Pretty much everyone on the internet is giving Logan Paul hell right now for his since retracted vlog: "We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest..." (there's a mirror on LiveLeak) in which him and his buddies make it only about a hundred yards from the parking lot before encountering and filming a fresh suicide victim dangling from a tree (what a surprise). In a natural attempt to cope with the shock Logan resorts to gallows humor, a tendency that arises during first hand experiences of stressful or traumatic events. A quick run-through of the psychology behind why someone might crack a joke under such a circumstance follows. "We can use humor to put our fears into perspective. Humor addresses the same issues as fear, not to dismiss them, but to strengthen our ability to confront them and then laugh them away from the door. Humor is, of course, the one thing that fear cannot abide: Laughter banishes anxiety, and can help replace fear. Laughter is a testament to courage, or at least a manifestation of the wish for it, and courage is stronger than fear". It's easy for people behind a monitor on the outside looking in to dictate how a person should've acted, but there is almost always a huge disconnect between how people think they'd act and how they do act in the moment when a stressful situation arises. Look to Michael Steven's experiment on the trolley problem for example. The type of reactions I'm seeing to Logan's behavior are reminding me of when pseudo conspiracy theorists were pointing to the bizarre smiling and laughing of some of the victims' families in the Sandy Hook shooting interviews as evidence for why they must be staged, when in reality they too were just succumbing to gallows humor as a coping mechanism to help their minds ease out of what had happened.

Aside from justifying his behavior I'd like to quickly defend the nature and standing of the video itself. You could say his viewer base consists mostly of young children, I'd agree. Although going on to say these viewers shouldn't be exposed to footage of a persons lifeless body; even if the intention was to raise awareness around the problem of suicide- is a double standard stemming from the common delusion of human supremacy. Everyone, kids included, are subject to viewing the death of animals in some way or another all the time without controversy. Why should the small nuance that the animal in this case happens to be a human make it a problem. They were trying to seize the opportunity to enforce a positive message with something very real here anyway, and are in turn getting bombarded with hate by the people whose sensitive heads it wooshed over when the man even had the courtesy not to monetize the video. I'm getting real tired of these reactive knee jerk responses everyone seems to be having nowadays to anything they're too shook or offended to step back and think about.