#1
... when she gave it to my husband, who gave it to me.
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#3
Not only did I handle everything, I built a design business and immigrated to England, with my kids.
We are no contact with all of these people.
The urge to know what is not meant for you is older than the internet, and psychology has a few things to say about where it comes from. Social comparison is one of the more fundamental human instincts: we evaluate our own progress, success, and status by measuring it against the people around us.
Nosy people simply take this further than most, using private information as a personal scoreboard. There is also an insecurity component that researchers point to, where digging into someone else's problems or shortcomings creates a temporary sense of superiority that has nothing to do with actual self-improvement and everything to do with avoiding it. Knowing your neighbor's business is much easier than examining your own.
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Social media has not helped at all. A SafeWise survey found that more than one in four people who use neighborhood platforms like Nextdoor or Neighbors admit the apps have made them noticeably nosier. One in five have gotten involved in a neighborhood conflict because of something they saw posted.
One in six say it has made them more paranoid about local activity and almost three in five say it makes them feel safer, which is a statistic that contains a very complicated relationship with other people's information. The apps were designed for community connection and have, in a significant number of cases, produced extremely invested curtain twitchers with a Wi-Fi connection.
#7
When the news came out, the company deleted their homepage, but I was able to locate a list of over 100 clients and brands and published it on my blog to national media attention.
I was just a random dog owner with no business blowing them up.
That indirectly led me to buy the site I Can Has Cheezburger? And the rest is meme history.
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#9
The people carrying secrets in this thread might be interested to know what that is doing to them neurologically, because it is not nothing. Reachlink confirms that keeping a secret activates stress pathways and drains cognitive resources, keeping the body on a low-level state of alert. Most people carry around 13 secrets at any given time, with five of those never shared with a single person.
The real psychological toll, according to research on secrecy, is not the moments of active concealment. It is how often the mind wanders back to what is being hidden. The rumination, the replaying of scenarios, the imagining of what happens if it comes out. The brain treats a secret like unfinished business, which means it keeps returning to it uninvited, producing a chronic low hum of anxiety that can manifest as poor sleep, constant unease, and an uncomfortable relationship with your own front door.
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There is, for the record, a meaningful distinction between being curious and being nosy, and it comes down entirely to motivation. Curiosity, as defined by psychologist John Certalic, is driven by a genuine desire to learn or connect. It respects non-answers and does not push past clear signals to stop.
Nosiness is driven by gossip, judgment, drama, or control, ignores every social cue available, and uses whatever it finds to compare, criticize, or spread. Most people believe they are the curious kind. Most people's neighbors would describe them as the other kind. But people on this thread most definitely self-identify as nosy, and they are celebrating each other for it. Go forth and spread chaos!
#13
His buddy was reimbursed for the lost gear.
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I said to my dad, who was smoking in the backyard, "can I ask you something?"
"Sure," he puffs.
"If a pregnancy takes nine months, and you were in prison for two years, how did we get [baby sister]?"
He said, "WE DONT EVER TALK ABOUT THAT!" Before taking my encyclopedias.
It stayed a secret for almost 20 years.
If you have ever called someone a ‘nosy parker’, you have been invoking Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury under Queen Elizabeth I, who lived from 1504 to 1575 and took his job of church reform to lengths that infuriated an entire nation. Armed with government warrants, Parker systematically pried into the private lives, finances, and religious habits of local churches, manor houses, and ordinary citizens.
His micro-managing snooping was so relentless and so widely resented that the public started using his name as shorthand for an insufferable busybody, and it stuck in the English language for the next five centuries. Being so nosy that your surname becomes a permanent insult is a legacy we wouldn’t be very proud of.
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Parker was, however, an amateur by the standards of J. Edgar Hoover, the first Director of the FBI, who spent decades building secret files on the private lives of the most powerful people in America. Presidents, civil rights leaders, Hollywood celebrities: Hoover collected wiretaps and gossip about infidelities, intimate lives, and personal habits, storing them in what he called his "Official and Confidential" files.
The files on JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. alone represent one of the most extensive organized snooping operations in American political history. He was also, technically, in charge of the nation's law enforcement, which is a level of irony that does not require further comment.
#19
And pulled a Rachel Dolzel
To assimilate being indigenous (with a colorful background story) and get college, govt benefits until she passed away a week ago. She got away with decades of crimes.
#20
