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It often turns out the person who got cut off was a giant asshole who 100% deserved it. You might not have sufficient visibility into the experience of the pers

by Kye 4y ago

It often turns out the person who got cut off was a giant asshole who 100% deserved it. You might not have sufficient visibility into the experience of the person who cut someone off to judge their actions fairly. You see this a lot in people whose kids have cut off contact. From their perspective, the cutting off was sudden and shocking. From their kid's perspective, it was the last-ditch effort to reclaim autonomy and preserve sanity after a lifetime of abuse and endless attempts to set boundaries and seek change. An outside observer is missing key details.

teddyh 4y ago
I believe that the percieved threshold of “giant asshole who 100% deserved it” is lowering.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Perhaps dependencies are being reduced. “Cutting off” is harder when you depend, or might need to depend on someone, assuming they have something of use for you.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    But did something happen to make people vastly less dependent in, say, the last five years?
- Kye 4y ago
  Whether the social stability that came with people putting up with or excusing more abuse and general toxicity was worth more than the dynamism that comes from more people feeling free to build supportive circles is something society is likely to wrestle with over the coming decades. Anecdotally, every person I know who's cut off people who were harmful to them has found more fulfillment even if things are harder for them. Like chosen family, chosen struggle seems to be easier to live with than a struggle that thrives on disempowerment. The threshold was high because people didn't believe they had a choice before.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Of course, you could be right. However, an alternative explanation is: 1. The threshold of what constitutes “abuse and general toxicity” has lowered significantly, giving people social tacit permission to ostracize others for lesser and lesser perceived offenses. 2. People always think that discarding something is good, and that they are better off without it, immediately after having discarded it. People naturally want to be able to blame all their problems on a single source, and after they have gotten rid of it, they quite obviously believe their lives to be better in every way. Of course, the worse the thing they discarded was, the more correct they are in their belief, but if they are entirely correct can not be known until much later.
    - Kye 4y ago
      1 is fine if the threshold was too high. People are ultimately free to associate with whoever consents to that association without justifying it to outside observers, or to the confused newly disassociated. 2 might be the case, but people can certainly have a sense that something is wrong. It could turn out they made the wrong call in trying to resolve that feeling, but my ancedata tells me this is vanishingly rare. I get the feeling my anecdata samples a larger portion of the people who pruned their connections to make room for growth, while your anecdata samples a larger portion of people who were cut off. I've already heard quite a bit from the latter and don't find their defenses compelling, so I'm still not convinced this is a serious problem.
      - teddyh 4y ago
        > People are ultimately free to associate with whoever consents to that association without justifying it to outside observers, or to the confused newly disassociated. Nobody contests that. But freedom was never the issue. The issue was a possible problem with people more and more readily abandoning dialogue for ostracism (with accompanying demonization, etc. as justification) as a normal thing to do on disagreement. > I get the feeling my anecdata samples a larger portion of the people who pruned their connections to make room for growth, while your anecdata samples a larger portion of people who were cut off. Both our sample sizes are very small, so we probably can’t draw any definitive conclusions either way. I was highlighting that ostracism seemed to me to become more common, and if this is true, it would point to either a rise in the existence of terrible irredeemable people, or a socially lowered threshold for abandoning conversation for demonization. Per the reasons described in the article, I tend to believe in the latter, not the former.

by Kye 4y ago

teddyh 4y ago

I believe that the percieved threshold of “giant asshole who 100% deserved it” is lowering.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Perhaps dependencies are being reduced. “Cutting off” is harder when you depend, or might need to depend on someone, assuming they have something of use for you.
- teddyh 4y ago
  But did something happen to make people vastly less dependent in, say, the last five years?
Kye 4y ago
Whether the social stability that came with people putting up with or excusing more abuse and general toxicity was worth more than the dynamism that comes from more people feeling free to build supportive circles is something society is likely to wrestle with over the coming decades. Anecdotally, every person I know who's cut off people who were harmful to them has found more fulfillment even if things are harder for them. Like chosen family, chosen struggle seems to be easier to live with than a struggle that thrives on disempowerment. The threshold was high because people didn't believe they had a choice before.
- teddyh 4y ago
  Of course, you could be right. However, an alternative explanation is: 1. The threshold of what constitutes “abuse and general toxicity” has lowered significantly, giving people social tacit permission to ostracize others for lesser and lesser perceived offenses. 2. People always think that discarding something is good, and that they are better off without it, immediately after having discarded it. People naturally want to be able to blame all their problems on a single source, and after they have gotten rid of it, they quite obviously believe their lives to be better in every way. Of course, the worse the thing they discarded was, the more correct they are in their belief, but if they are entirely correct can not be known until much later.
  - Kye 4y ago
    1 is fine if the threshold was too high. People are ultimately free to associate with whoever consents to that association without justifying it to outside observers, or to the confused newly disassociated. 2 might be the case, but people can certainly have a sense that something is wrong. It could turn out they made the wrong call in trying to resolve that feeling, but my ancedata tells me this is vanishingly rare. I get the feeling my anecdata samples a larger portion of the people who pruned their connections to make room for growth, while your anecdata samples a larger portion of people who were cut off. I've already heard quite a bit from the latter and don't find their defenses compelling, so I'm still not convinced this is a serious problem.
    - teddyh 4y ago
      > People are ultimately free to associate with whoever consents to that association without justifying it to outside observers, or to the confused newly disassociated. Nobody contests that. But freedom was never the issue. The issue was a possible problem with people more and more readily abandoning dialogue for ostracism (with accompanying demonization, etc. as justification) as a normal thing to do on disagreement. > I get the feeling my anecdata samples a larger portion of the people who pruned their connections to make room for growth, while your anecdata samples a larger portion of people who were cut off. Both our sample sizes are very small, so we probably can’t draw any definitive conclusions either way. I was highlighting that ostracism seemed to me to become more common, and if this is true, it would point to either a rise in the existence of terrible irredeemable people, or a socially lowered threshold for abandoning conversation for demonization. Per the reasons described in the article, I tend to believe in the latter, not the former.