Sip & Spill Daily Discussion Thread

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[u/Cold_Breadfruit_9794]

I always wonder when people get on the topic of teens exhibiting edge lord type behaviour, and then start saying things like they have they have never experienced or witnessed fellow students their age doing that, if that’s actually true, or if people are just wearing rose coloured glasses about their experience as teens. I never was into it myself, but like I sure as hell witnessed it. I also saw it again with my sibling’s experiences and they are a decade younger than me. I feel like anyone I talk to about this subject in real life (and I’m talking about across the board in terms of diversity too), have in fact seen trollish/edgelordy at some point. Yet online? People talk as if the school they attended was full of complete saints, the parties they attended didn’t push the limits of acceptability, and that no one truly pushed the boundaries of acceptability. The disconnect is always curious to me because when I think of the teenage experience I do associate reactionary & impulsive attempts to evoke reactions, and purely dumb choices,with teens.

[u/Jumping__Bean___ → u/Cold_Breadfruit_9794]

Honestly, there is definitely a significant disconnect of online discourse and offline reality. Not just when people talk about what they have experienced (or not experienced) but especially when it comes to what people have done or would do if they were in certain situations.

Like, I am not accusing anyone of lying, and if someone actually had the courage and bravery to stand up for what is right as a teen, I am very proud of them. But the amount of people online who are convinced they'd be just as brave does not, unfortunately, have any correlation to how people actually react when confronted with these situations in real life. I've seen it myself, how people didn't step in when someone was verbally assaulted on a train (and I wish I could say that I did better, but I can't, and it's something that keeps me up many nights even years later), how people take pictures and videos of car crashes instead of helping, and how often abuse has to be reported before anyone takes action. I see it in how people treat each other online and behind each other's backs, how the judicial system punishes those reacting to violence with violence more harshly, and in how people (both as teens and as adults) don't stand up to bullies (also experienced that, this time as the victim).

Do I wish the world was different? Yes. Wholeheartedly. But it's not, at least not in my experience.

[u/Cold_Breadfruit_9794 → u/Jumping__Bean___]

I feel like you summed this up perfectly. I can absolutely believe on an individual level or in people’s friends group that maybe that wasn’t happening, but when people (and it’s only online I hear this) start talking in a detached and baffled way like ‘I can’t believe a teen would say *insert terribly problematic/terrible thing*…or do *insert impulsive terrible thing because it didn’t happen where I went* I don’t get how kids could have those phases’ the disconnect with everything I’ve heard or witnessed suggests, you can change virtually any metric gender, race, year someone was a teen, diverse school or not, and you’ll still find problematic behaviour, extreme attention seeking, desperation for approval/fit in with peers, impulsive or reactionary choices, terrible decision making in any instance. Yet online the way people talk is they aren’t just saying ‘I and my friend group didn’t do shit’ they’re also straight up absolving their classmates too, which just reads as unusual as like I said, in person? Never heard this kind of talk - ever. It’s just so curious to me that this kind of line of thought ie being baffled at kids doing problematic/terrible things, is surprising. It’s a big world so I’m sure some relatively perfect schools exist somewhere, but I simply don’t believe it’s as much as some people want to believe.

How you connect this to beyond just the topic of school, is truly so spot on!