8 ms·

This is the money quote for me: "I shut myself up in my room. The further I removed myself from the people I knew in the real world, the further I descended in

This is the money quote for me: "I shut myself up in my room. The further I removed myself from the people I knew in the real world, the further I descended into the minds of people I’ve never interacted with and would never meet again." It seems the author isn't even aware of how awful this is, since later he admits he's still a karma whore. I am thankful that I recognized what an abysmal facsimile of an actual life this sort of thing is when it was only Usenet. I had a similar addiction for a little less than a year in the mid-90s. It seriously damaged my marriage, and more than I realized at the time, in hindsight. Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to are essential for a healthy life. If this statement causes a negative reaction, please ask yourself why. It needs your immediate attention.

hartator 7y ago
Reddit is made of real people too. Met multiple people there. Being miserable alone is not superior to being miserable on Reddit.
- sverige 7y ago
  I agree with your statement as far as it goes. I met several people irl that I had known only on Usenet back in the 90s. My question is, what are your relationships with relatives like? What about friendships with people who live nearby and share similar interests? I recognize that not everyone has family that lives nearby, and some have lost their natural families, which is very difficult. And there many who are estranged from their families for various reasons. I was estranged from my family, but that improved greatly with some considerable (and still ongoing) effort on my part, even though some of them have diagnosed mental illnesses. I guess my point is that if you have family members, it is well worth it to try to salvage what you can. If you do not have any family, it is well worth it to try to make one. Yes, those family members could be found on Reddit. Better to make the effort to have "real-life" friends and family you can see and talk to and touch daily so you don't have to be miserable alone. It can be hard to see when you're in the midst of it, though.
  - el_programmador 7y ago
    Imagine what you'd be doing if there were no reddit (or any other social network for that matter)? You'd be out there trying to find real friends at meetups, clubs, gatherings, etc. don't ya? It helps a lot if you assume that internet doesn't exist for a day and see what miracles your mind comes up with then!
    - r3bl 7y ago
      This doesn't make sense when you use the term "for a day". One day isn't long enough to change anyone's habits. But it's not like it would make more sense if the term was longer. The whole reason the Internet was created was to be the network that could survive a nuclear war. It'll always be there. People communicated via the Internet way before reddit and others, and would continue doing so if they were to disappear. "Imagine living without the Internet" is a useless imagination. It's a thing of the past with no way of reappearing. If your ISP were to go down, I assume you'd just switch to mobile data. Assuming you're using two different companies, it would take quite a catastrophe for both of them to be down at the same time, at which point your survival instinct would kick in, not a desire to make meaningful relationships offline.
    - jowsie 7y ago
      These kinds of people and scenarios existed long before reddit and 'social media' in the modern sense. They were just on Usenet/IRC/web forums, heh.
    - nasalgoat 7y ago
      I used to hang out on BBSes before the internet. Introverts weren't created by the Internet, they were set free by it.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    I get that you mean well, but to me this comes through as almost insulting in its presumptions of how other people feel. I for one am not miserable when I'm alone. I love my alone time. And to be clear this is not because it is rare. I make a conscious choice to be alone a lot of the time. I sometimes love time with people too, but only in small doses and only a very few people (this does not mean I can't enjoy being out in public - being around people I'm not interacting with constantly is just fine). I certainly don't want to have people around to see and talk and touch daily. The very thought is an exhausting nightmare to me.
- thrav 7y ago
  I developed real friendships back when I was moderating one of the big sports subs. Went to a bachelor party for one of the other guys, and had a blast with his college friends. Reddit is what you make it.
- munchbunny 7y ago
  I don't think the problem is necessarily whether it's real people. The problem is that if you're not careful, Reddit becomes the upvote Olympics. You can't build a healthy social diet on just approval. Some people do that with real life. It just happens to be far easier to do on the internet because we figured out that approval is addictive and drives user engagement.
  - el_programmador 7y ago
    Totally true. It also gives rise to echo chambers, people just keep circle-jerking around those of approve of them reciprocally and thus keep themselves in constant denial.
  - Chathamization 7y ago
    That's a large part of the problem. Another is that the vast majority of online content and votes comes from a small minority of people who are probably mentally ill[1]. Also, the way sites like Reddit (or HN) work are also in opposition to long and thought out conversations (you have a very short window of time to participate in the discussion before it drops off the front page and effectively dies). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
    - munchbunny 7y ago
      This brings up a related thought. One reason I dislike online forums (and especially Reddit's technical communities like r/programming) are that discussions never have time to evolve, so nuanced topics always just end in popular talking points. That leads to a dynamic where it's hard to try to express any real nuance, because any gray area in the discussion gets squashed when somebody jumps in with the least charitable possible interpretation of your point. I rarely ever run into any cases of "hmm you have a point but I still disagree." For example, I see this every time a discussion about code review culture comes up. The thread is always popular, and it always gets exactly two opinions: "we should be nicer" and "grow a thicker skin." God forbid there could be a situational truth to either point! You'd think from the discussion that every developer is either a caustic veteran or a thin skinned newbie who needs to get over themselves.
mcbutterbunz 7y ago
I completely agree. Social media makes it easy to quantify and measure your feelings, views, jokes, etc. The ability to measure how people interpret your posts allow you the opportunity to optimize them.
- rangibaby 7y ago
  I guess it taught me that karma is worthless. It’s easy to pander and make popular posts but they are usually a pedestrian opinion (did you know that (country) is BAD?) , a variation on a tired joke, or some boring tidbit (the SR-71 fast L O L).
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Yea, internet points are pretty useless motivation unless you’re trying to become an influencer—you can see this on HN too.
    - antisemiotic 7y ago
      The one exception are SE sites, where a certain number of fake internet points is required to fully use the site. It's harder to game the system there, though. Speaking of which, could someone with enough internet points on Math SE ask this guy https://math.stackexchange.com/a/35238 https://math.stackexchange.com/a/35238 how does he deal with carries during multiplication? I made an account specifically to ask this, but I'm not a mathematician and don't have enough expertise to answer questions asked there (or perhaps I'm too lazy to hunt for questions that I could answer).
      - viraptor 7y ago
        You don't have to ask that specific person. Open a new question, point at the answer you linked and ask about the specific bit you want to understand.
        antisemiotic 7y ago
smhenderson 7y ago
For me it was slashdot and I let myself dive into it too much at work. I was in a very dissatisfying position at a company I loved when I started working for them but they went way downhill several years later. I was being paid but completely ignored for months at a time so I spent probably more than 70% of my day trying to get noticed on slashdot and thinking it was a viable substitute for actually accomplishing something. When I moved on to better work I was able to leave it behind. HN is my only “social media“ now and I try to keep even it to a minimum.
claudiawerner 7y ago
I think this sets up a bit of a false opposition of concepts; the opposition need not be between real life relationships with "actual, real people" and the faceless people whom one meets through endless Internet arguments - the opposition is much more abstract, between people who one only encounters in the latter capacity and who one only encounters in the former capacity. As in, the type of interactions one has are the differentiating factor here, not the medium over which they are conducted. Almost anyone with history of using the Internet in a psedonymous capacity can attest to this fact - remote relationships one builds can be very strong and fruitful, surpassing even one's most intimate "IRL" connections, and real life relationships can be weak, obscured, superficial, and lonely. In my experience most people operate thinking that online relationships (and even all interactions) can only be adversarial and abstracted from the real people behind them (e.g. a battle of ideas) but I think there's a lot to be found in positive human interactions online. Taking this further, I think the idea you espouse has the potential to be dangerous and alienating - it denies certain modes of interaction that some people are not only comfortable with but satisfied with. In denying this capability, you not only shut yourself off from this potential, but you alienate people who find it most fruitful to explore this potential. This opposition comes up a lot - many people simply cannot understand how one can build a meaningful mostly-anonymous relationship online, or they cannot understand how one can build a sex life in the comfort of their room. They view it as a kind of degraded way of having a relationship or sexuality, "not the real thing", a mere substitute, that the person must be sad or lonely to be finding such enjoyment, to be deprived in order to seek it out, and unsatisfied to pursue it. It calls back the idea that the masturbator (or the contented asexual) can't be satisfied, since she's not experiencing the joy of sex - she's living in a sad, lonely, isolated and lower-tier way. It calls back the idea of the anime/comic book/sci-fi fan who can't be satisfied with their pleasures (or worse, that they are stuck in a childish imaginative state) because "it's not real/they're just comics/they're pixels on a screen". It calls back the idea of those who enjoy atonal music being either posers or fundamentally broken because they enjoy it more than classical period (or pop) music. It calls back the idea of asking why people would want to listen to music sung in languages they don't understand. It even calls back the idea that philosophy and abstract math are useless because they don't solve any real world problems. In its most egregious form, it calls back the idea that one can't enjoy a good story in a book because it's not visual/auditory and therefore can't appeal to us in the same way a movie can. Why read the Harry Potter books when you can just watch the films, right? With all due respect, I cannot express how much I detest this concept. It only comes from narrow-mindedness and pre-established ideas. The concept figures that because I can't see the value, the value can't exist for anyone else. Nobody else could experience the world differently. Ironically, it displays a lack of empathy - something, as conventional wisdom would have it, can only come about through real life interactions. To be clear, I'm not saying you adhere to the general 'conception' I've criticised here, but I am saying that your point fits very nicely into this ultimately harmful conception. I realize the irony of having this kind of argument online.
lowii 7y ago
He almost seems surprised that going into complete social isolation in order to win internet points made him less happy.
- homero 7y ago
  He's still at it https://www.reddit.com/user/dickfromaccounting https://www.reddit.com/user/dickfromaccounting
- sockgrant 7y ago
  It wasn’t surprising that what he was doing lead to that result. It was that it was a slow creep that lead him down the path and sometimes you don’t realize where you’re headed until you have a come-to moment where you take stock of your life.
- sullyj3 7y ago
  I don't think so. It's more that in many cases, knowing that a behaviour is bad for you is woefully insufficient to make you actually stop doing it.
vidarh 7y ago
Your statement caused an immediate negative reaction for me not because it isn't right for some people but because it is generalising your experiences into assumptions about what is 'real' and what works for other people that does not match my experience at all. It took me years to realise that what made me unhappy was trying to maintain these 'real' relationships out of a similar belief that it was what I needed. It's not that I can't enjoy relationships with people face to face. I do sometimes. But it takes a lot out of me. It drains me of energy. [sometimes that's worth it; sometimes it's not; sometimes it'd be worth it but I just don't have the energy.] The relationships you don't consider real often makes me happier. They're as meaningful to me as face to face relationships, but a lot less exhausting. The right balance for me is to be close in 'real' life with a partner and my son, and rely on my colleagues and the occasional other person for some limited other face to face contact (and a day or so a week is enough, thank you), and otherwise stick to myself in 'real' life and keep interactions largely online. Even then I often I prefer total solitude, and I'm happier this way than I ever was spending time with people for the sake of trying to be someone I'm not. Chasing 'Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to' can be as soul sucking and damaging as locking yourself in if you're doing it just because you're made to think that's what you should be doing. Not everyone is like you.
- kuerbel 7y ago
  I'm just like you. It's not that I don't like other people or hate them (that would be too draining anyways). I have ADD and interacting with people is draining... I have to focus on the conversation and most people don't understand that sometimes they say something that gets my imagination going, which makes me lose my focus so I miss some parts of what they say. Until I notice it and zoom in on the conversation again. Which in turn makes me sometimes miss some crucial points. Even when they know I have ADD it still might upset them, even though I do my best. And that is just one example of what makes it hard for me to interact face to face. I prefer writing. At my worst I even forget what I wanted to say mid sentence! Or I have to blurt it out and interrupt people...
- scarygliders 7y ago
  I gave you an updoot because I am exactly like you. We, are introverts. Introverts can function in the real world, but only for short bursts at a time. We can make friends, go to parties, even be the life and soul of a party - but only for short bursts at a time, then you'll usually find us chilling out somewhere quiet, recharging our metaphorical batteries. A lot of people confuse introversy with being shy or timid or other negative connotations, and they'd be incorrect. There are many good articles on what being an introvert is and means. For example https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-introvert/ https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-introvert/
Thorrez 7y ago
It sounds pretty clear to me he knows how awful it is. Why would admitting he's still a karma whore mean he thinks it's not awful? A drug addict can know being a drug addict is awful while still admitting to being a drug addict.
tvanantwerp 7y ago
I'm an introvert and I require far less human-to-human contact than society seems to expect. And yet, I 100% agree with you that real relationships are essential. Trying to replace them with online "relationships" doesn't work. I'm actually astounded by how many people replying seem to reject this idea entirely. I fear they may have eschewed real world relationships for so long that they haven't really got any, don't remember the difference, and use online "relationships" to fill the void as best they can. Sure, you can have relationships online. But it's never the same as real world relationships. Not even close. The satisfaction I get from being with my wife, my family, and my friends, is so, so, so much greater than any interaction I've had online with a person I've never met. Not remotely comparable. That the article is talking about a "karma whore" is telling. That title would imply that the main benefit of the online "community" is getting points, not having relationships. It's just a silly Internet game with short, rapid dopamine feedback loops. Social media, with its likes and upvotes, hardly seems like actual social activity.
- mercer 7y ago
  I'm inclined to agree for the most part, but it's important to remember that imposing your own experience on others ("astounded", "never the same as real world relationships", "hardly seems") is not just presumptuous and somewhat myopic, but also real shitty to hear for people who feel like they're not 'doing it right' just because they're different. There's a long history of people choosing to live solitary lives, and as far as I can tell there's no good reason to assume that they made the wrong choice. Sure, most people might need real social contact, but humans are a varied bunch. Let's accept or maybe even celebrate this, even while still keeping in mind that the more 'deviant' a behavior is, the higher the chance is that it's unhealthy. I'd never recommend a random person shut themselves in and replace real human contact with a digital version, because on average, it's probably not a good thing. But I try my best to also not impose what is 'normal' on them, because for all I know they're one of the odd ones out. (I am one of those odd ones, to an extent, and trying to conform to the 'healthy mean' has had some bad consequences.)
  - jrs235 7y ago
    Well said. Your comment perfectly ties into what I was thinking in a comment elsewhere here referring to a comment by dang.
naiveai 7y ago
This special value that people place on touching and seeing is completely arbitrary. Your condescending attitude on this doesn't help you make your case in any way.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  I was under the impression that it was widely accepted that babies who are not held / loved / touched enough can suffer developmental issue, or even die. I don’t believe it can be argued in good faith that touch and sight are valued due to completely arbitrary reasons.
  - naiveai 7y ago
    Comparing infants in the early stages of development to mature, adult humans is disingenuous.

hartator 7y ago

Reddit is made of real people too. Met multiple people there. Being miserable alone is not superior to being miserable on Reddit.

sverige 7y ago
I agree with your statement as far as it goes. I met several people irl that I had known only on Usenet back in the 90s. My question is, what are your relationships with relatives like? What about friendships with people who live nearby and share similar interests? I recognize that not everyone has family that lives nearby, and some have lost their natural families, which is very difficult. And there many who are estranged from their families for various reasons. I was estranged from my family, but that improved greatly with some considerable (and still ongoing) effort on my part, even though some of them have diagnosed mental illnesses. I guess my point is that if you have family members, it is well worth it to try to salvage what you can. If you do not have any family, it is well worth it to try to make one. Yes, those family members could be found on Reddit. Better to make the effort to have "real-life" friends and family you can see and talk to and touch daily so you don't have to be miserable alone. It can be hard to see when you're in the midst of it, though.
- el_programmador 7y ago
  Imagine what you'd be doing if there were no reddit (or any other social network for that matter)? You'd be out there trying to find real friends at meetups, clubs, gatherings, etc. don't ya? It helps a lot if you assume that internet doesn't exist for a day and see what miracles your mind comes up with then!
  - r3bl 7y ago
    This doesn't make sense when you use the term "for a day". One day isn't long enough to change anyone's habits. But it's not like it would make more sense if the term was longer. The whole reason the Internet was created was to be the network that could survive a nuclear war. It'll always be there. People communicated via the Internet way before reddit and others, and would continue doing so if they were to disappear. "Imagine living without the Internet" is a useless imagination. It's a thing of the past with no way of reappearing. If your ISP were to go down, I assume you'd just switch to mobile data. Assuming you're using two different companies, it would take quite a catastrophe for both of them to be down at the same time, at which point your survival instinct would kick in, not a desire to make meaningful relationships offline.
  - jowsie 7y ago
    These kinds of people and scenarios existed long before reddit and 'social media' in the modern sense. They were just on Usenet/IRC/web forums, heh.
  - nasalgoat 7y ago
    I used to hang out on BBSes before the internet. Introverts weren't created by the Internet, they were set free by it.
- vidarh 7y ago
  I get that you mean well, but to me this comes through as almost insulting in its presumptions of how other people feel. I for one am not miserable when I'm alone. I love my alone time. And to be clear this is not because it is rare. I make a conscious choice to be alone a lot of the time. I sometimes love time with people too, but only in small doses and only a very few people (this does not mean I can't enjoy being out in public - being around people I'm not interacting with constantly is just fine). I certainly don't want to have people around to see and talk and touch daily. The very thought is an exhausting nightmare to me.
thrav 7y ago
I developed real friendships back when I was moderating one of the big sports subs. Went to a bachelor party for one of the other guys, and had a blast with his college friends. Reddit is what you make it.
munchbunny 7y ago
I don't think the problem is necessarily whether it's real people. The problem is that if you're not careful, Reddit becomes the upvote Olympics. You can't build a healthy social diet on just approval. Some people do that with real life. It just happens to be far easier to do on the internet because we figured out that approval is addictive and drives user engagement.
- el_programmador 7y ago
  Totally true. It also gives rise to echo chambers, people just keep circle-jerking around those of approve of them reciprocally and thus keep themselves in constant denial.
- Chathamization 7y ago
  That's a large part of the problem. Another is that the vast majority of online content and votes comes from a small minority of people who are probably mentally ill[1]. Also, the way sites like Reddit (or HN) work are also in opposition to long and thought out conversations (you have a very short window of time to participate in the discussion before it drops off the front page and effectively dies). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
  - munchbunny 7y ago
    This brings up a related thought. One reason I dislike online forums (and especially Reddit's technical communities like r/programming) are that discussions never have time to evolve, so nuanced topics always just end in popular talking points. That leads to a dynamic where it's hard to try to express any real nuance, because any gray area in the discussion gets squashed when somebody jumps in with the least charitable possible interpretation of your point. I rarely ever run into any cases of "hmm you have a point but I still disagree." For example, I see this every time a discussion about code review culture comes up. The thread is always popular, and it always gets exactly two opinions: "we should be nicer" and "grow a thicker skin." God forbid there could be a situational truth to either point! You'd think from the discussion that every developer is either a caustic veteran or a thin skinned newbie who needs to get over themselves.

mcbutterbunz 7y ago

I completely agree. Social media makes it easy to quantify and measure your feelings, views, jokes, etc. The ability to measure how people interpret your posts allow you the opportunity to optimize them.

rangibaby 7y ago
I guess it taught me that karma is worthless. It’s easy to pander and make popular posts but they are usually a pedestrian opinion (did you know that (country) is BAD?) , a variation on a tired joke, or some boring tidbit (the SR-71 fast L O L).
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Yea, internet points are pretty useless motivation unless you’re trying to become an influencer—you can see this on HN too.
  - antisemiotic 7y ago
    The one exception are SE sites, where a certain number of fake internet points is required to fully use the site. It's harder to game the system there, though. Speaking of which, could someone with enough internet points on Math SE ask this guy https://math.stackexchange.com/a/35238 https://math.stackexchange.com/a/35238 how does he deal with carries during multiplication? I made an account specifically to ask this, but I'm not a mathematician and don't have enough expertise to answer questions asked there (or perhaps I'm too lazy to hunt for questions that I could answer).
    - viraptor 7y ago
      You don't have to ask that specific person. Open a new question, point at the answer you linked and ask about the specific bit you want to understand.
      - antisemiotic 7y ago

smhenderson 7y ago

For me it was slashdot and I let myself dive into it too much at work. I was in a very dissatisfying position at a company I loved when I started working for them but they went way downhill several years later. I was being paid but completely ignored for months at a time so I spent probably more than 70% of my day trying to get noticed on slashdot and thinking it was a viable substitute for actually accomplishing something. When I moved on to better work I was able to leave it behind. HN is my only “social media“ now and I try to keep even it to a minimum.

claudiawerner 7y ago

I think this sets up a bit of a false opposition of concepts; the opposition need not be between real life relationships with "actual, real people" and the faceless people whom one meets through endless Internet arguments - the opposition is much more abstract, between people who one only encounters in the latter capacity and who one only encounters in the former capacity. As in, the type of interactions one has are the differentiating factor here, not the medium over which they are conducted. Almost anyone with history of using the Internet in a psedonymous capacity can attest to this fact - remote relationships one builds can be very strong and fruitful, surpassing even one's most intimate "IRL" connections, and real life relationships can be weak, obscured, superficial, and lonely. In my experience most people operate thinking that online relationships (and even all interactions) can only be adversarial and abstracted from the real people behind them (e.g. a battle of ideas) but I think there's a lot to be found in positive human interactions online. Taking this further, I think the idea you espouse has the potential to be dangerous and alienating - it denies certain modes of interaction that some people are not only comfortable with but satisfied with. In denying this capability, you not only shut yourself off from this potential, but you alienate people who find it most fruitful to explore this potential. This opposition comes up a lot - many people simply cannot understand how one can build a meaningful mostly-anonymous relationship online, or they cannot understand how one can build a sex life in the comfort of their room. They view it as a kind of degraded way of having a relationship or sexuality, "not the real thing", a mere substitute, that the person must be sad or lonely to be finding such enjoyment, to be deprived in order to seek it out, and unsatisfied to pursue it. It calls back the idea that the masturbator (or the contented asexual) can't be satisfied, since she's not experiencing the joy of sex - she's living in a sad, lonely, isolated and lower-tier way. It calls back the idea of the anime/comic book/sci-fi fan who can't be satisfied with their pleasures (or worse, that they are stuck in a childish imaginative state) because "it's not real/they're just comics/they're pixels on a screen". It calls back the idea of those who enjoy atonal music being either posers or fundamentally broken because they enjoy it more than classical period (or pop) music. It calls back the idea of asking why people would want to listen to music sung in languages they don't understand. It even calls back the idea that philosophy and abstract math are useless because they don't solve any real world problems. In its most egregious form, it calls back the idea that one can't enjoy a good story in a book because it's not visual/auditory and therefore can't appeal to us in the same way a movie can. Why read the Harry Potter books when you can just watch the films, right? With all due respect, I cannot express how much I detest this concept. It only comes from narrow-mindedness and pre-established ideas. The concept figures that because I can't see the value, the value can't exist for anyone else. Nobody else could experience the world differently. Ironically, it displays a lack of empathy - something, as conventional wisdom would have it, can only come about through real life interactions. To be clear, I'm not saying you adhere to the general 'conception' I've criticised here, but I am saying that your point fits very nicely into this ultimately harmful conception. I realize the irony of having this kind of argument online.

lowii 7y ago

He almost seems surprised that going into complete social isolation in order to win internet points made him less happy.

homero 7y ago
He's still at it https://www.reddit.com/user/dickfromaccounting https://www.reddit.com/user/dickfromaccounting
sockgrant 7y ago
It wasn’t surprising that what he was doing lead to that result. It was that it was a slow creep that lead him down the path and sometimes you don’t realize where you’re headed until you have a come-to moment where you take stock of your life.
sullyj3 7y ago
I don't think so. It's more that in many cases, knowing that a behaviour is bad for you is woefully insufficient to make you actually stop doing it.

vidarh 7y ago

Your statement caused an immediate negative reaction for me not because it isn't right for some people but because it is generalising your experiences into assumptions about what is 'real' and what works for other people that does not match my experience at all. It took me years to realise that what made me unhappy was trying to maintain these 'real' relationships out of a similar belief that it was what I needed. It's not that I can't enjoy relationships with people face to face. I do sometimes. But it takes a lot out of me. It drains me of energy. [sometimes that's worth it; sometimes it's not; sometimes it'd be worth it but I just don't have the energy.] The relationships you don't consider real often makes me happier. They're as meaningful to me as face to face relationships, but a lot less exhausting. The right balance for me is to be close in 'real' life with a partner and my son, and rely on my colleagues and the occasional other person for some limited other face to face contact (and a day or so a week is enough, thank you), and otherwise stick to myself in 'real' life and keep interactions largely online. Even then I often I prefer total solitude, and I'm happier this way than I ever was spending time with people for the sake of trying to be someone I'm not. Chasing 'Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to' can be as soul sucking and damaging as locking yourself in if you're doing it just because you're made to think that's what you should be doing. Not everyone is like you.

kuerbel 7y ago
I'm just like you. It's not that I don't like other people or hate them (that would be too draining anyways). I have ADD and interacting with people is draining... I have to focus on the conversation and most people don't understand that sometimes they say something that gets my imagination going, which makes me lose my focus so I miss some parts of what they say. Until I notice it and zoom in on the conversation again. Which in turn makes me sometimes miss some crucial points. Even when they know I have ADD it still might upset them, even though I do my best. And that is just one example of what makes it hard for me to interact face to face. I prefer writing. At my worst I even forget what I wanted to say mid sentence! Or I have to blurt it out and interrupt people...
scarygliders 7y ago
I gave you an updoot because I am exactly like you. We, are introverts. Introverts can function in the real world, but only for short bursts at a time. We can make friends, go to parties, even be the life and soul of a party - but only for short bursts at a time, then you'll usually find us chilling out somewhere quiet, recharging our metaphorical batteries. A lot of people confuse introversy with being shy or timid or other negative connotations, and they'd be incorrect. There are many good articles on what being an introvert is and means. For example https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-introvert/ https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-introvert/

Thorrez 7y ago

It sounds pretty clear to me he knows how awful it is. Why would admitting he's still a karma whore mean he thinks it's not awful? A drug addict can know being a drug addict is awful while still admitting to being a drug addict.

tvanantwerp 7y ago

I'm an introvert and I require far less human-to-human contact than society seems to expect. And yet, I 100% agree with you that real relationships are essential. Trying to replace them with online "relationships" doesn't work. I'm actually astounded by how many people replying seem to reject this idea entirely. I fear they may have eschewed real world relationships for so long that they haven't really got any, don't remember the difference, and use online "relationships" to fill the void as best they can. Sure, you can have relationships online. But it's never the same as real world relationships. Not even close. The satisfaction I get from being with my wife, my family, and my friends, is so, so, so much greater than any interaction I've had online with a person I've never met. Not remotely comparable. That the article is talking about a "karma whore" is telling. That title would imply that the main benefit of the online "community" is getting points, not having relationships. It's just a silly Internet game with short, rapid dopamine feedback loops. Social media, with its likes and upvotes, hardly seems like actual social activity.

mercer 7y ago
I'm inclined to agree for the most part, but it's important to remember that imposing your own experience on others ("astounded", "never the same as real world relationships", "hardly seems") is not just presumptuous and somewhat myopic, but also real shitty to hear for people who feel like they're not 'doing it right' just because they're different. There's a long history of people choosing to live solitary lives, and as far as I can tell there's no good reason to assume that they made the wrong choice. Sure, most people might need real social contact, but humans are a varied bunch. Let's accept or maybe even celebrate this, even while still keeping in mind that the more 'deviant' a behavior is, the higher the chance is that it's unhealthy. I'd never recommend a random person shut themselves in and replace real human contact with a digital version, because on average, it's probably not a good thing. But I try my best to also not impose what is 'normal' on them, because for all I know they're one of the odd ones out. (I am one of those odd ones, to an extent, and trying to conform to the 'healthy mean' has had some bad consequences.)
- jrs235 7y ago
  Well said. Your comment perfectly ties into what I was thinking in a comment elsewhere here referring to a comment by dang.

naiveai 7y ago

This special value that people place on touching and seeing is completely arbitrary. Your condescending attitude on this doesn't help you make your case in any way.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
I was under the impression that it was widely accepted that babies who are not held / loved / touched enough can suffer developmental issue, or even die. I don’t believe it can be argued in good faith that touch and sight are valued due to completely arbitrary reasons.
- naiveai 7y ago
  Comparing infants in the early stages of development to mature, adult humans is disingenuous.