this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
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If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
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People blaming the parents are idiots. The parents were likely under 38 when they had him. How can one 38 year old be responsible for themselves AND another person, but the other 38 year old isn't given even enough agency to be responsible for themselves. Maybe it's all the grandparents fault because the parents were pressured to have children? How far do we have to go before anyone is responsible for their own actions at 38?
A 38 year old man is middle aged. Most high school kids are already more influenced by their peers than their parents. Once you're an adult actual parental influence is almost nil if the child wants it to be. How do you get to 38 and not have any idea of how life works? How do you get to 38 and not realise this day is coming, how can you take zero steps to get your life together? Literally every human they've interacted with has provided an example of how to get your shit together!
How can you blame parents for the behaviour of a middle aged man? Do you realise how hostile it is to a person to completely remove their agency like this? As if they can't control anything about their lives?!?
I think this is a really good start here. Lemmy is mostly populated by early- to late-middle-aged men in STEM fields, so it makes sense why many of the comments are focused on asserting how much better they are at parenting than actually talking about what the main topic is, which is how do we process this kind of situation. It's true that the reality of our society means that people who are legally adults are expected and, really, forced to be responsible for themselves whether or not they are prepared even if just by merit that nobody is guaranteed the material security to take care of all their kids after that point. Many of us find a way and find more lessond of use to ourselves for having done so, so it isn't very reasonable to only focus on these parents, though they do indeed seem like bad parents.
What you and most other people here have missed is the ableism element in this. This is very possibly an autistic person, and our society is extremely hostile even to well-equipped autistic people who have a reliable support network. Everyone here seems agreed that this ought not happen, but many if not most of you have chosen to go the route of finding individualized moral liability rather than identifying how this fits into a system where anyone is in this situation against their will.
Even if the guy was merely parented poorly, or is just a lazy bum, or disabled to the point of needing this kind of care, we should always be thinking about the fact that nobody should be fearing for their life because they don't know how to get a job or take care of themselves.
Yeah. I completely agree in that you can blame the parents as much as you blame society or capitalism for the situation.
On a societal level he shouldn't have to fear for his life in this situation. On an individual level, this is the context we live in. If you stop enabling them you by default subject them to the un-enabled experience of the world. You can't force an adult to improve their lives or even get therapy or help. The expectation can't be "if your middle aged child refuses to get help you're stuck caring for them forever" that's an adverse incentive. At some point you have to stop enabling them and let them start taking care of their own life. In a better society we would have progressives and leftists in charge who could create a good social safety net that would help us all through these situations.
We don't even know if OOP refused to work, or couldn't work. There are lots of conditions that make it literally impossible to work a job, no matter how much you "apply yourself" or how much effort you put in.
Either he CAN do something and he doesn't want to. Or he can't do ANYTHING and should apply for disability benefits. Every decent country has a program for severely disabled citizens.
I doubt this fictional tale is likely as written in a story without disability benefits.
We're still talking about the US, right? Lots of people fall through the cracks because their issues don't get recognized as a "real" disability, this is true even for countries with more comprehensive social security systems.
You're talking about kids who wouldn't become shut-ins anyway. If you're bullied in high school and drop out at 16, the only "peer" influence is the trauma. Not that I experienced anything like that ;_;
The thoughts and trauma also don't just go away, they fade like old scars but sometimes your finger runs over it and you remember how you got it. It leaves you harmed in such a way you now don't fit in exactly well, if you even did to begin with. Some find solace in pure solitude, others through substances. Neither of those situations is healthy. It's hard to take the bowl they purposely broke that is you, and glue it back together to continue holding water. It leans, constantly, and no amount of patching fixes it fully or forever.
Why is this relevant? Anon may be such an individual that the idea of even doing something to improve their quality of life seems insurmountable due to depression and trauma. Can't say for certain, but it was not a single instance.
That's fair, but I think you're using a narrow definition of peers. I'm sure you found online support and communities where you could be yourself a bit more than in high school. Certainly at 16 your own journey through society, online and in person, will have a greater influence on you than your parents worldview. These are all peer influences, since there is no hierarchical relationship between you.
Your parents worldview is a starting point, and by 16 most teenagers have already started forming many opinions which oppose their parents' worldview. That gap expands as you get older.
How much can your parents be to blame for you thinking it's okay to be a 38 year old dependent when you have access to all the information in the world from in person and online peers, to all the media ever produced that tells you society expects more from a 38 year old. Even in this fake meme it's clear that the parents have been telling this middle aged adult for decades that this isn't okay. You don't kick someone out you've been caring for for 38 years "all of a sudden", it's the last option on a very long list.
I don't think the shut-in believes it's normal or okay to be a shut-in. It's a feeling of complete failure to fit in and isolating as a result. The longer the shut-in is ostracized (or keeping themself ostracized), the stronger the feeling becomes that they do not fit in, they will never fit in, if there was ever an opportunity to fit in they surely missed it now. Being a 38 year old shut-in is actually very believable to me,it isn't exactly a situation that challenges your beliefs or motivates you to change.
Sure, it's harsh to put this all on enabling parents, but you also don't get to 38 without enabling. You don't leave the "last resort" on the table for 10-15 years. The very long list should be exhausted within 2 years and one of the options should be a therapist specialized in shut-ins. Beyond that, you'll just have to hope and pray that one day something clicks in that brain and they start taking charge of their own life.
I agree they should have kicked him out earlier, but I think the people blaming the parents would blame even harder the younger the child is.
No one is saying "he's too old to be kicked out of the house", they're saying "you can't kick a child out of the house EVER unless they're fully prepared for life".
What I'm saying is that after some point an adult is responsible for themselves, and that point is far below 38.
I'm also saying that it's nice to imagine parents can prepare an adult, but parents have a very limited ability to guide or influence an adult child. If he doesn't want to improve his situation you can't force him to get a job, get a house, make friends, go outside, stop frequenting toxic online spaces. He's an adult, he will just say no and not do it. You can't even force him to get help or get therapy, or take any depressants or do literally anything to improve his life if he doesn't want to. All you can do is give them more resources, or give them fewer resources. I think they tried both and now they're trying "give them much less" by kicking them out.
You can blame the parents because they enabled this behavior and are actively supporting it. Its very common with drug or alcohol addiction. Just because someone is an adult does not mean they are doing everything by themselves.
I'm not saying they ARE doing something by themselves. I'm saying we can't just take away their agency because of external factors.
At 38 you're responsible for your life whether or not you had people supporting your basic needs until then. I don't know why this is such a controversial take here.
The idea that it's normal for your life to be WORSE when you have people providing you shelter and food and resources is insane. That's not normal at all. This middle aged man has access to the internet and all the information in the world, they have had all the opportunity anyone had ever been given to realise they're doing something wrong and to do something about it.
Unless you have an extreme case where a person was caged their whole lives and never had access to the external world you can't just blame their parents anymore than you can blame capitalism or society.
It's interesting how you completely refuse to entertain the idea that OOP has an actual health issue instead of just being some kind of lazy bum.
Health issues and disabilities are an obstacle. They can even be an impediment to important aspects of life. But as an adult you're expected to do what you can with what you have.
If you're legs are paralysed and you're in a wheelchair you're not expected to do the same thing an able bodied person can. That's why every modern country supports sick and disabled people, and makes accommodations for disabled people a legal requirement while prohibiting discrimination against sick and disabled people. But if you decide to stay in bed for the rest of your life that's not because of your disability, that's on you.
Half the people here think his parents haven't done enough when if anything they've done too much.
Another bunch of people think it's reasonable to expect the parents to train and ready him for society at 38. As if they have magical mind control that can force him to work on his life.
That's not how it works. Parents don't control me, or you, or any other adults in a modern country who don't want to be controlled. Some people just suck. Hitler sucks. Trump sucks. Anon sucks. Nothing anyone's parents can do about it. Look at Hegseth's mom. You think she wouldn't force him to fix his life if she could and stop being a useless piece of shit who only harms everything he touches? She can't.
There is only so much your parents can do to make your life good, and there is only so much they can do to make it bad. Sure it can be a lot ... But by 38 you have more agency over where you are in life than they do.
Are you seriously saying that every person with chronic health issues / disabilities would be able to work a job if they just really tried? There's a huge variety of illnesses that is diametrically opposed to any kind of work life, e.g.:
ME/CFS
nonverbal autism
frequent panic attacks, e.g. due to extreme social anxiety, PTSD etc.
some kind of heavy chronic pain, like a fucked up back
heavy insomnia
fucked up arms
Even if it's theoretically possible to make it work, it's quite possible that even living with their parents, OOP doesn't have access to the necessary healthcare, and depending on the exact region the laws might be not at all accomodating for employees with disabilities.
When the fuck did I say that? I just said you have to try. That you have to do what you can with what you have. Anon isn't doing shit.
If you're unable to work most decent countries have disability programs. If you're not in a decent country, I'm sorry. Minorities and disabled people always get the worst of systemic inequality. Hopefully the world starts beheading the rich again and making things better for everyone.
Even if it wasn't the US, very few countries are going to put you on disability because of stuff like insomnia or social anxiety. If your country still has halfway-decent social security, you're most likely going to end up on some kind of general-purpose unemployment benefits, but that's often a very precarious position.