if I just lack whatever sorts of denial mechanisms most people have to get through the day.

The amplification of the idea through modern social media is a scary new vector. There is so much content about “they ruined the world, you’ll never own a house, why even try” that does not help. Like all half-truths, it’s… well, half true, but giving up can’t be the answer. Can’t change the bad things in the world, so the only viable option is to work around them.

I do feel for gen Z and A. It’s a hard world to exist in out there, and the online behemoth you’re pressured to be a part of is both a blessing and a curse. I’m just young-old man yelling at cloud to you, I know because that’s how I looked at other late 30 year olds at your age too.

Just don’t give up. Remember that online is all fake and the points don’t matter. The real people around you care about you, they truly do, even if you’re struggling to see it yourself.

To be nihilistic today is not cultural, but a manifestation of the 50 different pills one is taking, which are literally killing the spirit, killing ones health, and trapping one in despair, with no escape. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Very clearly I have no idea about what goes on in his head, anyone's head for what matters... But when I compare my upbringing with his, I cannot understand how is it that this happen. I had so little, and struggle so much compared to him, and it's him the one giving up on life before even trying? This is thought that hunts me the most.

Feels like giving someone way too much of anything just cripples the process of understanding the struggle as a beautiful part of the process to be something, overcome something, feel something...

All his life has been in front of screens, talking to strangers, bites of information he digests after the digital rendition of a human voice has been transferred from across the internet. There is no beauty in this way of life. No wonder kinds have no feeling for what the world has to offer, unless it's coming from an Instagram influencer.

The last 20 years has seen an intense effort to rid childhood of any hardship whatsoever, while providing a controlled environment where one's formative experiences are managed to a degree as to remove the possibility of any negative circumstances or emotions. But this just optimizes for the wrong thing. A development without challenges, conflicts, hardship, is a stunted development. This society-wide crisis of meaning is only going to grow as we continue down this path towards a hyper-connected world.

I assume you've asked him about what goes on in his head at least - what does he tell you?

a) The drive to change has to come from inside. I've seen quite a few people being sent to the online/gaming addiction group. Usually, they only come once.

b) Changing one self is hard generally. But here we got quite a bit of... idk, lets call it "damage". So many missing skills, confidence. So many bad, deeply ingrained habits. So many thoughts to avoid & distract from. And still no idea what will make me content.

c) I'm wondering quite often if not starting that journey would have been the better choice. If i could have found a way to stay happy. One motivator for me was the disdain for what i'd become, so no way back now. Now it'd be great to only disdain that past me ...

Why is interest in video games not a valid interest, or somehow a worse interest than a few that you listed like wasting money, drinking, smoking, drawing dicks on wall?

Is there no chance of interest in video game modding or content creation?

In my culture this is exactly what family should do.

"Soft doctors make stinking wounds".

I had to step in when my sister's post-natal drinking became too much. Everyone else turned a blind eye, but I couldn't stop thinking about my nephew and an emergency situation.

In a mini intervention, we snapped her out of it by saying you can't drive your baby to hospital in an emergency after 2-4 big glasses of wine (she was often on her own in the evenings); and if you did, child protective services would come down on you like hellfire. Plus a bit of "well prove us wrong that you don't need it to relax" etc.

It worked, quickly, luckily

If you loved your sister, you should do something, if direct confrontation isnt working, take another route.

> In my culture this is exactly what family should do.

I assume you mean "family should intervene here", because if you don't who would ?

My experience (with alcohol addiction) is: Tried to help once, got into problems (set family up with house of a friend), almost got into financial problems myself (almost lend them money but was stopped by wife, would have lost it all). But at least I could tell myself I tried. But how far would you go? An addict will take you away from your family and kids if you let them.

So what to do? Hope they take the first step themselves. Be clear that you will help them take steps, but only steps you agree with (I once got alcohol for said family, the begging and bad state got to me, at some point an alcoholic will improve on alcohol), but I still feel bad about that today.

As someone who had to give up on a close friend and addict, you have to set razor sharp boundaries for yourself. And if that doesn't work you have to leave. I think very few people have the capacity to make the right decisions when a loved one is slowly slipping into a hole of misery of their own making while begging you to keep them company on the way down.

If she gets angry about it, then probably there is something deeper going on. Or, you're just asking the wrong way (if you come in assuming there's no meaning/purpose to her life, that could easily happen).

If there's something deeper going on, then social media just amplifies things. Specifically about cosmetics and the beauty industry - people have complained about the effects of supermodels on TV, movies, billboards, magazine ads etc. for more than 30 years, social media has just taken it to the next level.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think it's important to add depth to the argument if we actually want to change the world for a better place.

Sometimes caring about someone means showing them that what they think they want is garbage that's hurting them. That will probably hurt their feelings, and they might lash out at you for it, but the alternative is doing nothing or enabling them and watching them drown.

I don't know. What one person calls an obsession can easily be called a hobby by someone else.

Personally, I like my little obsessions. I like them a lot better than judgemental people in my life. If someone were to start a "rational conversation" with me where they made me feel like I had to justify my "garbage obsession", well, I wouldn't want to talk to them anymore.

I feel like when your reaction is to detach from that and rely on emotional arguments to say it's emotionally impossible for you to handle the person criticizing you, that's when you've crossed a Rubicon after which nothing anyone says will change your self destructive behavior.

I'm saying this as someone whose two sisters both died from drug abuse in their 20s. Some people tried to reach them with empathy and others with criticism, but it's the point where someone says "I can't listen to this and I won't be subjected to this" that they become a victim in their own head of other people's harshness rather than being able to look objectively at their own state in a way that might let them change course.

In other words, content is more important than style. If you turn off because of style, that's an excuse to avoid thinking about the content. The people I know who survived are the ones who didn't use the style or delivery of the criticism directed at them as an excuse to avoid thinking about and self-reflecting on the content of what was being said.

You make the assumption that you are absolutely right about a "garbage obsessed" person. That's reasonable when it comes to substance abuse, but it's unlikely to be reasonable when it comes to an obsession. If you are not willing to consider you're wrong about the obsession, you shouldn't have the conversation.

Even if you're right, a truly obsessed person is not going to listen someone who's full of their own righteousness. But chances are you're just wrong, and then the conversation is just useless.

> If you turn off because of style, that's an excuse to avoid thinking about the content.

It's not an excuse, it's a reason. I like my obsessions. If someone is open and willing to understand, I am willing to explain or tell. But I do not care whether or not anyone thinks it's a garbage obsession. If that's all they're willing to talk about, I see no value in having the conversation.

Probably he is old-fashioned and means the coventional old-style purpose and meaning, that old-timey thing that we'd call "actual purpose" nowadays.

Some backward people don't understand that "being isolated and doom scrolling all day" or "getting tons of destructive cosmetic surgeries" or "Amway" can also be a torally fine purpose in life.

I really can't tell if this is a sarcastic comment or not, so just to be clear none of these examples are examples of purpose. How one spends their time isn't purpose, it's just a description of their day.

Absence some other criteria for concern, “I don’t like that they do this therefore they must stop doing it” is a line of thinking that desperately needs to be eradicated from human culture.

The concern is because they care about the person and "being isolated and doom scrolling all day" is objectively destructive and self-sabotaging.

It's not a relativistic “different strokes for different folks“ and don't judge situation.

Being nonjudgemental might make sense if someone you care about is at least happy, not miserable and throwing their life away.

I didn't actually read the OP as a concern focused on what their sister does, but a concern of why she may be spending her time that way.

Regardless, my point was just that doom scrolling, as an example, isn't purpose. If we're collectively losing the what the concept of purpose even is we really are in trouble.

Nah, it was sarcasm

>Absence some other criteria for concern, “I don’t like that they do this therefore they must stop doing it” is a line of thinking that desperately needs to be eradicated from human culture.

There are other criteria for concern, both empathy and concern for the invididual (other people recognizingt that living that way is destructive) but also concern for the general consequences in a society where people do those things.

My examples were sarcastic, based on those being bad ways to spend your time.

That said, I don't agree that "none of these examples are examples of purpose". Or at least I don't think purpose has to be something big, like "do great good", "cure cancer", "get rich".

Those could very well be descriptions of someone's purpose, they would just be unhealthy purposes.

My point was only that purpose isn't what you do, its why you do it. I'd actually argue that curing cancer isn't a purpose either, its what someone is trying to do while the purpose could be a desire to help others or fame or fortune.

E.g. "he found his life's purpose in playing the guitar" - this doesn't answer "why" he plays guitar, but it's a common way of putting it, no?

Here's another example from wordreference.com: "His purpose in life is to give a home to street cats" (again, no why, but a what.

Maybe he found meaning in playing the guitar because it allowed him to share a message, or improve others' lives through song. I'd be really surprised if the actual purpose behind it really did come down to the actual act of playing the guitar.

I'm probably getting too nitpicky or semantic here, sorry if I am. I do think the distinction is an important one though, a lot of problems can show up if the "what" is treated as the purpose or meaning in one's life and we forget the "why" behind it.

Maybe not necessarily. I mean, as long as the person is content and it's a healthy thing for them, then does it matter if they don't have a "why" for the thing that they consider their purpose to follow? I mean, if they don't have any "why" beyond "because I like it/it makes me happy"?

I think the purpose behind that would be to live a happy life for oneself. How one does that would be different for everyone, but I'd see that as the why behind doing something just because you enjoy it.

Said differently, two people with the same purpose can have wildly different ways of achieving it. What's more interesting, and more helpful as things change and one has to adjust, is knowing the why and how my purpose differs from others.

For example, in the curing cancer example if your purpose behind that goal is to save lives or reduce suffering, curing cancer is just the result of balancing what you think is possible and the impact it could have. If you learn that curing cancer is more difficult, you may pivot to a different goal but for the same purpose.

It also says something of the ways in which you may accidentally go wrong. If your goal is to save lives, you may miss the mark on saving lives but almost certainly wouldn't knowingly do something that will harm people in the long wrong. If your goal is to cure cancer to get rich, you may very well accept long term damage to people if it gets you rich now and you cover your ass for later (aka most of the pharmaceutical industry).

> It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.

Inverting the order of your explanations (to examine the weighting), we have:

    estimated low return for investment/effort
    avoidance of drama (the other's emotional upheaval) 
    relinquishment of participatory role in guiding the other
    relinquishment of influence/interest in the other's life

Can a person who obviously needs guidance/intervention not be worth the time ? Even though the person is in one's family ?

The narcissocial media actively create an illusion that gratifies loneliness and isolation. Modern urban life had already become a reality of denaturing, competition, isolation, and indifference. The antipatterns run deep.

But then you add...

> But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning.

Your family member seems to be in need of help. It takes a family/village, as they say. We too often omit to remind ourselves that a person becomes a person through other people. [1]

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy

She needs to find it for herself, and then establish that as her anchor. If it is cosmetics, then so be it. I have no gripe with that. What I do have a gripe with is reluctancy to be a functional human being and engaging with your family and friends.

As I said in another comment, I offered to help her to do stuff online on multiple occasions. But she can't even accept that, or come to terms with it. Hypothetically, that might also mean she knows that perhaps it's not what she truly wants for herself, as far as building a life (anchor) around it.

I'm not detached, and neither is anyone in my family.

Here are a few things that stick out. There is some motive force that animates your sister.

She travels to and from work regularly. Is able to go out and get surgery and cosmetics.

She has reduced interaction with immediate family - more precisely, she has reduced her interactions over several years.

You describe interactions as situations where “ ..doesn't share her actual thoughts and gets angry when asked about it”, / Emotional Upheaval.

There are many skills that are at play here. Decision making, planning, goal setting, even basic skills like getting out of the house. It will be tempting to “judge” and comment how those skills are being used - ignore that urge.

Secondly, you describe your efforts to provide assistance - suggesting Building sites, or expanding on her interests, which result in a “I dont know.” Of the methods attempted, loosely classified, they focus on action, doing things.

Assuming that you are helping in the manner you would expect to be helped - it may not be the manner in which she understands help or needs to be helped.

In the off chance that this extrapolation based on limited data is correct, then your sister may simply connect or need help in different ways.

From experience - some people dont need a plan or help, they need to understand themselves, this is sufficient information for them to make their own plans and act on their own. Others prefer concrete, actionable plans and dont really need this kind of help.

When two such individuals attempt to help each other, the usual outcome is either “You want me to do more, after I am already struggling?” Or “Why are you wasting my time when I need concrete solutions”.

If it helps - ‘thinking’ something through, is also a project. You are building yourself. Often people forget who they are, what their strengths are, become too tired, expect themselves to perform even though they are dead tired - they make errors in their projects.

In such cases some objective reassurance of their capabilities, a genuine analysis of their situation, helps. Often the best person to do this is a professional, because the emotional state interferes with the objective evaluation (“I will fail” vs “No shit - I cant be creative if I am this stressed”)

I dont have a solution, but I hope some of these thoughts aligned with the circumstances you find yourself within.

If it helps - I use something like this to work situations like this out.

Over engineered: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-KD6jm0l4c-thought-council

Base version: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-Cdq3drl87-two-guides

Non ChatGPT + version: https://chat.openai.com/share/d37ce786-20a4-482e-b348-87cd03...

The thing is, I'm sure for her it doesn't feel that way. She probably feels a lot of purpose and meaning in following all these people online and participating in social activities around them. That's part of the addiction too - it can feel meaningful for a long time.

I'd highly recommend the book "Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End" by Saito Tamaki, translated by Jeffrey Angles. First published in 1998 it describes the "hikikomori" social/psychological phenomenon, and ways treatment has been approached. Ultimately, Saito observes that nobody can "fix" the individual hikikomori directly— therapy must be multi-faceted, continuous, and ongoing, focused on reducing stigma and shame. And for all that, may ultimately not be effective.

I saw a couple of years of similar reactions from my sisters after they went through some difficult times without any of us knowing (since they were studying abroad and this was before easy internet calling). They'd get mad when asked seemingly innocuous questions, which turned out to be because the way the questions were phrased came off as insulting or dismissive of their problems in some way. We didn't even know about these problems since they never told us, but that didn't really matter for them.

It took years of slowly rebuilding trust for them to open up again.

With social media, it’s hard to gauge what’s the chicken and what’s the egg in this issue. Is she on social media because she is depressed and the brain is looking for quick dopamine? Or is being in social media making her more depressed?

"Loser" is however you want to define it. If you legitimately want certain things (fitness, skills, whatever), then by all means go out and get them.

But don't forget some people are living in a hippie commune, or in a van, by choice. There's lots of these types that are completely broke and "losers" by some definition but they're fulfilled because they can spend more time hiking, painting, or whatever it is they want in life.

This is my long way of saying, don't let social media define what "success" is in your eyes :)

> I need to work on myself before I date or make new friends

Real friends/partners will see you at your worst and stick around. IMO if you think you need to do XYZ first you'll never take the leap to make these connections. The fact that you're working on yourself is what they'll see.. "it's the journey not the destination"

The toxic part of social media is the online personas and interactions with strangers, who are perceived as friends.

There is a balance of letting kids have messenger and play games online with friends, than letting them have social media accounts, and burrow into cesspools of online activities that a lot of these social sites are.

Is it that she does not go out with friends?

I think her situation is not at all bizarre – I actually think it is overly normal.

Going out with friends: Fair enough, you sit at the same bar talk about the same things, etc.

I think we are in a crisis of communities. Even if your sister wanted to engage there are no good places to do it.

And be persistent to a degree, show her that you care and you are there for her (and actually be there for her, do something with her). Be understanding, some amount of video entertainment is okay. Be there for her, be patient, and know when to take a break about trying to change her bad habits.

I assume you also need to be prepared for the unfortunate possibility that she just won't budge and decides to spend her life in the matrix.

We're bad at predicting what makes us happy and even worse at making sound judgements through negative emotions. Those in the middle of such an experience don't want to believe that their habits are exacerbating or responsible for their problems, because change is uncomfortable. They want to continue to feed addiction.

I have instagram and almost never use it. It's addicting to me in a sense that when I have nothing to do I'll open up the app and endlessly scroll through the feed, check stories of people I follow. It made me uncomfortable because all of the stories of people I know looked fake somehow, everyone smiling, having a good time, making specific poses to look good on Instagram, but in reality their life is not full of roses. It made me uncomfortable when I had bad days, where I felt like I was never going to achieve the happiness people show on the social network. Luckily, wen this thought occurred, I was able to pinpoint it and say "well, this is NOT real, they are just faking it for likes and followers. you should feel good that you don't have this and you should value personal contact over likes on a website".

Since then I only use Instagram to browse for dog/pet videos.

But I have some acquaintances that they act like their life depends on instagram. Hell, I had a friend who spent all of her time watching stupid tiktok videos disseminating fake news and pseudoscience (and she was studying to become a psychologist), reading stupid things on facebook, and when she wasn't busy with this she would constantly complain to me how she self-evaluated that she had depression and anxiety, how her life is shitty. She was a pretty woman and all the time told me she wanted to change her appearance because of something she saw on facebook or tiktok, and I guess it wasn't enough for me to tell her she was perfect the way she is, even with her issues. She never listened and tried to convince me that the cosmetic changes she'd do weren't permanent.

My advice is to let her know that you think she has a media addiction, then at least she has some level of awareness.

I think that's typically true but I also would try anyway.

People can learn coping skills to deal with things they can't control. Reasoning can override emotion.

For myself, learning I was bipolar allowed me to understand what was happening and be able to put things in context. I still need medication but I don't need as much of it.

I mean I personally know people who rarely interact with others other than work, and do weird things like playing with electronics and games all day, mostly just for fun and not for profit. They are often happy as they are, I'm sure many of them are on this very website.

Your sister sounds a bit like the TikTok version of the weird nerd stereotype, replace the PCBs with cosmetics and games with celebrity gossip. Their influencers sell lipsticks instead of 3d printed desk toys and mechanical switches. For me it's difficult to recognize TikTok stuff as a legitimate interest and understand her devotion to it, but then many of the hacker stuff must seem the same to the people outside of these circles.

Not that I know her situation better than you do of course, this was more of a thought experiment on trying to understand a niche that I know very little about.

Are your short term pleasures in line with your long term goals ?

That's what supposedly differentiate us from most other animals, the capability to think about the future, and act accordingly. Regret is one of the worse feeling

It's not about 'telling my sister what to do'. It's about helping someone sick (my conclusion from your superficial description, reality might be different?).

I bring this up for several reasons. First, such conditions are especially underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed in girls and women. Second, even now ADHD is still heavily misunderstood with people focusing on the "hyperactivitiy" part, which is really only one variant. Third, the combination of isolation and focusing on something that doesn't seem to fit that (ie cosmetics and cosmetic surgery) screams coping mechanism and nervous system dysregulation to me.

30+ years ago such people would be forced out into the world. Some would be helped by this. Others would merely cope (ie masking). Some would be further traumatized by this and no one (including them) would recognize it. I've heard from many teachers who deal with ADHD/ASD students that it becomes pretty obvious that their parents are undiagnosed for these very same conditions.

Your sister might be described as a NEET in Western parlance but this isn't new or exclusive to the West. Japan has had hikikimoris from at least the 1990s.

It's worth adding that young people aren't stupid. Many of them recognize the hopelessness of their situation, economically speaking. Rents are crippling, home ownership looks increasingly impossibly to ever reach, student debt is potentially crippling and job prospects aren't great. We're crazy if we think young people don't recognize this so we have a hopelessness crisis on top of all of this.

So is social media allowing people to isolate and cope or is it the cause? Is ADHD/ASD more prevelant now? If so, why? Or was it just underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed until now? I don't know. To me it seems like it might exacerbate existing issues and it's only one facet of many of how our society is increasingly broken and failing young people.

By the time she got around to it, I had already wisened up and basically lost communication with her. I went on to do other things with my life and actually put in effort to experience new stuff.

She on the other hand did not. She found more excuses (dropped out of uni twice) than solutions.

Don't tell her what to do, or how to fix her life.

Go to her and tell her you are worried about her, that you are always no matter what there for her. And if she ever needs help you will be there for her.

Don't judge dont advice but make sure to let her know you care and will help when she comes around.

i explained to my sibling the other day that we cannot live our lives however we wanted because of our layers of responsibility: first to ourselves (as a human beings in this civilization), then to our family and friends (who expect to count on us at some point), to the society we inhabit (i am currently an immigrant), the human race, and lastly the environment. those are not easy responsibilities and they could crush anyone. but absconding isn’t a choice: we’re not here for selfish reasons.

i think you should intervene, at whatever cost to you. because no one else would, and depending on how persistent you are, she’d be grateful for the care and attention you showed. because that’s the sort of action that pure love motivates. good luck

I have tried various approaches, including being provocative, and that is why I said it is not worth it.

I am not abandoning her by any means and we talk. We are on good terms so to speak, but sadly those good terms only extend to lengths of her own comfort. She has a genuine problem with sharing who she is as a person and that is not easy to work with.

When every other thing you say gets interpreted as an “attack” or “you are crossing boundaries”, it makes no sense to push the person to end up where you started.

Honestly, it doesn't have to be that complex. I was shocked to read about the platform and the eCommerce site. That's such a HN solution to an ultimately human problem.

I believe the only thing you need to focus on right now is to understand where she's coming from. Do you know why she does the thing she does? Do you know what she feels about it?

That's it. Simple. But it'll be hard for sure. Because to you (and me), it's very clearly an issue that needs to be "fixed". But how would you feel if someone keeps telling you solutions to things you don't think are a problem? Like: "Hey, do you want a custom social media site so that you don't spend so much time on HN?" - the implication is that you're a HN addict. My first response would be defensive. "I think HN is good. You haven't even spent much time on it. How would you know anything about it? "

I think that unless there's this common ground of understanding and support, you'll never get anywhere.

Also, is it possible she's just depressed? I her a couple therapy sessions would help. These methods are how i got out of my video game hole, and i woulda killed for someone to go through this with. I can't tell you what to do, but what I've heard so far it doesn't sound impossible. It does sound like you've accepted the barrier to assistance she's set up. Maybe when you're ready to leave someday you can make a final push

it’s more difficult to even suggest what to do. what are your thoughts on genuinely being interested in her? not for the purposes of helping her. but being interested in her so that you spend time in conversations? start with a minute here and there reminiscing about moments between you two (and perhaps the larger family) that you both enjoyed, and gradually moving into longer conversations? i think what i’m saying here is that you might need to rebuild trust then build a new relationship on top of that. how to go about that? i really don’t know.

The complete destruction of religions, then traditions and now families/education (lack of education, lack of authority, &c.) probably had something to do with it.

You can't replace god/families/education with an iphone 15 and expect society to continue on the same path. And I'm saying that as a complete atheist, people need a framework, goals, rules, models, outlooks, a moral compass, &c. if all we have left is complete relativism and consumerism it's much harder to find a personal meaning and straight up impossible to find a global one

And what is wrong with education? This one truly baffles me. Kids these days learn more math faster than kids 50 years ago. They learn about a large and varied swath of subjects. High school's as i understand haven't really changed much except for upgrading curriculum and expectations occasionally. Colleges definitely aren't cheaper, but there's a lot more options out there, more degrees, more possibilities, maybe not more but different jobs to go to.

I do think it's bad to let children in school have iPad time, any at all. They should learn to use the internet in the proper way, focused on learning and informational resources. But my phone has been immensely useful for my education! Actually irreplacebly helpful and expanding. I've got dozens of textbooks on here that I've used for many things over time. I've got a youtube tuned to educational content and i don't let myself have enough time to get off track. This phone is what I'm reading your comment from! It's what I'm engaging in this conversation with.

I'd say yes, finding meaning is different now. The old tricks don't work anymore because you just don't have to. What did people used to do who didn't find meaning? I do think GP should at least attempt to help his sister, that's his responsibility to bear in society. I think phones do make certain things harder, and others, like wasting away, much easier. I don't think having more churches would solve that. I think we need actual education in schools about this, the same way we talk about drunk driving, "be careful, you don't wanna waste your life, or someone else's".

This is just the first time anything like this has happened in society to my understanding. I'd blame the corporations who parasitically feed on the time, attention, lives of people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in. We have the term "whale" to describe a person who gets too financially invested in a game (phone or other). Perhaps we need a derogatory term to describe people who get to chronically invested in social media. Something good, to really discourage people from wanting to be like that. There's lots of solutions, i don't think bringing back "traditional family values", "christain morality", or homeschooling is gonna fix it. Those are our old tools, useful at times for certain things. We need to build some new ones.

Millennial with Boomer parents here: There were a few things leading up to this, but in our family the tipping point was when our parents found out our religious education classes were telling me to stop asking questions. One of my parents' primary goals in life was for us to do better academically than they did, and they saw that as religion working against it.

One thing I would amend for myself - I don't think I feel as though I have responsibility to the environment in and of itself. I am an environmentalist, but that follows from my duty to the human race. The earth will keep on earthing either way.

Clearly it's not. It's the life of those she copies and is influenced by. I strongly doubt any of the people like your sister are actually making actual decisions about their lives.

You absolutely should try getting through to her, because that's in her best long-term interest. She's literally destroying her life.

this is not the average social media user. the problem is addiction, not doing surgery to yourself. if social media was banned or age gated you would have to ban wikipedia next as its also very easy to get addicted to doing a tree traversal of interesting articles starting at the single one article you intended to read. also stack exchange. pardon my tone deafness to your tragedy, but this is a political issue, and your post is being used for political purposes. this is also a waste of my tax money and proof that taxation is theft. if i was a parent i would just be a good parent like my parents and slap my kids if they get addicted to upvoting shit on social media just as i would slap them if they get addicted to watching tv, playing arcade games (since i would provide them with real games and not gacha shit, the former which still had the addiction problem and the exact same dumb discussions in the 90s)

You are a part of the problem.