Emotional overinvestment and bad online behavior

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One of the culture writers I’ve followed over the years, Freddie deBoer, wrote a thing today on how the larger sense of meaninglessness in our culture leads people to get WAY too wrapped up in their fandoms (in sports, TV shows, comics, etc.), which in turn leads to all sorts of horrible behavior online. I couldn’t help seeing some parts of this forum in his description.

The post is subscriber-only, so I don’t want to put the whole thing here, but these parts–especially on NBA fandom–sounded eerily familiar:

This collapse in meaning has left people so at sea that they have attempted to find transcendent meaning in places that can’t possibly produce it. Fearing that they are nothing, they become “Marvel movie fan” or “Reddit superuser” or “zealous advocate for analytics in baseball” or “Taylor Swift stan.” In other words, they attach their sense of self to the kinds of personal affinities and allegiances that, while fun and an important part of life, can never really provide the meaning they’re looking for.

…If you have a healthy sense of self and identity that goes beyond what you like and you meet someone who doesn’t like what you like, hey, whatever. That’s taste. But if your culture has systematically denied you meaning to the point where you start insisting that loving the Marvel movies is who you are , and someone comes along and calls them childish commodities, then you can’t just live with that disagreement. You have to destroy the person who voices it. Because they’re not just criticizing something you like, they’re undermining your very self.

…So we find yourself in a world where if [an NBA fan says] “they’re really playing hard today,” some self-satisfied Enlightened Fan dipshit is going to say, “uh, source for this claim???” It sucks. But this condition exists, I suspect, because for that dipshit the performance of superior expertise and enlightenment provokes a certain kind of order: I don’t know what I am, I don’t know if my life is enviable, I don’t feel confident in my day-to-day decisions, but by God, I will be smarter than the average NBA fan. I will be that, if nothing else. This is no fun if you think that watching basketball should be fun and casual and that the way you enjoy sports shouldn’t be taken as some sort of existential marker of your being. But I also suspect that it’s no good for that NBA hipster, either; I suspect that, in the bigger picture, it’s doing very little of good for him emotionally.

The collapse of meaning has led to a vast amount of emotional overinvestment , is how I would sum this all up. Things that should not be load-bearing elements of personality are being given that task, awkwardly. The result is people defending their tastes as their selves and, in so doing, turning every shared cultural space into a constantly-boiling cauldron of hurt feelings and recrimination. …I really do think that in a certain direct sense the problem with the internet is that people care too much about things and it would be better for everybody if we all chilled out.

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EXCELLENT, brother! This should be required reading in this place. Some people’s triggers are flaring up like a pack of hemorrhoids over who some online dude’s favorite QB is. LOL.

Even laying out bait to try to draw someone into their drama triangle. Needing cortisol hits like it’s oxygen.

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In general, my advice for every human being on the planet at the moment (including myself) is exactly that: chill the eff out, take a breath, geez…

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For sure. Loving the humans is so much better for ourselves. The perceived attacks (which aren’t really attacks, if you breathe), dont’ need to trigger us.

That said, I’m pissed that Fox didn’t get more playing time.

angry no way GIF

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While I agree with a lot of what’s said, I don’t attribute it to a collapse in meaning or their fear of being nothing. On the contrary, some are quite proud of their self.

Ultimately, there is an unhealthy sense of self, so I don’t mean to nitpick too much. But even then, my perception is that people in American society are poorly conditioned for objectivity. It starts in public school and continues through media influences.

That Reddit Superuser has influencers. If he’s a superuser in a sports sub, he’s probably influenced by the likes of Cowherd and patterns his communication after him. Well, that works if you’re instigating people to call in and hate on the people he’s hating on, or even drawing attention to himself, but in real life you’re just an ass.

ETA:
In my estimation, this is the LEAST used and MOST greatly missed communication tactic:

Part of it is decoupling your own sense of worth from having to be right. In a public forum, the words you’re exchanging are “in front of others” and those defensive mechanisms are going to be in play. Let go of your own pride and consider how the other might be reacting out of his own pride. Disregard yours (to a point) favoring the other’s so that he may be a more willing listener. If all else fails, walk away.

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I agree with everything you’ve said here, especially the part about learning how to argue in a way that lets everyone save face. Yes, part of that is having no formal instruction in how to argue with someone in good faith. But I think a lot of it is driven by the warped incentives that online discourse (shudder) creates, that most of us are not even aware of being influenced by. Meaning that the kinds of behavior that earn you visibility and status and influence in a community–especially an online community–are not necessarily aligned, at all, with the purported goals of that community.

So, for example, you could participate in a Lions forum where the stated goal is to have a place for constructive, interesting debate about Lions football where everybody feels free to participate. You may even believe in that mission when you see it written at the top of the forum. But the things that get you eyeballs and hearts and applause (not always, but often) will be crushing and humiliating someone on the other side of an argument. So you’re incentivized to do that–even if that undermines what the community is supposed to be about. (I say this as someone who has been guilty of this behavior, who’s trying to be more self-aware these days and not always succeeding.)

But I do think DeBoer is correct, at least in part, on the underlying cause of all this. The incentives for bad behavior may be baked into social media and online communities, but it’s the lack of * any * shared sense of right and wrong behavior that allows them to flourish unchecked. And that’s what DeBoer is driving at in the earlier parts of this essay, which I didn’t include. Let me post more of his argument:

…A small but vocal subset of Star Wars fans harass an actress to the point that she quits social media. A very different small but vocal subset of Star Wars fans sets out to purge Tumblr of a “ship” they find problematic. Otherwise-functional grownup professionals make death threats on tennis forums, spurred by debates over which racket brand is best. Preference for sitcoms is taken to reveal not what just taste in bullshit assembly line jokes but one’s entire political self. Adults become so invested in their “fandom” of cartoons that they get banned from Twitter for aggressive and threatening posts. Baking subreddits explode into toxic recriminations, with various sides using terms like “Nazi” and “bigot.” Obscure disagreements about influences on a particular anime lead to SWATtings that risk real lives. Casual conversations about football at the bar turn into culture war exchanges where the participants feel that they are not just staking out a position on a specific question about sports but defending their entire way of life. Different schools of thought on weightlifting become holy wars. Everyone feels that social media in particular and the internet in general have become simply insufferable, that people have lost the ability to interact with proportionality and perspective. Why? I suspect a lot of it has to do with the pervasive feeling that nothing has any meaning anymore, and with an attendant effort to find that meaning in places it can’t be found.

…The last century or several centuries have seen a widespread and persistent assault on any type of transcendent meaning, with previously-settled questions forced open, often into acrimonious debates that have raged for decades. Religion was undermined, as were many social norms and codes, as was the comprehensibility of many types of art, as was the inevitability and beneficence of how our society was structured, as were the basic foundations of physical reality, down to the terms of causality. The gender binary has been troubled in recent decades and may one day be torn down entirely, and the traditional practice of two-partner romantic and sexual commitments has slowly been subverted. One way or the other, the footing of meaning on which individual people once stood has crumbled. (For a reason, hold your powder.) I don’t have any personal investment in patriotism or religion or the gender binary, myself, but I understand them to have been part of a larger quilt of order that once provided people, certain types of people, with a durable sense of how the world was meant to operate.

Put it this way: there was a time when most Americans would at least understand the term “the American dream” in a good-faith way, relating it to an assumption of opportunity and just rewards. They might personally reject the concept or question its larger truth, but they would be able to interact with it understanding that most people around them believed it sincerely. Now, that phrase and others like it come to us pre-ironized; some still burn a candle for the idea, but nobody assumes that most people take it seriously. To take the American dream seriously in media or academia today is easily the contrarian stance.

The size and shape of such a dynamic is impossible to really quantify, given its necessarily vague boundaries. Perhaps I imagine more unanimity of belief, or at least more psychic orderliness stemming from traditional belief, than ever existed. I do think it’s fair to say, though, that a typical American citizen of ordinary financial security and normal circumstances had a stronger grasp on how to be a person back in 1950 than we do now. I don’t think that era was better - in most ways it was immeasurably worse, see below - but I do think that an awful lot of troubling social and cultural phenomena in the 21st century stem from a collapse in traditional understandings of how people should be and act that came before it.

[To summarize, DeBoer notes that overturning those traditional ways of understanding and placing oneself in a larger context does constitute progress, but that progress created its own issues: “Traditional forms of meaning did not collapse for no reason. They were rejected by those for whom they did not work, and no one should romanticize them…Such changes can be salutary while still leaving holes in our understanding of who we are, though.”]

…The problem is that we have never gotten around to replacing these old ways of meaning with anything coherent. Part of the issue is that tearing shit down is easier and more fun than building shit up, and this is as true in ideology and meaning as it is in physical construction. So many of the intellectual and artistic traditions of the 20th century, ones that endure and have value, were fundamentally about rejecting the old…

Now, we have several generations of people who were born after the collapse of traditional ways of meaning, after the existentialists and the hippies and punk and postmodernism and irony-in-everything. We have young people today who simply do not know what a sincere expression of cultural values would be like; everything they’ve ever heard has come wrapped in sneer quotes. And I think what we’ve discovered, as a species, is that living in this space of being totally unmoored at all times is not freeing. Rather it’s a nightmare of meaninglessness and uncertainty. When all of the old markers of adulthood have been so undermined and ironized (the job, the marriage, the kids, the two-car garage), how do you know that you’re moving forward? That you’re being what a person is supposed to be?

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Yeah the online world would be a much better place if people treated conversations there exactly how you would have them if you were face to face. People just tend to treat each other better one on one live and in person. There is a reason so many friendships from the past have been completely ruined by the FB machine. (I’m one of the few it seems in my age group who has never had a FB account). My wife will say things like wow… did you know your friend X was such a lib?? I say no because we never talked about politics when we were coming up. We were talking about how Deep Purple’s “Gypsy’s Kiss” was a vastly underrated tune as we were discovering that when you try to make cheese sticks in the Fry Daddy, that you should freeze the cheese sticks first, not put them in at room temperature…

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Most definitely. In addition to the toxic incentives baked into social media, the fact that you don’t have to worry about the potential consequences of being a dick to somebody the way you do if they’re standing in front of you is a big problem.

And yeah, I’ve long felt that the world was a much better place when I didn’t know (or need to know) what every random person I passed in the street was thinking or believing. Ignorance was bliss. In the meatspace world, it’s actually important to your immediate comfort and physical safety to figure out a way to exist with other people around you, and that tends to sand down the rough edges for at least most interactions with other people most of the time. Online, not so much.

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Thanks for the additional quotes. That puts his comments into clearer context.

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Good thread man. I dropped off social media a few years ago. Can’t stand the look at me, I don’t care I’m right I’m gonna yell as loud as I can until I get what I want society. Everyone it seems is triggered by every thing. I live in my own little world. Quit watching the news about 5 years ago. I like it better this way. I have no idea what happened to society the past 10 years that everyone is offened by anything.

It seems being able to hide behind a keyboard has regressed society in socially appropriate behavior.

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Man, I am super jealous. Not even kidding, you are almost certainly mentally healthier than 95% of people in this country.

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My brother has had a long standing joke that his greatest ability to be of service to mankind would be to have carte blanche to “thin the herd” by two people a day.

I mean, it’s not Thanos level overkill, right?

But yes, consequences for boorish behavior used to mean getting an ass whooping. Probably need to swing back towards that end of the pendulum, figuratively, online, without doing the whole Chinese Social Credit Score or Big Tech speech censorship unhealthy extremes.

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I’ve got 15 million thoughts on this subject. In the end since you are talking about millions of people there are so many different reasons each person behaves the way they do online. And some people will act one way in one community and then another way in another community.

One variable I’m going to throw into the mix (it may be covered in the article) is that real life interactions are dominated by extroverts while online interactions are dominated by introverts.

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End of the day, I think human beings are totally unprepared to be instantly connected with every other person and industry and interest group on the planet, or to grapple with all the consequences of that. Our brains just are not made to function at that scale. Over the next century or so, I expect our culture and laws and modes of behavior will adjust. But the technology changes we’re going through are as disruptive as the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, maybe more so. It’s going to take some time for humanity to work through it, and things may well get ugly(er) along the way.

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Really good observation - online is more like talking in your own head…almost like not even being with another human. No consequences of any sort (some consequences are “good” and some are “bad”). Online is like living in your own headspace, if you are not conscious to the fact that you are talking to humans.

I love how it more flagrantly points out the extent that we are all projecting our own inner dialogue and speaking how we speak to ourselves…only toward others.

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That is a very interesting observation. I’ve not thought of it in relation to online social interaction.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that one of the undertones of discussions regarding the disease that shall not be named is that there seem to be a lot of introverts who like the world better with far, far less social interaction.

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Introverts by nature desire deeper level interactions with less people vs more shallow interactions with more people.

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I try to start every online disagreement with the assumption that the other person is acting in good faith. If they are a troll, they will soon reveal themselves and I’ll know to move on. If you don’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt, then you can’t exchange ideas and nobody learns anything. Unfortunately the kneejerk reaction on much of the internet is to gang up on anyone who’s opinions aren’t fully aligned with the strongest personalities on the sites or forums.

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The way I try to flush out a genuine interaction vs someone with something else on their mind is to try to get them to concede a simple point. Someone who will say 2+2 is 4 or the sky is blue is someone that is easy to proceed with. But people with an agenda or a weird mentality will fight 2+2 or sky is blue. In those scenarios I need to just walk away. But my mentality is to dig in deeper and deeper. Its not healthy and I don’t suggest it. :joy:

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Lots of truth to this. Also, lots of people that label themselves introverts, really are not introverts. SO important to explore yourself, so you know …not only what you like…but WHY?
Many assume if a human feels drained from being in public, they are an introvert. While it is true that they have less energy in public, what if it is because they have trust issues? :wink:
Most people look at things and think to themselves, “I’m just that way,” regardless if it’s introvert/extrovert, if it’s fun for connection, significance, or merely meeting seeking comfort (or a change of scenery, on the other side of it).

Some people are more averse to expanding their comfort zone. For these reasons, I don’t like labels, even ones like introvert/extrovert.

People would call me an extrovert, for sure. That said, I used to be more extroverted when I was younger and needed more significance. I am charismatic and handsome, and that was a way that I met my needs, when I was younger. I got attention that I didn’t get when I was a kid, so it felt great.

I could go much deeper, but I’m going to keep this relatively short. When I was more outgoing, I was doing some of it out of bravery - “Putting myself out there,” if you will. That’s great, and it’s expansive, but there is also some lack of flow to it. It was very aligned for me at that time in my life. Now, after showing people who I am, and seeing that so many like-to-love me, I don’t need to reach for it as much, because I am more accepting of myself and dont’ need the external validation from others.

“Introverts,” can be the opposite. They can seek safety more than validation, and view even the idea of being judged by others, or “putting up with other ppl’s bullshit,” as draining. When people work with me, I show them that the only person we truly need to trust is ourselves. As it pertains to others, replace the word trust with “count on.” What can I count on them for/not count on them for? This helps to reduce judgement, and not throw the baby out with the bath water, when it comes to other humans. I can count on some ppl to be amazing, some are fun, some are triggered AF and constantly insecure.

I have zero desire to go downtown and party anymore. I don’t need the validation of sleeping w/tons of women, being able to drink a lot, the attention I used to get from going to karaoke, etc, etc. Am I moreintroverted? Is the person who learns to trust more and relax, while letting go of judgement more extroverted? Or…is the truth in the middle, as we get to know ourselves better.

SO important to look internally, becuase the only REAL freedom in the world is being your 100% authentic self. If you are frequently triggered, you absolutely can have more freedom in life. The cage that we put ourselves in is an energetic cage. By releasing the energy of our stories we have less judgement toward ourselves, toward others, and toward the world.

I know I was fairly shallow with this. I could literally write a book worth of content on this topic.

I absolutely LOVE this article, these principles, this discussion, and you handsome MF’rz.

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