Jenn

Ah ok, that does sound different, probably what I am thinking of won't be applicable if it was from a conscious decision to not react to others.

Do you mean that you don't feel things in the moment they happen, but only later after you think about them? That is not that unheard of, and it is pretty common among people with Asperger's (but not limited to people with aspergers, you can have this without having aspergers), I have the same quirk. Have you always experienced that (even as a child)? If so, I might have an idea why you feel so stuck and apathetic, a lot of the other things you describe in this post would make sense if that is the dynamic you have with emotion. The brain can get you into a weird feedback loop when the source of positive (or negative) emotions is not tied to the time you experience those emotions and the chemical release (like dopamine and serotonin). You can end up with all your motivation going into something that does not provide any positive feedback because your brain can't make the connection between the actual trigger event and the emotion you later feel from it. This causes you to be stuck in a limbo state and overtime this misalignment can isolate you, and eventually deaden your feelings and thoughts completely, often as your bodies way of protecting you when it can't find ways to experience feel emotions - your mind can often find some way (maladjusted or not) to cope with all positive or all negative emotions, but the mind cannot cope with nothingness. I can explain more or offer some suggestions of things that might help if this might be what you are experiencing.

5?! Those are all pretty serious safety issues, fortunately I haven't seen many examples of any of these on the site, and definitely not by one person. We may be using different definitions: For instance, for spamming I don't mean posting a lot, I mean intentional actions, often using auto-posting tools or bots, for some purpose such as DOS, promoting scams, chasing genuine users away from a service, inflating views and back-linking, etc. Fortunately most of that should be handled by the forum management tools and it is difficult to do something like that here because I don't think you can auto-post, so it would need to manual, which is a lot of effort for the small reach of a niche sub. Credible threats, doxing, stalking, I haven't seen any of these and I have a hard time believing the mods would not shut those behaviors down and ban someone immediately. Especially stalking - although that can be tricky to stop if the person is using alt accounts to bypass blocks and bans or if they manage to find their target on other platforms as well. Hate-speech sadly is probably the most common of these on the site, but people are good about reporting it when it happens and the mods have always been responsive to it and shut it down. There has been some examples of character assassination on this sub over the years, but I can't think of anything recent. There was one about Damo Mitchell awhile back, definitely some posts along those lines during the "additional baked-goods" era. Those are usually very intense targeted attacks motivated by revenge towards some some person, on here it usually seems to be towards a master or public figure by an ex-student. I haven't seen any significant trolling on this sub, at least since I have been lurking, trolls are generally not invested in the content they target and rather involve themselves simply to create chaos and sow division, often using sensitive topics, rage-bait and trigger words to incite flame wars. It's pretty easy to spot and I can't see the mods not acting on it if it were to happen on the sub.

I think the permanent, throw the keys away and never reconsider bans should be reserved for safety issues: threats, stalking, hate-speech, trolling, spamming, doxing, character assassinations, etc. For other issues, I would support to a cool down period and a second chance if the person is interested in returning and agrees not to repeat whatever caused the ban. I didn't interact with him much, but there was a significant change in his posting prior to the ban - I don't know what prompted it, but there are some possible causes that should be considered for reinstatement, for instance, he may have been going through something behind the scenes.

Another possibility is modern living has made us worse off spiritually, so we are not in fact reaching new, higher states, but rather have added many lower states we must now first pass through to get back to where the baseline used to be.