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369 points surprisetalk | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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anigbrowl ◴[] No.45068421[source]
Dear Author,

the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.

You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.

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JimmyBuckets ◴[] No.45069579[source]
This makes me sad. Please don't speak to people like this. The small pieces of humanity that people sincerely share are about the only thing that it is worth living for. What a dark world we would live in when our public sphere is filled with insincerity. I can't infer anything about you from a single comment but it must be incredibly isolating and lonely to talk to you when you are in this mindset. I can see your good intentions but you have communicated a sadness and defensiveness that presents cynicism as truth.
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1. anigbrowl ◴[] No.45070662[source]
I feel you've misread me as objecting to the author's sincerity - I don't think there's anything wrong with that! What I meant was that the internet, where all communication is necessarily quasi-personal and heavily mediated, is really not the best place to reach toward for mental health help, and that it's tremendously important to maintain or pursue genuine interpersonal contact, unmediated by screens or abstractions.