I know it's not the majority opinion here, but I do think Shane is legit disabled, possibly more severely than he's letting on, and that's at the root of most of his bizarre and shitty behaviour. I don't think he's ever come to terms with it, losing your career and going on benefits because your body let you down is a difficult blow to take to even a normal psyche, for someone so egotistical and macho as Shane it probably shattered his world. He was utterly convinced of his total superiority in all things, and when reality started to run counter to that he decided to reject reality in favour of a fantasy where he was this badass black-belt ninja elite computer hacker superhero who turned bad guys in to the feds and wowed the ladies and was basically Batman, which was the life he felt he was entitled to.
That's why he's mentally stuck in 2003. That was the last time his life was going the way he wanted, so that's where he stayed as his real life fell apart around him. He cannot accept the idea that he has failed at anything, this is observable during the bed saga where he tried to deflect away from his own incompetence by accusing six different firms of failing to do something that most people could achieve on their own in less than an hour. It's why he humiliated himself for the thread's amusement by "proving" he was tall or that he could run up the stairs, even though he's of average height and, like many disabled people, severely out of shape. Not everyone can be tall, and not everyone, especially those who have physical disabilities, can be super-athletes, and mature people understand that that's OK, you can't be good at literally everything. I suck at gardening, for example, so I pay someone to do it for me. That's OK because I'm good at my job and I get money from that to pay people to do the things I'm bad at, so I can spend my time doing things I'm good at instead.
But Shane has to maintain that pretence at all costs, even if it makes him look stupid or look like he's falsely claiming disability by saying he's much more physically capable than he really is. The idea that he might be fallible in any way absolutely fucking terrifies him, because for whatever reason he never reached that stage of maturity where you realise and accept that there are things you just suck at. Because if he admits it once, he has to admit to the thousands and thousands of times he has lied to himself and others. His whole self-perception would come crashing down like a house of cards and there would be nothing to insulate him from the fact he is just a lonely fat man with an even fatter girlfriend who, at the very least doesn't really seem to care about him all that much and who at worst he has to pay to keep around, with a sad career of dead-end jobs, no real education and no prospects. Pat Tomlinson is very similar, he psychologically has to maintain the facade, hence his compulsion to reply to every single message and tweet - because to do otherwise would, in his mind, force him to admit to how shitty his reality is and how badly he has failed at life.
Shane's reality is so far from his fantasy that the shock at having to bridge that gap would probably cause him to have a nervous breakdown, and therefore reality must be dismissed at every turn and the fantasy reinforced. If you read through the thread, you will notice a pattern - if someone gets under Shane's skin, either by outwitting him in a Twitter argument (i.e. every single time he gets into one) or by correctly guessing his psychology, he spazzes the fuck out and goes on an insulting spree. He can't allow anything to penetrate his defences so he goes on a wild, flailing attack instead.
One thing that confused me for a long time about Shane was this - who is he trying to fool? His lies and posturing were so transparent, his rage and flailing were so obviously responses to his fantasy being pierced, that nobody would ever be fooled by them. He's been doing it for 20 years, and not once have his fortunes improved in this respect. He's hated everywhere, banned everywhere, he has no friends, he alienates everyone he comes into contact with, but he keeps up the same thing. Why?
Well the answer is, on reflection, is that he's not doing it to fool other people. He's doing it to fool himself. He doesn't care if other people see right through what he's doing, he has maintained his fantasy in his own head and his monumental life failures (some of which aren't his fault, some of which are) remain un-thought about, and Shane's psychological house of cards maintains its precarious existence another day. It may genuinely be an autistic self-soothing behaviour, attacking and insulting people gives him dopamine and makes him feel like Batman, and that matters more than anything - more than the hurt and problems he causes other people, more than the harm he does to himself by behaving this way, he feels soothed in the moment to live another day.
In other words, what a self-centred loser.
