My pet peeve it "psychologist say".
First of all, no, we don't say any of that. Second, who are these magic ethereal psychologist. Because, unless you quote a peer reviewed paper, your argument is void. And even then you could be, as is often the case, grossly misinterpreting or misrepresenting the field.
Everytime I see videos like that, I have to remember the promise I made to myself not to become like my father.
It gets harder every year.i find it helps me to view other people explicitly as separate entities with free will.
Makes it harder to do any sort of funny business when you're more aware of their autonomy on a fundamental level.
but I am your father
That's not true! That's impossible!
In my experience, yeah tiktok addicts are like this...
...but so are tumblr addicts.
They just have a more esoteric/niche set of triggering conditioms, as well as a more esoteric/niche vocabulary used when emphatically proclaiming something hysterical, and they're also angry that you have 0 clue what 90% of the terms or events or people or characters they're referring to are.
Our species is more alone than we've ever been even though our numbers are greater than they've ever been and our means for reaching each other is nearly limitless.
Because everyone is so, so deeply scared of social rejection, an instinct bred into us through ice ages and apocalypses where we needed each other to survive, that the fear of rejections has become one of our primary social motivators. People now have a choice of trying to find social circles and groups that they can adapt to or compromise with like we've struggled through for thousands of years, or withdraw into spaces that prevent us from ever having to experience even a chance of rejection. Feel awkward when a stranger says hello? You can choose to practice getting better at responding to others, experience failures as well as successes, or you can retreat to a place where "hello" means oppression and you don't ever need to ever risk pain by responding.
This is just a tiny, micro-slice of the issue but EVERYONE does this, and if you think you don't, you are also stuck in the film-strip post-hoc rationalizing your every feeling.
You’re absolutely right about how deeply the fear of rejection is embedded in us—it's instinctual, a relic of survival. But here’s the thing: in our modern world, that same fear doesn’t protect us the way it once did. Instead, it traps us. It makes us bend and shape ourselves to fit into spaces we may not even want to be in, just to avoid discomfort.
The truth is, we all need connection, but the path to genuine connection isn’t through constant adaptation or hiding in safety bubbles—it’s through authenticity. When you stop worrying so much about how others perceive you and start living for yourself, two things happen: you begin to feel freer and more at peace, and your openness creates a magnetism that draws others toward you.
Awkwardness, rejection, and failure? They’re inevitable, but they also don’t define you. Each time you stop rationalizing avoidance and choose to show up as your full self, you break that fear’s hold on you. You discover what really matters: living authentically, for you, not for validation or social survival.
That’s where real strength comes from—not from being universally accepted but from no longer needing to be. And ironically, the less you care about how others perceive you, the more meaningful connections you end up making.
Engaging in small talk is "nicebombing" and is psychopathic behaviour? Now I have seen everything...
Reminds me of how any guy who develops feelings for a woman, gets rejected and feels upset at being heartbroken is labelled a Nice Guy™, or worse, an incel.
Sometimes I wonder if an external influence of some kind has been messing with the psyche of the modern generations. Maybe decades of austerity, flouride in tap water, social media addiction, microplastics or vape fluids containing far nastier chemicals than nicotine?
feels upset at being heartbroken
Here's where the word "upset" having multiple meanings can be a problem.
If he is upset, as in sad and/or confused, ok, that's a reasonably expected reaction.
If he is upset as in angry about being turned down, then he's being pretty entitled and has criticism coming.
In terms of things having gone too far, it's simple enough. We are connected all the time and we can find al sorts of echo chambers and be in contact with that circle 24/7 using online engagement where we can just turn off/ban anyone that we don't feel like dealing with. This fosters a strange mix of overthinking things, contagious pessimism, and isolationist behavior. People need more balance with more real life interaction.
Since when is vague a verb?
Verbing weirds language.
"Edit" and "access" also weren't originally verbs. Same with "babysit" and "eavesdrop". Backformation and category changing are common and perfectly natural processes in English.
Edit: This isn't directed at the OP of this comment chain, but I'm always surprised by the crazy amount of ignorant prescriptivism I see all over Lemmy. Like, I expected that shit on Reddit, but I thought we were better than that here, especially since literally the only real reason for prescriptivism is sowing class division and excluding people for not having access to the secret knowledge of "correct" (yuck!) grammar.
Since someone used it as a verb and it was understood by their audience
"Vagueing" as in "vagueposting".
'vagueing abt me being ableist'
'implying i was ableist'
There, translated.
Oh look, proper english is more direct and succinct!
Guess the tumblr user likes vagueing as well.
As far as zoomer/alpha slang goes, this makes a HELL of a lot more sense than most of the shit they've turned into verbs and the vast lexicon of terms they have for people who disappoint them.
slang is the way it is for a reason, it's why its called slang lmao.
Sick literally didn't make any sense the way people used it when it was new, same shit today, just different words, times change old man!
Every generation has a word soup vocabulary that generations prior don't get or can't use properly. It mostly falls out of vogue in a few years. Almost all of the words that are being used ironically to make fun of the lexicon, will become obsolete. The words that don't get the highest usage and remain stable in unironic use will move forward with the rest of the English language. That's just how language works.
Since we've all had to rework any word referencing Twitter for obvious reasons, I suppose.
"Posting" is fine, all the dumb "toots" and "skeets" are not. If you're trying to salvage "vaguetweeting" I suppose that is a semi-reasonable outcome. I don't think it works quite as well for subtweeting, though.
wtf kinda world do these psychos wanna live in ? only text don't talk. no calls only video conference. no music just music videos or vidvoks(letterkenny ftw) It's about out of hand , git off my lawn!
Texting vs talking has some situational context. E.g. if you're somewhere public, talking on the phone is often frowned upon, but you may text quietly. In a car it's reversed.
But a lot of us old folks do want people to sit down and shut up. It likely also plays into impressions of foreigners—a lot of immigrants are probably doing something they consider normal by talking on the phone on the bus, while everyone around them thinks they're being incredibly rude.
Calls and meetings can often be an email, too. Better to not disrupt others if you can avoid it.
The text instead of talk is pretty situational from what I see. Young people still will gleeflully hang with open mic on discord with their friends. One on one phone calls are certainly more rare, but I know my kid spends more time talking on discord than I ever spent talking on the phone growing up (sharing the house phone). I don't know if anyone is particularly excited about video conferences, certainly in my adult life video-capable meetings are the order of the day, but the cameras are generally off. It's way more convenient than the meeting calls of old.
From what I've seen while they are playing 'music videos', it's frequently just in the background and they aren't watching it, it's just a convenient way of getting the audio since youtube has it all and is the most convenient interface. There were more radio stations than MTV/VH-1, so it wasn't as convenient to just let MTV/VH1 be your audio back then as it is for youtube to be your music.
this just terminally online brain rot
Vagueing?
named after Darth Vagueis, presumably
Sounds like a wise guy, i trust him.
This is so true, it has been really sad watching people I care about get sucked into this cycle of anti accountability for their actions and behaviors, and then sabotage all of their relationships in a vicious cycle of misunderstanding and anger.
Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level... and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.
The only thing I can compare it to is 1984's newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced... and this is ... organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
Its even impacting the art we make.
Idiot plots.
Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.
Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and 'Schrödinger's Irony' style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.
Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
ironically, i've sort of done this at a smaller scale among some of the communities im in, and you would not believe how stupid people are, even when you literally inform them to their face that you're saying stupid shit for the purposes of saying stupid shit.
rage bait is incredibly effective and there's a reason everything using it goes so far. It's innate to the human psyche.
oh and by the way, for anybody who thinks this is like unethical or whatever, trust me, they LOVE eating it up. You would not believe how much shitpost you can do, before people realize that you might be shitposting.
hey that's ableist!
apart from that, yeah i agree with you. in general, if you compare Trump's and Hitler's speeches, you can see how extremely complicated some sentences that Hitler said were. Watch some (AI english dubbed, starting around 30 seconds in). Compare that to Trump's speeches, whose vocabulary seems to consist of 5 words.
Yeah, quality has gone down, it seems. I just talked to my aunt and grandma about this exact same thing yesterday. Everything seems to gradually loose quality, or in other words, enshittify.
(btw, i do not mean to say that Hitler's speeches were "good"; i was merely pointing out that the clarity of expression has gone down. The same can be seen with automobiles, houses, and many other things.)
Btw, I remember reading an article that said, after 2000, universities in the USA specifically tried to erode clarity in speech, because they found it proper. It's called post-structuralism; structuralism referring to "clarity". I hoped i summarized that well.
It might have something to do, or not, but it definitely is a coincidence.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
One of my most frightening and profound realizations as an adult, was that our language is our most powerful tool and nobody seems to know or care. It's how we can abstract the universe, rearrange ideas and concepts and come up with new ways to approach problems and explain feelings.
Because if you're not consciously explaining your feelings, you're unconsciously doing it, and make no mistake, your brain is ONLY a tool for telling a story to explain your feelings. It's not some vast computer or calculator, it's a hyper-charged neural network designed to write stories to tie up loose ends and provide cause and effect for the world around you. It doesn't seek logic or reason, it just wants continuity.
The sooner you realize this in life, the sooner you can start getting a handle on things like your own mental health, identifying rumination and where it comes from, figuring out what choices give you the best outcomes and how to overcome momentary discomfort for great rewards later. Things that our disconnected world is increasingly having a harder and harder time doing.
Because we're abandoning language. And no, listening to social media and reading posts doesn't boost your language, it doesn't train your brain how to take YOUR experiences and feelings and abstractify them into ideas you can move around and view from different perspectives... something we should be able to do with ease if we have a large enough toolset to make accurate pictures of our lives. Social media and reading posts doesn't boost you abilities to accurately abstractify the world and your life, it just gives you other people's stories. Which are usually equally inaccurate or limited in scope.
If we don't have language tools to help your brain write a more accurate story, you will believe terrible things about yourself, about others, about the entire world, and you will live in that state always.
