Sometimes, you just have to wonder whether this was all a mistake. And no, I’m not talking about the internet or social media, or whether there’s such a thing as over-sharing. For now, I’m more concerned if this whole human enterprise thing was a good idea from the get-go, and more importantly, if it’s still not too late to press that reset button.
One thing that Reddit users have got themselves into the habit of doing is sharing stories on the community-driven, thread-oriented social platform. Now these stories can range from anything innocuous as random encounters with celebrities on the street to hugely intimate and personal anecdotes underlining someone’s personal life. In this particular TikTok-ified instance, we’re, alas, dealing with the latter sort.
Relaying a particularly harrowing account from one of these Reddit threads, TikTok user jamie.nelson98 read about how two sisters found out their mother was having an affair with their brother’s wife, aka their daughter-in-law. That’s right; we’ve finally managed to hit that Freudian rock bottom where daddy and mommy issues get intermingled with all sorts of messed-up psychological fixations to push us further into the end-times dystopia we’ve been presiding over for the past few decades.
Here’s Jamie Nelson’s video if you want to hear the story yourself.
Those last few seconds really drive the story home, don’t they? Boy, did that escalate quickly.
I have to say; when I woke up today, this wasn’t something I was expecting to come across. And worse is the knowledge of its occurrence probably haunting my subconscious self from now on. As one TikTok user astutely commented, “I miss the person I was before listening to this story.”
I’m not even going to begin to imagine what that sort of betrayal and trauma would do to a person, but I hope the unnamed son is doing okay. This story feels like it came straight out of those Wattapad darkholes where all those late-hour super weird fanfic sessions take place.
Which, of course, reminds me of a sobering fact: That this story was shared on social media and then went viral thanks to TikTok doesn’t prove it really happened. After all, it doesn’t take much effort to create an account on Reddit and then post such a story — fabricated in its entirety, and the saucier the better — to attract attention.
But if it indeed happened, well, let’s just say that even the possibility of encountering such people in real life, or the realization that we may be among them this very instance, isn’t helping my trust issues by any stretch.