I’m with you on this one; I like feeling like an outlier. It makes me feel special :P
There are some examples there that did grind my gears though, like the pillow-throwing example and the ‘that didn’t hurt’ example. They felt more like ‘I’m going to insist your inner experience isn’t real, to the point where I won’t believe you (even if only in a joking way) if you told me’.
Whereas the ‘no-one does that’ example and the ‘we all love Tom Hanks too much’ example felt more like a metaphorical ‘everyone’ and if you actually said ‘no, I’m not like that’, the response would be ‘oh okay not ~everyone’s~ like that’.
I’d personally feel hurt by the former class of experiences but not the latter, because for me, it’s more about invalidation. It’s less ‘you don’t exist’, but rather ‘you exist in this particular way (that’s contrary to my own experiences and completely alien to what I perceive myself as), AND if you say otherwise you’re lying’.
Similarly, I’d feel hurt by an implication that someone else doesn’t exist, if it’s contrary to my own experiences. For instance, if I’ve argued about X with a lot of people and some of them gave a counterargument Y, and then someone has the counterargument Z. They think I’m strawmanning Z as Y, and they tell me: ‘no-one said Y’. It’s like … someone definitely said Y. I distinctly remember a nonzero number of people explicitly saying Y to my face, and I even made sure they actually meant Y and I wasn’t misinterpreting them.
Even if I know it’s a metaphorical ‘no-one’ and they actually just meant ‘most people who appear to be saying Y actually mean Z’, it still hurts :\
I’m with you on this one; I like feeling like an outlier. It makes me feel special :P
There are some examples there that did grind my gears though, like the pillow-throwing example and the ‘that didn’t hurt’ example. They felt more like ‘I’m going to insist your inner experience isn’t real, to the point where I won’t believe you (even if only in a joking way) if you told me’.
Whereas the ‘no-one does that’ example and the ‘we all love Tom Hanks too much’ example felt more like a metaphorical ‘everyone’ and if you actually said ‘no, I’m not like that’, the response would be ‘oh okay not ~everyone’s~ like that’.
I’d personally feel hurt by the former class of experiences but not the latter, because for me, it’s more about invalidation. It’s less ‘you don’t exist’, but rather ‘you exist in this particular way (that’s contrary to my own experiences and completely alien to what I perceive myself as), AND if you say otherwise you’re lying’.
Similarly, I’d feel hurt by an implication that someone else doesn’t exist, if it’s contrary to my own experiences. For instance, if I’ve argued about X with a lot of people and some of them gave a counterargument Y, and then someone has the counterargument Z. They think I’m strawmanning Z as Y, and they tell me: ‘no-one said Y’. It’s like … someone definitely said Y. I distinctly remember a nonzero number of people explicitly saying Y to my face, and I even made sure they actually meant Y and I wasn’t misinterpreting them.
Even if I know it’s a metaphorical ‘no-one’ and they actually just meant ‘most people who appear to be saying Y actually mean Z’, it still hurts :\