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I still don't understand what kind of mentality it takes for a person to say, in sincerity, "Kill yourself." That's just ... wow. Do they understand what they'r

• dasil003 13y ago
  They're expressing the average 15yo worldview which is that social acceptance is everything and embarassment by your peers is literally a fate worse than death. It's pretty fucked up, but also I think an inevitable part of growing up for most except for maybe a few hard-core geeks whose passions supercede whatever social narcotics their peers subject them to.
  • fudged71 13y ago
    >embarassment by your peers is literally a fate worse than death I hadn't considered that specific viewpoint, yet it makes so much sense.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
      Adolescent 17-year-old here, it is actually my greatest fear. But I do not have the healthiest mental state.
      • muraiki 13y ago
        The liberation from this fear comes in a somewhat disingenuous way: humility. I'm not saying that as a slight against you (as if you are proud) in any way whatsoever. Nor am I espousing humility as a sort of passive acceptance of "the way things are." But by recognizing, patiently overcoming, and forgiving yourself for your weaknesses and struggles -- and by offering others the same -- you will find that, over time, this fear will lose most of its strength. Furthermore, you won't be offended when others judge, reject, or humiliate you. Instead you will feel a sorrow for those who live in such a way, a sorrow that can hopefully be nurtured into compassion. If this sorrow turns into a holier-than-thou attitude, though, then we have a problem. :) The way to avoid this is through honest recognition of one's own weaknesses; once again, humility. Emotions and opinions are fickle; the way people treat others reflects as much about the struggles and burdens they bear as they do about how they might "really" feel about something. To make ourselves beholden to other people's opinions and judgments is to necessarily strap ourselves to a roller coaster. As someone who used to struggle with this a lot -- albeit unconsciously, because I was the one who was harsh towards others -- this is my experience.
        • fudged71 13y ago
          College offers you a much larger group of people surrounding you, so it's harder to judge everyone. And in turn, you recognize that people are judging you less. This is part of the freedom that you feel when you exit high school, I think :)
  • comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
    Let's keep some things in mind. Adolescence is the onset of adulthood before the capacity to function as a real adult in the real world is reached. One of the things that adolescents search for is some form of personal validation besides their parents and immediate family. It is probably close enough to true that we are biologically driven to look for this outside acceptance. Unfortunately our society favors heavily segregating children based on age. That results in confused & clueless teens begging for acceptance from equally clueless people from the same wing of the same asylum. Once in the real world a functional adult who can hold down a job finds there are a million ways to find personal validation. Teens do not have that opportunity; they (often) imagine that the opinion of other teenagers is the only path to validation.
    • siavosh 13y ago
      I'd never heard of the age segregation explanation, it's very interesting since it implies this degree of behavior isn't inevitable. Are there any references for this claim?
      • scott_s 13y ago
        This very long NY Magazine piece meditates on that topic, "Why You Never Truly Leave High School": http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/ http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/ I can't remember if the author states any scholarly work to support the idea, but she talks about it at length. One thing that I think is well established is that kids mostly being around other kids all day is a relatively modern phenomenon. It's a long piece, but it resonated with me.
      • marquis 13y ago
        I went searching for a great article I read on this lately but couldn't find it: the gist is that until schools become de rigueur, adolescents never spent time together as a group as they would be at work/apprenticeships whathaveyou with adult 'supervision'. It's a new phenomenon that leaves delicate minds in a Lord of the Flies situation. The study I read showed that even the 'cool' kids thought they weren't cool and the various coping mechanisms have been fodder for hollywood movies and novels since the last decades.
  • srumple 13y ago
    The trouble is I don't believe that all, or even most of the people who told him to kill himself were teenagers. I have no problem believing that there are adults out there who also would have joined in.
    • bgilroy26 13y ago
      Many who enter adolescence do not ever leave.
      • fudged71 13y ago
        The internet creates big pockets of social groups that have no consideration of age, race, social status, etc. There's an interesting side-effect of looking for validation from your peers when you don't know what those people are actually like. We can act more mature by looking up to a mature audience, we can look down on a less mature audience, or we can resonate with the values of a less mature audience. I went from Digg to reddit to HN mainly due to interests/content, but also because I looked up to the more mature audiences. Some people will stick to platforms where they are entertained by immaturity and seek those people's validation by mimicking them.
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    Honestly I think it is more an expression of the average 15yo mindset that it is fun to be mean and kick people while they are down.
  • brc 13y ago
    Required reading : Paul Graham; why nerds are unpopular http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html This is an incredibly insightful piece, one of the best. It talks about how, as a society, we shunt kids into a lord of the flies situation, and we force them to build skills that have little use outside the schoolyard. The problem is a lack of mentoring and not treating adolescents as people entering adulthood, but rather as a problem to be managed. Lots of cultures have initiations and rites of passage, and into this modern void hazing, bullying and downright weird stuff has popped up amongst peers rather than elders. I don't have the answer but it does cause a lot of problems.
• deleted 13y ago
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• carbocation 13y ago
  Probably some mixture of [1] and [2]. [1] = http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 [2] = They probably, at the end of the day, are not sincere. Instead, they are probably wordvomiting the pithiest, meanest thing they can think of in 3 seconds.
  • baddox 13y ago
    In fact, they are probably well aware that people tend to react like sukuriant, and their goal is probably to upset people rather than to cause them to commit suicide.
    • coldtea 13y ago
      Nobody implied they want (or hope) to cause them to commit suicide. It's the "upset people" that's disgusting in itself.
      • lwat 13y ago
        People like you are the reason they do it. If you stopped being such a pussy maybe they'd stop trying to get a rise out of you.
      • coldtea 13y ago
        For one, you are HN "dead". And rightly so from what it seems. Second, you are rude. Third, what you propose is called "blame the victim". It's immature, rude and equally bad as the bullying itself.
        • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
          “you are HN "dead". And rightly so from what it seems.” Then perhaps we shouldn’t tip him off? Isn’t that the whole point of hellbans: they get to spill their venom and we can just ignore them.
          • Dylan16807 13y ago
• deleted 13y ago
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• adrusi 13y ago
  For almost everyone who says that on the internet, they are nat saying it with almost any sense of sincerity. They don't want the person to actually kill themselves, they just say it. They say it because in their circles, that's a perfectly acceptable thing to say, and no one would interpret it as anything more than an expression of disapproval. (think 4chan, many subreddits, etc.). They then forget that outside of their circles, people aren't necessarily privy to such culture, and say it anyway. It probably doesn't even cross their mind that they're saying something hurtful.
  • Zircom 13y ago
    >They say it because in their circles, that's a perfectly acceptable thing to say, and no one would interpret it as anything more than an expression of disapproval. (think 4chan, many subreddits, etc.). I like how you qualify your statement in regards to reddit by saying "subreddits", which implies that it's only a portion of reddit that demonstrates such behavior, but make no such distinction about 4chan, which, contrary to popular belief, does not solely consist of /b/, and in fact has a number of boards that are actually quite civil. That said, your point is valid, and, as a regular of one of the more vitriolic boards, I sometimes forget to "switch modes" so to speak, and find myself acting in the manner you describe. My anecdote, for what it's worth.
• srumple 13y ago
  Unfortunately, people tend to be less then kind when divorced from the consequences of their actions. It's easy to hate, bully, and demean someone you've never personally met. The earlier days of the internet were much worse in that regard, because people generally had more anonymity then they do now, what with the rise of social networks. I'm just glad the guy seems to have taken the right lessons from his experience. Makes me hopeful that other kids will be able to do just fine too.
  • sukuriant 13y ago
    > It's easy to hate, bully, and demean someone you've never personally met. Sure; but... this wasn't online. This was in the real, physical world, right in front of him. They stood on tables and declared it to him, even, so says the article.
    • srumple 13y ago
      You have a point there, I forgot about that part. That being said, those were other kids, and it's rare that teenagers impress me with their social behavior. I'm not entirely sure I believe what pg says in http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html, but it does offer as good an explanation as any I've heard. I'm actually more concerned that his friends abandoned him afterwards. Kids are fairly resilient, as long as they have someone in their corner. I would imagine losing his friends over it hurt more then some random classmate telling him to kill himself.
• jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  I don't believe many people mean that literally any more than people mean for you to literally "go have intercourse with yourself" or literally "consume feces and die"
  • sukuriant 13y ago
    A big difference here is that those phrases are long established phrases that people have been using for a while; and even with most people I know, it's "eat feces", not "eat feces and die". This one is much shorter an, from an outside perspective, much more pointed. I don't really see how anyone could see that demand as anything other than "go end your life [because of these reasons]"
• fixxer 13y ago
  Kids are horrible. Trust me, I used to be a kid.