Some people enjoy patronising and depressing others

[Esprohuy]

Clearly everyone is having a different experience of the current situation. It seems to me from the posts here and elsewhere that MN is full of people searching for threads from people either asking genuinely when others think the restrictions may be reduced, or people expressing mental or emotional.distress due to being locked away, sometimes alone. The pattern is the OP posts, there are a couple of sympathetic/in the case of lockdown speculation dovish opinions then the Depressor swoops, usually with a formulation along the lines of:
If you think these restrictions will be lifted anytime soon you are a naïve fool. Christmas will be cancelled and things will never fully return to normal

In the threads expressing mental distress their standard formulation is a variety of:
FFS pull yourselves together. It's been (insert number) weeks, how the F do you think people coped in the war the. All you are being asked to do is stay in and watch Netflix

There seems to be a remarkably large number of people among this cohort who claim grandparental involvement in WW1/2 and have a partner/sibling serving as a front line NHS worker. These depressors seem to scour MN looking to pounce on people expressing povs like the above.

So out of touch isn't it? When in India, they are adapting train carriages for quarantine.

I'd second the voices saying no poster making, as others have said it'd be a great shame to have the Anti Demention Movement shut down. It's really interesting and illuminating to unpick the psychology behind this. I had a friend and summer job colleague who finished university a year before me. Every time I saw them or spoke to them from the August before I went back for my Final year to around the Feburary before the final term when I'd sit by admittedly reasonably stressful Finals they'd constantly say "you're going to have a SHIT final year". I questioned them onve on what they got out of it and rhey said "it's so you can prepare yourself".. Hmm I thought to myself .. so it's not because you had a crap final year and now have a job you don't like and are unhappily and celibately living at home, therefore desperate to drag someone down not just to but beneath your level? Our "friendship" never really recovered.

@trappedsincesundaymorn Yeah, I've had similar too, see upthread.

I was sitting in my parents' garden when someone from my mum's golf club turned up with a card. She left it and my mum said "Hopefully we'll get on the course before too long".

The woman was like "No! It will take months for us to get back. I dont' think we'll be back this year, if ever." or something equally mad.

I pointed out that, actually, there had been some chat that golf would be one of the first things to be eased up on as people could play in pairs and it was easy to be spaced out.

Rather than being cheered by this she glared at me. I suspect I'm going straight to hell now.

I think everybody is moaning, in every country, except for North Korea because they don't have CV there.

I think everybody is moaning, in every country, except for North Korea because they don't have CV there.

I think quite a few of the posters here - not in this thread obviously - would be quite at home in NK.

It can be hilarious if you approach it with a spirit of benign curiousity.

A scientific approach, I'll be the Attenborough to their Dementor.

I like that.

Imagine the North Korean version of MN.

I agree we might be close in some aspects.

The home birth threads are full of people like this too. Every other post is someone who’s baby (and them self) would have died if they’d had a home birth. Along with smugly telling women that their desire to have some control over their own body is naive and selfish. The tone is very much “you’ll see!” delightedly prophesising a total loss of dignity and agency.

Oh yes, the I Told You So threads.

Quite a popular choice these days.

I saw the ashamed to be British thread, I posted and I even dropped in a ♟️ for good measure

*Imagine the North Korean version of MN. grin

I agree we might be close in some aspects.*

NK would be absolute paradise for some of the posters here.

Maybe the person who's 'ashamed to be British' and wishes she could live somewhere else might like to board the next flight to Pyongyang as soon as flights resume? She might need to book early though, as I'm sure a lot of MNers will be desperate to get to their dream country.

I think quite a few of the posters here - not in this thread obviously - would be quite at home in NK.
LOL.
All the ones desperate to snitch on any neighbour who appears to overstep their own rigid interpretation of the guidelines - not the actual law - and who regard bread and milk as non-essentials. They'd love Pyongyang. You can imagine them telling off the person next to them in the stadium for not cheering the Dear Leader loudly enough.

On a more serious note, it's all given me a very uneasy insight into how dictatorships succeed. I'm actually shocked that so many people are natural members of the jackboot tendency.

You'd swear every other government on earth was managing this flawlessy, and that ever other public was adhering scrupulously to the guidelines - except for Britain.

My boss is French and her sister is still living in France. She’s posting daily rants about how badly the French government is handling everything. They’re all sneaking their ways round the guidelines - at one point dog owners were lending out their dogs so people could get round the guidelines and get out for a walk

I have two dogs, I could be making a fortune renting them out. I blame the British government for not having stricter rules.

The people who aren’t shielding whose children haven’t left the house for six weeks genuinely worry me. They might have a huge garden, lots of toys and spend the day doing productive crafts and baking, and the children might be perfectly happy never going out, but it can’t be doing them any good mentally. These children are learning “outside dangerous, inside safe” rather than learning to sensibly assess and minimise risk. Some children are really really going to struggle when they have to go back to school.

It's scary isn't it? And it's not just struggling with going back to school.

If you are a child and you are taught fear instead of common sense and risk assessment then you are just conditioned to operate on fear later and listen to anything the authorities tell you when you are an adult.

Well. it is being reported that overall, people are happier since lockdown, they are enjoying being at home etc so it is not just that, maybe it is just some people's nature.

All the ones desperate to snitch on any neighbour who appears to overstep their own rigid interpretation of the guidelines - not the actual law - and who regard bread and milk as non-essentials. They'd love Pyongyang. You can imagine them telling off the person next to them in the stadium for not cheering the Dear Leader loudly enough

I got into an argument a few weeks back with someone who said she buys enough milk for about 7 years (slight exaggeration but you get the point) and freezes some of it in ice cube trays. She calculates the number of cups of tea she's likely to have the next day and then defrosts the requisite number of milk cubes. When I said that sounded pretty grim and anyway I don't have a car or a freezer then she treated me as though I were a criminal. No doubt these were the same people who only a week or two before, were clutching their pearls about panic buying, and there they are buying up the whole milk stock in Tesco.

They're the same people who boast about how they haven't left the house for 4 weeks and their only contact with the outside world is to twitch the curtains to check if Emma from number 14 has left her home more than once today. Or the shopping basket stasi getting all outraged about the fact that someone bought ice-cream as well as gruel. You can really see how societies like NK come to be. I'm not even joking.

I have been researching social dominance recently. I know a woman who is behaving like the alpha male gorilla in a family group. She sees this hierarchy in her head and if we dont see her hierarchy she is narcissiticly injured. She is super lovely to those she sees as being above her in the hierarchy. None of the rest of us see this. We are notbat work. We are not competing.

I think there is something about peoples unwillingness or maybe inability to make their own risk assessment and to trust others to make their and to actually accept that there is no such thing as a completely risk free life.

This is an interesting point on the psychology front - I think we as a society have a false sense of security as to how safe and secure we have made our world. We think there is an answer to every solution, a prevention mechanism for every risk and, well, a vaccine for every disease.

Seeing that veneer shatter seems to be very hard for some people. They don't trust other people to deal with weighing up risks (say, driving a car or going to the supermarket) so the only real 'answer' is to control (itself a comforting mechanism) and stop other people taking any risks at all.

I'd absolutely agree with the poster up thread who said that critical thinking should be taught in schools.

Every problem, not every solution. Must proof read better.

I think the happiness has a lot to do with the bad predictions that didn't happen.

People were expecting Apocalypse, rioting, it was like jumping into the unknown, and once it settled, there is actually some aspects that can be pleasant, and there is the sense that we are doing something about a bad situation. Some of it is just enjoying the moment, before the next unknown, the easing of the lockdown.

It's a strange thing , happiness, it's so difficult to describe and quantify and the reasons for it shift all the time.

I think the happiness has a lot to do with the bad predictions that didn't happen.

I'm not so sure, a lot of people think that they did come true. 'Why are ice skating rinks now morgues!' and so on