Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
– Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
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If you have a truly revolutionary idea you’d want to be careful to state it in an oblique way so that it doesn’t get flooded or crushed before its time has come.
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Re: sex education: I would be kind of oblique about it. Have access to resources for people who need it, without making a huge deal about it.
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Be careful with fault lines
When you make it a practice to talk openly as much as possible about almost everything you think, see, come across, etc eventually you will stumble upon certain “fault lines” or “hotspots”. It’s sort of like taboos but not exactly. Sore points, maybe. Things that, when you point at them, talk about them (with the same casual curiosity that you use to talk about everything else!) you invite and incite disproportionate responses. It’s understandable why this is (and also annoying).
I define a nerd as someone who allows their curiosity to direct their behavior. Generally speaking, society will pay lip service to curiosity. Curiosity is good! Read! Learn! Ask questions! …no not like that.
But ok, you don’t want to be disrespectful, and there’s a lot of other things you’re curious about anyway, so you investigate other things. Also you investigate the meta-problem here: Why do these sore points exist? How do they work? And you learn the backstory, boy is it ugly.
My frustrating tentative conclusion is one that doesn’t surprise me, and yet it frustrates me anyway – there are some things that just don’t play well in public, because the public commons is not ready for it, because we do not yet have a high-trust public commons. I’ve circled around this a few times, bumped into it in multiple contexts the core of my frustration is: there are some kids who *only* have access to the public commons and nothing else, and if the commons is hostile and ugly, they will become that, too.
So this is a constraint that wasn’t so obvious to me (except intellectually) when I had a smaller following and could say whatever I wanted without as much concern about cascading effects. I understand better now why ppl with big followings are often bland. It’s humbling. Humbling how? I guess I used to think in some vague, hopeful way that, if I grow my following, I can choose to behave differently. And I’d like to think that I do still make a conscientious effort, I try my best. But there’s also a “physics” to it that I can’t defy.
I am determined to find ways to subvert these limitations though, and I think there are creative solutions available if you’re determined. The trick I think is to use intermediaries, use replies, to be subtle and artful, to reframe the problem(s).
Here’s a thing I don’t think anybody specifically told me: when you’re on a growth journey, there are things that you can do at each stage of that journey, that you can’t do at any other stage. Rather than be wishful for the next stage, enjoy what you can only do now.
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Been in a nostalgic, reflecting-on-my-youth mood all day today. Another thought is: a lot of the problems that I agonized about solving, turned out to be solved in a rather oblique way than what I expected. like, I was typically framing it wrong, but there was no obvious way to know that that was what I was doing.
When I was about 20, I was kinda paranoid that I would never be able to get good at calendars and schedules etc, and so I would fail at life. Turns out, at 30, I still suck at calendars and schedules etc – but I just ended up putting all my skill points in other things, and it works out.
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Re: “technology is ruining teenagers” – let’s approach this obliquely. Let’s take cigarettes. The widespread narrative is that cigarettes are, obviously, bad for your health. No sensible person would dispute the core fact. But the question to ask is, what job is the cigarette doing?
There are a bunch of possible answers to that, often overlapping. For the rebellious teen, it’s an act of exercising sovereignty. For those who get addicted, it’s often addressing some other issue(s): anxiety, poor appetite, wonky blood sugar levels…
So my question is: if teenagers are self-harming with technology- and I’m willing to consider that it’s a possibility- why? What are the underlying issues there? My guesses from conversations with dozens of kids: lack of autonomy, sense of control, desire for connection.
And I will acknowledge that yeah maybe regulating kids’ tech use might alleviate the bad symptoms of tech use – although then you have to ask, what are the costs of that regulation? Is the parent going to use coercion to do it? How do you study the costs of *that*?
And my general worry with these things is that a simple-sounding problem with a simple-sounding solution might distract people from looking upstream at the harder & IMO more consequential problems: which is that our world itself is not very teenager-friendly (or people-friendly!)
I’m not saying “smartphones are great, hand them to babies and let them do whatever with no oversight” – of course not! I think the important thing to do as adults is to have honest, open conversations with young people in a way that isn’t dismissive. And also to sympathise with parents I think teens entering an autonomy-seeking phase might not be very interested in having those conversations with them. Which is why it takes a village: older brothers and sisters, uncles and aunties, a good public commons…
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Being even a slightly thoughtful person means you’ll need to cultivate all manner of social skills to deal with the fact that you know the future better than others. Or you’ll have to get rich enough to not care, which is doable, but you may also end up misanthropic or numb in the process and I’m not a fan of either of those options. This is basically the shaman’s path. being even slightly thoughtful makes you a bit of a shaman-wizard relative to the norm. every adult intuitively understands this when dealing with children. when you walk the path you realize we are all children.
The challenge: how do you be an adult who appreciates and enjoys the presence of children, without being condescending about it? without judging them for their childish ways? love them without terrifying them? be honest without being hurtful?
When I say “know the future better than others”, I don’t mean knowing the precise dates of specific events. I mean knowing the inevitability of change, which lots of people are deluded about to varying degrees.
Being a rigorously honest person means you’ll need to develop the social skills to deal with liars and bullshitters. malicious ones, sure, but also innocuous ones. I have a lot of material about this stuff, but I always approach it in a somewhat oblique way, because saying this stuff too explicitly in an overly head-on way invites the worst sort of attention from the most clueless bunglers who think they’re geniuses.
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Just realized I can make an interesting promise about my future YouTube videos: I will talk about painful, difficult, challenging topics, but I will never mention them in the title, so they will only be discussed in the comments by serious people and not drama-seekers.
I believe that this sort of oblique strategy is key to improving tensions at a lot of the flashpoints and fault lines in society. It can’t quite be done directly head on, because that’s too adversarial. it has to be done sort of diagonally, sideways.
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I used to blog about local politics, and I found it frustrating and unproductive. I prefer oblique approaches now.
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I think people are conditioned early on to be oblique about their social needs, because being explicitly socially needy is often seen as tacky – unless you’re doing it with finesse, like an artist or a comedian.
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tbc