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540 points drankl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.258s | source
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Arainach ◴[] No.44484857[source]
There are some interested points hidden in a of projection from the author here.

>We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.

....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.

This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.

If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.

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1. ianbicking ◴[] No.44486011[source]
Yes, the author is deciding How People Really Are by looking online, when the distortions of online discourse are also what she is complaining about.

On the other hand, most interactions I have with people are devoid of this kind of involved emotional inquiry. There is neither the non-psychological characterization of people ("he wears his heart on his sleeve") nor the psychological characterization ("he is anxiously attached"). I talk about these things with some of my family, some of my friends. Never with acquaintances. That is: in normal (not online) life people don't generally talk about having ADHD until they've reached a significant level of trust; and ADHD is about the easiest thing to talk about compared to any other issue.

Maybe this an artifact of the more reserved WASPish circles I run in. We're all very polite. We don't give each other nicknames. We don't gossip. We avoid making assumptions about a person's character. I don't think this serves us particularly well... and maybe therapy talk is our way of getting past this, couching these ideas in acceptably academic language. But without that language (and even with that language) we mostly just don't talk about it.