I have no idea what point you’re making. Suppose all of the above happens, and also a few days after your date, Joe emailed you and asked you if you’d like to go out again, and you suddenly realize that it’s been a month and you never responded, because you were legitimately insanely busy with far more important things.
Well, so? Am I suggesting that you should berate yourself for being a horrible person? Or for being a sociopath? Am I trying to dictate how you should act? Am I criticizing you for letting it go that far?
No, I’m doing none of the above. Rather, I’m suggesting that at the point a month later when you suddenly remember Joe, even if you decide that at that point you’re both better off if you just let the matter drop, that you feel some empathy for him, that you take a fleeting moment to imagine how the whole thing must have looked from his side (series of pleasant and flirtatious emails exchanged, pleasant first date that he thought went pretty well, then he emailed you again a few days later, didn’t send you a dick pic or anything, and… never got a response), and realize “hey, you know, that kinda sucked for him”. Which doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, or could realistically could have done anything differently, or that there’s anything meaningful or productive you can or should do at this point, because life sucks sometimes… but, still, the world is a better place when people treat each other well, and the first step to treating each other well is empathizing with others.
I’m making the point that these horrible ghostings you’re sociopath-labeling people for often don’t even involve a conscious decision in the first place. Your ‘and also’ tries to ignore the reality that a lot of ghostings happen without a conscious decision, so it doesn’t really have anything to do with what I was pointing out.
Why should someone imagine a bunch of nonsense that might not even match reality? Maybe Joe didn’t think the date went all that well and actually just tried for the second date because he hoped to get laid before things broke off. Maybe he didn’t think it went all that well but felt like you might have been interested and figured he’d give you a second chance, so didn’t care about the non-response. Maybe he lacks the particular aversion to silence posters in this thread do and thinks of getting no response is better than an active no. Maybe he has a modicum of emotional intelligence and realizes that a non-response is the same thing as a no so wasn’t any more bothered than he would have been by an active ‘no’.
And seriously, is he supposed to get a medal for not sending a dick pic? “He didn’t do something completely asinine” doesn’t create any obligation in the person you refrained from being an ass too, regardless of what Nice Guys think.
The world is a better place when people don’t label other people sociopaths for not engaging in emotional labor for the benefit of stangers who they don’t owe anything to, and who might not even actually care about the situation. Your weird idea that everyone needs to sit around and lament minor setbacks that other people had that the person might not even lament for themselves isn’t some great step to making the world a better place, and in fact requires that you not take the feelings of the people you’re sociopath-labeling into account to do.