#neuroticism

[soulmaking]

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

[wanderingmind867]

I feel like my posts haven't gotten a lot of attention (even though I actually haven't made all that many posts lately), so my insecurities really messing with me. I don't even think i've heard from many of my mutuals or followers or whatever in quite a while, so the neurotic tendencies and insecure feelings are just getting more and more intense with time. To try and course correct on that, i'm just going to tag all my mutuals and stuff again. I can't ignore my insecurities any more than I already have. So just tell me if you've seen any of my posts, or if you're doing okay. Either answer would be fine, I think. I just need something to beat back my insecurities. I can't help it.

Mutuals: @marvel-and-moor @kryptonbabe @ihauntmyhouse @thewordsmith3 @snapcandle @c00c00pig @yourfriendlyneighbourhoodaries @southernfreakinggothic @demigod-jack-hearth @beauty-queen-official @molovesbooks @billybatsonmylove @irish-agender-moss @munchkinmarauder @dougielombax @0asta0 @one-of-batmans-orphans @ace-looking-4-parkingspace @supersonicdp @ltwharfy @loganjptaylor @spiritbox713 @drksanctuary @istilldontlikemyusername @berf-a-smurf @bacon-bitch @demigoddumbass @cosmo-autistic-version @blueknightmage @112emptycoffeecups

Now for some of the people I don't follow/I follow but they don't follow me back/any number of other possible explanations: @onewordaway @emperorcandy @tremendousdreamtragedy @aromanticfever @riordanverseaddict @royaltystudios @hawkflor @daresplaining @sandy-castle @conundrumrespeculis @babsvibes @the-fyre-flie @gelpenss @bobs-biscuits-emporium @opossumpal @somedamslytherindemigod2 @delicatebatharmony

[claudia-berdella]

Neurotic Nihilism, a zine by me

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Women Are More Likely Than Men to Endorse Political Violence

A new survey finding points to the dangers of digital outrage culture.

By: Colin Wright

Published: Jan 30, 2026

When we talk about political violence, we almost always assume that its perpetrators are young men. That makes sense: men are statistically more likely to engage in physical aggression and get arrested for violent crimes at higher rates. At the same time, many are dealing with rising unemployment, declining educational achievement, and growing social disengagement. Given all that, researchers may reasonably assume that young men are driving greater tolerance for political violence.

New data complicate that assumption. A recent survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers found that under certain conditions, women were more likely than men to express support for political violence. The findings were so counter to the prevailing narrative that they surprised even the researchers.

It makes sense, though, when you start to recognize where these women’s impulses come from. The rise of what I call “punitive femininity” is downstream of the toxic political culture online, a culture that is transforming the sex long viewed as more restrained and less prone to violence.

To investigate toleration of political violence, NCRI use data from a survey of 1,055 respondents, weighted to be representative across sex, age, race/ethnicity, and education. The survey asked participants whether they saw any justification for the targeted murder of President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It recorded responses on a seven-point scale ranging from zero (“completely unjustified”) to six (“highly justified”).

Among left-of-center respondents, 67 percent expressed at least some justification for the murder of Trump, an 11-point increase over NCRI’s earlier 2025 study. Fifty-four percent of right-of-center respondents expressed some degree of justification for murdering Mamdani.

Strikingly, justification for killing Trump and justification for killing Mamdani were strongly correlated. This implies that support for political murder is not merely partisan but reflects a generalized tolerance for political violence.

The most unexpected result: women were significantly more likely than men to endorse such violence. Female respondents were approximately 21 percent more likely than males to express some justification for murdering Mamdani and nearly 15 percent more likely to justify murdering Trump.

Both differences were statistically significant. These effects persisted even after controlling for age and other variables.

This disparity isn’t obviously the result of biological sex differences or even political polarization. Rather, it reflects the rise of a distinct and disturbing mindset.

The strongest predictors of tolerance for violence in NCRI’s data were heavy social media use and a sense that America is in a state of terminal decline. The supporters of violence in the survey aren’t traditional extremists. Rather, they seem motivated by the despair, nihilism, and moral confusion online.

For whatever reason, women seem uniquely at risk for infection by this mindset. Over the past decade, women—especially younger women—have become more politically and affectively polarized in their political judgments. Political disagreement is increasingly treated as a serious moral offense rather than a simple difference of opinion. When you see the world that way, punishing someone for holding different views becomes a moral good.

I think of this mindset as “punitive femininity.” By punitive femininity, I do not mean to invoke notions of hostility, cruelty, or aggression in the conventional sense. I mean the transformation of moral concern into a license to act punitively. Adoption of this attitude is fueled by a combination of raw anger, emotional manipulation, and an exaggerated sense of moral certainty.

Social media plays a central role in this transformation. Modern platforms reward outrage, absolutism, and performative aggression. They flatten moral complexity, elevating and even glorifying condemnation.

This lens helps make sense of some of the strangest corners of the internet. Consider the online reaction to Luigi Mangione. After his arrest for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some treated Mangione not as a killer, but as a celebrity. They even explicitly sexualized him, describing him as attractive, charismatic, and even romantic.

When violence is paired with attraction, it stops being judged on moral terms. Instead of asking whether an action is wrong, people start asking whether it feels meaningful, expressive, or somehow justified.

Women aren’t uniquely prone to this dynamic. But they do disproportionately occupy and get their news from the digital spaces where this kind of aestheticization spreads fastest.

Historically, women have played a stabilizing role in moral and civic life. Across cultures, they score higher on measures of empathy, care, and harm avoidance.

When women become less likely to demonstrate these virtues, it doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly transformed. It means the moral climate itself has deteriorated. Social media is breaking down basic norms of restraint, and that breakdown is showing up in groups once closely associated with moral caution and care.

If we care about social stability and the well-being of the next generation, we need to change course. We must stop rewarding moral outrage—especially when it means support for violence.

--

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Assassination-Culture_-How-Shifting-Gender-Patterns-Signal-a-New-National-Instabilitypdf.pdf

Contrary to conventional assumptions that political violence is more closely associated with male respondents, we observe a reversal of this pattern in expressed justification. Female respondents were more likely than male respondents to tolerate some degree of justification for the murder of both Mamdani and Trump. Specifically, females were approximately 20 percent more likely to express some justification in the Mamdani case and approximately 14 percent more likely in the Trump case, indicating that support for political violence in this context does not conform to traditional gender-based expectations.

...

The new findings also indicate that support for assassination culture is no longer concentrated among traditionally high-risk groups. Most striking is an unexpected rise in tolerance for assassination rhetoric among women under conditions of high social media exposure and perceived national decline. This is not a claim about blame or disposition. It is an empirical signal that something fundamental in the moral environment has shifted.

This shift matters because women have historically played a stabilizing role in civic and social life. Across cultures they are more strongly associated with norms of care, harm avoidance, and social cohesion. When even groups long linked to moral restraint begin to show elevated tolerance for political violence it suggests that the erosion is not ideological but structural. The environment itself is failing to reinforce basic moral boundaries.

[cool-girl-lies-alot]

Love the mental loop of I'm not good at this thing -> I'm not good at anything -> I'm a bad person -> Jump into something at an advanced level -> I'm not good at this thing

[leonelmolinari]

Gray

Neurotic is my favorite song of his week lol

The middle part where he does his long notes it's kinda... Sad? Like he's letting out all his anger by crying or smth, and idk it's kinda sad TvT

But it kinda makes sense, Neuroticism is a dimension of vulnerability or emotional sensitivity that predisposes the person to be more emotionally unstable, especially in the face of negative emotions. These people experience emotional pain in an excessive way.

And it starts with the lack of emotional support or exposure to traumatic events during childhood.

[theemotionmachine]

The Big 5 Personality Traits: A Framework for Understanding Our Differences

Dive into the Big 5 Personality Traits to gain a better understanding of human personality and individual differences. Discover how characteristics like Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism shape who we are and the choices we make in life.

Learn more here!

[eelhound]

"To attack gentleness is an unnamed crime that our era often commits in the name of its divinities: efficiency, speed, profitability. We try to make it desirable, exchangeable, institutionalizable, so that it does not upset everything. We kill gentleness with gentleness. We make it into a contaminated drug, the need for which is inculcated in us.

The Dostoyevsky of The Brothers Karamazov summons gentleness in the scene of 'The Grand Inquisitor.' The Inquisitor knows that no one can bear Christ's return; he will therefore take upon himself the decision to condemn. Christ never departs for a moment from his gentleness, and it is that alone that defeats the power and the certainty of the Inquisitor. It comes to convert the forces of mortification, opening another path to the truth other than terror. Humans do not want the freedom that you offer them, says the Grand Inquisitor to Christ; I, who am conscious of this, offer myself as a sacrifice to that freedom, depriving them of it and taking the full burden. Humans prefer servitude; they want to be guided and discharged from the exorbitant choice of their existence.

We see here that Freud had read Dostoyevsky, for what else does the obsessional neurotic do if he doesn't avoid at all costs paying the price of a freedom that he does not want? As often in Dostoyevsky, it is on the edges of baseness, betrayal, violence that gentleness becomes revealing. The beings who lavish gentleness are suffused with it like a fever that contaminates their interlocutors far from their usual territories. In their incapacity to be in the world otherwise than in this failure appears an unprecedented relationship to freedom. Because gentleness appears first as a failure. It infringes all the rules of social etiquette. The beings who demonstrate it are sometimes resisters, but they do not carry on the fight where it usually takes place. They are elsewhere. As incapable of betraying as they are of betraying themselves, their power comes from an act that is always a way of being in the world. And the passion that arises from it comes from the emotion that only gentleness may liberate: it is another living."

- Anne Dufourmantelle, from Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, 2018.