I’m 40. I never got the memo about growing up. There was never an adult moment. When I was half my age, life had a lot more promise and that commonality drives a lot of the more balanced interactions. What you can’t really understand at a much younger age is how alone and lonely the world becomes with age for most people. That hopeful promise fades, and with it goes purpose and hope. Dreams and intentions pass you by and mistakes haunt you. This drives many to a hedonistic place of connections with anyone that lets the person return to a carefree time of hopefulness or anywhere but this reality.

He likely lacks meaningful connections and turns to his only social outlet. If he has the depth, he needs a hobby or interest that helps him to connect with more stable people.

The original comment by SouthSamurai@sh.itjust.works:

Dammit, yet another question that I spent too much of my life on.

It comes down to nervesand tissue (cell, not paper) types.

The outside of your nose and the tissues of the anus are not the exact same. There's a different concentration of "nerve endings", and different types in different concentrations.

I doubt you want the full Monty of it, but if you look up the term "sensory receptors", you can do the deep dive very easily.

The short version is that we have specific types of "nerve endings" (that's what they're called colloquially, hence the quote marks, but I'll stop using those at this point). They detect pressure, temperature, pain/injury, etc.

The concentrations of them (as in how many per square inch), and the assortment of them (as in how many of each type in that square inch) varies across the entire body. The easiest way to demonstrate the relative principle is to touch your fingertip to your nose, your lips, your genitals (seriously), and your leg.

You'll find that your brain interprets the signals in an interesting way. It'll filter the less intense signals. You touch your finger to your lip, what your brain "says" is that your lips are being touched by something, and the signal from your finger takes the back seat. You touch the same fingertip to your thigh your brain says the finger is the primary sensation, and you feel the thigh via the finger rather than the finger via the thigh the way the lips worked.

Give it a try on whatever parts of your body you want. There's going to be a shifting perception of whether it's your finger touching something ( where emphasis is placed on the signals from the finger), or it'll be the section of the body being touched by the finger (signal from the touched location being emphasized).

The anus and the nose have different jobs. The anus, mostly, needs to detect pressure, injury, and some degree of chemical contact the nose needs less pressure sensitivity, but more motion sensitivity. So you'll get a different overall sensation with any given substance that's pushed against either, and when the same substance is moved across either. The difference may end up being minor. But both are sensitive enough that most people can tell a difference between paper tissue products blindfolded.

Back in the day, I wiped asses for pay. The only patients I had that couldn't tell the difference between brands of TP had medical issues that interfered with nerve signals. Do a test for yourself. Find a buddy to hand you tp or facial tissues and keep a log (heh, he said log while talking about butts). There's a very good chance that every single one will feel different. You'll probably be able to tell which brand is which if you've used that brand before.

You can probably even tell the difference with your fingers tbh. But you wouldn't likely be able to if the same products were placed or rubbed on your back

You'd also notice that different objects will feel different when just placed on an area and pressed gently into the skin vs when you wipe the area with it.

Skin is an amazing thing. It's armor, a sensor array, a biological filter, sunscreen, and a temperature regulator all in one! Plus other functions tbh, but shit like that gets overwhelming to read for a lot of people

You'd be amazed what you can discover with just an hour sitting around and touching things to parts of your body.

This is older but, with things that are coming up, I feel it is even more relevant.

It started with an earworm and a rather stupid idea for a poll...

A couple days ago I asked !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world the question What is love?

99 shitposters say it's hurt me don't Baby

@Tetsuo@jlai.lu creates a Suno AI song with the new lyrics

It's a banger

🎵 What is love, hmm? 🎵
🎵 Hurt me don't, baby 🎵
🎵 Hurt me no more, don't 🎵

Meanwhile, according to 187 shitposters the answer to What is love is Baby hurt me don't

Civility has become a cult.

Mods on modern websites (including Reddit and Lemmy.world) are forced to maintain courtly behavior instead of deciding who's the asshole. They will protect any cautious troll who can politely phrase 'you're subhuman and also secretly agree with me' but jump on the obvious reasonable response: "Fuck off." Even when that curt dismissal is followed by an explanation of how a comment was dishonest and manipulative, you said the no-no word, so only you get the boot.

And that boot will tend to be as heavy as possible, sometimes instantly permanent, because god forbid anyone learn anything. You keep permanently banning these trolls, when they can get a new account in minutes, and they keep coming back within minutes? Wow, it's almost like you've given them no reason whatsoever to stick out their ban and keep that username. Spritzing them in the face with a three-day time-out works better. This is basic Skinnerian conditioning - immediate reliable feedback is internalized and shapes future behavior.

By mindbleach@sh.itjust.works

Link

https://lemmy.ca/comment/12091177

well. to my everlasting shame it was the very website this post features. I got hooked in when it was still part of reddit. I was an angry young adult coming out of a terrible home situation and their collective “righteous fury” was appealing. after the move to a separate website, it just got worse and worse. hexbear, formally known as chapochat, had destructive drama outburtsts every single week right from the start.

I think it started with thousands of active users and rapidly dwindled down to only a few hundred because of how hostile and rigid it was. I was one of the few who stuck around because my warped sense of the world didn’t reveal how bad it was yet. I thought about quitting during many of these ridiculous “struggle sessions” as they called them. but something kept me hooked.

when the current ukraine-russia war started, the cracks were widening. a subsection of hexbear started to dominate. they were more openly bloodthirsty. they stopped pretending to care about the common people, which is what I cared about, and were cheering on the killing of civilians and conscripted soldiers. they posted videos of ukrainians getting shot and blown up accompanied with the site’s absurd emojis and weird in joke phrases. they were also just extremely hostile to anyone who wasn’t lockstep with their view. they would use vicious insults and accusations against naysayers and the mods would almost always rule on their side.

I rarely ever participated in the arguments up to that point because I didn’t see a reason to, but I got in fights with people about this. they were treating war like a football game and it really rubbed me the wrong way. but then that subsection of the site started to contain themselves mostly to the “news megathread” which I could easily ignore.

I became less and less interested in hexbear as time went on. I think other people were noticing these disturbing trends too because the number of active users dwindled down to around 150-200. the remaining users were the worst of the worst. so fucking mean and nasty, in that abusive family type of way. they proclaim themselves to be friendly, proclaim hexbear to be a welcoming and caring community, tightly knit, when behind the curtain they are horrible to each other. of course I had only ever known that type of life so I didn’t see it for what it was and continued to use the site.

I finally had a breakthrough internally and got the courage to go to therapy and try to reckon with the damage my upbringing did to me. and once that started to work, hexbear’s rose tint rapidly faded.

now I look back on my several years as a hexbear user with so much embarrassment. I can’t believe how much hatred was in my heart. I try to forgive myself and remember that I was young and broken and taken advantage of by malicious people online but I was old enough to know better. once in a while I’ll check hexbear out just to remind myself of how much I’ve grown and improved. I see people in there who claim to be in their 30s and 40s and i feel disgust at how they are manipulating young adults and even kids as we see here. I feel sad for them too. I don’t think anyone that old would be part of such a group if they didn’t have a seriously damaged worldview.

wow. sorry to dump on you. just seeing someone so young get roped into hexbear brought up a lot of feelings.

Behold the matching forearms of Lemmy:

https://lemmy.world/post/19983744

I visited for the first time around this year. It was incredible. The people were so nice. The Palestinian children I met in Israel were incredibly rude and surprisingly well-dressed considering we were all playing on a playground. My aunt and cousins were translating what they were saying to me and encouraging me to say rude things back that they’d translate. Reflecting on that: weird fucking experience and incredibly sad overall.

The people within Palestine were so polite, accommodating, and eager to share their culture. Many of them appeared to have meager means, but seemed so happy.

I saw an old Jewish man fall from a chair and hit his head on the stone ground near the western wall. Blood sprayed out and began quickly pooling. His family rushed to his side, but most of my fellow Jews ran away. Some to seek aid, most to flee from the inauspicious event at this holy site. But the most people who rushed to directly help this man we’re Arabs, presumably Palestinian, using their nicest holy garments to help a bleeding stranger and offering him water.

Years later, it hit me: the rude rich Palestinians I met at the playground weren’t acting that way due to cultural or religious differences, it’s because they were rich assholes repeating rich asshole shit. And their presence at the playground was only because their family could afford to live in Israel. But my aunt and cousin? They absolutely were making everything about race and religion. It had been trained into them and they were trying to train me. This was all pre-Netanyahu.

When my cousin got older, he started taking classes to learn Aramaic and Arabic so that he “could understand the enemy better” for intelligence purposes and tell them in their own language that he was going to kill them. He became a volunteer police assistant so that he could get gun training. Then he was allowed to police areas with high Palestinian populations.

It was during this that he learned how incredible Palestinians were and that most of their aggression was due to misinformation and fear. He never killed a single Palestinian and eventually became a more vocal advocate for their human rights. He knew that, given the chance, they’d kill him in a heartbeat but he also recognized that the impulse was driven into them by oppressive regimes. He even got the rest of his family to recognize the fraught existence of being treated like an unwelcome guest in your own home. A fugitive for merely existing…

When I visited Israel years later, I was being driven out to the military base to visit another cousin. Israel had expanded its borders; next to the highway where we were traveling, I saw fenced off vacant homes with tanks driving through them. “Oh cool!” I said, “are they doing training over there?” My cousin’s parents sadly explained to me that I was looking into Palestine. The people had been temporarily evacuated from their homes and the Israeli government was ensuring that “they won’t have homes to return to.”

After October 7, the first cousin I talked about hasn’t been the same… His unit was one of the first reactivated and mobilized; he was at the site within half an hour of the attack. What he saw of the dead and mangled still haunts him. The things he’s seen and done that go completely against his moral compass… The guy who used to laugh and tell me stories about getting stabbed by a Palestinian at a checkpoint and only arrested her because he’d do the same in her position; the guy who has caught and thrown grenades avoiding casualties; the guy who was arrested for refusing to needlessly fire into a crowd of protesting Palestinians. His clean conscience appears to be gone and sometimes he just disappears into whatever dark images he can’t seem to shake.

The place you see in that photo probably is gone. The people are gone. They were gradually eroded away. Any hope I had to see them again disappeared after October 7. The Israel I remember is gone, too… It’s been fanned into an inferno of hated that will likely last generations. The spirit of the Palestinians can’t be erased, though. I hope someday to see that spirit reflected in their society. I hope to see the warmth I remember of Israel shared once again by its people.

I hope that the next time I see my cousin that he remembers all the good he’s done and that he’s accepted what he’s done. I imagine he’d sooner go AWOL. I wish Israel and Palestine could forgive and reconcile, but I’ve lost about all hope to see humans treating each other humanely in that region within my lifetime…

(The title you see below mine is the wording chosen by the OP of the full post - I hope I do not cause offense, but I cannot control it showing up here as it is linked.)