this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024

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Meme phobias are an unacceptable insult to every person with real phobias. (lemmynsfw.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] mycodesucks@lemmy.world 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Username checks out

[–] RedditWanderer@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'm sure he spends a lot of time explaining to people "it's a misunderstanding, I'm acutally a great guy!"

[–] weariedfae@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Bro you need to switch to decaf.

Edit: nevermind, I get like this over plenty of things. Rage on my dude!

[–] BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I’m quite claustrophobic, particularly for caves and elevators, and still sometimes make myself uncomfortable with shit like the descent or reading about spelunkers getting trapped.. it petrifies me but, importantly, I’m not in a cave while reading or watching it, and that’s not something I’ll ever do, so I’m exploring it safely. It helps because we have all these really cool simulation mechanisms in our brains that work through the things we experience, and help us face them when we actually encounter them in our lives.

Exploring things that make you uncomfortable, whatever level that discomfort reaches, is really important for eventually overcoming it.

I would argue that pure aversion to things that cause discomfort is the far less healthy approach.

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com -5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I would argue that pure aversion to things that cause discomfort is the far less healthy approach.

I did mention that exposure therapy is a real thing. It is absolutely important to managing phobia symptoms and possibly making strides to overcoming a phobia.

I'm talking about these fake-phobia motherfuckers, who trade pics of their "triggers," when they're actually just sharing fetish objects, serving their paraphilia. Again: that's the opposite of a phobia, and it's insulting to real phobia sufferers.

[–] BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Who are you to judge what’s exposure therapy and what’s “fake-phobia motherfuckers”? Does it have to be paid for therapy? Led by someone with questionable credentials?

Let’s apply this to another realm.. are you not disabled if you aren’t diagnosed and in treatment?

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com -3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

You're not understanding what I'm talking about. I don't think you're familiar with the shit I'm talking about. It's an "I know it when I see it" type of thing. For real.

Go and visit /r/trypophobia for yourself. These people are trading fetish pictures. It's not exposure therapy, or anything like it.

I'm not wrong about this.

EDIT: And I hasten to add that I WOULDN'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT, IF THEY IDENTIFIED THEMSELVES, PROPERLY.

If they called themselves "trypophiliacs," or "trypomaniacs," and they openly traded those pics as a paraphilic thing, I wouldn't try to shame them. That's their shit that they like. Whatever. None of my fucking business. But they have ADOPTED THE TERMINOLOGY OF PHOBIAS, and that fucking pisses me off.

They're pretending to be suffering, when they're just mentally jacking off. Maybe even physically. Maybe these fucking freaks are nutting onto English muffins and eating them. And I still wouldn't be mad about that, if they weren't insulting real people who do suffer from real phobias.

[–] BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No, I know exactly what you are talking about.

Sure you might be right that some of them fetishize it or something, but… it could also be largely posted as an exposure channel…? Why else would you follow someone posting your trigger? Duh.

Idk maybe you are way more involved with those groups than I would be, so maybe you have some unique insight here, but frankly it’s not that different from other desensitization-themed groups that share shit without significant trigger warnings because you just expect to see your trigger posted there.

[+] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com -6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

other desensitization-themed groups that share shit without significant trigger warnings

That's part of the damage I'm talking about. I just went over to reddit's /r/claustrophobia, and it does indeed look just like /r/trypophobia. Are there any posts about where you can get therapy? Are there any threads, offering or asking for support, after people have had to flee confined spaces, and maybe that hurt their careers or their relationships?

Nah. None of that. If that stuff was ever there, it's gone now. It's been replaced by post titles, like "Saw this on tiktok and got my heart rate WAY up."

That's a real title, over on /r/claustroophobia, right now. The fucking trypophiliacs have SPREAD their fucking perversion. It's not just that one post, either. It's all just a giant wall of people one-upping each other, with more and more extreme confined-space-porn pics.

God help anyone who does want a place where there are significant trigger warnings. Those places have apparently been taken over by the "oooOOOOooOoh, that got my heart really racing," fetish people.

I'll be as clear as possible: I don't think the claustrophobia subreddit is populated by real people suffereing from claustrophobia, anymore. It's now being run by people who are using the memetic idea of claustrophobia as some kind of mental masturbation thing.

Are you really going to defend that, further?

[–] BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ok but if you are looking on Reddit, first of all you are whining to the wrong people about it. Most of us aren’t over there and don’t give a flying fuck about them.

But also if you expect every group to do everything, you are sorely mistaken as to the way the internet works and the way communities work, especially niche ones..

You aren’t in the Apple ecosystem here, this is the real world where people form the groups they want and they don’t give a fuck about your feels and that doesn’t make them less legitimate than whatever your ideal view of someone with a phobia is.

Grow up, we exist in the world and we make groups that feed into what we want to see and if you have a problem with that you literally have a problem with the way humans function in a social setting… you’ll learn someday that it’s so much easier to just let people be people. They will figure themselves out and they will like the content they like. You can’t change that, don’t bother. You’ll frustrate yourself because whatever you think people should do isn’t what they do in practice.

Best you can do is try to offer something better.

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com -4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

In this form, your point is largely unassailable. I concede, at least, that I have no power to act as the moral police, and impose any demands on people, no matter how much I'd prefer them to just replace "phobia" with "philia" in the names of their subreddits.

But it would be more polite, if they did.

And, just to refresh that point, that's all I'm really asking for. I'm just saying, it would objectively cause less harm in the world, if the default "_____phobia" subreddits were serious-minded, trigger-safe, sober places for people to go, when they really need help with their phobia, need advice, need to vent, need help finding treatment, etc.

There was a time, when reddit specifically, and the web more broadly, was quite a bit more useful and quite a bit less meme-ish. And I don't even mind memes. Most of my time on Lemmy is spent on the fucking meme boards.

But I'm not kidding myself, nor am I blotting out any formerly safe spaces, for anything serious. And yeah, again, I do know that I have no power over the people who are turning phobias into memes. I just don't have to fucking like it. In all honesty, simply pointing out that I can't control those people isn't adding much to the discussion. I made a rant, it's probably an unpopular one, and that's why I put it in this community.

[–] BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I think I understand our disconnect despite apparently agreeing. You seem to conflate the posters of the content for the consumers consumers of the content, I think..? But.. They probably aren’t the same group at all.

Sure, the person posting might be into it… moooooore likely they are into making people uncomfortable, whatever form, and that’s an easy way. And you know, we sort of need people to make those posts because we aren’t gunna seek it out otherwise?

Like the last super claustrophobic movie I watched, I watched it because people told me it would be fucking hard to watch.

Edit - have you ever looked at more general forums for phobias, rather than just super niche stuff? Reddit is a bad example but so is a single phobia.. you’d be better off looking at r/phobias (I assume that’s a place I’m just saying, general is the way)

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net 3 points 7 months ago

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 :)

[–] Glowstick@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

trypophobia is not a real phobia in psychiatry. Look it up, the term was literally coined by a random person in an online forum. Many people get the hebbie jebbies by it, but that's different from an actual psychiatric phobia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 7 months ago

I thought about pointing that out, but mainstream psychology has a veeeeeeerrrrrry sketchy track record, when it comes to adding new things that really DO need to be added to its "official" documentation.

And, ya know, an even more sketchy record, when it comes to removing things that SHOULDN'T be listed as mental illnesses, in that same documentation.

Like, go ahead and look up when various sexual orientations and behaviors finally got delisted from their "this is a mental illness" journals. It's not okay. Huge percentages of the people currently teaching psychology and psychiatry used to teach classes where they, themselves, openly referred to homosexuality as a mental illness. An even larger percentage of the practicing clinicians are old enough to have been taught, in those classes.

That's enough for me to just fully distrust psychology, period. I realize that people have no choice but to be treated by those doctors, when they need mental health treatment...but it's not a good situation. The entire academic discipline is poisoned by layer upon layer of homophobia, misogyny, ethically unsound political bias, etc.

Therefore, I made my argument about trypophilia, specifically without mentioning anything about "official" psychological opinions.

[–] Kyle@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 months ago

It's like you put a voice to the part of my brain that gets annoyed when bloggers bring it up.

I remember first reading about it on the blogosphere and it blew up ever since then.

Seed pods give me the heebie jeebies and that's about it. Probably an evolved aversion to bee hives and wasp nests that was useful once upon a time, just like spiders and snakes.

[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My wife definitely has trypophobia. She never seeks such images, and hates seeing them. You should hear her scream when she accidentally (to her. Mostly I plan it) comes across such images/objects. Just the other day she freaked out at some 'pineberries' that I brought home for their novelty.

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com -4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Your wife isn't a part of the group I'm talking about, then.

At least, she's probably not. I would like to know when she started having the phobia. Was it something she had all her life, apart from any internet interaction? Or was it something she basically contracted, from seeing internet posts about it?

I realize that's a rude question, but I don't think it's an invalid one. I have very serious doubts, as to whether ANYONE truly, definitely, absolutely had trypophobia, before they were exposed to it, as a meme on the internet. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is a real thing. If I'm wrong, then your wife is a real phobia sufferer. But I just think it has to be more than a coincidence that the historical record seems to be devoid of any mention of that phobia, in the pre-internet age.

I think it's a modern thing that internet assholes made up. If it's making people truly suffer from it, as a phobia, then it's even more of a scourge than I gave it credit for, in my original rant.

[–] magnusrufus@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

Your wife isn’t a part of the group I’m talking about, then.

Because every one of these fuckers who claims to have the “phobia” in question CONSTANTLY SHARES IMAGES OF THINGS THAT SUPPOSEDLY TRIGGER THE PHOBIA.

There is a contradiction here. You framed your unpopular opinion as being every one of them is faking it and posting about it but you are also saying there are other groups of them that you are not angry at or addressing in your post. Your real opinion is that some people pretend to have phobias and some people actually have phobias. And that is not an unpopular opinion, nor an interesting one.

[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

She has always had it. When we first met, she told me since she was a kid she hated certain things like fish scales, honey combs, etc. She felt like she wanted to scratch her eyes out when she saw them. I wanted to make fun of her saying she is the only person in the world with such a weird thing, and discovered that there was an actual name for it. Neither of us had any idea that trypophobia was a thing until I started searching with her symptoms.

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Well, that's really fascinating. My apologies for questioning the situation. I was just genuinely curious, because this is, for real, the first time I've heard of someone who verifiably had trypophobia, without any possibility that they "got it from the internet," as it were.

Someone else in this thread also talked me down from my ranting rage, too, for the most part.

It was an interesting conversation, and basically left me questioning whether I'm just being old-fashioned. Kids today may be interacting with phobias in a way that doesn't fit with my out-of-date mindset. Sharing images that trigger each other's phobias may be a way in which the younger generations are helping each other to challenge and take control over their fears.

In other words, just because they sometimes seek out their triggers, that doesn't mean I'm justified in accusing them of not really having the phobia. That simply may not be the way it works, for them.

From your language patterns, I suspect y'all are a bit older than Gen Alpha or Gen Z, and therefore I doubt your wife is going around looking at /r/trypophobia, but that doesn't mean I should make off-the-deep-end assumptions about the younger folks.

[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It's probably not all that new. From roller coasters to horror movies, we have always wanted to seek things that scare us, as long as the reward is better than the risk. It's like that movie "Talk to Me", where the kids use a possessed artifact to get high instead of avoiding it like the plague.

[–] tanisnikana@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

No no, you’re right, those meme phobias are dumb at best and hella upsetting at worst.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Are people posting pictures of holes and claiming they have trypophobia or warning against it being a trigger for those who do? I've only ever seen the latter, personally. I've never actually seen anyone claim to have the phobia and certainly not for a meme, or for attention like all those dipshits on tiktok that fake having tourettes.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I used to browse submechanofobia on reddit not because I have said phobia but because I liked seeing those pictures. I bet most people contributing to this kind of subs don't actually have that phobia for obvious reasons. I mean.. I'm not browsing the clown communities either if there even is any.

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What even is submechanophobia? Is it a fear of submarines??? Please tell me that's not what it is.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Fear of man-made underwater structures

[–] ChillDude69@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 7 months ago

Huh. I guess I can see that. Getting trapped in a shipwreck or whatever would be a pretty panic-inducing way to die.