Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

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Because fuck community. It's extremely rare to meet people who don't suck. My parents were never interested in me as a person, they were interested in me fulfilling their fantasy of a picture-perfect family. My aunt completely exploited her husband and then he happened to drink himself to death which was completely and unavoidably his own fault. Now she's ruining her daughter's teenage years just so that she can score popularity points among other religious nuts. When I was a kid I was the least popular in my class and I know that when you reach the bottom, literally nobody cares about you, unless they can extract something from you. It's dog eat dog. Now I'm an adult and the more I interact with general population the more it feeds my narcissism. I genuinely tried becoming a better person so that I'd have more friends but at some point I understood "it's not me, it's them". There's only so much I can do before I realize, most people aren't worth being friends with. The few people that are worth it are ridiculously difficult to find and usually have their own busy lives and chances are, the ones you happen to meet live on the other side of the city which is one hour one way.

This way of seeing the world is foreign to me. My family, friends, neighbours, co-workers, and even the guy who works at my local bakery are all good people.

I agree that most of the people I meet aren't going to be my friends, but disagree that they aren't worth being friends with for someone else. Most of them have got other friends. They're still worth something even when I don't have enough in common with them to want to hang out. I'm better than them at the things I'm good at, but they've all got their own strengths where they must surely outdo me.

I can't tell if you're from a different culture, carry some trauma, expect an unrealistic level of commitment, or something else that would cause us to have such a different outlook on life. I'm sorry that you've been let down by other people and I hope things get better for you.

Don't look at the world through the lenses of your problematic upbringing.

Healthy communities exist. They are increasingly rare due to the massive shift in the way of living, but they do exist.

The thing is a healthy community, by definition, isn’t going to allow a struggling loner to join them

This isn't exactly true.

1. If the community has "healing power", it can accept new broken members as long as they don't overwhelm the support system. Many hippie and religious movements work with some version of this idea.

2. A struggling loner might be so because of traits unattractive to general society, but attractive to the community. Pretty much all subcultures fit here.

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