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How One Subreddit Shows Us a Healthier Path For Society

r/AmItheAsshole pushes us all to be more introspective about moral gray areas

Ryan Fan
9 min readApr 17, 2024
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I grew up in the mid to late 2000s and went to high school in the early 2010s. At the time, I had a lot of questions only the Internet could answer. Yes, I went down the rabbit hole of trying to diagnose health conditions in myself without going to the doctor on WebMD, like a lot of people, wondering if I, at 12, was suffering some sort of debilitating cancer, or something much less serious but still impactful like Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

At the time, I was having issues with my stomach making very loud noises in quiet classrooms. I learned, eventually, that (1) it wasn’t a very big deal and no one really cared, and (2) a lot of it, unfortunately, was in my head and a product of anxiety (once my mind naturally shifted towards other things, this stopped happening as much).

There was one solace at the time for questions I had about myself: Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers, then, is like the Quora or Reddit of today. People asked questions, and other people answered those questions. The most popular posts were upvoted, while the least popular ones were downvoted. People asked all sorts of questions, including many personal and introspective ones about whether they were doing…

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Ryan Fan
Ryan Fan

Written by Ryan Fan

Believer, Baltimore City IEP Chair, and 2:35 marathon runner. Diehard fan of “The Wire.”

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