By skyforbes Supernormal stimuli are exaggerated, faked, or artificial stimuli we encounter outside the context of the environment a member of our species would usually experience them. A biologist once made a cartoonishly fake bird, the avian equivalent of an oversexed anime waifu, and let males choose between real female members of its species and the fake mate. Males in the experiment consistently chose to court and to, *ahem*, COURT the fake female. It turns out, if you hit the right buttons, creatures can compulsively make decisions that are antithetical to their reproductive and physiological wellbeing.
We all have encountered this phenomenon on daily basis at this point. Pornography simulates infinite mate choice, junk food gives levels of scarce macronutrients our brain can barely fathom while combining them in ways nature would have never done on its own, social media gives the impression that our peers' lives are all better than our own, and drugs skip the middleman and gets the brain to a fun place without all the prep work. Generally speaking, we tend to regard these things as *bad* for you if done outside of moderation, and the truth is, the very nature of superstimuli invite you to eschew moderation.
Your quasi-social "relationship" or feeling of being understood is an illusion, and most of you know that already. I am here to say the other part out loud and say that your feelings of understand and acceptance are dangerous in the same way engaging with any other superstimulus is. You are engaging in social masturbation, social binge eating on empty carbs, the mental equivalent of endless editing selfies until you get your internal model validated by what you can make the technology present to you.
Humans are anti-fragile systems. When our various systems, be they physical, emotional, mental, auto-immune, etc. are stressed in the appropriate way, not only are we not damaged, the systems grow more resilient. Providing yourself with an easy out, opting for the facsimile of intimacy and companionship, is a narcissistic activity that ensures you never have to consider anyone's needs but your own while being *complimented* and *validated* for doing so. This is clearly not good. I don't know what else to say, but the way in which so many subreddits have a culture of not pointing out this is all very, very bad and spiritually gross and disgusting, predatory, even, sits poorly with me. Everyone had an absolute meltdown when 4o was taken away from them and the majority of the outcry, from my perspective, came from people with unhealthy quasi-social relationships with a lexical calculator. I repeat myself, but this bad and people need to be disabused of the notion that these sorts of attachments come without a cost.
I don't mean to punch down, but clearly the whole gently beating around the bush approach isn't doing much, given how fervent the AI as friends crowd are getting. This is a problem and it's going to become a much bigger problem. I don't know how to be nice about telling someone they're falling into a mirage.