poignant?

> His next major growth spurt came when his university career ended. When Oxford University rejected his master’s application in 2020, Edwards posted a video of himself crying, entitled “oxford university rejected my masters application… (sorry this video is sad)”. Social media rewards confession. Authenticity, sincerity and vulnerability were important – more important than orthodox intellectual baubles.

It's literally pathetic.

    pathetic
    /pəˈθɛtɪk/
    arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness.
    "she looked so pathetic that I bent down to comfort her"

I really have a hard time understanding why people post videos of themselves crying. Maybe I'm already old in my 30s, but it's hard for me to wrap my head around it.

Like, I get that at some level it's fishing for sympathy and pity, but your real friends are going to be there whether they have a video of you crying or not. Everyone else just... doesn't matter that much?

Please don't post snark to HN threads. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I felt the same way when I read this paragraph and the one about Jack being a target of abuse but I couldn’t resist an opportunity to ‘dang’ a ‘dang’ thread. At the same time it is touching how Jack has forged some semblance of a real world community out of this. I still can’t take what he does serious as a whole and I’m not warm to the idea that the “World’s most powerful literary critic is on TikTok” and I do have a sort of apathy toward the cultural intrigue borne from people in their twenties today. Like dang I was expecting a hit piece and was no less impressed to find it the opposite—fluff. Both poignant in some ways and pathetic in most per my own sensibilities.)