🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (15 tweets)
cuteness is an interesting concept. my sense is, part of what it means to be cute is to be adorably immature, child-like… and from some angles, in some senses, weak, harmless, defenseless, powerless. it’s not always *just* that, but it’s part of it https://t.co/61f0ucWM5n
I think often of this gifset of rihanna very graciously telling paparazzi to back off, and “it’s not cute” here is a euphemism for “you’re being threatening and invasive”, “it’s creepy and hostile”, etc https://t.co/JitI64ULUi
I got to thinking about this again when I stumbled on some old tweets where I was trying to make sense of Amanda Palmer’s story and I found myself saying “it stopped being cute”. What’s cute when you’re the underdog stops being so when you gain power. This is hard to navigate!! https://t.co/fEMstN855K
@deepfates @nickcammarata Ie she thought of herself as a rogue vagabond of the streets, which she legitimately was at some point, & she tried to continue with that, past a point where it stopped being cute. This is very difficult to navigate. I’ve dealt with a tiny, tiny version of this & it’s unsettling
there are many instances of social problem that fit the category of “underdog attains success but fails to adapt to the new context”. And there’s not a lot of compassion for this because most people don’t deal with it bc most people live in a fairly predictable social context https://t.co/p0A0huwXQ4
It’s so difficult to go from being an underdog to being successful (happens to 1% of people?), and it seems so unlikely when you’re slogging, that... when they get successful, it seems like only 1-5% of *those* are able to adapt and reorient What got you here won’t get you there
success- the more outsized the success, and the more quickly it happens- can have a way of yanking you sharply out of your context. your usual coping mechanisms stop working. your social reality transmogrifies in front of you. it’s incredibly chaotic and annihilating https://t.co/ghR3pFQs3R
I’m quite fairly convinced that this class/sphere of thing is the primary bottleneck preventing success from happening at larger scales. it’s not that people aren’t smart enough, etc. It’s an emotional, psychological bottleneck that keeps people from doing self-alienating work
this also helps explain why so much progress happens in relatively tight-knit scenes – you could think of them as spaces where aliens support and encourage each other emotionally and psychologically https://t.co/PEQnmKDv1b
this also ties back to a wholly separate thread I did an hour ago about how people relinquish their power. It’s funny but it’s true. People don’t typically want more power than they’re comfortable being responsible for. And there are so many knock-on effects to be observed https://t.co/M7G70y2elK
“power resides where men believe it resides” is roughly true for personal autonomy as well, outside of extreme contexts. I’m just continually startled to see how easily people relinquish their power. I get it, it’s too much responsibility to bear, so ppl choose psychic bondage…
so, to have a better world, we gotta be honest with ourselves and each other about the realities of power, the responsibilities that come with it, and we have to support and encourage each other to step into the responsibility. We gotta learn to artfully deal with not being cute
another way of thinking about all of this is to just frame it as growing up. What does it mean to be a grownup? To be an adult? To be an elder? To find meaning in serving one’s community, to appreciate when a stage of life is past? That one is no longer a child or a teen etc?
@visakanv i haven't read it yet but "Preparing For Power", about american elite boarding schools, talks about how kids who go to those schools are actually explicitly trained to not be squeamish about exercising power https://t.co/vA3NzJhsSv https://t.co/WxcjIVmlq5
