When I am avoidant, like most of us these days, I scroll. I am on Mastodon, which is a federated collection of loosely affiliated servers that talk to one another in the manner of the early Internet, without an algorithm. I follow a bunch of people who share mostly mundane things like photographs of owls in towels or the current knitting project. Some of them talk about politics, but it’s not all politics. Some of them write extensive screeds about software problems, mostly in language I cannot follow at all. There are landscape photographs, and links to videos. Mastodon is more like talking to my extended friends group and their friends than it is like social media.

I don’t belong to Facebook Instagram, Threads, Twitter or BlueSky. I deleted those accounts a while back, after also deleting every record of my existence there as much as possible.

When I’m really avoidant, though, I look at Reddit, and I just rejoined yesterday so that I could belong again to the fountain pen subreddit, the fencing sub, my local city subs (the two more staid ones), and a few other favorites. Now I’m remembering why I deleted the account, though, because Reddit keeps suggesting other subreddits to me. I belong to r/Philly, so it suggests r/westchester. I belong to r/fencing, so it suggests r/archery when I’m looking at the “home” feed. I’m not interested in knowing more about things I’m not interested in, for the most part.

Especially the popular subreddits that ask, “Am I the Asshole?” There are a number of variants. In these communities, some outraged person narrates an excruciating situation and asks the plaintive main question. Given the elaborateness and improbability of many of these situations, I suspect that many of them are entirely fictional or created by some large language module user. People have been adopting false identities since the beginning of any kind of social media; I still remember my child weeping over an online friend in their fan forum who had committed suicide, only to discover that the friend hadn’t died and probably didn’t exist in the first place.

I digress. Even the ones that may be depicting real situations (my ex dropped my kids off in their pajamas on my front step in the freezing cold so she could go to Vegas with her boyfriend, my mother is claiming I am defaming her with my therapist and keeps calling said therapist trying to get access to my files, I refuse to have my stepfather at my wedding), these stories all have one main thing in common: The protagonist is almost completely blameless.

And almost always, the comments underneath agree in unison, “No, you are not the asshole.”

I tend to difer. I tend to say as I read, “Yeah, you’re an asshole. You’re looking for justification and you want people to tell you you’re completely innocent. You’re not. There’s no such thing. Mahatma Gandhi was an asshole, and so was Sister Theresa. Everyone else in your story, I grant you, sounds utterly intolerable, and there are situations where all the blame lies on someone else, but you’re still an asshole. You’re not the asshole. There’s plenty “assholery” to go around.”

That was my cousin John’s favorite insult, “asshole,” I note parenthetically. And it’s what the character Otto, played by Kevin Kline in “A Fish Called Wanda,” used to yell out his car window after he had caused a crash. I yelled it the other day at someone who ran a red light in order to avoid backing up for a turning bus.

Again, I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that those little narratives make nice neat pictures, where the story-teller is right and everyone else is wrong, and believe me I tell myself plenty of those when I’m lying in my bed at night after having an awkward social interaction. Those are fantasies, designed to evoke sympathy and reassurance. But if the storyteller is looking for reassurance, that means they have an inkling that they might be wrong in some way.

So yeah, yesterday I was probably an asshole. I’ll probably be one at some point today. I am not completely innocent. I should hope not. I’m 74 and I’ve done a boatload of dumb things in my life. But everyone else is an asshole too.

What I set out to say in the first place is that’s what makes good stories: When everyone is flawed, including the protagonist. And I re-joined Reddit so that I could make it stop suggesting those AITA stories to me, because I’m tired of people trying to make me feel sorry for them.