Ask Redditors what’s the worst subreddit, and a few names always come up. /r/atheism and /r/childfree are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don’t begrudge them a place to vent. The one that really floors me is /r/petfree.
The denizens of /r/petfree don’t like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most common are:
Some stores either allow pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are pets go in those stores, and they are dirty and annoying.
Some parks either allow off-leash pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are off-leash pets in those parks, and they are dirty and annoying.
Sometimes pets attack people.
Sometimes inconsiderate people get pets they can’t take care of and offload some of the burden onto you.
Sometimes people are cringe about their pets, in an “AWWWWW MY PRECIOUS WITTLE FUR BABY” way.
Sometimes people barge into spaces that are about something else and talk about their pets instead.
These are all valid complaints. But the people on /r/petfree go a little far:
These people are crazy. So let’s return to our usual question - what kind of crazy? Which DSM-recognized disorder do they have?
One easy answer would be cynophobia, the pathological fear of dogs. I don’t think this is true. The people on /r/petfree mostly don’t seem afraid, unless they’re sublimating it in some really weird way. And I know people with actual disorder-grade dog phobia, and they’re not angry about it. Many of them are apologetic, or agree dogs are cute, or at least don’t spend all their time fuming about the existence of dogs. You would really have to stretch the definition of phobia here. You can do it - witness “homophobia” for people with normal political or religious objections to homosexuality - but it would feel wrong.
The condition this reminds me of, more than any other, is misophonia.
Misophonics - and I say this as one of them - are angry. As I discuss in the link above, the anger seems more characteristic of the condition than the sensory sensitivity. If they go deaf, they’ll still be angry that people are making the noises they hate, even though they can’t hear them. Confronted with the noises they hate in a context where they don’t know it’s the noise they hate, it won’t bother them. I think of misophonia (again, explained at the link - the rest of this post won’t make sense without it) as a superstructure of anger/trauma/phobia/rumination built on top of a foundation of otherwise-non-disabling noise sensitivity. This isn’t to belittle misophonics’ problems - they genuinely hate the noise exactly as much as they say they do, and there’s no way for them to “turn it off” or “just get over it”. But the condition only enters full bloom when you take it from the neurological context of noise to the social context of people making noise.
Freud called intellectualization a defense mechanism. But at least for me, it functions as more of an overflow. When I’m at my worst - low on sleep, off all meds, forgot all earplugs - I go from hating whatever noise I’m hearing, to hating the fabric of civilization. I ruminate on crazy theories of how everything about modern urban life has been designed by crooks and liars to annoy me personally, and who we have to tax/ban/imprison to make it stop.
I look at some of those /r/petfree posts. There’s the one where someone said his friend posted a meme about how much she loved her dog, and now he “can’t ever go over to her house”. There’s the one where somebody asked a reasonable question about dog grooming on a hygiene sub, and the poster said that THEY HAVE TO INFEST EVERYTHING 😩😥🤢. I look at stuff like that and think - yeah, if there was a subreddit like this about noise, I’d post on it.
Someone - I think it was Philosophy Bear - once asked why a certain type of conservative treats it as axiomatic that order and low crime are the fundamental public goods. If a city has a few more muggings than usual, why is that automatically worse than the city having a few more families on food stamps than usual, or a little worse traffic than usual? This was great food for thought - I agree with the conservatives that public order seems somehow more fundamental, but I agree with Philosophy Bear that this wouldn’t feel obvious to an alien observer.
Since then I’ve been noticing how much of politics seems driven by different people having rumination clouds / purity instict violations about different kinds of omnipresent aspects of public life. For me it’s noise. For the /r/petfree people it’s dogs. For the /r/fuckcars people, it’s cars. For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not). I’m not asserting that none of these are real problems or that you can’t have rational objections to them. I’m just saying, one less-than-perfectly-mentally-well person to another, that I can see myself in you.
I think when you have something you get exposed to every day, plus starting variation in which things mildly annoy people, you have the opportunity to get the kind of cloud of mutually-self reinforcing triggers and automatic negative thoughts that sustain a misophonia-like condition. Then, depending on their levels of intellectualization and paranoia, some people will develop broader theories of why they’re right to hate these things and their all-consuming unhappiness accurately reflects an all-consuming evil in society. It’s a miracle that the /r/petfree people haven’t developed some word that cashes out to basically meaning “the petarchy”.
This is the point in an essay like this where I’m supposed to say that this is a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media - that the existence of communities for these people validate and intensify their emotions and make everything worse. But I’m not feeling it - all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them, and removing every other misophonic in the world wouldn’t improve things a bit.
