Podbit · Smosh Reads Reddit Stories
A 23-year-old man hooked up with a bisexual stranger 25 years his senior, then started dating a 20-year-old woman — only to meet her father at a park and recognize him immediately. The dad later confessed and asked his daughter to dump the boyfriend so he could pursue the guy himself.
Where this was said
At 2:04 · chapter starts 0:00
The episode opens with Shayne welcoming the audience to what he describes as their annual Pride episode and confirms it's their fourth, calling it 'the big episode of the year.' He introduces Chanse McCrary and first-time-on-camera guest Jared Goldstein, who is a 'good friend of Smosh.' The group shares a quick behind-the-scenes detail: they recorded a Reddit Live show the following day, meaning by the time this episode airs, they'll already know whether it went well. Jared's admission that he mainly uses Reddit to look at purses gets an amused reaction, and Shayne previews that all the stories tonight are pride-themed — though he warns some might just be ordinary stories that happen to have a gay couple in them.
Smosh Reads Reddit Stories has been doing an annual Pride episode for four years, making it one of the show's signature recurring events.
Most people confuse things they value instrumentally (because they get them other things) with things they value intrinsically (for their own sake). Greenberg's friend stayed in a miserable relationship for years because she was living by her parents' values, not her own — the values map made the mismatch instantly visible.
Jungian analyst James Hollis distills a good life to four things: shut up (have gratitude, stop whining), suit up (prepare yourself to fulfill a role), show up (do the actual work in service of others), and daily get out of stimulus-response to ask what your deeper wish actually is. The whole landscape of self-help slots into just these four bins.
Toward the end of their 20s, many men discover that all the strategies that earned them recognition and success have stopped working. It's a second adolescence — more important than the first — where the question shifts from 'how do I play the game?' to 'who do I actually want to become?' Most people going through it look fragile from the outside. They're actually building a foundation.
Boys are told from childhood not to cry, not to feel, not to be weak — but anger gets a pass. The result: a generation of men who reroute every emotion, including sadness and fear, through the only acceptable channel. Emotional avoidance isn't toughness, it's misdirected sensitivity.
Men need a 'bank account' of masculine status — muscle, money, success — before society grants them permission to express vulnerability. Chris Bumstead can cry at the Olympia and get celebrated. A struggling nobody doing the same thing gets contempt. This creates a tragic paradox where the men who most need emotional support get the least of it.
Emotional sensitivity isn't a defect — it's a high-resolution scanner for human experience. Highly sensitive people pick up body language, tone, and unspoken tension that others miss entirely. In the right environment, that's not a liability. It's a superpower.
Her supervisor told her she was too emotional for the pediatric ICU. So she asked herself: 'What area of medicine can I cry in?' That question led her to psychiatry. Finding the environment that holds your emotional sensitivity isn't retreat — it's strategy.
For someone with RSD, ghosting isn't ambiguity — it's a self-verdict. Their brain doesn't read 'this relationship ended,' it reads 'I am the reason this failed.' No closure means the brain fills the gap with evidence of personal insufficiency, and it keeps filling indefinitely.
More freedom doesn't produce more happiness — it produces more anxiety. Kierkegaard identified this 180 years ago: the more options you have, the more you feel the 'dizziness of freedom,' a paralytic unease at having to choose any single one. The freest generation in history is, by his prediction, exactly the most anxious.
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