Cringeworthy Blogging

Oliver Dubois-Cherrier, ‘Shame and/or Twinge of Conscience’

Sometimes, writing on an online public forum feels like putting on a performance without knowing who’s actually watching. Anonymity means that anyone and everyone is a viewer, and there’s no way to know who’s reading the things I post here.

So when I read some of my posts, I can’t help but cringe a little. Why? Well, my personal style of blogging is, well, personal. This is strange for a blog that wants to engage with others. As a reader, you just have to trust that I hide a lot of credible or academic research behind my posts.

So, for example, the article Understanding Meaninglessness is greatly inspired by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of bad faith. Similarly, the warm and fuzzy Theories in Motion piece is based on anthropology’s perennial interest in the tension between theory and ethnography.

But when you read these, you may well think that all you’re reading is someone’s personal rant or, worse, gossip. You may well think that you’re reading nothing but some guy’s word puke.

Of course, I’m open, but never too open: I’m open about personal problems, but I obviously guard the finer details of these problems. So, for example, Understanding Meaninglessness is inspired by the crises encountered in a ‘personal project of friendship’, and Theories in Motion wants to ‘see through veneers of guilt and hurt’. But in both cases, you won’t (ever) know the specific stakeholders or details behind either of these personal ‘problems’.

Still, even admitting that I have  personal problems feels like being a bit too open (as if no one else has personal problems). This is definitely because social media wants us to pretend that our lives are perfect, when in reality they aren’t. In any case, what makes me cringe is that my posts can reveal too much to an unknown audience.

I’m going to call this mushy, personal form of blogging the Cringeworthy School. Every blogger is guilty of it to an extent. Even the most drab and impersonal article, by virtue of being  written by a person, contains something of that person’s personality. Bloggers always face a choice: write about something personal or write about something pertinent. Sometimes the two extremes coincide, as with gender issues, but a good rule of thumb is that they mostly don’t, so that you have to prioritise.

Why have I chosen personal over pertinent? Well, there’s a few reasons, some good and some bad. Firstly, I’m just lazy, plain and simple- to be pertinent, you actually have to research, cite sources, quote others, make an article more holistic. Secondly, I’m recovering from a long bout of writer’s block, and it’s much easier to write in this lazy-friendly personal style.

But there’s at least one good reason that’s deeper than simple laziness: the possibility that even the most personal note can contain deep insights about the entire world. The thing with writing detailed, ‘pertinent’ pieces is that they sacrifice relatability for ‘hard facts’, or evidence. But they still conceal the same mix of personal opinions, biases and subjectivity under this concrete surface. By writing ‘cringey’ and ‘personal’ articles, I’m giving the opposite a chance: articles that can be mushy or all-revealing, but conceal a lot of hard facts and evidence under their soft surface.

 

To simplify all of this: I’m choosing accessibility over sophistication.

 

And the way to become accessible is, in this case, by being personal – or, specifically, particular. I feel this resonates with how the anthropologist Nicholas Long ends his monograph about Indonesia’s Riau Islands, Being Malay in Indonesia:

“[…] it is only through a concrete engagement with the complexities of human lives that we can develop a more nuanced understanding of the thought processes, experiences and agency that animate the Riau Islands [..]” (Long 2013: 251)

Night Food Market at Tanjung Pinang, capital of Riau Islands Province

It is only by directly speaking to the particularity that colours our daily lives that we can guess what the big picture really looks like. This is not only a big reason why I blog in the personal tone, but also why I’m such a big fan of social anthropology.

 

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So, if you’re reading this blog and cringe at what you see, consider the possibility that this the cringey-ness is really a vehicle to guide you towards something that’s bigger and more complex, in a way that’s more accessible than the tedious and, frankly, boring alternative.

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Image Credits: 

Oliver DuBois-Cherrier: http://saimg-a.akamaihd.net/saatchi/92733/art/1556736/776015-7.jpg

Tanjung Pinang Night Food Market: https://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/31264992.jpg

The Dream, Dissected

The idea (or should I say ideal?) of the dream surrounds us. There’s the American Dream, exemplified in films such as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. A friend who loves their well-paying job, owns their own home, travels a lot and has hobbies, is living the dream. Winning the lottery, or a reality show such as Britain’s Got Talent, is often a dream come true. Parents, teachers and overpaid gurus all tell us to follow your dreams, whatever that means.

A few months ago, my professor and I were discussing creativity in a neoliberal world. Does neoliberalism (that is, an economic system based on rationality, self-interest and self-control) encourage as well as constrain creativity? This sort of tension was something I’d never thought of. Soon after, I began wondering if our world does the same to dreaming.

Iron Men and Iron Mortals

Consider Richard Branson, Tony Stark or John Nash. They are all ambassadors of a system of entrepreneurs, workers, corporations, regulations, teams, goals, ideas, strategies, decisions, planning and so on. They’re all dreamers- Branson, the intrepid explorer who’s explored every business from record labels to space travel; Stark, the CEO who saves the world with brilliance, boldness and badassery; Nash, the troubled genius and subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, whose 26-page PhD thesis created an entire new field of economics – game theory.

These figures embody a set of values that teases out what it means to follow dreams, whether they are American, British or Marvellian. Such values include positivity, eccentricity, creativity, intensity, rebellion, freedom and so on. It is then very striking that in our daily lives, we are asked – compelled, even – to adopt a set of values in direct opposition to the above: pragmatism, realism, diligence, balance, compromise, compliance and so on. Why this tension? This is a conundrum that is quite unashamedly one of the most important and urgent questions there is.

A Disclaimer

Before we set out answering it, though, let’s be clear about my stance on the whole issue, so that my bias doesn’t cloud my writing. And if it does, at least I’m being upfront about it. Here are my working assumptions:

1. Neoliberalism is not only an economic system but also an ontological system (that is, a system of being) based on the tenets of neoclassical economics (rational choice, self-control, self-interest etc.) and Judaeo-Christian ideology;
2. Creativity nourishes and leads to forms of governance, policy, work, social relations, and meaningful living;
3. Dreaming is a processual activity that is both conscious and unconscious, and that fosters creativity;
4. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (a cliche, I know)

So I’ve given my disclaimer. Let’s get to understanding the issue- how is it that some of us seem to have a license to dream and some of us don’t?

Skills Are The New Memes

I’m not the only who thinks memes are kind of a big thing, am I? It hit me, strangely enough, when I saw this Comedy Central ad about some TV show that apparently used many “dank memes”. When mainstream TV in the US adopts a word originally used to describe potent marijuana, that word has arrived. It is, officially a big thing. It has, so to speak, danked up. It has, I might add, slam dunked. I’ll stop now.

But when words are danked in this way, they almost always lose their original meaning. When hippies use ‘dank’, they mean something quite specific. When meme pages like Amphetameme or Papa Fazool’s Memearria use ‘dank’, they mean something slightly different. When Comedy Central uses ‘dank’, it loses its original meaning almost entirely, becoming some sort of shell-word that no one really understands. When something gets danked up, it almost immediately gets danked down.

This ‘phenomenon’ – if it even deserves to be called that – has some degree of universality, in my opinion. Which is to say, it can be seen in areas far more different (and far more relevant) than online memes, however existential, robust or fresh they may be. I’m talking about something all of us – students, CEOs, Comedy Central staff – will certainly go through at one point or another. I’m talking about jobs: applying for them, getting them and recruiting for them. And I’m talking about how the word ‘skills’ has turned into something apparently found only in professional spaces.

Let’s begin with some whinging. Last year, I was looking for part-time work to support my studies. About 40 rejections later, I got an interview at a place claiming to be a ‘FinTech startup’, ‘innovative’, and having done away with ‘stuffy offices’. The picture painted was of an informal workplace, one I hoped would be relatively social. After interviewing, I did get the job. The rejections were worth it, I thought to myself.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the office for the first time: a stuffy room in a strangely dark office space, with no one showing much excitement, innovation or dankness (save for my interviewer, who wore shorts during my interview). The owner would pop down every other day or so. I bumped into him many times – the nearby café, the loo, the passage – and was ignored, almost as if he didn’t know I worked for him (I sat two chairs from him in the office). A colleague later told me that he didn’t really speak with the staff. I recently left the job, and it’s reflecting on this experience that got me wondering about the dissonance between words and the reality they’re supposed to represent. This job was described as contributing to an innovative team. It was a lot of things – some meaningful, to be fair – except that.

Something similar happened when a friend started working in a social work charity, helping recruit graduates. I remember her telling me how we need more male and more BME social workers and how her team planned on recruiting from these groups. One way was to represent their graduate programme as a leadership development programme, one that would help  you ‘kick-start’ a career, ‘inspire’, ‘lead’, ‘persuade’ and so on. Now, a job in social work is all about that, but surely such ideals sit around more central themes such as kindness, care, patience, empathy and so on? Isn’t becoming a social worker to become a leader quite like becoming an investor because there’s a chance you’ll beat the market? Yes, the big profits would be a neat bonus, but you won’t find your day job meaningful unless you actually enjoy investing: understanding businesses, seeing your money make a tangible difference, the magic of compounding, allocating capital, and so on.

I know you’ll almost definitely think of all this as naïve idealism, but if you asked Warren Buffet why he still makes billion-dollar investments at 86 and ask a moderately successful City portfolio manager why they invest, Buffett would likely talk about the joys of capitalism, while the manager would likely say something about transferable skills. What’s true for investing is true for social work; if you’re not in it to actually affect people’s lives or see them smile, I’m not sure how meaningful you’ll find it. Worse, you might be in for a bit of a shock.

But let’s be less anecdotal- let’s consider the job listings you usually see on the LSE’s careers portal, LSE CareerHub. As of March 1, there’s 1263 listings on CareerHub. Searching for ‘exciting’ returns 208 opportunities, so about a sixth of all entries. What are these jobs like? There’s an exciting opportunity to join a fast-paced liability management team; another exciting opportunity to join a firm’s credit research team; the exciting chance to do taxes for Britain’s wealthiest. “Dynamic” returns 151 results, where we have: the tax job that makes another appearance, being dynamic as well as exciting (who would’ve known?); a marketing internship in Paris looking for dynamic individuals; best of all, we have Yahoo! (yes, Yahoo!) looking for dynamic professionals. Moving on, “leadership” gives 144 results, full of leadership development programmes, one of which promises to ‘accelerate your development as an inspirational and supportive leader’, which quickly loses charm when you realise the job’s for a prison warden (yes, I know that this job requires a massive level of commitment, especially your ability to lead but I’ll return to this in a moment).

You catch my drift: reflecting upon simple ‘research’ anyone can do, and simple experiences everyone goes through, leads me to believe that there’s a very specific discourse around the process of applying for a job as well as actually working in it. It’s a discourse that thrives upon the usage of terminologies that might have been meaningful or relevant in certain contexts, but certainly aren’t so in all professional contexts or jobs.

Think again of memes: they’re simple pictures that transmit ideas, thoughts and cultural symbols through imitation, that is, mimesis. You discover a picture of an above-average looking guy in a marathon and put a caption on it, and suddenly everyone wants to join the fun. A TV show airs footage of a drug-addicted dad crying before his son, and suddenly everyone wants to autotuned him. Do you remember when everyone was talking about Good Guy Greg and le rage faces? (Pepperidge Farm remembers)

But something else is going on here: memes, or the origins of memes, tend to be moments that are almost poignant, moments that capture (or try to capture) emotions or feelings at some base or essential level. Ridiculously Photogenic Guy – the marathon runner – might well have ‘gone viral’ because people aspire to look good, be with good people or have heard stories of their fit friends enjoying the perks of, well, being fit. The crying father captures the intense emotions that surround addiction, kinship, withdrawal, sadness and so on. Good Guy Greg becomes a way of hoping that one day, even we’ll meet some good guy on the tube who’ll go out of his way to get us a seat.

This is also true, I like to think, for skills – well, at least the discursive qualifiers that surround the skills that our world extols or aspires to. The meanings (and feelings) we are expected to attribute to such skills as leadership, innovation, creativity, fun and so on, often originate from unique contexts across time and space.

Silicon Valley and Wall Street are the most explicit examples of such contexts, what I like to call ‘origin cultures’. My contention is that jargon such as ‘innovative’, ‘fun’ or ‘creative’ has largely emerged due to the outburst the Valley’s waves of innovation since the 1970s. Similarly, words such as ‘leadership’, ‘driven’, ‘ambitious’ find origins in the trading offices of Wall Street, or the ad agencies of Madison Avenue.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak building computers was exciting. Larry Page patenting PageRank was innovative. And the contexts these people drew inspiration from – the notorious Burning Man festival, trips to India, acid trips – were fun. J.P.Morgan was a leader who once rescued the US economy by locking up the country’s most powerful men in a room until they came up with a way to solve the Panic of 1907. However misplaced you think their ambition might be, ambitious traders from places like Goldman Sachs have been behind almost every American financial shakeup, from the first wave of leveraged buyouts in the 70s to the creation of markets to trade asset-backed mortgages (we all know where that led).

So when we speak of skills, we’ve already set ourselves to an ideal type that cannot be accomplished. There’s a certain authenticity that only shines upon professional excitement, fun, ambition, leadership, drive and so on, when you see them at work in their original contexts. This is not to say that the fun we have at work is invalidated. It’s just that no app developer will get away with calling their app ‘beautiful’ the way Steve Jobs sold millions of iPods by calling them ‘beautiful’. Similarly, no one will ever master advertising by simply imitating Google’s business strategy, just as you can’t simply pick up American optimism, put it in a European trading floor, and expect the same result.

In a bid to achieve the results that a few noteworthy cases did, mimicking the values they stood for, the language they use and the methods they stand by, is a method we quite like to rely on.

Understanding Meaninglessness

I’m going to jump head-on into a question that’s been bugging me for a while. Recently, I set out on a simple but important personal project of friendship, which I wrote about in another article. By doing so, I’ve made a great many leaps and bounds in my understanding of the world. Or, to be more precise, I’ve found a way to finally organise my understanding of the world in a way that makes sense and doesn’t negatively affect those around me. So far, so good.

But I also made another kind of leap, a more troubling one: by starting this project, I took the leap of faith that I knew where I was going with it. This raised many questions: was my starting point of choice (to improve my friendships) completely arbitrary? Did it make sense to jump on a project of friendship without my friends even knowing about it? How credible is this project and who’s to say it isn’t stupid or, worse, delusional?

At the heart of all these questions is the same fear, the fear that my project is essentially meaningless or, at the very least, arbitrary. There’s a relief in this sort of fear, to be sure. In a world of memes, the idea of meaningless has almost become something worth aspiring to. But in feeling this fear, I’ve realised that if the idea of meaningless feels like a sort of escape, then you’re doing it wrong. It should unsettle you, it should freak you out. If you laugh at it or avoid seriously discussing it, that’s a good thing, because you’re tacitly recognising the true magnitude of what meaninglessness entails.

So, in this inaugural long-form article, I’m going to approach the prospect of life being meaningless through the prospect of my project being meaningless. Just a quick word of warning before I begin- this article’s going to be quite abstract, a style that I don’t particularly enjoy anymore. But as much as I like giving examples, I feel that examples would only make this piece less relatable. I’d rather have an abstract piece that the reader can relate to themselves, and I’d rather not obstruct that process by lining this article with examples or ‘case studies’. Hopefully, it makes sense without them.

So much for the long intro. Let’s get right into it, and hopefully I still have your attention by the end. But first, I think we’ve just enough time to enjoy a quick painting.

All actions are measurable…or are they?

Throughout this article, I’m going to assume that our actions can be grouped together and categorized into different ‘projects’. So, everything we do falls under a ‘project’ of some sort: professional (e.g. working at an audit firm), academic (e.g. revising for an exam) etc. It follows that we’re all involved in one or more of such projects, whether by choice or force. In most of them, we are embedded in a bigger picture governed by some external entity like a university or a company, which translates our actions into a measure of value: grades, money etc.

Hence, with exams, your university gives you grades that (hopefully) reflect your performance. This is what you brag about in your CV, not the hours you spent revising. If you’re in an auditing graduate scheme, you’ll have regular performance reviews, and this is what ultimately gets you promoted. Of course, a good final measure of value, a ‘grade’, is completely dependent on your own actions, but it’s precisely this end ‘grade’ that made your actions worthwhile!

More importantly, this ‘grade’ also decides which actions are relevant to a project and which aren’t- an exam doesn’t test your ability to down a pint in 10 seconds, for example.

We’re all part of at least one such system- the modern economy. At least in theory, your earnings reflect the value of your actions, just as there are clear lines as to what counts as work and what doesn’t.

But all this measuring, grading and validating vanishes when the project in question is a personal one. The problem, in a nutshell, is that with personal projects, there’s no examiner to give grades, no manager to give an appraisal, no final currency to measure success or failure with.

Personal Projects

What exactly do I mean by a personal project, and why is it different from a regular project? Well, a personal project is something that’s close to your heart in a way that most projects aren’t. A personal project directly engages with some aspect of yourself. Note the emphasis on ‘directly’; this is what disqualifies routine projects from being personal projects. Yes, a great exam does highlight your amazing skills at, say, the history of vampires, but it doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person. It only does this indirectly, through the skillset it’s designed to test.

Of course, this is not to say that all personal projects are mushy, touchy-feely, or Zen-like. A personal project can very much coincide with a ‘regular’ one. And when this happens, the outcome is often the Nina Simones, Nikola Teslas, Sachin Tendulkars, Rosalind Franklins and Warren Buffetts of our world. This is why we’re told to be ‘passionate’ about our work, or to always be ‘motivated’ or ‘driven’ in what we do (for the record, I think that this sort of motivational-speak is basically stupid and misses the point completely). It might be why, as David Mitchell outlines so well in the video below, we see so many advertising billboards that leave us wondering whether it’s really possible to be passionate about tax optimisation, customer-focused services, or sofas:

I hope you caught a breather with that video. So, when I say personal projects, I refer to projects that, at least on paper, relate directly to yourself. They’re projects about engaging with ourselves. Many things, most of them seemingly mundane, can be called ‘personal projects’: saying a prayer before sleeping, starting a diet, going on a long holiday, coming up with a set of morals to stick to, and so on. Very often, they underlie all of our other projects – work, study, family, friends – and, very often, we feel uncomfortable talking about them.

And this discomfort is exactly the issue at hand. We don’t usually confront such projects head on, at least not in front of a great many people, and for good reason: they betray a certain vulnerability that’s not really anyone’s business. And this vulnerability comes from the lack of a standard by which to measure our actions.

So, apart from directly relating to the self, something else makes personal projects unique: unlike other projects, there’s no official external body to validate them for us, or to give our actions a unique personal meaning on our behalf. Put simply: with personal projects, by definition, no one’s going to do our job for us.

This is precisely what makes personal projects seem meaningless. It’s precisely why, for example, there’s people who jump into an Eat, Pray, Love-style soul-searching holiday, only to find themselves wondering what the point of it all was, as they swat mosquitoes & count their savings while getting sunburned on some Thai beach.

When we embark on a personal project, we make two leaps of faith: firstly, that it’s taking us somewhere that matters, and secondly, that it’s taking us anywhere at all.

 

Let the Crises Begin

But here’s something that’s even more worrying: all other projects, be it corporate audits, academic exams, or even personal budgeting, collapse onto some personal project. Though these projects don’t directly relate to yourself, the skills or actions they relate to are, ultimately your own. And these skillsets or actions do relate to yourself. Ultimately, then, even non-personal projects are reducible to a personal project, albeit indirectly.

Surely you’ve been there. It’s the classic crisis that goes by many names: mid-life, quarter-life, existential, and so on. Almost all such crises come out of something that’s more ‘real’ and less ‘abstract’, often some kind of watershed event: getting (or losing) a job, becoming a parent, retiring, achieving something, and so on.

This is a really important point: it’s not just with personal projects that we make a leap of faith; we do the exact same with non-personal projects. It’s just that, when it comes to non-personal projects, this leap gets projected onto some outside entity. We shift the need for credibility from ourselves to something or someone else: money, employers, family, and so on. And when, through some encounter or incident, this credibility is questioned or, worse, shattered, we’re often faced with the same question of how meaningful our jobs, degrees or whatever else, really are.

The spectre of ‘meaninglessness’ looms over all human action alike.

We’ve now established one thing: that all ‘projects’, personal or otherwise, directly or indirectly lead to fundamental questions and worries about who we are. And in doing so, all projects directly or indirectly lead to an existential question of what the point of it all really is. So at least in this sense, the division between ‘personal’ and ‘regular’ projects is unnecessary. From this point on, then, I’m going to drop this division and simply talk about ‘projects’.

Let’s take this back to where I started. In my case, I suddenly find myself wondering if my personal project is similarly unfounded. Without getting into too much detail, the point of my project is to understand myself, and myself in relation to those who matter to me. The aim is to avoid instances where my problems strain my relationships with others. After all, it’s often those closest to us who suffer the most from our demons.

But what if the people concerned don’t care, or are oblivious to my actions? What if those I share this project with secretly shake their heads at my stupidity or naivety? Well, objectively speaking, these are the fears of a project not going in the intended direction. But what if I am successful in this project? What if my achievements obscure the reasons I embarked on it and take me in another direction? This is the fear that, from the start, my project was essentially arbitrary, doomed to be replaced eventually by another project that’s suddenly more relevant.

However good or bad my project is going – it’s had its ups and downs – it runs aground if I start questioning why I embarked on it in the first place. This is not a pessimistic observation, it’s simply a fact of life.

Finding a Way Out

So, the problem is whether I can be the best judge of my own actions. A surprisingly simple point, but that’s exactly why it’s so easy to miss.

As it turns out, I think there’s at least two levels on which you can approach this problem: a functional level and an existential level. Most of the time, it’s enough to approach the problem at a functional level. Only if you’re sure that the problem can’t be solved at this level does it makes sense to approach it fundamentally. Needless to say, this is no small task, and will likely affect you a lot, which is why you should not only be sure in approaching it, but also be confident and self-assured that you’ll come out through the other end.

As a side note, this is probably why people get annoyed with pop ‘existentialism’ or ‘nihilism’, or why thinking about existential problems may come across as – and often is – overthinking. You don’t preach philosophy or spirituality to someone who wants to fix her car. I’ve made the mistake many times of confusing existential problems with functional problems, much to the annoyance of those around me.

I think it’s very rare to end up in a crisis proper when it comes to most projects. This is because you have a ready-made inventory of things to measure your actions; so if you’re dieting or saving up, you’ve got weighing scales and budgeting apps to help set targets. This is helpful enough to address most problems at the functional level. It’s when you’ve tried this and still find yourself asking questions about why you want to lose weight at all, or whether you really need to spend less, that you’re venturing into the more fundamental nature of your project. You’re questioning your moral compass.

And this is when the functional level becomes obsolete, and you’re faced with a choice: jump in and tackle the problem at an existential level, or to wish it away and pretend it never happened. The outcome? A sort of fox-and-the-grapes situation, where you either get the grapes or complain that they’re sour: you either meet your fitness goals or tell others why you’re too busy to exercise; you either build sound savings or find yourself telling friends you’re really a ‘free spirit’ at heart.

It’s important to bear in mind that neither of these choices are inherently bad choices! Even the most mundane personal project operates on an existential level, but it’s just not worth mulling over this fact. Sometimes – no, most of the times – it’s okay, even good, to say you’re a free spirit, or find yourself ‘too busy to exercise’. Otherwise, we’d all be stuck in perpetual panic or depression, falling deeper from crisis to crisis.

I’m not going to dwell much on the functional level, because I think most of us are quite good at being functional. In fact, I’m sure most of you are much better at being functional than I am, whether this is navigating bureaucracy, time-management, work-life balance, personal-professional divisions, being good friends, and so on. So I’d rather dwell on the other level, the fundamental level. Hopefully, this article so far has convinced you that I have some idea what I’m talking about.