Bait and Switch

[primeideal]

This is yet another "framework I turn over in my mind for a while, never have an excuse to write about, want to write a long and rambly book review, this will be a long and rambly digression, better make it its own post." As usual, I can't really talk about just one thing without a lot of digressions/tangents, but it fits together in my head. And a lot of it I've probably actually said before in different contexts, because they're long-term preoccupations, but I might have better ways of articulating it now than I did years or decades ago.

Also, I am absolutely not telling anyone to think this way or feel this way, I understand that it's not healthy. I'm trying to explain a neurosis that I already experience.

Sometimes, people express things like "it's so hard as a person who doesn't want a romantic/sexual relationship or kids, because society keeps trying to pressure me into doing that." And usually my (silent) reaction is, "that's too bad that that happened to you, but I guess we live in different societies, because nothing like that has ever happened to me." I feel very fortunate that I have parents and family that love me unconditionally and encourage me to follow my dreams, no matter what they are! Nobody around me ever says "oh, there must be something wrong with people who don't want [heteronormative] romance/sex/kids/etc." So I've never felt like I've failed to meet some standard in that way. However, in a few limited ways, I sometimes feel like there are narratives/tropes out there that present a possible false dichotomy, and that has the potential to cause problems.

What does it mean, "follow your dreams, no matter what they are"? I think in a lot of media, particularly media aimed at kids, there's a very diffuse trope I'll call the Quester. The Quester is often, but not always, a man. The Quester has a Quest. It doesn't need to be a physical item; sometimes, it involves being the best version of oneself they can be. Maybe they want religious truth. Or scientific knowledge. Or a sports star trying to win the big game. Or making peace where there was war. Or producing a beautiful piece of art or music. Some of these align with the pursuit of fame, but not always; sometimes it's enough to know that you did it, even if nobody else knows your name. Life isn't always easy for the Quester; sometimes they suffer greatly or have to sacrifice things that are less important. But, usually, after long journeys and effort, they achieve their Quest.

The Quester trope is correlated with a clear-cut, unambiguous worldview. Goodness is stronger than evil. Even when there is suffering, truth/art/glory will outshine even death. If this is a "Level One" philosophy, then unsurprisingly, there's also a Level Two. Level Two says: "the world does not work like that, and thank goodness!" Some works, whether they're aimed at adolescents themselves or adults, seem to take for granted that people undergo a radical reshift/realignment in adolescence, and break with a lot of the things they believed before. If you used to think that good would defeat evil, now you think, "good" and "evil" are all arbitrary so who cares. If you used to believe that sex outside marriage is wrong, now you think, God is dead but sex is a lot of fun so let's get it on. After all, once you've gone through puberty, you're definitely a raging ball of hormones with an urge to stick it to the man, right?

Now, I do think there's something to be said for gradual...if not disillusionment, per se, then focusing of goals as you come of age. A five-year-old might want to be an astronaut and a rock star and a ballplayer and the president, but a fifteen-year-old probably recognizes that most of these are impractical, certainly at the same time. At the same time, even if the scale of your dreams changes, the dreams themselves do not. Maybe you need to play in a garage band on the weekends to keep yourself sane amid the rat race. That's important, you shouldn't jettison it, even if you're not going to be on tour.

But then, it feels like, the "adult" synthesis of childhood idealism and adolescent cynicism is the Family Person. "Okay, so you don't have a magic portal fantasy, but you know what you can have? A significant other! You're not going to compose a glorious sonata, but you know what you can leave as a legacy? Offspring! You're not gonna make a major scientific discovery, but you know what's really fun? Sex! To the world you may be one person, but to one person, you can be the world!"

No. This is a bait and switch. Or, as the kids call it, "cope."

The problem is not that direction--if you like being a spouse and parent, wonderful, more power to you!--so much as the converse. Because the converse feels like, "if you can't do this, if you can't find meaning and value in all these things 'normal' people like, then you have to be a Quester. And if you're just a mediocre scientist/artist/hobbyist/whatever else, what good is that?"

Sometimes when I feel miserable and guilty and taking the weight of the world on my shoulders, people ask me, "Do you hold other people to the same high standards?" And I answer, "No." And they say, "Okay, good. Why is that?" "Well, because it's impossible to be responsible for what other people do, I have no power to determine that." But I think it's also true that "they don't need to suffer extra because they already have magical empathy powers that let them soak in the suffering of people around them without collapsing." Now, I'm not saying I should try to do that, I don't think I'd be particularly good at understanding romance or parenting or whatever, and trying to force it would not end well. But I do think that plays into the sense of "if you have kids you're allowed to be selfish on their behalf, but someone like me is just required to play the martyr."

In math folklore there are lots of anecdotes about mathematicians whose lives were tragic and/or bonkers. As we all know, correlation is not the same as causation: if it was the case that going pro at math drove you crazy, well, that would be a good thing to warn people about. Rather, it's a reverse causality. The people who aren't crazy have actually important things to do with their lives; a few of the crazies turn to math because it's a world where things make sense, a lot more crazies don't really thrive in math or anywhere else, and the ones whose stories come down through the ages are the overlap.

[Edit to add because this feels relevant but I'm not sure how to segue/forgot it the first time: part of what reinforces the dichotomy is portrayals of characters like Anatoly from "Chess" or George from "Sunday in the Park with George" who are very good Questers but very bad Family People. They have wives who are like "ugh why am I stuck with this guy, he's married to his job, I want a divorce." I can understand why these people wind up divorced. I cannot understand why they got married in the first place! Unless, again, there is such a stifling societal sense of "everyone needs to get heteronormatively paired off right now or you are a failure" that even the Questers buy it.]

Anyway. I am actually very happy with my life overall! I have a good job and a lot of time to spend in hobbies I enjoy. I have people who encourage me and support me as I am, and I have the courage to pursue some dreams even further (short story writing, etc.) I'm doing well! But I'm sensitive to the Quester versus Family Person dichotomy tropes, when they arise.

Comments

[cahn]

This was a really interesting post!

Related to your Questing thoughts: When I was in seventh grade, I attended an awards ceremony where the speaker was an extremely charismatic young man who told us all to follow our passion. This wasn't the only time I heard this -- I feel like it was a message that was everywhere when I was in high school and college -- but it might have been the first time; it's certainly the one that made the biggest impression on me. So for a very very long time I thought I had to have something to be passionate about, and then for a very very long time I felt like a failure because I don't, in fact, have anything I'm particularly passionate about. (I have a lot of things I like a lot, a lot of things I enjoy and am reasonably good at, but I don't have anything where I'm like, yes, that, that's The Thing.) Eventually (after a number of years) I reached the conclusion that I could be like that: I could enjoy a lot of things, I could have a job that I wasn't, in fact, passionate about, but which I enjoyed a lot and which was very comfortable; I could write fanfic stories and try to write them well without being a author writing the Great American Novel; I could make a difference by volunteering for music at my church for ~100 people without having to Make a Difference for Everyone in the World; I could be a parent without having to be a 100% perfect parent whose kids grew up to save the world.

I think you're right about there being a bit of bait-and-switch with the Family Person cultural messaging. A Significant Other is built up culturally, I think, as that person who will always understand and validate you and fill all your needs, and while maybe that's true for some people (just like there in fact are people who follow their passions/Quests and are wildly successful at it) I don't think that really is the case to that strong of a degree for most (and I've seen at least one instance where someone who grew up with that messaging had a hard time working through it as an adult with a significant other). And same with kids, where there is a sort of parallel issue to the Quester issue, where the kid could grow up to be and do anything! ...but of course they can't actually do everything or even anything, so one is just pushing out the disillusionment to another generation :)

[primeideal]

Thanks for reading :)

A Significant Other is built up culturally, I think, as that person who will always understand and validate you and fill all your needs Yeah, I think part of the allure is "no matter what you're going through, that person will be there for you to take out your problems on and they'll understand and empathize and commiserate with you!" And like, especially because of the way I tend to see relationships as transactional where emotion-dumping is concerned, my reaction is "well I'd love to have someone like that but I can't imagine being that person for someone else, and that's not fair."

I guess with kids my internal stereotype is "even if the kid isn't going to be a perfect Quester themselves, you made another human being, that's pretty impressive!" But then again, my siblings and I turned out pretty well, so my parents probably think they're fortunate compared to families that had more challenges.

[cahn]

Yeah, I think part of the allure is "no matter what you're going through, that person will be there for you to take out your problems on and they'll understand and empathize and commiserate with you!" And like, especially because of the way I tend to see relationships as transactional where emotion-dumping is concerned, my reaction is "well I'd love to have someone like that but I can't imagine being that person for someone else, and that's not fair."

Yeah... and because people, especially other people, are not automatons, this abstraction (of being perfectly understanding and empathetic) rarely makes it into reality :P Most (all?) people aren't perfect at handling emotion-dumps, ranging the whole gamut from "mostly pretty good actually but sometimes has bad days/weeks because people do" to "is ok with this occasionally but not to an overwhelming degree" to "can handle certain types of emotion dumps" to "must be told explicitly that an emotion dump is about to happen and then it's fine" to "does not really want to hear about your emotions actually," and if you've grown up thinking that your significant other WILL be able to handle this completely effortlessly like ChatGPT or something, this is a problem! (The family member I alluded to above occasionally sends me texts about how she has to lower her expectations about what she expected romantically... which... I agree with, yeah, given that what she expected was someone who would be endlessly patient and validating towards her. I mean... she's not endlessly patient and validating herself either!) I lucked out in that my significant other and I tend to be pretty well matched up in what we expect from each other and what we are willing to give, but it's definitely true that a) there have been rough patches and times where we got hurt and had to communicate about what we needed because the other person did not in fact intuit it, and b) there are whole swaths of people for whom either of us would be absolutely terrible significant others because we wouldn't match up in this way :)

That is to say, I think you are actually thinking about it in a more healthy way than a lot of people :P :)

I guess with kids my internal stereotype is "even if the kid isn't going to be a perfect Quester themselves, you made another human being, that's pretty impressive!" But then again, my siblings and I turned out pretty well, so my parents probably think they're fortunate compared to families that had more challenges.

I think kids are pretty amazing and definitely a lot of work, but they are also their own people and a lot of who they are is, well, themselves. I think for most kids (obviously there are special needs and so on), as long as they feel loved and aren't neglected or abused, that takes care of a LOT. (That being said, this is a high bar for some families... in my own family, there's a lot of generational trauma that has had to get worked through. My spouse was lucky enough that his mom did the working through of all her generational trauma before it got to him, ha.)

[primeideal]

That is to say, I think you are actually thinking about it in a more healthy way than a lot of people :P :) Well, for what it's worth (if it wasn't obvious from context), I'm not really looking for or expecting to be anyone's significant other, at this point I'm mostly just interested in critiquing the trope :P

[cahn]

Oh yeah, for sure! I am just saying that coming from a point of critiquing the trope is probably more healthy in a number of ways than coming from a point of expecting a significant other who fills the trope exactly :P :)

[landofnowhere]

Just followed the link here from your most recent post, and this reminds me of something I said recently elsewhere: one of the things I like about Tolkien is that it's okay to be a hobbit, to live most of one's life in comfortable domesticity, and to have an adventure once or twice when one is called to it. Life is long, you can different focuses at different times (or sometimes at the same time) rather than spending your whole life being a Quester or a Family Person.