Microblog Memes

i find it helps me to view other people explicitly as separate entities with free will.

Makes it harder to do any sort of funny business when you're more aware of their autonomy on a fundamental level.

but I am your father

Texting vs talking has some situational context. E.g. if you're somewhere public, talking on the phone is often frowned upon, but you may text quietly. In a car it's reversed.

But a lot of us old folks do want people to sit down and shut up. It likely also plays into impressions of foreigners—a lot of immigrants are probably doing something they consider normal by talking on the phone on the bus, while everyone around them thinks they're being incredibly rude.

Calls and meetings can often be an email, too. Better to not disrupt others if you can avoid it.

this just terminally online brain rot

I agree, this needed more layers.

Our species is more alone than we've ever been even though our numbers are greater than they've ever been and our means for reaching each other is nearly limitless.

Because everyone is so, so deeply scared of social rejection, an instinct bred into us through ice ages and apocalypses where we needed each other to survive, that the fear of rejections has become one of our primary social motivators. People now have a choice of trying to find social circles and groups that they can adapt to or compromise with like we've struggled through for thousands of years, or withdraw into spaces that prevent us from ever having to experience even a chance of rejection. Feel awkward when a stranger says hello? You can choose to practice getting better at responding to others, experience failures as well as successes, or you can retreat to a place where "hello" means oppression and you don't ever need to ever risk pain by responding.

This is just a tiny, micro-slice of the issue but EVERYONE does this, and if you think you don't, you are also stuck in the film-strip post-hoc rationalizing your every feeling.

"Edit" and "access" also weren't originally verbs. Same with "babysit" and "eavesdrop". Backformation and category changing are common and perfectly natural processes in English.

Edit: This isn't directed at the OP of this comment chain, but I'm always surprised by the crazy amount of ignorant prescriptivism I see all over Lemmy. Like, I expected that shit on Reddit, but I thought we were better than that here, especially since literally the only real reason for prescriptivism is sowing class division and excluding people for not having access to the secret knowledge of "correct" (yuck!) grammar.

Verbing weirds language.