Venting it's polite to keep your pain to yourself.

[endofeverything]

doesn't it piss you off so fucking much?

people love asking "how are you", "how are things going", "what's new" and such..... but if you were to actually give a genuine and truthful answer that involves talking about your recent struggles, your sadness, and heavens forbid even your suicidality, you'd get looked at funny. from friends and family alike, but ESPECIALLY family. it's funny to me how friends are often more supportive than your own relatives when it comes to things like this.

people don't want to know how things are going. they want you to give a positive answer that gives them a segue for talking about something else. even if they respond to your genuine answer, it's often surface-level, shallow and dismissive.

keeping your pain from others is the polite, proper thing to do. you're not meant to open up and talk about it. you gotta swallow it down and smile. and if you can't smile anymore, you're ruining the fun, the vibes, the party.

i can't pretend or smile. i just wish people would stop asking me what's up if they don't actually wanna deal with the answer.

 

[Kali_Yuga13]

"how are you"

Haha yeah good point. "How are you" is more of a compliance check than a genuine inquiry.

 

[WaitingAllMyLife]

And then after you're gone they will say, "if only we had known." It's such a crock. People do not want to hear you're struggling. And if you do share, they will just tell you to get help. A little compassion and empathy would go so far. But no one wants to hear your shit. Very isolating.

I'm sorry you're hurting.

 

[SilentSadness]

I always respond something negative to these questions and then I get asked if it's "the usual kind of negative" or something worse. I think others view suffering as part of me.

 

[Kali_Yuga13]

And if you do share, they will just tell you to get help.

And the standard help is a fist full of psych meds and ta therapy that doesn't work.

A little compassion and empathy would go so far.

At this point I'm not sure it's that people are holding out. It's more like they don't have these qualities. Some study or survey found a significant portion of the population doesn't have an internal dialogue.

 

[Electra]

- How are you?
- Little by little. You?
- Same.
*The end.*

 

[Peter Skellern]

people don't want to know how things are going

This is a revelation to you? When people ask "How are you?" it's an opening pleasantry. They don't actually want to know the reality. You've got how far in life not realising this till now?

 

[notreallybored]

ב''ה,
The pleasantry thing is one of those fucked up inexplicable things.

I'll date myself a bit and for 80s and 90s kids this was always a bit of a chuckle and an opportunity for all the endless youth culture awkward giggling about how much to overshare or not. Pleasantry and opportunity, y'know, you can break convention and choose to have a breakdown day, as is American custom, just don't overdo it and become an unlikeable sad sack.

But something weird happened around the time everyone suddenly gave a shit about Harry Potter for some G-dawful reason. Europeans and other ESLers were being taught that it's always only a pleasantry. In how the fuck did this work on anyone, and how did everyone lose anything good about humanity in a few short post-9/11 decades, the fucked up part is that the authorities in education promoting this then found the foreigners 'so much more agreeable' because they'd stick to the script. And exotic and whatever else, and with vaguely European accents coded as smart and educated because American PBS got aroused by BBC.

This then somehow escaped a few high schools into culture in general. So polite! Such nice people!

Just going to put out there, it's weird to have to or try to use media to prove anything culturally, but for purposes of this discussion Cheers tried to provide the American model: it's set at a bar, a supposed place of celebration even if bars are actually just bars. The characters are living their shit, and, y'know, you can hear Frasier answering "Fine, fine.. alright I'm not fine!"

And that was how shit went until suddenly everyone realized they had no time or interest or compassion for anyone's bullshit and go to Dr. Phil or go home.

Anyway, when society functioned before this reprogramming, know your audience, but the point was to be pleasant until, with a certain level of camaraderie, you'd occasionally get a 'sick day' sort of card to pull if there was an actual problem or you actually needed social help. Now if you pull this rather than the helpfully media reminded this happens sometimes, thank G-d it's not too often, actual rallying of social support, you get the deer in the headlights and the 'you have broken the script' maligning particularly from whatever happened to my generation and younger, and also most elders who checked out into dementia and narcissism completely in the past 10 years.

Anyway, fuck Europe for believing and upholding "you can only ever answer I'm fine to Americans" rather than the "try to hold off crises to once every six months or at least once a month if you can" until Americans bought that as efficient and European for the economy, and a savings on 'unnecessary' social skills.

 

[wiggy]

I won't be a hypocrite, when I ask someone how they're doing in mundane interactions there is nothing I would like less than a substantiated answer

 

[The_screaming_dawn]

Don't ya just love it? So fantastic to be completely ignored at any given chance.

 

[wiggy]

And the standard help is a fist full of psych meds and ta therapy that doesn't work.


At this point I'm not sure it's that people are holding out. It's more like they don't have these qualities. Some study or survey found a significant portion of the population doesn't have an internal dialogue.

If I'm not mistaken, the study you're referring to was surveying people on whether their thoughts manifested in a verbal or non-verbal way. There is no built in implication that people who don't have an internal monologue are less intelligent or attentive than those with an internal monologue, and no data seems to bear out those hypotheses either, or indeed any behavioral difference between the two groups. Personally I have no internal monologue, I just think in abstractions unless I'm consciously forming sentences in my head.