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Do you ever feel the "dormant person feeling"? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The dormant person feeling is a feeling I find myself having on the Internet often. Casually browsing the Internet, I find myself reading through threads and websites that don't look like they've been updated since 2009, or 2010, or ${currentYear - 10}. Profiles that haven't posted in so long either.

When I see just how long ago their last activity was, it gives me the feeling, which I can only describe as a mix of concern, curiosity, and empathy. In my head, I go "I wonder how they are doing now", and "are they alive and well?". Sometimes I find myself "investigating" them or looking them up to see if they are still alive just so I can satiate this feeling of mine.

Do other people experience the dormant person feeling too? Is it wrong to have such a feeling? But hey, if I feel the dormant person feeling, it does show that I do have empathy for strangers, a good quality, I suppose.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I sometimes get that feeling when I run across someone's personal blog, and it hasn't seen updates in quite a long while (yeah, like in ten years or so). However, as with most of the other replies here, I tend to just assume they've lost interest and moved on.

I've had some blogs like that myself, and I'm certainly still alive (I hope, lol!) Some of them already gone with the sites themselves like Multiply, if you ever remember that, also, Friendster blogs—all this in the late 2000's and early 2010's. Then there's some Wordpress blogs I used for a while back in 2015~2018. I just got lazy, lost interest, and so left them in the dust.

Thus, yeah, I simply assume they're doing just fine, and have just moved on with their lives.

However, there's a different feeling for when I browse the blog/social media profile of someone I definitely knew has already passed on. It hits different. It's like a frozen snapshot of their life. Their final post just there. A lot of times, the final post doesn't even indicate anything. Their lives just went on as normal until it didn't, and it just hits me differently than someone who I would just assume have just stopped posting.