doubleca5t on tumblr:
imo one of the funniest genres of dude is the ones who post shit on social media like “in 2024 I don’t have time for fake friends” “so many people trying to betray you and stab you in the back, can’t trust anyone but yourself” “I got a lot of enemies, a lot of people praying on my downfall” and then they work at like the mall or something like bro what kind of life are you leading there cannot be that many people out to get you
I don’t know anything about the ‘entrepreneur’ part of this but my guess as to why this happens is:
Friend groups of choice are naturally filtered by drama level, such that low drama people don’t join friend groups with a lot of drama, and vice versa, and once the sorting has occurred the two kinds of groups don’t naturally bump into each other. (Also see section V of this blog post.)
If you exist in a high-drama group, you do have fake friends and you do relatively often have “stabbed in the back” social experiences – e.g. people will nod when you rant about your grudge against the guy you’re beefing with, but then invite him but not you to their events because it turns out they liked him better all along, and this is surprising and hurtful.
This is largely conjectural. My one personal experience that leads me to believe this is true is from a 2 year period starting 2022 where I decided to expand my horizons and hang out with a very different friend group than the kind I’ve been used to since my late teens. (This group had originally crystallized around board games, but they also drank alcohol, and drinking buddies were a nutrient I felt quite deprived of at the time.)
They were maybe 4x more drama-prone than my usual groups. And my impression was that one of them was a refugee from an even higher-drama friend group and was glad to hang out with chill people. In a group of about 15 core members, five of them did surprising-to-me drama things like:
- Giving me a tarot reading and saying “this one is perfect for you, it says you shouldn’t commit” (she knew I was poly and married, and apparently didn’t like the first thing)
- Went and kicked a utility box in the street when I offended him by accident
- (Same person ) Becoming so angry during a board game at a public game house that he started shouting violent things
- (Different person) Goading that guy at the public game house
- (Same person) Made jokes about his friend’s (nonexistence) OnlyFans that she was clearly uncomfortable with
- Using moderator permissions on Discord to delete someone else’s messages without warning or permission
- (The partner of someone in the group) Unlocking the guy’s phone without permission and reading his messages
Where did the low key high school bullies go, the ones you don’t see around anymore now that you’re an adult and only socialize with people you like? My guess is they now hang out with each other, stressing each other out, making social media posts like this.
(Anticipating one comment: this was not obviously a class thing or an education thing – this group and my primary low-drama friend group were both wealthy on average, but my primary group is higher variance and has more people who didn’t go to college, who are NEETs, etc. The main difference I notice is sex/gender and textuality – my primary group is noticeably sluttier and trans, and tend to write a lot of blog posts or long Discord messages. Probably the latter is the more relevant correlate.)