I don’t see what other outcome being socially isolated can produce…? I suppose you could be isolated but not rejected by society, but the person who comes out of that isolation is not going to be a normal person (depending on the length of isolation), and likely won’t be accepted by most normal people, which would make them an outcast no?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10409601/ this is a recent study showing social isolation by gender and age, and it turns out after age 55 women are more likely to he isolated, so what I’m saying only applies to young and middle aged men.

I don’t believe there have been studies on irl reddit meetups, but usually there is a photo posted. With image recognition tools you could probably get a rough distribution, but my theory that most who show up will be male is based on anonymous polling data, which I don’t believe women would hide their gender on. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255182/distribution-of-users-on-reddit-worldwide-gender/ Many women use Instagram or snapchat or tiktok etc, but I think you’d agree those aren’t general conversations focused. Most (all that I have seen) that focus on discussion are majority men. You could say the discussions that happen on these sites are just more appealing to men, or that women get pushed out, and I can neither prove or disprove that. If you know of any websites that focus on general chatting that are mostly women I’d be curious to hear about them. Omeggle I know actually was pretty neutral on gender.

I’m not arguing that women don’t look for online spaces, the statistics aren’t even that lopsided and I know many women IRL who spend much more time online than I do. It just seems to me if men are more likely socially isolated, they are more likely to become outcasts, and hence more likely to spend all their time online. Not that women won’t be in these spaces, or some communities aren’t majority women.

Evidently online usage for the younger generation is almost exactly even across the two sexes, but I’m not sure how much of this is for conversation vs how much is watching tiktok/posting on Instagram.

As an example, if you look up “reddit irl meet-ups” it’s either a majority men or an overwhelming majority men, I’ve met up with a community for a game I’m interested in and it was mostly men. Maybe men would just be more likely to show up? but anonymous statistics on websites also report the same.

Just a post of someone saying they’d rather be stuck in the middle of the woods with a bear rather than with an unknown man, been posted lots of places not just lemmy.

I think they’re including people that aren’t exposed to communities even if they would be welcome. Men are more likely to become socially isolated (I’ve only seen studies for 30+ yrs of age), which means they generally turn more to online. Definitely a surprising amount of women lurking, but look at any group online meet-up and it’s almost all men (even if all members show up)

Yeah 100% I think the post was kinda ragebait though so people were being angry and hyperbolic.

Thank you for writing this🙏 Only thing I think is missing is how it hurts people who are already on your side too if you overgeneralize.

An example is dr K a psychiatrist who does youtube videos, with some focus on gaming addiction. He had many women (and some men I’m sure) calling for him to speak out on women’s experiences, so he made a video talking about how women’s experiences were much harder and men were living on “easy mode.”

I personally haven’t watched any videos of his after that, not because they aren’t interesting psychology topics, and I know exactly what he means to say, but it was just such a hurtful thing to hear from someone that felt like was on my side. The comments were people who understood what he meant feeling hurt and disengaging, and the people who needed to be reached just getting angry, and now it’s ousted a lot of people who were already empathetic towards women’s struggles.

I think most people are somewhat oblivious to them making others feel uncomfortable because they can clearly see you and they don’t feel nervous, so their brain tells them no one around them feels nervous. The more the reverse happens (them feeling followed) the more aware they’ll become that they’re doing it.

I think saying “an unknown man with no consequences is very dangerous if you’re a woman” is fair, and also sexist in a way. That’s just the reality of how things are.

If I replace woman with “an unknown jew… is very dangerous” it’s similarly saying “this group is bad” but is also completely untrue. Understanding that it’s sexist is important, but swapping the word out can be an invalid comparison imo.

Especially when saying “no cheese” 8 times means you will definitely be getting cheese

I would’ve agreed with this a few years ago, but when you realize things can have subtle effects on our body that aren’t easy to measure or readily apparent, you shouldn’t fully trust something just because studies say it’s safe. A study can’t really show that “50 years of repeated exposure caused slightly more exhaustion,” for example.

However, we DO know tooth decay is a major health risk for our whole bodies. Avoiding a maybe possibly slightly harmful chemical isn’t stupid, but avoiding something that prevents known and documented dental harm and the effects that has on your entire body, that’s just letting fear override rational thinking.

It takes a “special” kind of person to take something so ingrained in culture and still say “I’m not gonna do that,” usually a slightly crazy and/or neurodivergent person. I think this is partly why there are so many “insane” vegans, because it’s self selecting for people who are outside the norm.

I don’t even mention to most people I’m vegan, usually just an excuse like “meat makes me feel sick” because the average person will think I’m going to give them a 20 minute lecture.

To anyone who is the vegan who will give the 20 minute lecture, please consider if your goal is actually animal welfare, you can hardly ever debate someone out of something they like. Instead, just show people easy dishes you made that they actually enjoy (pasta with spaghetti sauce, French fries, vegetable stir fry, roasted veggies with olive oil) and you’ll often find they start cooking more vegan food (or at least less meat), and also talk more positively about veganism

Sometimes very dangerous, as an example a company may pay for security updates for windows XP, but you won’t get these updates. Say someone takes a look at what changed, finds a buffer overflow or other easily exploited bug, embeds that in a program, and pays to have it bundled with some freeware. One of these exploits could even infect you just from visiting a webpage.

Security updates are annoying but they’re the one kind of update Microsoft is actually justified in pushing

Everything outside of my health is great, good relationship with my family, stable situation, generally good attitude towards life, but I got covid in 2021 and now just staying out of bed the whole day is basically impossible. A fun event passes and half the time I just feel completely blank, like having a good friend telling you something you find extremely interesting but you haven’t slept for 50 hours. Even watching a movie is just overwhelming and I need to take breaks. I sometimes feel like I’m already dead and I’m just lingering on. Half of my life feels like a dream, 40% feels like I’m just trying to get to tomorrow where I might feel conscious, and 10% feels almost normal. My whole family is excited about Christmas and I’m overwhelmed by the idea of staying out of bed long enough to say hello to my brothers…

As a (sometimes) lurker, when I see a comment on the middle east I say “wow even if I studied this conflict I would still have trouble having an opinion here” and skip over it+the replies. I also can’t tell if the person said something so ridiculous that the ad hom isn’t out of line.

Test

I would’ve failed out of highschool but homeschool allowed me to take community college classes that didn’t force 2 hours of busywork every day. If regular schools could deal with different types of students I’d agree, but as it is now that’s not the case.

Well the problem is I “know” the reason, it’s because of long covid. All the tests I’ve taken have shown up completely normal (echo,ekg, etc, as it does for other people with long covid). tachycardia showed up on my last heart monitor and they gave me some prednisone which helped until it went away almost entirely, but they don’t know what to do if nothing is observably wrong with my heart.

I’ll likely mention the Holter monitor to my doctor though and see if it could find something actually diagnosable though, especially since my heartrate feels off when I’m exercising. Honestly just completely forgot to mention this was happening to my doctor 😅 thanks 👍

I have long covid and during the initial stages I had some really bad tachycardia (unknown to me yet) that caused breathing issues. It hadn’t been too bad until one day I was lying in bed unable to sleep, and suddenly I feel like every breath is getting me less and less air, even though I’m breathing normally.

I woke up my mom at ~4:30 AM (home because of long covid) and said I feel like I can’t breathe. She asks if it’s bad enough to go to the ER, and I say it might be. I decided to wait 15 minutes, my heartrate was going crazy and I must just be panicked, and that’s why my heart rate is high and why it’s hard to breathe.

Over those 15 minutes my heart rate climbs higher and I’m getting dizzy and hyperventilating and still breathless, and say I need to go now, I think I’m at the edge of where I could actually die.

We drive to a hospital and my heart rate slows down a little bit, and I figure I’m not gonna die in the next hour so I end up waiting, struggling to breathe, until 6AM when my primary care opens his office. They do some tests and say everything looks normal, but later a heart monitor would show my heartrate sometimes get to ~120, even while I’m lying in bed trying to sleep. I eventually learned that is what causes the breathlessness.

I’ve had that happen a couple times since, less frequently it seems, but when it does happen I’m always afraid that this is the time my heart finally gives out. Fortunately it’s very rare and I’ve been able to do some cardio to hopefully help it be even more rare.

for things like this I just assume the person’s brain just exploded for a second. I could definitely see myself doing this with 2 hours of sleep, and feeling 100% sure you said try is also something a sleep-deprived person would do. Still sucks when it teaches you not to speak up though