AITA? How a Reddit forum posed the defining question of our age
First of all, you need to picture the sandwich.
This was a 6ft-long party sub from a local deli, with loaves of bread braided together to make one super-sandwich – nearly twice the standard width, and loaded with fillings. It would have comfortably fed 20 to 25 people, and there were far fewer coming over to watch the fight.
But the host had not accounted for Alan. While the group was distracted by the TV, he ate more than half the sandwich by himself. “What I thought would be a total non-issue has ballooned into a huge problem,” Alan began his online post the following morning.
His host’s girlfriend had exploded at him, calling him an “incredible pig” for eating 3-4ft of a 6ft sandwich. Alan’s protest that he had brought homemade chicken wings to share (“sort of my specialty”) fell on deaf ears, as did his offer to order pizzas for the group.
The next day Alan awoke to angry texts telling him that he had embarrassed himself. “I figured I could post here to see if what I did was really that bad,” Alan wrote on the online forum Reddit. “Was I the asshole for eating that much of the sandwich?”
It is a question that all but the most oblivious of us sometimes ask: am I the bad one in this situation? Am I in the wrong for wanting to bring my dog to social events? For having a destination wedding? For telling my boyfriend he can’t order KFC because I can’t eat it? For telling my six-year-old stepsister she isn’t my real sister?
In an age of uncertainty, Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? forum exists to tell it to us straight. It is where some 2.4 million people gather to review accounts of real-life wrongdoing, before delivering their verdict: YTA (“You’re the asshole”) or NTA (“Not the asshole”).
Of course, if you’re looking for help to live a better life, AITA is just one of many options. Advice columnists, for example, have mushroomed in popularity in the past 10 years – along with the range of problems they tackle. “In the old days, people would write to Dear Abby or Ann Landers about problems with a pesky neighbour or an intrusive mother-in-law,” Heather Havrilesky, the author of New York magazine’s “existential advice” column Ask Polly, explained in 2014. “Those wise women would offer brief, concrete guidance, like: ‘Tell her to butt out!’ and: ‘Run, don’t walk, to your nearest mental health counsellor!’ These days, I think people are more interested in asking specific questions that sort of branch out into the big picture of their lives.”