Snapping my fingers to every line here. Besides all the other intelligent stuff to unpack in this piece, I love the sucker punch that politics isn’t some sort of country club that’s members only. It’s available to everyone all the time. People are allowed to dip in and dip out and choose what to throw their energy into and when to save their energy for next time.
This is very interesting. I lived in London in like 2002, I landed with an Italian passport. No problems. That world got shitty. This is the most political thing I have ever read. That’s not a bad thing.
this is such a good way of looking at it & actually avoiding alienating people from participating in a system that very much dictates their daily lives
Knowing the jargons are unnecessary. As long as you know how it affects you, that's good enough. So you have been to Mexico too? You have been to a lot of places. Wow.
Just on holidays. A few times but not travelled long haul for a while. I don't mind taking the plane solo for short trips (5 hours max) but long hauls on your own is not for the faint of heart. 😄 You just feel so inadequate x
I’m so touched—honored, really—that something I wrote was a catalyst for your essay. Thank you for this gracious acknowledgment. It has brightened my week.
I’m a big embarrassed to admit that, while I can readily relate to your ideas and feelings, I’m not familiar with the zeitgeist you refer to in the opening of your essay. I don’t know anything about the YouTube beauty boom, the highlight to the gods, the carved brown, the triangles of concealer and so forth. The first I heard of Bad Bunny was a few months ago, when I learned that he performed in the Super Bowl. (I don’t follow organized sports and did not watch the Super Bowl. But I did listen to a clip of Bad Bunny and could feel the warm connection he made with his presence and his music with the everyday people and neighborhoods of his native Puerto Rico. That moved me.)
In any case, I’m pleased that differences in our life experiences did not get in the way of our reading, understanding, and commenting on Substack.
It sounds fascinating to be French and living in the UK, but coldly sobering to have suffered through Brexit and its consequences. I’m sorry that the ennobling ideal of the European Union, at least as I have understood it, of a transnational community with free movement of people, ideas, and possibilities across traditional borders, has been challenged by a more tribal and reactionary nationalism. And I’m sorry that you were one of the people who had to pay the price.
Circling back to a central idea you developed—the idea of standing up to shame-throwing, jargon-spewing political bullies—in my experience, many of these belittling folks are not really politically engaged at all. It’s as if they see political judgments and attacks as a kind of hobby (as well as a psychological defense mechanism). They often avoid the messy give and take of politics in favor of an insulating and protective self-righteousness. The people I’ve known and admired who seek the common good through civic and political engagement bring a genuine humility to the quest. They are the last persons to judge others for the way they show up politically, whether through the front, back, or side doors.
Three cheers for you as you see and express politics in your distinctive and worthy way.
Glen, the fact that you flagged that the opening references weren't familiar to you, showed up anyway, and found your way in touched me. The makeup world I described in the opening paragraph is incredibly niche. Blink-and-you'll-miss-it specific to a very particular capsule of internet time. Even my closest girlfriends wouldn't clock all of it. That's the beauty of it. We are all trying to understand each other across our different cultural capsules, find a common ground, talk to each other somehow.
Your observation about the psychological defence mechanism has struck a chord with me. I think it goes even deeper than that. When someone has spent years building an identity around a body of knowledge, an admission of not knowing can feel to them like a dismissal of the thing they love. As if my gap is somehow a verdict on their investment. It isn't. My "I don't know much about this" is just honest. It's actually an invitation, if it gets received that way. Sometimes it doesn't but that's ok too. We bounce back... eventually :)
Your insight, consolidated in such a pithy form, “As if my gap is somehow a verdict on their investment,” also struck a chord for me. It reminded me of both some academic literature and my own personal experience—and vulnerabilities.
The academic associations had to do with child development theory and about how many of us, through the imperfect childhoods that we invariably experience, can develop a dependence on the gaze of others (originally the parents) to avoid feeling abandoned. I’m oversimplifying a bit, but it seems to me that the field of knowledge you refer to, in some people, is not merely an acquired competence but a foundational bridge to human connection. When others don’t cross that bridge by showing interest in our field, we can feel a kind of desperation—the desperation that comes from fear of being left all alone in a world that can feel overwhelming or terrifying. I think we all have this fear to some extent, but when people get angry at another’s lack of interest in their field, it may be that this fear is heightened and unknowingly triggers a re-experience of difficult times in childhood. Perhaps anger serves as a protest behavior, a strong, even if counterproductive, effort to get the other person to mirror our interests and in that act show that we are indeed worthy of love and attention.
I’m thinking of studies I read years ago in which researchers observed the behavior of young kids, say, a year old, who seemed quite happy with their newly acquired mobility and ventured away from their parent to discover and play with a new toy. But they periodically returned to the parent for emotional refueling. The parent’s gaze was like an external power source they needed to continue with their independent play.
I think we all go through a version of this, but if kids don’t get enough of this refueling, if parents tend to be distracted, preoccupied, inconsistent, or, very sadly, to get demonstrably pissed off at the child’s needs, then it’s harder for the child to internalize a sense of steady inner worth. I may be reaching here too far into the child psychology weeds, but maybe the people you’ve met that get irritated at others’ lack of interest in their own brand of political involvement are not getting the emotional refueling that they unconsciously longed for—and still long for—as adults.
It’s also true, I think, that sometimes we develop deep knowledge in a field less out of an intrinsic interest or soulful calling than out of a need to excel to gain the attention we craved but didn’t quite get. If this is true, our deep knowledge may be as much something we perform as something we are summoned to. I don’t think this is an all or nothing kind of thing. We all probably want to do well in a domain both because we are wholesomely drawn to it and because we are positively reinforced for getting good at it. But I’m thinking that people who get angry when others are disinvested in their own field may have a particularly brittle self that is held up more by others’ validation for their performance than about their own curiosity, commitment, and aspirations. Maybe it’s shattering for the fragile self when others turn their attention elsewhere.
I don’t want to come across as holier than thou. As a dad and grandad, I’m sure there were many times when I fell down on the job of being a fully present emotional refueling station. And even though I’m 74, I can still touch into times as a child when I so much wanted my parents, who were quite caught up in their own complex worlds, to pay more attention to me and attend my school and athletic activities at a much higher level than they did. Even in retirement, when I began to write personal essays, where I would often speak from my heart, I was at first saddened (though not angry) that some family members and friends, while happy that I was writing, seemed to have little interest in my words. It took me a while to accept that we can be loving and close but still have widely different interests—different enough to mean that people in my circle of care would read my pieces only selectively.
I do try to stay with my sadness, disappointment or fear and not turn these difficult emotions into a reactive anger or a cheap shaming of others. Sometimes, I just feel the need to grieve, even if the grief is for day-to-day losses or disappointments and not the cosmic grief of a loved one dying.
Anyway, your astute observations stirred so many thoughts and evoked so many associations. Thanks for the continuing dialogue.
Glen, I've read this twice and I'm still processing it. The emotional refuelling theory (thank you for introducing it to me!) has won me over completely. I have known since before I was 10 that I would never want to raise a child, partly because I have always understood, even without the language for it, what an enormous responsibility it is to be someone's grounding presence when they are still becoming themselves.
Your framework gives words to something I have long felt instinctively. And as an empath, it is going to help me considerably in future similar scenarios, not to excuse the behaviour, but to understand the potential wound underneath it. Context is not a free pass, however! 😊
Your question about why we deepen our knowledge into things has unsettled me in the best possible way. I hope my reasons are mostly noble. I suspect they are mixed, as most human motivations are. The honest answer is probably: partly curiosity, partly the need to feel less inadequate, still figuring out the rest.
And please, holier than thou is the last thing you are. Quite the opposite. The inner child you describe doesn't strike me as a lack of development. It strikes me as proof that we never fully stop needing to be seen. That doesn't diminish us. It just makes us human.
Finally, the people in our close circles who don't read our writing. I started a beauty blog once because no one around me cared about lipstick. I understand completely. My beauty blogger days are long gone but I feel that this is what Substack is supposed to be, before the performance and the preoccupation with growth got involved. A place to find the people who get it. I'm very glad you found your way here. 🌞
You absolutely rocked this. This is how SO many people feel about politics. From your previous note I wasn't sure if you were a hard 'NO' or if you were interested and just didn't really know the way through to find the information to fill the gaps. This is a gateway piece for a lot of people to dig in where they may have tossed in the towel before! 10/10! ✨ ℳ
Thank you so much. My note was cryptic, I knew my opening paragraph would be too niche too and the fact you stayed long enough to get the gist means a lot. Thank you ♥
Snapping my fingers to every line here. Besides all the other intelligent stuff to unpack in this piece, I love the sucker punch that politics isn’t some sort of country club that’s members only. It’s available to everyone all the time. People are allowed to dip in and dip out and choose what to throw their energy into and when to save their energy for next time.
This is very interesting. I lived in London in like 2002, I landed with an Italian passport. No problems. That world got shitty. This is the most political thing I have ever read. That’s not a bad thing.
this is such a good way of looking at it & actually avoiding alienating people from participating in a system that very much dictates their daily lives
Thank you so much 🫶🏻
Knowing the jargons are unnecessary. As long as you know how it affects you, that's good enough. So you have been to Mexico too? You have been to a lot of places. Wow.
Just on holidays. A few times but not travelled long haul for a while. I don't mind taking the plane solo for short trips (5 hours max) but long hauls on your own is not for the faint of heart. 😄 You just feel so inadequate x
Loved this piece so much! Could not agree more with what you wrote, thanks for writing about this!
Thank you so much, Harryyyy 🥹
Dear Tsunimee,
I’m so touched—honored, really—that something I wrote was a catalyst for your essay. Thank you for this gracious acknowledgment. It has brightened my week.
I’m a big embarrassed to admit that, while I can readily relate to your ideas and feelings, I’m not familiar with the zeitgeist you refer to in the opening of your essay. I don’t know anything about the YouTube beauty boom, the highlight to the gods, the carved brown, the triangles of concealer and so forth. The first I heard of Bad Bunny was a few months ago, when I learned that he performed in the Super Bowl. (I don’t follow organized sports and did not watch the Super Bowl. But I did listen to a clip of Bad Bunny and could feel the warm connection he made with his presence and his music with the everyday people and neighborhoods of his native Puerto Rico. That moved me.)
In any case, I’m pleased that differences in our life experiences did not get in the way of our reading, understanding, and commenting on Substack.
It sounds fascinating to be French and living in the UK, but coldly sobering to have suffered through Brexit and its consequences. I’m sorry that the ennobling ideal of the European Union, at least as I have understood it, of a transnational community with free movement of people, ideas, and possibilities across traditional borders, has been challenged by a more tribal and reactionary nationalism. And I’m sorry that you were one of the people who had to pay the price.
Circling back to a central idea you developed—the idea of standing up to shame-throwing, jargon-spewing political bullies—in my experience, many of these belittling folks are not really politically engaged at all. It’s as if they see political judgments and attacks as a kind of hobby (as well as a psychological defense mechanism). They often avoid the messy give and take of politics in favor of an insulating and protective self-righteousness. The people I’ve known and admired who seek the common good through civic and political engagement bring a genuine humility to the quest. They are the last persons to judge others for the way they show up politically, whether through the front, back, or side doors.
Three cheers for you as you see and express politics in your distinctive and worthy way.
Glen, the fact that you flagged that the opening references weren't familiar to you, showed up anyway, and found your way in touched me. The makeup world I described in the opening paragraph is incredibly niche. Blink-and-you'll-miss-it specific to a very particular capsule of internet time. Even my closest girlfriends wouldn't clock all of it. That's the beauty of it. We are all trying to understand each other across our different cultural capsules, find a common ground, talk to each other somehow.
Your observation about the psychological defence mechanism has struck a chord with me. I think it goes even deeper than that. When someone has spent years building an identity around a body of knowledge, an admission of not knowing can feel to them like a dismissal of the thing they love. As if my gap is somehow a verdict on their investment. It isn't. My "I don't know much about this" is just honest. It's actually an invitation, if it gets received that way. Sometimes it doesn't but that's ok too. We bounce back... eventually :)
Dear Tsunimee,
Your insight, consolidated in such a pithy form, “As if my gap is somehow a verdict on their investment,” also struck a chord for me. It reminded me of both some academic literature and my own personal experience—and vulnerabilities.
The academic associations had to do with child development theory and about how many of us, through the imperfect childhoods that we invariably experience, can develop a dependence on the gaze of others (originally the parents) to avoid feeling abandoned. I’m oversimplifying a bit, but it seems to me that the field of knowledge you refer to, in some people, is not merely an acquired competence but a foundational bridge to human connection. When others don’t cross that bridge by showing interest in our field, we can feel a kind of desperation—the desperation that comes from fear of being left all alone in a world that can feel overwhelming or terrifying. I think we all have this fear to some extent, but when people get angry at another’s lack of interest in their field, it may be that this fear is heightened and unknowingly triggers a re-experience of difficult times in childhood. Perhaps anger serves as a protest behavior, a strong, even if counterproductive, effort to get the other person to mirror our interests and in that act show that we are indeed worthy of love and attention.
I’m thinking of studies I read years ago in which researchers observed the behavior of young kids, say, a year old, who seemed quite happy with their newly acquired mobility and ventured away from their parent to discover and play with a new toy. But they periodically returned to the parent for emotional refueling. The parent’s gaze was like an external power source they needed to continue with their independent play.
I think we all go through a version of this, but if kids don’t get enough of this refueling, if parents tend to be distracted, preoccupied, inconsistent, or, very sadly, to get demonstrably pissed off at the child’s needs, then it’s harder for the child to internalize a sense of steady inner worth. I may be reaching here too far into the child psychology weeds, but maybe the people you’ve met that get irritated at others’ lack of interest in their own brand of political involvement are not getting the emotional refueling that they unconsciously longed for—and still long for—as adults.
It’s also true, I think, that sometimes we develop deep knowledge in a field less out of an intrinsic interest or soulful calling than out of a need to excel to gain the attention we craved but didn’t quite get. If this is true, our deep knowledge may be as much something we perform as something we are summoned to. I don’t think this is an all or nothing kind of thing. We all probably want to do well in a domain both because we are wholesomely drawn to it and because we are positively reinforced for getting good at it. But I’m thinking that people who get angry when others are disinvested in their own field may have a particularly brittle self that is held up more by others’ validation for their performance than about their own curiosity, commitment, and aspirations. Maybe it’s shattering for the fragile self when others turn their attention elsewhere.
I don’t want to come across as holier than thou. As a dad and grandad, I’m sure there were many times when I fell down on the job of being a fully present emotional refueling station. And even though I’m 74, I can still touch into times as a child when I so much wanted my parents, who were quite caught up in their own complex worlds, to pay more attention to me and attend my school and athletic activities at a much higher level than they did. Even in retirement, when I began to write personal essays, where I would often speak from my heart, I was at first saddened (though not angry) that some family members and friends, while happy that I was writing, seemed to have little interest in my words. It took me a while to accept that we can be loving and close but still have widely different interests—different enough to mean that people in my circle of care would read my pieces only selectively.
I do try to stay with my sadness, disappointment or fear and not turn these difficult emotions into a reactive anger or a cheap shaming of others. Sometimes, I just feel the need to grieve, even if the grief is for day-to-day losses or disappointments and not the cosmic grief of a loved one dying.
Anyway, your astute observations stirred so many thoughts and evoked so many associations. Thanks for the continuing dialogue.
Glen, I've read this twice and I'm still processing it. The emotional refuelling theory (thank you for introducing it to me!) has won me over completely. I have known since before I was 10 that I would never want to raise a child, partly because I have always understood, even without the language for it, what an enormous responsibility it is to be someone's grounding presence when they are still becoming themselves.
Your framework gives words to something I have long felt instinctively. And as an empath, it is going to help me considerably in future similar scenarios, not to excuse the behaviour, but to understand the potential wound underneath it. Context is not a free pass, however! 😊
Your question about why we deepen our knowledge into things has unsettled me in the best possible way. I hope my reasons are mostly noble. I suspect they are mixed, as most human motivations are. The honest answer is probably: partly curiosity, partly the need to feel less inadequate, still figuring out the rest.
And please, holier than thou is the last thing you are. Quite the opposite. The inner child you describe doesn't strike me as a lack of development. It strikes me as proof that we never fully stop needing to be seen. That doesn't diminish us. It just makes us human.
Finally, the people in our close circles who don't read our writing. I started a beauty blog once because no one around me cared about lipstick. I understand completely. My beauty blogger days are long gone but I feel that this is what Substack is supposed to be, before the performance and the preoccupation with growth got involved. A place to find the people who get it. I'm very glad you found your way here. 🌞
“A place to find the people who get it.” What a perfect way to describe what I would probably try to say in twice as many words—and not as well.
Thank you for being glad that I “found my way here.” I’m very glad, too—and glad that “here” includes you.
Peace and blessings to you, Tsunimee,
Glen
You absolutely rocked this. This is how SO many people feel about politics. From your previous note I wasn't sure if you were a hard 'NO' or if you were interested and just didn't really know the way through to find the information to fill the gaps. This is a gateway piece for a lot of people to dig in where they may have tossed in the towel before! 10/10! ✨ ℳ
Thank you so much. My note was cryptic, I knew my opening paragraph would be too niche too and the fact you stayed long enough to get the gist means a lot. Thank you ♥