Loner being defined as choosing not to incessantly socialize with other teens. This hopefully refutes the point of mass shooters like , Elliot Rodger, Seung-Hui Cho and James Holmes being loners; they were social rejects rather than loners.
In my mind, I’ve always thought observed violence in ghettos by teenage gangs, riots in major cities are caused by groups of young adults who have various social connections and in my apartment block during Halloween a group of young teenagers blared music so loud that they lost hearing temporarily.
I wonder if your experiences are the same and if any loner dopers were like this. It seems that peer pressure leads can lead to delinquency. Do you agree?
As a young kid, I lived in fear of getting in trouble. And I learned very quickly that I was much more likely to get in trouble by hanging out with other kids. It always seemed like either the kids would pressure me to do things I knew were against the rules or–in an effort to fit in with them–I’d put on a personality that would likely get in me marked as “bad” in the eyes of authority. Like, I remember being mortified when my second grade teacher informed my mother that I had been talking too much in class. After that moment, I decided I would be a quiet girl and not associate much with the other kids. I was successful for the most part–though occasionally I would “forget” and try to be more normal. I got in trouble in the fifth grade for being in a gossip ring, and the shame of the whole thing was so traumatic for me that I decided once and for all I would stop being “one of the gang”. Almost 30 years later, I have kept my promise. I know such black and white thinking is wrong, and it has been very difficult for me to shake the belief that getting too close to others will turn me into an obnoxious mean girl.
I think loners follow a bimodal distribution. They tend to be either people who are given to destructive means of stimulation because they are totally dysfunctional psychosocially. Or they tend to be people who are perfectly content with their own minds and thus need very little external stimulation or external validation from their peers. The more external stimulation and validation someone needs, the more extroverted a person will be.
Currently I would say no. The violence you get from a loner may be different but in general terms delinquency seems to be broader-based than it was 50 years ago.
The lonely kid who does some petty vandalism (e.g., knocking over some mailboxes) is far more likely to be labeled a “delinquent” than the captain of the football team who does the same thing. (“Boys will be boys.” “Hey, who hasn’t done something like that, it’s part of growing up?”) How such individuals would be treated therefore varies greatly.
My observation: it’s really easy to be “caught up in the crowd” and do stupid stuff.
Hijack, but what is up with that? I remember in high school, I had a lot of friends who liked to play music really loud. They even loved to blast it through headsets. I found that actually physically painful, and I never understood it. It’s probably the reason my audiograms look like someone’s 20 years younger. I went to just a few rock concerts in high school. The loud music nauseated me. Literally. I hated bars during college for the same reason. When I did venture into a bar, I wore earplugs.
What the hell is pleasant about loud sounds right next to your ear?
[/hijack]
