>>40114Precisely. "Losers" have been effectively ejected from every niche they once could have called their own. It's genuinely depressing that there's been no "home" for people like me for ages now. Of course the individualists will always be able to enjoy their stuff in solitude, it's admirable but it's not a common power.
I don't have it. I always felt I was a social creature that suffered unfortunate injuries to the psyche and unfortunate life circumstances making it incompatible with fulfilling its basic emotional needs. I was content with just going on the internet and talking about nerd shit with the guys though, back when nerd was a dirty word.
Back then I used to be able to talk about a lot of stuff online without feeling like I was out of place, the feeling of being among mostly like minded people with mostly similar life experience was palpable. It was a comforting thing to be a part of a tribe.
For a long time now it's not really been possible for me to go anywhere and talk about anything without feeling like shit about what I am. It's obvious that it's factory settings for other users to consider people like me to be unwelcome outsiders, remnants of a "worse" era. It's a bit like being back at school again. People can't help themselves but bring their IRL stuff into the exchange and flaunt their real or imagined superiority even though they don't realize it, that's just the way they've always been offline and it's what they turned the internet into.
Normals will mockingly talk about crabs in buckets and "losers" making everything worse for themselves by convening in places where the one common factor is misery but it was the normals who appropriated absolutely everything that used to be "ours" and kinda left us no other options.
Back in the day I never really had to think about misery when I'd spend time online. Our shared issues were so much of a given that they didn't have to be at the core of discourse. It wasn't absent from discussions but most of the time we could focus on talking about other stuff, with our point of view being the assumed default without ever having to explicitly bring attention to the causes.
In the modern age though it's like there's nothing else left to define myself by but the divergence and the hurt. There are no friendly spaces. It's just their shit and I'm always the outsider. Not like I didn't try t
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.