The Moment I Saw “-ngo,” My Sympathy Vanished
The other day, I read an online news story about someone who had died young from cancer.
Apparently, they had been sharing their experience with the illness online, leaving behind a record of their condition gradually worsening.
Dying young from an illness is simply tragic.
I was reading the story thinking, “How awful” and “They were still so young.”
Then I saw their final words, and everything changed.
“Guess this is the end, ngo.”
…Ngo?
At that moment, all the sympathy I had felt seconds earlier vanished at astonishing speed.
“Oh. A J-min.”
“J-min” is Japanese internet slang for a member of NanJ, a community on one of Japan’s largest anonymous message boards that is notorious for its own peculiar brand of abrasive online humor. “-Ngo” is a distinctive bit of slang its users append to the ends of sentences.
The next feeling that surfaced was:
“If they were a J-min, I don’t care.”
That is terrible, even by my own standards.
Seconds earlier, I had been mourning the death of a young person. One tiny suffix, and this was how completely my attitude changed.
“-Ngo” Carries Far Too Much Baggage
The suffix “-ngo” originally spread from the internet culture surrounding NanJ.
I have never posted there myself, but I have spent enough time online to know what that world feels like.
Provoking people. Hurling insults. Laughing at other people’s failures. Starting fights over things that do not matter.
Of course, someone’s use of “-ngo” is not proof that they spent every day doing those things.
But inside my head, the following conversion happened at lightning speed:
“-Ngo” → “NanJ” → “anonymous message-board user” → “probably spends their time trolling people”
I knew nothing about their personality. I did not know whether they had been a good person or a bad one.
And yet one tiny piece of slang was enough for me to construct an entire personality for them.
The human brain is useful.
Sometimes, inconveniently so.
We See Labels, Not People
Come to think of it, this is not just an internet phenomenon.
When we know nothing about someone, we see that person as an individual.
But the instant we learn that they belong to some category, the way we see them changes.
Hometown, occupation, education, religion, political affiliation.
And “-ngo.”
One label gets attached, and suddenly we feel as though we understand the person’s entire character.
This time, I gave a perfect demonstration of that process myself.
For most of the article, they were “a person who died young from cancer.”
Then one sentence—“Guess this is the end, ngo”—turned them into “a J-min.”
Their illness, their age, and their entire life disappeared. All that remained was “-ngo.”
They Probably Did Not Mean Any of That
Perhaps they simply did not want things to become unbearably solemn at the end.
Instead of writing:
“I will die soon. Thank you, everyone.”
They chose to end with:
“Guess this is the end, ngo.”
Seen as a refusal to abandon their usual online voice even at the very end, it is rather admirable in its own way.
The problem was me.
From one tiny suffix, I filled in a vast amount of information on my own, invented a personality for them, and then decided on my own to stop feeling sympathy.
If an AI did that, we would angrily call it a hallucination. When a human does it, we simply call it an “impression.”
Do not judge people by the categories they belong to.
Do not label them.
See each person as an individual.
All of that is correct.
I would normally say the same things myself.
And yet this time, one tiny “-ngo” was enough to erase my sympathy.
Apparently, my love for humanity came with a kill switch triggered by one tiny suffix.