In the olden days, if you were having a dispute with someone and wanted advice about the situation, you’d ask your mother, your friends, or you’d write Dear Abby, Ann Landers or Miss Manners.  The vast majority of people now get all their information from the internet, so naturally that’s where they go for advice.  One of the most popular questions asked nowadays is: Am I the a**hole?

In case you’re even older than I am, let me geezersplain (see below) this. 

“Am I the a**hole?” is a subreddit, or topic, featured on Reddit, which is an American social news aggregation and discussion website.   People write in with their conflicts and readers give their opinions about who is right and who is wrong.

According to Reddit: “The purpose of this sub is to offer perspective both on the merits of your actions, and why your counterparts are upset. Comment with the goal to give the OP (see below) actionable feedback on how to improve when they’re on the wrong side of a conflict, and to deal with difficult people/situations when they’re on the right side.” 

This has become such a “thing” that there is a legit abbreviation for the question: AITA.  Ask your kids or grandkids about that acronym and I bet they’ll know what it means.

I’m not on Reddit, and was previously only vaguely aware that it existed, but AITA posts have been showing up as suggested reads on my Facebook page lately. When I was visiting my sister last week we clicked on one of them, and down the rabbit hole we went.

I doubt most of these conflicts ever happened at all.   People make shiz up, the more sensational the better, to earn 15 minutes of fame from random strangers: Internet Munchausen Syndrome.   A lot of the situations involve sex, as you might imagine.  All of the stories are written in the same over the top format, with a lot of the same terms being used, like “she smirked”.  In my experience, the average Joe does not use “smirked” in daily conversation, least of all the kind of person who is asking if it was OK that she beat up the ho in the next trailer who may or may not have had sex with HER baby daddy. Clearly ChatGPT has an AITA setting.

Nobody asking the internet for their opinion is in any doubt that the a**hole in the affair is the other guy.  Always.  In the few cases where some parts of the situation may have actually happened, you KNOW the OP is only revealing the stuff that makes the other person look bad.  They never did anything that could be even slightly interpreted as having “asked for it.”  Never. Most judgments are cut and dried. Who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy is as obvious as if they were wearing white and black hats in an old-time Western. 

Here are a few actual examples from Reddit:

1. “My parents only paid for my sister’s college tuition because “she deserved it more.” When I graduated with honors and landed a 6 figure job they asked me to pay off their mortgage.”  There are a lot of sibling rivalry posts.
2. “My husband told me he wished I was dead instead of his first wife.  I’m devastated.”  There doesn’t seem to be much room for interpretation here, but maybe it was April Fool’s Day.
3. “My Mother in law tried to have me declared legally dead so she could gain access to my assets.”  Hmmm…hard to put a positive spin on this one.

If we dug further into the above situations for the information the OP isn’t giving, we might find:

1. The OP couldn’t go to college because she was in and out of jail for most of her life. Her parents mortgaged their house, time and again, to post her bail.  After getting her degree in prison on the taxpayer’s dime, she was ready to start fresh without that parental burden.
2. The OP started the argument with, “Your first wife is lucky she’s dead so she doesn’t have to live with you!”
3. This happened after the son-in-law tried, unsuccessfully, to have his mother-in-law bumped off to get HER money.

As fascinating as these are, I’d be more interested in real-life situations that may have happened to real-life people like, for example, me:

1. A huge branch of my neighbor’s crabapple tree hangs over my fence.  It’s really messy and I fear that one day it will snap off and land on my patio furniture.  For years I’ve been asking him, very politely, to clean up the dead flowers, the leaves, and the &%$@* mushy, rotten crab apples that fall on my patio, but he just laughs.  AITA because I firebombed the tree?  Which also torched half his back porch?
2. Traffic is stop and go on the highway because the left lane is ending.  I’m in the middle lane and I see someone a ways behind me sneak out of our lane and race along the ending lane until the very last second, forcing the rest of us to slam on the brakes to let them in. AITA for launching a heat-seeking missile at their car?
3. I’m in the 15 items or less line at the store and the person in front of me has at least 16 items, and that’s being generous since technically every package of Koolaid counts as one.  She’s digging around in her huge purse for a coupon that turns out to be expired, then needs a price check on a 12-pack of Coke that she was SURE was on sale.  Then her credit card doesn’t work because she put it in wrong. Three times.  All the while she and the cashier, who is scanning items as slowly as if she had all day (since she does.  She’s getting paid by the hour, unlike the customers who are at her mercy) are chitty-chatting about somebody they both used to work with.  So I scream at them, “What the actual $&%@#!? Some of us have places to be!  We don’t want to stand in line for hours for one lousy ½ gallon of ice cream which is, by now, melted!” And I slam the slushy ice cream down onto the conveyor belt and stomp out of the store.

Reddit should concentrate more on daily life conflicts like this.  Not only would it be helpful for people with similar problems, it models right living since, clearly, the OP is the innocent victim in all 3 examples.  And if you disagree?  No need to ask who the a**hole is here.

Geezersplain: To explain modern words and expressions to elderly persons.

OP: Original Poster –the person asking the question or starting the thread topic.