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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the shadowbanned comments here. This article is hilarious to read, but I am willing to be cognizant of how common this level of anxiety is.

This person receives a follow and a couple DMs from someone that used to undermine their self esteem. Instead of saying anything, instead of just ignoring them, they wonder about a half dozen scenarios of horniness that completely misunderstand men in general, then they go to Twitter and to a PhD Sociologist (a "doctor") to get a variety of explanations.

The culmination being this dissertation style thought piece.

Talk about spiraling. Wow.

Are a lot of people like this such that I should stop laughing and "validate" this behavior? I can do it. But only if consensus says so. My whole modus operandi is blending in for status.

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The culmination being this dissertation style thought piece

I think that's too generous. A dissertation has a thesis. This article just sort of meanders around with no particular point to make. She says how "utterly astonishing" receiving a message from this man was and how she "had questions" but never bothers trying to answer them. She speaks with a philosophy lecturer and gets a bunch of stories from other people about their experience talking to their bullies but doesn't care anything about her own. I was really hoping at the end she'd tie it all together by having a conversation with her former bully and telling us how it made her feel but she just...stops. It's not an article; it's just a list of anecdotes from other people.

I'm always a little frustrated when I see a page that obviously comes from someone whose main concern was having an article to write instead of having a subject they care about so much they wanted to write an article about it, and this was pretty clearly the former.

I'm not proud of everything I've done in the past. I've thought about reaching out to apologize but I think ultimately it's a selfish thing to do. I don't want to drag up old memories or cause this sort of anxious reaction in someone. Time has passed and the kindest thing I can do now is to stay out of their life.

> This person receives a follow and a couple DMs

No, this person ignored a couple DMs and follows, then had to deal with the perpetrator contacting their friends and trying to goad them into meeting. Then after that failed, continued to try to follow the person on LinkedIn and other sites. That's called stalking and it's a real problem.

> from someone that used to undermine their self esteem.

You don't know that. The author didn't say what the problem was other than that the perpetrator was a bully. They could have been a rapist for all you know.

> Instead of saying anything, instead of just ignoring them,

They tried that and it didn't work! They gave a clear signal that this is not OK, and whatever the perpetrator wants to say, the author doesn't want to hear it. And yet, the perpetrator persisted in trying to find other ways to get the author to do something they didn't want to do.

> Talk about spiraling. Wow.

Yeah, this isn't spiraling. This is pointing out a real issue that some people have with boundaries, and the people around them ignoring it or being too afraid to tell them. Repeatedly contacting someone from your past who doesn't want to be contacted is not cool no matter why you want to contact them.

> Are a lot of people like this such that I should stop laughing and "validate" this behavior?

I mean, if you don't want a be a dick, don't laugh at other people's pain, even if you don't understand it. But you do you.

Everything you wrote was about Kimberley Bond's story. Everything I wrote was about the author Rachel Thompson's story. All good, easy mistake to make given this author's writing style.

The article is written in first person, and the author is a professional writer. Her bio: "Based in the UK, Rachel writes about sex, relationships, and online culture."

I don't think she was spiraling. I think she's just doing her job.

> instead of just ignoring them, they wonder about a half dozen scenarios of horniness

Good journalists shouldn't ignore uncomfortable situations, otherwise there would be very little to write about.

useful context that she has an incentivize to act this way. too bad its for Mashable, so she has to get these contrived sources to complete her assignment.

I highly recommend everyone review the shadowbanned comment (and account) in question before agreeing with this comment. It puts on display a shocking lack of humanity, and I'd hope most folks I interact with on this site have a little bit more empathy toward the very real affliction of emotional trauma than is on display in this thread so far.

Yeah the words I use aren't as harsh, and I'm willing to adjust.... if there is really consensus in making an accomodating world for people like this instead of ...... yeah a more Machiavellian outcome for people that can't cope, incentivizing people to figure out how to cope or disregard some stimuli.

> Instead of saying anything, instead of just ignoring them, they wonder about a half dozen scenarios of horniness that completely misunderstand men in general

Yeah, I kind of wonder if the author was trying to validate her ego. Some of her statements just seem like bragging.

For what it's worth; I've personally been in this situation, randomly receiving two apologies from childhood bullies whom I completely forgot about. I just took the apologies at face value, replied that I accepted, and continued to not give them any thought. I didn't think those people were flirting or asking for favors, and even if they were...they still wouldn't be worth dwelling on.

Yeah. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. I guess I would blame social media? I don't know. Or maybe we just don't teach kids how to deal with this anymore.

That a grown adult would still be dwelling on shit from high school is something that I cannot fathom. I was a complete backwards nerd in high school, didn't know how to socialize, didn't know how to talk to girls, didn't play sports, loved math, science, and computers, all the stereotypical attributes. In many ways I still am that person. I got the stereotypical treatment back then, but it's ancient history. High school kids are idiots for the most part, why would you be letting their idiocy back then affect you as a grown, independent adult today. Have some self respect for pete's sake.

> I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school.

This is probably 99% survivorship bias. You don't end up reading about the feelings emotionally mature people on the Internet because they it's not very interesting to read about their feeling or experiences.

Here's trick I try to use whenever I find myself believing some generalization about people: Ask myself "How many people do I know in person that fit this generalization?"

Now, certainly, my in-person circle is a biased sample in many ways. But the set of poeple you end up reading about on the Internet is also highly biased and in particularly skewed ways. If I find that a generalization doesn't fit most of the people I know, I discard it as mostly a consequence of the natural bias that humans prefer negative news about bad people.

Almost everyone is fine.

> High school kids are idiots for the most part, why would you be letting their idiocy back then affect you as a grown, independent adult today. Have some self respect for pete's sake.

Many people enter high school not just with the random abuse and misbehavior of their fellow kids but also other trauma from earlier in their life. If they were, say, abandoned by their parents, sexually abused by a neighbor, or suffered some other violent act, it may not be so easy to "have some self-respect for pete's sake."

Or, put less charitably, what it is about you that prevents you from feeling compassion towards people that are struggling emotionally and instead instead leads you to react in frustration? Who are you to judge? Maybe you aren't as fully healed as you'd like to believe either.

> Yeah. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. I guess I would blame social media? I don't know. Or maybe we just don't teach kids how to deal with this anymore.

As a millenial, I agree with this. It took me until I hit 30 before actually reaching something resembling healthy emotional maturity. It took a lot of really painful experiences for me and a lot of self-reflection for that to happen.

They focus on the "healing", it strikes me as so ridiculous. It is a choice to think about the ancient past and key words like healing are all implicitly based on chosing to bother thinking about something in the first place.

A couple decades back when I told my parents I wasn't interested in their religion anymore and couldn't deal with the guilt of dishonestly letting them believe I was, they immediately blamed themselves thinking the root cause was all the crappy stuff they did when I was a kid. I was totally shocked, even as a teen I didn't take most any of it seriously. In my mind, it was never part of my "real life" because I was just so many months away from leaving their home forever. Likewise with the nonsense events in 4 years of highschool.

People really need to be told they have a choice to think about something or not, I guess.

How do you know someone is shadowbanned and how can you read their comments?

for some users there is a "showdead" option in your profile settings. set it to yes, if the option is available for you. it might be based on karma, but HN has a lot of anti-patterns.

this will show you flagged and shadowbanned comments. someone is shadowbanned if all their comments are not visible by default. its kind of unique that there is an option for us to see those comments.

you can always check if you are shadowbanned by viewing your profile or a recent thread you commented on in an incognito browser. always useful to check.

go to your settings and enable “show dead”

When you virtue signaled "doctor" in quotes I immediately knew which political ideology you subscribe to. In my experience a lot of bullies subscribe to the same ideology. "F*ck your feelings" is an actual, popular political slogan within that set.

Its in quotes because I realized I didn't know what kind of doctor, Dr Andrew Kinton was, just from the article. Did she go to a doctor (reinforcing the point I was making)? Did she got to a therapist (reinforcing the point I was making)? Is this lecturer practicing as any of those at all (that would be... hilarious in the context of spiraling but definitely something I should accurately write)? I looked him up and he only has a PhD - hence the Doctor - and only lectures on some topics like sociology at the university, in the United Kingdom. So she didn't go to a doctor for treatment, she went to someone that is nominally authorized to have Dr in their name. Hence "doctor".

Which political ideology is that suggesting, by the way?

I'm having a hard time determining which political party you are ascribing this to, as I've heard variations of this from both.

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