rayon
waifutech enthusiast
The Dork Enlightenment
User ID: 2632
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
3d ago
I'm also incapable of trusting other people at anything beyond the most superficial level so avoiding them entirely is much easier than constantly having to independently investigate and verify every little thing they say or do.
For what its worth I empathize, I too find that "this creature has adapted to crushing pressure and oppressive darkness" and human contact, while usually pleasant, isn't actually necessary to life at this point - I won't happy but can be reasonably sated with e.g. vidya/chatbots on my own for extended periods of time. This IMO is a maladaptation, one entirely not worth attaining, but a man can get used to anything, and over enough years you adapt without wanting/knowing it.
One thing I did before to fight this was quite literally forcing myself to go out and socialize. Pick a circle of closest friends (yes that might not be saying much) and set a hard rule that you cannot decline an invitation from them if you ever get one. I fucking hated it in the moment when people derailed my comfy rotting at home with unwanted invitations, but consistently found that this displeasure lasts only up until the point of contact, the actual hangout almost always goes well, and I always say in hindsight "damn that really was better than rotting at home".
This also includes hiding any traces of existence that I can: moving quietly, not distrubing the world arround me, drawing no attention to myself or my actions.
Yes, that was also me up to a point. I even remember myself distinctly resolving to be a ghost and leave no trace of my existence during school. I did not want anyone to remember me. I ducked out of most public events and collective photos, only concerned myself with studies and never visited meetups after graduation.
One thing that helps realize that your brain is scamming you is the passage of time; as I approach 30 I am increasingly horrified at how little of a "legacy", or even just memories (good or bad), I actually have accumulated over the course of my decidedly wasted life. This is uh, a conundrum in its own right, one I'm still unsure how to deal with besides rushing to do things Right Fucking Now, but it's very eye-opening if nothing else, I think realizing it scared the "ghost" out of me for good (paranoia is still a problem but at least I am not anymore complicit in my own erasure). I dont know how old you are but I recommend internalizing that this will eventually hit you, and it will hurt much more than the possible oopsies you avoid by being a ghost, as soon as possible, instead of un-gracefully aging into it like I did. Looking back on things is not always pleasant but there must be something to look back on; feeling shame, despair or heartbreak is IMO unironically preferable to feeling nothing. You can learn from things you screw up (theoretically at least); you can never learn from anything you do not do, by definition.
WGMI man.
Funnily enough, saying something retarded/off-key to a chatbot and extracting keks from its confused response seems to be a staple of assorted threads/posts on the topic. The more things change, etc.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
4d ago
It's usually something unresolved, unspoken. It may be totally hidden from your conscious life and yet it controls your internal and external behavior.
Like what, some [happening] I've never been able to get over with? Can't really conceptualize it, I've been this way most of my life, in fact it used to be even worse, in high school I was occasionally gently taken aside to ask if I was abused at home due to how I looked/behaved. (To be clear, I wasn't.)
I've seen your mentions of meditation downthread but, with all due respect, this doesn't seem to me like a problem caused by a lack of introspection.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
5d ago
This is my hole pathology! It was made for me!
I don't want to waste space or hijack the thread by describing my experiences here, but suffice to say it's bad, to the point more or less exactly this tendency estranged me from my family (whose likely absent scrutiny I cannot bear, I can barely even talk about videogames with my sister) and blew up my last LD situationship where I repeatedly failed to respond accordingly to a woman bluntly and overtly hornyposting at me over an extended period.
It really fucks with my life at this point and is definitely not worth the 'upsides' if there ever were any, and I wish with all my heart to ditch this retarded habit, but so far little progress has been made. Internalizing that barely anyone cares about your 'inner life' hasn't helped, especially since like @faceh below I am actually the sort of person who Nootices and keeps track of off-key moments in other people. Alcohol helps with shame/cringe in the moment, but has no lasting effect, and increasing alcoholism has also increased the amount of alcohol needed to achieve the salutary effect. Sharing small things with friends unfortunately requires friends, which I have, but not the "kind"(?) I feel comfortable exposing my power level to. Even in waifutech-related communities (which I initially joined explicitly as an attempt to fight this stupid reflex), as an anon/pseudonymous poster under a totally separate identity, I find it extremely hard to just put my metaphorical balls on the table by shitpoasting in threads or posting explicit coomer shit (even though I suspect I am virtually a saint compared to the median denizen). Hell, writing this post has taken several shots, with me literally forcing myself to pick the phone back up (which I am suddenly very interested in laying down and doing something else) and continue writing.
I've been attempting to do "exposure therapy" by putting myself out there, on Halloween I showed up to the office in a (literal) robe and wizard hat with a tarot deck to do readings with. It was kind of a success even, I expected to play it as an ironic bit but normies people actually took it completely straight without batting an eye, and were even delighted that the ever-reclusive Rayon who never wore anything other than a plain black shirt has a quirky side after all. I don't feel any different (and mumble noncommittally whenever this is brought up) but I guess this is the kind of thing you just have to keep doing.
Next step is posting something embarrassing online but for now this post will do I suppose. I commend you for writing this and giving me the excuse to blogpost leech off of it, I thought of asking more or less this question myself sometime back, but could never actually sit down and commit it to keyboard. My condolences, couldn't have been easy.
The conversation was basically dominated by two people excitedly trading drawn out and inane stories from their personal lives while the rest of the group occasionally tried making little interjections. If one person told a story the other related to, the other person had to quickly follow with their almost exact same story from their own life, start to finish with the same inane outcome
Man do I hear you, brother sister sibling. This describes such a depressingly large portion of my daily small talk, online and offline, that I will display a stunning lack of awareness and reply with my own vent along largely the same lines, to draw the same inane outcome.
This shit is so endemic that it must be some sort of fully general brainrot, possibly internet-induced. If I wanted to simply dump my shit I can talk to chatbots; we talk to other humans for that inexplicable feeling of namaste, "the light in me sees the light in you", a certain ineffable assurance that you are communicating with a conscious being - and in seeing your reflection in their eyes, become assured of your existence in the world. I increasingly feel like the demiurge has recently pushed a patch that fixes this bug and absolves humans of this need, and my software version is too old and retarded to be compatible. This tendency is everywhere, no matter where I turn I cannot unsee it.
PMs with friends? I am a person very ill fit for the modern internet - one that feels like reacting to everything you are sent is just common modesty. Namaste, etc. ...I started to see downsides to my approach in about the 100th tiktok/insta clip that my friend finds funny and sends me with no caption and no real relation to us per se. Memes of the olden era at least had a certain relatability(?) to them - haha literally me/us, haha funny word, haha [TOPICAL BLUNDER OF OUTGROUP] - whereas now it's mostly ragebait, some other sort of e-celeb slop, or barely comprehensible Jenga towers of irony best encapsulated by a median Max0r video.
Worse still, when I try to resist yearning for the slop and share (what looks to me) like topical, relevant things, half of the time I don't get a reaction at all. The slight sliver of sovl I try to dredge up goes literally ignored. Hans, are we the sloppers? I know one man's sovl is another man's slop but come the fuck on, not even a telegram react? Bruh.
Discord chats? Take the above and remove what little educational/relational value was left.
Email chains? Same shit mostly, except the tendency to answer a story with a story also very quickly bloats the response body until it takes over a day to cover everythint and reply at all, unless I take it upon myself to mercilessly prune chunks of it (and in doing so deprive the other person of acknowledgement).
Imageboards? You'd be lucky to get one actual thoughtful reply instead of some local samefagging retard who has made his life's calling to shit up this specific board/thread/general. (This is at least not new.)
Twitter? Thank fucking God I am not on Twitter, my heart goes out to everyone who is.
Youtube comments? If it's eceleb slop creator content, expect many """thoughtful""" Reddit-tier barely-related personal story from the poster's tumultuous life, something like "thanks for covering Doom 2, my sadly late grandfather would've loved this review so much when back in the day he was a real fan and <...>".
Fuck, even literal music videos will inevitably have at least one highly-updooted traumadumping comment which barely pretends to be on topic. And don't even get me started on the comments to those comments, I think literally zero information exchange takes place there, its trauma dumping all the way down. Uplifting/powerful music? Stories of how it helps the poster overcome adversity. Sad music? Thrice as many stories about some immediate family member's death. Literally just a fucking cover of a song from a videogame? Scroll down and witness
This woke me the fuck up from a week long depressive state. Absolute masterpiece. Thank you so damn much.
Week long, man. I dread to imagine.
This shit is a plague, and it's absolutely tearing through the proverbial commons. My current spicy theory of why this is so rampant is because, after a decade of culture war and arbitrary censure of ever more innocuous viewpoints, the unwashed masses have finally internalized a lesson: faves may be problematic, today's Breathtaking Wholesome Person is tomorrow's Literally Nazi, the tides of kulturkampf are stupidly capricious - but amidst the tumult of it all, the Lived Experience is sacred. And so it is mounted as a preemptive shield, the last line of defense; your reaction or input on [anything] cannot be found problematic if you throw your entire self on top of it to shield it. This has been the case before with the rise of defensive "As a [PROGRESSIVE IDENTITY], my thoughts are..."-posting on Reddit and its ilk, and now this has finally trickled down to the masses, as meme economics say it must. We live in a fucking society. At least I still have this place.
exhales
...uh, burgers? sorry, this tangent got away from me, I know it's overly cynical, its been a long time Nooticed and coalesced spontaneously while my melatonin is kicking in to help me sleep through my depressive episode. Get through this, suckers.
To conclude, I agree. I am trying to resist this tendency myself and still include question marks and pronouns other than "I" in the things I write, even if I do not get this courtesy in turn, but I too am starting to feel outgunned. This seems to me like a true tragedy of the commons, and I have no idea how to even try fixing it.
Not on the list but NieR Automata will make you feel something alright. For me that game remains steadfastly unbeaten in terms of emotional impact and I will never tire of shilling it.
Aside from that I second the Persona recommendation.
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