Before anyone says it, I know that the best option for me is to just delete my Reddit account and never use it again, but I don’t have any type of impulse control to stop me from mindlessly scrolling through social media so that option is out of the question for now
Anyways, I saw a Reddit thread about an NFL player who accidentally killed someone while he was drunk driving having PTSD from the incident and a good amount of the comments were acting revolted at the thought that a person who fucked up was a human being with emotions. Maybe I’m being too sympathetic to the NFL player but I think like it’s a bit extreme to say that the feelings of a dude who seems to be pretty guilty and remorseful over unintentionally committing the worst mistake of his life are invalid because of what he did. It’s also kind of representative of this thing that redditors do where they go out of their way to post these deranged fantasies about what they think should happen to every criminal and to talk about how people in prison don’t deserve to be treated with any kind of dignity or compassion because they committed a crime once. I don’t know if these people are just saying this because they want to feel morally superior to everyone else and look down on prisoners because they’re easy targets or if they’re genuinely just deranged and like it when people are dehumanized
But yeah thanks for making it this far into my semi-coherent essay, you can tell me why I’m an idiot in the comments if you feel like it
I can be sympathetic to NFL players. They're mostly kids who were pulled right out of highschool and thrown in to college sports, then pro sports. Intensively managed the whole time. Racking up TBIs and often not learning how to function outside of football. By they time they hit their thirties a lot of them are fucked up just from the concussions and cumulative brain damage. The whole thing is a lot of stress to begin with, then throw in the brain injuries on top of that which can cause all kinds of cognitive and behavioral issues, including difficulty with risk assessment, anger, impulsivity. Shit can really fuck you up.
TBI means traumatic brain injury?
Yeah. Recent research shows that just the tackles and impacts from football cause small but significant brain injury and it stacks up over time with worse and worse symptoms. NFL guys who have been doing it since they were kids can show pretty severe, disruptive symptoms. It's a little shitty to assume someone's behavior is due to brain damage, but it's enough of a known and well researched problem, and one of the major symptoms of TBI is varying kinds of impaired judgement, I think it's reasonable to posit that symptoms of TBI could be a contributing factor.
Ah christ, I read about repeated concussions causing issues. I guess the full extent is much more than just that.
Exactly, they aren’t given good opportunities to mature and gain wisdom. Add to that being given more money than they may be used to and suddenly more bad decisions start to happen. Obviously drinking and driving is bad, but if he feels bad and curtails his drinking, and or his driving, I think he’s going in the right direction
This, but military