Yeah, that sounds very familiar. A deadbeat dad that was overly controlling when he was present. A mom that was trying to juggle her career, housework and two kids. This meant lots of time spent alone. Can't learn now to depend on people when there is nobody around. Bullying at school does not help, either. Hyper independence is a predictable outcome.
It's very familiar. My father was abusive towards me and so I tried to disturb him as little as possible. He was extremely supportive of my younger brother, however, and we both turned out very differently. He turns to my parents constantly for help (and receives it) and the few times I have I've only been brushed off, and so I've always done everything myself, even if it meant spending long periods living in poverty with no footholds upward.
Years later I'm nearly 50 and have transitioned to female. My now divorced mother decided she likes having a daughter and so suddenly all of this support has materialised and with presumably less time to live the life I missed out on I'm making a conscious choice to start being a little dependent on it and shortcut some things that would have taken longer otherwise.
It's hard to describe but it feels like I'm living a more normal, less marginalised life now. I definitely have more friends, where previously I chose to avoid having any because I felt like having friends meant sharing burdens that were mine alone to carry.
I also see a lot of very similar behaviour in the wider trans community where most people's axis of behaviour revolves around some facet of not having support. We don't all handle it in a healthy way, but I now do my best to help my community find stability and adjust their expectations to having better outcomes.
It’s a blessing in some ways, I’m much more capable at doing difficult things without much help. But it’s also debilitating in significant ways, I constantly feel like I need to do incredible things to get love
The butchered title makes close to zero sense. The original title "Psychology says people who don’t maintain many close friends often learned independence too early" does.
It was to fit into HN's title limits. I tried my best to cut down and rephrase the title to fit the requirement, while keeping the original meaning as much as possible.
Weird. Half a dozen comments calling this LLM generated. Doesn’t strike me as that. Maybe English as a second language or someone trying to dumb down their language. Maybe I’m out of touch.
The thing that bothers me is repeated references to “psychologists say” but no reference to peer reviewed science, just other articles on the same site.
Whole-heartedly dislike the article. Again a form of being atypical neurologically is framed as a pathology. "You are insufficiently clingy to be a good human, and the reason is your childhood trauma".
It fits one of my relatives who is so odious that no one can stand hen but is impervious to learning hen's own faults and can't keep a job so depends on others to put a roof overhead
"too" seems pointlessly judgmental. My early independence (a result of being the second child of parents without a lot of love to give) contributed to who I am, and I don't think I'm an inferior specimen.
Psychology has a well understood metric for people who keep many shallow friendships vs those who keep a small number of deep friendships. Any article that fails to account for that doesn’t progress our thinking.
FWiW there are (several) AI "vetting" bots out there, eg: https://tropes.fyi/vetter .. not my thing, I bookmarked that one from an earlier HN thread, that particular tool graded the article hard over and firmly in "AI Slop" (their term) territory.
