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.
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.
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 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.
Search “tunnel fire hazmat genius hacker” and you’ll probably find it
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.
There’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_Tunnels
"restorative" "meditation" "self care" "reflection" "me time"
Or he's really into dwarf fortress.
Or he wants to relive Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Or he wants a secret hangout.
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.
it's not risky, it is a time-bomb that will bury him alive.
I get better photo ops though
"So what are you up to outside of work?" "I uh... dig a tunnel." "Right."
It's just that most of the relevant conversations surrounding these things were had decades ago with other hobbies, and many hobbies probably wouldn't have a prayer of actually passing muster if they were new today - Full contact football being a good example.
This issue of legality that you raise is a good one though, and likely the most relevant, unless this guy is going out into the desert to do this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hobby_tunneling&s...
Then there was the twenty-year-old tarantula… the time one learned to spin yarn and made a sweater out of his dog’s hair… that time they procured some authentic bedouin garb and built a bonfire of plastic american flags on the driveway (this was pre-9/11)… fun bunch
"The 5th Duke of Portland is known to have been a hobby tunneler, although he did no digging himself but rather had workmen build his tunnels."
Hobby tunnel manager, perhaps?
Eccentric aristocrats get trapped by the social norms of their classmates. There's even lore around this. For example, people who don't think Shakespeare actually wrote anything[0] also tend to believe it was written by some aristocrat who couldn't reveal they participated in something as vulgar as creative writing.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespeare_authorship...
Now, if this was in a remote area...
Just get started, and work out solutions as you go along.
I always wondered what they thought when they tore the house down 15 years later.
> "The Hackney Mole Man", In 2006, a network of tunnels were discovered beneath a house in Hackney, London. This discovery initiated a wave of public concern and media attention revolving around a lone figure, known locally as 'the Mole Man'.
Also, following an artist mentioned in the video, I tracked this page [2] and an interesting excerpt:
> Though flattered by my interest, the Mole Man proved to be extraordinarily difficult to work with. He was extremely racist, misogynistic and paranoid, and was only interested in talking about my sex life. His elusive, subterranean behavior – in many ways like that of an actual mole – and his obsession with tunnels was the ultimate Freudian manifestation. I soon realized, though, that the sexual overtones of our relationship threatened to over-take the project completely.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwJVjJPtWaw&ab_channel=LateN...
Dashrath Manjhi's story is one I would qualify of "great", after his wife sadly died from what he perceived was a delay of care due to his village remoteness, he resolved to straight carve a roadway through the ridge abutting his village (over which the nearest town was located). Spent 20 years carving a 110m long and 9m wide road through the ridge, apparently with hammer and chisel.
https://www.kvue.com/article/news/crews-arrive-to-fill-in-tu...
There are way worse things for your mental health than habitual physical activity. I'd bet half the people here would benefit from a good tunnel project.
But it's probably like any addiction. He's addicted to the progress he's making and doesn't feel the same about anything else in his life. He needs a reason to stop digging the tunnel.
In the update[1] he says it's calming and makes him feel safe. He's happier after doing it.
It doesn't sound so bad. I mean, it's gotta be healthier than so called idle games, and about as useful. Or similar to lifting weights or jogging or something. It makes him feel good, that's all the justification any non-harmful activity should need.
[1] Mods removed it on Reddit. Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20220417170609/https://old.reddit...
This is a story of escalating isolation. He's isolating from society, from people who care about him and whom, we presume, he cares about. (Or maybe not. Maybe he gets along fine at work and at church, and is simply uninterested in his SO.)
Agreed, but once he unleashes the Balrog it will be a bit too late. Then the area will be a Superfund site for generations until some grey guy shows up with a stick & an attitude.
If he’s healthy, I also agree that this hobby is probably not bad for mental health.
True enough[1], but "aggravating a clear conflict with ones partner" clearly qualifies. Obviously we have only one side of the story here, but it's not so much "digging the tunnel" that is at issue here. It's "digging the tunnel and failing to sufficiently explain the hobby to your increasingly concerned girlfriend" that carries this into the realm of nutjobbery. It's one thing to be "I know it's weird, but <my obscure hobby> makes me happy and I promise it won't impact our relationship" and quite another to front with "I'm digging the tunnel. Leave me alone."
The implicit questions being asked by the poster here are ones our amateur miner should have answered long ago, basically.
[1] And for the record: I have a hard time believing that an amateur tunnel through sediment in an otherwise typical geological area is all that dangerous, the guy isn't chasing veins through bedrock or tapping sinkholes here.
Maybe the karma points subconsciously incentives people to write profusely detailed situations before hit Send. Almost impossible to believe.
And while the posts might be fake, the disturbing thing is that the comments/advices usually are not.
I don't have any estimates on the rates of change, but consider how huge Reddit and some of the default subs are, and how half of those people are below-average intelligence(Carlin quote?).
I'm not at all surprised to see dumb shit on big subs, or to see people lying on the internet for imaginary points. I just moderate my expectations based on where I happen to be at a given time.
Part of being well-adjusted means knowing damn well better than to post anything approaching honesty online.
You can find a fun sampling of those insane posts here: https://nitter.net/redditships
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.
You can pay to pick up heavy things and put them back down, so we have people paying to be stevedores.
So why not have places where you can pay to dig tunnels? With proper supervision and a bit of safety gear, it could be quite nice, you could even allow people to purchase memberships for "their tunnel" and compete with others ...
Back when I lived in California gold country I used to know a guy who would go panning for gold for free and usually made enough money to pay for the beer he took out there — though I suspect the fresh air and beer were the important aspects to his gold bug.
—edit—
Should add his “secret spot” was somewhere right in the middle of Auburn and I believe within walking distance from his house.
Very off-topic, but "stevedore" is an awesome word. Spanish is my first language, and wouldn't have guessed the word for "estibador" in English, it looks so weird. Had to lookup the etymology, and it's weird because sailors imported the word from Spanish or Portuguese. The original Latin verb is "stipare".
It was a solid "OMG, Minecraft is REAL" moment.
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.
That of course leads me to the other wonder of reddit, folks who describe being in a relationship but seem to know little to nothing about the other person / haven't talked about some things ... sometimes in that relationship for a long time.
Sometimes a guy just wants to dig a tunnel, come on.
Fear not (?), that is simply the feeling of middle age approaching. In no way is it specific to Reddit.
Tunnel vision?
> Reddit, particularly when it comes to personal advice, sometimes feels like The Peanuts where there are no adults around.
Adults generally have better things to do. Except this guy, he's got a tunnel.
https://reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/u6a3qp/o...
This guy ... I don't think he understands but he seems nice enough
Imagine if dang did that... It's unthinkable.
It's just like this community - we don't allow offtopic posts either. Except instead of a small modteam, we have people who have a certain amount of karma to "remove" (bury) the post.
r/BestofRedditorUpdates is probably my new favorite sub, and I appreciate the legwork people put into gathering the pieces of posts into a coherent and satisfying story.
"after church today" - I can see why he wants to get away
I one hundred percent agree. unless you have proper tools training and equipment for confined space work, trench work, and mine safety you shouldnt be doing this. depending on where you dig you risk exposure to a host of bad hombres including methane, radon, arsenic, and asbestos.
One thing to consider is that property rights and mineral rights are completely different in most states. Identifying the owner of the mineral rights to the property might the the first step in getting him to cease and desist.
another thing to remember is that if you dig too deep, get too stuck, or are generally too cumbersome, rescuers will not pursue your rescue or exhume your corpse. As in the 2009 nutty putty cave disaster, youll simply be left interred, with a memorial marker. death by entrapment is a slow death of exhaustion and dehydration.
If I want to skydive? Kayak across the Atlantic? Run a fight club? Build a custom homestead? Smoke? Drink? Do drugs? Play Russian Roulette?
Where's the line? There's one somewhere. To me, digging tunnels feels like the sort of thing which we should allow. Some of the others, I'm okay banning.
There’s a reason construction teams bring in reinforced barricades for anything much over 3 feet. Yes it saves on rework, but it’s also about safety.
When I was a kid my dad stopped me from digging a cave in a 5ft tall pile of snow that got stacked up by a plow. I was so mad about that for a long time, but he was probably right. Digging it would likely have been fine, but once it started to melt it could collapse at any point (probably during the heat of the day, when I or another child might have been around).
There is also the possibility he is competent at this as well.
I would raise the idea of bringing someone in who could assess the current effort for safety and quality. Most people who are building properly should welcome this. Being highly defensive from prying eyes definitely raises some red flags.
> 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
Obviously they weren't, because for excavation you hire dwarfs.
Basically becoming completely obsessed like this, stoping any other task
Oh, and there could be another strange mood where the affected dorf becomes obsessed with delving too deep and too greedily, with certain spoilery consequences if not stopped in time.
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.
Here's the whole playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGjbAdaOBLBlS1MPKXYmq...
From what I can tell, he's trying to dig himself out of a relationship he isn't happy in instead of just leaving. If he works hard enough digging deeper, maybe he can drive her away instead of having to own disappointing and hurting her, or it will collapse on him and he can be liberated in death and still remembered as perfect and a martyr. If only he had a father who could tell him, son, stop digging. This woman isn't your mother, accept yourself. Strike this set, grieve, and move on.
Or he's just a nerd with a shovel, but it's never just a nerd with a shovel.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/mole-man-of-hackney...
Digging for Balrogs no doubt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyttle
There was also the sixties (racist) film Battle Beneath the Earth, tapping into the digging fascination.
And what it is now:
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.
I would be delighted to learn there's a community college out there somewhere that has "Tunnel Building" as a course.
Most of us are just here because it's curious to think about while sharing some anecdotes, related stories, and thoughts.
This might've happened in a movie and people would discuss it pretty much the same way.
EP 39: 3 ALARM LAMP SCOOTER https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/39/
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.
Reddit: He's a danger to himself and others!
HN: That's neat! sounds better than my current project.
It was definitely a death trap. It was a large dirt hole dug deep into a hill.
I was too young to even think of reenforcing it, let alone have a budget to do so. In the end my parents finally decided my tunnel was a death trap and we had to plug it up.
Thinking back I’m amazed it didn’t collapse on me. Oh well… cheating death is just part of growing up.
So, in some suburban environment (which has been engineered to not have cellular reception) there is a house. Out in the yard, if you look for it, there's this thing that looks kind of like a cupola, sitting on the ground, about 50 yards from the house. It has a basement (never found the pool). In the basement was a metal door, with a little room and a hallway around a corner. When the door shuts behind you it goes "WUMP! Wump! wump wump wump wump". Looking around the corner, there's a pulley, like a clothes line, disappearing into the murk. It's a gun lane.
Guy who'd bought the house wanted to use it for a wine cellar. He wanted a wood floor in it (on top of the concrete). This is insane! We found an amazing high-end engineered product (laminated) faced with cypress. Aged it in the hole for a couple of months prior to installation. Lost about 10% of the product, but we planned for that. Crazy. Paid well.
All of a sudden he has a "playground", maybe some cheap property that doesn't have a great use or value otherwise. Those become nice to have for dude toys and dude projects.
Girlfriend of course has multiple agendas that she didn't discuss with him and doesn't like any activity outside of those, which is garden variety manipulative partner stuff.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3ATx76...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/a-million... [soft paywall]
From one of many other related articles, "The equipment was fed by what Wink called a dangerous, “haphazard daisy chain” of power cords. And on the day of the fire, hours before it broke out, Beckwitt was aware of the smell of smoke in the basement, according to Wink, but reacted only by adjusting the circuit breakers."
That one article can't capture this situation well enough, there was an entire series of them (and it's still ongoing), but one of the issues had to do with the authorities dealing with the situation and simply not knowing what to do to secure the tunnel after the fact. Tunneling was haphazardly done and had gone beyond his property line and undermined neighbors' homes, and it got very complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temples_of_Humankind
Looking for them again I also found Sassi di Matera:
I'm not sure I see the problem entirely.
Digging the tunnel is his after-work / weekend video game.
He's obviously neglecting his partner a bit, but if he could balance that out, and assuming he knows how to dig without collapsing the world onto his head, it seems like there's nothing too harmful here.
But seriously, there is no mention of its purpose or where it leads? If it's nearly finished then bf/gf can find a compromise. If it has no end then there are bigger problems.
I am a dwarf, and I'm digging a hole
Diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy hole
I am a dwarf, and I'm digging a hole
Diggy diggy hole, digging a hole
Really cool dude
The alternative is he is cheating on his GF and hired an excavation crew as a cover. Elaborate but..with the crap I've seen you really never know. lol.
"inherited property" = He started this with Grandpa, then he left for college and/or grandpa died, now its a memory of the good old days. Now if he could only find someone to experience this together in the current year, like someone who calls him "boyfriend"... (edited to be more explicit, this was never about digging a tunnel it was about hanging out with grandpa, kinda like I never fished to live and wasn't even a huge fan of eating fish but I liked fishing with grandpa as a kid)
All the single people on Reddit AND HN not understanding the difference between doing something with someone and doing something around someone, so using strict binary thinking if the poster is not a fellow digging addict the poster must ostracize the digger and force them to be alone. My wife does fine precision woodworking "with" me not "along" with me, for example. She's right there scrapbooking while I'm hand cutting (loose and rattle-y LOL) dovetail joints, etc. The poster is making a huge mistake by not hanging out with BF using the excuse of not wanting to lift a shovel. Read a book, watch videos, do some craft, no need to pick up a shovel.
There's never been a better time in history to take up tunneling. Youtube is full of abandoned and active mine exploration videos, uncountable hours. There's something strangely chill and technologically impressive about seeing mining works on screen. I picked up this youtube interest during the covid lockdown as a way to get out there while also satisfying some techno-curiosity. "Exploring Abandoned Mines and Unusual Locations" is good, Frank is pretty chill dude. Beware that looking at mining videos leads you down a path where next thing you know you're watching The Proper People do urban exploration and then you find the Dead Malls of Discord server and you're watching cruise director Kristin wander an empty dead mall at 2:00am when you have to work the next day...
My experience with cranky old men, being related to several and probably turning into one myself, is if they're not overly talkative you'll get the standard complaint regardless what's going on. So my elderly uncle goes to his rented farm patch "to weed the tomato raised beds" almost every sunny day but that's like five minutes work and the rest of the time he does all kinds of crazy stuff ranging from tractor maintenance to fertilizer application to whatever else his hobby interests lead him to. So this dude is probably restoring the house to move in, or planting a huge crop of "something" or maybe he's just fishing all day, but yeah he's not the talkative type and he "went out to dig today". Or sometimes that's just how guys plan hobby time. Today I WILL mow the lawn so I say I am mowing the lawn but really I spent most of the time doing misc yardwork tasks, trimming bushes, etc, still I'd simplify it as "I mowed the lawn".
