Sam 

I'm having to come to terms with there being ongoing psychological effects from nearly dying at Christmas. Suppose this shouldn't be a surprise. But one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is asymmetric friendship.

Recently, I had a friend who was seriously ill. The expectation was that they would receive all the support their friends could give. I was actively berated by their partner when what I was able to offer did not live up to their expectation. 1/

Mar 18 at 12:05pmWeb
Show threadSam Mar 18

That friend managed an emoji on one social media post I made from in hospital. The partner who berated me openly mocked my being in hospital.

That's asymmetric friendship. I clearly mean less to them than they do to me. There are expectations on me of how I should respond to their crises that they do not feel obliged to reciprocate.

This has happened before. 2/

Show threadSam Mar 18

Someone I considered closer than a best friend literally cut me out of their life because I wasn't living up to their standards of "what a good friend should do" and when I followed their exact instructions in terms of what they wanted, they accused me of ghosting them.

And I'm done with it. I'm just done with humans who expect me to follow rules that don't apply to them, or who tell me they want something and it turns out I was supposed to understand they meant something else. 3/

Show threadSam Mar 18

And I think a lot of this is exacerbated by distant friendships, relationships that largely exist online, because it's so easy for that distance to mean someone matters less when you don't physically interact with them.

I had no problem with the people who did nothing more than post a supportive comment when that's all I've ever done for them. It's not the level of support that bothered me, but the unfairness of expecting something that wasn't there in return. 4/

Show threadSam Mar 18

This is also, I think, a big part of why I've not really gone back to being online as much as I used to be, and I wasn't terminally online anyway. I want to be more "in the world". To be hands-on, interacting physically with things and people I can touch and smell.

Enshittification is reaching interpersonal relationships by virtue of the way the algorithm controls how we interact with people we rarely see. The only way I see to combat it from where I am is just refusal. 5/5

Show threaddriftwolfMar 18
@ravenbait I understand. Human psychology is a mine field. The boundaries and interactions are different online. Even in the flesh, if not explicitly stating this or that, people project, hear what they want or expect. Which often enough leads to incorrect ideas. I trust few to listen. When one is allowed access to medical notes, it's fascinating to peruse such feedback. Even the professionals have penned the opposite spoken. A witness by my side, who knows how to listen, to confirm.
Show threaddriftwolfMar 18
@ravenbait The server I'm on doesn't allow nearly enough characters. To add to the previous message, you're one of the exceedingly few in this world of which I wish physical distance wasn't an obstacle.