The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker
wired.com
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My personal theory is that you have some sort of obligations to long term acquaintances but you owe nothing to strangers on the trail. It's this feeling of obligation that leads you to resent people over time.
My wife and I have our good moments, are good parents (I think), but day to day is such a struggle. It is constant cycle of me wanting to be left alone and her wanting something or the other from me and getting annoyed that I show reluctance to do it leading to resentment on both sides. Not sure how to fix it or where to turn to for help. I am not an angry person and I don't physically yell or hurt her but she has said that me being reluctant with most things is a form of emotional abuse, which after reading this concerns me and is cause for introspection.
All I wanted my whole life was a happy family with a happy relationship like my parents had. That didn’t happen and now all I want is to be left alone, and it’s like everyone wants something from me but I don’t need or want anything from them. I have a great job now, so the only thing I look forward to each day is hopefully reaching financial independence before I’m 40. At least then I can “buy” some alone time.
I had the exact same wish. I just wanted a happy family like my parents had. I adore my child. Now I just wish we could both get out of this without damaging him too much and I can be left alone.
> her grad school tuition that I had been saving to pay for her
> she has not worked for >90% of our ~10 year marriage
My friend, you are not abusing your wife. She is abusing you. She is also gaslighting you into thinking you are the problem. You're not. And she is using your child to blackmail you emotionally.
> things she has anxiety about doing -- driving the car to new places, walking the dog when it is dark outside
This isn't anxiety, it's laziness. But if you're merely reluctant about the exact same things, she calls it "a form of emotional abuse." Brilliant.
Unfortunately, the way the law is currently applied, there is nothing you can do without violating it.
I was married to a woman who behaved in a similar fashion. Calling me during work days for ridiculous reasons. Never satisfied. Needed constant attention. Took all disagreements as personal attacks. Needy, prickly, never thankful to anyone. In the end we separated as everything in the marriage was one way street in her direction.
Today I regret that I did not leave her more early but tried to rescue the family by letting everything her way.
Looking back she had a Narcistic Personality Disorder (which was meanwhile confirmed by a psychologist).
Get books on narcissism. Try to speak to a professional if you believe she is narcistic. But NPS is (almost) not treatable. So the only solution is to leave if she is narcistic.
Luckily I managed that our kids stayed with me after separation. And for the kids protection, don't leave the kid with her when you leave. (Recommended Reading: "Children of the self absorbed" by Nina Brown).
Why are you still together?
Can you explain what the advantages of the dominant marriages are? Since you mention Islam, I assume you're the dominant one. I'm going to assume your wife is happy in her role. Do you think the female can be the dominant one in a relationship, too, or how is that decided?
The word “dominance” seems to carry a negative connotation in the context of interpersonal relationships. There a lot of historical factors that are the cause of this and it's beyond the scope of this conversation to delve deeply into that.
Nonetheless, as far as Islam is concerned, it is the role of the man to wield the influence/be dominant in his household. This is by virtue of his responsibilities -- his attachment to the Masjid (or “Mosque” in the West), his duty to earn a living for the household and his duty as an educator and paragon of good character, not just in the home but in his community as well.
The word “dominance” may suggest a sense of oppression in modern times. But in the scope of Islam, that husband who is “dominant” in reality eschews all reprehensible conduct that could be associated with the word.
As I mentioned before, yes, in Islam there are expectations on the Muslim wife. But likewise there are expectations (if not more) on the Muslim husband. Again, that Muslim man assumes dominance in the household out of the necessity that is to submit himself both internally and externally to the conduct of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and prayers be upon him).
The advantages of this lie in the husband assuming his natural role as prescribed by Allah and exemplified by the Messenger of Allah (peace and prayers be upon him). If the situation were to be reversed, then this could not be the case. If anything, the man would not just be neglecting his duties as a husband, but as a Muslim as well. If the situation were to be reversed, it would behove the woman to instead leverage this dominance in order to encourage her husband to fulfill the rights he owes to her and to humanity. If he accepts this, then the natural order as described above would inevitably fall into place.
It is strange to assume that two people who are different by their very nature can be “equal”. The sense of equality between a man and a woman can only come about by the fulfillment of the rights that exist between the two of them, which are different but have to be observed reciprocally.
The problem is that we (meaning humanity at large) are totally unaware of the rights that we owe to each other. Not just in the household, but outside of it as well. Worst of all, we are unaware of the rights that are due to our Creator.
May Allah, the One who is Most Gracious, strengthen you and your wife. Ameen.
Sounds like you’re an introvert and need time to recharge from managing a team and you’re burnt out from that.
I think she’d be delighted with an hour a day of full presence, perhaps more on the weekend.
What are you getting out of the relationship at all? Sounds like they should leave and be alone.
That strikes me as fine if both people are happy with the arrangement, but if kids are in the picture or one of the partners is unhappy with this arrangement I don't know if it will work.
What you’re describing sounds like a personality disorder of some sort. Identifying such may help surface strategies for lessening those feelings. Disclaimer: not a mental health professional, but have had a couple in my personal life.
It is indeed fairly common. I'm affected (thankfully not strongly these days) by bipolar behaviour. I try to present a more average me as the mask.
> in order to fit in into the wider society and be able to achieve one's goals.
It can be more selfless than that. In work life it is about fitting in (or at least not standing out in an inconvenient way) but in personal life it is more that I don't people to worry overly. I have things well managed, I know I can push through, I know it will pass, there is no need to cause stress in others.
> However having it 'on' is apparently taxing
During a bad patch, the extra concentration adds up over time if you find yourself having to work at it for a while. I don't have many prolonged bad patches, I imagine it can get exponentially harder for those more severely affected than me. It is why a lot of people experiencing mental health issues retreat away from interaction even if they are not otherwise particularly introverted.
I had a significant personality change after a psychotic break and most people don’t think I’ve changed. I know I have.
The way I think and care about people has changed. I no longer care what people think about me. At the same time, I have a depth of compassion and empathy I couldn’t have had before.
I have no obligation to anyone. This lets me choose to care about someone without getting unnecessarily attracted. As a result, I can share my love and support freely without worrying about people taking advantage of me. I have no guilt showing people the door.
As a result of this, my motivations have changed. To use a metaphor, I see myself as a light in a dark world. My goal is to make everyone’s day a little better. I’m not some kind of savior, though I have saved lives. I’m just a “good person” trying to do “good things”.
My interests have changed in odd ways. I’d never have written erotica but sex is far more interesting to me now. This isn’t a result of me being repressed. I’ve always been asexual and been hypersexual since I was nine. But now I’m deeply exploring sexuality in my writing.
The last one is both odd and the most fundamental to my being. Just take it at face value.
I had a deep, spiritual connection with wolves from six years old until my break. That connection was a core part of me and without it, I wouldn’t have known who I was.
That connection is gone and I really don’t care about it. As far as I’m concerned, it was delusional thinking.
I no longer have the spirituality that was such a part of me. There is only the rational world now. (Side note: My faith in God had always been rational, not emotional or spiritual.)
If I had to guess, I think sexuality took the place of spiritually in my brain.
It’s quite possible I haven’t changed as much as I think, but the world inside my head is so vastly different, I can’t understand the person I was before.
If they do notice, they chalk it up to maturity.
I was 32 when this all happened.
That just sounds like standard introvert, though.
The hiker in the article, on the other hand, seems to be off-the-deep-end introvert.
I also assume you can be an introvert who has some spectrum and type of mental illness, sexual and gender classification they choose, past exploitation and/or violence committed against you, etc.
I just think it is interesting b/c the person underneath the shell is different person to person and I think we lump very granular groups into large piles for ease of discussion and use.
I think he wanted a mental health, possibly a moral/spiritual awakening but he was toward the end or had completed the hike and was facing reality that there was a mental issue or past event in his life that he could not get past. Maybe just going back to the "real world" was just to much if it had to be in his own skin with his past.
This is why the masks ar pretty much always super charming and likeable. If you're acting anyway, might as well act like someone that's super likeable. Pretty much how you max out a player in some game.
When I first meet people Im more than happy to share, give of myself, etc. Usually I will either feel that gestures are not reciprocated, or taken for granted, so I pull back. Ive wondered if I feel like Im expecting too much of my generosity and I think Ive been guilty of that before. At this point though I think I have reflected enough and changed to where this is not the case.
Long term- I feel like being social requires me to "be on" which is exhausting to me. I would rather only see people when I can be decent company so I end up seeing people much less than more socially adept folks...
I've had this problem in many contexts. Some of it stems from childhood circumstances, but it's also that I often read people better than they seemingly know themselves, i.e., noticing anger that they don't think they have. This can cause a lot of stress.
However, you do have to learn how to avoid taking on other people's emotional burdens.
I used to always try to please others. My dysfunctional family liked it that way. It made their life easier. That was one of the last quirks to go. It was only after being forced into being assertive to defend my kids, I've realized that it is ok to stand up for yourself. Life's been much better since, surprisingly, most people appreciate assertiveness. And being assertive is not nearly as exhausting as being nice.
It was a long journey, started with therapy 25 years ago.
People like this do not behave abusively towards their loved ones all the time, it's pretty on-and-off. The loved one is typically a dependent or avoidant. They remain in the relationship because they need the positive affirmations, and healthy people do not want to be with a dependent or avoidant. So, no choice but to suffer the negativity also.
It's clear that this man developed a personality disorder as the result of suffering abuse as a child.
I don't think the causality is clear at all. If he treated his parents the way he treated his girlfriends then his childhood would have been rough no matter how loving they were.
If he behaves like he did in the article: polite at first but increasingly hostile the longer the relationship lasted then he must have been a hellish teenager to wrangle. One part of the article mentions that his anger at his father may have been the result of putting him in an institution.
I'd say that is pretty hard to tell from the hearsay and all these are just speculations, which are okay. We're learning more from these conversations anyway.
I agree that my assumption was based on hearsay. Fundamentally, I don't believe that children who are loved and protected by their primary caregivers shoot themselves in the stomach in an attempt to die.
It is possible to have a who child goes off the rails in a very nurturing and a generally normal family. I've seen cases where one of the many siblings gets to become a sociopath and the family never understands why and they continue to be normal and consistently try to get their sibling back on track. It is clear that abuse in the family doesn't always play a role. But quite often it does and while mental health has a hereditary component, a bad environment only makes things worse.
I recommend Ramsay's movie 'We need to talk about Kevin' to make an idea of how wrong it could go. Surely, it is a movie but it's not too far from reality.
( Fortunately for her, the friends who attempted to console him pretty soon noticed how violent he got when he talked about her. When he threw a glass at the wall at a friend's apartment, she started getting a lot of apologies. )
It's almost an adaptive behavior. If they were violent to strangers, they wouldn't have long term acquaintances.
I just finished listening to a podcast called My Year in Mensa, which centers around an unmoderated Mensa facebook group, and the author's interactions with them. As you can imagine from an unmoderated community, it sucks and a lot of people say shitty things there.
A common refrain the author heard from people defending the group is "They're the nicest people in real life!", which may absolutely be the case, but publicly, they are presenting abusive versions of themselves.
Gordon Ramsay perhaps?
All the yelling and vitriol is kind of a spliced-down highlights reel, is the impression I've gotten, the stuff that makes for good tv. It's there and it's real, but it's a smaller part of a guy who's generally nice and genuinely cares about the people on his shows.
Good suggestion though.
So when you're around them, you know you can let out your bad side to some extent. You don't know that with random strangers.
wrt your "personal theory" (sense of obligation leads to resentment), that's too simplistic, but for the sake of argument, let's say you are on the right track, here's how to improve your understanding of personality disorders: all people feel the resentment of obligations to those close to them. That part is actually the normal part. The question is, why doesn't the person with this disorder (we are hypothesizing) feel the other positive parts of a close relationship that help a better adjusted person feel in balance, and then take the normal resentment of obligations in stride.
Its the idea that the more you learn about people and have to be around them, you start to judge them and then realize they aren't like you, so you push them away and crater relationships on purpose so you can be alone and unencumbered by other people's problems. It sounds to me like he did just that. Easier to have short-term relationships and human contact when you need it, but not long enough where you start to get bitter about having to continue being around people you don't like.
He created a world that seemed to fit his personality better than what he had been doing most of his life. It must have been beneficial in some way if he continued doing it for so long.
You definitely get the sense that he just wanted to be alone at times. Hard to do that when you're in a long term relationships because you have to adjust to some else's schedule. Easier when your acquaintances are short-term.
1) If you are weird, then you have mismatched expectations about relationships (and other social obligations) than majority society. Not providing something that is expected would be 'neglect', while expecting something that is not provided would be 'entitlement'. Social rules with strangers or casual acquaintances are much simpler.
2) Being in some kind of deep relationship means emotional stakes are higher. Perceived violations due to (1) causes higher emotional damage if they are from someone near than someone distant.
I've known people closely people like that, there's a selfishness to their lack of acknowledgement of others' needs and wants, but it's more of a drive to do that than a reaction to their existence; if and when they have nobody else to hollow out with their negativity and neglect, they'll turn it on themselves, and over time there will be just less and less of themselves.
Notwithstanding that they can be charming on a superficial level.
There's lots of ways people can have that pattern of being a completely different beast to strangers than to intimate partners in a bad way. Say on the other end the ones that make their whole world about you, but that specially means that every single bad feeling of theirs will be offloaded or straight up blamed on you.
With long term acquaintances, you start to notice imperfections. If you have a low self-esteem, you could develop this peronality where you are constantly judging others, and trying to control and make them perfect, because they are part of your life.
This could have been caused by constant criticism received during childhood, or abusive parents who were themselves perfectionist in treating you, and didn't show enough acceptance, pride and love.
Its either that or he truly hated my mother, my brother, and myself.
Sorry to spell it out, and I don’t expect any sympathy for it, but the pattern was man/woman.
The allegations of physical and mental abuse here are particularly bad, and I’m not trying to make any excuses for Rodriguez. But they aren’t exactly uncommon in this world, either.
The tone of this article feels a little too judgmental to me. Like Rodriguez somehow had an obligation to all the people who were interested in his story, and has let them down. But is it really surprising that someone who died in such unusual conditions, with no friends or family to report him as missing, would have had a rough past?
The author also says at one point “maybe that’s the prettiest bow you can put on the box that contains this strange story”. But why should we as interested observers feel the need or be entitled to “put a bow” on this other man’s life?
Edit-Why not check your egos and ids for once and let it go?
The more I read about this the more I'm reminded of Chris McCandless.
I’m open to the idea that it may not really matter, and everyone deserves the dignity to not be buried anonymously. But there were a lot of resources invested in this case because he looked very relatable in photos. He was very different from what people thought of him, and what motivated them, and therefore the truth is unsettling wrt that effort.
This doesn’t mean the effort was wrong, or that he was a monster not worthy of compassion. He was clearly fighting some demons, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, sometimes unleashing them on others. It defies easy moral judgements, and I believe the article does an excellent job saying as much.
But meanwhile, thousands die anonymously and unnoticed every year, and their photos and circumstances of death are far less compelling, but many if not most of them would have life stories that do not include multiple episodes of physically and psychologically abusing everyone close to them.
Compassionate efforts often cannot be shifted according to utilitarian calculations (which is one argument for getting together and making them someone’s actual job, in a process usually called “government”). But stories like this do maybe serve to make some people think about the best allocation of such efforts.
(The other unsettling truth is that HN can read this story and come away asking what people could possibly object to in his life story, and why one should believe the spouses (plural) that describe his dark side)
Separately, IMO, previous girlfriends or friends, etc. won’t go out of their way to spit on someone’s grave. I think the exception is when someone finally feels safe to speak out that they were abused or if the person was a true POS.
Not sure why the default logic in this case is to automatically assume the exes are bad mouthing the deceased just because they can. Sure, it happens, but in this case there were two separate first-hand accounts and from the girl’s parents.
Assembling dialogue around the divisive narrative of a misleading title is just something that plays into it and I think something we all need to avoid.
Allocating resources based on how charming someone's photo is is also wrong, and worthy of discussion, though presumably people at least aren't doing that consciously.
Edit: I'm fairly disturbed that this appears to be controversial.
I know one is usually meant to just nod when people say things like "all human life matters" and "no death is anything but horrible" and all that, but it's really not true.
In fact, if I model people's actions I find that nearly everyone will nod along with those things but few people act in a manner that is consistent with that action.
Toward the end it seems like he might have starved to death or maybe of dehydration.
What's unsettling about thinking that hit pieces on a dead man with quotes from supposed "ex girlfriends" is obnoxious?
The internet finds a story like this and spends a month on it.
"Good chimp killed? Good chimp killed on hike? Hiking good, hikers good. Must be good victim chimp. How can good chimp have bad thing happen?"
Then somebody finds out who the chimp is, and somebody gets a thousand bucks to write
"Good chimp not so good. Fought with other chimps. Shouted, got quiet, not share food. Not good chimp die on trail. Bad chimp wander off to die because bad. Sad but ok."
That's the natural cycle of news, it's been going on since the press was invented and it's mostly ok.
What's frustrating is the internet adding the layer of
"Bad chimp? Bad Chimp?! What kind bad chimp? Bad chimp have excuse to be bad? No? Put on list of Villain Chimps! Vvvvvvvvillllainous chimp."
Dysfunctional dude didn't do so well with his personal relationships on his way to an early grave. Ok-doke.
Unfortunately the author really didn’t have many more people to interview as the guy was a bit of a loner.
For my part, I find it sufficient for me to conclude this guy hit his girlfriend.
Its really not, it's a "hey let me trash this dead guy for clicks" story.
>For my part, I find it sufficient for me to conclude this guy hit his girlfriend.
Someone claiming to be your ex sent me a message saying you kill puppies and beat women. That's sufficient for me to believe you abuse women and animals.
That's it. It's a non-story.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/01/403535274/in...
To his credit, though, there is the possibility that he was simply unable to walk because he poisoned himself accidentally [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless#Lathyrism_due...
But not, apparently, therapy.
It's not just "some ex's" word. It's her word and the words of the other people who knew him.
You don’t find this behavior unsettling? How about this anecdote being characterized as “this only the light stuff”?
I was a little to flippant in my comment, maybe I should be more unsettled?
(EDIT: People with SPD are averse to violence and prone to all kinds of abuse. The he-said/she-said stuff is particularly useless here.)
(Minor edit: Also, committing spousal abuse is distinctly not a trait of schizoid personality disorder.)
People who decide to commit suicide sometimes appear to others to be feeling a lot better in the time between the decision and the final act. It can look externally like an upswing, like they've gained a new perspective and things aren't weighing on them as heavily. It sounds like he was conscious that his behavior was bad for other people, and he didn't believe he could change. That's a terrible position to be in: to feel you can't fully function in the presence of others but to feel their absence keenly as well, to be incapable of being with others without hurting them, but also incapable of being alone. I can't imagine how bad it would have to be to starve yourself to death, but I can't help wondering if that's what he did.
I suspect this is just an instance of the pretty common response to having made a decision that was weighing on you. If it's a big one (divorce, career change, etc.) I'm sure most of us have experienced this at least 2nd hand.
It's also stronger than that because the very likely "normal state" of your brain up to that point is severe depression, so you're not anywhere near what people might consider an average state of mind, and you're getting that strong of a kick.
You can ride that euphoria for quite a while even through some of the nagging doubts clawing their way back between the initial feeling and the last action. I doubt much research can be done for what I'm about to say (and I might be very wrong), but I have the feeling that when you're alone (mentally) you can ride that wave for a decent amount of time yet with just a very brief REAL interaction with another human being you can snap out of it. It might not fully dissipate but still break the trance-like state.
Not a lot of interactions might feel real like that, but when they do they can be life-changing (for obvious reasons) even when the subject matter is frivolous.
You'll likely never know just how many you changed, nor why.
We often notice how "easy"/quick it is to hurt somebody by saying something even light-hearted, but when it comes to that extreme you'd be surprised how very few words about mundane things can prevent a collapse (at least that time).
> We often notice how "easy"/quick it is to hurt somebody by saying something even light-hearted,
I've been very aware of this for the last ten years after realizing that despite my good intentions I could sometimes hurt others.
> but when it comes to that extreme you'd be surprised how very few words about mundane things can prevent a collapse (at least that time).
I think this will be important to keep in mind too going forward.
Thanks!
I've also experienced a lot of variance in my social group in terms of what things have really seemed to set them back.
I really like your point that seemingly "small" things can make a huge difference in someone else's state of mind. It's a strong argument for being as kind as you can by default, because you really have no idea what those around you are going through.
From the other side of things, I have had decent outcomes attempting to be both at once when someone is in crisis. Using my better judgment to figure out what to prioritize if conflict arises between the two - often based on what I perceived from the other person. There's time for advice, there's time for being heard, there's time to be.
I'd hardly call that an exact science, but I remind myself and anyone who I think should hear it that you shouldn't beat yourself up for trying to help and not "succeeding". That it's not your fault, nor is it the fault of the person in pain to do something so violent because they want to stop feeling that pain. Faulting leads nowhere constructive, even though later on I could find strength to figure out (and own up to) my own part of responsibility in life - which can be constructive. I guess the HN-equivalent discussion is all the debate around the naming of "git blame" :)
We just simply don't have enough information about the universe to really know better most of the time, and as a consequence of that you can't reliably predict much of it all even with the best and most genuine attempts to help. (I realize I am saying obvious things, but I'll leave it there)
To misquote a line from a favorite TV show;
"Fear accompanies the possibility of death. Calm shepherds its certainty." -Ka D'Argo, Farscape
I have attempted suicide, and that line fits for me. As another reader has pointed out there is also peace that comes from making a choice and knowing that your pain will be ending soon.
I hope you have that certainty in hope for a better future with you in it and that things are better for you now.
This is the point that nobody understands. It's HARD to do! The easy thing to do is let the momentum of living bring you to the next day. It's very difficult to over-ride instinct and cause life-threatening injury to oneself.
So I laugh when I hear "it takes more courage to live", or "they took the cowards way out".
Thank-you for your gentle words. To once again misquote (from a movie): "I'm not dead yet."
I am. I'm not.
Major Depressive Disorder is a bitch with a long memory.
I feel the trees mentioned are somehow involved too.
A good read and a good reminder that people are always much more complex than we think. I wonder sometimes if by being exposed so often to fairly flat depictions of characters in movies and on TV if folks forget that. I know I do sometimes.
One day they called me because at 8PM they were still at the office trying to crack a problem. After a short discussion, I suggested to use a (.*) regex to solve it, without seeing the code, that was the best I could do. Another call 30 min later, I suggested the same but on a different level. At the third call I told them that if they need to keep doing that, something is deeply flawed and they should rewrite it. No more calls came :)
I kinda see where this sentiment is coming from and it's really hard to convince people otherwise. People see movies like Rain Man and they see scientists with huge blackboards and they can't understand a thing so it must be a work of a genius.
But it is unfair to nice good coders who don't get praised as crazy good, cause they were not assholes to people.
I often take a look at a problem from multiple perspectives in order to try and find ways of minimizing the number of special cases or minimizing the number of states in the (perhaps implicit) finite state machine. This is often harder than just gut-feeling my way through the most intuitive ad-hoc coding solution.
For instance, if something has an optional timeout, I strongly prefer to write it as a non-optional timeout that defaults to something absurdly large (but not so large as to uncover multi-billion-year overflow bugs in libraries I'm using), usually 100 years. Maybe that's the hard way of doing it, but it gets rid of special handling of the optionality. I'm sure some colleagues would describe this as "the hardest way" to write an optional timeout, but it objectively has fewer code paths to reason about and test. Some people really hate seeing code that doesn't treat the no-timeout case as a special case, because they just find it uncomfortable to switch perspectives. They really want to code it up as they most naturally think about it, not in the way that yields the least twisted code.
In another case, one of my colleagues wrote some minor error recovery logic for a distributed system. I politely told him that his solution had too many implicit states and would get stuck if messages were delayed between systems. I proposed a simple 4-state machine: ok, trying_to_resovle, resolved, and taking_too_long_to_resolve. But, he was the one originally assigned the task, I didn't have any real authority, and it wasn't worth a fight. He said the way he wrote it was "easier" and "more natural." A few months down the road, his solution got stuck and never alerted us that it was taking too long to resolve the error, because messages got delayed between systems. In an afternoon, I whipped up my original proposal: since the recovery action is idempotent, when you go into the recovering state, just blindly fire off the recovery action every x seconds until you either get confirmation of resolution, or after y seconds give up and alert the humans that the problem might not be resolved. As far as I know, my 4-state FSM solution is still in production years later. I'm sure the author of the original felt a 4-state finite state machine was "the hardest way to write it."
In a third case, we have a pretty slick internal publish-subscribe system, but the error handling is just level-based: the subscriber provides a callback taking a boolean that indicates if the publisher has just gone from "bad" to "okay" (true) or "okay" to "bad" (false). Publishers have an upper time limit of inactivity after which they'll publish out a size zero message, so if a subscriber doesn't get any messages in that maximum idle period plus some configurable leeway, then the subscriber needs to assume the publisher has died and go into error mitigation/recovery/alerting logic. It's a pretty simple two-state FSM. The start state is the "bad" state. Every message results in the current time being recorded as the latest timestamp, and if the current state is "bad", transition to the "ok" state and pass true to the health status callback. If there's not an existing timer, create one for transitioning back to a "bad" state. When the timer goes off, check the latest recorded timestamp, and see if you really should transition to a "bad" state and call the health status callback with false. Otherwise, calculate the next timeout based on the latest heartbeat and reset the timer. The problem is that it starts out in the "bad" state, so in order to handle the case of publishers being dead at subscription time, all subscribers need to implement their own timer logic, and a lot of subscribers either don't try to handle the case or handle it incorrectly. I spent a while trying to convince the main developer for the pub-sub system to switch to a tristate FSM: start, bad, and ok. If you use 100 years for the default time to transition from the start state to the bad state, you'll get backward-compatible behavior for subscribers that just assume their first health status callback must be their initial notification that the publisher is live. The other state transitions were all really easy to work out. I sent him an email with a pretty state transition table showing all 4 possible state transiions, what triggered them, and which transitions triggered which health status callbacks. It's really dead simple: 3 states, 4 transitions, and it greatly simplified code on the subscriber side and stopped forcing all subscribers to implement their own poor solutions, and it was 100% backward compatible if default parameters were used. He kept on pushing for various ad-hoc solutions with more implicit states and state transitions because his gut feeling solution was easier for him than thinking in terms of a 3-state finite state machine. We went through a couple back-and-forths with me pointing out flaws in his ad-hoc proposals, and him not pointing out any flaws in my FSM, but just complaining that it was "complex". But, he didn't really mean "complex", he meant "hard"[0] because he wasn't accustomed to thinking in terms of state machines. With the extra corner cases and implicit states in his ad-hoc proposals, his solutions were more complex by an objective complexity metric. But, I'm sure he'd complain that my 3-state, 4-transition state machine was writing it "the hardest way."
I also strongly prefer to put throttles with very high limits in cases where we don't think throttles will ever be necessary. When the network admins are yelling at you that you're killing the network is no time to have to code up a throttle instead of just changing a configuration. I've had people argue that putting in throttling logic is too complicated. When some middlewear daemon got absurdly slow, I've also had to tell those same people "The middlewear admins are screaming. If the middlewear daemon's memory usage hits 3.75 GB, we need to kill your programs to keep the middlewear from falling over." Sometimes a colleague complaining about complexity is really trying to simplify things to a dangerous degree.
It can be quite difficult for folks like this (Disclaimer: IR1) to find happiness. Crowds, high-stimulus environments, external expectations can be quite chafing.
It can also be tempting to latch onto external things and people, to try to heal something that can't really be healed; but only mitigated (long story, but I went through that kind of thing, myself). I can understand anger, when they don't "fix" us.
I can also relate to the "sleep it off" thing. It would be sort of like Miranda, in Serenity.
It's a really sad story. There are quite a few people like that.
Or he could have bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety, C-PTSD or a number of other things.
All of those would explain what I’m seeing.
Personally, I’m bipolar and I share an a lot of traits with autism. You can’t know what’s happening in a person’s head unless you take time to talk to them or they’ve left a detailed journal.
I just found that I could relate to pretty much everything he was about (check out my code for some truly anal coding), with the exception of the abuse, but I could also easily see myself getting into that, if I had the trauma background (although I don't have that, exactly, I am quite familiar with what trauma can do to even neurotypicals).
I'm quite similar to this guy, some of us find a way to adapt to their environment, their differences, accepting the fact they can't "fix" that real-world environment, but.. that's a harmful experience, mostly for yourself
When I was working through my stuff, I often would have loved to do that.
It's really a special kind of hell. We can't stand being ourselves. I grew a beard, because I couldn't stand looking in the mirror. Shaving it was actually a watershed, for me.
Nark isn't credited in this particular Wired article (although he was credited in Thomson's first article for Wired [2]). This is the despite the fact that Nark, as far as I can tell, wrote the first mainstream article about Mostly Harmless and also was the first reporter to determine his identity.
I suppose Nicholas Thomson must have researched it independently for this new wired piece, explaining why it's being released so much later and with no mention of the reporter who "broke" the story.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526104
[1] https://www.adventure-journal.com/2020/12/the-mystery-of-dec...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/nameless-hiker-mostly-harmless-i...
Listen to a piano cover while you read the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmL12NRE4hQ
And if you liked this story, you will probably also like "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans" https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...
It's possible to disappear if nobody is looking for you and you have enough cash. Even the latter is somewhat optional, it just means you are much less comfortable.
Fundamentally in this world, many (most?) of us are redundant. A person missing here or there is only missed if their social web is wide enough.
This might interest you: I watched the quite disturbing documentary "Dark Days" a few years ago about homeless people living in subway and sewage tunnels under New York. They had built small apartments down there and even had electricity.
Here are the first 10 minutes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh4s78Db5OQ
Not as far as any link between the disappearance and D&D, no:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dallas_Egbert_III#Disapp...
> and there was a Tom Hanks movie about it.
Mazes and Monsters, the novel and the movie, were inspired by the (false) story of the event.
Had no idea the movie even existed.
>A genomics company, Othram, had taken his DNA and started to do cutting-edge genetic analysis to identify him. Collier County had sent them a bone fragment; they had extracted the hiker’s DNA and then begun searching for genetic similarities among people in a database called GEDmatch to build a tree of potential relatives. They learned that the hiker had Cajun roots; that his family had come from Assumption Parish, Louisiana; and that there were family members with the name Rodriguez. The founder of the company, David Mittelman, went on Facebook to talk about the case. I bought Facebook ads on my personal page to promote my story in the region of Louisiana where I thought his relatives likely lived.
> It reminded everyone that it is still possible to disappear.
Actually, it did the opposite
> No, she said. “I don't think I was committed to Vance as a human. I detached myself as a person to Vance, in that I didn't want to get too attached to a dead stranger. But I was committed to solving the case with others because it would be a great way to prove that people can do great things together.”
This sums up what I thought about the whole thing. The unsettling truth is that a man went off grid and strangers, looking for nothing more than a selfish desire to know, put him right back on it.
This is the "unsettling truth", the last paragraph, we all been so Twitter'ed everyone needs to look for more -
> Yet it’s hard not to look at this story with anything but sadness. The boy who raised his hand to get help from a passing truck—and whose body still bore the scar of that Louisiana field—had grown into the man who didn’t seek help as he died in a Florida swamp. A man was able to disappear in no small part because no one was looking for him. A man was harmed and maybe harmful. And then he went into the woods and became Mostly Harmless.
Would he garner the same amount of attention if he wasn't white or good looking?
Every day there are reports of many new missing/homeless/dead people, why is this man more important than all the others?
Identifying an unknown deceased person so the next of kin can be notified is part of a normal death investigation, even when there is no foul play.
He seems to have made a positive impact on people who met him on the trail, which is why those people wanted to find out who he was. They wanted to give his friends and family closure.
I don't think it's any different from when you ask a person to describe their pet, they describe themselves.
The fearful part is, how, everyone, decided that in good faith, they should work together, to unlock this past vs just leaving it to the government.
This is a case where it seemed he didn't like his parents, and probably didn't want/care to let them know of his demise.
His romantic life, same, probably didn't care to know either.
But, Mystery solved? We did it Reddit! /s