Q: How do you cope with people saying mean things about you on the internet? I think of you a human (as opposed to some text on a screen without feelings), a nice guy, and I agree with you on so many topics. I saw a reddit post yesterday that broke my heart on your behalf - mean ass people just being horrible about you. How do you cope with that?
A: Perspective, and a little bit of understanding about why they are horrible.
It used to really bother me. Like, a lot. But I eventually concluded that those people are projecting their own insecurities, sadness, and failings onto me. A happy person doesn’t spend a lot of time in a forum going off on someone they’ve never met and know very little about, and I’m just grateful that I’m not like them.
I also believe that not a single one of those people would say one of those things to my face, because they’d have to look at me, realize that I am a human being, a father, a husband, a person who is doing his best to support his family and make good art. It’s a lot easier for them to be shitty on the Internet because they can be shitty to the idea of me that they’ve created in their head, and not see the human being who gets afraid, who worries about his kids when he doesn’t hear from them for a day or longer, who has lost people close to him who will never come back, who is just another human being, trying to exist.
Someone the other day wished that I would get cancer, and I thought, “does that person even know what that means? Does that person actually think that they want me to suffer for some indeterminate amount of time while the people around me watch, helpless and afraid, knowing that it’s just a matter of time before I die, leaving my wife without a husband, my children without a father, and my parents without a son? Would that person say something like that directly to me?” Of course he (because it’s always a young male who hasn’t developed a sense of empathy) wouldn’t.
I’m working on a column about empathy, and how I believe that there’s a small but very loud and active contingent of people on the Internet who either haven’t developed empathy, or have chosen not to develop empathy, and how they really do make it difficult for the rest of us to exist in peace. There are also just profoundly horrible people in the world, like Adam Baldwin, for example, who really get off on working the people I just described into a rage, because it gives them a sense of power and importance that they don’t otherwise have. It’s both sad and unsettling to me that a 50 year-old father of two girls can behave that way, but for whatever reason, doing that sort of thing is how he gets through his days. That Milo guy seems really angry and unfulfilled, and seems to be spending his entire life trying to hurt people directly, or trying to get other people into some sort of rage mob who he can direct, because it makes him feel important. I think that hurting other people to make yourself feel important or valuable or powerful is really, really sad. In fact, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Adam and Milo are both associated with Breitbart, because that entire site and seems to exist specifically to work up the Stupidsphere into a rage, cash the checks from their clicks, and then send those people out to attack whomever they’ve chosen as their target for that day. They’re the weak, and I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd, Ringo.
The world has always had really shitty people in it, and I believe that without exception, those people are profoundly unhappy for one reason or another. The only way they can feel marginally better about themselves is to lash out and attempt to hurt other people. I used to take that stuff personally, but I’ve learned that it just isn’t about me, and if I see some sort of hate mob working itself up on Reddit or wherever, I don’t read it, I don’t engage with it, and I instead choose to go do something positive that makes me happy.
