I'm especially thinking of "trypophobia." There are others, but it's the worst. I'll start out by correcting the word, at its most basic level: these motherfuckers have trypophilia. Yeah, I fucking said it.
You know why I'm saying that? Because every one of these fuckers who claims to have the "phobia" in question CONSTANTLY SHARES IMAGES OF THINGS THAT SUPPOSEDLY TRIGGER THE PHOBIA.
That's the opposite of a phobia, you fucking nimrods. People who have a fear of dogs don't post pictures of pit bulls and dobermans, in their goddamn group chats and subreddits. People who can't get on airplanes don't go looking for graphic photos of air disasters. People with acrophobia don't flock to that glass-bottom walkway, at the fucking Grand Canyon.
But, again, these assholes who are supposedly stricken with trypophobia constantly share pics of bubbly English muffins, collanders, plant pods, etc. THAT'S A FUCKING PARAPHILIA, YOU INCONSIDERATE FUCKING FUCK-STICKS.
At the risk of repeating myself, that is the opposite of a phobia. These intolerable douche-tubes even pervert the word "trigger" into a horrific parody of its actual use. They'll slide a particularly spicy picture of a slice of Swiss cheese into a discussion, and be like "ooOOOhhhH, this triggered me so much."
For "triggered," you can substitute "gave me a twitching hard-on."
Once again: this is NOT how it works for real phobias. If you've got hemophobia and someone shows you a picture of someone bleeding, you are NOT GOING TO REACT THAT WAY.
You do NOT seek out pictures of your phobia triggers. You do NOT discuss them in a basically lewd way, like the goddamned trypophiliacs do.
If you have a REAL PHOBIA, and you actually do get that shit triggered, it's, ya know, ACTUALLY TRAUMATIC. Again: you avoid those triggers, even if it costs you job opportunities, social standing, personal relationships, etc.
People with real phobias are living with real fucking problems, as a result of them. They work and struggle and research ways to try and lessen their effects. That might involve exposure therapy, where they deliberately interact with the object of their fear, but they are NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO THOSE SESSIONS, AT ALL.
They are suffering. They are suffering with real mental illness symptoms.
When you post your "oooOOHhhH, look at this seed pod, it's sooooo trigigigigigerring my trypophobia" shit, that is as close as you can get to spitting in the faces of all the people with real phobias, out there in the world.
I hasten to add that I don't have any debilitating phobias, myself. But I know people who do. And that struggle is painful to see. If you're out there faking a phobia, turning it into a paraphilia for shits & giggles, on the internet, FUCK YOU.
If you're out there doing that shit, I hope you develop a real phobia, and experience every iota of the real pain and suffering that it entails. That would be justice.
Those are interesting points. I hadn't considered the possibility that the current form of phobia discussion on social media might be some kind of symbiotic relationship, between people bringing in content that will be hard to watch for other groups, and then those people drawing from that well, to expose themselves to the triggering content, in a way that I might indeed classify as "healthy."
I will concede that I might be applying old-fashioned values to that paradigm. Maybe it's genuinely helping people, even if I still view it as...I suppose, "unwholesome" might be a good word for how I feel.
The point is, I was making too much of a snap judgment, and not even beginning to consider that there might be a true, valid middle ground between "we're pretending to discuss a phobia, while we mentally masturbate" and "we're engaging in super serious, ideally professionally directed exposure therapy."
I belong to the Geriatric Millennial age group, and so I'm bringing my own particular sensibilities about political correctness and social interaction into the discussion. In other words, I have unconscious biases, like anyone and everyone. In this case, those biases may have given me a real blind spot.
That’s the problem with being a millennial. All the things we “know” mostly don’t apply anymore, really. And whatever you manage to catch in passing is your new paradigm.. exhausting to learn, when the next gen runs at the speed of computers.
Things have changed a lot in ways even we don’t recognize, and like we used to call those people attention whores and whatever.. now we call them content creators, because they have a different medium.
But I’m glad to have made a difference :) “let people be people” is honestly the best and easiest advice to live by because we have records from thousands of years ago and they could have been written yesterday. And if we actually did it we’d have moved on from that :)