i find it helps me to view other people explicitly as separate entities with free will.

Makes it harder to do any sort of funny business when you're more aware of their autonomy on a fundamental level.

but I am your father

Our species is more alone than we've ever been even though our numbers are greater than they've ever been and our means for reaching each other is nearly limitless.

Because everyone is so, so deeply scared of social rejection, an instinct bred into us through ice ages and apocalypses where we needed each other to survive, that the fear of rejections has become one of our primary social motivators. People now have a choice of trying to find social circles and groups that they can adapt to or compromise with like we've struggled through for thousands of years, or withdraw into spaces that prevent us from ever having to experience even a chance of rejection. Feel awkward when a stranger says hello? You can choose to practice getting better at responding to others, experience failures as well as successes, or you can retreat to a place where "hello" means oppression and you don't ever need to ever risk pain by responding.

This is just a tiny, micro-slice of the issue but EVERYONE does this, and if you think you don't, you are also stuck in the film-strip post-hoc rationalizing your every feeling.

feels upset at being heartbroken

Here's where the word "upset" having multiple meanings can be a problem.

If he is upset, as in sad and/or confused, ok, that's a reasonably expected reaction.

If he is upset as in angry about being turned down, then he's being pretty entitled and has criticism coming.

In terms of things having gone too far, it's simple enough. We are connected all the time and we can find al sorts of echo chambers and be in contact with that circle 24/7 using online engagement where we can just turn off/ban anyone that we don't feel like dealing with. This fosters a strange mix of overthinking things, contagious pessimism, and isolationist behavior. People need more balance with more real life interaction.

Verbing weirds language.

"Edit" and "access" also weren't originally verbs. Same with "babysit" and "eavesdrop". Backformation and category changing are common and perfectly natural processes in English.

Edit: This isn't directed at the OP of this comment chain, but I'm always surprised by the crazy amount of ignorant prescriptivism I see all over Lemmy. Like, I expected that shit on Reddit, but I thought we were better than that here, especially since literally the only real reason for prescriptivism is sowing class division and excluding people for not having access to the secret knowledge of "correct" (yuck!) grammar.

Keep complaining and it's going to be a noun next

Since someone used it as a verb and it was understood by their audience

"Vagueing" as in "vagueposting".

'vagueing abt me being ableist'

'implying i was ableist'

There, translated.

Oh look, proper english is more direct and succinct!

Guess the tumblr user likes vagueing as well.

I agree, this needed more layers.

named after Darth Vagueis, presumably

Texting vs talking has some situational context. E.g. if you're somewhere public, talking on the phone is often frowned upon, but you may text quietly. In a car it's reversed.

But a lot of us old folks do want people to sit down and shut up. It likely also plays into impressions of foreigners—a lot of immigrants are probably doing something they consider normal by talking on the phone on the bus, while everyone around them thinks they're being incredibly rude.

Calls and meetings can often be an email, too. Better to not disrupt others if you can avoid it.

The text instead of talk is pretty situational from what I see. Young people still will gleeflully hang with open mic on discord with their friends. One on one phone calls are certainly more rare, but I know my kid spends more time talking on discord than I ever spent talking on the phone growing up (sharing the house phone). I don't know if anyone is particularly excited about video conferences, certainly in my adult life video-capable meetings are the order of the day, but the cameras are generally off. It's way more convenient than the meeting calls of old.

From what I've seen while they are playing 'music videos', it's frequently just in the background and they aren't watching it, it's just a convenient way of getting the audio since youtube has it all and is the most convenient interface. There were more radio stations than MTV/VH-1, so it wasn't as convenient to just let MTV/VH1 be your audio back then as it is for youtube to be your music.

this just terminally online brain rot

Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.

People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level... and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.

The only thing I can compare it to is 1984's newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced... and this is ... organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.

The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.

Its even impacting the art we make.

Idiot plots.

Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.

Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and 'Schrödinger's Irony' style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.