Reddit is full of far-fetched stories like this that ultimately turn up to be completely fabricated (obviously for the purpose of internet points). While this one isn't ridiculously far-fetched, it's definitely borderline.
Also, the first thing that came to my mind when reading this was the movie Vivarium [1], where one of the main characters does almost exactly this. It sounds like the author watched that movie, modified it slightly, and posted it to /r/advice.
I'd like to think that people know that this stuff is (most likely) not real, but some people can chime in and provide interesting information anyway. The top comment (about being trained in working in confined spaces and asphyxiation hazards) is new information to me, for example.
In my opinion, this kind of entertainment is in the same class as morning talk show sketches like "Second Date Update." It's obviously fake (who would agree to talk about a date on the radio from a random caller?), but it's hilarious and, for some, an interesting thing to talk about with friends who might even have similarly crazy stories that are actually real.
Because (1) it's more fun discussing conclusions than assumptions and (2) it doesn't matter.
Reddit mostly seeks to be entertaining. It turns out that improv/LARPing is more fun than reading or writing the 100th comment of the day that just questions an OP. We can't know if OP is being truthful or not, so why not just assume it's true and play along.
HN is different and some subreddits focus on being educational. But most are just trying to keep engagement up and don't mind the fakery/scenario-building/theatrics, as long as it's on-topic.
I don't question it because I have no reason to think it's fake. It could be, but there's nothing indicating it is. In the absence of proof showing it's fake, I have to assume that it's real.
I think it's a fantastic idea, and have thought of doing it myself.
What's interesting about this to me is the way it sort of causes you to examine why certain things are acceptable hobbies and other things aren't. This particular hobby has three notable attributes:
1. It's risky.
2. The end product doesn't seem particularly useful if we set aside the mental/physical benefits. i.e.: it's done for it's own sake.
3. It's novel.
I would argue that 1 and 2 are attributes that a great number of hobbies share. Skiing, Mountain biking, football, kayaking, woodworking, sitting in a chair and playing video games all weekend. All these things carry some very specific and often non trivial risks to health or bodily harm over time.
Of course because these hobbies aren't novel, the benefits of the hobby are well understood. Our understanding of the risks and how to mitigate them are also quite a bit more understood.
It seems to me that the real 'problem' with this tunnel digging hobby is how novel it is. Which consequently leads to a lack of knowledge about what the risks and benefits may be.
Of course it's possible the poor guy is just dealing with a mental illness.
I'd strongly add "4. It's isolating." There are no issues with "solo" hobbies, but it's definitely another axis and social hobbies def improve your sociability and relationships.
It's all a matter of context, people can learn to do this, but one would need a reason.
I've actually visited an old Victorian-era house that had "a tunnel" in the basement. It ran from the front of the basement, underground, to somewhere underneath the public street where it terminated in a half-cylinder chamber perpendicular to the tunnel. Everything was lined with bricks, solidly built. I was told it was used to store booze during prohibition but no one is really sure. Found this on youtube (https://youtu.be/nDTyz7ivgNk?t=78), that's the one.
I have yet to hear of a mountain biker causing a collapse that destroys a nearby road, which someone raised as absolutely a possibility here. Less that the risks are "novel" and more that they are absolutely known in the mining industry which is why this is illegal.
There's also a (probably apocryphal) story about Seymour Cray (the supercomputers guy) digging his tunnel too:
> John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said. [1]
> Update: Mr Bali Hai sez, "I worked for Cray Research from 1984-1996, and I can tell you that the story of him tunneling under his house is largely a fabrication made up by John Rollwagen to enhance Seymour's reputation as a quirky, visionary genius (which he was, but not because he was digging tunnels under his house). What actually transpired involved Seymour having some excavation work done on his basement by contractors. As far as I know, none of them were elves.
There is a great story about an old man who lived in Hackney, East London who dug a series of tunnels under his house and surrounding houses. He was finally found out when other peoples houses started subsiding.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/mole-man-of-hackney...
I don't know if there is something with redditors or the internet itself, but early on in this I got the feeling that the text was trying to entertain me rather than asking a real question.
Maybe the karma points subconsciously incentives people to write profusely detailed situations before hit Send. Almost impossible to believe.
There are forums outside of reddit almost dedicated to do exactly that (post fake stories on reddit). Honestly, the posts (not this one, I think this is actually real) are sometimes so outlandish and "baity", yet reddit almost always fall for it. There's this bizarre pattern of always suggesting divorce, calling the cops or other very... "reddit" advice that comes off as unadjusted.
And while the posts might be fake, the disturbing thing is that the comments/advices usually are not.
Reddit's is kind of infamous for posts from people in insane relationships. (There's even a rumor that Grimes posted there while dating Elon, but that's unconfirmed so I won't link it here.)
There's a ton of fake stories posted to reddit. Some of them are creative writing projects. Others are pretty clearly "push-polling" certain political/social themes to generate outrage. The bad ones are pretty obvious, yet most of the comments slurp them up. Most people just aren't very critical of the things that they read.
it's more than subconscious. It happens fairly often that people on Reddit fabricate stories for karma. Sometimes it's because it's their job, i.e. farms that generate accounts with a large amount of karma with the purpose of selling them
I think about this too. It's got a conflict ("he's doing something I don't want him to do"), it's weird enough to be eye catching but not weird enough to be unbelievable, serious enough to warrant concern but not so serious that it isn't funny to read and think about, and comes with an explicit invitation to engage. It's got relatable themes (loneliness, male hobby obsession, finding fulfillment outside the drudgery of work) and has an easy entrypoint for engagement.
I'm not saying this is fake, especially since it wouldn't really matter either way, but it's interesting to think about. I remember reading something about people who fake advice column letters. There's a real art to the best ones.
Chances are I won't do it, but there's something very intriguing about subverting the urban landscape and creating a little (or massive?) hidden world. What's held me back is other prevailing interests and not owning any land where I could get away with it.
Maybe I'm not mentally fit myself, but I don't think the tunnel-digging is bad for his mental health. If anything, it could be helping him deal with something else that it's really a symptom of. But I have no idea. I'd be more likely to believe that he has an obsession, and it's debatable whether any particular obsession is pathological.
This guy probably has a shot at making it big on social media if he posted photos/videos. I know I would subscribe. If he brought in the bux, I'm sure her attitude would change, the inherent danger of amateur tunnel-digging notwithstanding.
All serious safety concerns. Also: Something that happens more often than we hear about is tunnelers breaking into an open space which collapses some of the floor they're standing on, causing them to fall and get seriously injured, or die. Is he tying himself to something? Does he have ground-penetrating radar?
Well, YouTubers are doing this in front of a huge audience (9M views on just one part of a series), so I would guess a lot of people share a similar interest in doing this too. I would be worried about accidents as well, but if popular folks on YouTube keep pushing this as something that can be done, I am sure many people who are not worried (and lack the skills) will follow until it eventually ends in a disaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diAxiWkwlC0
It's interesting because, not too dissimilar to building tree houses, digging or tunneling is something kids are obsessed with that has a clear evolutionary advantage.
A nice tunnel is something you can use to store food in, stay safe from predators in, use for shelter or to stay cool in, have a shadow puppet theater.
I wonder if hes just got a bit of a positive feedback from some monkey brain circuits.
I think the GF should get him enrolled in some community college tunnel building classes or some such and demand he build it well and safely. Beyond that, it seems like a pretty benign hobby.
>there's also the fact that he doesn't really have a social life, because of this thing. I'm pretty much the only person he still talks to outside of his job, and he doesn't go out and do anything anymore. It used to be that he'd occasionally head out and do some digging on the weekends, but now he spends almost all of his free time out there
This is one of those situations on Reddit I find odd.
Of all the things we're worried about here it is the tunnel. The tunnel isn't the reason, it's just a choice reflecting something else.
Meanwhile everyone focuses on the tunnel... tells this person why digging the tunnel is dangerous and tunnel technical discussion. Or they go to grand conclusions about this person who they don't know... It's like most of the advice is gathered from Jr. High students (no offense to mature Jr. High students).
Reddit, particularly when it comes to personal advice, sometimes feels like The Peanuts where there are no adults around.
When I was in art school "hobby tunneling" was kind of a fad. Both the sculpture and performance art students got into it. Digging a huge hole or tunnel on campus was frowned upon, so it was that much cooler to pull it off. I remember one guy digging a giant well and another guy digging a huge tunnel by hand and literally living in it for days. The art school was 50/50 male and female and there were plenty of trends that both participated in, but only the men got into this particular art fad for some reason.
Maybe she should buy a shovel and work with him. Also, there is a good chance this story is fake, that it is an advertisement beacon for a movie or something.
People have to remember that half the crap posted on these sites is fake. Without proper evidence that this happening, people are just wasting their time commenting and just feeding the troll.
Water mines in the mountains in central Portugal. Many are said to be from Moorish times. It’s a long tradition, suffice it to say, along with the elevated stone aquaducts lining the nadirs of each valley.
The one on my old land there was dug by an elderly friends father about 80-90 years ago with a pickaxe. It took about a year and a half of full-time work. (Who fed them during that time? Was it a village funded effort?)
It’s allegedly about 150m deep, which is terrifying to imagine, as it’s like 1.6m tall and maybe 80-90cm wide or something and the bottom is full of water.
I never dared wade in more than about 5m, it’s sorta crouching person height and it’s basically just scraped out of the schist, although there are pockets of a hard white quartz of some kind that I can attest to the difficulty in breaking, one dislodges large chunks of it instead.
[+] [-] jader201|3 years ago|reply
Reddit is full of far-fetched stories like this that ultimately turn up to be completely fabricated (obviously for the purpose of internet points). While this one isn't ridiculously far-fetched, it's definitely borderline.
Also, the first thing that came to my mind when reading this was the movie Vivarium [1], where one of the main characters does almost exactly this. It sounds like the author watched that movie, modified it slightly, and posted it to /r/advice.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8368406
[+] [-] nunez|3 years ago|reply
In my opinion, this kind of entertainment is in the same class as morning talk show sketches like "Second Date Update." It's obviously fake (who would agree to talk about a date on the radio from a random caller?), but it's hilarious and, for some, an interesting thing to talk about with friends who might even have similarly crazy stories that are actually real.
[+] [-] tommiegannert|3 years ago|reply
Reddit mostly seeks to be entertaining. It turns out that improv/LARPing is more fun than reading or writing the 100th comment of the day that just questions an OP. We can't know if OP is being truthful or not, so why not just assume it's true and play along.
HN is different and some subreddits focus on being educational. But most are just trying to keep engagement up and don't mind the fakery/scenario-building/theatrics, as long as it's on-topic.
[+] [-] JacobThreeThree|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burntwater|3 years ago|reply
I think it's a fantastic idea, and have thought of doing it myself.
- It's fun
- It's exercise
- It's challenging
- You learn new things
- You're building something tangible.
- You're potentially building something useful.
- You're better prepared for zombies.
[+] [-] slackfan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weaksauce|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kumarsw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] type0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barfingclouds|3 years ago|reply
Search “tunnel fire hazmat genius hacker” and you’ll probably find it
[+] [-] newalexandria|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MetroWind|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrevorJ|3 years ago|reply
1. It's risky.
2. The end product doesn't seem particularly useful if we set aside the mental/physical benefits. i.e.: it's done for it's own sake.
3. It's novel.
I would argue that 1 and 2 are attributes that a great number of hobbies share. Skiing, Mountain biking, football, kayaking, woodworking, sitting in a chair and playing video games all weekend. All these things carry some very specific and often non trivial risks to health or bodily harm over time.
Of course because these hobbies aren't novel, the benefits of the hobby are well understood. Our understanding of the risks and how to mitigate them are also quite a bit more understood.
It seems to me that the real 'problem' with this tunnel digging hobby is how novel it is. Which consequently leads to a lack of knowledge about what the risks and benefits may be.
Of course it's possible the poor guy is just dealing with a mental illness.
[+] [-] Someone|3 years ago|reply
There’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_Tunnels
[+] [-] franciscop|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crispyambulance|3 years ago|reply
I've actually visited an old Victorian-era house that had "a tunnel" in the basement. It ran from the front of the basement, underground, to somewhere underneath the public street where it terminated in a half-cylinder chamber perpendicular to the tunnel. Everything was lined with bricks, solidly built. I was told it was used to store booze during prohibition but no one is really sure. Found this on youtube (https://youtu.be/nDTyz7ivgNk?t=78), that's the one.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] honkycat|3 years ago|reply
it's not risky, it is a time-bomb that will bury him alive.
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|3 years ago|reply
I get better photo ops though
[+] [-] kixiQu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joecot|3 years ago|reply
https://reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/u6a3qp/o...
[+] [-] cato_the_elder|3 years ago|reply
> John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said. [1]
[1]: https://boingboing.net/2006/08/10/seymour-cray-liked-t.html
[+] [-] Flollop|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaclaz|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_tunneling
[+] [-] maxencecornet|3 years ago|reply
Basically becoming completely obsessed like this, stoping any other task
[+] [-] willejs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dugmartin|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOelRv7fMxY
Update: tnorthcutt has a better url in a reply to this comment - it is for the entire playlist and not just the first video in the series.
[+] [-] highspeedbus|3 years ago|reply
Maybe the karma points subconsciously incentives people to write profusely detailed situations before hit Send. Almost impossible to believe.
[+] [-] mardifoufs|3 years ago|reply
And while the posts might be fake, the disturbing thing is that the comments/advices usually are not.
[+] [-] dejawu|3 years ago|reply
You can find a fun sampling of those insane posts here: https://nitter.net/redditships
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overthemoon|3 years ago|reply
I'm not saying this is fake, especially since it wouldn't really matter either way, but it's interesting to think about. I remember reading something about people who fake advice column letters. There's a real art to the best ones.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|3 years ago|reply
Chances are I won't do it, but there's something very intriguing about subverting the urban landscape and creating a little (or massive?) hidden world. What's held me back is other prevailing interests and not owning any land where I could get away with it.
Maybe I'm not mentally fit myself, but I don't think the tunnel-digging is bad for his mental health. If anything, it could be helping him deal with something else that it's really a symptom of. But I have no idea. I'd be more likely to believe that he has an obsession, and it's debatable whether any particular obsession is pathological.
This guy probably has a shot at making it big on social media if he posted photos/videos. I know I would subscribe. If he brought in the bux, I'm sure her attitude would change, the inherent danger of amateur tunnel-digging notwithstanding.
[+] [-] pwason|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mittermayr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RosanaAnaDana|3 years ago|reply
A nice tunnel is something you can use to store food in, stay safe from predators in, use for shelter or to stay cool in, have a shadow puppet theater.
I wonder if hes just got a bit of a positive feedback from some monkey brain circuits.
I think the GF should get him enrolled in some community college tunnel building classes or some such and demand he build it well and safely. Beyond that, it seems like a pretty benign hobby.
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
This is one of those situations on Reddit I find odd.
Of all the things we're worried about here it is the tunnel. The tunnel isn't the reason, it's just a choice reflecting something else.
Meanwhile everyone focuses on the tunnel... tells this person why digging the tunnel is dangerous and tunnel technical discussion. Or they go to grand conclusions about this person who they don't know... It's like most of the advice is gathered from Jr. High students (no offense to mature Jr. High students).
Reddit, particularly when it comes to personal advice, sometimes feels like The Peanuts where there are no adults around.
[+] [-] stolenmerch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brewdad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] embit|3 years ago|reply
https://boingboing.net/2006/08/10/seymour-cray-liked-t.html
[+] [-] _aleph2c_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway561|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iostream24|3 years ago|reply
The one on my old land there was dug by an elderly friends father about 80-90 years ago with a pickaxe. It took about a year and a half of full-time work. (Who fed them during that time? Was it a village funded effort?) It’s allegedly about 150m deep, which is terrifying to imagine, as it’s like 1.6m tall and maybe 80-90cm wide or something and the bottom is full of water.
I never dared wade in more than about 5m, it’s sorta crouching person height and it’s basically just scraped out of the schist, although there are pockets of a hard white quartz of some kind that I can attest to the difficulty in breaking, one dislodges large chunks of it instead.