People's lives are more like soap operas than anyone realizes | Hacker News Reader

People's lives are more like soap operas than anyone realizes

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60 pointsarundelo33 comments

Finally realizing and accepting how crazy people (including ourselves!) are, and the world is, is the main lesson of your 20s. There comes a subtle but powerful increase in fearlessness and self-acceptance when you realize that any screw-up, offense, or drama you could cause pales in comparison to that being dealt with by everyone else on a regular basis :-)

In most people, there seems to be a subtle increase in fearlessness after this realization.

Wow, this comment really resonates with me. Just figuring this stuff out for myself.

Meet girl. Flirt with girl. Go home with girl.

Some weeks and much happiness later, for one reason or another end up with the following conversation:

"You were abused, weren't you?" "Is it really that obvious?" "No."

... or at least it doesn't seem to be to most people. But after a while of talking to enough people and really listening to them, it becomes easier and easier to spot.

I'm enough of an optimist to still put faith in individual humans but humanity as a whole? Goddamn we suck.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying. Is it that you're finding it easier to identify which girls you're in relationships with have been abused?

If you believe the figures for rape and abuse of women, you could say this to any woman and be right a large percentage of the time.

One of the figures that always floored me was regarding sexual abuse of children generally. I can't remember it now, but it was in the 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 zone. When you extrapolate that to the number of people you know, it's a tad depressing.

The figures get counted all sorts of interesting ways though, which significantly reduces their impact on me, at least (except as a very good set of examples of how statistics can be made to say anything you like).

My personal experiences, on the other hand, suggest percentages which seem rather more realistic but still scare the shit out of me.

>There's really not a lot of evidence against the idea that a very large subsection even of first world countries is unbearably miserable. We'd never see them, because they'd be off living in poorer areas, or stuck in nursing homes, or too sick to go out much. No one would make movies or TV series about them. And no one would give them jobs as newspaper commentators.

particularly the last part, i find this very insightful. the world sees itself with a tremendous bias towards experiences of successful individuals. of a "talking class".

Next week, your humble narrator stumbles into McDonald's and discovers heretofore unknown segment of population actually eats fast food for which he has seen commercials.

ain't that the truth. As one who found a long lost brother, on google no less, I have to agree

Come on now...you can't throw that out and not tell us the whole story :)

Thanks, Ryan.

My mom had to give up a baby for adoption in England in 1954. The rest of us found out about him in 1978. No one knew what happened to him.

One day in June 2005, I was using google to see what my family in Ireland is up to. I'm naturally nosy that way. Quite by accident, I came across someone who was trying to locate my mother. I established contact with them and found that it was my older brother!

We soon spoke to him and he and his wife visited our mom in New York. It was an amazing experience. He has two sons and one of them has the same name as me. My mom, now in a nursing home, was elated.

Mark is a geek too! He invented this SCSI, fiber optic thingy and built a company on it in the UK. We really hit it off and we chatted quite a bit on the web. He's incredibly funny.

To me, this is the most amazing consequence of the Internet. I can't tell you the number of connections I've been able to establish, maintain and recover by email and google. Mark was certainly the most significant.

Sadly, Mark passed away at the end of January. He only made it across the pond the one time, but the connection will stick with us forever.

Thanks for sharing that. Sorry to hear about your loss, but at least you got to share some time with him, however brief.

Btw, I agree that the connections made with real, actual people are what's best about the web. From family to long-lost friends to great communities of like-minded people (HN), the web has definitely helped make my life richer and more meaningful. So thanks to all the folks out there who make that possible :)

It's not just Killarney, and it's not just among the poor.

A leading story this week in The Washington Post has been the murder of a young woman at the University of Virginia. She and the apparent murderer, her boyfriend, were varsity lacrosse players. Both from families at least prosperous, both from excellent private high schools. But some of the graduates of excellent private high schools do turn out to be mean drunks and abusive partners.

Reagan's first SEC chairman had to resign when it came out that he was an abusive husband.

This guy's kidding himself if he thinks that even seemingly happy, intelligent people who appear to have it all together are not suffering from many of the things he describes, and others. I imagine depression, alcoholism and unintended pregnancy occur highly within higher socio-economic groups.

And yet my greatest fear is that my life will just be boring all the time.

I just started reading a fascinating book: Andrew Potter's The Authenticity Hoax: http://jseliger.com/2010/05/07/who-is-our-authentic-self-exa... , which starts with the story of a French couple who decided that life in France was too boring and decided to buy a boat and sail. They decided to go through the Indian ocean near the coast of Somalia; they were warned about pirates; they ignored the warnings, got kidnapped, and eventually the man was killed in the crossfire between a French navy warship and the pirates.

That story is only one of a single dumbass, but the larger point that Potter is trying to make is that a) we often don't have much of an idea of what authenticity really is and b) if we think of it as some aspect of danger / grittiness, it often turns out that there's a reason why many people are striving towards lifestyles that are merely boring all the time.

Boring often means productive, well-fed, and high social standing. If you're unhappy with boredom, by all means change -- but remember that you might not like what you get.

It sounds like you're saying that their decision was a mistake, simply because one of them died as a result. The story sounds sort of like "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." But you're guaranteed to die no matter what you do, so by that measure, any possible decision is a mistake. The relevant measure is what else you manage to do under that constraint. Getting kidnapped by "pirates" and then getting shot isn't my ideal set of experiences for the next year, but it still might have been better than whatever they would have experienced otherwise.

I recently got a taste of this kind of social tragedy after seeing the housing conditions some families would live in months after their homes were foreclosed. They were squatters in their own homes.

That's not tragedy, that's just them being assholes. If your home is foreclosed you're supposed to move out.

Foreclosure is not a binary function. Its a slow motion tragedy of deepening desperation that ends when men with guns forcibly evict you.

I still fail to see how it's a "tragedy" when the bank buys you a house on the strength of your promise that you'll pay them back, and you fail to live up to your end of the bargain.

My sympathy in these situations is reserved entirely for the bank.

Don't bother feeling sympathy for the banks; it's their own fault for granting very large loans to people they knew couldn't pay it off (or to people who they didn't know could pay it off, at least).

Besides, they're a business. They lose some money? The person loses their HOUSE. I'll feel sorry for the banks when the U.S. government forcibly evicts them from every single one of their physical properties.

The person loses their HOUSE

It's not their house, it's the bank's house. The bank bought it for them, and all they were obliged to do was pay the bank back for it over a period of decades. They didn't live up to their end of the bargain.

I think the backlash is coming from the fact that the "social contract" (if I may blatantly abscond with the term) between lenders, employers, and government regulators didn't live up to its "end of the bargain".

The promise to pay made by borrowers was made against the banking industries' promise to uphold a certain level of professional conduct.

The undercurrent of perception that's been created "when they fail they get a bailout, when you fail, you get screwed and pay for their bailout" is far more dangerous than most politicians and investment bankers realize.

I wonder if people end up liking reality TV shows because scripted dramas aren't f*ed up enough for them.

I don't think there is any need for condescension.

I don't know who is downvoting you, but I wasn't intending to be condescending.

I think there might be more to it than that, even. A lot of people won't admit it, but there are definitely cheap ego boosts to be had from watching people you perceive to be idiots firing emotional shrapnel at each other.

I'm in Florida. This kind of stuff is so common here. There's a reason Fark has a special [Florida] tag.

Dr. Drew and Adam Corolla had (have?) a call-in radio show on late at night (99.5 Washington D.C) and they had a segment of weird stories named "Germany or Florida". It's always something weird/stupid and always happens either in Germany or Florida.

Depressing and not surprising.

Why is it that so much about the state of human behavior and society is summarized by those four words?

Only in the small! Comfort yourself with the great narrative arc of humanity.

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