vague elitism, perhaps

[egypturnash]

And it is funny -- once you hit a certain level of the fluorogeek sphere, you get a population that's so interesting and individualistic but so neurotic that we're all basically doomed to envy each other and never really recognize the next person in the circle envies us... At the risk of sounding like 1970's public service announcement, we're all the cool kids. - yulicorn in comments on a somewhat locked entry.

(I hope you don't mind me excerpting this, dear; I thought it was worth broadcasting beyond the small number of people who could see the entry it was in the discussion of. Let me know if you do.)

We may all be the truly cool kids, but during the prime years of cool really mattering in our lives, we were repeatedly told we were uncool. Kept ourselves apart from the other kids, never quite learnt how to really easily connect with other folks (at least I sure didn't), at best we quit consciously caring about cool and just did our own damn thing.

And somewhere deep inside we all still remain convinced we're uncool... maybe even worthless because of that. Certainly not worth talking to someone as cool as (other cool person goes here).

Self-worth is weird and horrible stuff. Hard to accumulate. And the more you deserve it, perhaps, the more you're aware of your flaws: along with skill and practice comes humility, because you're examining the craft of those further along the paths you may be taking, and any honest person will always find their own work lacking when held up to that of a master. And someone doing their creative thing in a different field looks even more arcane and learned.

Comments

[rainwing.livejournal.com]

By the time I got over not getting to be cool at school, I was old enough to have learned humility. I'll never get to be cool. :D

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I knoooow! It sucks, doesn't it! I wanna be cool, people even tell me I'm cool sometimes but I just know in my heart of hearts that I'm not cool! And that it looks lame to go on about how great you are!

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Casual observation from outside the sphere has told me one thing: Folks who call themselves cool, aren't. Folks who want to be cool may already be but don't understand it.

Annoying, innit?

[rainwing.livejournal.com]

I think you're too cool for school.

Except when you say you are. *nuzz*

[403.livejournal.com]

I'm just now realising that your icon has feathers, not water-ripples. Neat!

[rainwing.livejournal.com]

Hee. Yes! I am a brrd-dragon, not an anomaly. n.n

[hydra-velsen.livejournal.com]

No one ever said I was cool until my senior year in high school.

[403.livejournal.com]

...we're all basically doomed to envy each other and never really recognize the next person in the circle envies us...

From my position in the vast social arrangement, this is ironic as, first, it's not common for me to show these signs of envy/admiration/what have you unless I happen to know the recipient well (I dislike the thought of appearing to be a sycophant, and am generally poor at expressing anything other than 'wow' when I don't think I am sounding that way), so there's little to suggest to most of the next persons along that they are envied. Second, while reading the quote, I found myself thinking that there's no possibility it could refer to me (self-centred, aren't I?) in any way, shape or form. At the same time, it's impossible for myself alone to determine whether or not it actually does, due to the other items described.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's that, too. Quiet admiration of someone's geeky prowess from afar. So nobody even gets much of the ego stroking they badly need (and tend to shrug off when they do get it due to humility and self-hate).

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Can I state for the record that I AM cool, damnit, thereby proving my deep and fundamental uncoolness, and exempting myself from ever having to worry about being cool again, or will that not work?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. *grin* Good try, though.

[draca-serpens.livejournal.com]

"Hey, wait! Maybe if you're truly cool, you don't need to be told you're cool!" -Homer Simpson

[raki.livejournal.com]

One of the important things I learned was that humility and self-loathing are not the same things. Humility is an orientation to the rest of the world, a little bit of wonder and love that it should be so beautiful and weird and flawed... and being perfectly fine with feeling small in the face of it. Self-loathing is an orientation to oneself -- it's a version of self-absorption. Instead of celebrating the wonder of the world, you hate yourself for not celebrating the wonder.

Coolness is relative. For some, coolness comes from a place of being approved of, being adored; for others, it comes from sticking to your guns, ruthless compassion, and chasing after dreams just because they come along.

It was an emotional epiphany that got me to let go of my self-loathing. I'm not sure I can recreate it or explain how one moves from the one state to the other. But they are qualitatively different, emotionally. And humility feels a whole lot better, I must say.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I don't think humility and self-loathing are mutually exclusive. I've been full of self-loathing for a long time, I still am, though I'm working through some of it. And I've also been pretty reflexively humble about my skills.

She was using the 'cool kids' bit because the person she was responding too was saying they didn't think they were cool enough for something; I'm not sure "cool" is really the right word. It's easy to grab onto that, which I kinda did myself. Such a loaded word. The part of the quote I was really interested in was the first one, that a lot of the really neat people are so damned abstracted and fucked-up that it's hard for them to realize other people look up to them in one way or another, that anyone would ever think they're worth listening to, that someone else on a similar wavelength but different manifestation of it would bother talking to them...

[yulicorn.livejournal.com]

Exactly -- I don't think it came through, but I was hoping to universalize "coolness" in order to destroy it. I think just about anybody who tries to exercise that capacity of their mind, even if the results aren't always directly productive or even pretty, succeeds in a very real and meaningful sense. In particular, what I was going for in that comment was based on observing that many of my friends envy many of my other friends, who envy other friends in turn. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised if in the end we just form this big circle of envy, seeing other people's glamour but not our own, seeing our own faults and trials close up but not those of our friends...

Or maybe it's just me. :) I think we've already had the conversation about how long it took me to get over the habit of putting prominent people in the fandom on a pedestal -- and how thoroughly bizarre it is to hear any of those same people envying or even just respecting or acknowledging me for anything...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Like a big mutual admiration society, except horribly fucked up and broken.

It's easy, in some respects, for me to measure some of my 'worth' in this very visually-oriented fandom - I can look around and see that people whose work was far better than mine when I first started doing this animal-head people thing have just settled into a rut, or even backslid somewhat in matters of technical artistic quality, while in that time I've grown a lot as an artist and hope I'm nowhere near any peak of my skills. I see all the flaws in my stuff, but I can also see almost as many flaws in the work of "big names" if I get picky.

But in other ways, it's hard. I don't have anyone regularly imitating my visual style, and how much my thoughts and ideas have been transmitted into people who like my work is anyone's guess. I tend to focus on what's wrong with my art half the time instead of what's right. Even harder for you, since your contribution is far less tangible than a small pile of weird drawings. You make people think about weird and fascinating stuff, and that does cause things to happen and change, but it's an obscure connection. I mean, are you indirectly responsible for this image or that? Maybe.

I dunno. I know that I sure see more of my faults, most of the time, than my glamor.

[yulicorn.livejournal.com]

"I'm an artist without an art. I just move people's heads around." -- Stanley "Sta-hi" Mooney, in Rudy Rucker's Software

[raki.livejournal.com]

{nods} I think what you said earlier about people eventually abandoning notions of cool because they don't fit them is part of it. Coolness starts not to matter -- but being accepted and loved do matter, and people start to get fucked up... and partly, it might be a gradual atrophy of the capacity to feel admired and cared for, out of disuse or abuse.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I know my ability to feel loved and admired is pretty withered. I've been trying to re-grow it but it's not easy.

[raki.livejournal.com]

Not easy at all.

[paka.livejournal.com]

One time I was listening to a radio show that just happened to be on, just happened to have some sort of self-help-book writer. She came out with the statement that you need to hear 11 affirmations to counter the effect of one negative statement.

I have no idea where she got the stat, but the point is; much like learning a foreign language, if you learn to hate (or love) yourself at an early age, it will stick longer and with less practise than trying to do it later in life when your learning curve has slowed.