[pipeline_peak]

"His girlfriend Taren always dealt with taxi-drivers, with waitresses."

"The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep"

I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual. I can't imagine his submissive behavior was a net positive to his mental health.

[nzmsv]

And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture.

It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people think in these "man/boy" terms it's easy to start thinking that all people do.

The next step is to consider oneself hopelessly broken and unworthy of affection, and dismiss any real friendship as a pity party. And yet: there was an outpouring of love and sadness following aaronsw's suicide. So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.

[mrtranscendence]

> So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.

I think some things are being conflated here. There is the stereotype of manliness, conforming to which requires you to do or have interest in stereotypically manly things (sports, cars, home improvement, working outside, being tough, being reticent to show emotion). But there's also failure to conform to adultness -- being able to call a cab, order food, pay bills, manage finances, maintain steady employment.

It sounds that Swartz, though not stereotypically manly, was also not stereotypically adult. The former's not a problem -- I'm not manly either, I say as I cuddle my pet rabbit -- but failure to be an adult can cause issues (at least for those without such indulgent friends and family as Swartz had).

[nzmsv]

True. This one hit close to home for me personally, but I can say with confidence that therapy can make things a lot better.

There's a tendency to either coddle a person with these issues, or try to get them to change through tough love. The reality is that neither of these things is helpful - what is really needed is a good therapist.

P.S.: In case someone is reading this and nodding along: you have likely spent years on the roller coaster of trying to prove yourself through pathological self-sufficiency interleaved with breakdowns and "failure to adult". It's OK to seek help. Even pro athletes use coaches and personal trainers if they are stuck in a rut. This is no different. Oh, and you are far from alone in this.

[pdonis]

> I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual.

I think it is telling that people close to Swartz, such as Lawrence Lessig, referred to him as a "boy" when talking about him. I have to think that Swartz himself got that vibe from them. The problem is, as the saying goes, you can't send a boy to do a man's job. To Swartz's credit, he didn't shrink from trying to do a man's job; but it might have helped if others around him had reinforced more that he was a man doing an man's job.

[borski]

I’m not diagnosing, obviously, but a lot of this, including the phobia of fruit and non-white and yellow vegetables seems… on the spectrum, at the very least. I wonder if Aaron had undiagnosed autism of some sort.

[jedberg]

He was a super taster. When he stayed with me he insisted on the plainest of food and told me it's because he's a super taster. Although thinking back now, maybe that was just an excuse to cover for something else.

[caslon]

To be honest, I’ve always had a problematic relationship with food. I always liked plain things — the year before college I lived mostly off of eating plain, microwaved bagels. At oriental restaurants I would always just order steamed white rice. Wes Felter, noting I would apparently only eat white food joked, referencing a Science Fiction novel, that I would eat light bulbs, but “only the white ones”. This reached its extremes at a World Wide Web conference where all the food was white, even the plate it was on. Tim Berners-Lee later pulled my mother aside to share his concerns about this diet.

Finally, one day at an oriental restaurant by Stanford (years before I went to school there), we had the typical discussion except this time Cory Doctorow spoke up: ‘are you sure you’re not a supertaster?’ he asked. I had heard the They Might Be Giants song but never considered the possibility. I thought about it as the conversation continued and it seemed to make sense to me. [At this point I imagine a crane shot lifting up and up over the conversation at the restaurant. Fade to:] I did some research on the Internet and did the test (which formally consists of putting blue food coloring on your tongue, taking a piece of paper with a three-hole punch, placing it over the tongue and counting the number of taste buds in it) and indeed, I am a supertaster. This hasn’t eliminated the discussions about my eating habits, but it does shift the blame.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/eatandcode

[borski]

Yeah, my fiancé is a supertaster as well, but still has managed to avoid a literal phobia of various colors of foods. My best friend, on the other hand, has a similar phobia to Aaron's and is, admittedly, probably somewhere on the spectrum (though again, undiagnosed; but we've talked about it and she agrees it's a definite possibility).

[z3ncyberpunk]

So what? Why do you need to conform to a socially constructed persona?

[pdonis]

> Why do you need to conform to a socially constructed persona?

Being an activist and doing things to further causes you believe in, when those things are predictably going to anger those in power, means you are trying to do an adult's job. And that means you have to be an adult. That's not a "socially constructed persona"; that's a fact of life. You can't be a "boyish intellectual" and take on the establishment.

[nathanvanfleet]

I think if you speak about it like man/boy it seems sort of abstract. It's more that he wasn't so much of an adult. It seems like he was lacking a lot of responsibility that one would expect from an adult.

[simplestats]

well if you're just an everyday introvert, then you need some promting, or else to summon the courage on your own to overcome your aversion to social situations. (digression, but the internet is a big help for this nowadays. you can watch youtube videos that walks you through how to ride the bus or whatever, for people too scared of embarrassing themslves to try).

On the other hand if you have a social anxiety you probably need some kind of stronger help to be able to function.

Either way the alternative of avoiding much of the world and relying on oehters to get by probably isn't preferable.