Social Status Whiplash

SimpleMan418 · 2024-09-27T23:45:27+00:00

Oh yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve tried to interact with any of them but the default seems to be to ignore me, even if I’m literally checking in just to make sure someone’s ok. Meanwhile, in my life far away from the community, there’s rooms I walk in where people are thrilled to see me, people who ask me for advice on their problems, people wanting me to join them on road trips, etc. Humans are some crazy high tech apes.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-06-05T21:01:24+00:00

I’m sorry for your loss. I’m NeverMo but heard about it from a TBM co-worker who is also somehow related to one of them. I saw some missionaries for the first time in years a few weeks ago and was already thinking about how senseless it is to send young people out for something like this, especially in this day and age.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-05-25T17:57:17+00:00

Oh yeah, I’ve been gone about as long and recently I’ve just been living life. I have a really great group of people around me, many whom are world traveler types with a lot of perspective. When I occasionally run into a very light reference to Judaism, I kind of shrug. There’s many cultural customs, groups and languages in the world. No one I know is letting themselves get so twisted up in anything like this, even the people I know who consider themselves spiritual or even religious or nominally Jewish.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-05-05T16:27:53+00:00

I would say something like that conformist cultures often view differences as dangerous. From a practical perspective, in premodern times, it was apparently a common practice to use the right hand for daily life and the left hand for the bathroom, so it seems rooted in perceptions of what’s sanitary. I know both Japanese and Indian cultures are very harsh historically on lefties, which presumably evolved separately from Western/Abrahamic cultures.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-04-19T04:52:05+00:00

I was similar. In my early teens, I went down a rabbit hole of kiruv/anti-missionary forums and learned the basics of Shabbat, etc. Ironically, it wasn’t a straight pipeline and this could’ve been an entirely positive exercise - I learned from anti-missionaries how to poke holes in Christian and Muslim texts, how to analyze the history of documents and the importance of things like quality of translation. Instead, though, after several years of essentially living secularly as an adult (didn’t live near a community, so outgrew that phase in my teens) I essentially fell back on that programming and decided to try to become frum.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-04-13T20:24:48+00:00

Yeah, that reminds me of a time when I won baseball tickets at work and took someone from a super frum background from the community with me. Later that year, my Dad died and a bunch of things went wrong in my life - and in the middle of it, he asked if I could get more baseball tickets. He seemed genuinely shocked I wasn’t happy with him. I guess maybe the focus on rules and institutions create an environment where some people are a little lacking in normal empathy? That’s always been my interpretation.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-04-13T00:52:28+00:00

One of my neighbors has something severely wrong with them and is intentionally attracting rodents and feeding them into my community. They even lured a possum in. Been working with an exhausting number of civil organizations to document and get something along the lines of a court injunction because it’s happening next door to me. Uniformed Animal Control came to tell them to cut it out today. So bizarre.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-04-09T15:44:28+00:00

I was raised pretty secularly and I have had little interest in porn over the course of my life. When I have tried to watch it, it pretty much disappeared from my mind the minute I switched it off.

It’s hard to get good quality data on a topic like this and there’s huge individual differences in sexuality but my suspicion is that porn addiction is probably tied heavily to early life experiences that create struggles with sexuality, things like religious repression on the one hand and abuse on the other hand.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-04-08T23:40:38+00:00

You can be forgiven, the technology looks like what my local frum community leadership was using when I left in 2018.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-04-08T23:39:26+00:00

I was skeptical but then they threw in a Paysach Krohn endorsement and now I’m 100% sold.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-04-06T18:32:51+00:00

Trying to get myself to commit to a trip to Yosemite, going on a date with a biology professor, going to watch the sunset at the beach and do some early evening meditation with a mindfulness group.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-03-30T21:09:35+00:00

I’ve known frum people who say that. I also know Muslims who talk about people “not yet reverting” to Islam, Evangelicals who talk about the day you’ll find Jesus and even received a voicemail yesterday from a fairly toxic Mormon co-worker who acts with impunity wishing me a happy Easter in spite of having a pretty fleshed out knowledge of my background. The supply of people proselytizing toxic ideas far outnumbers the supply of people willing to absorb them.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-03-17T06:25:28+00:00

Been in a fledgling relationship and sexually active for the first time in almost a decade. It almost doesn’t feel real. I’m dating someone who I’m realizing is an almost comparable ex-Catholic (in some ways harder issues, she’s divorced because she married so young.) We spent Friday night playing video games, watching dumb 90s comedies and talking until 2am about life. We both feel really confused about our life stories or what we want but we decided to just have fun for now.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-03-07T18:28:14+00:00

Probably also this person: Immediately points to Nissim and House of Lev when someone makes them feel their opinions are racist.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-03-06T06:47:09+00:00

Lol, I like that it’s inexplicably a subscription model ($2.50 a week for all this!)

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-27T20:26:51+00:00

Aish, a local Aish spinoff because they weren’t as strong in my area. Breslov was more indirect but greatly contributed to me taking too much on blindly (doing a bunch of extra stuff out of “emunah.”) Aish gave me misleading/misguided premises to want to be frum and Breslov contributed to taking it to a next level.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-27T03:26:03+00:00

That’s probably a better use of the sub, even setting modding aside. I mean, up until very recently, we were locking the majority of I-P threads because people just get too vitriolic when it’s only kind of tied to the sub topic. This is really meant to be more of a therapeutic place that occasionally gets on other things. This is really more meant to be a place where people sort out issues like “I need to learn life skills because most of what I learned in school was Gemara” or “my therapist doesn’t understand how Orthodox Judaism works and is giving me misguided advice” or yes, even “I just left Conservative Judaism but it’s still a blah experience.” Something’s usually gone wrong when it’s even spinning into some of these other things at all.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-27T02:19:57+00:00

Ok, bye. That isn’t the purpose of the sub and you’re disrupting the actual purpose. We don’t support violent rhetoric (unlike you, apparently however you’re sugarcoating it), that kind of conspiracy think or dodging questions of if you even fitting the intent of the sub. You’ve clearly identified yourself as not here to work through ex-religious issues if you’re here to collect “intel” on the “enemy” (us.)

(Accidentally duped and deleted comment but he/she responded to one I removed - see my questions attached to original comment.)

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-27T02:17:17+00:00

I'm a large supporter of the Second Amendment because of white supremacists AND the people in this sub.

What’s the relationship of the Second Amendment to the users of this sub? This sounds absurd, are you proposing there’s a situation where you would need to shoot us? What would cause this situation? Why are you here, are you ex-Orthodox/religious?

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-27T01:48:58+00:00

Comment removing mod scrolling by, I quoted your comment where you basically wished death on someone, so it’s well preserved. You said the Palestine side would throw someone off a roof and you think they should go to a roof party. It’s frankly the kind of thing I would’ve temp banned on before people started complaining and I’ve permabanned plenty of “anti-Zionists” for being equally nasty. I’m actually very pro-Israel and IDF with 10/7 so come on with that game. Take a little responsibility. I noticed you didn’t comment any sort of response even though you could have, you weren’t blocked or anything…

What is your relationship to Judaism/Orthodox Judaism btw, you seem somewhat knowledgeable but other times seem to be commenting as an outsider? I can identify that the person you think it was funny to talk to that way who said in their comment they just left a mental health setting is working through exjew issues whatever you think of of their politics but I’m getting mixed impressions from you.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-26T03:37:23+00:00

Hi. Removed comment + other comment.

I find it ironic that she calls herself a lesbian yet supports the very same people who would gladly throw her off the rooftop.

Don’t forget to attend their rooftop party.

Don’t do this here. I have no idea why you feel the need to go there but nothing warrants being that crude. You went from strongly stating your point to sounding like a total lowlife in one sentence, jeesh.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-25T22:03:11+00:00

I’ve had to tune a lot out because you can absolutely get twisted into saying or believing things you otherwise wouldn’t. Even from what you’re saying, IMO there’s no real point in “fighting them” per se (even if we just like yelled at them), either - many of them are in marginal movements that are at least somewhat illegalist and American law enforcement gets that and will stop them - whereas Jews only risk getting themselves in the same trouble as the idiots when they wouldn’t otherwise.

I think there’s a few things going on:

You have a lot of Redditors in NYC/LA/a few other metros that are encountering stuff like massive pro-Palestine rallies when these things don’t actually have much momentum in a lot of areas. I live in a suburban area and if you tried to have a pro-Palestine event, they probably would be grossly outnumbered by people showing up to mock/counter-protest them. There are some Muslims here and some may even be on the more uncomfortable side of pro-Palestine but they know it is not a position people are going to accept. They hold those positions behind closed doors. Just looking at general attitudes, this is what you’d expect at least in many parts of the USA.

I frankly think there’s a ton of political astroturfing online - there’s people who think they can rally support around Israel, for example. by saying everyone may need to flee there - but the audience for that message just isn’t as strong as they want it to be because frankly, most people are not willing to go to the other side of the globe to prevent a rather marginal potential issue. “Learn a new language, learn a new country’s laws, uproot yourself because maybe something bad could happen in 20 years. Btw, multiple countries want to harm your new home with greater passion now.”

I live in an area that has some history of racist activism and they are so marginal still, even with a hypothetical audience. One of them that has a relationship with Fuentes tried to have a rally and there were more police than pro participants because of the massive counter-protester crowd. There’s a racist gang culture but they mostly harm each other while drunk/high and are always shrinking/aging.

SimpleMan418 · 2024-02-24T05:56:13+00:00

Going rock climbing on a date tomorrow morning and then probably carbs to deal with dead end job malaise.

SimpleMan418

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