I’ve been drawing closer to this idea that intimacy goes badly when your relationship with yourself is broken, incomplete, evasive, or overly harsh. I’m in the harsh, overly familiar disgust category, but people who fear their own desires and flaws tend to fear the desires and flaws of their partners, too. I also think that when you move to smaller, less self-awareness-fixated cities and towns; you discover that rigid traditional / moral codes are alive and well. Anyway, the point is: I love this post!
Well, I’m dead!!! Fatal reaction to this comment aside: a lot of my friends still live in Louisiana and Texas, and we’ve noticed that we’re all in general states of reaction against local conditions that vary: they’re still, as I once was, mostly inclined to push against oppressive traditional contexts, while I’m out here stumping for those against the contextless hyperfree anxiety-laden free-fire scene that has its own trade-offs!
In any event, as a fan since the 90s, I’m reeling at this moment!!! Thank you for the kind words!
I copy/pasted so many parts of this post to keep on record for myself! Hot damn this is a banger!!!
Now I'm going to do the ego thing where I tack a small idea onto your big ones. It is associated but mostly I'm just cramming something I think is interesting into the dialogue because I'm curious for your designer thoughts.
I was talking to a french friend of mine about cancel culture, and she told me about a famous woman in france who has been blackballed for saying something that she shouldn't have (some classic shit that I personally balk at about who is a woman and who isn't, but I digress). She wasn't an expert on this, she said this thing as an aside, and now her identity is so toxic that people are refusing to sit next to her at dinner despite being a very beloved person otherwise.
My friend used the word "association" in telling this story - people didn't want to be associated with this woman. So much so that they couldn't even be in the same physical space as her, lest they be framed as formally aligned with her by doing so.
Your argument and my friend's was that, in the past, this was not the case. People would just sit at the goddamn table with someone they thought sucked or was flawed in small maybe even significant ways.
I'm not going to go into whether or not that is net good or net bad. I'm more curious to ask you now the question of exactly why this change has come on so dramatically.
My hunch is it's the tractability of individual identity, facilitated by online profiles. The functional unit of the internet is the individual profile. All of your behaviors are documented, including your associations (following people, liking their content, tagged photos of you at dinner). It all gets captured and pointed back at you through your usernames/urls.
Even if you yourself *are not that sure* of shit, even your casual associations are concretized in a way they never were before. So the result is that we are all hyper aware of our associations. People won't sit with that woman at dinner in part because the implications on perceptions of themself are too risky and too high in today's world where the individual is so concretized in public.
It seems like that's been very, very bad w/r/t mental health x identity. People who are really online, or who have online followings that are significant, are now facing a world where we are each more atomized in our sets of opinions and taste than we ever have before, *and* the stakes are higher for each of the associations we take on because those things are so tractable.
I was curious if you think this hunch that the conspicuousness / tractability of the individual profile unit online has had an impact on how we make our identity and thus how we make relationships?
Yes!!! And first off: if this is an “ego thing,” it’s an example of the ego being good. This rules and is what I at least (and I suspect most writers) want!
An extremely important thing you said (IMO) is that it’s not clear whether this change has been “good” or “bad” in a net-net kind of sense. One thing that slows me from writing about these things is that I don’t have a position on that, either. It’s cool when a social system lets people be more free and experimental with identity and opinion; it’s also cool when a social system rewards the moral and punishes the immoral (how a given idea of morality is conceived is important, of course). I think it’s important to be able to discuss tradeoffs and changes without seeming to suggest that one has a clear, confident sense of “what’s better.” How the hell would I know anyway?! There are many imaginable societies with many imaginable dynamics. As you may know, I happen to be very optimistic about humans generally and do not fear eg that “we’ve taken a wrong turn,” only that we’re a little inattentive to or uncompassionate about the change costs and transition costs of historical development.
(For every capitalist who doesn’t care about the devastation wrought by globalization and offshoring on small towns, there’s a culture critic who doesn’t care about the upheaval new forms of social existence and new modes of relation brings to communities from the indigenous to the hegemonic).
I 100% think profiles are a big part of this. Profiles, indexability, search interfaces, text as the basis for all things: all this sums to immense pressure to be legible and correct about all things at all times, which is literally impossible on a global scale! When I was a teen, no one paid any attention to what I said or thought and none of it was captured anywhere; when I started blogging in ‘95, no one read it and no one was online! But once we got the centralized platforms, general scrutiny and memory exploded. As a crazy person, I found it very, very hard, but I don’t expect society to go out of its way to accommodate my rashness or intemperance or tendency to have truly bad takes.
We agonized a bit over profiles on Substack for some of these reasons, but to go back to the earlier theme: it was a matter of trade offs, like everything!
Yes I remember Hanne saying that when she was younger and she wanted to kinda experiment/push the boundaries of who she was, she'd just go to some party - like a goth or punk party - in a city where she didn't know anyone. She'd get consumed by another subculture - by a group!!! - to form her identity.
This seems like it's greatly diminished today. To form your identity, you have to construct it in a more atomized, sticky, and self-focused way than ever before.
My gut says that's a little sad bc us poor humans need less self-absorption /// less default mode network cycles!!! Or at least I know I do...
My take on this is pretty similar, which is that the twitter-ification of the internet has forced us to bring parts of our self into spaces where it previously was not. I remember on the early social media / internet that my persona was very fragmented. I was joking around with friends on AIM, posting vacation pictures on facebook, getting into political spats on various forums, etc.
I distinctly remember twitter changing this because it felt that I didn't know my audience and therefore couldn't focus my posting to them. Instead of having a silo of friends here, extended relatives there, and other tribe political people somewhere else, everybody was in one place! I was now posting politics dunks for my non-politics crowd, vacation pictures for people who didn't know who I am.
To me that felt like a turning point where all parts of my self were exposed to a (public!!) audience, and the inability to block off sections for appropriate crowds died. To me, that change (which has since spread to tons of non-twitter places) was the big turning point moreso than the profile-ification of the internet. Anyways, awesome comment!
"...the nightmare process of all things becoming familiar and contemptible."
I have the exact opposite fear of aging. My stepmother's mother is in her mid-90s; everyone she ever knew in her youth is gone. The world she grew up in is gone. Everything familiar is gone. Even her children and grandchildren continue to change and expand and take on more activity and technology than she can wrap her understanding around. The one place I know she feels "at home" is Turner Classic Movies, and she needs help figuring out how to get there. I'd bet even PB&J doesn't taste right anymore.
Completely true! In the last decades of his life, my father loved TCM, although in fairness he and I were both always somewhat backwards-looking. It feels like old age / end stage life really does involve a lot of “returning”: to weakness, to incontinence, to anxiety, to the search for the familiar over the longing for the novel, etc.
Incredible to think we’re all going to go through it, all of us. I think I’m as unprepared as you can be.
This is an interesting idea. I feel like I agree with your psychiatrist but it's never that simple, is it? I feel like I have a very healthy relationship with myself, I'm kind and supportive, not too harsh, but always with high standards. I prefer to toughen up instead of feeling sorry for myself. If I look at the mirror I might be like "Haha that's a bit fucked up but we'll get there."
But then that might not translate to my partner when I treat her like I treat myself because she might have different needs or a different framework of mind (e.g. she had a bad day and wants me to say "Oh, I'm sorry, poor thing," instead of "Life is suffering, get over it," or a less exaggerated version of that.)
So even if you're being kind to them you might come across as an asshole because they need other types of "kind."
On another level I do feel like I judge strangers way more than familiar people, I might think horrible things about them because I don't know their story, I don't care for them, I don't know the reasons for why they're doing that terribly stupid thing, and so on.
But what the hell do I know about anything, right? We live in a twilight world, peace out.
Incredible last sentence! I have the same thing with strangers; it’s definitely a bit more mixed / complex than I made it seem in the post / than my shrink’s theory implies (as I suspect she herself would admit).
Reminds me of this Russian word. They say it all in one word! “умиротворение” - “мир” “творить” (umirotvorenie). To create the peace in his own soul (mind) and thus create peace around himself.
Yes but: you should be posting!!! I am a subscriber and I want more of this; I too deserve the feeling of “yes, that!” and once a week Zoom meetings are a good start but: POAST!
I’ve been drawing closer to this idea that intimacy goes badly when your relationship with yourself is broken, incomplete, evasive, or overly harsh. I’m in the harsh, overly familiar disgust category, but people who fear their own desires and flaws tend to fear the desires and flaws of their partners, too. I also think that when you move to smaller, less self-awareness-fixated cities and towns; you discover that rigid traditional / moral codes are alive and well. Anyway, the point is: I love this post!
Well, I’m dead!!! Fatal reaction to this comment aside: a lot of my friends still live in Louisiana and Texas, and we’ve noticed that we’re all in general states of reaction against local conditions that vary: they’re still, as I once was, mostly inclined to push against oppressive traditional contexts, while I’m out here stumping for those against the contextless hyperfree anxiety-laden free-fire scene that has its own trade-offs!
In any event, as a fan since the 90s, I’m reeling at this moment!!! Thank you for the kind words!
I copy/pasted so many parts of this post to keep on record for myself! Hot damn this is a banger!!!
Now I'm going to do the ego thing where I tack a small idea onto your big ones. It is associated but mostly I'm just cramming something I think is interesting into the dialogue because I'm curious for your designer thoughts.
I was talking to a french friend of mine about cancel culture, and she told me about a famous woman in france who has been blackballed for saying something that she shouldn't have (some classic shit that I personally balk at about who is a woman and who isn't, but I digress). She wasn't an expert on this, she said this thing as an aside, and now her identity is so toxic that people are refusing to sit next to her at dinner despite being a very beloved person otherwise.
My friend used the word "association" in telling this story - people didn't want to be associated with this woman. So much so that they couldn't even be in the same physical space as her, lest they be framed as formally aligned with her by doing so.
Your argument and my friend's was that, in the past, this was not the case. People would just sit at the goddamn table with someone they thought sucked or was flawed in small maybe even significant ways.
I'm not going to go into whether or not that is net good or net bad. I'm more curious to ask you now the question of exactly why this change has come on so dramatically.
My hunch is it's the tractability of individual identity, facilitated by online profiles. The functional unit of the internet is the individual profile. All of your behaviors are documented, including your associations (following people, liking their content, tagged photos of you at dinner). It all gets captured and pointed back at you through your usernames/urls.
Even if you yourself *are not that sure* of shit, even your casual associations are concretized in a way they never were before. So the result is that we are all hyper aware of our associations. People won't sit with that woman at dinner in part because the implications on perceptions of themself are too risky and too high in today's world where the individual is so concretized in public.
It seems like that's been very, very bad w/r/t mental health x identity. People who are really online, or who have online followings that are significant, are now facing a world where we are each more atomized in our sets of opinions and taste than we ever have before, *and* the stakes are higher for each of the associations we take on because those things are so tractable.
I was curious if you think this hunch that the conspicuousness / tractability of the individual profile unit online has had an impact on how we make our identity and thus how we make relationships?
Yes!!! And first off: if this is an “ego thing,” it’s an example of the ego being good. This rules and is what I at least (and I suspect most writers) want!
An extremely important thing you said (IMO) is that it’s not clear whether this change has been “good” or “bad” in a net-net kind of sense. One thing that slows me from writing about these things is that I don’t have a position on that, either. It’s cool when a social system lets people be more free and experimental with identity and opinion; it’s also cool when a social system rewards the moral and punishes the immoral (how a given idea of morality is conceived is important, of course). I think it’s important to be able to discuss tradeoffs and changes without seeming to suggest that one has a clear, confident sense of “what’s better.” How the hell would I know anyway?! There are many imaginable societies with many imaginable dynamics. As you may know, I happen to be very optimistic about humans generally and do not fear eg that “we’ve taken a wrong turn,” only that we’re a little inattentive to or uncompassionate about the change costs and transition costs of historical development.
(For every capitalist who doesn’t care about the devastation wrought by globalization and offshoring on small towns, there’s a culture critic who doesn’t care about the upheaval new forms of social existence and new modes of relation brings to communities from the indigenous to the hegemonic).
I 100% think profiles are a big part of this. Profiles, indexability, search interfaces, text as the basis for all things: all this sums to immense pressure to be legible and correct about all things at all times, which is literally impossible on a global scale! When I was a teen, no one paid any attention to what I said or thought and none of it was captured anywhere; when I started blogging in ‘95, no one read it and no one was online! But once we got the centralized platforms, general scrutiny and memory exploded. As a crazy person, I found it very, very hard, but I don’t expect society to go out of its way to accommodate my rashness or intemperance or tendency to have truly bad takes.
We agonized a bit over profiles on Substack for some of these reasons, but to go back to the earlier theme: it was a matter of trade offs, like everything!
Day made by this comment BTW, thank you!!!
Yes I remember Hanne saying that when she was younger and she wanted to kinda experiment/push the boundaries of who she was, she'd just go to some party - like a goth or punk party - in a city where she didn't know anyone. She'd get consumed by another subculture - by a group!!! - to form her identity.
This seems like it's greatly diminished today. To form your identity, you have to construct it in a more atomized, sticky, and self-focused way than ever before.
My gut says that's a little sad bc us poor humans need less self-absorption /// less default mode network cycles!!! Or at least I know I do...
My take on this is pretty similar, which is that the twitter-ification of the internet has forced us to bring parts of our self into spaces where it previously was not. I remember on the early social media / internet that my persona was very fragmented. I was joking around with friends on AIM, posting vacation pictures on facebook, getting into political spats on various forums, etc.
I distinctly remember twitter changing this because it felt that I didn't know my audience and therefore couldn't focus my posting to them. Instead of having a silo of friends here, extended relatives there, and other tribe political people somewhere else, everybody was in one place! I was now posting politics dunks for my non-politics crowd, vacation pictures for people who didn't know who I am.
To me that felt like a turning point where all parts of my self were exposed to a (public!!) audience, and the inability to block off sections for appropriate crowds died. To me, that change (which has since spread to tons of non-twitter places) was the big turning point moreso than the profile-ification of the internet. Anyways, awesome comment!
I hope there are!!!
"A way outback take house..."
slow clap.jpg
"...the nightmare process of all things becoming familiar and contemptible."
I have the exact opposite fear of aging. My stepmother's mother is in her mid-90s; everyone she ever knew in her youth is gone. The world she grew up in is gone. Everything familiar is gone. Even her children and grandchildren continue to change and expand and take on more activity and technology than she can wrap her understanding around. The one place I know she feels "at home" is Turner Classic Movies, and she needs help figuring out how to get there. I'd bet even PB&J doesn't taste right anymore.
Completely true! In the last decades of his life, my father loved TCM, although in fairness he and I were both always somewhat backwards-looking. It feels like old age / end stage life really does involve a lot of “returning”: to weakness, to incontinence, to anxiety, to the search for the familiar over the longing for the novel, etc.
Incredible to think we’re all going to go through it, all of us. I think I’m as unprepared as you can be.
This is an interesting idea. I feel like I agree with your psychiatrist but it's never that simple, is it? I feel like I have a very healthy relationship with myself, I'm kind and supportive, not too harsh, but always with high standards. I prefer to toughen up instead of feeling sorry for myself. If I look at the mirror I might be like "Haha that's a bit fucked up but we'll get there."
But then that might not translate to my partner when I treat her like I treat myself because she might have different needs or a different framework of mind (e.g. she had a bad day and wants me to say "Oh, I'm sorry, poor thing," instead of "Life is suffering, get over it," or a less exaggerated version of that.)
So even if you're being kind to them you might come across as an asshole because they need other types of "kind."
On another level I do feel like I judge strangers way more than familiar people, I might think horrible things about them because I don't know their story, I don't care for them, I don't know the reasons for why they're doing that terribly stupid thing, and so on.
But what the hell do I know about anything, right? We live in a twilight world, peace out.
Incredible last sentence! I have the same thing with strangers; it’s definitely a bit more mixed / complex than I made it seem in the post / than my shrink’s theory implies (as I suspect she herself would admit).
Banger
Reminds me of this Russian word. They say it all in one word! “умиротворение” - “мир” “творить” (umirotvorenie). To create the peace in his own soul (mind) and thus create peace around himself.
Holy god, that’s so good!!!
Thank you for writing this.
Yes but: you should be posting!!! I am a subscriber and I want more of this; I too deserve the feeling of “yes, that!” and once a week Zoom meetings are a good start but: POAST!