every time I see that post about the 4chan incel dude turning his life around bc he started raising shrimp or whatever im like yeah okay man but do you still hate women? you still hate women bro?
Like “I had an easier time developing empathy for shrimp than for women” is not a success story.
to expect exemplary behaviour from someone who was in the rock bottom of a system designed to radicalize these disillusioned young men and turn them into white supremacists and by himself found a way to get out of it and realize he can do better, and then treat him as unsalvageable and permanently damaged because he used bad words, is why this same system keeps being so successful at catching and ruining these men. the shame they are made to feel becomes anger.
i understand not having the patience to educate everyone you ever meet (i don’t do that), but you all on this hellsite need some nuance and realize people can be in different points of enlightenment and recovery. that dude was reaching out, don’t throw him back in the pit.
Brine shrimp, fish, and other low-maintenance-but-living-and-reacting pets are a pretty good Caring For Others 101 course: they have fairly basic, simple requirements for their care and provide rewarding feedback in response to success at those requirements.
Relationships, even friendships, between humans are very advanced in comparison. I’d rather see dudes like Brine Shrimp Guy given stepping stones to develop skills and then level up, than throw themselves with increasing frustration at human relationships they’re nowhere near equipped for and catastrophically failing.
Self-care, self-presentation, self-discipline, some variant of the empathy-sympathy-compassion spectrum, communication, responding to others’ needs, understanding of personal boundaries … there’s a lot of skill sets that underlie the ability to have any functional romantic success.
A person whose abilities are highly lacking in these regards would do better to work on them at the level they’re at, rather than the level they aspire to reach. And just as a five-year-old who wants to be a theoretical physicist when they grow up studies addition and subtraction before they get into calculus, just as an apprentice blacksmith learns how to make nails before they start making swords, a person who has not yet figured out how to care for even themselves properly ought to start out with interesting acquarium life instead of a significant other.
A step up a staircase is better progress than a flying leap at a wall too high to clear.
