> I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me.
That seems so bizarre. Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy. Yes, back in the day if tragedy happened people would take deliberate effort to call each other.
20 years ago, death announcements were expected and normal. They appeared in places people were expected to see - including local newspapers. You would also see death announcement being read in churche, posted in buildings etc. 20 years ago people met in person more often and you learned this stuff via gossip and word of mouth. Not being told to you personally, but being told to a whole group of people.
The aggressiveness of your response is absurd. No, it was not seen as a mental health illness at all.
When you expect personal one to one call, it is equivalent of removing yourself from other social structures in the past. You can do it, but your relationships will weaken and eventually die out. Just like it happened in the past.
It's very country specific. I'm from Romania and I think there were obituaries in newspapers, but I'm having a hard time thinking of people I know that did it.
You read the obituaries in your local paper, “oh, so and so has passed away”, you don’t know them particularly well, might or might not go to the funeral.
Posting it to social media, then thinking if whoever doesn’t contact you to… what? “Sorry for your loss”? “My condolences” … hurts your relationship with that person?
> Posting it to social media, then thinking if whoever doesn’t contact you to… what? “Sorry for your loss”? “My condolences” … hurts your relationship with that person?
That's not what anyone said, you're out here fighting ghosts.
> And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.
Right but it's not 20+ years ago. 20+ years ago when my family visited relatives abroad, our relatives would get to the airport and often have to wait for our delayed flight because they had no way of knowing and half the day would be lost. If your flight arrived early then you just waited. That was normal. Now we update each other over a web messenger, arrive at our destination, hop onto the free WiFi, then wait until our relatives greet us.
> 20+ years ago when my family visited relatives abroad, our relatives would get to the airport and often have to wait for our delayed flight because they had no way of knowing
Apart from phoning the airline or airport and checking whether the flight was on time. We used to do that all the time 30+ years ago.
Most of us would not have even done that, though yes, the option was there, but that sort of thing was much more popular 40+ years ago.
There was another discussion where this came up on HN recently, but people get quite emotionally defensive when you start scrutinizing their reasons for staying on social media, so it is hard to have an honest conversation about it without a bunch of hyperbolic takes.
In my experience, it was designed to be addictive, partly by using our own behavior against us and partly by vindicating the desire for attention. The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic, as it turns out, but we are so steeped in it that's there's no chance of purifying those waters, again.
To your point, yes, there was some aspect of this back in the day, what with obituaries in newspapers being out there to both acknowledge that a person lived, but also put out the call to any old acquaintances to come say goodbye, but it was a laughable effort by today's standards of maximum self-aggrandizing and competitive social engagement. We have to ask ourselves if that is a socially and mentally healthy position to be in, which is an admittedly scary question.
> but it was a laughable effort by today's standards of maximum self-aggrandizing and competitive social engagement.
What does this mean?
> The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic
I know about one or two people who does this. And it's far away from an obituary.
I'm not quite sure I get what you a saying. I just meant in my upbringing it was quite normal to share publicly when someone died. And they still do it today.
Apologies if my wording was too vague. I am using 'Self-aggrandizing' to mean a high exhibition of self-importance, or to put it another way, advertising one's self in a way that makes minor events or details seem bigger than they are. I am using 'competitive social engagement' as an alternative phrase to "Keeping up with the Joneses" which illustrates comparing yourself to your neighbors in terms of status, wealth, moral fiber, etc.
The invention of Social Media propelled us into extreme versions of these two very-human aspects of our psychology, which I believe to be both dangerous and ill-fated.
My intention was not to attack in any way, I just thought your reference to obituaries was an interesting link to our past prior to social media that was worth exploring and comparing. In a way, we can think of our Facebook profile as an extended obituary since that data is all accessible after we die. In fact, I am experiencing this on Instagram, having just lost a friend on New Year's Day and sitting down to peruse his old Instagram posts for the happy memories therein. Your comment just got me thinking, so I decided to expound on it.
added: I should maybe clarify that I'm of an age that remembers what the world was like before Social Media and the Internet as we know it today. The differences when I compare those two halves of my life tend to be alarmingly drastic, which is something that warrants examination, to me, since many HN readers might be a bit too young to remember, so from their perspective, Social Media habits are likely more normalized.
> Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy.
Do you have a reference for the claim that the diagnostic criteria for Munchausen By Proxy (or Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another) once included broadcast-type notices when a family member dies? The DSM-IV would have been in effect 20 years ago, and while version 5 doesn't have that in its warning signs, I guess it could have changed from the previous version?
We got a real pot, meet kettle situation here. It is absolutely wild to suggest that doing something standard like arranging for an obituary in the local newspaper would be viewed as a sign of mental illness.
That seems so bizarre. Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy. Yes, back in the day if tragedy happened people would take deliberate effort to call each other.