As I start writing this post, I am not sure how much chance there is that I will publish it. I finished one a few days ago, and then decided to not release it into the world.
It is as if I am circling round a certain topic, or topics, where I run the risk of writing something from a point of oversensitivity and then it’s a bit whiny, and later I wonder, what was the point.
And yet, I do want to write about certain things, just maybe coming from a different angle. Something wants to wriggle its way out. Can it be of any significance to anybody else but me? Maybe I should not worry about that for the moment.
Why I am writing here:
To document (these crazy times)
To think
To practice!
If I can connect with others, if they get something out of what I write, that’s great, but it would not work if that was my primary aim.
And this is somehow part of the problem: Thinking one has to justify oneself for being there. Everybody can stop reading after the first few paragraphs. And if they do, I won’t even notice it. This is a place where I can write something and be okay with not getting a response!
A recurring question: How much is the pain of the world connected to my own pain? Or anybody else’s pain. Are they reflecting each other? Or do we run the risk of projecting our own pain onto the world?
This has come up partly, because I felt some emotional pain last week, and that seemed to be a really exaggerated reaction to something. As I said, some kind of oversensitivity. But what if this only appears as oversensitivity, because most people have managed to numb themselves so much that they don’t see what is hurtful as such anymore.
And even if you take into account that how people behave is mostly nothing personal, it’s just because they are overwhelmed themselves — if the end result is something that looks like disrespect and indifference, it might just be perceived that way, however much you rationalise it.
And I believe, if we found ways to encourage people, make it easier for them, to be attentive, it would serve the not-so-sensitive people as well. Good communication is better for everyone, and might just make everyone feel better.
It is a bit like a supermarket once realised that everybody, including people without disabilities, liked the accessible version of a website (that is, clearer contrast, bigger fontsize etc.) better than the normal one.
Today, I was reminded of something Erich Fromm said, by reading it on the substack of a young German author, Lilly Gebert.
The most normal are the sickest and the sickest are the healthiest... The person who is sick shows that certain human things have not yet been suppressed to such an extent that they come into conflict with the patterns of culture and that they produce symptoms as a result of this friction. The symptom, like pain, is just an indication that something is wrong. The person who has a symptom is fortunate, just as the person who has pain when something is amiss is fortunate.
And yet, people differ a lot — I am often astounded, how much — and I would hesitate to call every ‘normal’ person sick. Also, we can’t consider every little personal sensitivity somebody might have. This is actually something a lot of collective effort has gone into over the past years, and it is exhausting. (I remember tech companies being scolded for having table-tennis, and employees drinking beer, because apparently women tended to enjoy these things less.)
So, I wonder, how much, and what aspects, of my coming up against the world as it is, comes from my own nature, and my past experiences, or even trans-generational trauma? In my case, there was a lot of difficulties with being social (as a child I think I was “on the spectrum”, and to a much lesser degree, I might still be today). Also, I was depressed quite a lot and had two major depressive episodes in my twenties. There were echos of those in the decades after. Probably as a result of that, I easily feel insecure and lack confidence, among other things.
But I have been mostly quite happy as well! I am grateful for so many things in my life. It’s just that I often seem to be in my own way.
I am looking for a different perspective. I don’t want to shut myself off emotionally of course. What I would like to do, is, when I have strong unpleasant emotions: Feel them, interrogate them, see whether they point to something that I can and should address, then let them go.
But also, I think there has been this feeling of… failure? I am interested in certain things, and when I want to contribute, to work on something, everybody seems so much further ahead… And would it not be okay to maybe grieve that a bit, and then just… get on with it? Start from a modest position.
How many people in this world feel like they are a round peg in a square hole1 ? I’d really like to know. And is that necessarily uncomfortable? If the sides of the square are about the same as the diameter of the peg, they can fit into the hole. They might just think, “hey, I am special, I don’t look like the other ones”, or they think, “I am different, I don’t feel right here.”
So, there’s the being different, and the not fitting in. And then both of those things could be judged positively or negatively. Or ideally, neutrally?
The not fitting in though, is mostly uncomfortable. People cut pieces of themselves off to fit in, or they keep wandering around to find places with bigger holes.
And if this regards work, and you really need the money, to provide for your family, to pay a mortgage, you are under pressure to find a hole.
What if you’ve been told you are special in some respect, but then you realise you find it difficult to fit in?
There’s a blog post from 2014 called Everyone is brokenhearted that I kept coming back to over the last 10 years, because to me it so fittingly described the sentiment of those times and beyond. 2014, that was before Brexit, Trump and Covid, but there was already a lot of violence. The ‘war on terror’ and Isis.
The other day, I checked what the author, Joshua Ellis, might be doing these days, and realised he is in London now. And he has a substack, but not posted for a while, he seems not to be in good health. The last post, from April 2023, is called Gifted.
He describes, how he could read from age two and was a super talented kid. And how in some respects, that giftedness was a curse. The whole article is heartbreaking.
I want to acknowledge that the terms ‘gifted’ and ‘highly gifted’ are used in a quite narrow sense in the context of school, mainly literacy and numeracy, whereas every child is born with brilliant talents. But those academic skills seem to be the ones that make children stick out most.
I am not nearly as gifted as Josh Ellis in that sense, but I feel some things in my life are a faint echo of his. (I am not American, not a man, and have a different background and interests, that has a further influence on particular outcomes). I would say I peaked at 11 or so. I just never needed to do any work at school, because I got all the important subjects straight away, like maths and Latin, and I just loved English anyway. I never did very much throughout my whole school career, and was fine. One school mate, when we were age 18, said to me “You can do anything”, because apparently I was so clever. But I Did Not Live Up To Expectations.
Towards the end of that essay, there are many passages that strongly resonate with me. Perhaps, these two the most:
Most gifted children, I think, tend to be unhappy. Social media is full of “former gifted kid” memes that we all post, and the tropes are unsettlingly familiar: a complete inability to finish what we start, abandoning hobbies or work as soon as it actually requires us to make an effort, an inability to easily form friendships... and most of all, an inability to Live Up To Our Potential. A lot of us suffer as adults from emotional disorders or attention deficit disorders. Many of us discover we lie somewhere on the autism spectrum; many of us end up as drunks or junkies. God knows I’ve smoked enough cigarettes and drank enough whiskey and done enough drugs of all sorts to kill a horse.
Why, though? Why are we so cursed? I think it’s a combination of two things: expectations and perceptions, both our own and those of the people around us.
Do you remember the first time you realized that a lot of society’s unspoken and unquestioned rules are, in fact, bullshit? That people spend half their time just doing busywork so their bosses will think they’re earning a paycheck, and that most of what most people do with their day is actually pretty unimportant and unnecessary, and that both they and society as a whole would probably be better off if they were doing things that mattered, that they loved and cared about? A lot of us figure this out when we’re in our teens or our twenties, if we ever figure it out at all.
Now imagine you saw all of this and understood it when you were eight years old.
I didn’t figure that out at eight years old. For me it was probably more in my twenties, and even then I’m not sure if I had those conscious thoughts. But I was never keen on ‘having a career’, that’s for sure.
David Graeber published his essay on Bullshit Jobs in 2013, and then it became a book. Regarding work, there’s probably many people now who see it like that — that most of what people do day in day out is quite meaningless.
So, this is a widespread challenge now, not only that of some round pegs. We are all in this mess together. Why are so many of us doing such meaningless stuff? And how can we change it?
Coming back to an earlier point, I would argue that the troubles that ‘child prodigies’ tend to get into, are actually one sign of something being wrong with modernity and the way we live now. They are a symptom. A pathology, as Hillman calls it in the book I wrote about last time. A pathology that points to something.
I will write more about that next time.
This quote was famously used in an Apple advert - there’s an irony in that as a ‘digital creative’ you had to have a Mac, i.e. conform to the fashion, otherwise nobody took you serious