Do you feel like saying "ein Ex-Freund von mir" still carries this boyfriend connotation as opposed to "mein Ex-Freund"? The latter is clear to me, but I could see myself saying the former and thereby mistakenly suggesting a past relationship. (Non-native speaker.)
On the other hand, it's clear that "eine Ex-Freundin von mir" means ex-girlfriend.
Maybe I'll stick to "ehemaliger Freund" or just use "Kumpel" instead of Freund(-in) altogether. Otherwise people will think I've dated everyone I know.
"Do you feel like saying "ein Ex-Freund von mir" still carries this boyfriend connotation"
Native-speaker, but I honestly cannot make my mind up about this.
"The latter is clear to me, but I could see myself saying the former and thereby mistakenly suggesting a past relationship. (Non-native speaker.)
On the other hand, it's clear that "eine Ex-Freundin von mir" means ex-girlfriend.
Maybe I'll stick to "ehemaliger Freund" or just use "Kumpel" instead of Freund(-in) altogether. Otherwise people will think I've dated everyone I know."
Hits the nail on the head. Your feeling of the language is excellent.
Why is that funny? Our own (German) culture is full of usage of english words. Wouldn't it be natural to assume that other people would likewise adopt foreign words?
Yeah, apparently it is natural that languages do that. I think german does too much of that, we're basically too lazy to figure out how to phrase things properly in german, so we just stick in a few english words. That feels different then what english does with words like "Kindergarten" and "Zeitgeist". But I guess I am too much on one side of the fence to see the similarities.
English is a highly recombinant language, it’s natural for English speakers to pull words from German or elsewhere rather than inventing new English words from scratch.
Frankly as much as I read it (twice now) I find nothing good or bad to say, I don't seem to get the point and maybe someone can enlighten me? Is this a piece about how people became fragile at the face of delayed gratification or when something doesn't go their usual way (it seems a twitter unfollow initiated this whole thing)? So many questions.
I understand that for some, that represents a drama which surely begs the question of what the person who wrote this thinks a friendship means and what the boundaries of that friendship are since a benign online transaction shattered their world view. I also don't get the parallels to other people? Am I missing the point? What is OP trying to say?
I have friends I haven't talked to for ages and that friendship is not quantifiable by the amount of likes they give me on twitter/ig/fb and even less on the amount of messages we share but it's qualitative, when we meet we always have a blast and I can count on them if I have to move to another place (well some would help, others I am damn sure they won't lol).
To me this comes over as a bit hollow and a tad whiny? I don't know. Again, I might be missing something crucial here.
(As a sidenote I'm getting a few GPT-3 vibes but seriously there surely is a function that states "any article has non null probability of being written by GPT-3" so you can ignore this last part...)
Seems to me you are not very acquainted with rejection, which is the topic of the article.
It talks about how, in our modern age, we face rejection all the time: at work, dating, in friendships... and how the internet has made the number of rejections you might face in your day-to-day explode... and how we're not psychologically prepared to face that.
An article, IMO, doesn't need to have a call for change, or a very deep insight or idea.... this one just calls to our attention what's happening and how that might be causing consequences we're not paying much attention to (like the appearance of incels culture and other "avoid rejection at all costs" movements), which is something I do agree with.
Well the first part might not be true, as a north african immigrant in Europe I am very well acquainted with rejection in so many things I lost count, a simple case is searching for a flat in Munich which made the news a few years ago. My name only is a reason for rejection and frankly nothing can ever prepare you for that unless, you get a lot of rejections. Has it ever stopped me? no.
Thank you for clarifying though, I get it, I definitely had a different definition of what a rejection is which is what caused my confusion.
For the last part, I absolutely agree, some people tend to be too focused on the rejection itself and define themselves by it instead of doing something to changing it or themselves. Which always leads to bad things.
I agree. Was the “friendship” actually just someone they chatted with on Signal occasionally? That’s not really what I’d call a friend. It would barely class as an acquaintance. They also mention they interact with hundreds of people this way. I’m sorry but those aren’t friendships. Has modern life completely done away with actual friendships where you know each other fairly intimately and actually spend a good deal of time together? If you barely talk to someone’s online persona why should you even bat an eye when they ghost? You haven’t actually invested anything so you haven’t lost anything.
Well here’s the thing, you are putting friendship on a pedestal. Everyone is lucky to have anyone to talk to at all. Enjoy it for what it is, but why feel entitled to a life long commitment?
These things come and go, and it’s better not to judge how life progresses.
Having a few solid, long-term friendships where you trust each other over decades is something important for many. Maybe not for you. It has nothing to do with a pedestal.
From how I understand the post, it's about the disconnect between human nature and modern relations (personal, romantic, professional, etc)
As humans we have a limit to how much rejection we can process in a healthy way. It varies from person to person, some can process things pretty quickly while others (like myself) quickly reach a breaking point
This becomes an issue, when (as the author points out), we try to rationalise people's emotional response away ("you're overreacting"). The author points out that rejection doesn't happen in a vacuum and the cumulative effect of these can have profound negative effect on people. This means that what might seem like a disproportionate emotional response to being rejected, in actuality is proportional to the cumulative build up of multiple rejections over time
Personal take: I agree with the author on the unhealthy nature of framing such emotional responses as a failure of the individual. This is especially true for the large part of the population who's neurodivergent
I myself have ADHD, and rejection sensitivity is something that I have to spend a lot of energy on, since I have to make sure I'm able to withstand a large emotional response, when I think I'm being rejected
The cumulative effect of a significant amount of rejection over the years combined with emotional dysregulation can result in me feeling actual physical pain because my emotional response is so intense
Advise like "you just need to not take it personal" is damaging, because it doesn't address the fact that feelings are out of our control - just like telling someone who's having an anxiety attack that "there's nothing to be afraid of" is missing the point of what is going on and is actually harmful to the person experiencing it
The post doesn't provide any solutions to this problem, but I think that acknowledging that this is an issue, might be a good start in any case
I get your point and thank you very much for taking the time to write a detailed answer for me.
Put like this it makes a whole lot of sense now, I was maybe just distracted by the examples the author brought in which confused me. It really shows that there's a spectrum of possible ways on how to deal with rejection that I am not aware of.
I never took rejection personally but in contrary saw it as a challenge. Maybe that helps to frame why I wrote my initial question. I agree that it's tirening to have to work twice or 3 times as hard as others for the same result and having more roadblocks on the way (metaphor for rejection) but one thing that is sure to me, I never really gave any importance to emotional rejection because that one is very subjective and I don't understand why people think how they think. I might lack the emotional intelligence?
The one that might have challenged me the most was rejection at work or rejection for just having a foreign name or foreign face because the latter is a checklist with all the marks ticked but still, something didn't quite fit completely.
Autism and ADHD both can be sources of something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria[0] which is, in my experience, one of the most seriously socially damaging aspects of ADHD.
Fairly new field of study but there is some evidence that low doses of guanfacine and clonidine can offer help. More research needs to be done, but it appears to be genetic and neurological and not, as some may intuit, sourced in trauma.
Please note that "Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria" is not a medically standardized term. It was coined by an ADHD specialist and it appears he was the only real person promoting its usage.
After I discovered this I usually labeled the qualities in myself as general social anxiety, or just "being bad at making friends or social situations." I wanted to believe that labelling every negative aspect of myself would help me understand my problems better, but it seems like it just made the appearance of those traits feel justified to me.
I've had to discipline myself not to take the easy way out and use the labels as excuses or explanations for my regrettable behavior when I already know of techniques or medicine to treat that behavior that have worked in the past. Learned helplessness has been pervasive throughout my entire life.
"Rejection sensitivity" is a term that has been around for decades within the psychiatric community. It used to be one of the main symptoms used to distinguish typical depression from "atypical" or neurotic depression, and patients who suffer severely from it usually do bettrr on older medications like MAOIs instead of modern SSRIs.
Interestingly, severe social anxiety will often only be helped by MAOIs.
The article didn’t resonate with me at all either, but I think it’s mainly because I don’t fit into the collective “we” the author talks about.
> We apply to hundreds of jobs. We swipe on hundreds if not thousands of people on dating apps. Many of us are like me, and perpetually have an infinite loop of notifications on an infinite loop of communication apps.
Naturally if you go head first into potentially thousands of interactions, there will be a lot of rejection.
To me, friends and social media are separate concepts, but I understand that most mix the two.
Have these people forgotten how to live in the world without these apps? I understand how some folks get there with technology, but put the apps and screens down and go live in the real world. This concept that people are somehow captive to these apps blows my mind a little. I am generation X though, I grew up being kicked out of the house during the day and was forced to run around and play outside when not in school when I was younger.
One of the reasons might be urbanisation and such? Although it is easy to go out in a city, the question sometimes is "what for"? I wonder if time spent on social media is correlated to population density of the area.
Unclear. I know my post was a bit curmudgeonly, but my point was, people and friends exist outside of the phone and the comfort of our homes. Even if you meet someone on an app you must leave the safety of your home. COVID-19 obviously complicated this. I think a lot of people stuck in this loop with their devices and lives would be well served to take up hobbies that force you to meet and interact with other humans. That is a starting point, as COVID-19 winds down. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and this applies for social networking as well. Real life rejection is also much less common outside of dating. It’s a skill and you can’t learn it on apps. Even as introverts, it’s worth it to find your social groove and things that work for you. I think cities can be more isolating in a lot of ways.
It sort of states the obvious, but one of the hallmarks of today's world, is that everyone "just knows" stuff, without actually ever "coming out and saying it."
As far as rejection goes, I'm very fortunate, as I can take my toys and go home, if no one wants to play with me.
I worked for many years, for a corporation that had a culture of excellence. It could be grating, near-abusive, and frustrating, at times, but it did teach me to set and maintain a very high personal bar. I got rejected a lot, and it taught me to be fairly self-sufficient, irt self-evaluation.
I won't do it to other people, though. I won't establish any relationships that I don't intend to maintain, and, when I change the status of a relationship, I make it a point to communicate it to the other person. That's not always easy. I also try to make it a point not to project personal values onto others (also not easy).
Also, not every relationship needs to be a lover. I have perfectly good relationships with people that horrify me. I don't need to do anything more than chat with them, once a month or so, and we don't need to talk about anything that causes friction, so I just keep it superficial.
Of course, humans being what we are, the favor is seldom returned, and one of the things that I've learned to do, through many painful years of hard work, is have enough personal self-regard, that the opinions and maltreatment from others doesn't have damaging effects.
TL;DR: I make sure that I have a good relationship with myself, I establish a minimum bar of Honor and Integrity for myself, and my relationships with others have flourished, as a result.
I've learned that people don't respect people that don't respect themselves, so respecting myself is job one.
An interesting thing, for me, was looking for work, after leaving my job of 27 years.
I encountered ageism, which was quite a shock. I've never had to deal with rejection; simply based on my physical appearance (I've always actually been rather sought-after, because of my skills, and, I hate to admit, probably because I'm a white male). It helped me to understand what a lot of folks go through. When we "hear" about something, it doesn't have the same weight as when it actually happens to us.
Funny thing about ageism, is that we will all get older (the alternative isn't fun). We'll each get a turn at this oar.
> one of the things that I've learned to do, through many painful years of hard work, is have enough personal self-regard, that the opinions and maltreatment from others doesn't have damaging effects.
That's a really great quote... a lot of people need to learn this. Offense must be taken to have an effect. You can choose to not take it.
Please don't misinterpret this to read like it's ok to intentionally go around trying to cause offense to other people... that's not ok! But people disagreeing with you, for example, is NOT offensive. People criticizing your work in a professional manner is NOT offensive. People having different cultures is NOT offessive.
Somebody posted something a day or two ago, about why Russians don't smile.
It has nothing to do with whether or not they are happy or like/dislike people. It's just a cultural thing.
Americans can interpret this as "they don't like me," and Russians can interpret Americans smiling as "they are laughing at me."
Doesn't mean we can't get along. It just means that we need to be open to learning about the culture of others.
If I have an unsmiling Russian friend (I have), then I shouldn't insist that they smile on my behalf, and they shouldn't insist that I stop smiling on theirs.
The idea of cummulative rejection is interesting! I never thought about it that explicitly in that way. I think it's an idea that transcends social rejection and might apply to all rejection.
In my case, I have this with job interviews. Unfortunately, every 10 additional rejections is affecting my mental health. This is about after a threshold of 50 initial rejections, including being rejected in the resume round.
I wouldn't be surprised if many people experience this with job interviews. I think it's because, in a sense, everything that one has experienced in life suddenly may come together (in terms of values, beliefs, behaviors and so on).
If that what comes together is not a system that can work in any way shape or form, then people crash and can crash hard. Especially when one decides to "act out" their cummulative rejection. I've noticed that I sometimes happen to do that now as I'm noticing my patience is wearing thin on all facets of life and it sucks for everyone involved unfortunately.
It might be weird to say, but because of this I sometimes wonder, maybe I should become a bus driver or something "simple" [1] like that (pre-corona at least).
[1] I'm fairly sure that if I don't give a job like that my full attention, it isn't simple at all. I guess that some people see it as simple since there's less "IQ-ish reasoning" involved.
I felt this way at some point. After dozens of rejections I had to admit that I had the “wrong” background and I started trying different approaches. Eventually did a coding boot camp followed by an internship at a startup, which wasn’t prestigious, but it was considered by a mid-sized company to be the right kind of experience. Experience at the mid-sized company was finally considered relevant by FAANG, etc.
Before WW2, people were living together more often. Apartment buildings were less common.
Today we are all atomized and individualized. Individual kitchen, bathrooms and living rooms are the source of the problem.
We feel rejected because our brain are naturally wired for a need of social interaction. It's a normal and legit emotion.
In earlier times, people lived closer together. We experienced prosperous large homes, but now unemployment and other jobs are making social life difficult.
In my view, neighborhoods should have a large living space for people to live together: read, talk, eat, etc. Since communism ended this concept of the commons died.
We are all depressed to go back home to rest in an empty apartment.
I remember in university I lived in a house with 8 people. We would all gather for dinner, often with a few extras from out of the house. It was such a wonderful feeling (and wonderfully efficient, you only had to cook once a week!).
The idea of communal spaces needs to come back. I don't think it would be too hard for a 10-story apartment block to offer a communal area, especially as the shops that were often on the first and second floors are going out of business due to online shopping.
Most of my younger friends who live in large cities (in Europe and Latin America) live in communal apartments, and most of the older ones certainly did in the past, especially when in university.
I'd like to see more architecture (and organizational/financial) oriented towards this. There were a lot of great experiments in the early Soviet Union that were hammered down by Stalin and his desire to imitate western opulence.
I agree. I wasn't built at all for the internet/phone/email things that people call friendships now. Long-distance friendships aren't even even friendships to me, or rather they're in maintenance mode until we live near each other again.
I kinda understand what you're going for, but it sounds... very narcissistic, almost psychopathic, and indifferent or numbed to rejection and interpersonal relationships.
Maybe the authentic and true self is a prick that nobody wants to interact with in that case.
Well since the quote says 90%, it seems to be saying you don't need to succeed on the first _9_ tries (at most), which I think is where the sentiment that it's an unachievable clause comes from.
lol, downvoted. A sensitive incel I suppose? should've realized this is incel land. Using that power to silence other users here when they criticize incels seems like quite the abuse of that power.
"Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment and hatred, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against sexually active people. The American nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. Incels are mostly male and heterosexual, and many sources report that incels are predominantly white. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands.
At least seven mass murders, resulting in a total of 46 deaths, have been committed since 2014 by men who have either self-identified as incels or who had mentioned incel-related names and writings in their private writings or Internet postings. Incel communities have been criticized by researchers and the media for being misogynistic, encouraging violence, spreading extremist views, and radicalizing their members."
Your comments have broken several of the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here? We'd be grateful. Flamewar and fulmination are two things we're trying to avoid, and going on about downvotes is a third.
Your GP comment was flamebait and unsubstantive, so it's hardly surprising that it was downvoted.
We have more opportunities to interact with more people from all walks of life from all over the world in a way that is unprecedented. Marginalized groups have found ways to connect to people like them (which would have been impossible in the past). They've found validation about their identity and made real friends. There's so many positive aspects about the society and world we live in today. But because there's so much opportunity for connection today, there's also so many more opportunities for rejection which, as the author puts it, "becomes a painful memory, no matter how many."
Occasionally I'll think to look up someone that I hadn't thought of in a while on Facebook, only to find that they, some time ago, removed me from their friends list. No matter how far removed we were from each other in real life, this always kind of stings. The action requires effort on their part; they look at my profile and evaluate our friendship, or lack thereof, and actively decide that no, they don't want me to be a part of their life anymore, no matter how socially removed Facebook is from it. I've been removed and rejected from participating in their life in this way.
I've also dealt with people of whom I thought I was pretty close and they suddenly drop all contact with me. What did I do to make her not want to be my friend anymore? I don't know. Should I have done something differently? Probably. Is she going through some shit? I don't know and I can't find out. It's frustrating and depressing and is damaging to my already fragile ego.
I don't really have any friends, anymore. There are people that I will occasionally talk to but every year it feels like I've become more and more isolated, despite the fact that there's so much more available out there. Internal factors like depression, anxiety, and ADHD play a part, for sure. When you stop participating in social activities enough for long enough, even the most loyal friends will stop putting in the effort to maintain a relationship with you when they get so little back in return. It's selfish to expect them to do so.
Life marches forward at an almost cruel pace. It doesn't care that I need a breather. That I'm starving for affection or that I'm searching for the faintest drop of connection with another human being. It cares not that the rejections are piling up on top of me making it gradually harder and harder for me to move. It continues on and I have to keep moving forward. Hopefully at some point on the way I can find someone who, if not ease my burden, can at least commiserate as we continue to march forward through it together.
It sounds like you’re in a bind. Truly hope everything is ok-ish in any case. I’m rubin55 on Libera.chat, rann on OFTC. If you ever feel like having a chat, send me a dm. You can also send me a message on me@rubin55.org. Don’t know if I can make a difference, but your message rings true with me.. life and relationships with peeps really got strange in the last decade(s) or so, and all this COVID business didn’t help much either! In any case, hang in there and try not to get too much down about the apparent bleakness of it all; sometimes a few days/some time makes all the difference in how a particular moment feels.
If 2 ppl are running on a track, given different needs, abilities, personalities, life experience etc to get into sync usually one has to slow down and the other has to speed up.
But staying in that state for ever can be quite an unnatural thing,
because both aren't running at their natural pace.
So communication is key. People need to hear that you appreciate when they slow down for you. They need to hear what made you want to speed up for them. They need to hear you arent holding them responsible to stay in sync with you forever but that you enjoy their company and the reasons why. They need to hear where you are heading and why you think its going to be fun. It becomes easier to reconnect with people when you spend time thinking about and verbalizing some of these things.
Its all about just being honest and saying simple things. You can do it.
I've always seen making friends as another hobby that I fail to remain interested in. But unlike hobbies like gushing about television shows or tending gardens, it's frequently stated that you need people to remain mentally healthy at a certain point. My gut feeling towards this sentiment is that given how ambivalent or ruthless some people have been to me when I've tried to play the social tact game, saying that making friends is not just another interest is so unfair that it angers me. (Then again, life generally isn't fair to begin with.)
My issue is similar: the strangers I meet ultimately don't see enough of a reason to keep interacting with me after a certain point, because my interests lie elsewhere. I just find playing the social game and trying to win favor tiresome and depressing, usually not having much to talk about in the end that wouldn't be forcing it or pretentious, and unless the relationship is therapeutic or deliberately a "reach out to me if you want to talk for a few days" sort of thing, it's never worked a single time, so I'm not even in a place to understand what the benefits of a lasting friendship even are, except having someone to endlessly and selfishly vent to.
But people are still pressuring me to get friends. Still it's a challenge that I'm not even sure I feel like surmounting in the first place, not when I don't understand what I'm working towards. And yet I'm up against a body of people that I have the responsibility to convince that I'm worthy of their limited time for this supposed need that will end up killing me if I fail to fulfill it, which from my experience, lack of relatable interests and limited attention span I'm generally not.
I mean, when it feels like the social aspect of your life is just a void and all you believe that having a friend would do is fill that void with something else, is that friendship even going to be be healthy? How can friendships be cultivated with someone that just cannot find a way to care about friendship in the first place?
About the only hope I feel I have is stumbling across someone who has the same disorders as I do, or has a child with one of those disorders, which would temper their outlook on people of my kind to be much more forgiving and patient. (In fact, that's about the only thing related to meeting people that's ever gone well in my life.) Then I would be able to talk about my behavioral patterns without a fear of being rejected due to there not being any way the person can empathize with something they don't want to understand. Ironic, given I don't really care about understanding a lot of things, and at times it feels like I can't help that. Why do some people like writing novels over watching movies? Maybe making friends will never be my hobby, and you probably wouldn't force yourself to get into a hobby that you actively dislike. But failing to remain interested in that hobby could significantly harm my chances of success in life.
It’s possible countries with mega populations don’t have this problem. I wonder if people in India or China have any disillusion that they are one out of a billion in their country, and are nothing special. It’s possible they value whatever the hell life gives them (whatever friends they have, whatever family, whatever job, etc).
The west is taught that we are unique. Really? Let me connect everyone to the internet and show you how untrue that is. Now what do you value?
It’s the type of existential crisis of finding out you are really not to the right of the normal distribution, and in fact, dead smack in the middle (or to the left, horrifyingly).
Someone can easily stop talking to you. You didn’t sincerely believe you were special did you?
I am from India but have lived in the Middle East ( over a decade) and the US( few years ).
I see very little difference among the middle and upper middle class people of these countries nowadays. With globally connected social media everyone thinks they are unique ( maybe rightfully so ). Just because you are born in India or China you are not going to be thankful for whatever life has given to you.
Western values( or is it global ) as far as uniqueness seems to be the dominant thought process atleast in the metros.
I see the problem described in the article among my friends here. Everyone is depressed, anxious or having an existential crisis.
'Ghosting' is one of the most petty things imaginable. Sorry to say I judge a person's character so much by this. It's understandable that someone may not want to break up with their partner, but simply not responding is still terrible behaviour. I'd rather be yelled at than ghosted, at least it's candour.
Summon the courage and civility to find a few empathetic words and that's that.
It's odd that we teach 'knowledge' and even 'morality' in school but not 'basic manners'. I can imagine a room of teenagers laughing out loud at someone trying to teach them how to be civil and polite, and it probably wouldn't change them, however, I think that a few years later it would start to click in. As if they were 'lessons for later, when you're not an irreverent teenager'. They would at least have choices and options for human engagement, it's a form of knowledge.
Ghosting is bad for other reasons also.. Imagine one of your parents "ghosted" you. Would you feel rejected? Or would you think something bad must have happened, and break down their door assuming they must be in duress and need assistance?
That's an extreme example, but I was trying to point out that dropping off the face of the earth to avoid an uncomfortable interaction, and lead to a _much more_ uncomfortable and awkward interaction later.
It would be especially bad if the person experienced ghosting-like behaviour when they were young, including from their parents.
All those little events build up and can make one insecure about their relationships if any hint of abandonement is in the air, let alone complete abandonement through ghosting.
If a very significant other ghosted you it would almost invariably be an emergency. That or an extremely problematic relationship. Parents don't 'ghost' children. I mean, unless there's something very, very wrong already like an abusive relationship etc. etc..
For 'recently dating couples' the issues is that the one couple doesn't want to own up to saying 'no' so they just duck and avoid.
How much violence in society is a reaction to cumulative rejection? I'd guess a good deal if not most of it. Our ancient lobster-shared neural mechanisms take it deadly seriously whether we do consciously or not. From the long perspective of our selfish genes, rejection is a mortal threat.
I appreciate the sympathetic treatment of incels in this article, which seems like an exception to the norm. I think most of us can sense the pain that goes with this designation. At least with race or gender based rejection we can see progress and action and a way forward. But how do you deal with rejection that isn't about your group, but is about your personal characteristics, your character and attractiveness? Things you either can't change or would make you someone else if you did? Violence is a loathsome reaction, but not one that's hard to understand.
I think that's why incels attract such hate. We usually can't help them, so our empathy becomes just frustration and shared pain. We imagine the mix of anger and depression a lifetime of that would cause us, which leads us to fear them. We reject people for suffering too much rejection, a vicious circle.
Yet much rejection is utterly necessary. You can't be a friend, lover or business partner with everyone. We must sometimes cause as well as recieve such deep pain. It's not a solvable problem.
Do you know any peer reviewed scientific paper which confirms the lobster shared neural mechanism? Was looking for evidence for this claim a while back, couldn't find it.
Homo sapiens have a similar response to seratonin manipulation. I wouldn't call this confirmation, and I'm not sure what I would accept. But I do think it's a compelling association.
I don’t think so, because there are plenty of socially normal people who are misogynistic towards women too, and they don’t engender the same level of visceral disgust.
Their lived experience, whether perceived or by proxy, is that women hated them first. The 'incel culture' is really just the same echo chamber amplification that the Internet enables with any marginalized group. Some are going to get out and lead a normal life, some are going to lean into it and get more and more detached from reality.
> Their lived experience, whether perceived or by proxy, is that women hated them first.
How do we define "hate" here? There are incels who literally claim that they are entitled to sex with virginal women who are also extremely conventionally attractive. Does it rise to the level of hate when they are rejected by such women?
There have also been incels who have gone on killing sprees and murdered multiple women -- and those killers have then been celebrated by other incels.
It is a false equivalence to say, "They hated me, which made me hate them." I know of no cases where women have created a community where they encouraged each other to kill incels and then made heroes of them after the fact. This behavior is specific to incel culture.
This is a question we should all ask when the term is used. It's a pet peeve of mine when people throw an unqualified 'hate' around and here I am doing the same thing.
Hormones are an extremely powerful, relentless motivator. It requires an equally profound level of rejection to override that signal. When a young person finally admits 'defeat' in seeking a relationship and then sees the person they are interested in select someone that's a polar opposite of them instead, it doesn't just feel like they are being rejected in the instance, but categorically rejected. It's not that 'she doesn't want anything to do with me', it's 'she doesn't want anything to do with anyone like me'. When this happens once, their ego can stomp on that feeling, but when it happens over and over it becomes something broadly categorical in and of itself. That's the feeling I'm referring to as 'hate'.
Everything you mention past that is, in my opinion, just applied extremism. If you'll pardon my language, unfuckable guys have existed forever. What's new is the cohort that the Internet in general and social media in particular enable. The basement edgelord not settling for anything less than a perfect 10 is the sexual equivalent of 'diamond hands' in /r/wallstreetbets. It's a signal of tribal allegiance and propped up by selection bias. As far as why there isn't a symmetry between the sexes, there are lots of theories...would love to see some research.
I think incels attract hate because many of them online become so twisted from their pain that they end up externalizing a lot of the factors that makes them involuntarily celibate, rather than accepting any personal responsibility. Discussions between incels in those communities amplify all the negative things they may be feeling and validates their opinions regardless of how absurd or offensive it may seem from an outside observer.
While placing the blame on external factors can be helpful psychologically for the person suffering, it also signals to others that they are not taking any responsibility for their failure to meet their goal of well, having sex.
Everyone needs compassion and arguably the worst of us need that compassion the most, but for a lot of people, that's really, really hard.
> They aren't unlikeable because they can't get laid. They can't get laid because they are unlikeable.
Perhaps like ourobouros it feeds it self into a cycle that may amplify an initial bit of bad luck into a toxic cancer that kills it's host?
The thing that I discovered about dating is that the more you do it the easier it is and the better you get at it... just like many other things... but there is no way to really start up... and even then you need to get hurt, and try again. One of my most important relationships was with someone really emotionally abusive, but I was well-aware of it, and I took it as a learning opportunity to learn various skills that have served me well.
My assumption with anyone who wants to succeed at something but is repeatedly failing is that whatever changes they need to make to succeed are not easy or obvious for them - otherwise they would have made the changes already.
My personal take is that the Incel phenomenon is not actually about the sexual dynamic, but that society builds a wrong narrative about what the modal heterosexual dynamic is; Incels attract hate because they are working to break the narrative and they have a massive and annoying sense of entitlement.
It's not just that we can't help them. It's that we can't help them and there is a kernel of truth to what they are saying. It's also incredibly hard to tell someone to drop their standards.
I have interacted with women that wanted virgin men (not to mention being surprised at the excitement of the woman who took my virginity, I am pretty sure in the end it was not a fantastic experience for her, though we're still friends). I was friend of a bride for a wedding where the man had never even kissed a woman before (the officiant embarassingly brought it up during the ceremony), and was told privately by
the bride that this was a plus.
> want nice girls so I should be a "nice guy."
This is one of the axes where the incels are correct, women since time immemorial have say they want "nice guys". Why would you (publically) say anything else? It's a very pro-social stance to take. I'm not sure that women's preferences actually take nice-guy-dom into account. OTOH, incels insistence that women exclusively like bad guys is probably overreach, though definitely nice guys tend to be less assertive which is very likely a negative quality for the modal heterosexual woman, and since sampling rate matters for raw success dating and sex dynamics, it exacerbates the illusion.
(The other axis where the incels are correct is the myth of "there's someone for everyone". Yeah, we should kill that one with fire.)
> The point is rejecting to get a sense of power or self.
I could be convinced but I'm not sure. I think this is more of a PUA thing.
> They'll complain about outcomes but never offer solutions.
I'm a Christian so I know all about the "I'm a virgin and want a virgin" thing and couldn't approve more. Just... healthy expressions of it. The complete production people put on when a 25+ virgin is discovered is shameful, not for the virgin but for everyone acting it out. I hope I didn't imply I subscribe to any of that. But that being wrong is still an example of calling out an untruth. It isn't a truth unto itself.
> I could be convinced but I'm not sure. I think this is more of a PUA thing.
There will usually be something like a PUA nearby torturing or exploiting them with demands and expectations, yeah. Narcissists form vicious hierarchies. Incels are just the ones at the bottom. You have to subscribe to the gymbro's ideas/values before he can 'win points' torturing you about gains or whatever. They're both obsessed with looking in the mirror. One just likes what he sees so he ends up higher in the pyramid. They both project their own self-image (bad or good) onto the expectations of others.
Lots of people think of narcissism as an after-the-fact thing but it's not. It's a pattern that anyone can be in, ugly or beautiful, rich or poor. Incels are unsuccessful narcissists; PUAs are successful narcissists. You're right to see a pattern.
In simplest terms, narcissism is an addiction to deeming things not good enough. The three flavors of targets are family/friends/SOs (covert), things (megalomania) and groups of people (grandiose). Incels are basically grandiose narcissists that can't back it up with any form of societal success.
What's nagging at the back of everyone's head is existential loneliness. Self awareness, the ability to see yourself as a separate entity from the world, comes at a price: understanding that you experience everything utterly alone.
That is, you alone experience the feelings that emanate from within you. Sure, you can tell someone you feel sad, you can express joy. But you can't make someone else an integral part of what goes inside you. (Barring telepathy of course)
The togetherness we all crave is seeing how other people acknowledge, accept, recognize, validate our existence, and our identity and, most importantly, how we feel and experience life. That happens through actions, language, culture,... in countless ways really. And it gives us a sense of reassurance, acquiescence, confidence, trust,...
Rejection, then, is the awareness that the other person doesn't share that sense of reconciling their experience with yours. Either they have a profoundly different experience of life that doesn't align with yours; or they choose to live a different experience from yours.
Rejection is par for the course. Humanity isn't like the Borg. 7.8 billion lives each live their own individual of being alive, within their own bubble. You can recognize that you both feel similarly about each other, each within your own experience, and act on those feelings, or you don't.
The awareness of this disjointed experiences between you and the other causes discomfort within yourself. It raises questions. And above all, it makes it utterly clear that you are very much alone with yourself and your feelings.
What makes all the difference then is in how you deal with those feelings.
Regardless of all the advice, therapy, medication,... the hard truth is that you and you alone are confronted with the feelings and emotions that go on inside yourself. It's entirely up to you to face those and to figure out how to approach yourself.
You could do that through self soothing, positive affirmation of yourself, showing compassion and kindness towards yourself and so on. Or you could choose self loathing, beating yourself up, talking yourself down, blaming yourself, the rest of the world, the universe and so on. It's entirely your choice.
This has absolutely nothing to do with being rejected by others, and everything with how you decide to view and treat yourself.
Emotional maturity is about understanding this difference.
Having said that, it's important to recognize that people come in all sizes. Emotional maturity isn't 100% a choice. It's also determined by your mental health and your circumstances (upbringing, social economic situation, education, past experiences,...)
Even so (and this important) that doesn't mean you are excused from your personal responsibility as to how you deal with your own feelings and emotions.
Here's how that works:
> I think that's why incels attract such hate.
I mentioned that everyone looks towards each other for validation, recognition, acknowledgement and so on, right? This works both ways. If you choose to indulge in utter self loathing, and you decide to express that by behaving in a destructive fashion towards yourself and other people, well, the vast majority of people won't recognize their own experience in that... and simply walk away in an effort their own mental and physical integrity.
It's not "hate", it's called "guarding your own boundaries". And has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination.
You aren't being discriminated because you are somehow "less attractive". People simply walk away because they perceive you as emotional immature and your behavior as threatening.
Discrimination, however, is a different ballgame. That would be actively invalidating the experience and the existence of others through violent behavior. Simply because you feel, you are convinced, that the other doesn't fit in your own experience of life, your own view of the w...
> ow much violence in society is a reaction to cumulative rejection
Given how much violence happens in relationships or between people sho closely know each other, this is unlikely.
Even mass murderers and such dont really fit this stereotype. Not even Elliot Roger whose communication issues run super deep, but ultimately forcing girl to date him would not fix him. Elliot Roger was not actually rejected by a girl, not even once.
I don’t have this issue with social media because I don’t really participate all that much. Occasionally one of you guys gets on my case but hey HN are a rowdy sort so I take my punches :)
In terms of job interviews I can see where it would get hard for people. The best advice I ever got for that is to expect one call back for every hundred applications, one interview for every hundred call backs, and maybe one offer for every hundred interviews. If you expect that sort of ratio then it stops feeling personal and just feels like a numbers game.
Are... you sure about those numbers? That would be one interview per ten thousand applications, and one offer per million applications. I know you have to submit a lot of job applications, but, uh, that seems excessive!
When I was in high school and university decades ago, before social media and even stable phone numbers, friends used to come and go all the time; co-workers at summer and co-op jobs, classmates, roommates, ...
You'd have beers and a few good times and then the next term/year would happen and you might never see them again. It didn't feel like rejection because there really wasn't a practical way to stay in touch. You only felt rejected by romantic partners and old friends who decided to move on.
Now, we "connect" to everyone; we follow each other on Facebook/Twitter/Signal/WeChat and we have each others emails.
I'm trying to imagine the roommates I had one summer, who I had almost nothing in common with but who shared their stash with me because I would bring good steaks and fresh vegetables from home, reaching out to me a year later and saying "hey man, why did you ghost us?". What would you even say to that?
So, now, when these temporary friendships are over ... we have this lingering connection that doesn't just go away at the end of term. Someone has to take the extra step of closure.
I get that this feels like rejection but that feeling is a new thing.
Summer loves and friendships were meant to end with a sobbing farewell at the end of August, not with a unfollow and block in November.
> Summer loves and friendships were meant to end with a sobbing farewell at the end of August, not with a unfollow and block in November.
This is such a good thought. I think it applies to other areas of human relationships as well. Breaking up, for example. It was easier to have healthy boundaries after breaking up... before social media made it so easy to stalk or just be constantly reminded of your past relationship.
Oh man, agreed. My family reunion Facebook pages both now have a firm "no exes" rule, with exceptions for my two "cousins-in-law" whose spouses passed.
> N. wasn’t a particularly close friend, and we didn’t have a falling out per se. The friendship just fizzled, until eventually he decided to unfollow me on Twitter, to put a final nail in a slow process of undoing.
> A flaccid “what happened?” text went unresponded to, and just like that, the relationship was over.
> Rationally, I know there was no reason for him to respond to a text asking for closure. Our friendship was brief, just over a year, and for the last six months, not much of a friendship at all. It amounted to a mostly barren Signal thread, with the odd message here or there about astrology, or a podcast neither one of us listened to completion.
The author didn't lose a friend here. They never had a friend here.
I wonder how much of the author's problem is about a mistaken expectation. The expectation that you can meet someone, make contact, and then file that person as a friend forever who will never leave you.
The author is treating friendship as a transactional exchange.
You obtain friends.
If you're well connected, you obtain many ..
.. however, it's difficult to keep hold of them.
---
The issue is friendship and human relations—while transactional during an exchange—are not transactional in the way recent app based culture has lead us to believe.
We maintain relationships. We need to tend to them. They change as time moves forward. We can pause; and pick things up later.
The best friendships involve high degrees of honesty, and because of that we need to be vulnerable at times. I'm not sure writing a blog post or tweet is displaying the necessary levels of sensitivity (at least on an interpersonal level) to meet this criteria.
> I'm not sure writing a blog post or tweet is displaying the necessary levels of sensitivity (at least on an interpersonal level) to meet this criteria.
This is an unnecessary dig on the author, and is just a bit pompous. I would counter: writing a blog post on the loss of a close friend and exploring how and why for them and in society at large; displays a high level of introspection, self awareness, and a mature relationship with their emotions. When anger and blame are the typical reactions for such an outcome, it was a mature and reasoned exploration.
There is (yet another) aspect that the author didn't cover: internalized rejection.
Imagine you burn out during college, so you pivot and get a professional certification instead. You pass the exam and have the certificate in hand, and you start looking for jobs. You scroll and scroll through indeed, glassdoor, the job sites for the organizations that would hire someone with your certification and training, and...
they all require that degree you don't have. They all require N years of experience that you haven't gotten.
How many visits like this does it take before you stop looking altogether?
Rejection can seem to be overwhelming and all-important because of pack-mentality behaviors that sustained our species long ago. EG...belonging to a pack/tribe/whatever increased your odds of survival against predators. Getting kicked out of the pack thousands of years ago was likely a death sentence. Old habits(and our mental/emotional reactions to them) die hard.
Then there's the rejection martyrdom that happens on Twitter. 'Seeing a lot of unfollows after my <edgy in-group signaling> on <topic flooding everyone's timelines>, I guess <broad strokes description of out-group> just can't handle <more in-group signaling>'.
Maybe I’m more considerate than average to people I’ve known throughout my life, but being rejected is not normal for me. The frequency to which the author was rejected by people seems to indicate there’s a problem with him, not society. Of course it has happened, but we are talking about ex-girlfriends or people I’ve had legitimate fights with.
But I still have friends from every stage of my life. I have a group of friends that I’ve known since grade 1 and we WhatsApp every day. We get into salty verbal arguments all the time like brothers, but we never have coke close to rejecting each other. During the pandemic I’ve had friends from high school that I haven’t spoken with for 30+ years that sought me out and we talked on the phone for 2 hours. In the last few weeks I had a coworker from 20 years ago reach out to me because she heard I “retired” pre-pandemic and wanted my advice on if she should do it. We chatted for over an hour. During the pandemic I’ve pinged several friends/coworkers from various companies I’ve worked with just to say hi. I’m planning on going for lunch with another coworker from 20 years ago in the next few weeks. I’ve even made new friends during the pandemic, having met someone that shared my same cynical views on the Federal Reserve, the stock market, etc.
It’s not hard to maintain friendships with people, just be considerate and courteous! Not everyone needs to be your best friend, but you also don’t need to be so navel gazing that all you care about is yourself.
The fact that the author has so many people rejecting the author makes me think he’s simply not a good friend and deserves to be rejected.
Empathy doesn’t mean saying “everything you do is okay.” Thats called enabling their behavior. It sometimes means having to say the honest, hard things in hopes that people will change their behavior for the better. It’s fairly obvious that the author has a hard time maintaining friendships. To blame that on society today and social media is wrong.
I mean she kind of implied a reason why some people are “rejecting” her.
I don’t want to talk professionally after work with certain people as I don’t gain much value. Certain people I enjoy mentoring, certain people I don’t. I don’t want another “task” to do.
Also people with “too many” friends I find a little fake. You can’t expect me to take you seriously if you’re trying to maintain “close / intimate” friendships with 100 or more people.
> The number of people I speak to on any given timescale far exceeds Dunbar’s number, and if I took every instance of rejection personally, I would be a very depressed person. I have lost friends, acquaintances, and people who exist in the liminal space between the two for all sorts of reasons: I’m too flaky, they don’t like what I write here or on Twitter, my real or imagined allegiances with people they’ve decided are their enemies, I don’t sufficiently respect their otherkin identity, they don’t sufficiently respect my professional identity.
>Sometimes it’s because I’m being an ass, but a lot of the time, it’s just a statistical normality. Cast a wide enough net, you’re bound to lose a certain number of fish.
I think what (maybe?) got lost in this blog post is that it's more about the unhealthy nature of lifestyles that encourage the constant churn of socialization than feeling rejected by someone unfollowing me on Twitter. For me, lots of people I know in person follow me on Twitter, it's a bit of a ding. I'm also a super high visibility person on social and elsewhere, which complicates things.
But lots of folks are in this boat -- people like me who are constantly meeting new people, folks who work in jobs that necessitate hundreds of applications, people on dating apps who go on hundreds of first dates. It's not so much that every individual rejection is a character indictment on anyone involved, it's more that the transient nature of socialization is stressful.
I hope my frame didn't suggest a shallow definition of friendship or one specifically anchored in social.
One last example that might be salient - The Bay Area is all about this kind of radical openness that isn't scalable or sustainable. Even if you have more real friends outside of that framework, being a human airport of connection kind of blows. Maybe a very specific scenario.
> I hope my frame didn't suggest a shallow definition of friendship or one specifically anchored in social.
I certainly didn't take it that way, but I do believe the "lingering" nature of these new types of friendships has changed the nature of rejection; or forced things that didn't have a rejection component before to now have one.
And I agree with your point of we have a lot more connections now and, hence, a lot more "micro rejections".
As someone with actual rejection sensitivity (ADHD), I know exactly what you mean.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadOn the other hand, it's clear that "eine Ex-Freundin von mir" means ex-girlfriend.
Maybe I'll stick to "ehemaliger Freund" or just use "Kumpel" instead of Freund(-in) altogether. Otherwise people will think I've dated everyone I know.
Native-speaker, but I honestly cannot make my mind up about this.
"The latter is clear to me, but I could see myself saying the former and thereby mistakenly suggesting a past relationship. (Non-native speaker.) On the other hand, it's clear that "eine Ex-Freundin von mir" means ex-girlfriend. Maybe I'll stick to "ehemaliger Freund" or just use "Kumpel" instead of Freund(-in) altogether. Otherwise people will think I've dated everyone I know."
Hits the nail on the head. Your feeling of the language is excellent.
I understand that for some, that represents a drama which surely begs the question of what the person who wrote this thinks a friendship means and what the boundaries of that friendship are since a benign online transaction shattered their world view. I also don't get the parallels to other people? Am I missing the point? What is OP trying to say? I have friends I haven't talked to for ages and that friendship is not quantifiable by the amount of likes they give me on twitter/ig/fb and even less on the amount of messages we share but it's qualitative, when we meet we always have a blast and I can count on them if I have to move to another place (well some would help, others I am damn sure they won't lol).
To me this comes over as a bit hollow and a tad whiny? I don't know. Again, I might be missing something crucial here.
(As a sidenote I'm getting a few GPT-3 vibes but seriously there surely is a function that states "any article has non null probability of being written by GPT-3" so you can ignore this last part...)
It talks about how, in our modern age, we face rejection all the time: at work, dating, in friendships... and how the internet has made the number of rejections you might face in your day-to-day explode... and how we're not psychologically prepared to face that.
An article, IMO, doesn't need to have a call for change, or a very deep insight or idea.... this one just calls to our attention what's happening and how that might be causing consequences we're not paying much attention to (like the appearance of incels culture and other "avoid rejection at all costs" movements), which is something I do agree with.
Thank you for clarifying though, I get it, I definitely had a different definition of what a rejection is which is what caused my confusion.
For the last part, I absolutely agree, some people tend to be too focused on the rejection itself and define themselves by it instead of doing something to changing it or themselves. Which always leads to bad things.
These things come and go, and it’s better not to judge how life progresses.
As humans we have a limit to how much rejection we can process in a healthy way. It varies from person to person, some can process things pretty quickly while others (like myself) quickly reach a breaking point
This becomes an issue, when (as the author points out), we try to rationalise people's emotional response away ("you're overreacting"). The author points out that rejection doesn't happen in a vacuum and the cumulative effect of these can have profound negative effect on people. This means that what might seem like a disproportionate emotional response to being rejected, in actuality is proportional to the cumulative build up of multiple rejections over time
Personal take: I agree with the author on the unhealthy nature of framing such emotional responses as a failure of the individual. This is especially true for the large part of the population who's neurodivergent
I myself have ADHD, and rejection sensitivity is something that I have to spend a lot of energy on, since I have to make sure I'm able to withstand a large emotional response, when I think I'm being rejected
The cumulative effect of a significant amount of rejection over the years combined with emotional dysregulation can result in me feeling actual physical pain because my emotional response is so intense
Advise like "you just need to not take it personal" is damaging, because it doesn't address the fact that feelings are out of our control - just like telling someone who's having an anxiety attack that "there's nothing to be afraid of" is missing the point of what is going on and is actually harmful to the person experiencing it
The post doesn't provide any solutions to this problem, but I think that acknowledging that this is an issue, might be a good start in any case
Put like this it makes a whole lot of sense now, I was maybe just distracted by the examples the author brought in which confused me. It really shows that there's a spectrum of possible ways on how to deal with rejection that I am not aware of.
I never took rejection personally but in contrary saw it as a challenge. Maybe that helps to frame why I wrote my initial question. I agree that it's tirening to have to work twice or 3 times as hard as others for the same result and having more roadblocks on the way (metaphor for rejection) but one thing that is sure to me, I never really gave any importance to emotional rejection because that one is very subjective and I don't understand why people think how they think. I might lack the emotional intelligence?
The one that might have challenged me the most was rejection at work or rejection for just having a foreign name or foreign face because the latter is a checklist with all the marks ticked but still, something didn't quite fit completely.
Fairly new field of study but there is some evidence that low doses of guanfacine and clonidine can offer help. More research needs to be done, but it appears to be genetic and neurological and not, as some may intuit, sourced in trauma.
[0]https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-an...
https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/12583/what-is...
After I discovered this I usually labeled the qualities in myself as general social anxiety, or just "being bad at making friends or social situations." I wanted to believe that labelling every negative aspect of myself would help me understand my problems better, but it seems like it just made the appearance of those traits feel justified to me.
I've had to discipline myself not to take the easy way out and use the labels as excuses or explanations for my regrettable behavior when I already know of techniques or medicine to treat that behavior that have worked in the past. Learned helplessness has been pervasive throughout my entire life.
Interestingly, severe social anxiety will often only be helped by MAOIs.
> We apply to hundreds of jobs. We swipe on hundreds if not thousands of people on dating apps. Many of us are like me, and perpetually have an infinite loop of notifications on an infinite loop of communication apps.
Naturally if you go head first into potentially thousands of interactions, there will be a lot of rejection.
To me, friends and social media are separate concepts, but I understand that most mix the two.
It sort of states the obvious, but one of the hallmarks of today's world, is that everyone "just knows" stuff, without actually ever "coming out and saying it."
As far as rejection goes, I'm very fortunate, as I can take my toys and go home, if no one wants to play with me.
I worked for many years, for a corporation that had a culture of excellence. It could be grating, near-abusive, and frustrating, at times, but it did teach me to set and maintain a very high personal bar. I got rejected a lot, and it taught me to be fairly self-sufficient, irt self-evaluation.
I won't do it to other people, though. I won't establish any relationships that I don't intend to maintain, and, when I change the status of a relationship, I make it a point to communicate it to the other person. That's not always easy. I also try to make it a point not to project personal values onto others (also not easy).
Also, not every relationship needs to be a lover. I have perfectly good relationships with people that horrify me. I don't need to do anything more than chat with them, once a month or so, and we don't need to talk about anything that causes friction, so I just keep it superficial.
Of course, humans being what we are, the favor is seldom returned, and one of the things that I've learned to do, through many painful years of hard work, is have enough personal self-regard, that the opinions and maltreatment from others doesn't have damaging effects.
TL;DR: I make sure that I have a good relationship with myself, I establish a minimum bar of Honor and Integrity for myself, and my relationships with others have flourished, as a result.
I've learned that people don't respect people that don't respect themselves, so respecting myself is job one.
An interesting thing, for me, was looking for work, after leaving my job of 27 years.
I encountered ageism, which was quite a shock. I've never had to deal with rejection; simply based on my physical appearance (I've always actually been rather sought-after, because of my skills, and, I hate to admit, probably because I'm a white male). It helped me to understand what a lot of folks go through. When we "hear" about something, it doesn't have the same weight as when it actually happens to us.
Funny thing about ageism, is that we will all get older (the alternative isn't fun). We'll each get a turn at this oar.
That's a really great quote... a lot of people need to learn this. Offense must be taken to have an effect. You can choose to not take it.
Please don't misinterpret this to read like it's ok to intentionally go around trying to cause offense to other people... that's not ok! But people disagreeing with you, for example, is NOT offensive. People criticizing your work in a professional manner is NOT offensive. People having different cultures is NOT offessive.
It has nothing to do with whether or not they are happy or like/dislike people. It's just a cultural thing.
Americans can interpret this as "they don't like me," and Russians can interpret Americans smiling as "they are laughing at me."
Doesn't mean we can't get along. It just means that we need to be open to learning about the culture of others.
If I have an unsmiling Russian friend (I have), then I shouldn't insist that they smile on my behalf, and they shouldn't insist that I stop smiling on theirs.
In my case, I have this with job interviews. Unfortunately, every 10 additional rejections is affecting my mental health. This is about after a threshold of 50 initial rejections, including being rejected in the resume round.
I wouldn't be surprised if many people experience this with job interviews. I think it's because, in a sense, everything that one has experienced in life suddenly may come together (in terms of values, beliefs, behaviors and so on).
If that what comes together is not a system that can work in any way shape or form, then people crash and can crash hard. Especially when one decides to "act out" their cummulative rejection. I've noticed that I sometimes happen to do that now as I'm noticing my patience is wearing thin on all facets of life and it sucks for everyone involved unfortunately.
It might be weird to say, but because of this I sometimes wonder, maybe I should become a bus driver or something "simple" [1] like that (pre-corona at least).
[1] I'm fairly sure that if I don't give a job like that my full attention, it isn't simple at all. I guess that some people see it as simple since there's less "IQ-ish reasoning" involved.
Today we are all atomized and individualized. Individual kitchen, bathrooms and living rooms are the source of the problem.
We feel rejected because our brain are naturally wired for a need of social interaction. It's a normal and legit emotion.
In earlier times, people lived closer together. We experienced prosperous large homes, but now unemployment and other jobs are making social life difficult.
In my view, neighborhoods should have a large living space for people to live together: read, talk, eat, etc. Since communism ended this concept of the commons died.
We are all depressed to go back home to rest in an empty apartment.
The idea of communal spaces needs to come back. I don't think it would be too hard for a 10-story apartment block to offer a communal area, especially as the shops that were often on the first and second floors are going out of business due to online shopping.
Most of my younger friends who live in large cities (in Europe and Latin America) live in communal apartments, and most of the older ones certainly did in the past, especially when in university.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_architecture
- If you have no enemies, you're not doing something important
- If you don't fail 90% of the time, you're not pushing your boundaries hard enough
The idea being that once you get rejected often enough, you lose your fear of it and you start becoming authentic and true to yourself.
Maybe the authentic and true self is a prick that nobody wants to interact with in that case.
yeah...that's certainly _a_ way to describe them. haha.
"Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment and hatred, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against sexually active people. The American nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. Incels are mostly male and heterosexual, and many sources report that incels are predominantly white. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands.
At least seven mass murders, resulting in a total of 46 deaths, have been committed since 2014 by men who have either self-identified as incels or who had mentioned incel-related names and writings in their private writings or Internet postings. Incel communities have been criticized by researchers and the media for being misogynistic, encouraging violence, spreading extremist views, and radicalizing their members."
So yeah, FU incels.
Your GP comment was flamebait and unsubstantive, so it's hardly surprising that it was downvoted.
Occasionally I'll think to look up someone that I hadn't thought of in a while on Facebook, only to find that they, some time ago, removed me from their friends list. No matter how far removed we were from each other in real life, this always kind of stings. The action requires effort on their part; they look at my profile and evaluate our friendship, or lack thereof, and actively decide that no, they don't want me to be a part of their life anymore, no matter how socially removed Facebook is from it. I've been removed and rejected from participating in their life in this way.
I've also dealt with people of whom I thought I was pretty close and they suddenly drop all contact with me. What did I do to make her not want to be my friend anymore? I don't know. Should I have done something differently? Probably. Is she going through some shit? I don't know and I can't find out. It's frustrating and depressing and is damaging to my already fragile ego.
I don't really have any friends, anymore. There are people that I will occasionally talk to but every year it feels like I've become more and more isolated, despite the fact that there's so much more available out there. Internal factors like depression, anxiety, and ADHD play a part, for sure. When you stop participating in social activities enough for long enough, even the most loyal friends will stop putting in the effort to maintain a relationship with you when they get so little back in return. It's selfish to expect them to do so.
Life marches forward at an almost cruel pace. It doesn't care that I need a breather. That I'm starving for affection or that I'm searching for the faintest drop of connection with another human being. It cares not that the rejections are piling up on top of me making it gradually harder and harder for me to move. It continues on and I have to keep moving forward. Hopefully at some point on the way I can find someone who, if not ease my burden, can at least commiserate as we continue to march forward through it together.
But staying in that state for ever can be quite an unnatural thing, because both aren't running at their natural pace.
So communication is key. People need to hear that you appreciate when they slow down for you. They need to hear what made you want to speed up for them. They need to hear you arent holding them responsible to stay in sync with you forever but that you enjoy their company and the reasons why. They need to hear where you are heading and why you think its going to be fun. It becomes easier to reconnect with people when you spend time thinking about and verbalizing some of these things.
Its all about just being honest and saying simple things. You can do it.
My issue is similar: the strangers I meet ultimately don't see enough of a reason to keep interacting with me after a certain point, because my interests lie elsewhere. I just find playing the social game and trying to win favor tiresome and depressing, usually not having much to talk about in the end that wouldn't be forcing it or pretentious, and unless the relationship is therapeutic or deliberately a "reach out to me if you want to talk for a few days" sort of thing, it's never worked a single time, so I'm not even in a place to understand what the benefits of a lasting friendship even are, except having someone to endlessly and selfishly vent to.
But people are still pressuring me to get friends. Still it's a challenge that I'm not even sure I feel like surmounting in the first place, not when I don't understand what I'm working towards. And yet I'm up against a body of people that I have the responsibility to convince that I'm worthy of their limited time for this supposed need that will end up killing me if I fail to fulfill it, which from my experience, lack of relatable interests and limited attention span I'm generally not.
I mean, when it feels like the social aspect of your life is just a void and all you believe that having a friend would do is fill that void with something else, is that friendship even going to be be healthy? How can friendships be cultivated with someone that just cannot find a way to care about friendship in the first place?
About the only hope I feel I have is stumbling across someone who has the same disorders as I do, or has a child with one of those disorders, which would temper their outlook on people of my kind to be much more forgiving and patient. (In fact, that's about the only thing related to meeting people that's ever gone well in my life.) Then I would be able to talk about my behavioral patterns without a fear of being rejected due to there not being any way the person can empathize with something they don't want to understand. Ironic, given I don't really care about understanding a lot of things, and at times it feels like I can't help that. Why do some people like writing novels over watching movies? Maybe making friends will never be my hobby, and you probably wouldn't force yourself to get into a hobby that you actively dislike. But failing to remain interested in that hobby could significantly harm my chances of success in life.
The west is taught that we are unique. Really? Let me connect everyone to the internet and show you how untrue that is. Now what do you value?
It’s the type of existential crisis of finding out you are really not to the right of the normal distribution, and in fact, dead smack in the middle (or to the left, horrifyingly).
Someone can easily stop talking to you. You didn’t sincerely believe you were special did you?
Could be wrong though.
I see very little difference among the middle and upper middle class people of these countries nowadays. With globally connected social media everyone thinks they are unique ( maybe rightfully so ). Just because you are born in India or China you are not going to be thankful for whatever life has given to you.
Western values( or is it global ) as far as uniqueness seems to be the dominant thought process atleast in the metros.
I see the problem described in the article among my friends here. Everyone is depressed, anxious or having an existential crisis.
Summon the courage and civility to find a few empathetic words and that's that.
It's odd that we teach 'knowledge' and even 'morality' in school but not 'basic manners'. I can imagine a room of teenagers laughing out loud at someone trying to teach them how to be civil and polite, and it probably wouldn't change them, however, I think that a few years later it would start to click in. As if they were 'lessons for later, when you're not an irreverent teenager'. They would at least have choices and options for human engagement, it's a form of knowledge.
That's an extreme example, but I was trying to point out that dropping off the face of the earth to avoid an uncomfortable interaction, and lead to a _much more_ uncomfortable and awkward interaction later.
All those little events build up and can make one insecure about their relationships if any hint of abandonement is in the air, let alone complete abandonement through ghosting.
For 'recently dating couples' the issues is that the one couple doesn't want to own up to saying 'no' so they just duck and avoid.
I appreciate the sympathetic treatment of incels in this article, which seems like an exception to the norm. I think most of us can sense the pain that goes with this designation. At least with race or gender based rejection we can see progress and action and a way forward. But how do you deal with rejection that isn't about your group, but is about your personal characteristics, your character and attractiveness? Things you either can't change or would make you someone else if you did? Violence is a loathsome reaction, but not one that's hard to understand.
I think that's why incels attract such hate. We usually can't help them, so our empathy becomes just frustration and shared pain. We imagine the mix of anger and depression a lifetime of that would cause us, which leads us to fear them. We reject people for suffering too much rejection, a vicious circle.
Yet much rejection is utterly necessary. You can't be a friend, lover or business partner with everyone. We must sometimes cause as well as recieve such deep pain. It's not a solvable problem.
Homo sapiens have a similar response to seratonin manipulation. I wouldn't call this confirmation, and I'm not sure what I would accept. But I do think it's a compelling association.
I'm pretty sure it's because they are largely unbe-LIEV-ably misogynistic and hateful towards women.
How do we define "hate" here? There are incels who literally claim that they are entitled to sex with virginal women who are also extremely conventionally attractive. Does it rise to the level of hate when they are rejected by such women?
There have also been incels who have gone on killing sprees and murdered multiple women -- and those killers have then been celebrated by other incels.
It is a false equivalence to say, "They hated me, which made me hate them." I know of no cases where women have created a community where they encouraged each other to kill incels and then made heroes of them after the fact. This behavior is specific to incel culture.
This is a question we should all ask when the term is used. It's a pet peeve of mine when people throw an unqualified 'hate' around and here I am doing the same thing.
Hormones are an extremely powerful, relentless motivator. It requires an equally profound level of rejection to override that signal. When a young person finally admits 'defeat' in seeking a relationship and then sees the person they are interested in select someone that's a polar opposite of them instead, it doesn't just feel like they are being rejected in the instance, but categorically rejected. It's not that 'she doesn't want anything to do with me', it's 'she doesn't want anything to do with anyone like me'. When this happens once, their ego can stomp on that feeling, but when it happens over and over it becomes something broadly categorical in and of itself. That's the feeling I'm referring to as 'hate'.
Everything you mention past that is, in my opinion, just applied extremism. If you'll pardon my language, unfuckable guys have existed forever. What's new is the cohort that the Internet in general and social media in particular enable. The basement edgelord not settling for anything less than a perfect 10 is the sexual equivalent of 'diamond hands' in /r/wallstreetbets. It's a signal of tribal allegiance and propped up by selection bias. As far as why there isn't a symmetry between the sexes, there are lots of theories...would love to see some research.
While placing the blame on external factors can be helpful psychologically for the person suffering, it also signals to others that they are not taking any responsibility for their failure to meet their goal of well, having sex.
Everyone needs compassion and arguably the worst of us need that compassion the most, but for a lot of people, that's really, really hard.
Perhaps like ourobouros it feeds it self into a cycle that may amplify an initial bit of bad luck into a toxic cancer that kills it's host?
The thing that I discovered about dating is that the more you do it the easier it is and the better you get at it... just like many other things... but there is no way to really start up... and even then you need to get hurt, and try again. One of my most important relationships was with someone really emotionally abusive, but I was well-aware of it, and I took it as a learning opportunity to learn various skills that have served me well.
It's not just that we can't help them. It's that we can't help them and there is a kernel of truth to what they are saying. It's also incredibly hard to tell someone to drop their standards.
Projection: I'm a virgin so I want virginal women.
The other type of projection: I want nice girls so I should be a "nice guy."
Impossibly high standards and sense of entitlement: The point is rejecting to get a sense of power or self.
Complaining: They'll complain about outcomes but never offer solutions.
The incel community is more about attacking untruths. It's like a negatively-defined idea that's close to the truth, but I wouldn't call it a kernel.
I have interacted with women that wanted virgin men (not to mention being surprised at the excitement of the woman who took my virginity, I am pretty sure in the end it was not a fantastic experience for her, though we're still friends). I was friend of a bride for a wedding where the man had never even kissed a woman before (the officiant embarassingly brought it up during the ceremony), and was told privately by the bride that this was a plus.
> want nice girls so I should be a "nice guy."
This is one of the axes where the incels are correct, women since time immemorial have say they want "nice guys". Why would you (publically) say anything else? It's a very pro-social stance to take. I'm not sure that women's preferences actually take nice-guy-dom into account. OTOH, incels insistence that women exclusively like bad guys is probably overreach, though definitely nice guys tend to be less assertive which is very likely a negative quality for the modal heterosexual woman, and since sampling rate matters for raw success dating and sex dynamics, it exacerbates the illusion.
(The other axis where the incels are correct is the myth of "there's someone for everyone". Yeah, we should kill that one with fire.)
> The point is rejecting to get a sense of power or self.
I could be convinced but I'm not sure. I think this is more of a PUA thing.
> They'll complain about outcomes but never offer solutions.
Very true.
> I could be convinced but I'm not sure. I think this is more of a PUA thing.
There will usually be something like a PUA nearby torturing or exploiting them with demands and expectations, yeah. Narcissists form vicious hierarchies. Incels are just the ones at the bottom. You have to subscribe to the gymbro's ideas/values before he can 'win points' torturing you about gains or whatever. They're both obsessed with looking in the mirror. One just likes what he sees so he ends up higher in the pyramid. They both project their own self-image (bad or good) onto the expectations of others.
Lots of people think of narcissism as an after-the-fact thing but it's not. It's a pattern that anyone can be in, ugly or beautiful, rich or poor. Incels are unsuccessful narcissists; PUAs are successful narcissists. You're right to see a pattern.
In simplest terms, narcissism is an addiction to deeming things not good enough. The three flavors of targets are family/friends/SOs (covert), things (megalomania) and groups of people (grandiose). Incels are basically grandiose narcissists that can't back it up with any form of societal success.
That is, you alone experience the feelings that emanate from within you. Sure, you can tell someone you feel sad, you can express joy. But you can't make someone else an integral part of what goes inside you. (Barring telepathy of course)
The togetherness we all crave is seeing how other people acknowledge, accept, recognize, validate our existence, and our identity and, most importantly, how we feel and experience life. That happens through actions, language, culture,... in countless ways really. And it gives us a sense of reassurance, acquiescence, confidence, trust,...
Rejection, then, is the awareness that the other person doesn't share that sense of reconciling their experience with yours. Either they have a profoundly different experience of life that doesn't align with yours; or they choose to live a different experience from yours.
Rejection is par for the course. Humanity isn't like the Borg. 7.8 billion lives each live their own individual of being alive, within their own bubble. You can recognize that you both feel similarly about each other, each within your own experience, and act on those feelings, or you don't.
The awareness of this disjointed experiences between you and the other causes discomfort within yourself. It raises questions. And above all, it makes it utterly clear that you are very much alone with yourself and your feelings.
What makes all the difference then is in how you deal with those feelings.
Regardless of all the advice, therapy, medication,... the hard truth is that you and you alone are confronted with the feelings and emotions that go on inside yourself. It's entirely up to you to face those and to figure out how to approach yourself.
You could do that through self soothing, positive affirmation of yourself, showing compassion and kindness towards yourself and so on. Or you could choose self loathing, beating yourself up, talking yourself down, blaming yourself, the rest of the world, the universe and so on. It's entirely your choice.
This has absolutely nothing to do with being rejected by others, and everything with how you decide to view and treat yourself.
Emotional maturity is about understanding this difference.
Having said that, it's important to recognize that people come in all sizes. Emotional maturity isn't 100% a choice. It's also determined by your mental health and your circumstances (upbringing, social economic situation, education, past experiences,...)
Even so (and this important) that doesn't mean you are excused from your personal responsibility as to how you deal with your own feelings and emotions.
Here's how that works:
> I think that's why incels attract such hate.
I mentioned that everyone looks towards each other for validation, recognition, acknowledgement and so on, right? This works both ways. If you choose to indulge in utter self loathing, and you decide to express that by behaving in a destructive fashion towards yourself and other people, well, the vast majority of people won't recognize their own experience in that... and simply walk away in an effort their own mental and physical integrity.
It's not "hate", it's called "guarding your own boundaries". And has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination.
You aren't being discriminated because you are somehow "less attractive". People simply walk away because they perceive you as emotional immature and your behavior as threatening.
Discrimination, however, is a different ballgame. That would be actively invalidating the experience and the existence of others through violent behavior. Simply because you feel, you are convinced, that the other doesn't fit in your own experience of life, your own view of the w...
Given how much violence happens in relationships or between people sho closely know each other, this is unlikely.
Even mass murderers and such dont really fit this stereotype. Not even Elliot Roger whose communication issues run super deep, but ultimately forcing girl to date him would not fix him. Elliot Roger was not actually rejected by a girl, not even once.
In terms of job interviews I can see where it would get hard for people. The best advice I ever got for that is to expect one call back for every hundred applications, one interview for every hundred call backs, and maybe one offer for every hundred interviews. If you expect that sort of ratio then it stops feeling personal and just feels like a numbers game.
You'd have beers and a few good times and then the next term/year would happen and you might never see them again. It didn't feel like rejection because there really wasn't a practical way to stay in touch. You only felt rejected by romantic partners and old friends who decided to move on.
Now, we "connect" to everyone; we follow each other on Facebook/Twitter/Signal/WeChat and we have each others emails.
I'm trying to imagine the roommates I had one summer, who I had almost nothing in common with but who shared their stash with me because I would bring good steaks and fresh vegetables from home, reaching out to me a year later and saying "hey man, why did you ghost us?". What would you even say to that?
So, now, when these temporary friendships are over ... we have this lingering connection that doesn't just go away at the end of term. Someone has to take the extra step of closure.
I get that this feels like rejection but that feeling is a new thing.
Summer loves and friendships were meant to end with a sobbing farewell at the end of August, not with a unfollow and block in November.
This is such a good thought. I think it applies to other areas of human relationships as well. Breaking up, for example. It was easier to have healthy boundaries after breaking up... before social media made it so easy to stalk or just be constantly reminded of your past relationship.
> A flaccid “what happened?” text went unresponded to, and just like that, the relationship was over.
> Rationally, I know there was no reason for him to respond to a text asking for closure. Our friendship was brief, just over a year, and for the last six months, not much of a friendship at all. It amounted to a mostly barren Signal thread, with the odd message here or there about astrology, or a podcast neither one of us listened to completion.
The author didn't lose a friend here. They never had a friend here.
I wonder how much of the author's problem is about a mistaken expectation. The expectation that you can meet someone, make contact, and then file that person as a friend forever who will never leave you.
You obtain friends.
If you're well connected, you obtain many ..
.. however, it's difficult to keep hold of them.
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The issue is friendship and human relations—while transactional during an exchange—are not transactional in the way recent app based culture has lead us to believe.
We maintain relationships. We need to tend to them. They change as time moves forward. We can pause; and pick things up later.
The best friendships involve high degrees of honesty, and because of that we need to be vulnerable at times. I'm not sure writing a blog post or tweet is displaying the necessary levels of sensitivity (at least on an interpersonal level) to meet this criteria.
This is an unnecessary dig on the author, and is just a bit pompous. I would counter: writing a blog post on the loss of a close friend and exploring how and why for them and in society at large; displays a high level of introspection, self awareness, and a mature relationship with their emotions. When anger and blame are the typical reactions for such an outcome, it was a mature and reasoned exploration.
I can understand your point, but I think the response of writing a blog post is an example of continued transactionality.
I'm not trying to be mean, I'm aiming to be honest.
Imagine you burn out during college, so you pivot and get a professional certification instead. You pass the exam and have the certificate in hand, and you start looking for jobs. You scroll and scroll through indeed, glassdoor, the job sites for the organizations that would hire someone with your certification and training, and... they all require that degree you don't have. They all require N years of experience that you haven't gotten.
How many visits like this does it take before you stop looking altogether?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atypical_depression
But I still have friends from every stage of my life. I have a group of friends that I’ve known since grade 1 and we WhatsApp every day. We get into salty verbal arguments all the time like brothers, but we never have coke close to rejecting each other. During the pandemic I’ve had friends from high school that I haven’t spoken with for 30+ years that sought me out and we talked on the phone for 2 hours. In the last few weeks I had a coworker from 20 years ago reach out to me because she heard I “retired” pre-pandemic and wanted my advice on if she should do it. We chatted for over an hour. During the pandemic I’ve pinged several friends/coworkers from various companies I’ve worked with just to say hi. I’m planning on going for lunch with another coworker from 20 years ago in the next few weeks. I’ve even made new friends during the pandemic, having met someone that shared my same cynical views on the Federal Reserve, the stock market, etc.
It’s not hard to maintain friendships with people, just be considerate and courteous! Not everyone needs to be your best friend, but you also don’t need to be so navel gazing that all you care about is yourself.
The fact that the author has so many people rejecting the author makes me think he’s simply not a good friend and deserves to be rejected.
> makes me think he’s simply not a good friend and deserves to be rejected.
You sound like maybe a bit more rejection would have been good for your sense of empathy.
In the article, the author reached out for feedback on what happened and the person didn't choose to say any "honest hard things."
I absolutely think it is fair to blame society today for treating people who face social challenges with contempt and scorn.
However, I disagree that there is any obvious evidence that this author has a hard time maintaining friendships.
I don’t want to talk professionally after work with certain people as I don’t gain much value. Certain people I enjoy mentoring, certain people I don’t. I don’t want another “task” to do.
Also people with “too many” friends I find a little fake. You can’t expect me to take you seriously if you’re trying to maintain “close / intimate” friendships with 100 or more people.
> The number of people I speak to on any given timescale far exceeds Dunbar’s number, and if I took every instance of rejection personally, I would be a very depressed person. I have lost friends, acquaintances, and people who exist in the liminal space between the two for all sorts of reasons: I’m too flaky, they don’t like what I write here or on Twitter, my real or imagined allegiances with people they’ve decided are their enemies, I don’t sufficiently respect their otherkin identity, they don’t sufficiently respect my professional identity.
>Sometimes it’s because I’m being an ass, but a lot of the time, it’s just a statistical normality. Cast a wide enough net, you’re bound to lose a certain number of fish.
I think what (maybe?) got lost in this blog post is that it's more about the unhealthy nature of lifestyles that encourage the constant churn of socialization than feeling rejected by someone unfollowing me on Twitter. For me, lots of people I know in person follow me on Twitter, it's a bit of a ding. I'm also a super high visibility person on social and elsewhere, which complicates things.
But lots of folks are in this boat -- people like me who are constantly meeting new people, folks who work in jobs that necessitate hundreds of applications, people on dating apps who go on hundreds of first dates. It's not so much that every individual rejection is a character indictment on anyone involved, it's more that the transient nature of socialization is stressful.
I hope my frame didn't suggest a shallow definition of friendship or one specifically anchored in social.
One last example that might be salient - The Bay Area is all about this kind of radical openness that isn't scalable or sustainable. Even if you have more real friends outside of that framework, being a human airport of connection kind of blows. Maybe a very specific scenario.
I certainly didn't take it that way, but I do believe the "lingering" nature of these new types of friendships has changed the nature of rejection; or forced things that didn't have a rejection component before to now have one.
And I agree with your point of we have a lot more connections now and, hence, a lot more "micro rejections".
As someone with actual rejection sensitivity (ADHD), I know exactly what you mean.