When OCD and Cancellation Collide
A hypervigilant fear of being cancelled is prevalent among OCD sufferers, and typical reactions to this fear make things worse.
People are pretty familiar with the typical OCD manifestations—cleanliness and germophobia (of course), magical thinking rituals to prevent peril, and hypochondria or worries about health and safety (this is how it usually goes for me.)
But there are many other forms of OCD—intrusive thoughts and fears about more taboo things, things which most people are scared of mentioning. Thoughts that you might harm children are common among OCD sufferers, for the simple reason that this is the worst thing those people can imagine, so their OCD attaches to it. This is precisely how intrusive thoughts and OCD work—I was once in an OCD support group with a nice woman who often worried that she might cheat on her husband without realizing it, and eventually developed a terrifying obsession that she could, at any moment, become a cannibal serial killer.
A less taboo, but also less well-documented version of this subtype of OCD is a fear of cancellation, or having your life/career ruined by the hands of an online hate mob, usually for perceived bigotry. Unlike a fear that you are one bad day away from skilleting and filleting your neighbor, a fear of cancellation makes a bit more “sense”—far more people have been cancelled (as in, lost their jobs or entire careers, not “got yelled at online for two days”) often for seemingly innocuous or minor things, than become serial killers. (Take, for example, the young man who was famously fired for making a middle-school-tier sex joke to a friend at a tech conference, within earshot of a woman he’d never met.) One could not become a serial killer by accident, but almost everyone who has been canceled over online slights (or worse, behaviors out of context, filmed by strangers in public) did not think what they did was wrong. And at least for a while, openly expressing this fear, or any criticism of “cancel culture,” made you a target of this same culture which supposedly didn’t exist. Which was, to say the least, bad for people with this subtype of OCD!
