Thursday’s post what I want my kids to know struck a nerve with readers for different reasons. A close friend noted that it seemed pretty male-centric. Having grown up with only a brother himself, he probably wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t for raising a daughter now. He wrote me a thoughtful email about it, analogizing between seeing the world as a mountain to climb (male-coded lens) vs a more sea-like horizontal interconnectedness where you are bombarded by both supportive and punishing waves. A line he wrote that resonated:
women are more in-tune or more impacted by the reality there may not be a peak to this mountain. That the mountain itself is just a projection of a higher-dimensional reality and the “peak” is really just a collection of tradeoffs.*
*You can find my immediate response to this further below but it’s secondary to the message front-and-center
I think seeing a “collection of tradeoffs” does several things.
First of all, it immediately flattens the idea of a peak or at least places them as narrow spires on a plateau. You can be the greatest in the world at XYZ, but you haven’t conquered life. Elite performers don’t usually sugar-coat the cost of these conquests. Sometimes the public sees the price they pay when their lives crumble and wonder if it’s because they are stunted in every other domain than the one they dominate. The self-aware ones are effusive in acknowledging the support of their families in enabling what is ultimately a pursuit of glory and even posterity.
Secondly, seeing a “collection of tradeoffs” loosens the creativity muscles. If you view life as a race to some mountaintop, you will restrict the routes your life can take. That artificially narrowed menu will be written by your immediate surroundings, which is already a skinny slice of human experience.
I want to pause on that for a moment. The narrowness of the menu we choose flows from the most tyrannical source: random path dependence. Where you were born, in what time, and to whom? It’s probably adaptive to ignore that perspective and trudge forward, but I admit it’s a thought that intrudes just enough to bug me.
I was watching videos of people covering songs I like on YouTube the other night. I will often wander to the long tail of videos that have very low view counts. It feels like you are watching something vulnerable and isn’t really intended for your eyes except for that they posted it publicly. I watch and I wonder. Who is this person? What’s their life like? I’m getting an energy from their performance but they have no idea who I am, where I am, and that I’m watching this a decade after they posted it.
I’m several of the 34 views of this vid:
It’s not a nice voice. The man looks unwell. But it’s extremely expressive. The way he performs it. The instrumentation he chose. The fact that he looks enigmatically young and old at the same time.
Futurism and space travel represent adventure and vastness. Sheer wonder reminds us how small we are. But I see vastness in a simple video like this. This individual is made of the same stuff I am, but we are aliens to each other. Maybe or maybe not. But that’s the point. The mystery creates a sense of vastness. It is the wonder, that right here on Earth, the lyrics of the song hold:
See the animal in his cage that you built
Are you sure what side you’re on?
Better not look him too closely in the eye
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
What if everything around you
Isn’t quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you want it to be?
What if you could look right
Through the cracks?
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afraid to see?
Shortly after that vid, the YT algo served me Trent Reznor’s speech when he inducted The Cure into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He eloquently transmits the idea that their music and way of being spoke to so many people who didn’t feel like they belonged. People who likely saw something besides life as a “mountain”. When Trent first heard The Cure he thought they were making music directed at him.
Trent is gesturing at the thing every great artist or artisan understands. The skeleton key is to connect with others authentically. To give people something they deeply want because you understand the yearning yourself. Artists express and artisans solve. One has fans, the other has clients. Sometimes the artisan is so good the clients are fans. In both cases, the relationship is deeply empathetic. I call it a skeleton key because that thing is different for everyone but it unlocks the same door.
The door to thriving.
*As promised, this was my reply back to my friend:
I see what you mean and yes I agree its gendered. I think underneath it all, my sense of how the world operates is probably from a biological place — women are default valuable (their overt subjugation in much of the world is a demented response to this…like a male attempt to take back power that biology confers) whereas a man is entire worth depends on what he can provide. Modernity changes the calculus to a meaningful extent (in doing so trades off against novel considerations) but I don’t think it has created a new calculus. At the end of the day, there is a competition and as with any competition, there are niches that will provide a better harbor for some individuals to strive within based on their unique traits and views.
Insofar as my writing is narrow, it is written from the perspective of being subsumed by one of these niches. I’m swimming in the “water” in the David Foster Wallace sense of the word. But of course, the audience is self-selected and therefore assumed to be in the same water.
The beauty of travel is to be able to look back home and see the water for what it is. Something that has a particular pH balance that nourishes parts of our souls and sickens other parts.