Every time I see that little red number in my inbox, my first thought is: Did I mess up? My brain jumps to the worst-case scenario—maybe I said something controversial, and now everyone’s correcting me and downvoting my stupid comments. Even though, most of the time, the messages are actually helpful and fun, that number still triggers some sort of insecurity and anxiety. The bigger it gets, the louder my worries grow.
Logically, I know I don’t screw up that often, and most feedback is neutral or even positive. But deep down, my insecure monkey brain panics at the thought of being wrong—or worse, publicly called out. Even when I’m right, the number still makes my stress levels spike up. What if people disagree with me? What if they don’t like what I wrote?
And yes, I see the irony in posting this. Writing about it is basically asking for it and feeding the very anxiety I’m trying to ignore. Maybe it’s my version of exposure therapy.
I had a decent stretch where I was just making comments and expected them to get bad replies, or I didn’t really have the space to care about any replies I got, so I stopped checking obsessively and they built up. I’m in my 30s with a wife, a toddler, and a job that alternates between “oh god you need to lock the fuck in for 8 hours straight” and “you’re being paid to be here if something happens”. I also have had some big life shit happen in the time since I started using lemmy that would pull me away from checking/responding.
Then I had some replies mentioning things I wanted to look into later, so those I made sure to keep as unread.
More recently, I find that I use my own profile’s comment page and the upvotes and downvotes on any of my comments in there to get an idea of what I’m about to walk into. Also helps remind me what the fuck I posted in the first place. So any replies I interact with that way don’t get marked as read either.
Kind of like email, once it passes something like 20 or 30 unread the count just kind of becomes visual noise.
That visual noise angle is true though. Once the number grows beyond a certain point, it looses all meaning. Might as well disable the red dot entirely, since it serves no purpose any more.
BTW “save for later” is a thing. I use that when I want to get back to something.