>If you do phone a friend at 4am to say "I'm down" they take it seriously.
Well, I mean I've never had friends so I can't really say too much about that. But I never really had anyone in my life that would do that so... eh?
> In RL, you can be alone on purpose without seeming antisocial.
>People try to get you to stay "just a little longer" and make you feel wanted.
No one's ever done that for me. Quite the opposite actually. I'm rather repulsive in real life so most people would prefer me away in real life.
> A hug is always nice, but a real, close, body-touching real life hug is … nicer :)
Is it? The two times I've been hugged in my life have been more just uncomfortable.
> You can know for sure that people who are being nice to your face aren't simultaneously bitching behind your back
... my father was praised as being a good man. He was also the same man that grabbed by my hair and violently introduced my face to the kitchen floor. Broke my nose and lip, then made me clean the blood up with my tongue as apology to him for forcing him to hit me. He's flung coins into my face hard enough to cut the skin. Broken coffee mugs over my head.
I don't blame him for doing what he did; I was difficult as a child. But it never really made any sense to me why his peers would praise him for being good when there was so much controversy over just spanking a child vs what happened to me when it seemed perfectly normal to me to get hit with a stick hard enough to bruise for a month afterwards.
Always made me wonder what else someone would hide from strangers.
> You can hear the warmth in the voice that says 'I love you' and see the look in the person's eyes
... This is something I've kind of wanted to rant about for a while. But no. I don't want love in my life. 25 years of my life were spent receiving bruises, cuts, and humiliation because my parents loved me. And I spent 25 years enduring it in silence because I loved them. Because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone.
They're gone now. And I've had more then enough love in my life to say that I want no part of it anymore.
No, I think the quiet of an IRC screen is quite a quite a bit more preferable to outside.
Hey, I'm sorry you had to go through everything you've described here.
I've never had to go through anything remotely similar.
I'd just want to point out what you've experienced is not love. There may have been some form of love from those people towards you, but the things you've described are not manifestations of that love, they're manifestations of something else.
I hope you can believe me. Sorry if I'm intruding.
My email is on my bio if you ever want to chat in a non-public setting.
Speaking as a pariah for most of his life; I doubts it would ever be so dire.
There's always going to be social circles and people coupling up no matter what. But if anything I wonder if, for people like me who aren't really worthy of intimacy, living in a society has options to live a solitary life while still contributing is actually a net positive overall. For me to self select out of the dating pool would mean less noise for someone else looking for a worthy partner.
There's less chaff that people in said said pool would have to wade though. The people that want to couple and are capable of doing so will continue to so with less distraction. That seems an overall good thing, no?
Differing perspectives I suppose. It's comforting to me to think that no one would be bothered if tomorrow I dropped dead. I'd actually be somewhat happy if they could just leave my corpse to rot somewhere in a field, or at least be disposed of in a landfill. No funeral, just compacted in the back of a garbage truck and then tossed as refuse.
Somewhat a little harsh, but at least I'd rather people worry about the living then fretting about my remains. By the point, I would be beyond caring.
In this society someone like me that is solitary for the most part can contribute to others, and be compensated for my contributions without having the issue of having to deal with other people directly.
It's not appealing to everyone, but having the option is helpful to those averse to direct interaction. I don't see much downside in having it open.
The downside is that unlike in a society where that isn't an option people aren't forced to socialize and then they adapt. Having everything catered to shut-ins normalizes pathologies, something common across a lot of modern internet subcultures.
It enables a sort of Peter Pan like existence in which people stay perpetual kids without ever having to take on the obligations of adulthood. And it's becoming so common that in countries like SK who are at the front of this people have replaced starting families and having sex with adopting dogs and cats. In an entire society like this who takes care of them and delivers their packages when they're all 60 years old is a frightening question. (and a very real one in the near future)
If it was an odd-ball thing it wouldn't matter, but social isolation and delaying or ignoring responsibilities of adult social life are now mainstream issues.
That does assume thought that adaptation is the only outcome though. But requires at least two conditions to be met; that the individual in question can adapt, and that society would accept them. What happens when one or both conditions are unfulfilled?
On the obligation of adulthood, do you mean to say that starting a family is an obligation? If so then I wonder if perhaps people choosing not to do so may not be a bad thing. My parents married because that's what you're supposed to do as an adult, and it was something I know my mother regretted later in life. Some people start families and rise to the challenge but it's tragically common that they utterly fail as well.
600,000. That's the number of unique cases the various Child Protective Agencies in the US contends with each year. The US CDC estimates that 1 in 3 women will experience violence committed to them by an intimate partner, and 1 in 7 men will experience the same. Unhappy partnerships aren't exactly rare.
I suppose that does beg the question if it's better to have fewer families with a higher portion that are stable, or more families in general even if it means a higher proportion of them will be broken or unstable.
Agreed. I've seen enough miserable and dysfunctional families (which by far are the majority of families) for me to just clock out from the notion of marriage.
Life is short and I've got shit to do and places to be, I ain't got no time for that concentrated bullshit.
>"Having the option is helpful to those averse to direct interaction"
Perhaps it's more worth your while to examine why you're so opposed to interacting with other people. It is undeniably unhealthy to isolate one to such a degree as you're describing perpetually. (And this is coming from a deeply introverted person—I scored in the 5th percentile for extraversion when I took the Big 5/OCEAN assessment. But even I feel the effects of isolation before too long.)
Part of it is just finding interaction with other's to be exhausting. My parents forced to go out and about rather often in my youth, usually under threat of violence. Even after they stopped have any real power over my I was dragging myself to outings that I utterly loathed doing. To this day I cannot look at a golf course without my stomach becoming unsettled.
Some of it is irrational fear but all emotion is irrational. Some of it is lingering anger from the agency I lacked for so long.
Whether it's unhealthy or not, ultimately I think matters little. At the end of the day I'm the only that it affects. And I think the tradeoff of having my silence is worth that cost, and I find no real impetus to change that.
on the contrary, that feels like the step right before the good ol' dystopian VR reality that many sci-fi literature dive into . I don't see much upside to that happening.
I can't foresee something like Ready Player One happening on a large scale though.
My preference for not interaction with anyone is the exception, not the norm. For what you fear to come to pass, the the opposite would have to become true. Why would people in general shift their preference towards isolationism?
>Why would people in general shift their preference towards isolationism?
Because it's convinient. It's always because it's convinient. We've had so many issues in society happen because the alternative is more convinient.
And yes, isolation is convinient. No worries about interpersonal insecurities, no worries about troublesome encounters, entertainment can be tailored to your tastes instead of as a compromise of the group, and minimum social pressure to do what you are not comfortable with.
I can ask the contrary, why wouldn't people shift towards isolationism if they otherwise had their own automomy and comfortable living.
I would surmise that the answer would lie in just how comfortable people can make themselves without any other sort of interaction. My first instinct would be to say that there are many that wouldn't, if the migration into large and expensive metropolis's such as New York, London, Paris, or Tokyo are of any indication.
For the ambitious, it's quite unlikely for one to strike greatness without support from others. Anyone is capable of anything, but no one is capable of everything. That ability to connect and network with others so that their skills and resources can be utilized to achieve feats that would otherwise be impossible alone. And I doubt that those without any sort of ambition are the majority.
Plus we saw major advances towards that sort of reality during the Pandemic, and yet those changes haven't had quite the staying power in society as some had predicted. More and more people are congregating again in various ways.
Hence why I say that I doubt that we'd see some dystopian reality where people are going to be plugged into VR all the time.
No, there is such thing as social TV and radio. Just check out bars.
The VR future tailoring to your imagination is where things really start to go dystopian. It's not exactly a slippery slope since that's what the GP mentioned.
Can't say I overly agree with that, I work full time from home but pretty common for me to not leave my residence for 10 to 15 days at a time, and usually only to purchase groceries or small things to repair or maintain where I live. This is my life for the last 6 or 7 years now.
I have no family to speak of, and I don't have any acquaintances outside of work. And I've never met any of my colleagues face to face. Many of whom have never seen a photograph of me. Most of our interactions are in Mattermost chats, emails, or work items. Most people only know me as ASCII codes rendered on a screen to form words.
If that doesn't qualify me as a shut in, what does?
>To be a shut-in is the inability to access the full spectrum of what life has to offer.
My response to that would be to ask why such things would be appealing in the first place. Why should one that finds no reward in dealing with other people at all, aspire to being promoted or falling in love? Both of which inherently require dealing with other people.
My response to that would be to ask why such things would be appealing in the first place. Why should one that finds no reward in dealing with other people at all, aspire to being promoted or falling in love? Both of which inherently require dealing with other people.
A good question. I define that with: nothing happens. Life becomes static. Events don't happen.
That's what I meant by being a shut-in. To be fair, a shut-in to having a life is a range rather than a binary thing.
My response to that would be to ask why such things would be appealing in the first place. Why should one that finds no reward in dealing with other people at all, aspire to being promoted or falling in love? Both of which inherently require dealing with other people.
I don't know. I was OK with not meeting people in real life. Then I started meeting people, and started to find a new dimension in life. I found that I have certain social talent that I didn't know I have.
One thing to take into consideration is that people changes and their preferences changes. They are not static.
Anyway, it's not so much about having photos or being able to see someone's face. It's about something happening. It's kinda hard to define.
Again, no failure, but no success either. No exhilaration, and no happiness. Life is static. Nothing happens. Sadness may happens, but hopefully good things should outweigh that.
>Again, no failure, but no success either. No exhilaration, and no happiness.
It's worth keeping in mind that the only useful judge of success/failure and happiness/despair is you and you alone.
This means your experience and what you consider success and happiness are only valid insofar as you are concerned. They cannot and should not be applied (nor forced, for that matter) upon anyone else.
The same argument has been used to oppress people since time immemorial, whether they were brown skinned, homosexuals, neurodivergent, Jews, or various other arguments for being “not as we were evolved to be”. (You have targeted one form of neurodivergent people here).
If you ignore the eyeblink of the last 100 years, then we have hundreds of thousands of years of brutal rape, war, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, enslavement, and I’m sure we could think of a few others…
It would be very hard to argue that this is not “what we’re evolved to be”, since we so lustfully pursued these endeavors for literally 100 times as long as we have recorded history.
This argument is basically the same exact sentiment as “because that is Gods will” or “because that is the way it’s always been done” dressed up in a patina of science by including the word “evolved” in it.
>If you do phone a friend at 4am to say "I'm down" they take it seriously.
Well, I mean I've never had friends so I can't really say too much about that. But I never really had anyone in my life that would do that so... eh?
> In RL, you can be alone on purpose without seeming antisocial.
>People try to get you to stay "just a little longer" and make you feel wanted.
No one's ever done that for me. Quite the opposite actually. I'm rather repulsive in real life so most people would prefer me away in real life.
> A hug is always nice, but a real, close, body-touching real life hug is … nicer :)
Is it? The two times I've been hugged in my life have been more just uncomfortable.
> You can know for sure that people who are being nice to your face aren't simultaneously bitching behind your back
... my father was praised as being a good man. He was also the same man that grabbed by my hair and violently introduced my face to the kitchen floor. Broke my nose and lip, then made me clean the blood up with my tongue as apology to him for forcing him to hit me. He's flung coins into my face hard enough to cut the skin. Broken coffee mugs over my head.
I don't blame him for doing what he did; I was difficult as a child. But it never really made any sense to me why his peers would praise him for being good when there was so much controversy over just spanking a child vs what happened to me when it seemed perfectly normal to me to get hit with a stick hard enough to bruise for a month afterwards.
Always made me wonder what else someone would hide from strangers.
> You can hear the warmth in the voice that says 'I love you' and see the look in the person's eyes
... This is something I've kind of wanted to rant about for a while. But no. I don't want love in my life. 25 years of my life were spent receiving bruises, cuts, and humiliation because my parents loved me. And I spent 25 years enduring it in silence because I loved them. Because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone.
They're gone now. And I've had more then enough love in my life to say that I want no part of it anymore.
No, I think the quiet of an IRC screen is quite a quite a bit more preferable to outside.