#29: On shit-talking, clickbait, and politics (in bed)

Five reader questions, five answers

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Good morning and welcome to Dear Baby.

Today I’ll be answering these five question:

1. Did you have any serious hesitations about being a public figure?

2. What’s your opinion on different political leanings in relationships? Can it work?

3. I’ve been writing my whole life but lately I just cannot make myself sit down and write because I know it won’t be good enough. Please send help?

4. Why do you think nuance doesn’t translate well in online writing? Is its absence negatively affecting a generation of young readers?

5. What do you love the most and hate the most about living in New York City? If you had to live somewhere else, what would you choose?

Thank you for asking me questions! Let’s get started.

On being a public figure

“Did you have any serious hesitations about becoming a public figure? I'm curious if you ever had a conscious check-in with yourself about whether putting yourself and your thoughts out there was something you wanted and were comfortable with, and if so, what that dialogue was like.”

I didn’t hesitate before I became a semi-public figure, probably because I didn’t exactly set out to do that, but I definitely hesitate now. Especially since striking out on my own and learning how it feels to endure the burden of public critique alone. I think some people are more suited for it. Their skin is thicker, less porous, or they’re energized by conflict. I’m not like that at all. The sensitivity inherent to my work is double-edged.

There’s this pervasive belief that if you enjoy the perks of an audience, you must endure listening to strangers talk shit about you—that this is part of the exchange: clout for shit-talk. It’s certainly been true in my experience. And even though what I’ve received has been mild compared to others, sometimes it weighs so heavy it doesn’t feel worth it. Most pressingly, it makes me pessimistic about my ability to connect with others, which is unmooring to me as a writer, if not totally inhibitive. Without that belief, everything feels pointless. It’s a slippery slope to depression. I know there’s more to public figurehood than critique, but it’s the only part I seriously struggle with.

The other day, Avi and I were walking past a cafe in Manhattan when he asked me if I heard that. “Heard what?” I asked. “Those girls,” he said, “they were talking about you.” He hadn’t heard the exact words, only the tone, which was critical, and a snippet: “I want to give that girl…” He missed the rest. At first I wondered what they said—checked my black pants and navy sweater, imagined how I looked to someone who didn’t know me or didn’t like the look of me. I want to give that girl a piece of my mind! I want to give that girl a haircut. I want to give that girl a hug? A moment later I felt something else: a flood of relief that I’d never know. That I wouldn’t spend even one minute considering whether she’d been right or rude, building a defense against a stranger, fighting off an aimless fog of animus about something so fleeting. I wouldn’t give it any energy at all.

This is what having a following has taught me: You’re not supposed to hear people talk shit about you. As my mom would say, it’s bad for your spirit. Shit-talk is meant to stay between a small group of people who are bored and feel things and want to connect through the age-old bonding agent that is gossip. I’m not anti-gossip. I love gossip! I am starved for it in quarantine! But gossip is never really about the subject of the gossip, it’s about the people doing it. Through it they are seeking to connect through shared emotions or values. They are, as anthropologist David Sloan Wilson would call it, “defining group membership.” Obviously gossip has its limits. When it becomes an organizing principle of a friendship or community or point of view, it tends to erode rather than support our ability to organize. It can make people cruel and dispassionate. But I do think a lot of gossip is just a form of catharsis. An opportunity for self-reflection. A way of metabolizing social mores and establishing our places within them. What it isn’t is legitimate critical feedback, and this distinction is important to me, because online it’s often lost.

Sometimes it’s the words themselves that distinguish shit-talk from critique, but sometimes it’s just the tone, context, delivery method, or relationship between the speaker and the subject. Despite how much feedback is given online all the time about everything and everyone, I think a fairly small percentage of it is genuine critique, and the rest is just shit-talk. Blatant shit-talk or shit-talk presented as concern or gossip dressed up as moral policing. And like I said, gossip has its purpose, especially privately, but I don’t think that purpose is to make its subject improve. And online, in the form of negative comments, even less so. This is where I so often get it wrong.

I read: “Yikes. Quality starting to dwindle. And you want people to pay for this?”—a recent Maybe Baby comment from someone with no face and no name—and I feel as if it were coming from a long-time editor. It doesn’t matter that I understand intellectually that I shouldn’t, that I don’t know this person’s story or what’s going on with them today, or that a lot of people would disagree. It matters that it confirms my worst fears as a self-employed writer: I am only as good as my most recent essay; I will inevitably disappoint people; I am not worth anyone’s time or money; I am not good enough. I think the person who left that comment knew it would cut deep, and that was part of its impetus. Actually, they deleted it fairly quickly. Stupidly, I will never forget it.

This is what I mean when I say I’m not sure I’m cut out for being a public figure. I’m too receptive, too ready to absorb, too willing to consider whether someone who simply sees things differently or wants to hurt me actually knows the truth about me, and that I in turn am blind to myself, or have been wrong all along. The first lesson I learned about critical feedback as a kid was that you’re not going to agree with it at first, and that’s why it’s worth considering. But to apply this approach to shit-talk—often exaggerated for effect or emotional release—is to accelerate toward the event horizon of self-destruction. Online, where it’s increasingly difficult to parse the difference between gossip, critique, trolling, posturing, and cruelty, the stakes are impossible. You’re either improving or annihilating yourself. And until you’ve toed that line, you don’t really understand how it feels. I know that because I remember living more privately and thinking people were too sensitive. But I was underestimating the strong social imperative humans experience to belong.

This was a long and specific answer to a broad question. But it’s a persistent topic in therapy for me and I still haven’t figured it out. I don’t mind opening up to people I don’t know—at least not for the obvious reasons people might shy away, like privacy or shame. What I struggle with is the medium of the internet, whereby publishing your work means enduring a steady stream of critical feedback from strangers with no faces and no names, bad days, bad moods, bad takes and all. It’s in conflict with my personality, which is open to new ideas and self-critical as a rule, and also my driving force, which is to share, understand, and connect. To harden myself would be to lose something, too.

I wouldn’t trade my job as a result of this conflict—I’ve never been so grateful for anything as I am for the chance to write like this, and the good parts are gratifying beyond any work I’ve ever done. (They can also be fun: I’ve written before about the more material perks.) But it undoubtedly impacts my career decisions and mental health in ways I haven’t fully grasped yet, and undoubtedly makes me shy away from pursuing a larger audience.

On love and politics

“What’s your opinion on different political leanings in relationships? I’ve always been very outspoken about my political views (I’m on the revolutionary end of left and started attending political demonstrations as a teen) whereas my boyfriend is, I would say, moderate. He’s by no means a Trump supporter, and a lot comes from him not being as politically engaged (he is very open to debate and has actually changed his mind a few times after talking to me), yet I can’t help but feel our differences, even if they’re not extreme, might lead to issues as we enter an increasingly uncertain future.”

This is a valid question and I’ve gotten several different versions of it. I think there are infinite reasons two people might have different politics. They could have grown up in different environments, been treated differently by authority, read different publications, gone through different struggles. They could have different priorities, values, modes of communication. Their natures and ways of seeing the world could be so different they may as well be speaking different languages. They may start out similar and then grow in different directions, as beliefs so often do (and in surprising ways). So my view on whether people with different political leanings can be in a healthy relationship is that it depends on where those differences are stemming from, what both people want from the relationship, and whether those two things can be compatible.

You mentioned that your boyfriend isn’t as politically engaged as you. Why is that? And is the answer a problem for you, or not really? My sense is that something about his approach bugs you, and that’s why you’re writing me, so maybe a more specific question is: Why does it bug you? And when you answer that, ask why you feel that way. Do that thing to yourself that a five-year-old does when they ask why over and over until you inexplicably reach an essential truth that feels momentous or like not that big of a deal.

Mom why is there a fly in the house?
Because it came in through the window.
Why?
Because it was looking for food.
Why?
Because it was hungry.
Why?
Because all creatures get hungry.
Why?
Because they need energy.
Why?
Because life is one long merry-go-round of seeking energy and expending it and then we die.

Do that!

Setting politics aside for a second, there will always be differences between romantic partners, because there are differences between everyone. People tend to get platitudinous about this; they say opposites attract or we’re the same person. And when the inevitable differences grate on them: nobody’s perfect or listen to your gut. But what I think these notions fail to account for are the idiosyncrasies of every person and relationship. Sometimes opposites attract because those individuals like to be challenged by their loved ones, or because their opposing traits mash up in strange and energizing ways. Sometimes people don’t want that at all. Sometimes their differences are irreconcilable. The point isn’t about rules or what’s right for someone else, but about individuals recognizing what they personally need and want.

I would personally struggle to commit to someone with different politics from mine because politics play a big role in my life and perspective, and I want them to play a big role in my relationship and decisions. Avi and I have slightly different approaches to politics (he tends to think more historically and narratively, whereas I focus more on the present social impacts), but they lead us to similar places, and we enrich each other’s perspectives through our differences. We spend a lot of time discussing politics and learning together and I’d be sad if we didn’t share that interest. But not everyone feels that way, or wants politics to be so present in their romantic lives, and I think that’s totally fine. Where you may run into trouble is when political differences become personal, as they often do, and start to impact how you behave around and advocate for other people. Depending on his flavor of disengagement, that may be hard to wave off.

But it sounds like your boyfriend is open to engaging with you on these topics and isn’t necessarily stubborn. I think that’s a really good sign that your conversations will evolve over time, especially if he knows they’re important to you. If you tend to be the more passionate one, it might be useful for you to ask more questions about his perspective so you can better understand it, then keep it in mind when you share things with him or seek out your own education. Creating a super safe space for both of you to share your fears, ignorance, or private thoughts might help move the conversation into new places. And if you get the sense, in the end, that your political leanings are based on a fundamental difference in worldview that will probably not radically change, the next question to ask yourself is if you’re okay with that.

I think every relationship comes with its challenges, and when we choose to commit to someone, we can often predict what some will be. That doesn’t mean we don’t all have the capacity to change, but in my experience the fundamentals tend to stick around in some form, and denying that (or assuming someone will change) is a shoddy framework on which to build. So I think you have to explore what’s at the root of this difference between you and your partner, and ask yourself if that’s in conflict with what you need to be fulfilled in a relationship, or whether you’re up to taking this particular challenge on in the first place.

On writing every day

“I’ve been writing my whole life but lately I just cannot make myself sit down and write. I keep seeing everyone saying YOU HAVE TO WRITE EVERY DAY but I feel so scared I’m never gonna be as good as 19-year-old me who published a damn book that I’ve just stopped writing altogether. Please send help???”

The other day, in the middle of reading Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, I did some quick math: the year the book was published minus her year of birth. The answer was 31. You could say I did that out of simple curiosity, or to place her ideas in a certain context, but the truth is I’d just read a really good paragraph, and needed to know whether I was still young enough to write that good of a paragraph at her age or if my ship had sailed. To come to the necessary conclusion, which is of course that my ship had sailed, I had to do some mental gymnastics, because actually, I’m 31 too, but I reasoned that if it was published when she was my age, she must have written these essays in her twenties. Ipso facto, my ship has sailed.

It’s funny and humiliating to spell these neuroses out. The internal logic doesn’t stand up to external scrutiny even a little bit. But that’s also what makes it useful: By saying my fears out loud, I’m forced to contend with their unlikeliness, absurdity, or toothlessness. This one—that I’m “behind” the career trajectory of a nationally beloved, award-winning author—is particularly absurd because it’s balancing on a stack of fallacies. The first is that art has more merit when it comes from someone young. The second is that human trajectories are linear and predictable enough to be compared. The third is that you should only pursue something you love if you’re just as good or better at it than other people. None of which I actually believe. They are simply the logical conclusion of a capitalist mindset that understands humanity through markets: productivity, potential, early adaptors, long-term market value, scarcity, competition. Resisting this brain poison takes consistent effort.

I say this because I’m sure you have at least a few unlikely, absurd, or toothless fears of your own that stop you from writing. Most of us are in competition with someone (even just our former selves) and don’t want to fuck it up and humiliate ourselves in front of other people. We pay lip service to the necessity of mistakes and the messiness of the creative process and then fail to internalize it ourselves. Aphorisms like WRITE EVERY DAY become passed around as a symbol of how to do it right—how to plug away like a good little worker—instead of just something that sometimes works for some people. Personally I’d go nuts if I wrote every day. What I need is free time and deadlines in some kind of mysterious dance with each other that I don’t completely understand. But it doesn’t really matter because it might not work for you anyway.

At the crux of the advice to write every day is the idea that you can’t get better at something unless you practice, and of course that’s true. Practice helps a lot. But you can also just do something poorly that you like to do, and never improve. That’s an option! Kind of a cool option, actually. My mom is awful at singing but sings all the time because it brings her joy, and I think that’s one of the purest expressions of creativity I can think of. But anyway, if you wrote a book at 19 that outcome seems unlikely. And if you’ve written all your life, my guess is that you get something out of it, so you have to decide how badly you want that thing (to express or understand yourself? to connect with others?) and whether it’s okay if you don’t become “good’ or commercially successful in the process of pursuing it. Unless what you get out of writing is money and fame (lol!), I’m willing to bet you are.

I’m putting it in simple terms because I find that verbalizing the twisted pathologies behind our biggest mental blocks is the fastest path to minimizing them. There’s almost always some kind of capitalistic fallacy keeping us from trying things, and rather than trying to stomach them with more capitalistic fallacies about productivity, I think it’s more useful to try to unravel them, or at least learn to live with them, acknowledging as often as possible that they don’t actually concern our wellbeing. 

On nuance

“Why do you think nuance doesn’t translate well in online writing? Is its absence negatively affecting a generation of young readers?” 

I think nuance does translate to online writing, but it just doesn’t perform very well. And “performance” matters a lot, because media is funded by ads, and brands won’t pay for those ads unless a lot of people are seeing them. The easiest way to get people to click is not nuance, but to appeal to their most libidinal instincts: anger, sex, joy, money, outrage, gossip. We ran into this at Man Repeller all the time while I was there. Some people demanded more thoughtful, nuanced, inclusive content, and we wanted to make it, too, but those stories often tanked. Horoscopes and celebrity gossip and shopping stories got the most clicks every time. It was depressing. This put our goals as writers and our leaders’ financial goals in conflict with each other. A lot of sites function like this. Good work is sacrificed at the altar of clickability and brand-friendliness. Headlines need to be hyperbolic enough and the takes spicy enough to get a snippet of people’s increasingly atomized attention. The result is outrage, division, and spectacle, the impact is a failing industry with a few rich people getting richer.

When work is funded by subscription rather than corporations, this shifts. Of course, even under a subscription model, performance matters. If you don’t have people reading, you can’t fund it. But when the customer you’re trying to please (the subscriber) is literally invested in the work, not just the virality, the creator’s goal starts to change. It becomes about making the writing feel genuinely valuable and worth people’s money, instead of making it capture people’s attention for half a second. I’m drawn to a gossipy headline just as much as the next person, but I’m unlikely to pay for a subscription to the NYPost. What I will pay for is something that I think genuinely improves my life and is important. The subscription model isn’t perfect. It has its own challenges—financial accessibility, barriers to entry, reaching new audiences, etc—but I think the exchange is far more ethical, mutually enriching, and friendly to nuance, which is better for everyone.

The vast majority of my subscribers still don’t pay for my newsletter. Maybe it’s not worth $5/month to them (in which case I still want to reach them) or maybe it is, but they don’t understand why they should pay for it. I don’t blame them at all! I still get a lot of content for free, too. It’s the status quo. But if working in new media taught me anything, it’s that this particular status quo, like most of modern America, is good for almost no one except corporations. We have to figure out another way to fund creative work and understand, as consumers, what we give up when we insist on everything being free.

I haven’t even gotten to the second part of your question! Is the lack of nuance negatively affecting a generation of young readers? I think the moralizing and flattening inherent to social media and internet discourse is poisoning all of us, not just younger generations. But I also think we’re all still capable of holding complex ideas in our heads, we’re just better at doing it in real life, or with better stimuli. Most recent generations have had their nuance-crushing advancements, too, whether it was telephones or cable TV or email, so I think it’s more useful to ask how we can invite more texture into technology (instead of insisting on ease as the ultimate virtue) and how we can make modern discourse less brand-focused and more human-centered. These challenges are obviously complicated and unwieldy, but I think awareness about how these mediums actually function combined with collective pressure to better fund and regulate them are good places to start. 

On New York

“What do you love the most and hate the most about living in NYC? If you had to live somewhere else outside of the US, what would you choose?”

The things I love and dread about New York are intrinsically linked, like the things I love and dread about life itself. Living here feels like living in a heavy-handed metaphor. Sometimes this is charming beyond belief, like when the seasons change like moods or unlikely characters make the best of friends. Other times it’s very dark, reminding you of the emptiness of careerism or how you can still be lonely in a crowded place. I think this is why writers who live in New York write about it incessantly. Life here feels so rich in metaphor you can’t help but try to capture it. The corniness is incidental. The sprawling city lit up like infinite possibility. Ugh! But to be fair, it did.

To get specific and corny myself: I love how big it is, and how much I haven’t seen of it yet. I love going to Central Park with Avi and the New York Times crossword and staying there until we finish. I love venturing out on a weekend morning with a tote and no plans whatsoever and coming home later that night having walked 16 miles, met 10 interesting people, and sat in three cafes I’ve never heard of. I love the cultural emphasis on reading. I love that there’s history on every corner. I love the people who lived here before me and made art about it, which I also love. I love that living here involves sacrifice—of money, of space, of time—and that people do it readily. I love getting drinks in weird bars with people I’ve never met and love immediately. Honestly, I love Show Time. I love the guy who’s always playing the saxophone in Washington Square park. I love how the five square blocks around my apartment always start to feel like a small town after awhile. I love the shitty, broken subway and all the cranky people riding it. I love the Looks, the eccentricity, the value placed on being different. I love that it’s a hub for art, community, and collective action. I love the non-biological families and the old couples who always sit on the same bench. I love the seasons and how they bring everyone in the city together, especially in the spring. I love the camaraderie inherent to loving a place that’s complicated, and getting to share that with an infinitely diverse group of characters, including the rats.

Most of the things I dread are endemic to America—the corruption, the poverty, the wealth gap, the seemingly unstoppable infiltration of big box stories and experiences designed for Instagram—which are concentrated and crystallized in a place as dense as New York. Sometimes I dread the pace, the social climbing, the way people so handily use each other. I dread the careerism and how consistently I have to fight off the desire to be accepted by certain people and institutions. At times I dread the insatiable hunger for trendiness even though I also kind of love that. I respect that New York doesn’t rest on its laurels or ever get too comfortable with itself, even if that means living here means constantly adapting.

This duality applies to everything. Days as thrillingly unpredictable as a round of roulette. Ambition as an energizing but aimless force. Discomfort—via trains, crowds, pace, chaos—you come to require because anything else feels like a temperate room, muscles atrophying, senses dulled, no more surprises. I think that’s why some people end up leaving even when nothing has really changed in a material sense: the reasons they used to love it are now the reasons they hate it. I haven’t said anything new here: I love and I hate that, too.

And if I could live anywhere else outside the US, it would have to be Tokyo.

Thanks for reading,
Haley

This month a portion of subscriber proceeds will be donated to Open Path Collective, a nationwide non-profit network dedicated to providing affordable therapy to those in need. 

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