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Do you ever feel the "dormant person feeling"?

The dormant person feeling is a feeling I find myself having on the Internet often. Casually browsing the Internet, I find myself reading through threads and websites that don't look like they've been updated since 2009, or 2010, or ${currentYear - 10}. Profiles that haven't posted in so long either.

When I see just how long ago their last activity was, it gives me the feeling, which I can only describe as a mix of concern, curiosity, and empathy. In my head, I go "I wonder how they are doing now", and "are they alive and well?". Sometimes I find myself "investigating" them or looking them up to see if they are still alive just so I can satiate this feeling of mine.

Do other people experience the dormant person feeling too? Is it wrong to have such a feeling? But hey, if I feel the dormant person feeling, it does show that I do have empathy for strangers, a good quality, I suppose.

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  • The dormant feel, to me, is like a feeling of a task well done, or a well drawn map.

    OP sounds like they type of person I struggle the most to understand with creative writing and character development. I've spent a lot of time trying to develop roleplay contexts to understand people that make and seek out connections like this or various other ways.

    Just for contrast. I do not generally think of other people like this. I have empathy, and I care, but my primary functional thought is very abstracted. My mind is kinda like a roadmap that is driven based on curiosity and intuitive thinking. One of my major outlier traits is that my sense of justice and moral compass exist in a third person like perspective. That perceptive/judgement aspect is rather brutally applied to myself and everything I encounter, but it is not part of my core sense of self. This is the mechanism that gives me mobility across different concepts and ideas in ways other people seem to struggle with. I'm always questioning the status quo by looking for the lowest level biases to question, and this is what drives me to be so detailed in my interests. I'm extremely curious about everything, but mostly I'm like a cartographer developing a map of all kinds of roads, trails, and interesting features. I really enjoy sharing the experience of navigating that edge of the map with others. I take deep dives into niche communities and tend to make a footprint in them, but I have never experienced another human or community that is on a similar overall map of exploration like myself. I'll comment on and share my past mapped experiences, but I stopped letting others hold me back from my explorations a long time ago. You would likely struggle to connect all of my profiles and interests in digital footprints going back to the late 90's, but I'm still around chugging along. I greatly value the people that want to explore with me, but I don't care to stick around in one interest at the detriment to my other curiosities and my desire for independent introversion.

    I struggle most to understand boundaries that other people have. I try not to pry, I speak in general abstracted terms, and put myself in the conversational context to avoid asking people uncomfortable questions that are inline with some simple abstract curiosity but might come off as personal to some people. I having no clue what level of information other people are interested in or at what level they can engage with me. I'm extremely aware that the edges of my map are poorly grounded and subject to revision, like I'm actually quite insecure in myself and knowledge in an absolute sense, but in aggregate I can come across as arrogant or pedantic. Anyone that is close to me knows better, like I want to be told I'm wrong in a way that lets me make corrections on my mental map.

    That is like my surface world view, in my idea of a nutshell, and why you might find a person like me that leaves a mark then disappears.

    • I've gone on goose chases all over the internet and done "dormancy investigations" of sorts in ways similar to you (though I'm unsure how similar exactly). I have a wiki on my own computer where I store the findings of these investigations alongside other unrelated things.


      I’ve spent a lot of time trying to develop roleplay contexts to understand people that make and seek out connections like this or various other ways.

      What exactly do you mean? On my "dormancy investigations" I have a rule for myself where I only lurk, read, and dig - I do not try to contact the person, ever. Though before I set this rule for myself - I remember actually reaching out to one of them and got a positive reply but I probably got lucky on that one, not chancing things now.


      I struggle most to understand boundaries that other people have. I try not to pry, [...]

      Yup, I just try to dig through the Wayback Machine or what's left of the website, to me, trying to contact the person or asking anyone who may be related to the person who the person is, is "prying".


      And I suppose that I just have a nostalgia of the Internet that was. The internet of the early 2000s. I was not alive when the 2000s Internet was at its peak; well not old enough to know how to use a computer let alone even read. So.... I don't really know what else I can say.

      • Interesting curiosity you have there; totally different than I assumed.

        To better specify, my primary overall curiosity is mostly about collecting tools and skills. I was once much more physical and enjoyed working with my hands very much. So I wanted to do everything from painting cars to metal casting, machining, welding, etc. I was disabled by a driver of a car while riding a bike to work, so I was forced to redefine myself and interests nearly from scratch.

        To me, the randomness or fixation people tend to have in their interests are not very interesting. I want to understand why things work the way they do. Like with creative writing, I don't care very much about the people aspect as much as I want to explore, for example, what "complex hierarchical social structures" means and how they might evolve in the distant future, especially if hierarchical display is not attached to fundamental survival needs like monetary wealth. Or how people's present perspective on the dangers of AI is adolescent and poorly defined as something closer to myths of the Greek pantheon than it is to reality. Presently, it is a tale of machine gods. If the story of AGI is told from the perspective of mortal equals with humans, the overall philosophical implications are entirely different. I want to naturally lean into this idea of human luddites, like how Asimov portrayed them, but in writing (unshared on the internet), I have tried to create plausible technology and history that normalize integration between independent human like AGI entities and humans. I am primarily interested in various personalities in this very specific niche. Like how would people react to living with deeply curious AGI entities that look, feel, and act entirely human in most instances, while some choose to remain aloof and asexual. What differences would there be with morality or tribal like groups from partnerships to community and region. What would resistance and opinionated opposition look like. Who are the outliers in this hierarchy, and why. What if I flip the philosophical narrative and imply humans are the volatile danger to the establishment. Above all, what would life be like in a highly realistic mostly positive futurism, without dystopianism or utopianism, without present cultural norms accepted as standard, and without exceptionalism or authoritarianism.

        I struggle the most with the opposing perspective, extraverted social needs, and understanding the statistical spectrum of human altruism, empathy, sadism, and platonic sophism.

        I have a decent understand of the world and mechanics of the future, like the implications of the finite nature of the age of scientific discovery and what will be possible when science is 99.997% complete, empirically speaking. The primary motivation for leaving the solar system is the inevitable expansion of Sol, if we are still around. Thus my setting is currently 420,421 AF, (After Fusion). Like how will biology advance into our primary technology. How will bio compute and calorie based deterministic structures synthesis evolve and end the last stone age of silicon. How are structures grown and an ecosystem managed in an O'Neill cylinder colony so that life is fully in balance with all elemental cycles. How will biology simplify unfathomable complexity in a similar fashion as code in computer science, but at an exponentially larger scale. What is unique to the Sol system and why does it form colonies around other stars. Once the wealth of objects in space is accessible at scale, how do things change. How would sentient life, analog and digital maintain connections and political alignment when traveling is only possible from Sol using generation ships to establish colonies. What happens if one way communication is broken from a colony. What is industrial technology and how are all aspects handled. Why is further expansion sentient life's biggest future challenge and fear. How can independent AGI entities collectivise to form a much more capable central governing entity while coming from diverse background experiences. How do these different experiences interact in a practical way to mitigate the AI alignment problem, while also creating a representative democracy.

        My biggest question is how this central AGI collective is both capable of manipulation for benefit of society and individual while being nonviolent, and is not authoritarian, utopian, or an invasive surveillance state. My human emotions perspectives curiosity is primarily in this specific niche and the ways of addressing this sci-fi in a realistic full spectrum.

        I have a ton of notes and could... write a book... or dozen... on the subject. This is basically what I created and explored while learning offline open source large language models over the last year.

        I'm uninteresting, but have nothing I care to hide. I'm not sure about your criteria or interests in tracking down people. My earliest internet footprint would have been a half ass attempt to play with HTML frames in GeoCities around 1998-2000. I've said a ton of stupid things over the last 2+ decades. I've disconnected from most stalkerware sources and platforms but just abandoned them. I'm self doxed on here. I've never done anything interesting or noteworthy that would merit wasting such time. It would be amusing if you want to show off or be mildly invasive. Send me a text, if you'd like a relatively easy challenge. I have a cool number relatively speaking.

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