Venting doesn’t work
From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I&#x27;ve seen two main categories of venting:<p>1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide what a mature response would be. Once you start venting to someone you know, especially someone you  respect, you have an incentive to present a mature interpretation and approach to the situation. This can help immensely.<p>2) The other group tends to want to avoid the mature response part, and instead wants to seek sympathy and confirmation for their frustrations. They deliberately avoid discussing these issues with respected peers or mentors because they know their response is unhealthy and not a good look. They embrace online forums like Reddit and Twitter where they&#x27;re free to give one-sided stories without fear of their peers calling them out for exaggerating or stretching the details. This type of venting doesn&#x27;t solve anything because they don&#x27;t really want solutions in the first place. There&#x27;s something rewarding or perhaps freeing about hunkering down in the victim role and being showered with sympathy from random internet strangers.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen any reason to believe the first type of venting (discussing with respected peers, seeking feedback and solutions in the process)  is anything but helpful. However, the latter type of venting (online venting to collect sympathy) does seem to be quite damaging from my limited experience. There&#x27;s something dangerous about going online to bond with others and seek personal affirmation in a way that&#x27;s fueled by venting frustrations and victimizations. Once inside of those circles, there&#x27;s an incentive to continue bringing more frustrations and more victimizations to the table to keep the bonding and community contact flowing.<p>The story in the article about going to a park to scream together raises my red flags as such a situation: It becomes an in-group thing where you need to adopt an outward appearance of being very frustrated to fit in with the other people in the group. Not a good incentive for improving the situation.