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Comment by apricot | Hacker News Reader

> Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL

As a parent of a teenager, I see them use "unalive" non-ironically as a synonym for "suicide" in all contexts, including IRL.

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If your teenager often talks about suicide, there could be some issue that needs to be resolved.

Sincerely the child of a parent who committed suicide. He mentioned suicide a few days before.

“Unalive” is sort of… awkward in that silly online way. But, we also have phrase like “off oneself,” or just euphemistically describing the person as having died. It’s always been a difficult topic to talk about, I don’t understand using it as a specific example of gen-Z fragility.

Just that they suck at coming up with pithy new slang terms.

They do have some awful slang.

I agree though I think they're picking it up from online censorship in this case, not being fragile.

Well that’s sad. They can’t even face the word?

It’s not about whether they can face it. The younger generations are more in tune with mental health and topics like suicide than any previous generation. The etymology of the euphemism was about avoiding online censorship, while its “IRL” usage was merely absorbed through familiarity from the online usage.

But unalive self is suicide and unalive is just death, right? For example, You can unalive other people against their will...

I've seen 'unalived' used as a synonym for 'died' or 'killed' by YouTube minecrafters (e.g. CaptainSparkles) to avoid YouTube's demonitization/censorship. For example, using "I was unalived by a skeleton." instead of "I was killed by a skeleton."

Literal Newspeak in action and we're doing nothing about it.

'An hero' came before it but that was as a meme.

Unalive is mostly to avoid censorship same as ahh. But once they enter common usage it's not really about censorship anymore.

The damaged interpret internet censorship and route around it.

It's not about being intune, it's that their narrative is shaped by the filters implemented by online interactions.

Online env ban the word suicide. No one uses it. unalive is not banned. Discussion is the same, word or no word.

Vernacular 101.

>more in tune with mental health and topics like suicide than any previous generation.

More in such a fad than any previous generation

I think it's just the term they immediately associate with the idea. They see "unalive" more than "suicide" online, so it becomes their default word for it. The fact that it originates in automated censorship avoidance is irrelevant.

It's getting blocked / shadow banned / demonetized on sites like YouTube, so naturally all commentary starts using a synonym.

Unalive is one of the popular ones, but it's a whole vocabulary at this point. Guess what "PDF file" stands for.

pedophile

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