You Are a Type of Guy
How I learned to stop competing and love hot yoga
The instructor called me by my first name as she encouraged me to deepen the stretch into the curtsy lunge. Her broad smile announced poses whose names suspiciously matched the theme of the class. Did she just make up “fallen tree pose” to go with the organic beats and the “I am nature” affirmations we went through earlier? I’m pretty sure “airplane hands” are a recurring move, though. We were sending energy out the crown as we juiced up our booties in a room heated up for optimal bendiness. A few years ago, I would have hated Corepower hot yoga with a vengeance. While it still made me smirk, my recent response was almost entirely appreciation and God Bless America. The cure to my hipsterism turned out to be a psychological judo move.
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich happy
The reason I would have hated Corepower hot yoga was my identity of spiritual and cultural sophistication. Asanas need to have Sanskrit names, and yoga should be in support of spiritual development, not juicy booties. Mixing it up with corporate nature worship in a low-key sauna seemed like combining caramel with fish sauce.
The spiritual identity was one of multiple iterations: Me from even further back would have been excited to correct the implied misconceptions about yoga as an ecology of practice because my identity constellated around being smart. Scott Alexander describes the Former Gifted Kid Syndrome beautifully. I too went from proudly being the smartest kid in my high school to deciding being well read was more important than intelligence at university. Until a philosophy student at a house party in Berlin called me out on not actually having read “the Wealth of Nations” (I had confidently regurgitated the fun fact that “the invisible hand” was only mentioned once). As a result, I started talking about jhanas at parties instead.
This phenomenon is not limited to nerds; it’s a core driver of status games. In a competition for status, the alternative to competing in the given reference frame (e.g., IQ, fame, or wealth) is to switch the reference to where I have an advantage. If successful, reference switching will spawn a new subculture. Nerds vs. jocks is the classic example, but any subculture can be defined by what is considered high status. In my hipster days, I used to listen to music mediated by an image of the cute girl I would impress with it. I kept a mental jukebox for this: Songs adjacent to what her clothes suggested she already liked, obscure enough that she’d have to ask. How much I actually liked the music was secondary.
And maybe the reason Corepower hot yoga didn’t bother me was that I now present as the type of emotionally intelligent person who turns every trigger around to welcome my shadow.
Harry Potter’s Curse
The culprit: capitalism (of course). The demand side is the core feeling of “not good enough” that global consumer culture successfully installs in most teenagers. The hole of worthlessness needs to be filled with proof that you are, in fact, worthy. The supply side is ladders: Those with a shot at competing at the status olympics in the disciplines of wealth or fame become cargo puppies. Most others pick a subculture that ranks something they are decent at. The poor souls with no discernible talent might pick up bird watching at some point or binge the premium mediocre of specialness: typing systems from MBTI to Astrology.
Our popular culture repeats a single myth so persistently that it’s also called the “monomyth”. The hero’s journey seems to be the only pattern to guide popular culture: Superheroes saving the world. There used to be a rich network of mythical stories; now it’s just about the individual’s descent into chaos and ascent into greatness. Harry, Neo, Luke Skywalker, and Paul Atreides. All of these protagonists have had their specialness decreed by prophecy, unverifiable, creating an awkward obligation for them to prove it. You must be special is the chorus of the monomyth, trying to stuff that hole of not enough.
I noticed in my own experience how these two flip into each other: I want to belong and I’m afraid to be rejected because I fear that I’m not enough. Narrating my own hero’s journey, I assert that I’m special because I’m a smart cookie and can feel my body at the same time. It flips back into impostor syndrome (not enough!) because I can’t explain how a laser works. I silence that by mentioning that Haken uses the laser as his example of self-organisation far from equilibrium (special!!). This layer cake of psychological posturing made it impossible for me to feel like I could belong to any group.
“I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member” - Groucho Marx
The atomization in WEIRD society is connected directly to Harry Potter’s Curse. We resist being lumped in with groups because that would undermine our precious individuality. I still haven’t gotten over being outed as a “type of guy” (“tech bro” especially stung; “philosophical fuckboy” at least had some swagger).
Ironically, the fear of being mediocre is what’s in the way of growing beyond the norm. It felt better to pretend to read Whitehead rather than reading Ribbonfarm. I didn’t want to focus on my breath like a pleb, so I half-assed Russian doll visualizations of tantric deities with spotty results. Most people lose money with leverage trading, but the rules don’t apply to a rational agent who understands market structure and human psychology. I wasted my time pretending to be more advanced than I was, missing out on the joy from reading Daniel Suarez’s page-turners and the beautiful simplicity of open awareness meditation. I lost so much money it physically hurt.
The birders won
The last (in status) shall be first (in meaning). It would be absurd to turn bird watching into a status competition (of course, some just can’t help themselves). Nobody cares except a few geeks huddling with binoculars in a carpark. That’s why most birders are free to enjoy the sky dance of Woodcocks for its own sake. Whether you enjoy watching the copulations of birds or words, decoupling it from status games is what gives an activity the breathing room to become meaningful.
Status is always relative: a person rising means somebody else falling. If you fall, you either try to get up there again or switch references to establish another ladder to climb. But you’re always climbing and defending your position. The only way out is to go to the omega point of reference switching, taking it even further than the birders: You become your own reference, n of 1. “Competition is for losers” is the one Thiel quote that applies to both startups and individuation (that’s how it’s possible to become a billionaire gay Christian vampire).
I can feel my former cargo puppy counting the n of 1 category as winning, and then proceeding to out-individuate my past self. I can reference switch on my past self by letting go of my compulsive hipsterism and unironically affirming “I am nature”. Or better yet, to turn the fact that I’m secure enough to admit that I like Coldplay into a flex. You know what, you get to have that, sweet puppy. I can’t fully step outside my culture, and the underlying need for recognition won’t go away. The difference is that getting respect and care from a few people will actually satisfy that need, whereas status competition is an endless game of chutes and ladders.
Both individuation and specialness ask for what is yours from the inside, but only specialness checks the answer against everybody else’s. Individuation asks what feels meaningful, not how it ranks. Like most humans, I want to be touched regularly and be useful to my friends, both of which would fail an originality audit. Meaning is non-rivalrous and symbiotic. I’m delighted that you are collecting birds in the Merlin app like Pokémon, and as a bonus, I can use it as an example in my blog post.
How to love a type of guy
The impulse towards individuation might be the healthiest part of my aversion to categories of people. The categories often came with an implied ranking. Categories also prevented me from seeing and being seen. Once somebody filed me as a tech bro, they wouldn’t think to talk to me about how animism applies to art any more. I wanted to see through people’s superficial categories to find Alice. I wanted you to see my idiosyncrasies, not my commonalities (I’m a Leo moon). If you really loved me, you could blindly map the freckles across my body.
Once the psychological underbelly of not enough / special drops away, so does the apparent conflict between individuation and group membership. If I’m not in a defensive stance of constantly needing to assert my specialness, it’s obvious that a background in tech does not define me. At the same time, it’s also true that I will share commonalities with other tech bros, such as knowing which Peter Thiel line to quote. Categories are useful maps to understand humans and stereotypes are mostly true on average. Men are loud; Swiss people are anal about timing.
“Did you just defend stereotypes? Bigot.”
Not quite. I’m not saying every stereotype is true for each individual but that they provide necessary starting points. Shared characteristics are traffic control for human relationships. We need stereotypes to make the complexity of the social realm manageable and can’t help but project our own psyche onto others. I’m attracted to emotional intensity because that’s what my own psyche is yearning for. If I’m lucky enough, I get to meet the person underneath the fire goddess that initially drew my fancy.
My friend Sahra taught me the judo move of hot-swapping my disdain for categories into appreciation. It felt as sudden and effortless as perceptual shifts from rabbit to duck, from the face to the vase. I used to think “how annoying that men are loud” and Sahra suggested I just decide to see the other side and notice “how lovely that men are loud”. Except for obnoxious motorcycles taking a piss in my auditory space, I was surprised to find that it worked. I could appreciate the virtues of testosterone in others and myself. Loudness can help organise people and competition can be mutually empowering.
Group identity gives way to individual expression as you get to know me: Like any man, I like to compete. But my particular way of doing it is by reference switching into Venn Diagrams. Corepower hot yoga is the most American thing since Mac and Cheese and a singular syncretic practice. Caramel with fish sauce actually works because it’s the type of dessert that adds a bit of savoury to give depth to the sweetness. Nobody arrives at fish sauce caramel by testing things at random: The category came first, and then somebody went deeper and found a more interesting option to add to caramel than salt.
Let them file you
I’m finally ready to admit that I’m pretty basic in most ways, most of the time.
What a relief! Embracing my mediocrity removes all that pressure to be the chosen one. It frees me up to do what I like. Once I don’t need to be the next Scott Alexander, I can joyfully spike my journal-dump with obscure references and obscene riffs. The ice cream I enjoy the most is plain chocolate, just like most people. I also do bibliomancy with A Thousand Plateaus while listening to Sun Ra, but I don’t need to make that my personality.
Nobody ever found me through my idiosyncrasies; they found me because they were interested in the type of guy they took me for. The ones who stuck around eventually got to the animism or the freckles.
How would you spend your time if you didn’t have to compete?
Ink trails:
The girl in your headphones is a funhouse mirror
Clarified desire turns out more generous than obligation
Status is a lossy compression of what actually matters
ooh ya, Sun Ra
all praise octopusyarn