“Being a person is too hard a job to leave to a single person. We can’t do it on our own, not even as adults. Figuring out how to be a person is a group project, and we have to help each other. But the catch is that we don’t really know what we are doing, so sometimes we end up hurting each other instead. When you are weird, you experience this hurt. Social categories have been poorly constructed and fail to conduce to human happiness. The weird person is a record of the mistakes we have made.”
it sounds like her own “weirdness” is experienced as a source of pain, not as a stable and beloved personal identity. and that she’s uncomfortable with public celebration of “weirdness”.
admittedly it is a bit paradoxical that contemporary culture celebrates “weirdos” in a not-very-individualistic way. the nonconformists who are celebrated do, actually, conform to their own little club rules.
this never particularly bothered me, though!
if i find a club i want to be a member of, that’s fantastic. i’m not attached to being literally unique.
if i find that existing “labels” or “groups” don’t entirely suit me as an individual, that can be a bummer, but i don’t think i would be better off if no fine-grained identity categories existed and i was expected to conform with everyone in my geographical location.
there’s a very natural explanation about why children’s books star alienated weirdos: writers are not typical people!
beloved children’s book authors were writing to children like me, the children who read a lot of books and might grow up to be writers ourselves.
this isn’t some paradoxical thing.
what is “normal” (both common and normative) in the world of books is what is “normal” for text-native obligate readers and writers, which does in fact mean being different from the majority! Bookishness is a minority trait!
Bookish people, as a rule, are glad we are this way, and eager to acculturate potential kindred spirits into bookishness. This seems generally healthy to me.
sure, be a little thoughtful about not making depictions of alienation into self-fulfilling prophecies, but I think a little bit of care and taste suffices. no need to angst about “what if we are BAD ROLE MODELS”. it’s okay to like your own quirks.
links 01/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-27-2025
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/where-the-wild-things-arent Agnes Callard is strange and unsettling here. I wonder what this is “really” about.
“Being a person is too hard a job to leave to a single person. We can’t do it on our own, not even as adults. Figuring out how to be a person is a group project, and we have to help each other. But the catch is that we don’t really know what we are doing, so sometimes we end up hurting each other instead. When you are weird, you experience this hurt. Social categories have been poorly constructed and fail to conduce to human happiness. The weird person is a record of the mistakes we have made.”
it sounds like her own “weirdness” is experienced as a source of pain, not as a stable and beloved personal identity. and that she’s uncomfortable with public celebration of “weirdness”.
admittedly it is a bit paradoxical that contemporary culture celebrates “weirdos” in a not-very-individualistic way. the nonconformists who are celebrated do, actually, conform to their own little club rules.
this never particularly bothered me, though!
if i find a club i want to be a member of, that’s fantastic. i’m not attached to being literally unique.
if i find that existing “labels” or “groups” don’t entirely suit me as an individual, that can be a bummer, but i don’t think i would be better off if no fine-grained identity categories existed and i was expected to conform with everyone in my geographical location.
there’s a very natural explanation about why children’s books star alienated weirdos: writers are not typical people!
beloved children’s book authors were writing to children like me, the children who read a lot of books and might grow up to be writers ourselves.
this isn’t some paradoxical thing.
what is “normal” (both common and normative) in the world of books is what is “normal” for text-native obligate readers and writers, which does in fact mean being different from the majority! Bookishness is a minority trait!
Bookish people, as a rule, are glad we are this way, and eager to acculturate potential kindred spirits into bookishness. This seems generally healthy to me.
sure, be a little thoughtful about not making depictions of alienation into self-fulfilling prophecies, but I think a little bit of care and taste suffices. no need to angst about “what if we are BAD ROLE MODELS”. it’s okay to like your own quirks.
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202502/noti3114/noti3114.html anatomy of a Lean proof
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade
he sounds genuinely awful, though i haven’t read his writing