71–80 of 218 posts
Would he garner the same amount of attention if he wasn't white or good looking?
The article talks about his ability to be friendly to strangers but abusive to his long term acquaintances. I have observed this pattern and curious if anyone knows what drives this? My personal theory is that you have some sort of obligations to long term acquaintances but you owe nothing to strangers on the trail. It's this feeling of obligation that leads you to resent people over time.
Sorry to spell it out, and I don’t expect any sympathy for it, but the pattern was man/woman.
The article talks about his ability to be friendly to strangers but abusive to his long term acquaintances. I have observed this pattern and curious if anyone knows what drives this? My personal theory is that you have some sort of obligations to long term acquaintances but you owe nothing to strangers on the trail. It's this feeling of obligation that leads you to resent people over time.
( Fortunately for her, the friends who attempted to console him pretty soon noticed how violent he got when he talked about her. When he threw a glass at the wall at a friend's apartment, she started getting a lot of apologies. )
It's almost an adaptive behavior. If they were violent to strangers, they wouldn't have long term acquaintances.
Maybe Rodriguez’s story is similar to Cody’s. He was alone in a vast, unfamiliar city. He’d destroyed his relationships. He left his apartment in anger. And then, as he traversed the mountains, walking through sugar maple and oak, hickory and poplar, stepping over roots and rocks, he tamed his demons too. The many people who met him didn’t sense the dark, brooding, sometimes dangerous person who left Brooklyn. People…
> People who decide to commit suicide sometimes appear to others to be feeling a lot better in the time between the decision and the final act. I suspect this is just an instance of the pretty common response to having made a decision that was weighing on you. If it's a big one (divorce, career change, etc.) I'm sure most of us have experienced this at least 2nd hand.
It's also stronger than that because the very likely "normal state" of your brain up to that point is severe depression, so you're not anywhere near what people might consider an average state of mind, and you're getting that strong of a kick.
You can ride that euphoria for quite a while even through some of the nagging doubts clawing their way back between the initial feeling and the last action. I doubt much research can be done for what I'm about to say (and I might be very wrong), but I have the feeling that when you're alone (mentally) you can ride that wave for a decent amount of time yet with just a very brief REAL interaction with another human being you can snap out of it. It might not fully dissipate but still break the trance-like state.
Not a lot of interactions might feel real like that, but when they do they can be life-changing (for obvious reasons) even when the subject matter is frivolous.
You'll likely never know just how many you changed, nor why.
We often notice how "easy"/quick it is to hurt somebody by saying something even light-hearted, but when it comes to that extreme you'd be surprised how very few words about mundane things can prevent a collapse (at least that time).
Okay, this quote stood out -- “He was a crazy good coder. Except he would always code everything the hardest way possible, kind of like you hired Rembrandt to paint your bathroom. You know it is going to be lit, but over the top.” A good read and a good reminder that people are always much more complex than we think. I wonder sometimes if by being exposed so often to fairly flat depictions of characters in movies and…
It's possible to disappear if nobody is looking for you and you have enough cash. Even the latter is somewhat optional, it just means you are much less comfortable.
Fundamentally in this world, many (most?) of us are redundant. A person missing here or there is only missed if their social web is wide enough.
Was he abused by his father or something? Sounds like it should be investigated further. People usually don't just become like this without a good reason.