#kvetch about it on your own blog vague post do what you need to do but directly confronting a stranger who’s life you do not know

[badolmen]

I think maybe we should all go stand in the rain for a bit.

[chamerionwrites]

If you’re not holding the “basically no one under 40″ person to what they said, why do that for the people who replied?

Because imo people are allowed to express their feelings - sometimes in less-than-perfectly-articulated ways - up until the moment they begin taking those feelings out on other people. That’s the difference. Somebody venting generalized anxiety/sadness/anger/etc about the state of the world on their own blog is neither directing those feelings AT anyone else nor demanding that anyone else engage with them, even if followers or passers-by happen to see it and feel uncomfortable or upset. Somebody who chooses to deal with their discomfort by lashing out at that person with harsh character condemnation because they dared to be less than 100% sunny and cheerful in public is taking out their feelings on another person.

I don’t understand why this distinction is so difficult to make.

I worry that in the world you’re pushing for, we’ll be doing that to people who get triggered in reaction to other people being triggered, but not to people who get triggered by other means. (I don’t think this is your intent, but I worry it will be an effect.) I think that would be bad. 

This is a little bit convoluted but if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that if the rule is "You're not allowed to hurt people just because you’re upset," then people aren't allowed to make vent posts because those vent posts might hurt people.

Again, you’re seeing a double standard here that I simply don’t. Like I said, this is a problem of competing access needs. I completely accept that encountering expressions of negative emotion - especially hyperbolic or clumsily-phrased negative emotion - is often painful for people. However as long as the person expressing those emotions isn’t directing them at other people or demanding their engagement, I don’t accept that they are doing harm in the same way as somebody who lashes out at another person with victim-blaming language for being Too Sad In Public. “My needs are different than your needs, and this sometimes creates intractable situations or painful compromises” is not the same as “my needs are different than your needs, which gives me the right to attack you.”

In the world that you’re pushing for, people are never allowed to express negativity in public because it might upset someone (“We should also be setting things up such that people don’t feel the need to act that way, e.g. setting up private spaces for people to vent so they don’t need to do it in public”). The point of my post is that in any given space, what’s considered negative or upsetting is frequently dictated by power - which means that banning anything that makes someone uncomfortable from public spaces becomes a tool for silencing anyone who challenges people in power. I think this is sometimes well-intentioned, but nonetheless extremely bad.

The bit they replied to isn’t necessarily the bit they reacted to…my vague sense of online discourse tells me that OP would have received less pushback without the “basically no one under 40.″

As I already said, I don’t disagree with you that this probably accounts for some of why people were motivated to respond that way. I simply don’t think it’s relevant to the question of whether they SHOULD have responded that way, which is what my post was about.

“Basically” is not the same thing, it mediates the strength of a statement but not the confidence in it. 

So we agree that, by qualifying their statement with “basically,” the OP mediated the strength of what they said. In other words: not literally everyone under the age of 40 feels this way, merely many people. (And because OP is speaking in this kind of emotional and anecdotal way, we can probably further infer that they meant “many people in my own experience and/or social circle”).

Kvetching and commiseration are part of human communication. Distinguishing between someone speaking in an emotional register vs a more formal and factual one is part of human communication. Yes, there are places (many places, in fact!) where it’s not appropriate to communicate in that kind of imprecise way. I don’t agree with you that “in a vent post on your personal blog” is one of those places, simply because other people - all of whom are perfectly free to unfollow, mute, block tags, etc - might see it and be upset by it. 

On the subject of double standards, expressions of positive emotion - even imprecise or hyperbolic ones - are almost never subject to this kind of demand for self-censorship in the name of not hurting other people’s feelings. A person with a terrible fear of dogs thanks to a traumatic bite they received as a child might be pained by a post about how every dog is a pure and perfect angel of a creature. However I think most people can agree that they’re being a bit of a self-centered killjoy if they shoulder their way in to rant about it on a post where some stranger is gushing in this kind of hyperbolic emotional register because they have a sweet new puppy and are understandably excited about it. And the fact that most people are PERFECTLY willing to make allowances for positive hyperbole, yet show up in droves to condemn negative hyperbole, gives the lie to any claim that the real concern is about accuracy of information or precision of language, as opposed to policing other people’s emotional expression for the sake of their own comfort.

Obviously they can be [spreading misinformation]? Sure "basically no one under 40″ is obvious hyperbole, but it’s not obvious how hyperbolic. Some people are going to read it and more-or-less believe it.

We agree that it’s obvious hyperbole. By this measure, anybody being obviously facetious or ironic is “spreading misinformation” if someone who isn’t good at detecting irony takes them seriously. Again, most people seem perfectly willing and able to do the interpretive work required to understand not-strictly-literal human communication up until the moment it causes them emotional discomfort by not being cheerful enough.

I do think it should be pushed back against. Probably not in the way the people you quote did push back, but somehow.

And I’ve already said multiple times that the problem isn’t that people disagreed or pushed back, it’s (1) that they defaulted to victim-blaming character condemnation and (2) that this is part of a broad societal pattern where accusations of “negativity” are weaponized to silence anybody who criticizes an unjust status quo.

If we agree on that then I don’t understand why you’re arguing.

There’s something I want to say about toxic positivity and the difference between hope and optimism, and the way people misuse the former when they really mean the latter; for ages I’ve been turning over thoughts about it and then discarding them, because I know it will make people mad and while they have a right to their feelings, this is a horribly tender spot for me and it takes a lot of spoons to sit down and write about it, and the thought of doing that and then getting angry responses leaves me preemptively exhausted

But it’s getting to the point where I might have to say it anyway