So I moved back to my city after 7 years where my family lives.
It’s been 2 years but I never really enjoyed people here. Mostly people I met were from my previous circles, family, school friends and their partners.
I always thought something was off and maybe over time I will figure things out but it was just not happening.
Yesterday I went to dinner with my partners friends and damn it was whole different vibe. As if it’s a different culture. I really enjoyed talking and was genuinely interested in next meeting.
Resparked my joy in meeting people and I guess I was with wrong people and there are people who are out there who vibe match with me but it’s so hard to find them.
Yeah, I agree it’s really social media shit.
I had no problems socializing 10-20 years ago. Now it’s incredibly difficult because people don’t really want to socialize anymore so much as be validated incessantly. It’s warped people’s brains to think any minor discomfort is this horrible thing, and anyone who disagrees with you is a raging asshole.
In my college days I used to like being around people who disagreed with me and talking about those disagreements. That is how I made most of my friends Now that is all but impossible. The second you disagree now, no matter how trivial, people demonize you and start saying crazy over the top conclusions about how evil and awful you are. I used to like my friends because they were different than me… now people hate anything different than themselves.
Literally, I’ve had many of my dates the past few years scream at me what a racist piece of shit I am for the books I read, and also for the books I don’t read. Mostly because I read classics and to people’s mind anyone author born before 1970 is a racist piece of shit or something. I do not understand how people have normalized this insanity. I am still reading the same books I have always read for decades… but now instead of being viewed as a positive it’s viewed with straight up delusional hostility. Apparently reading Dostoevsky makes me a conservative Pro-Putin, anti lgbt, racist now…
It’s true.
I’m lucky to have a lot of friends via the roller derby community, but I’m a white man in a largely liberal and activist community, so my mantra whenever any controversial topic comes up is: “I don’t feel it’s my place to speak on that” or “I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that”. (Which in a lot of cases is probably true.)
Those friends end up being surface-level in a lot of ways because I love the sport and can’t risk accidentally saying something that offends someone and risk losing my access to it, because if you say the wrong thing, malice is always assumed and there’s simply no grace given for error.
that’s exactly why i left my communities/hobby activities. I can’t live my life that way. It’s miserable being around miserable people who want to be offended by everything. like you want to play a board game, and there are only male/female pieces and the person goes on a rant about how awful and cruel and abusive you are for choosing that game because it’s not ‘gender inclusive’. it’s a fucking game. it’s not reality. it’s supposed to be simple. just like the pieces only come in one color and not 1000s.
In a personal relationship it’s called ‘walking on eggshells’ and it’s a form of emotional abuse. I don’t want to hang out with emotionally abusive people. The irrational insane abusive people should be shunned, not the people who are well-intentioned, but for some reason we’ve inverted this now and the insane abusive people get catered to as being far more valuable and special than the non abusive people.
It can be like that for sure. I accidentally called a trans skater ‘she’ three years ago, and they got over it and understood it was a mistake, but one of the refs in the league still won’t talk to me. So petty and stupid how people can be.
honestly, i have had the SAME experience. the trans people are way more chill than the non-trans people who think they are ‘fighting’ on behalf of trans people. they are drunk on self-righteousness. i got more shit about BLM from white women who had zero black friends, than i ever did from a black person. multiple times I got screamed at for not attending a BLM protest… by a woman who didn’t herself attend and would say ‘i woudln’t feel safe attending a blm protest as a white woman’. totally ignorant of her own racism inherent in that statement.