When did everyone decide that the answer to every question in life is therapy? It's weird. It's really become like church for a certain type of secular person. I increasingly don't see any evidence that the general theories of life/emotions/relationships you get from pop-psychology or even real psychology have any evidence behind them.
The best therapists use evidence-based techniques and work steadily with a patient to improve specific outcomes on the timespan of months to years, or conclude that therapy may not be the not right tool.
The more typical therapists works with a patient indefinitely. They don't get better, they don't get worse, but both therapist and patient are bought into the idea that it is slightly better than it otherwise would be. Hard to measure this.
For the worst-off patients, for instance someone liable to make damaging life choices, merely having a regular contact who listens patiently may be very valuable (although they may be overpaying for it). Or maybe temporary relief from some symptoms is worth constant vigilance.
But the typical case with the typical patient is where lifestyle therapy comes in. In many cases it feels kind of unethical on the therapist side, or at best a kind of hobby that has nothing to do with actual medical intervention. Among the worst therapists, they may even assist in their patients self-pathologizing, to create the experience of therapeutic growth (but which is actually the experience of emotional tourism).
Lesson: Get therapists who use evidence-based methods, and have a vision of the progress you want to make. Be realistic and honest in your expectations.
(There is some literature on this but unfortunately I having difficulty conjuring up the specific papers that I read.)
In the UK, the culture of therapy is based much more around brief, time-limited interventions. Part of this is cultural - having an ongoing space just to "talk about your feelings" is seen as a bit self-indulgent, I think- and part of it is economic, as the NHS is on a tight budget and will only pay for limited, evidence-based intervention. (Private therapy exists, but is out of a many people's budget, and norms are still often influenced by NHS practice). So therapy is typically something you might do for 6-10 sessions or so, with some specific measurable improvement in mind (either an improvement in scores on a mental health questionnaire, or a practical goal like 'taking a bus journey alone without having a panic attack'). 6-10 sessions is definitely insufficient for many people, and maybe the goal-orientedness of it all is a bit overly reductive. But I'm also wary of the indefinite model you seem to see more in the US. If you're not keeping an eye on progress, it seems like it could just devolve into the therapist becoming a replacement for friends, or for developing your own emotional resilience. I'm surprised by how many Americans seem to get regular long-term therapy - which isn't cheap - yet don't seem to have a great sense of their intentions or process, besides "talking it out".
I'd suggest that the kind of situations best addressed by the UK model are not the mentally ill. As far as I can tell, mental illness cannot be cured. It can be accommodated or "managed," and this requires frequent and ongoing contact and participation.
My strategy post-2024 has been to use ChatGPT and my therapist in tandem. I'm actually in a fairly decent state in terms of my mental health but do have some residual issues stemming from past experiences, and I'd like to have a therapist around in case I have future problems.
Both ChatGPT and my therapist know the important events in my life which shaped who I am, and I run what ChatGPT says through my therapist to see if they agree and to make sure that ChatGPT isn't merely being obsequious as it's reputed to be. In most cases, they do.
If I claim a therapist is mostly just a sounding board - that's not necessarily a knock on therapists, that's a recommendation of sounding boards!
A lot of people just need a sensible reference point outside of their own head. And there is no reason why ChatGPT shouldn't be great at that. I'd certainly much rather having people ask ChatGPT for advice than Reddit!
I think we're in a weird place right now where, at least for neurotypical people with certain issues, there are really good evidence based talk therapies.
And there's also a lot of _not that_ out there.
And if we have a human who could use an evidence-based therapy, it's asking a lot for that person to somehow sort out the wheat from the chaff, particular while having whatever issue warrants the therapy.
I've had life-changingly useful therapy and therapy where the best thing I can say about it is that it wasn't harmful. But in hindsight, when I look at the not-useful sessions, I don't think there was some information available to me that I could have used to make a better decision making process. At that time in my life, I didn't understand what my issues were and by luck I did not end up with a therapist who could understand my life, my value system, look at my issues, and then explain it to me entirely on their own.
Social bonds which used to do the job of maintaining a positive mental climate have dissolved just as polarization has deepened and the internet has put us in constant view of those who therefore live in ways abhorrent to us
I get the feeling that a lot of people turn to Reddit for the kind of everyday problems that an earlier generation would have brought to an older person at work or church who seemed to have their act together.
There’s a lot of people estranged from their parents who also don’t have any other wiser heads to look to, it’s sad.
It's a popular answer online because it is advice that can be given in almost any situation without requiring any expertise or even understanding of the situation. You could go to almost any reddit post and say "you should go to therapy" and never be wrong. It's the same reason "drink more water" is popular advice.
I don’t think everyone needs to go to therapy. They said, there is evidence to support many common therapeutic approaches, but they’re often very different than the kind pop-self help psychology you see online.
I've known a lot of people who've been to therapy, or gotten really into therapy adjacent belief systems. Many found it helpful, but many also got stuck in therapy forever getting deeper and deeper into their own sense of victimhood.
For sure, I’ve seen that too, and it doesn’t help that some therapists seem to view their role as merely being a professional nice person.
I think the thing about good therapy systems is they’re actually pretty demanding on the client and require the client to take some agency in their life, and some people don’t want to do that. Exposure therapy requires the client to face this fears again and again. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy asks clients to label and challenge their thoughts and behaviors again and again in their day to day lives. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy teaches a suite of mindfulness and emotional management skills that require lots of discipline to integrate into your life. EMDR requires clients to dive back into traumatic experiences.
I have made dramatic improvement in my mental health via therapy and know others for whom the same is true, so it can work.
Yeah. I think the problem is that a combination of incentives (keeping a long term client) and belief systems (everything is the fault of society or parents and victimhood is a desires end state) work against this for a lot of cases.
The "tough love" observation is spot on. I suspect that a lot of people who repeatedly give advice to strangers online get off on that exact impulse. They are just looking for a forum where they can show no empathy and tell someone to feel bad about themselves.
Yes. there was a woman who was especially rude to me (multiple times, didn't realize it was me because I was on throwaways) and I checked her post history and she was.....just doing that. And she was incredibly popular and frequently upvoted! It's a Reddit norm.
I think the steel man in something like AITAH is that posters are always going to try to make themselves look as good as possible so it makes sense to correct a bit in the other direction (assume the other party has a side too which is not being presented). However “there are people on the internet who enjoy judging other people and yelling at them” is evergreen.
The example I'm thinking of doesn't fit into that construct; it wasn't even on Reddit, in fact. It was on, I think the Tripadvisor forums. I wanted to stay in a particular hotel, and there was a price on some no-name hotel reservation site that was like, a tiny fraction of what it was on the Hotel website or the mainstream sites. It looked fishy, so I googled that site, and I found a thread on Tripadvsior of people complaining about it. (If you are curious, I ended up booking the ticket on Amex and using their price match function to the no-name website, huzza!)
The thread I found had several prominent users who were completely all-in on blaming the victim. One of them said that it was the OP's own fault because there was some term contained in the website's TOS that the "tough love" sociopath poster looked up and read. That drove me absolutely crazy for a few reasons, but the most prominent was that this term was completely bog standard and is contained in all sorts of consumer contracts. I don't remember what it was, but my best guess was that it was a provision limiting the company's liability to giving you a refund, and the OP was complaining that their reservation was lost and they were stuck paying much higher prices for booking on the spot at the hotel counter. No sympathy, no empathy, just a spurious justification for kicking someone when they are down for absolutely no reason.
Beyond that, I guess I feel like, if you're going to give someone advice, you should be generous to them rather than go the opposite direction and assume they are shading the truth in their favor. A professional advice-giver who I like has actually said that they generally will take their letter-writers at face value (unless something very obviously doesn't make sense) and that they aren't even terribly concerned about whether a letter is fake, since everyone except the letter writer isn't in that specific situation anyway, so the readers experience is the same whether the situation is fake or real.
So I guess that's a long winded way of saying that the notion that posters are going to present a skewed version of the truth, and that somehow justifies "tough love" or whatever...seems like just another excuse to be jerk to the OP.
Yeah, and let me add this phenomenon across cultures. Yahoo (still a thing in Japan) Q&A section is (in)famously one of the most toxic corners of the internet where basically most of the responses are “why are you such an idiot asking this stupid thing, the world would be better off without you” lol
And a bit related, “hatred to novice” among some online circles follow the same dynamic.
Idk about Reddit but 2-chan (the parent of 4-chan, sorry for creating 4-chan) hobby threads(horse race is the most infamous) are also known for extremely hostile to novice…
Not to excuse toxicity but having been pretty involved in answering questions in a few different internet places (not just Reddit) there are many things that are extremely frustrating about trying to help people online.
1) No one will ever say thank you. Even if you're in some tiny niche and you're literally the only person who replied to their very specific question.
2) Not only will you never be thanked, most of the time there will be zero indication they are even reading the thread after posting their question. Basic questions (not prying personal stuff but "will you have your own transport?" type stuff) won't be answered.
3) People don't search. My personal "favourite" was people who would post to ask what the weather was currently like in Location X, as if online weather doesn't exist outside of America.
4) Extremely poorly framed questions are ubiquitous. Things like, "What's a good book to read?" or "Is $500 a week enough to holiday in France?" Maybe? Depends on what you like? Do you ask people in real life questions this vague?
My general assessment is that “tough love” can work, but only if the love part is completely beyond dispute. Which is literally never the case on a Reddit advice sub
When it comes to reddit, it's important to remember that the commenters have literally no stake in your life. If you burn it all down, it will just be more fodder for entertainment. That alone is good reason to take reddit-based advice with quite a bit of salt.
So this is one of the conflicts that I tend to have with my mom.
My mom gives me a lot of advice that is wrong and outdated regarding dating, daily life, how to behave, etc. When I say her advice is bad, she counters with "I'm the only one who has a stake in your life. No one else cares about you to the same extent that I do, so you can guarantee that my advice has your best interests at heart. Other people, even your friends, will say whatever because they won't have to live with the consequences." The problem is, the amount that you care about someone isn't always an indicator of how good your advice is going to be.
So you're kind of caught in a dilemma - you take advice from those who are close to you and have a stake in your life who are well-meaning but have strong biases and are acting from a place of unprocessed trauma like my mom, you take advice from outsiders who may (but not always) be more objective but have no stake in your life, or you pay a lot of money to see a professional for a limited amount of time who will do their best to be objective but also don't have a strong stake in your life.
You wonder why therapy and advice are some of the most common use cases for ChatGPT? It's because the options when talking to real people about tough issues all have these tradeoffs. The people who care about you the most might not be equipped to give you the best advice, and outsiders, while possibly being more objective or better-equipped, also don't have a stake in your life and thus will care less about giving the best advice available.
Dude for real! I was struggling with some mom/productivity issue which I've forgotten about. I talked to 1) my mom 2) my husband 3) a mom friend 4) a sibling. None of them were really curious about the problem (which seemed small potatoes at that point) and they didn't give me much beyond platitudes. Five minutes with chatgpt and we have a fulfilling solution that worked well for me.
As someone with a mom who grew up in another culture, I can relate to this. Growing up, often I could get better guidance on how to live by observing other people and how they dealt with challenges in their own lives. It can be guilt-inducing not to take your mom's advice/outlook seriously. But sometimes that's what you have to do to thrive in a different time and place than the one that formed her. Sometimes I'll see a mom and daughter and granddaughter all doing something fun together, all speaking the same language and apparently living in the same world, and I'll think, "That's so wonderful" and have a deep sense of loss.
This has informed my view about parenting, which is that IMO it's less important to have a lot of big emotions about your kids and more important to have your shit together and model how to deal with situations. And I am glad that my kids and I are not caught up in this cross-cultural struggle.
"If you just want to vent and complain, don’t even bother posting—you’re genuinely better off venting to ChatGPT."
I actually did vent to Claude about something, and it gently reproved me and told me, in polite language, to be better. I was enraged and went to ChatGPT and it was much more like "Oh girl, I hear you."
One of the most striking things I've ever read about the internet is this random old set of blogposts on the subject of "estranged parents' forums". If you've never seen them, you can find the archives by googling "issendai estranged parents" - they go semi-viral every now and again. No idea who the writer was, but they make for interesting reading, and I think of them often when looking at the dynamics of online communities - and IRL communities as well, sometimes.
Basically, this blogger looked at forums for parents whose adult children had cut contact, and observed that they seemed to be a complete echo chamber - they were full of people with zero capacity for self-reflection, no interest in nuance, and no room for any model except poor innocent parent vs evil ungrateful child. This seemed odd, because there are obviously *some* parent-child splits where the child is at least partially responsible (e.g. through addiction or serious mental illness). The conclusion they drew was that parents in that situation *did* use the forums, but only briefly. As people who meaningfully reflected on the situation, identified possible solutions, found more specific communities that could help them, and were uninterested in long-term commiseration, they self-selected out of the group. The people left are the ones who do not want to get out of the group.
And this is something I've noticed happening in a *lot* of different places online. Whenever you have a community that is based around a major life issue - relationship dysfunction, illness, moving abroad, whatever - people who quickly identify and resolve their issues tend to be temporary visitors to the community. On the other hand, people who are stuck in their challenges long-term - whether through the situation being genuinely hard to resolve, or because they lack the emotional tools to deal with those challenges - tend to stick around. The most stuck of the stuck can even become de facto authority figures, simply by virtue of being the most longstanding and prolific posters. This leads to a pessimistic and skewed environment, where the people with the most intractable issues dominate the conversation, project their own cases onto other people, and re-enforce each other's beliefs, all while subtly driving out people who'd like to offer a different opinion.
Great post! Re: the pro-intellectualism bias, I feel like many of the proffered tidbits of advice on r/AITA and other subreddits are goods example of rationality taken to absurd extremes, often dismissing any "non-rational" expectation or obligation grounded cultural or social mores. For example, if your parents would like you to participate in a ritual from the immigrant culture they hailed from, Redditors are much more like to dismiss said ritual out of hand. Another example: If a friend or family member expects something from you that isn't explicitly defined in the law, well, you're totally justified in ignoring them. It drives me bonkers.
This example is more endemic to the internet and I think a sign of our changing social systems, but they're also incredibly reluctant around ideas of filial duty. The idea that you could owe your parents or siblings a certain sort of treatment is just not present.
A lot of Redditors came from backgrounds where this filial duty was weaponized in an abusive way (this is the entire concept of r/asianparentstories, for example), which radicalized them towards being hostile to any notion of family being "special". If you're willing to cut off friends for that sort of behavior, why not your parents? Your other family members? Why is family special?
But there’s also a lot of harm inflation, where they try to fit even pretty normal behavior into the framework of “abuse”. E.g. suggesting that older siblings occasionally having to babysit or cook a meal while the parents are out is abusive parentification worthy of going no contact
And similar concepts are much more popular among euro-background Americans right now as well.
As w/ a lot of reddity stuff it's not necessarily the idea so much as the attitude that seems troubling. It's true that it's ok to cut off the abusive parent, and it's true that "you don't owe anyone" many things, but eventually saying that frequently enough starts to sound like a pro-atomization rallying cry. I don't have the post off hand but it reminds me of a criticism of introvert-posting I've read recently; it's totally true that some people don't appreciate how exhausting social interaction can be, but that doesn't seem like the most salient point when you're spending all day posting memes about it from bed.
Sure, but I think there's a directionality component to all of this.
In a society where the predominant culture is "blood is thicker than water" and "family sticks together no matter what", this kind of advice is good, actually! And many Redditors do indeed come from these sorts of cultures. But the prevailing culture among progressive young people is pretty much the opposite extreme. Of course, they have very good reason to be this way - most traditional cultures are the former type of culture and it leads to a whole lot of suffering. But it becomes a pro-atomization rallying cry when the default response to any sort of conflict is "cut the other person off".
Balance is hard, though, when you're dealing with traumatized people whose experiences all were with one particular extreme, because that extreme was the norm in most traditional societies. The opposite extreme is relatively new and people aren't as aware of the harms to that extreme.
think where I’m at is a period of despair at the fact that like, a thing about the internet seems to be that it’s collided people who can gather over these ideas into the ability to reach people in any situation anywhere, so like we no longer have a world in which i can go around telling my fellow whites to call their dads safe in the knowledge that someone in a different context isn’t listening in and taking it to heart when they shouldn’t. I think this is a factor in polarization, lots of people getting real mad about stuff they hear about happening in cultures that don’t have to do with them.
So like I agree that kinda everything is like this, where it’s all relative, and I tend to be disposed to see the truth in any POV… but also I’m really worried about that because it leaves me feeling like there’s no resolution.
I guess one way out is to look at it as the formation of new polities which will establish moral equilibria within themselves? Idk
Exactly. For example, the reason why wokeness became a thing in the first place was because it was in response to a culture of rampant racism, misogyny, anti-LGBT sentiment, etc. But if you were raised in an egalitarian (or even somewhat woke) way and you encounter militant wokeness, that'll radicalize you because you didn't grow up in the same context in which wokeness formed. Telling whites/Asian men that they're privileged when their experiences don't match that at all, precisely because of social progress, is radicalizing!
Redditors are on average a very leftist/progressive bunch who were radicalized by having grown up in traditional cultures, and so there's a lot of overcorrection from the bad old days that they engage in.
It certainly seems like Reddit's version of pro-intellectualism is often just being a jerk. Basically the worst caricature of Richard Dawkins applied to all aspects of life.
That was true in the earlier days of Reddit, but nowadays Redditors seem to have taken a hard turn against this and have made entire subreddits mocking these types (such as r/iamverysmart) to the point of dismissing anyone who considers themselves gifted or who has any resemblance to the neckbeard archetype.
Enjoy seeing a mention of r/weddingattireapproval, since I’m kind of fascinated with that one. I used to try to give practical advice on there but got tired of being downvoted for telling people their non-floor-length and/or brightly colored dresses were fine.
I enjoy/hate reading the advice on r/hygiene because how many different ways can someone ask “how do I wash my body so I don’t stink?”, and how many possible answers could there be? Apparently so many. Washing the vagina is especially fraught. Either your militant cleaning with soap will turn you into a dry husk prone to infection or you’re a pig living in slop and good luck ever finding a romantic partner. You have to laugh or you’ll cry about how unhinged people are.
I quit reading AITA a few years ago, but one thing I do remember it doing pretty well was giving women whose partners were being emotionally abusive some validation that they weren’t being irrational or unreasonable. The sub was absolutely horrible about teenage mothers, though. Even in stories involving teenage moms who had very obvious postpartum depression, it was always, “She made the choice to have a baby, so you don’t owe her anything.” Even if it was something like, “AITA for not babysitting my nephew so my teen mom sister can have her first night out in months and go to homecoming?”
Your story about the listeria concerns brings me back! I was at a continuing legal education seminar when I was pregnant and I couldn’t eat any of the sandwiches. They all had cold cuts, except the vegetarian one, which had bean sprouts. *Long* comment on the evaluation form.
I am a bit surprised there aren’t any gender distinctions in the survey, I feel like Reddit generally treats male and female OPs differently, at least on dating and relationship topics. My perception is men are more likely to get “touch love” advice (which is often straight up mean) and are more likely to be seen as the one in the wrong who needs to change. But I’m totally open to my perceptions being wrong here.
Great article though, you hit on all the reasons I don’t post on Reddit for advice anymore, and have mostly stopped reading advice subreddits.
My perception is that it VERY much depends on the topic. In general redditors come down harder on anyone who is playing into gender stereotypes. So a man who seems to not be pulling his weight around the house, or a woman who seems to have unrealistic expectations around her wedding, will get dogpiled more than the opposite.
I think that's a big draw to Reddit then - the potential for more objective advice.
Also, I think the reason why this disparity exists on Reddit is because everyone is aware of the trope of the socially awkward incel-adjacent STEM-y autistic Redditor. They're tired of people like him making them look bad by association.
Reddit advice can be very *random*. Often, the first decently well written response will set the tone. And a lot of people will latch on to the first decently argued, slightly counterintuitive read on things.
Saw a stat yesterday that the top use for AI in 2024 is therapy, which i suppose includes this type of venting. Advice subs are dead or will be dead soon I think.
I've grown to feel that online advice is only for people with standard problems. AI advice works well for non-standard problems requiring expertise in 1-3 areas.
Honestly, that would be an improvement. It sounds like I'm not the only one with the idea - I started using ChatGPT for this purpose in 2024 and it's been great; it's been better for my mental health than any Reddit post. That said, the flaw with ChatGPT is its reputation for obsequiousness and deference - it is too nice to you. I have to be very explicit in telling it to not sugarcoat things and even then it tends to not challenge me unless I say something factually incorrect.
This is my main issue w/ these things, probably because I mostly use them as sounding boards more than anything else. Early attempts to get Claude to be antagonistic just made it briefly stupid nitpicky.
I did argue with it about shrimp welfare once, and I found telling it to pretend to be a lawyer dedicated to carrying out a good-faith case successfully got it to stand ground unless concessions were warranted. Sorta like kink gives the brain permission structure to have sex, if it could channel the "That's a BRILLIANT observation" impulse into "meta chat" limits, it seemed better at maintaining character.
Oh I just feel a bit shakey about my non-utilitarian thought on the matter so I was wondering if it would be as helpful as like, being a debate kid was in terms of spotting inconsistencies. Idk how much Claude helped per se, but I did have a couple good moments of "Hm... I'm not really satisfied with what I have to respond to that," so the experience did serve my troubleshooting.
There was a reddit post the other day about "5 AI Prompts That Will Punch You in the Soul (And You’ll Thank Them Later)". It would "show you the truth you're avoiding."
Buddy, if I'm avoiding the truth, I probably have a good reason.
Incidentally, instead of googling or even Reddit, when you have an overpowering fear have you ever tried Claude or ChatGPT? At this point they're better search engines than Google, they talk to you after a fashion, and they're not neurotic. Worth a try.
When did everyone decide that the answer to every question in life is therapy? It's weird. It's really become like church for a certain type of secular person. I increasingly don't see any evidence that the general theories of life/emotions/relationships you get from pop-psychology or even real psychology have any evidence behind them.
I think "go to therapy" has become basically another way of saying "engage in some self-reflection".
The best therapists use evidence-based techniques and work steadily with a patient to improve specific outcomes on the timespan of months to years, or conclude that therapy may not be the not right tool.
The more typical therapists works with a patient indefinitely. They don't get better, they don't get worse, but both therapist and patient are bought into the idea that it is slightly better than it otherwise would be. Hard to measure this.
For the worst-off patients, for instance someone liable to make damaging life choices, merely having a regular contact who listens patiently may be very valuable (although they may be overpaying for it). Or maybe temporary relief from some symptoms is worth constant vigilance.
But the typical case with the typical patient is where lifestyle therapy comes in. In many cases it feels kind of unethical on the therapist side, or at best a kind of hobby that has nothing to do with actual medical intervention. Among the worst therapists, they may even assist in their patients self-pathologizing, to create the experience of therapeutic growth (but which is actually the experience of emotional tourism).
Lesson: Get therapists who use evidence-based methods, and have a vision of the progress you want to make. Be realistic and honest in your expectations.
(There is some literature on this but unfortunately I having difficulty conjuring up the specific papers that I read.)
In the UK, the culture of therapy is based much more around brief, time-limited interventions. Part of this is cultural - having an ongoing space just to "talk about your feelings" is seen as a bit self-indulgent, I think- and part of it is economic, as the NHS is on a tight budget and will only pay for limited, evidence-based intervention. (Private therapy exists, but is out of a many people's budget, and norms are still often influenced by NHS practice). So therapy is typically something you might do for 6-10 sessions or so, with some specific measurable improvement in mind (either an improvement in scores on a mental health questionnaire, or a practical goal like 'taking a bus journey alone without having a panic attack'). 6-10 sessions is definitely insufficient for many people, and maybe the goal-orientedness of it all is a bit overly reductive. But I'm also wary of the indefinite model you seem to see more in the US. If you're not keeping an eye on progress, it seems like it could just devolve into the therapist becoming a replacement for friends, or for developing your own emotional resilience. I'm surprised by how many Americans seem to get regular long-term therapy - which isn't cheap - yet don't seem to have a great sense of their intentions or process, besides "talking it out".
I'd suggest that the kind of situations best addressed by the UK model are not the mentally ill. As far as I can tell, mental illness cannot be cured. It can be accommodated or "managed," and this requires frequent and ongoing contact and participation.
My strategy post-2024 has been to use ChatGPT and my therapist in tandem. I'm actually in a fairly decent state in terms of my mental health but do have some residual issues stemming from past experiences, and I'd like to have a therapist around in case I have future problems.
Both ChatGPT and my therapist know the important events in my life which shaped who I am, and I run what ChatGPT says through my therapist to see if they agree and to make sure that ChatGPT isn't merely being obsequious as it's reputed to be. In most cases, they do.
Yeah I think this is part of the lesson too.
If I claim a therapist is mostly just a sounding board - that's not necessarily a knock on therapists, that's a recommendation of sounding boards!
A lot of people just need a sensible reference point outside of their own head. And there is no reason why ChatGPT shouldn't be great at that. I'd certainly much rather having people ask ChatGPT for advice than Reddit!
I think we're in a weird place right now where, at least for neurotypical people with certain issues, there are really good evidence based talk therapies.
And there's also a lot of _not that_ out there.
And if we have a human who could use an evidence-based therapy, it's asking a lot for that person to somehow sort out the wheat from the chaff, particular while having whatever issue warrants the therapy.
I've had life-changingly useful therapy and therapy where the best thing I can say about it is that it wasn't harmful. But in hindsight, when I look at the not-useful sessions, I don't think there was some information available to me that I could have used to make a better decision making process. At that time in my life, I didn't understand what my issues were and by luck I did not end up with a therapist who could understand my life, my value system, look at my issues, and then explain it to me entirely on their own.
Social bonds which used to do the job of maintaining a positive mental climate have dissolved just as polarization has deepened and the internet has put us in constant view of those who therefore live in ways abhorrent to us
I get the feeling that a lot of people turn to Reddit for the kind of everyday problems that an earlier generation would have brought to an older person at work or church who seemed to have their act together.
There’s a lot of people estranged from their parents who also don’t have any other wiser heads to look to, it’s sad.
True, or even just ask friends.
It's a popular answer online because it is advice that can be given in almost any situation without requiring any expertise or even understanding of the situation. You could go to almost any reddit post and say "you should go to therapy" and never be wrong. It's the same reason "drink more water" is popular advice.
I don’t think everyone needs to go to therapy. They said, there is evidence to support many common therapeutic approaches, but they’re often very different than the kind pop-self help psychology you see online.
I've known a lot of people who've been to therapy, or gotten really into therapy adjacent belief systems. Many found it helpful, but many also got stuck in therapy forever getting deeper and deeper into their own sense of victimhood.
For sure, I’ve seen that too, and it doesn’t help that some therapists seem to view their role as merely being a professional nice person.
I think the thing about good therapy systems is they’re actually pretty demanding on the client and require the client to take some agency in their life, and some people don’t want to do that. Exposure therapy requires the client to face this fears again and again. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy asks clients to label and challenge their thoughts and behaviors again and again in their day to day lives. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy teaches a suite of mindfulness and emotional management skills that require lots of discipline to integrate into your life. EMDR requires clients to dive back into traumatic experiences.
I have made dramatic improvement in my mental health via therapy and know others for whom the same is true, so it can work.
Yeah. I think the problem is that a combination of incentives (keeping a long term client) and belief systems (everything is the fault of society or parents and victimhood is a desires end state) work against this for a lot of cases.
I can’t second this enough. Self reflection is a good thing. You don’t have to pay someone to do that though.
I think the stigma against therapy was too far, but I don’t think therapy should be the norm either.
The "tough love" observation is spot on. I suspect that a lot of people who repeatedly give advice to strangers online get off on that exact impulse. They are just looking for a forum where they can show no empathy and tell someone to feel bad about themselves.
Yes. there was a woman who was especially rude to me (multiple times, didn't realize it was me because I was on throwaways) and I checked her post history and she was.....just doing that. And she was incredibly popular and frequently upvoted! It's a Reddit norm.
I’ve found when you look at the comment histories of these people, half the time their own life is also a mess.
Yeah, tbh I feel like all types of online extremist has more or less similar underlying dynamic (maybe except influencers grifting through and through
Like I am 99% sure both“I love Hitler” racist and “Tariff subjugates all women” misogynist have miserable personal lives…
I think the steel man in something like AITAH is that posters are always going to try to make themselves look as good as possible so it makes sense to correct a bit in the other direction (assume the other party has a side too which is not being presented). However “there are people on the internet who enjoy judging other people and yelling at them” is evergreen.
The example I'm thinking of doesn't fit into that construct; it wasn't even on Reddit, in fact. It was on, I think the Tripadvisor forums. I wanted to stay in a particular hotel, and there was a price on some no-name hotel reservation site that was like, a tiny fraction of what it was on the Hotel website or the mainstream sites. It looked fishy, so I googled that site, and I found a thread on Tripadvsior of people complaining about it. (If you are curious, I ended up booking the ticket on Amex and using their price match function to the no-name website, huzza!)
The thread I found had several prominent users who were completely all-in on blaming the victim. One of them said that it was the OP's own fault because there was some term contained in the website's TOS that the "tough love" sociopath poster looked up and read. That drove me absolutely crazy for a few reasons, but the most prominent was that this term was completely bog standard and is contained in all sorts of consumer contracts. I don't remember what it was, but my best guess was that it was a provision limiting the company's liability to giving you a refund, and the OP was complaining that their reservation was lost and they were stuck paying much higher prices for booking on the spot at the hotel counter. No sympathy, no empathy, just a spurious justification for kicking someone when they are down for absolutely no reason.
Beyond that, I guess I feel like, if you're going to give someone advice, you should be generous to them rather than go the opposite direction and assume they are shading the truth in their favor. A professional advice-giver who I like has actually said that they generally will take their letter-writers at face value (unless something very obviously doesn't make sense) and that they aren't even terribly concerned about whether a letter is fake, since everyone except the letter writer isn't in that specific situation anyway, so the readers experience is the same whether the situation is fake or real.
So I guess that's a long winded way of saying that the notion that posters are going to present a skewed version of the truth, and that somehow justifies "tough love" or whatever...seems like just another excuse to be jerk to the OP.
Yeah, and let me add this phenomenon across cultures. Yahoo (still a thing in Japan) Q&A section is (in)famously one of the most toxic corners of the internet where basically most of the responses are “why are you such an idiot asking this stupid thing, the world would be better off without you” lol
And a bit related, “hatred to novice” among some online circles follow the same dynamic.
Idk about Reddit but 2-chan (the parent of 4-chan, sorry for creating 4-chan) hobby threads(horse race is the most infamous) are also known for extremely hostile to novice…
Not to excuse toxicity but having been pretty involved in answering questions in a few different internet places (not just Reddit) there are many things that are extremely frustrating about trying to help people online.
1) No one will ever say thank you. Even if you're in some tiny niche and you're literally the only person who replied to their very specific question.
2) Not only will you never be thanked, most of the time there will be zero indication they are even reading the thread after posting their question. Basic questions (not prying personal stuff but "will you have your own transport?" type stuff) won't be answered.
3) People don't search. My personal "favourite" was people who would post to ask what the weather was currently like in Location X, as if online weather doesn't exist outside of America.
4) Extremely poorly framed questions are ubiquitous. Things like, "What's a good book to read?" or "Is $500 a week enough to holiday in France?" Maybe? Depends on what you like? Do you ask people in real life questions this vague?
Yeah and if you gather ppl with that mindset, I think there’s only positive feedback between these…
Like they get high on each other’s supply
My general assessment is that “tough love” can work, but only if the love part is completely beyond dispute. Which is literally never the case on a Reddit advice sub
When it comes to reddit, it's important to remember that the commenters have literally no stake in your life. If you burn it all down, it will just be more fodder for entertainment. That alone is good reason to take reddit-based advice with quite a bit of salt.
So this is one of the conflicts that I tend to have with my mom.
My mom gives me a lot of advice that is wrong and outdated regarding dating, daily life, how to behave, etc. When I say her advice is bad, she counters with "I'm the only one who has a stake in your life. No one else cares about you to the same extent that I do, so you can guarantee that my advice has your best interests at heart. Other people, even your friends, will say whatever because they won't have to live with the consequences." The problem is, the amount that you care about someone isn't always an indicator of how good your advice is going to be.
So you're kind of caught in a dilemma - you take advice from those who are close to you and have a stake in your life who are well-meaning but have strong biases and are acting from a place of unprocessed trauma like my mom, you take advice from outsiders who may (but not always) be more objective but have no stake in your life, or you pay a lot of money to see a professional for a limited amount of time who will do their best to be objective but also don't have a strong stake in your life.
You wonder why therapy and advice are some of the most common use cases for ChatGPT? It's because the options when talking to real people about tough issues all have these tradeoffs. The people who care about you the most might not be equipped to give you the best advice, and outsiders, while possibly being more objective or better-equipped, also don't have a stake in your life and thus will care less about giving the best advice available.
Dude for real! I was struggling with some mom/productivity issue which I've forgotten about. I talked to 1) my mom 2) my husband 3) a mom friend 4) a sibling. None of them were really curious about the problem (which seemed small potatoes at that point) and they didn't give me much beyond platitudes. Five minutes with chatgpt and we have a fulfilling solution that worked well for me.
As someone with a mom who grew up in another culture, I can relate to this. Growing up, often I could get better guidance on how to live by observing other people and how they dealt with challenges in their own lives. It can be guilt-inducing not to take your mom's advice/outlook seriously. But sometimes that's what you have to do to thrive in a different time and place than the one that formed her. Sometimes I'll see a mom and daughter and granddaughter all doing something fun together, all speaking the same language and apparently living in the same world, and I'll think, "That's so wonderful" and have a deep sense of loss.
This has informed my view about parenting, which is that IMO it's less important to have a lot of big emotions about your kids and more important to have your shit together and model how to deal with situations. And I am glad that my kids and I are not caught up in this cross-cultural struggle.
"If you just want to vent and complain, don’t even bother posting—you’re genuinely better off venting to ChatGPT."
I actually did vent to Claude about something, and it gently reproved me and told me, in polite language, to be better. I was enraged and went to ChatGPT and it was much more like "Oh girl, I hear you."
LOLOLOLOL
One of the most striking things I've ever read about the internet is this random old set of blogposts on the subject of "estranged parents' forums". If you've never seen them, you can find the archives by googling "issendai estranged parents" - they go semi-viral every now and again. No idea who the writer was, but they make for interesting reading, and I think of them often when looking at the dynamics of online communities - and IRL communities as well, sometimes.
Basically, this blogger looked at forums for parents whose adult children had cut contact, and observed that they seemed to be a complete echo chamber - they were full of people with zero capacity for self-reflection, no interest in nuance, and no room for any model except poor innocent parent vs evil ungrateful child. This seemed odd, because there are obviously *some* parent-child splits where the child is at least partially responsible (e.g. through addiction or serious mental illness). The conclusion they drew was that parents in that situation *did* use the forums, but only briefly. As people who meaningfully reflected on the situation, identified possible solutions, found more specific communities that could help them, and were uninterested in long-term commiseration, they self-selected out of the group. The people left are the ones who do not want to get out of the group.
And this is something I've noticed happening in a *lot* of different places online. Whenever you have a community that is based around a major life issue - relationship dysfunction, illness, moving abroad, whatever - people who quickly identify and resolve their issues tend to be temporary visitors to the community. On the other hand, people who are stuck in their challenges long-term - whether through the situation being genuinely hard to resolve, or because they lack the emotional tools to deal with those challenges - tend to stick around. The most stuck of the stuck can even become de facto authority figures, simply by virtue of being the most longstanding and prolific posters. This leads to a pessimistic and skewed environment, where the people with the most intractable issues dominate the conversation, project their own cases onto other people, and re-enforce each other's beliefs, all while subtly driving out people who'd like to offer a different opinion.
Postocracy - rule by the stubbornest posters.
That last paragraph is a perfect description of incels
Great post! Re: the pro-intellectualism bias, I feel like many of the proffered tidbits of advice on r/AITA and other subreddits are goods example of rationality taken to absurd extremes, often dismissing any "non-rational" expectation or obligation grounded cultural or social mores. For example, if your parents would like you to participate in a ritual from the immigrant culture they hailed from, Redditors are much more like to dismiss said ritual out of hand. Another example: If a friend or family member expects something from you that isn't explicitly defined in the law, well, you're totally justified in ignoring them. It drives me bonkers.
This example is more endemic to the internet and I think a sign of our changing social systems, but they're also incredibly reluctant around ideas of filial duty. The idea that you could owe your parents or siblings a certain sort of treatment is just not present.
A lot of Redditors came from backgrounds where this filial duty was weaponized in an abusive way (this is the entire concept of r/asianparentstories, for example), which radicalized them towards being hostile to any notion of family being "special". If you're willing to cut off friends for that sort of behavior, why not your parents? Your other family members? Why is family special?
But there’s also a lot of harm inflation, where they try to fit even pretty normal behavior into the framework of “abuse”. E.g. suggesting that older siblings occasionally having to babysit or cook a meal while the parents are out is abusive parentification worthy of going no contact
And similar concepts are much more popular among euro-background Americans right now as well.
As w/ a lot of reddity stuff it's not necessarily the idea so much as the attitude that seems troubling. It's true that it's ok to cut off the abusive parent, and it's true that "you don't owe anyone" many things, but eventually saying that frequently enough starts to sound like a pro-atomization rallying cry. I don't have the post off hand but it reminds me of a criticism of introvert-posting I've read recently; it's totally true that some people don't appreciate how exhausting social interaction can be, but that doesn't seem like the most salient point when you're spending all day posting memes about it from bed.
Sure, but I think there's a directionality component to all of this.
In a society where the predominant culture is "blood is thicker than water" and "family sticks together no matter what", this kind of advice is good, actually! And many Redditors do indeed come from these sorts of cultures. But the prevailing culture among progressive young people is pretty much the opposite extreme. Of course, they have very good reason to be this way - most traditional cultures are the former type of culture and it leads to a whole lot of suffering. But it becomes a pro-atomization rallying cry when the default response to any sort of conflict is "cut the other person off".
Balance is hard, though, when you're dealing with traumatized people whose experiences all were with one particular extreme, because that extreme was the norm in most traditional societies. The opposite extreme is relatively new and people aren't as aware of the harms to that extreme.
Yeah I agree with this mostly.
think where I’m at is a period of despair at the fact that like, a thing about the internet seems to be that it’s collided people who can gather over these ideas into the ability to reach people in any situation anywhere, so like we no longer have a world in which i can go around telling my fellow whites to call their dads safe in the knowledge that someone in a different context isn’t listening in and taking it to heart when they shouldn’t. I think this is a factor in polarization, lots of people getting real mad about stuff they hear about happening in cultures that don’t have to do with them.
So like I agree that kinda everything is like this, where it’s all relative, and I tend to be disposed to see the truth in any POV… but also I’m really worried about that because it leaves me feeling like there’s no resolution.
I guess one way out is to look at it as the formation of new polities which will establish moral equilibria within themselves? Idk
Exactly. For example, the reason why wokeness became a thing in the first place was because it was in response to a culture of rampant racism, misogyny, anti-LGBT sentiment, etc. But if you were raised in an egalitarian (or even somewhat woke) way and you encounter militant wokeness, that'll radicalize you because you didn't grow up in the same context in which wokeness formed. Telling whites/Asian men that they're privileged when their experiences don't match that at all, precisely because of social progress, is radicalizing!
Redditors are on average a very leftist/progressive bunch who were radicalized by having grown up in traditional cultures, and so there's a lot of overcorrection from the bad old days that they engage in.
It certainly seems like Reddit's version of pro-intellectualism is often just being a jerk. Basically the worst caricature of Richard Dawkins applied to all aspects of life.
That was true in the earlier days of Reddit, but nowadays Redditors seem to have taken a hard turn against this and have made entire subreddits mocking these types (such as r/iamverysmart) to the point of dismissing anyone who considers themselves gifted or who has any resemblance to the neckbeard archetype.
Enjoy seeing a mention of r/weddingattireapproval, since I’m kind of fascinated with that one. I used to try to give practical advice on there but got tired of being downvoted for telling people their non-floor-length and/or brightly colored dresses were fine.
I enjoy/hate reading the advice on r/hygiene because how many different ways can someone ask “how do I wash my body so I don’t stink?”, and how many possible answers could there be? Apparently so many. Washing the vagina is especially fraught. Either your militant cleaning with soap will turn you into a dry husk prone to infection or you’re a pig living in slop and good luck ever finding a romantic partner. You have to laugh or you’ll cry about how unhinged people are.
Vagina or vulva? I *really* hope no one’s trying to wash inside their vagina…
I wouldn’t put it past some of the people on that sub. Cleanliness is next to godliness
I quit reading AITA a few years ago, but one thing I do remember it doing pretty well was giving women whose partners were being emotionally abusive some validation that they weren’t being irrational or unreasonable. The sub was absolutely horrible about teenage mothers, though. Even in stories involving teenage moms who had very obvious postpartum depression, it was always, “She made the choice to have a baby, so you don’t owe her anything.” Even if it was something like, “AITA for not babysitting my nephew so my teen mom sister can have her first night out in months and go to homecoming?”
Your story about the listeria concerns brings me back! I was at a continuing legal education seminar when I was pregnant and I couldn’t eat any of the sandwiches. They all had cold cuts, except the vegetarian one, which had bean sprouts. *Long* comment on the evaluation form.
You refused to divorce your husband on the advice of anonymous reddit weirdos?
Wow. Sounds like toxic narcissistic behavior to me. Not a good look.
(This is 100% satire and not a real sentiment.)
I am a bit surprised there aren’t any gender distinctions in the survey, I feel like Reddit generally treats male and female OPs differently, at least on dating and relationship topics. My perception is men are more likely to get “touch love” advice (which is often straight up mean) and are more likely to be seen as the one in the wrong who needs to change. But I’m totally open to my perceptions being wrong here.
Great article though, you hit on all the reasons I don’t post on Reddit for advice anymore, and have mostly stopped reading advice subreddits.
My perception is that it VERY much depends on the topic. In general redditors come down harder on anyone who is playing into gender stereotypes. So a man who seems to not be pulling his weight around the house, or a woman who seems to have unrealistic expectations around her wedding, will get dogpiled more than the opposite.
Do you think that's true of real life too?
IRL I think people tend to think the person they’re closer to is in the right.
I think that's a big draw to Reddit then - the potential for more objective advice.
Also, I think the reason why this disparity exists on Reddit is because everyone is aware of the trope of the socially awkward incel-adjacent STEM-y autistic Redditor. They're tired of people like him making them look bad by association.
I think almost everyone is afraid of giving tough love advice to their real life friends and family.
Wow, there are real people that post on r/AmITheAsshole? 🤣
"A SAHM who experienced minor but frequent conflicts with her husband was told to divorce him repeatedly"
Even by Reddit standards this seems excessive
Reddit advice can be very *random*. Often, the first decently well written response will set the tone. And a lot of people will latch on to the first decently argued, slightly counterintuitive read on things.
Saw a stat yesterday that the top use for AI in 2024 is therapy, which i suppose includes this type of venting. Advice subs are dead or will be dead soon I think.
I've grown to feel that online advice is only for people with standard problems. AI advice works well for non-standard problems requiring expertise in 1-3 areas.
Honestly, that would be an improvement. It sounds like I'm not the only one with the idea - I started using ChatGPT for this purpose in 2024 and it's been great; it's been better for my mental health than any Reddit post. That said, the flaw with ChatGPT is its reputation for obsequiousness and deference - it is too nice to you. I have to be very explicit in telling it to not sugarcoat things and even then it tends to not challenge me unless I say something factually incorrect.
This is my main issue w/ these things, probably because I mostly use them as sounding boards more than anything else. Early attempts to get Claude to be antagonistic just made it briefly stupid nitpicky.
I did argue with it about shrimp welfare once, and I found telling it to pretend to be a lawyer dedicated to carrying out a good-faith case successfully got it to stand ground unless concessions were warranted. Sorta like kink gives the brain permission structure to have sex, if it could channel the "That's a BRILLIANT observation" impulse into "meta chat" limits, it seemed better at maintaining character.
I’m curious to know the full story how you ended up arguing about shrimp welfare with an AI!
Oh I just feel a bit shakey about my non-utilitarian thought on the matter so I was wondering if it would be as helpful as like, being a debate kid was in terms of spotting inconsistencies. Idk how much Claude helped per se, but I did have a couple good moments of "Hm... I'm not really satisfied with what I have to respond to that," so the experience did serve my troubleshooting.
You don't have to always be challenged. You can ask stuff like "are there any flaws in this plan"
There was a reddit post the other day about "5 AI Prompts That Will Punch You in the Soul (And You’ll Thank Them Later)". It would "show you the truth you're avoiding."
Buddy, if I'm avoiding the truth, I probably have a good reason.
Incidentally, instead of googling or even Reddit, when you have an overpowering fear have you ever tried Claude or ChatGPT? At this point they're better search engines than Google, they talk to you after a fashion, and they're not neurotic. Worth a try.