Podbit · Smosh Reads Reddit Stories
A woman drives to pick up her boyfriend for a road trip she's funding, spots him outside with two friends and all their bags — uninvited, after repeated explicit promises — and simply keeps driving without stopping. He chases after her car. The hosts are unanimous: this is the correct response to someone who agreed to your terms and then violated them anyway.
Where this was said
At 21:20 · chapter starts 18:47
Shayne introduces the second story from Am I the Asshole (September 2022): a 30-year-old woman's boyfriend, Smith, aged 39, has been repeatedly asking to bring his two friends on a road trip she's paying for with her own car. He promises to drop it, and she agrees to pick him up — only to arrive and find him standing outside with his friends and all their bags, fully expecting her to comply. She doesn't stop. She turns around. He chases after her car on foot. [1] — Shayne Topp "A woman drives to pick up her boyfriend for a road trip she's funding, spots him outside with two friends and all their bags — uninvited, a…" 21:20 The fight that follows includes him accusing her of acting immaturely and demanding she apologize for embarrassing him in front of his friends. The hosts are uniformly stunned that a 39-year-old is behaving this way, with Shayne suggesting this isn't a one-off red flag but an unchangeable character trait. Ian and Amanda both note the inability to respect someone's 'no' signals he may not actually like her — and is using her financially. A perfectly-worded Reddit comment closes it out: 'recommend you keep this guy in the rearview mirror.'
The OP was paying all expenses AND providing her car for the road trip, making the boyfriend's secret friend invite even more exploitative.
The hosts are particularly stunned that the road-trip boyfriend is 39 years old. Shayne points out the behavior — lying to sneak friends onto a trip his girlfriend is paying for, then accusing her of acting immature — signals not just a red flag but an unchangeable character pattern. Ian adds: if he's doing this at 39, it's never going to change.
The boyfriend who secretly brought his friends on a paid trip his girlfriend was funding was 39 years old, which the hosts found especially egregious.
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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