I've been wondering about this lately, because so many forums I'm a part of have been invaded by hordes of what I tend to call ( for want of the proper Sanskrit term :-) attention sluts. You know the type of person I'm talking about. Insecure, not many real-life friends, and seriously in need of attention. Any kind of attention will seemingly do. So the attention sluts tend to post a LOT, eating up bandwidth and automatically rendering themselves uninteresting to those who don't gravitate to Chatty Cathy types.
If no one replies or gives them the attention they seek, the attention sluts tend to practice one or more of three primary strategies. The first is to talk about themselves, pretty much non-stop, as if telling everyone how great they are will make these people think they're great. This tactic tends not to work on spiritual forums, because it's rightly interpreted as runaway ego, and who wants to talk with a runaway ego? The second tactic is to praise other posters, or "love bomb" them, hoping that they too are insecure enough and in need of attention enough to reply to the flattery. The idea seems to be that if the attention slut can get a person to focus on them by flattering them, maybe they'll *keep* focusing on them. In my experience, this tactic only tends to work on other attention sluts, and tends to result in the formation of cliques, in which groups of attention sluts chat mainly with each other. The third tactic, when the above two have failed, is to try to insult or badger or abuse other people into replying. After all, the only thing that's important to an attention slut is the *attention*. It doesn't matter what form that attention takes. Again, this tends to work only on those who are so ungrounded in their own self as to feel the need to "defend" that self when it's insulted. The thing I see lately on multiple forums lately is that attention slut-itis is rampant, almost epidemic. I blame this on the emergence of social media like Twitter and Facebook, in which the entire game is about how much attention you can attract. "How many followers do you have?" https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/408664_283013468313\ 9_1552286745_2594704_2120755496_n.jpg <https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/408664_28301346831\ 39_1552286745_2594704_2120755496_n.jpg> But if you think about it, aren't compulsive attempts to get other people to focus their attention on you kinda...uh...un-spiritual in the first place? On pretty much all of the forums in question, those voices that are most universally appreciated and held in some regard belong to people who don't utilize any of the three strategies above. Instead, they tend to talk only when they have something to say, and reply only to people who have actually said something interesting. And they stay out of protracted arguments and generally skip the small shit. Because it IS, after all, small shit. Call me crazy, but these folks seem to figured out something valuable about the nature of chat forums that the oh-so-needy Chatty Cathys haven't. Maybe they just spend more time in meditation and immersed in the Self than the attention sluts, and thus have no need to try to pump up the self by sucking attention from other people. Or maybe they're just grownups...I don't know. All I know is who I avoid and who I want to engage in conversation with.
