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Morning! Today I’m thinking about the phenomenon of pick-me-ism, which I think is one of those things that lots of people can agree is a phenomenon, and yet I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anybody really examined it closely and chase down the implications https://t.co/VvY45samhc
The cishet male equivalent might be the “white knight”, or conditional feminist https://t.co/Sb2JDnsS20
Nowww how shall we approach all of this? How do we begin to make sense of it? What questions do we have, what do we want to know? I’m curious to know if there’s anything like this *outside* of sexual/romantic marketplaces. And... I think there is 🤔 https://t.co/C9QRH6lSHK
One of my “it’s counter-intuitive but explains a lot” ideas is that not many people *actually* care very much about having lots of sex. A much stronger drive IMO is the drive for connection, status, belonging. You don’t want the sex nearly as much as what you think the sex means
“I’m worthy, I’m lovable, people want me, people think I’m cool, fun and interesting, people want to spend time with me, people want to look at me, people have my back, people will defend and support me, people envy & admire me” The desire for social approval runs deep, IMO
I guess the next question I should ask myself is, when and how have I embodied pick-meism in my own life? And I find myself thinking about my political blogging days in my late teens. Whether I fully realized it or not, I found myself in a rather heady social scenario
I “got into” political blogging because I was really mad about a flagrantly misleading bit of statistics in the national newspaper. I wrote in about it, and they completely neutered my criticism. So I got madder, and took to the Internet. The rage-mob gave sweet, sweet approval
I had inadvertently become my own version of a “pick me” guy in the political blogosphere scene. I craved the views, the shares, the comment wars... it somehow meant that I was *relevant*. Even if people were hating on me, it must’ve been because I was *on* to something
And, without thinking, I found myself subconsciously optimising for things that the audience wanted to hear, wanted to rally behind. My calls for nuanced got a fraction of the attention, so I didn’t bother with that as much. I “had been chosen” to deliver what “the market” wanted
But there came a point where I got fucking sick of it. I realized I wasn’t writing what I wanted, but what I thought would get a reaction out of people. My audience seemed to be getting stupider, not smarter. In 2013 I decided to give up, and walked away from a high-traffic blog https://t.co/SXBdfEN9j6
I started @1000wordvomits to switch tracks, from writing for an audience to writing for myself. I deliberately made it tedious and inaccessible - anti-clickbait. Not so much to deter other people but to deter myself from pandering to other people
I decided I wanted to be honest, sincere, kind, nourishing - I had all of these things in me all along, but they were buried in the mix when I was stuck optimising for short-term vanity metrics that don’t measure any lasting value. In 1000, I incubated a better version of myself
And when you realise that someone else is probably lonely - which I suspect is the case for most humans - a really cool thing you can do is reach out with warmth and kindness https://t.co/WOhX8Vl2nY