On the one hand, it's true that some of us who are living quiet lives don't really have a flamboyant dancer inside trying to escape. On the other hand, it's good to be open to discomfort and scary things. I'm not talking about random drug use, I mean learning to tolerate discomfort that allows you to enter situations where you can learn, grow, or give to others. Pema Chodron writes, "The interesting thing is that the more willing you are to step out of your comfort zone, the more comfortable you feel in your life. Situations that used to arouse fear and nausea become easier to relax in. On the other hand, if you stay in your comfort zone all the time, it shrinks…And the older you get, the more threatened you feel. Things that didn't bother you when you were thirty or forty can make you very uncomfortable when you are seventy or eighty." (from Welcoming the Unwelcome).
I think this wise. Important to know, and to be, yourself and no need to be a fake tomboy (reminds me of the “cool girl” monologue from Gone Girl). But there is quite a bit of equivocating between “able to tolerate mild discomfort to enjoy things, like hiking or a baseball game” and “enjoys group sex on mushrooms” in this article!
The problem isn't that you have to like being licked by a dog. It's that when you start running your life in a way that prioritizes never being in a situation where you might get licked by one, you start limiting yourself and the people around you. Especially your kids. Ditto for many kinds of discomfort.
I am honestly a bit weirded out by the "people who like dogs are outre and not priggish, girly rule followers" discourse. Doesn't every president except trump have a dog. I thought having dogs was the peak of normie behavior :) being afraid or disliking dogs is fine, but like that's not normie in the western world. To like pets or dogs =/= being a hippie weirdo. The girliest girls have had dogs and loved dogs. Marilyn Monroe had dogs, Grace Kelly had dogs. Its weird to see the world now being divided into dog lovers and dog haters when the modern western world was never like that.
And I agree about it imposing weird artificial limits, especially on your kids. Most people dont *like* being licked by dogs. They allow it. Or they are okay with it. Becuase dogs do that and to be around dogs is to let them do that occasionally. My dog once chewed through my apple cable when he was a young puppy and anxious. I did not LOVE that. Or even LIKE that. I just allowed it. What do you want me to do? Take him to the back and shoot him?
It’s not a feminine/masculine thing (the original Mark is not feminine at all) although I guess in my case it always felt like my kind of prissy-ness was associated with being a girly girly. But loving dogs is a very gender neutral thing, and I would say the same of being grossed out by dog slobber.
Thank you for clarifying. I see you more as a Monica from friends. Very feminine clearly but also high maintenance. But Rachel and Phoebe are also feminine though Rachel is the infamous “cool girl”
“Doesn't every president except trump have a dog.”
I got curious and looked it up. Trump is the only president in modern (or “modern”) times to not have a dog, but several of the early presidents didn’t, and Polk and Andrew Johnson had no pets at all.
Dogs are definitely normie-coded. “Look, Jane. See Spot. See Spot run.”
I consider trump not being a dog guy and refusing to get a dog, like Obama did, to be his biggest red flag because that is how normie it is to have a dog.
This is a side note but despite being super feminine Marilyn Monroe always codes pretty rough and tumble to me. Like Lorelei from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would absolutely be game for a challenging hike or sailing or whatever if it could somehow lead to diamonds.
Exactly. I am a big R romantic, literally start crying at sad movies or romantic movies or even ads with like sweet family dynamics, I hate statistics, I never understand CHH’s many graphs and I love long dangly earrings and painting my nails, I like staying at fancy hotels and never went hiking, am I not feminine because I also love dogs and have been licked on the face and mouth by my dogs over the years? I realized at some point of reading that CHH is conflating being high maintenance with the idea of "hyper feminine".
There is an episode of Friends where they all decide that Monica is more high maintenance than Rachel, but would anyone call Rachel not hyper feminine because she is chill with dogs and animals and knows to sail?
One of the most feminine women I know is very much the cool girl who is pretty rough and tumble, goes hiking and sailing and can still turn up in a silk dress she fished out of her rucksack for a dinner.
I think about this a lot with respect to people who don’t have kids. It’s not to say you can’t continue to stretch out of your comfort zone as adults without kids, but kids certainly force you to! I feel like a lot of the middle aged and up people I know without kids have hardened into these people who must always have their coffee at 8:06am and their nap at 2:03pm and will only stay at Marriotts (don’t even mention an Airbnb much less a hostel!) whereas kid parents (in general) are more used to just going with the flow and having to adapt to whatever age/stage they’re in.
I think it depends on people's underlying temperaments. The people who are willing to stretch in the first place, parenthood stretches them more and they become more adaptable. In turn, they raise adaptable kids who can sleep in a different bed or eat different food. Yeah, I know there's inborn temperament and some kids have anxiety or tactile sensitivity or other issues, but still, their kids are more adaptable than they would have been had they been raised by other parents who didn't push them into uncomfortable situations.
But there's another whole subset of people who constrict their lives when they have kids and disappear into their tightly structured family bubble where they can't do this or that because it's the kids' nap time or the kids won't eat this.
That's usually only for like the first two years of the child's life. Beyond that, you can't really stay away from life, unless you have some anxiety issues that would keep you away from life anyway. And even so, you end up having to do things that are beyond yourself, like having to rock a baby to sleep, or watch baby shark a thousand times, or go on a merry-go-round. Even the constricting life is usually something outside their comfort zone and they are happy to be done with it once that phase is done.
But I still think the constricted version with kids is more flexible than the no kids version of their lives would have been (given the underlying temperament)
I think it depends. I have seen chill up for anything types become more limited in response to having anxious kids. Instead of trying to push through and gradually widen their kids' circle of comfort, they constricted their own lives. I found it very sad.
"if you stay in your comfort zone all the time, it shrinks…And the older you get, the more threatened you feel. Things that didn't bother you when you were thirty or forty can make you very uncomfortable when you are seventy or eighty."
The median age of the typical American has risen from 30 to 40 since 1980 and is increasing ever more still. You basically described a hugely key component for trends in music and movies and the most important underlying component of why political and policy trends have happened the way they have the last 25 years.
Specifically, more than any other cultural phenomenon since 1950, pop music has revolved around the new and appealing to the young. I suspect the significant decline in new music getting mass appeal is very related to the rising median age and what you just described.
This put the finger on the thing that kind of didn't work for me about this post.*
*The other being that it came across as some "grass is greener" idealization that women who are more rebellious and free-spirited and tomboyish don't get pressured to change basically everything about themselves.
I love *Peep Show* and have always related to Mark. His rant to Jez about how global capital is the only reason he can be a hippie burnout is something I think about semi frequently.
I haven’t seen the show, but I constantly think about that concept (if I understand what you’re saying). I consider myself to be very liberal (supporting more redistribution, believing that people don’t usually “deserve” what happens to them - good or bad, etc), but - the fact remains that every single thing about my life (up to and including both this particular Substack and Substack itself) would be impossible without the wealth generated by global capitalism and the environmental destruction that comes along with it.
I mean, this in of itself is not such a contradiction - nothing would be possible without the circumstances which brought it to being (for example, there wouldn't have been a French revolution to get rid of the monarchy without the centralization created by the very same monarchy). I think there is bigger contradiction: Hippies, although rejecting capitalism, never had the potential, nor had any serious attempt, to create an alternative to it. They were far to individualistic and hedonistic for that.
I think the distinction is between whether you are doing either one - being a hippie free spirit or a prissy straight - from love or from fear. The behaviors of both can be identical, you have to figure out for yourself which one is you. Being overly self controlling and having no boundaries can both happen from fear. Being driven by fear isn’t in itself bad (sometimes fear is legit!) but sometimes (especially if a lot of things in ones life are driven by fear) leads to feelings of resentment, reaction, blaming others, controlling behavior.
Spot on! I’m an uptight person with OCD who has my preferences and tendencies which I don’t feel necessary changing, but for a lot of contexts my uptightness was stemming from fear and anxiety and not wanting to be uncomfortable, and pushing myself to do the thing anyway led to some nerve-wrecking but wonderful experiences and friendships I wouldn’t have had otherwise. “Loosen up” is just blanket advice that is really meant for people who need that push sometimes. It’s been worth it for me to figure out for each context what my uprightness is stemming from, and get better at figuring this out.
On a related note, exposure therapy for OCD is aimed at tolerating the discomfort and intrusive thoughts while doing the thing anyway, but it doesn’t make any judgement calls like “the person who is finally doing the thing is actually the REAL AUTHENTIC you”, which is also helpful!
Self proclaimed “stick in the mud” here. I went to a liberal arts college in PORTLAND. There were nude drum circles, lots of people crashing out on drugs at Reed’s annual Renn Fayre, white people with dreds who went to special hairdressers and used special shampoos to dry them out, and lots of shrooms. Suffice it to say, by graduating I moved out of Portland within 48 hours to a red state. This post is also *me* 💯
I'm not some type who thinks people can't wear whatever hairstyle they want but man do white people with dreads get like a caution flag from me. Like I feel they are going to be the most insufferable person you've ever met.
Yeah, it's a question of what sort of person wants that look to begin with.
Reminds me of a bit from a Rick Gervais skit where he said that he planned to do a politics module at university, but when he went to sign up, saw that three of the five people queued up ahead of him were wearing berets. So he didn't sign up, because "I decided I didn't want to spend a whole semester with, as we used to call them at the time, 'cunts'."
Not quite the same, but somewhere along the way, I realized my aesthetic did not at all match my politics. I went to a liberal arts school, William & Mary. It's a state school so very much doubt my college was as "hippieish" as your school, but there was definitely a hippiesh element if that makes sense. So given my politics and where I went to school, makes sense my social life was very connected to people who people who love going to festivals, dressing a certain way and having particular music tastes. And that's...just not me. I like dressing well (I wear tailored shirts and cuff links to work when it's not summer), I love sports and happy has a clam watching football all day on a Sunday, love me some steak...heck if I'm really honest with myself, the type of girl I was into in my younger days was not particular "alternative". There are of course a hundred reasons why I might have struck out with a variety of girls when I was younger, but I do kind of suspect that in a few cases given the social milieu I ran in, my whole aesthetic was not that appealing to the type of women I would be often meeting or hanging out with.
An example what I'm getting at. I've noted before the gay marriage debate was a pretty formative part of my politics given my teenage and college days were early 2000s. Feel proud to have been pro gay marriage before it got close to 50% support nationwide. And in recent times, I've found the attacks on stuff like drag queens absolutely abhorrent. I know there is some tough "edge case" stuff around this issue right now (like the sports question), but feel pretty confident to say that a lot of current attacks on stuff like drag queens circa 2022 and transgender people now is driven by a lot of rank bigotry. All a big run up to say...I don't find drag queens, or lip synching or basically anything you can watch on RuPaul's drag race particularly entertaining. Like an appreciate the time and effort that goes into it, how amazing some costumes look and the genuinely impressive dancing. But it's just...not something that is me or I find all that entertaining generally.
I don't have any OCD tendencies. I have also never, not even once in my life, felt anything but ridiculous when I've gone to a club and attempted to "dance." So I don't think there's necessarily any connection between being terminally uptight and OCD.
I related to this quite a bit. I am an IS TJ on Myers Briggs, and spontaneity often can be stressful for me. I have a Google sheets freezer inventory, and for my wedding had an event plan with 15 minute increments tracking vendor deliveries, when various people needed to arrive at the church, etc. It worked beautifully, and we had no major issues with the ceremony and reception. I married someone who, while capable and responsible, is much more spontaneous and relaxed. If you've read Calvin and Hobbes, we have a bit of a Calvin and Susie dynamic. While we were wedding planning, I kept saying, "We should do a day-by-day itinerary for our honeymoon." And my husband (then fiance), kept saying, "Yeah, that's a great idea." But somehow it didn't happen (we had a short engagement, so I was pretty focused on the wedding planning instead of the honeymoon.) So the detailed itinerary never came together besides the hotel reservation.
The day after the wedding, we were driving to our destination, and we spontaneously stopped at a cheese store, and then at a scenic hike, with no worries about itinerary. It was great! And each day we woke up and said, "Okay, what do we want to do today?" It was very relaxing, and my husband admitted he had been stalling on the itinerary on purpose so we could be more spontaneous.
Over the past few years, I think we have balanced each other out, where we can each appreciate the benefits of planning and spontaneity. (As I imagine Calvin and Susie would have if they had gotten married as adults.) And, on our last vacation, I was the one who said we should pull over and stop to see a museum off the highway that we hadn't been planning to visit. I think many couples have someone who is more structured and someone who is more spontaneous, and if there is respect for the benefits of both approaches, this can be healthy.
I loved this article and I completely relate. I think America is a particularly trying country for the proud fuddy duddy, because we culturally enshrine rebellion and transgression. I also think our obsession with youth culture (often sustained by people in well in their thirties and older) and the idea of being cool are bound up in all this.
The people I know who are most into this line of thinking ironically spend a lot of energy editing themselves to perform some version of authenticity or coolness they’ve gotten from outside themselves.
Non-American who used to live in the US here. Walking into a Walmart in Florida, I can’t say I ever felt assaulted by coolness, rebellion and/or transgression. Youth culture yes, but that can very much exist within a very restrictive, narrow framework.
Depends on what the “rebellion” is against, I guess. If you’re rebelling against Target-ites who would rather drink a gallon of glue than let their children in the same room as a firearm, Walmart is your place. 😂
Before Amazon came along and said “hold my beer”, Walmart was notorious for treating their employees poorly and hurting mom-and-pop stores. Other than that I was pretty oblivious to the Target vs Walmart culture wars, and would just go to whichever was closest.
Possibly the most American thing I ever did was to get a haircut *and* an oil change during the same Walmart visit.
A lot of this reminds me of my mom who like you has some kind of ocd and is diagonised for anxiety (recently in her 50s). Because she was undiagnosed and not even remotely as self-aware as you are, growing up with her was like to see an extreme comfort at home and with order and rules but complete meltdown when the smallest rule changed or when we went out and something didn't happen according to plan. But it wasn't like the house was not messy, it was just her mess and she knew where things were and that was okay lol
The other people's smell thing is so funny especially because my mom always thought everyone smelled (Well duh? humans smell?) and was the only person in the world who made me feel like my mouth was a rotting museum of all the food I had ever eaten no matter how many times I brushed. I refused to brush after every meal and she was pretty upset about that. Funnily enough I grew up and forgot all that nonsense and then met a friend who clearly had some sort of ocd and had been living on his own in the boondocks for a while. Guess what, he thought my mouth smelled and his girlfriends' too apparently and demanded that both of us go get checked (we did, nothing was wrong). He insisted that we permanently keep chewing mints when talking to him which was so funny, but a couple of years later suddenly the smell has apparently gone and he has forgotten we smell bad in the mouth. sometimes the smell is just other humans and you are not used to other humans or you are hyper-sensitive to the existence of another human :)
Your friend sounds like me (although I never went to the extent of demanding that everyone get checked or keep mints with them at all times). I couldn’t stop fixating on all the smells around me at some point. The only times this has subsided for me is when I am in a very, very relaxed state and I’ve gotten somewhat used to them
yes I think that is the case for my friend. he is now used to both his girlfriend and me being around often (I visit him once or twice a year typically) and now he is very relaxed about being around us. I could tease him about why the mouth smell disappeared without me doing anything but I am just glad I don’t have to keep eating mints anymore :D
As someone who is very straight-edge, I have a deep and abiding affinity for Mark's triumphant early-morning "Turn the music down, stop smoking your drugs, I’m making tea and toast for Sophie, I’m putting on Radio 4, everything’s normal." That said, Jez's highly relatable fanaticism around things feeling Christmassy enough and Mark's corresponding apathy feels like a seasonal role-reversal of priggishness that's somehow still very in character...
I’ve mentioned in past comments that I lurk on Mumsnet, and one of the reoccurring themes on that site is women who are concerned that their daughters are getting married too young. This never means ages 18-22; it’s always daughters who are at least 23 and have gotten engaged.
Every time one of these posts appears, several people will say something like, “You’re not being unreasonable to be concerned. Your twenties are supposed to be for going out dancing and drinking and exploring your sexual freedom – they’re for discovering who you are!” And I have similar thoughts to what you’ve expressed here. What if “who you are” is someone who doesn’t enjoy nightclubs and drinking, and your idea of sexual freedom is to be free to NOT have unusual sex with people you hardly know?
“I like to be indoors (or outdoors in a very specific temperature range), I do not like animals touching me and I think kissing a dog on the mouth is disgusting.” OMG, same (except that I don’t have a problem with cats touching me). My kids always want me to play outside with them, and I just…don’t enjoy it. It’s always too bright or too hot or too cold. And I am decidedly NOT a dog person, because dogs are always getting in my personal space and shedding and drooling.
I knew I wanted to marry my husband when we started dating at 17; he felt the same -- we quietly dated until 24/25 (when we got married) and didn't let out a peep about marriage those first 3-5 years, because people would have thought we were insane. (especially my secular family -- his catholic family would have been far more accepting). No one writes movies about atheist families whose daughters rebel and happily settle down, stop seeing psychiatrists, convert to catholicism, and start saving up for a farm. We aren't very interesting, I guess.
My husband and I started dating in high school, but we didn’t get married until I was 26 and he was 27. Luckily I’m from a family in which my parents, three of my dad’s siblings, and my mom’s sister all met their spouses in (Catholic) high school, so no one thought we were too crazy.
On a recent the Argument podcast Jerusalem Demsas (who I really like to be clear) made a casual reference about how it would be bad for more women in their early to mid twenties to have kids, and it has really stuck with me.
I didn’t have kids until I was in my thirties and I think that’s perfectly fine timing for many people but the idea that it is an actively *bad* choice to have a kid in your early twenties, and something that society should discourage, being so casually dropped by smart reasonable people all the time freaks me out.
A couple of my husband’s cousins have had babies as married women in their early-to-mid twenties. One is active military and one is a dental hygienist, so they don’t have college degrees but they’re working in trained positions. It seems to be going pretty well for them. The military one is 28 with three kids.
My husband’s grandmother, still alive at 92, had her first baby (my husband’s mom) when she was 21. It’s nice that my kids are old enough that even if she died today, they’d still have lasting memories of her. My great-grandparents were all dead when I was born, except for one great-grandfather who died when I was two.
That's wild. I met my husband at 21 and we were married within the year... most of my friends thought I was crazy, but I had known I just wanted to get married and have kids since I was like 12. Some people know what they want but apparently it's not socially acceptable to want a "boring" stable married life at 21, lol.
I'm convinced this is the pathway from left or liberal to Trump. Free spirit/be yourself sounds vaguely lefty, and it takes you to "do your own research" and then to conspiracy theory. More broadly, be yourself, don't worry about what others think is inherently selfish and entitled, which is, to borrow their stupid phrase and use it better, cultural Trumpism.
I used to say "I don't like fun" which obviously wasn't what I meant. I meant "what you find fun, I find miserable." Dancing is a good example. I like to dance. I have a lesson tonight, and I go dancing every Thursday. And dancing is only good if it's a flow experience, you can't be thinking about where everything belongs and actually enjoy yourself. But put me on a dance floor and ask me to improvise without structure - absolutely not. I will do the waltz. Foxtrot. Cha cha. Rumba. Anything with a basic structure I can rely on.
(I laughed at your mention of a normal Salsa - I don't like Salsa precisely because I think it's too free-spirited. Plus too much hip. I stop at bachata.)
I think it’s in *The Sun Also Rises* that a character (about to go out on a binge or just back from one) says “happy people don’t have to have fun.” I think of that a lot.
Free spirit hippies are definitely right wing coded these days. The left are all believe the science COVID booster takers while the right embraced do your own research and drinking unpasteurized milk.
I say this as a 59-year-old baseball fan who loves hot dogs and won't sweat the occasional mustard fail: It is precisely because you are yourself that I enjoy reading your writing.
One of my wife and my best moments of mutual love was when a group of our friends planned a camping trip during Covid in the middle of summer 2020 in Wisconsin and we both emphatically agreed we’d rather die of Covid then go camping. We got a little bit of shit for it, but then we heard it ended up being 90+ degrees and the bugs were terrible and nobody could sleep and we went to a nice dinner instead and cheered our mutual genius.
I do not remotely understand the appeal of camping. My family was not into it at all. I went once at age 23 or so with some friends just to see, and I indeed had very little enjoyment. Never again am I gonna pay to have less comfort!
I think the question of what the self is has always been fairly fraught to me. I don't think there is a meaningful separation between my "self," my neurodivergence (in my case ASD/ADHD instead of OCD), my various behaviors (up to and including the ways I lie to myself about what I want and work to cover it up in front of others). My "self" is a container in which I find all of these things.
I have grown more comfortable in and adept at navigating my self when I have tried less to reject any one of those parts, and have at least been honest with my self (to the best of my ability) about their presence. Like I think that trying too hard to be the kind of person who isn't constantly introspecting and worrying about this would be as much of a pretense as when i let that part of my self lead me into pretending I don't also have e.g. sexual desire or material comfort needs
The short version is that a large chunk of my personal growth in the last couple years has just been really internalizing "in all things, seek first honesty" as a personal maxim
On the one hand, it's true that some of us who are living quiet lives don't really have a flamboyant dancer inside trying to escape. On the other hand, it's good to be open to discomfort and scary things. I'm not talking about random drug use, I mean learning to tolerate discomfort that allows you to enter situations where you can learn, grow, or give to others. Pema Chodron writes, "The interesting thing is that the more willing you are to step out of your comfort zone, the more comfortable you feel in your life. Situations that used to arouse fear and nausea become easier to relax in. On the other hand, if you stay in your comfort zone all the time, it shrinks…And the older you get, the more threatened you feel. Things that didn't bother you when you were thirty or forty can make you very uncomfortable when you are seventy or eighty." (from Welcoming the Unwelcome).
I think this wise. Important to know, and to be, yourself and no need to be a fake tomboy (reminds me of the “cool girl” monologue from Gone Girl). But there is quite a bit of equivocating between “able to tolerate mild discomfort to enjoy things, like hiking or a baseball game” and “enjoys group sex on mushrooms” in this article!
yeah I was a bit confused about how being okay with a dog licking you becomes group sex in a lake house :D
Thanks for making me laugh!
The problem isn't that you have to like being licked by a dog. It's that when you start running your life in a way that prioritizes never being in a situation where you might get licked by one, you start limiting yourself and the people around you. Especially your kids. Ditto for many kinds of discomfort.
I am honestly a bit weirded out by the "people who like dogs are outre and not priggish, girly rule followers" discourse. Doesn't every president except trump have a dog. I thought having dogs was the peak of normie behavior :) being afraid or disliking dogs is fine, but like that's not normie in the western world. To like pets or dogs =/= being a hippie weirdo. The girliest girls have had dogs and loved dogs. Marilyn Monroe had dogs, Grace Kelly had dogs. Its weird to see the world now being divided into dog lovers and dog haters when the modern western world was never like that.
And I agree about it imposing weird artificial limits, especially on your kids. Most people dont *like* being licked by dogs. They allow it. Or they are okay with it. Becuase dogs do that and to be around dogs is to let them do that occasionally. My dog once chewed through my apple cable when he was a young puppy and anxious. I did not LOVE that. Or even LIKE that. I just allowed it. What do you want me to do? Take him to the back and shoot him?
It’s not a feminine/masculine thing (the original Mark is not feminine at all) although I guess in my case it always felt like my kind of prissy-ness was associated with being a girly girly. But loving dogs is a very gender neutral thing, and I would say the same of being grossed out by dog slobber.
Thank you for clarifying. I see you more as a Monica from friends. Very feminine clearly but also high maintenance. But Rachel and Phoebe are also feminine though Rachel is the infamous “cool girl”
“Doesn't every president except trump have a dog.”
I got curious and looked it up. Trump is the only president in modern (or “modern”) times to not have a dog, but several of the early presidents didn’t, and Polk and Andrew Johnson had no pets at all.
Dogs are definitely normie-coded. “Look, Jane. See Spot. See Spot run.”
I consider trump not being a dog guy and refusing to get a dog, like Obama did, to be his biggest red flag because that is how normie it is to have a dog.
I am afraid to see how many things the puppy has chewed up while I have been reading and commenting here. I'd better give her some love….
Men can hate dogs too. I certainly do!
Most of the people I know who hate dogs are men lol. They think it’s too maternal to like dogs or animals 😭
This is a side note but despite being super feminine Marilyn Monroe always codes pretty rough and tumble to me. Like Lorelei from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would absolutely be game for a challenging hike or sailing or whatever if it could somehow lead to diamonds.
I *love* Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Lorelai would probably climb a whole mountain if there were diamonds at the top. 😁
Exactly. I am a big R romantic, literally start crying at sad movies or romantic movies or even ads with like sweet family dynamics, I hate statistics, I never understand CHH’s many graphs and I love long dangly earrings and painting my nails, I like staying at fancy hotels and never went hiking, am I not feminine because I also love dogs and have been licked on the face and mouth by my dogs over the years? I realized at some point of reading that CHH is conflating being high maintenance with the idea of "hyper feminine".
There is an episode of Friends where they all decide that Monica is more high maintenance than Rachel, but would anyone call Rachel not hyper feminine because she is chill with dogs and animals and knows to sail?
One of the most feminine women I know is very much the cool girl who is pretty rough and tumble, goes hiking and sailing and can still turn up in a silk dress she fished out of her rucksack for a dinner.
Dogs think cat shit is a delicious treat. Keep their filthy mouths away from me.
Yeah the equating both those levels of things is a vibe.
To be fair group sex on mushrooms is probably a great time
I think about this a lot with respect to people who don’t have kids. It’s not to say you can’t continue to stretch out of your comfort zone as adults without kids, but kids certainly force you to! I feel like a lot of the middle aged and up people I know without kids have hardened into these people who must always have their coffee at 8:06am and their nap at 2:03pm and will only stay at Marriotts (don’t even mention an Airbnb much less a hostel!) whereas kid parents (in general) are more used to just going with the flow and having to adapt to whatever age/stage they’re in.
I think it depends on people's underlying temperaments. The people who are willing to stretch in the first place, parenthood stretches them more and they become more adaptable. In turn, they raise adaptable kids who can sleep in a different bed or eat different food. Yeah, I know there's inborn temperament and some kids have anxiety or tactile sensitivity or other issues, but still, their kids are more adaptable than they would have been had they been raised by other parents who didn't push them into uncomfortable situations.
But there's another whole subset of people who constrict their lives when they have kids and disappear into their tightly structured family bubble where they can't do this or that because it's the kids' nap time or the kids won't eat this.
That's usually only for like the first two years of the child's life. Beyond that, you can't really stay away from life, unless you have some anxiety issues that would keep you away from life anyway. And even so, you end up having to do things that are beyond yourself, like having to rock a baby to sleep, or watch baby shark a thousand times, or go on a merry-go-round. Even the constricting life is usually something outside their comfort zone and they are happy to be done with it once that phase is done.
But I still think the constricted version with kids is more flexible than the no kids version of their lives would have been (given the underlying temperament)
I think it depends. I have seen chill up for anything types become more limited in response to having anxious kids. Instead of trying to push through and gradually widen their kids' circle of comfort, they constricted their own lives. I found it very sad.
True, good point
"if you stay in your comfort zone all the time, it shrinks…And the older you get, the more threatened you feel. Things that didn't bother you when you were thirty or forty can make you very uncomfortable when you are seventy or eighty."
The median age of the typical American has risen from 30 to 40 since 1980 and is increasing ever more still. You basically described a hugely key component for trends in music and movies and the most important underlying component of why political and policy trends have happened the way they have the last 25 years.
Specifically, more than any other cultural phenomenon since 1950, pop music has revolved around the new and appealing to the young. I suspect the significant decline in new music getting mass appeal is very related to the rising median age and what you just described.
This put the finger on the thing that kind of didn't work for me about this post.*
*The other being that it came across as some "grass is greener" idealization that women who are more rebellious and free-spirited and tomboyish don't get pressured to change basically everything about themselves.
I love *Peep Show* and have always related to Mark. His rant to Jez about how global capital is the only reason he can be a hippie burnout is something I think about semi frequently.
I haven’t seen the show, but I constantly think about that concept (if I understand what you’re saying). I consider myself to be very liberal (supporting more redistribution, believing that people don’t usually “deserve” what happens to them - good or bad, etc), but - the fact remains that every single thing about my life (up to and including both this particular Substack and Substack itself) would be impossible without the wealth generated by global capitalism and the environmental destruction that comes along with it.
Relatedly: the people I know who think All Cops Are Bastards would clearly be outraged if they got burgled.
I've never seen Peep Show, but I have seen the same actors on That Mitchell and Webb Look.
I mean, this in of itself is not such a contradiction - nothing would be possible without the circumstances which brought it to being (for example, there wouldn't have been a French revolution to get rid of the monarchy without the centralization created by the very same monarchy). I think there is bigger contradiction: Hippies, although rejecting capitalism, never had the potential, nor had any serious attempt, to create an alternative to it. They were far to individualistic and hedonistic for that.
I think the distinction is between whether you are doing either one - being a hippie free spirit or a prissy straight - from love or from fear. The behaviors of both can be identical, you have to figure out for yourself which one is you. Being overly self controlling and having no boundaries can both happen from fear. Being driven by fear isn’t in itself bad (sometimes fear is legit!) but sometimes (especially if a lot of things in ones life are driven by fear) leads to feelings of resentment, reaction, blaming others, controlling behavior.
Spot on! I’m an uptight person with OCD who has my preferences and tendencies which I don’t feel necessary changing, but for a lot of contexts my uptightness was stemming from fear and anxiety and not wanting to be uncomfortable, and pushing myself to do the thing anyway led to some nerve-wrecking but wonderful experiences and friendships I wouldn’t have had otherwise. “Loosen up” is just blanket advice that is really meant for people who need that push sometimes. It’s been worth it for me to figure out for each context what my uprightness is stemming from, and get better at figuring this out.
On a related note, exposure therapy for OCD is aimed at tolerating the discomfort and intrusive thoughts while doing the thing anyway, but it doesn’t make any judgement calls like “the person who is finally doing the thing is actually the REAL AUTHENTIC you”, which is also helpful!
Self proclaimed “stick in the mud” here. I went to a liberal arts college in PORTLAND. There were nude drum circles, lots of people crashing out on drugs at Reed’s annual Renn Fayre, white people with dreds who went to special hairdressers and used special shampoos to dry them out, and lots of shrooms. Suffice it to say, by graduating I moved out of Portland within 48 hours to a red state. This post is also *me* 💯
I'm not some type who thinks people can't wear whatever hairstyle they want but man do white people with dreads get like a caution flag from me. Like I feel they are going to be the most insufferable person you've ever met.
Yeah, it's a question of what sort of person wants that look to begin with.
Reminds me of a bit from a Rick Gervais skit where he said that he planned to do a politics module at university, but when he went to sign up, saw that three of the five people queued up ahead of him were wearing berets. So he didn't sign up, because "I decided I didn't want to spend a whole semester with, as we used to call them at the time, 'cunts'."
It's the most high maintenance way to signal being natural and low maintenance I can possibly imagine
Not quite the same, but somewhere along the way, I realized my aesthetic did not at all match my politics. I went to a liberal arts school, William & Mary. It's a state school so very much doubt my college was as "hippieish" as your school, but there was definitely a hippiesh element if that makes sense. So given my politics and where I went to school, makes sense my social life was very connected to people who people who love going to festivals, dressing a certain way and having particular music tastes. And that's...just not me. I like dressing well (I wear tailored shirts and cuff links to work when it's not summer), I love sports and happy has a clam watching football all day on a Sunday, love me some steak...heck if I'm really honest with myself, the type of girl I was into in my younger days was not particular "alternative". There are of course a hundred reasons why I might have struck out with a variety of girls when I was younger, but I do kind of suspect that in a few cases given the social milieu I ran in, my whole aesthetic was not that appealing to the type of women I would be often meeting or hanging out with.
An example what I'm getting at. I've noted before the gay marriage debate was a pretty formative part of my politics given my teenage and college days were early 2000s. Feel proud to have been pro gay marriage before it got close to 50% support nationwide. And in recent times, I've found the attacks on stuff like drag queens absolutely abhorrent. I know there is some tough "edge case" stuff around this issue right now (like the sports question), but feel pretty confident to say that a lot of current attacks on stuff like drag queens circa 2022 and transgender people now is driven by a lot of rank bigotry. All a big run up to say...I don't find drag queens, or lip synching or basically anything you can watch on RuPaul's drag race particularly entertaining. Like an appreciate the time and effort that goes into it, how amazing some costumes look and the genuinely impressive dancing. But it's just...not something that is me or I find all that entertaining generally.
“This is the sort of thing people do when they’re having a good time!” - Mark, to himself while doing drugs at a bowling alley
Yes!!
I don't have any OCD tendencies. I have also never, not even once in my life, felt anything but ridiculous when I've gone to a club and attempted to "dance." So I don't think there's necessarily any connection between being terminally uptight and OCD.
I related to this quite a bit. I am an IS TJ on Myers Briggs, and spontaneity often can be stressful for me. I have a Google sheets freezer inventory, and for my wedding had an event plan with 15 minute increments tracking vendor deliveries, when various people needed to arrive at the church, etc. It worked beautifully, and we had no major issues with the ceremony and reception. I married someone who, while capable and responsible, is much more spontaneous and relaxed. If you've read Calvin and Hobbes, we have a bit of a Calvin and Susie dynamic. While we were wedding planning, I kept saying, "We should do a day-by-day itinerary for our honeymoon." And my husband (then fiance), kept saying, "Yeah, that's a great idea." But somehow it didn't happen (we had a short engagement, so I was pretty focused on the wedding planning instead of the honeymoon.) So the detailed itinerary never came together besides the hotel reservation.
The day after the wedding, we were driving to our destination, and we spontaneously stopped at a cheese store, and then at a scenic hike, with no worries about itinerary. It was great! And each day we woke up and said, "Okay, what do we want to do today?" It was very relaxing, and my husband admitted he had been stalling on the itinerary on purpose so we could be more spontaneous.
Over the past few years, I think we have balanced each other out, where we can each appreciate the benefits of planning and spontaneity. (As I imagine Calvin and Susie would have if they had gotten married as adults.) And, on our last vacation, I was the one who said we should pull over and stop to see a museum off the highway that we hadn't been planning to visit. I think many couples have someone who is more structured and someone who is more spontaneous, and if there is respect for the benefits of both approaches, this can be healthy.
And then there's me, reading this story and worrying about the cheese not getting into the refrigerator because of the hike.
Get the manchego. That stuff will keep at room temperature for multiple days on the trail.
We had a cooler with ice packs, and it was a fall wedding, so it was pretty cool outside.
I loved this article and I completely relate. I think America is a particularly trying country for the proud fuddy duddy, because we culturally enshrine rebellion and transgression. I also think our obsession with youth culture (often sustained by people in well in their thirties and older) and the idea of being cool are bound up in all this.
The people I know who are most into this line of thinking ironically spend a lot of energy editing themselves to perform some version of authenticity or coolness they’ve gotten from outside themselves.
Non-American who used to live in the US here. Walking into a Walmart in Florida, I can’t say I ever felt assaulted by coolness, rebellion and/or transgression. Youth culture yes, but that can very much exist within a very restrictive, narrow framework.
Depends on what the “rebellion” is against, I guess. If you’re rebelling against Target-ites who would rather drink a gallon of glue than let their children in the same room as a firearm, Walmart is your place. 😂
Before Amazon came along and said “hold my beer”, Walmart was notorious for treating their employees poorly and hurting mom-and-pop stores. Other than that I was pretty oblivious to the Target vs Walmart culture wars, and would just go to whichever was closest.
Possibly the most American thing I ever did was to get a haircut *and* an oil change during the same Walmart visit.
A lot of this reminds me of my mom who like you has some kind of ocd and is diagonised for anxiety (recently in her 50s). Because she was undiagnosed and not even remotely as self-aware as you are, growing up with her was like to see an extreme comfort at home and with order and rules but complete meltdown when the smallest rule changed or when we went out and something didn't happen according to plan. But it wasn't like the house was not messy, it was just her mess and she knew where things were and that was okay lol
The other people's smell thing is so funny especially because my mom always thought everyone smelled (Well duh? humans smell?) and was the only person in the world who made me feel like my mouth was a rotting museum of all the food I had ever eaten no matter how many times I brushed. I refused to brush after every meal and she was pretty upset about that. Funnily enough I grew up and forgot all that nonsense and then met a friend who clearly had some sort of ocd and had been living on his own in the boondocks for a while. Guess what, he thought my mouth smelled and his girlfriends' too apparently and demanded that both of us go get checked (we did, nothing was wrong). He insisted that we permanently keep chewing mints when talking to him which was so funny, but a couple of years later suddenly the smell has apparently gone and he has forgotten we smell bad in the mouth. sometimes the smell is just other humans and you are not used to other humans or you are hyper-sensitive to the existence of another human :)
Your friend sounds like me (although I never went to the extent of demanding that everyone get checked or keep mints with them at all times). I couldn’t stop fixating on all the smells around me at some point. The only times this has subsided for me is when I am in a very, very relaxed state and I’ve gotten somewhat used to them
yes I think that is the case for my friend. he is now used to both his girlfriend and me being around often (I visit him once or twice a year typically) and now he is very relaxed about being around us. I could tease him about why the mouth smell disappeared without me doing anything but I am just glad I don’t have to keep eating mints anymore :D
I am that dreaded normie, a middle aged white lady who lives in the suburbs with two kids and a husband. And you know what? I freaking love it.
I second this.
As someone who is very straight-edge, I have a deep and abiding affinity for Mark's triumphant early-morning "Turn the music down, stop smoking your drugs, I’m making tea and toast for Sophie, I’m putting on Radio 4, everything’s normal." That said, Jez's highly relatable fanaticism around things feeling Christmassy enough and Mark's corresponding apathy feels like a seasonal role-reversal of priggishness that's somehow still very in character...
I’ve mentioned in past comments that I lurk on Mumsnet, and one of the reoccurring themes on that site is women who are concerned that their daughters are getting married too young. This never means ages 18-22; it’s always daughters who are at least 23 and have gotten engaged.
Every time one of these posts appears, several people will say something like, “You’re not being unreasonable to be concerned. Your twenties are supposed to be for going out dancing and drinking and exploring your sexual freedom – they’re for discovering who you are!” And I have similar thoughts to what you’ve expressed here. What if “who you are” is someone who doesn’t enjoy nightclubs and drinking, and your idea of sexual freedom is to be free to NOT have unusual sex with people you hardly know?
“I like to be indoors (or outdoors in a very specific temperature range), I do not like animals touching me and I think kissing a dog on the mouth is disgusting.” OMG, same (except that I don’t have a problem with cats touching me). My kids always want me to play outside with them, and I just…don’t enjoy it. It’s always too bright or too hot or too cold. And I am decidedly NOT a dog person, because dogs are always getting in my personal space and shedding and drooling.
I knew I wanted to marry my husband when we started dating at 17; he felt the same -- we quietly dated until 24/25 (when we got married) and didn't let out a peep about marriage those first 3-5 years, because people would have thought we were insane. (especially my secular family -- his catholic family would have been far more accepting). No one writes movies about atheist families whose daughters rebel and happily settle down, stop seeing psychiatrists, convert to catholicism, and start saving up for a farm. We aren't very interesting, I guess.
I’d see that movie! 😁
My husband and I started dating in high school, but we didn’t get married until I was 26 and he was 27. Luckily I’m from a family in which my parents, three of my dad’s siblings, and my mom’s sister all met their spouses in (Catholic) high school, so no one thought we were too crazy.
On a recent the Argument podcast Jerusalem Demsas (who I really like to be clear) made a casual reference about how it would be bad for more women in their early to mid twenties to have kids, and it has really stuck with me.
I didn’t have kids until I was in my thirties and I think that’s perfectly fine timing for many people but the idea that it is an actively *bad* choice to have a kid in your early twenties, and something that society should discourage, being so casually dropped by smart reasonable people all the time freaks me out.
A couple of my husband’s cousins have had babies as married women in their early-to-mid twenties. One is active military and one is a dental hygienist, so they don’t have college degrees but they’re working in trained positions. It seems to be going pretty well for them. The military one is 28 with three kids.
My husband’s grandmother, still alive at 92, had her first baby (my husband’s mom) when she was 21. It’s nice that my kids are old enough that even if she died today, they’d still have lasting memories of her. My great-grandparents were all dead when I was born, except for one great-grandfather who died when I was two.
That's wild. I met my husband at 21 and we were married within the year... most of my friends thought I was crazy, but I had known I just wanted to get married and have kids since I was like 12. Some people know what they want but apparently it's not socially acceptable to want a "boring" stable married life at 21, lol.
I'm convinced this is the pathway from left or liberal to Trump. Free spirit/be yourself sounds vaguely lefty, and it takes you to "do your own research" and then to conspiracy theory. More broadly, be yourself, don't worry about what others think is inherently selfish and entitled, which is, to borrow their stupid phrase and use it better, cultural Trumpism.
I used to say "I don't like fun" which obviously wasn't what I meant. I meant "what you find fun, I find miserable." Dancing is a good example. I like to dance. I have a lesson tonight, and I go dancing every Thursday. And dancing is only good if it's a flow experience, you can't be thinking about where everything belongs and actually enjoy yourself. But put me on a dance floor and ask me to improvise without structure - absolutely not. I will do the waltz. Foxtrot. Cha cha. Rumba. Anything with a basic structure I can rely on.
(I laughed at your mention of a normal Salsa - I don't like Salsa precisely because I think it's too free-spirited. Plus too much hip. I stop at bachata.)
I can definitely imagine an episode where an American tourist gives Jez a MAGA hat and he goes all in...
I think it’s in *The Sun Also Rises* that a character (about to go out on a binge or just back from one) says “happy people don’t have to have fun.” I think of that a lot.
That is so good!
Free spirit hippies are definitely right wing coded these days. The left are all believe the science COVID booster takers while the right embraced do your own research and drinking unpasteurized milk.
I say this as a 59-year-old baseball fan who loves hot dogs and won't sweat the occasional mustard fail: It is precisely because you are yourself that I enjoy reading your writing.
One of my wife and my best moments of mutual love was when a group of our friends planned a camping trip during Covid in the middle of summer 2020 in Wisconsin and we both emphatically agreed we’d rather die of Covid then go camping. We got a little bit of shit for it, but then we heard it ended up being 90+ degrees and the bugs were terrible and nobody could sleep and we went to a nice dinner instead and cheered our mutual genius.
I do not remotely understand the appeal of camping. My family was not into it at all. I went once at age 23 or so with some friends just to see, and I indeed had very little enjoyment. Never again am I gonna pay to have less comfort!
I think the question of what the self is has always been fairly fraught to me. I don't think there is a meaningful separation between my "self," my neurodivergence (in my case ASD/ADHD instead of OCD), my various behaviors (up to and including the ways I lie to myself about what I want and work to cover it up in front of others). My "self" is a container in which I find all of these things.
I have grown more comfortable in and adept at navigating my self when I have tried less to reject any one of those parts, and have at least been honest with my self (to the best of my ability) about their presence. Like I think that trying too hard to be the kind of person who isn't constantly introspecting and worrying about this would be as much of a pretense as when i let that part of my self lead me into pretending I don't also have e.g. sexual desire or material comfort needs
The short version is that a large chunk of my personal growth in the last couple years has just been really internalizing "in all things, seek first honesty" as a personal maxim