Ask Lemmy

Attention seeking, in general, is neither a personal failure nor a societal ill. It's a normal part of the human experience. Read a few "gentle parenting" books and they'll tell you not even to use the phrase, instead suggesting "connection-seeking behavior" as a better term.

When my son asks me how much is twenty plus twenty plus two million, he already knows the answer. He just wants to start a conversation. Same when I want to brag to my wife about a good day at work, or she wants to vent about her sister being pissy with her over text.

It depends.

But generally speaking, it's both.

I have trouble not seeing it as a spectrum due to all the people I've seen the label applied to. I have friends who have been labelled this way but I don't mind being there for them, even without expectations for the most part, especially if time is all they ask for. I mean, they are my friends.

I think free will is an illusion so the distinction you are making here is not morally meaningful. You are simply listing some things where science has come to an understanding of the contributing factors and others where it has not. But that does not mean some things are out of our control and some things are subject to it. We are all products of our environments and genetics, none of which we necessarily chose. Some things are just less studied or harder to understand.

Each event should be judged on its own merits. They can each have different causes.

That being said, our “isolated western society” which is creating more people disconnected from everyone, likely yields clues to why it seems to be growing.

The wedding thing I think it's privilege and narcism.

The trauma thing could be a mix, meaning either/or, or a combination. I'm sure someone that was deprived could become an attention seeker.

Society is weird. What is society? Is this an image of what society is based off of mainstream life? Because mainstream life is pretty much 40% of reality (obviously not a fact). So many people are completely unaware of the reality of others. It can be pretty dumbfounding to see "mainstream" culture and how entitled it is. A lot of people are practically unconscious and on autopilot because they were never in a position to become grounded in reality. For example consumerism. Just look at someone that is into brand-name everything. Some people like nice quality things, others literally think those things define who they are because they have no understanding of their self or who they actually are.

It doesn't even have to be mainstream culture either. Basically any culture people narrow their life into instead of broadening the view of reality of humanity as a whole.

So I guess... Society plays a role in not properly teaching people the broadness of humanity, but at the same time it's something a human should naturally be able to become aware of by gaining experience and wisdom. Society doesn't really reward experience or wisdom so it kinda gets put off as something unneeded for survival.

A lot of people, youth particularly, and not just youth in this current time but youth during past times as well, are entitled because they are taught reality is something it really isn't. Life isn't a special happy go lucky place like schools put in our heads. There's so many people out there, grown adults, that would probably buckle and put a bullet in their head if they experienced what some youth experience daily. When the privileged kids see what reality is really like they act out with "entitlement" of what they were falsely promised. Society hid reality from them. They have the right to be pissed off about it, just the same as the people that live the raw reality have the right to be pissed off at the other side. Neither side of youth are to blame for this. Society basically fucks them up and then gets mad at what they've created. I always like the metaphor of a person covering a young plant with a bucket and then wondering why it didn't grow successfully.