I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.

People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.

Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?

    • @sailingbythelee
      5•10 months ago

      The subject of the arguments is certainly politics (and war and religion), but the source of the arguments is strongly differing world views.

      Despite what we’d like to believe about ourselves, humans are not well-adapted to being exposed to a wide variety of differing viewpoints. We evolved in small, racially and socially homogenous groups, for the most part. Up until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of humanity lived and died within 30 miles of where they were born, and only had daily interaction with what was essentially an extended family.

      Travel, mass immigration, and the Internet changed all that. Being exposed to such a diversity of opinion on a daily basis quite simply breaks our brains. It causes a tremendous amount of internal conflict and stress, for some more than others. That constant strain becomes more intense when there is war, such as in Gaza and Ukraine, or particularly divisive politics. There are obviously some extremely contentious elections coming up, including the US election, which has tremendous global implications. There are, no doubt, people on Lemmy right now for whom the result of the US election is a matter of life and death, and yet they aren’t US citizens and can’t vote.

      We should all take a chill pill and try to be less confrontational and use less emotionally-charged language when it comes to hot button issues. The politics and news subs are an avalanche of charged words and phrases like genocide, fascist, apartheid, Nazi, racist, transphobic, anti-gay, religious zealot, and many others. Those are fighting words. Deserved or not, words like that not only reflect, but also create, a lot of emotional dissonance and stress, which lead to emotionally charged arguments.