9
votes
How Reddit's "Am I the Asshole?" subreddit created a medium place on the internet
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- Title
- Can "Am I the Asshole?" Actually Help Make People Better?
- Published
- Oct 7 2020
- Word count
- 4309 words
Whenever I check reddit without being logged in, there's about a 66% chance that there's an AITA post on the front page that pulls me in. By the time they hit /r/all, whatever input I'd possibly have to offer is already posted (and buried), but most of the time I'm reading with a kind of morbid curiosity at the things that shape people's thinking.
On a tangential note:
I mean... is it that common? That raised my eyebrows. I might have had a couple individual instances in my life where I felt like that, but it was nothing remotely close to regular. I think I have a decent grasp on the factors that helped me develop my self-confidence from a young age, and I'm very grateful for not having experienced the alternative, but the idea of that kind of insecurity being the norm is really troubling.
I have the opposite reaction. I feel like 99% of the posts on that subreddit are either obvious answers or just made up for karma. I guess you could say that about most big subreddits though. Once they reach a certain size, it becomes a massive game of oneupsmanship.
It's both really. People are more insecure, on average, than they appear but at the same time a fair percentage of people have mechanisms of coping with insecurity layered on top that allow them to function with confidence.
At least in my experience. I think both things are built in to some degree. Insecurity about value motivates us to contribute to the group (which contributes to survival). And confidence is, safe to say, a highly favored selective trait because it allows for decisive action when necessary and helps you reproduce more. Important enough that we're wired to maintain a sense of confidence even if it requires a bit of self delusion.
So I don't think a huge percentage of the population is paralyzed by self doubt all the time, but I think everyone is varying degrees of insecure.
I guess it depends on how she means it. I have certainly had that experience, but it's not all the time. There have been times when I felt like everyone around me was ganging up on me and I couldn't figure out why. I'd have a thought process like this: "Am I doing something different? Did I say something inappropriate and not realize it? They talk to me this way and I responded in kind. Are they just big babies who can dish it out but not take it? Or did I misunderstand what they meant? Or are they misunderstanding what I mean? What the fuck is going on?"
I haven't been there in a while, and I think it's because I did a bunch of reading and podcast listening about critical thinking and how thinking goes wrong. I learned a bunch about my own biases, which helped, but I also learned ways that other people think and can understand better how things I say or do might cause other people to think something other than I intended. It's not perfect, but it really helps relieve some of that insecurity. Once you can see either, "They have a blind spot about this, so there's no use in arguing about it..." or "They may have meant what they said in this other less inflammatory way..." it's way easier to chill out about some of these things. Or at least it was for me. (But I was probably an extreme case.)