[Coda]

Originally Posted by Voidbarker

tfw you don't have much of a sense of self as opposed to piecing things together from other people.

This is more normal than you might realize, especially at your age. The general path of human social development is relatively consistent from person to person, although the details and timing vary.

Babies aren't born with an ability to distinguish themselves from the world around them. It's some time late in toddlerhood that most children begin to understand that other people have identities in their own rights. For most of childhood, then, a child's identity is tightly bound up in the concrete facts of day-to-day life. It isn't until the teenage years that humans start to develop a personal identity independent of one's parents and the social constructs they're forced into like school and family.

Teenage angst and rebellion come as a result of this growing drive (both internal and external) to develop one's own identity. You realize how much your life is out of your control as you start to build up a sense of personal agency, but your outlets for self-expression are limited. You naturally want to become your own person instead of what the authority figures above you want from you.

One of the easiest ways a teenager can express their own agency is to choose who to associate with, and it's only natural to seek out similar people. With little personal background established yet but an undeniable urge to define oneself, it's only natural to latch onto those things that you see in your social group.

That's not going to change until you start getting some real agency in your life -- when you're able to make meaningful choices about yourself and your future, when you're not directly dependent on other people to make it possible to get by. Getting out of the house for college is a very common time for this to happen in the western world.

a post abt ppl mimicking each other's tone of speech being normal is vaguely comforting.

It's not just normal -- it's instinctual, a part of how humans build societies.

Originally Posted by Kaderin Triste

Ugh, I'm probably gonna have to start job hunting again soon. XP

Got the "phone talk" at the museum. Basically, you've been caught looking at your phone and S would appreciate it if you'd leave it on a shelf during your shift."
Which...okay fine at most typical jobs you don't get to have your phone on you, whatever, but literally everyone else gets to have their phones on them. Everyone else gets to TAKE PERSONAL PHONE CALLS during the day and check Facebook (I know, I've seen them do it), but oh no, just ban my phone usage (which is 99% just listening to music so I don't want to die quite so much in the early mornings) because you caught me changing songs on my playlist, checking the time, or sending a quick 2 word response to my dad so he'd stop spamming me.

It's the hypocrisy of it all that bothers me the most.

This is why I started wearing a smartwatch. People have a lot less of a problem with you glancing at your wrist instead of pulling out your phone, even if you're doing the exact same thing. Music controls and time checks are trivial, and most smartwatches have the ability to send canned responses to text messages.