Reddit, Facebook, online forum
How ‘miserable’ people get drawn
Having been addicted to online forums when I was battling my depression, I understand the significance of these mediums for those living under miserable circumstances.
Their miserable circumstances do not get sincerely recognised or even understood to a reasonable depth. Often they misconstrue how they got to where they are.
Such miseries result from the people they share most of their life with, such as family. Apparent threats (i.e., poverty) to one’s life are not the cause of misery. These threats originate from human actions and the incapabilities to make good life decisions and thrive in healthy relationships.
To make it even worse, the immediate family members in these settings tend to demonstrate a lack of emotional intelligence, paranoia, and manipulative behaviour, which isolate the subject person from the rest of the world. Isolation and scrutiny from immediate family members shape the subject’s outlook on life particularly negatively.
The lifetime of isolation makes these people yearn for a specific outlet to vent out their negative emotions.
Through participating in these online forums such as Reddit, these people achieve:
- To reinforce that their negative outlook on life is universally accurate and is widely accepted. They specifically engage in discussions about social issues, political scandals, and other controversial subjects. Underneath this facade that they are concerned about important topics, and they seek justice, there is a damaged self with a severe narcissistic injury.
- To exert that they are correct once and for all. Their thoughts, opinions, and feelings are never valued in real life. They are desperate to pick on the pettiest and most insignificant error in other users’ comments to prove that they are correct. This assurance allows their crumbling ego to stretch a bit further and gives them a bit of space to breathe. It never provides oneself with a sense of victory or satisfaction.
It is a means of survival for them, and they will spend extraordinary amounts of time fending off opposing arguments. It is terrifying for them to imagine that even the internet is full of people who cannot embrace their opinions. To them their thoughts are equivalent to their flesh and bone. In a healthier setting, your thoughts and opinions are meant to be constantly challenged as a part of learning curve. Unfortunately some people will rather choose to deny due to their inability to separate their knowledge/opinions from their actual self and identity.
These people do tend to have black and white, or all or nothing approach to shaping their opinions. This attitude is influenced by their parents’ narrow views and tumultuous and volatile family dynamics. Flaws in their arguments are generally unavoidable.
Once they engage in these keyboard battles, they can go for months. A narcissistic injury gives the subject person strength and dedication to preserve what they only have. From the bystander’s point of view, it seems a complete waste of time.
- To seek validation and comfort from strangers. As they do not matter to their own family or immediate surroundings, they are afraid to reach out to anyone in the physical world in case of rejection. They are well aware that they can only seek comfort and acceptance from strangers. But they do not know how to in the real world. You can only start discovering more about a person once you spend more time making in-depth conversations.
On the contrary, the forums leave behind the traces of peoples’ opinions and feelings quite casually. It allows any user to get a false impression that they obtained a clear understanding of what others on this forum are thinking. By spending a fraction of time and effort, the subject person feels they can find people they can emotionally connect with relatively easily.
They do not realise that the level of validation, acceptance, and care the subject person seeks from an anonymous forum user is quite intense. It is that of a newborn crying every 30 minutes to seek attention from its mother.
No matter how many people they gather across the world wide web, it will not substitute the care they never got as a child. The same goes for those looking for parent figure qualities in their romantic partners.
No one other than their genuine parents will have the opportunity to smother them with unconditional care and a non-judgemental attitude towards their behaviours. Those days are gone regardless of whether you, unfortunately, did not receive it.
It is pretty sad to see these people wasting their youth to compensate for what they haven’t got in their real life. Being buried in trauma does cause irreversible damage to one’s life. These are their times in their 20s, 30s, and even later stages in life they will never get back.
