The real world is crazy. The amount of bullying, stalking and attacks I've gotten after getting a series of promotions in a rotten workplace with a few bad apples is unbelievable.
If I knew better, I'd have paid attention to the above comment.
If I knew better, I'd have paid attention to the above comment.
It's quite amazing how large the gap is between the way the world is described to us through various mediums, versus the clearly observable reality of it.
FTA:
> I approached the individuals and the institutions concerned about the content of my Subject Access Request. They all refused to discuss the matter with me, so I can only speculate as to what was going on.
Of course, these people were just "avoiding drama" they'd tell us. But then, is avoiding drama that what they were doing when they were trashing this person behind their back in emails?
I think people have a tendency to conceptualize a stark, "real" line between adolescence and adulthood, but the reality of the matter seems to be that many adults are little more than high school kids plus some added expertise in some narrow domains. The adult world, even at the highest levels of authority, largely consists of the same petty cliques, backstabbing, lying, and whatnot that you'd experience in high school.
I'm not a fan of claiming this type of behavior is childish and something we leave behind after high school. Before advances in mass transportation that made it feasible for people to uproot and move to a new community, most people were stuck in the same ingroup for most of their lives.
High school is just a cultural relic that mimics this previous social grouping. It's not necessarily something that kids do that we grow out of - it's the other way around - modern society has broken the existing communities we had in place, but in return gives us the freedom to find new ones anywhere we want.
On the other side of these experiences, when everything is going well it's easy to ignore all that's wrong with people.