10 ms·

Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. Its a word that

Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. Its a word that has ceased to have any real meaning but virtually every behavior that used to just be normal every day activity is Toxic. Everyone has flaws and no one has all the answers. Parents are just people doing the best they can and for the most part making what they think are the best decisions in the moment while struggling with everything that everyone else struggles with. Children want to put their parents on a pedestal and assume that all decisions; and any harm caused was intentional. There are of course bad parents and bad people and I don't mean to discount the effect that those people have on their kids. Social media is quick these days to tell you that your parents are narcissists when in reality they are just distracted trying to figure out what happened to their lives and trying to get by. At the end of every day I look back and see choices I made that were probably not great or see where I ignored my kid as I was trying to get something done for work. These things pile up and then are focused through the lens of the internet and suddenly you are a bad parent.

dcole2929 5y ago
Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable. I may have more empathy in one case than another but if you refuse to accept responsibility for the harms you caused then yeah that empathy is likely going away. And this is what the author refers to near the beginning of the article: "Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship". No one is perfect. I still have a great relationship with my own parents despite their failings but not all my siblings do, and as I've told each of my parents, it's on them to work to make that relationship better. Some things my siblings may never forgive or forget and you can do with that what you will, but if you want this person in your life you have to work to make it happen.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  I don't disagree, it is everyone's job to work on relationships.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    Sometimes only one side wants the relationship. In that case, they're the ones that have to work on it.
- dionidium 5y ago
  > Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. It matters a lot! First of all, it matters legally. An entirely different set of laws and procedures will be invoked depending on which it was. But, second, it matters because it tells me something about what to expect from you in the future. It tells me something about how you feel towards me. It tells me something about your character, about your capacity for violence.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    Don't ignore the sentence that "it doesn't matter" applies to: > You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable. Obviously it matters in other ways.
    - dionidium 5y ago
      Yes, my first objection addresses that part directly. Of course you're still accountable, but you're accountable in totally different ways. It matters a lot even just in how one should be accountable. Even if the topic is limited to accountability, there's no possible way to say it doesn't matter. It informs every aspect of that discussion.
nsxwolf 5y ago
A few years back there was a movement on Facebook with groups called "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" and similar that encouraged people to cut off their parents. It seemed wildly popular and had tons of engagement. People would diagnose their parents with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, discuss how every problem in their lives could be traced to their parents, and that was that. I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > A few years back there was a movement on Facebook with groups called "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" and similar that encouraged people to cut off their parents.... > I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made.... That's a really good point. Before the internet, and especially social media, people had weird and arguable toxic ideas, but it was almost always impossible to form a geographically-based community around them, so they'd almost always peter out and their effect was limited. The internet broke geographical limits, allowing intense purely ideological communities to form around almost every idea and validate them, no matter how wrong and misguided. In our very online times that can have serious social consequences, sometimes for good but often for ill.
  - jrumbut 5y ago
    What's weird is some of these communities aren't even wrong, a lot of people do have parents with personality problems or whatever, it's just their nature to go off the rails and have unpleasant real world effects.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    Also their congregation creates the conditions for other similar types of thinking and cross pollination of other niche ideas which explains Q-like, super-conspiracy groups that are like a rotating prix fixe menu of paranoid nativist memes and fit neatly adjacent to neo-nazi, sovereign citizen, and even incel movements.
bart_spoon 5y ago
I think that if its not single-handedly causing this, its by far the biggest factor. The ways in which our world has been altered by the rise of the internet are things we haven't even begun to comprehend. I think most of our modern societal "ills" that we frequently lament about today seem to all trace back to extreme individualism and narcissism, both of which are fueled largely by the internet and social media.
shagie 5y ago
> The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. Its a word that has ceased to have any real meaning but virtually every behavior that used to just be normal every day activity is Toxic. I've been tempted to write a blog post "Toxic Considered Harmful" One of the biggest problems with the toxic label is there isn't anything that can be said in response. Its an attempt to get sympathy and/or end the discussion. "That's toxic" and well... there's not many places that a conversation can go from there. It is often incredibly difficult to refute someone making a claim that something is toxic - especially when much of the diagnosis of the situation is based on a one sided and often idealized view. Additionally, applying the label of toxic to a wide range of situations reduces the descriptive nature of the word and the options available within a wider vocabulary selection.
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  The correct response is not to refute the label, it's to explore the feeling and ask what makes them feel that way. I'm sure some people will shut you down at that stage, but most people will open up if they actually want resolution.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    But that's exactly the concern, that "toxic" is both hypercharged with negative affect and can't be disputed. Similar labels don't have that problem - I would and do tell friends things like "she's not contrarian, she just has strong beliefs you haven't fully understood".
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > It is often incredibly difficult to refute someone making a claim that something is toxic Perhaps a lot of the "toxic things" are subjective based on someones experience, so there is not much to refute. If someone says the way they were treated by another was toxic, who are you to refute its toxicity? People tend to be able to understand how some thing affects them and if it is good for them.
- nathanaldensr 5y ago
oh_sigh 5y ago
There was a viral video I saw yesterday of a baby crying, and a deer rushing out of the woods probably trying to protect it. Anyways, the lady who posted it got a ton of comments about her shitty parenting style from literally a 6 second video, to the point where she had to make a response video saying "No, I don't just place my newborn on a wooden porch", and explain why her child was on its stomach, and why it cried, etc.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Social media invites all sorts of low effort "you ought to" or "look I know about X" comments. These people don't really care about her baby. They care about getting virtue points for pretending like they care. It's a twilight zone at the intersection of virtue signaling and bike shedding.
GavinMcG 5y ago
"Toxic" is just a catchier-sounding synonym for "harmful." It doesn't imply intent — in fact, that's one of its strengths, and one of the major components in the shift in the way we collectively talk about things over the past couple decades. Part of the conversation around race, for example, has been an awareness by more and more people that unintentional harms are far more prevalent than intentional ones, and in total are something to be taken seriously. What if everyone is a "bad" parent? What if no parent lives up to their child's expectation? Intentional harm or not, people coming of age have to reckon with the gap between their idealized understanding of/hope for their parents, and their increasing understanding of the tradeoffs adult life demands. Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing. Burying our resentments doesn't solve things—talking them through and understanding each others' perspectives does.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Resentment arises from a gap between expectations and reality. Maybe the problem is the idealized expectations. And talking about things doesn’t help that. Kids need to learn that life sucks and then you die and really internalize that in order to bring expectations in line with reality.
  - nathanaldensr 5y ago
    Agreed. Except now, idealization doesn't only apply to "white picket fence" experiences or "going to college." Now it applies to inner identity, and sometimes aggressive or even militant external identities. It's an impossible situation for a parent. Sometimes, the only way for the parent to survive emotionally is to allow the child to fail and hopefully learn from the failure.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Have to wonder if that identity is the final refuge of generations that feel helpless and worse-off than prior ones.
      - 5y ago
raverbashing 5y ago
"Gens Y and Z getting lower salaries, higher rents, higher costs of education, limited choices, etc" Sure, it must be the fault of social media /s Sure, not all harm is intentional, but when they get labeled as "lazy, useless, incompetent, etc" by the boomers it's hard to not blame them. I am lucky to have been relatively successful, but I see that a lot of people (a couple of years) younger than me are really struggling.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  "when they get labeled as "lazy, useless, incompetent, etc" Where are they getting labeled as this on?
  - dcole2929 5y ago
    The news, court rooms, congress floor, board rooms, hiring committees, college admissions, and yes on social media. But let's be honest here. We have two subsequent generations whose economic outlooks have been substantially harmed by the previous generation being blamed for not being successful and it's in more or less all corners of the world that imply power.
burgessaccount 5y ago
I’m not so sure about blaming social media. I really wish the article had included any sort of concrete data on whether estrangement has actually become more common over time. In my family, my grandfather didn’t talk to his parents because they were alcoholic money-grubbers. My grandma didn’t talk to her dad because he’d left their family to start another family. My aunt didn’t talk to my grandma because my grandma discouraged her from having a career. Reading biographies and history books, it seems like there have always been shitty, “toxic,” or difficult parents, and there have always been disowning, abandonments, and silent treatments. Add to that the fact that our social support structures (babysitting help, end-of-life care) can be paid for in cash, rather than social favors, and you have some pretty normal and understandable dynamics. People barely have time for friends these days. What are the odds that both parents are fun, awesome people you really want to hang out with and spend extra time with? FWIW, I get along great with my parents. But I also recognize that they were better, healthier, more supportive, more present parents than what most of my friends had growing up.
cronix 5y ago
That, and the "news." If you watch CNN/MSNBC/NBC/CBS/ABC/PBS you are led to think that anyone who supports Republicans is the devil and only show things that support that viewpoint. You rarely see them agree with anything the Republican put forth. If you watch FOX/OAN or other similar networks, you are led to think that anyone who supports the Democrats are the devil. You rarely see anything in a positive light. It's as though each side is incapable of doing anything the other side might also agree with. The extremist language on all networks has gone into overdrive. It's interesting if you take a few weeks and watch all sides, as unbiased as you can, and listen to the names and language they use towards each other. They are chalk full of specific buzzwords, which are inflammatory. Seriously, transcribe them and look at the unnecessary adjectives used to "tell a story." Count them. Hundreds uttered every 30 minutes. It's a ratings show for them, but ripping the rest of us apart.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  one of the worst things to happen to society was pay per click advertising and news being funded by advertising dollars based on viewership numbers.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  The way you're presenting the "both sides" of "FOX/OAN" vs everyone else sounds like you are presenting the FOX/OAN perspective that the media has a liberal bias and they are the counter. The truth is much more nuanced: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ Most of your listed 'left' news sources only "skew left" but focus mostly on "fat reporting". Compared to FOX/OAN who are "hyper partisan right" and focus on "selectve, incomplete, unfair persuasion, propaganda, and other issues" When the most important facts of the day (electoral fraud, climate change, pandemic health and safety, vaccinations) have a "liberal bias" - in that the left is on the side of factual reality, and the right is on the side of unfounded conspiracy theories, you simply can't compare the news media the way you have.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > in that the left is on the side of factual reality I wish: - CNN/MSNBC/WaPo have retracted numerous stories recently. - Biden is senile. Where's the reporting on that? - Why is our southern border not being defended? Why are illegals getting care packages and free travel from the current govt? - the lab leak theory is far more plausible than the wet market one, yet social media still censors that.
acituan 5y ago
> Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. You're spot on. The article coyly makes a mention of the real cause in this clause: > For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.” Although identity has many, and positive, functions[1], here it stands for "unquestioned affirmation of one's narcissistic self-image", in other words "what I think I am, being reflected to me". Social media can do this almost perfectly, most of them are perfectly fine tuned for our engagement, what we think we are, what we would like to hear, and what we would like to get angry at (which confirms our identity through opposition). Anything that fails at this confirmation is expelled via the magic word "toxic"[2] and parents take their share for not being able to match this self-constructed, unearned narrative of an identity. [1] Identity is a useful narrative that explains us to ourselves and others through time and space. But it is only useful to the degree it actually conforms to the reality, else it loses its adaptivity. Which means identity needs to stem from our relationships to the world; it doesn't come from within, it does't come from without, it comes from our genuine relationship with reality as we test it. If the majority of the reality we had to conform to was internet, where we can block, downvote, silence, cancel and get recommended to by an entity that are really interested in us sticking around, our identity becomes seriously self-deceptive and not useful across time and space outside the internet. In a sense, internet replaced the narcissistic, toxic parents we were running away from, except this parent is perfectly, and callously, able to tell us what we want to hear. [2] Toxic exists. But not everything that pisses us off, or threatens our sense of identity is toxic. Narcissistic family systems are toxic because they put their needs above the needs of the child, that includes the need of the child to hear the harsh truth at times. What I see today is some parents are switching strategies by trying to outcompete with internet in being endlessly accommodating their children and not implementing necessary but unpopular structures their children might need. They couldn't have won anyway.
Hobli 5y ago
Social media no doubt is inflicting brain damage in much the same way being surrounded by the wrong people does. But putting that aside, when reasons have acummuluted over time for a relationships to weaken the main question is whether there are reasons to connect. And whether it gets verbalized, acknowledged and built upon. If there are common interests, activities that generate energy on both sides (as simple as cooking a meal together, gardening together etc) then it gets easier to maintain connect cause there is something positive for the mind to focus on inspite of all the negatives. Then there is hope.
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
Don't forget "trauma"!
deanCommie 5y ago
> Parents are just people doing the best they can. I'm not willing to be this generous by default. Beyond the basic manslow hierarchy of needs, people choose their priorities. Career, Friends, Family, Children, Recreation, Education, Health -> These are all facets of an adult priorities and they choose how much to allocate to each of these. Many of those that have children do it out of obligation, ego, legacy, society. Many have unrealistic expectations about how much control they have in shaping their spawn, and do not handle well when this new independent human does not match their expectations. These people end up causing genuine harm, and when we look back at what they did we should absolutely call out their prioritization and choices as harmful or toxic, and learn from them.
01100011 5y ago
There's a meme going around that says something to the effect that people are just meat with electricity inside. It's obviously a simplistic joke but there's something about it that really resonated with me. I'm trying to keep that in mind now, have compassion for others more, and to basically lower my expectations for the human animal. Sure, we can and do overcome our limitations sometimes, but that's something to be grateful for, not something to be expected.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  Not sure if you have kids or not, but once I had them it really made me understand where my parents were coming from and forgive their flaws. I literally know nothing about raising kids and am just making it up as I go along. I feel like I get it right a lot but also often get it wrong. There is no manual for being a parent or a person, we are all just flawed beings doing the best we can in a situation we have very little control over.

dcole2929 5y ago

Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable. I may have more empathy in one case than another but if you refuse to accept responsibility for the harms you caused then yeah that empathy is likely going away. And this is what the author refers to near the beginning of the article: "Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship". No one is perfect. I still have a great relationship with my own parents despite their failings but not all my siblings do, and as I've told each of my parents, it's on them to work to make that relationship better. Some things my siblings may never forgive or forget and you can do with that what you will, but if you want this person in your life you have to work to make it happen.

wonderwonder 5y ago
I don't disagree, it is everyone's job to work on relationships.
- NateEag 5y ago
  Sometimes only one side wants the relationship. In that case, they're the ones that have to work on it.
dionidium 5y ago
> Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. It matters a lot! First of all, it matters legally. An entirely different set of laws and procedures will be invoked depending on which it was. But, second, it matters because it tells me something about what to expect from you in the future. It tells me something about how you feel towards me. It tells me something about your character, about your capacity for violence.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  Don't ignore the sentence that "it doesn't matter" applies to: > You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable. Obviously it matters in other ways.
  - dionidium 5y ago
    Yes, my first objection addresses that part directly. Of course you're still accountable, but you're accountable in totally different ways. It matters a lot even just in how one should be accountable. Even if the topic is limited to accountability, there's no possible way to say it doesn't matter. It informs every aspect of that discussion.

nsxwolf 5y ago

A few years back there was a movement on Facebook with groups called "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" and similar that encouraged people to cut off their parents. It seemed wildly popular and had tons of engagement. People would diagnose their parents with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, discuss how every problem in their lives could be traced to their parents, and that was that. I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made.

tablespoon 5y ago
> A few years back there was a movement on Facebook with groups called "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" and similar that encouraged people to cut off their parents.... > I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made.... That's a really good point. Before the internet, and especially social media, people had weird and arguable toxic ideas, but it was almost always impossible to form a geographically-based community around them, so they'd almost always peter out and their effect was limited. The internet broke geographical limits, allowing intense purely ideological communities to form around almost every idea and validate them, no matter how wrong and misguided. In our very online times that can have serious social consequences, sometimes for good but often for ill.
- jrumbut 5y ago
  What's weird is some of these communities aren't even wrong, a lot of people do have parents with personality problems or whatever, it's just their nature to go off the rails and have unpleasant real world effects.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  Also their congregation creates the conditions for other similar types of thinking and cross pollination of other niche ideas which explains Q-like, super-conspiracy groups that are like a rotating prix fixe menu of paranoid nativist memes and fit neatly adjacent to neo-nazi, sovereign citizen, and even incel movements.

bart_spoon 5y ago

I think that if its not single-handedly causing this, its by far the biggest factor. The ways in which our world has been altered by the rise of the internet are things we haven't even begun to comprehend. I think most of our modern societal "ills" that we frequently lament about today seem to all trace back to extreme individualism and narcissism, both of which are fueled largely by the internet and social media.

shagie 5y ago

> The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. Its a word that has ceased to have any real meaning but virtually every behavior that used to just be normal every day activity is Toxic. I've been tempted to write a blog post "Toxic Considered Harmful" One of the biggest problems with the toxic label is there isn't anything that can be said in response. Its an attempt to get sympathy and/or end the discussion. "That's toxic" and well... there's not many places that a conversation can go from there. It is often incredibly difficult to refute someone making a claim that something is toxic - especially when much of the diagnosis of the situation is based on a one sided and often idealized view. Additionally, applying the label of toxic to a wide range of situations reduces the descriptive nature of the word and the options available within a wider vocabulary selection.

arrosenberg 5y ago
The correct response is not to refute the label, it's to explore the feeling and ask what makes them feel that way. I'm sure some people will shut you down at that stage, but most people will open up if they actually want resolution.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  But that's exactly the concern, that "toxic" is both hypercharged with negative affect and can't be disputed. Similar labels don't have that problem - I would and do tell friends things like "she's not contrarian, she just has strong beliefs you haven't fully understood".
vineyardmike 5y ago
> It is often incredibly difficult to refute someone making a claim that something is toxic Perhaps a lot of the "toxic things" are subjective based on someones experience, so there is not much to refute. If someone says the way they were treated by another was toxic, who are you to refute its toxicity? People tend to be able to understand how some thing affects them and if it is good for them.
nathanaldensr 5y ago

oh_sigh 5y ago

There was a viral video I saw yesterday of a baby crying, and a deer rushing out of the woods probably trying to protect it. Anyways, the lady who posted it got a ton of comments about her shitty parenting style from literally a 6 second video, to the point where she had to make a response video saying "No, I don't just place my newborn on a wooden porch", and explain why her child was on its stomach, and why it cried, etc.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Social media invites all sorts of low effort "you ought to" or "look I know about X" comments. These people don't really care about her baby. They care about getting virtue points for pretending like they care. It's a twilight zone at the intersection of virtue signaling and bike shedding.

GavinMcG 5y ago

"Toxic" is just a catchier-sounding synonym for "harmful." It doesn't imply intent — in fact, that's one of its strengths, and one of the major components in the shift in the way we collectively talk about things over the past couple decades. Part of the conversation around race, for example, has been an awareness by more and more people that unintentional harms are far more prevalent than intentional ones, and in total are something to be taken seriously. What if everyone is a "bad" parent? What if no parent lives up to their child's expectation? Intentional harm or not, people coming of age have to reckon with the gap between their idealized understanding of/hope for their parents, and their increasing understanding of the tradeoffs adult life demands. Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing. Burying our resentments doesn't solve things—talking them through and understanding each others' perspectives does.

rayiner 5y ago
Resentment arises from a gap between expectations and reality. Maybe the problem is the idealized expectations. And talking about things doesn’t help that. Kids need to learn that life sucks and then you die and really internalize that in order to bring expectations in line with reality.
- nathanaldensr 5y ago
  Agreed. Except now, idealization doesn't only apply to "white picket fence" experiences or "going to college." Now it applies to inner identity, and sometimes aggressive or even militant external identities. It's an impossible situation for a parent. Sometimes, the only way for the parent to survive emotionally is to allow the child to fail and hopefully learn from the failure.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Have to wonder if that identity is the final refuge of generations that feel helpless and worse-off than prior ones.
    - 5y ago

raverbashing 5y ago

"Gens Y and Z getting lower salaries, higher rents, higher costs of education, limited choices, etc" Sure, it must be the fault of social media /s Sure, not all harm is intentional, but when they get labeled as "lazy, useless, incompetent, etc" by the boomers it's hard to not blame them. I am lucky to have been relatively successful, but I see that a lot of people (a couple of years) younger than me are really struggling.

wonderwonder 5y ago
"when they get labeled as "lazy, useless, incompetent, etc" Where are they getting labeled as this on?
- dcole2929 5y ago
  The news, court rooms, congress floor, board rooms, hiring committees, college admissions, and yes on social media. But let's be honest here. We have two subsequent generations whose economic outlooks have been substantially harmed by the previous generation being blamed for not being successful and it's in more or less all corners of the world that imply power.

burgessaccount 5y ago

I’m not so sure about blaming social media. I really wish the article had included any sort of concrete data on whether estrangement has actually become more common over time. In my family, my grandfather didn’t talk to his parents because they were alcoholic money-grubbers. My grandma didn’t talk to her dad because he’d left their family to start another family. My aunt didn’t talk to my grandma because my grandma discouraged her from having a career. Reading biographies and history books, it seems like there have always been shitty, “toxic,” or difficult parents, and there have always been disowning, abandonments, and silent treatments. Add to that the fact that our social support structures (babysitting help, end-of-life care) can be paid for in cash, rather than social favors, and you have some pretty normal and understandable dynamics. People barely have time for friends these days. What are the odds that both parents are fun, awesome people you really want to hang out with and spend extra time with? FWIW, I get along great with my parents. But I also recognize that they were better, healthier, more supportive, more present parents than what most of my friends had growing up.

cronix 5y ago

That, and the "news." If you watch CNN/MSNBC/NBC/CBS/ABC/PBS you are led to think that anyone who supports Republicans is the devil and only show things that support that viewpoint. You rarely see them agree with anything the Republican put forth. If you watch FOX/OAN or other similar networks, you are led to think that anyone who supports the Democrats are the devil. You rarely see anything in a positive light. It's as though each side is incapable of doing anything the other side might also agree with. The extremist language on all networks has gone into overdrive. It's interesting if you take a few weeks and watch all sides, as unbiased as you can, and listen to the names and language they use towards each other. They are chalk full of specific buzzwords, which are inflammatory. Seriously, transcribe them and look at the unnecessary adjectives used to "tell a story." Count them. Hundreds uttered every 30 minutes. It's a ratings show for them, but ripping the rest of us apart.

wonderwonder 5y ago
one of the worst things to happen to society was pay per click advertising and news being funded by advertising dollars based on viewership numbers.
deanCommie 5y ago
The way you're presenting the "both sides" of "FOX/OAN" vs everyone else sounds like you are presenting the FOX/OAN perspective that the media has a liberal bias and they are the counter. The truth is much more nuanced: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ Most of your listed 'left' news sources only "skew left" but focus mostly on "fat reporting". Compared to FOX/OAN who are "hyper partisan right" and focus on "selectve, incomplete, unfair persuasion, propaganda, and other issues" When the most important facts of the day (electoral fraud, climate change, pandemic health and safety, vaccinations) have a "liberal bias" - in that the left is on the side of factual reality, and the right is on the side of unfounded conspiracy theories, you simply can't compare the news media the way you have.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > in that the left is on the side of factual reality I wish: - CNN/MSNBC/WaPo have retracted numerous stories recently. - Biden is senile. Where's the reporting on that? - Why is our southern border not being defended? Why are illegals getting care packages and free travel from the current govt? - the lab leak theory is far more plausible than the wet market one, yet social media still censors that.

acituan 5y ago

> Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. You're spot on. The article coyly makes a mention of the real cause in this clause: > For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.” Although identity has many, and positive, functions[1], here it stands for "unquestioned affirmation of one's narcissistic self-image", in other words "what I think I am, being reflected to me". Social media can do this almost perfectly, most of them are perfectly fine tuned for our engagement, what we think we are, what we would like to hear, and what we would like to get angry at (which confirms our identity through opposition). Anything that fails at this confirmation is expelled via the magic word "toxic"[2] and parents take their share for not being able to match this self-constructed, unearned narrative of an identity. [1] Identity is a useful narrative that explains us to ourselves and others through time and space. But it is only useful to the degree it actually conforms to the reality, else it loses its adaptivity. Which means identity needs to stem from our relationships to the world; it doesn't come from within, it does't come from without, it comes from our genuine relationship with reality as we test it. If the majority of the reality we had to conform to was internet, where we can block, downvote, silence, cancel and get recommended to by an entity that are really interested in us sticking around, our identity becomes seriously self-deceptive and not useful across time and space outside the internet. In a sense, internet replaced the narcissistic, toxic parents we were running away from, except this parent is perfectly, and callously, able to tell us what we want to hear. [2] Toxic exists. But not everything that pisses us off, or threatens our sense of identity is toxic. Narcissistic family systems are toxic because they put their needs above the needs of the child, that includes the need of the child to hear the harsh truth at times. What I see today is some parents are switching strategies by trying to outcompete with internet in being endlessly accommodating their children and not implementing necessary but unpopular structures their children might need. They couldn't have won anyway.

Hobli 5y ago

Social media no doubt is inflicting brain damage in much the same way being surrounded by the wrong people does. But putting that aside, when reasons have acummuluted over time for a relationships to weaken the main question is whether there are reasons to connect. And whether it gets verbalized, acknowledged and built upon. If there are common interests, activities that generate energy on both sides (as simple as cooking a meal together, gardening together etc) then it gets easier to maintain connect cause there is something positive for the mind to focus on inspite of all the negatives. Then there is hope.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago

Don't forget "trauma"!

deanCommie 5y ago

> Parents are just people doing the best they can. I'm not willing to be this generous by default. Beyond the basic manslow hierarchy of needs, people choose their priorities. Career, Friends, Family, Children, Recreation, Education, Health -> These are all facets of an adult priorities and they choose how much to allocate to each of these. Many of those that have children do it out of obligation, ego, legacy, society. Many have unrealistic expectations about how much control they have in shaping their spawn, and do not handle well when this new independent human does not match their expectations. These people end up causing genuine harm, and when we look back at what they did we should absolutely call out their prioritization and choices as harmful or toxic, and learn from them.

01100011 5y ago

There's a meme going around that says something to the effect that people are just meat with electricity inside. It's obviously a simplistic joke but there's something about it that really resonated with me. I'm trying to keep that in mind now, have compassion for others more, and to basically lower my expectations for the human animal. Sure, we can and do overcome our limitations sometimes, but that's something to be grateful for, not something to be expected.

wonderwonder 5y ago
Not sure if you have kids or not, but once I had them it really made me understand where my parents were coming from and forgive their flaws. I literally know nothing about raising kids and am just making it up as I go along. I feel like I get it right a lot but also often get it wrong. There is no manual for being a parent or a person, we are all just flawed beings doing the best we can in a situation we have very little control over.