Cringe sublime

[entertainment]

From a certain point of view I think our lives and everything about them is deeply embarassing. There are other points of view, corresponding to other modes of consciousness, where this feeling of embarrassment makes absolutely no sense. But lately I've found myself inhabiting this particular point of view more and more. Not in a particular depressing way. Just as a matter of fact way that I state it and form an irony about it. But it's still there, the embarassment. It's there as some kind of nagging aftertaste that sticks around in the mind space after certain thoughts have passed through, or as some kind of bottom line result when all the points of your existence have been added up and held against each other: the only appropriate attitude towards what you're left with is embarassment.


The right interpretation is, I think, that it's not necessarily our lives in themselves that there is something wrong with. Embarassment requires something that deems the thing embarassing, and it always requires some kind of other whose gaze we assume when we feel embarassment. My interpretation is that there is a great incongruence between the world today, our lives today, and our cultural vision of who we are, based on history, ideals, pop cultural images.

This incongruence manifests as embarassment. When you're looking from a certain angle that is.

 

[luka]

I havent felt embaressment since the age of 14. its an adolescent emotion essentially.

 

[entertainment]

I havent felt embaressment since the age of 14. its an adolescent emotion essentially.

I had hoped you would understand actually

 

[luka]

i do understand but its not a vantage point i would chose to occupy. its not essential. its uncomfortable and makes the world impossible. so i wouldnt personally choose to sit there.

 

[entertainment]

i do understand but its not a vantage point i would chose to occupy. its not essential. its uncomfortable and makes the world impossible. so i wouldnt personally choose to sit there.

Maybe it tells us something interesting

 

[luka]

yeah it does. but you know what that thing is already.

 

[luka]

id say theres something inherently misanthropic about it in fact

 

[IdleRich]

Embarrassment requires something that deems the thing embarassing, and it always requires some kind of other whose gaze we assume when we feel embarassment.

It does but also it doesn't. I reckon we're all familiar with that feeling where we are alone and we do something embarrassing so we sort of look around to double-check noone was looking, and then give a sort of foolish relieved laugh. But we have almost created someone out of nowhere just to stand outside us and make us feel self-conscious.

 

[entertainment]

I think we are embarrasesd because we a burdened with an heir we don't understand. This is why culture is insufficiently oedipal. The father figure is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The voices in our head have no speaker, no one we can fight, and so the primary outlet for catharsis becomes a sort of abdication.

 

[Leo]

I havent felt embaressment since the age of 14. its an adolescent emotion essentially.

could be an age thing. what might have been embarrassing at a younger age is just shrugged off when you get older. you still recognize the embarrassment, still sense the ping, but instead of internalizing it and dwelling on it, you just say "ah, fuck" and move on.

 

[IdleRich]

Certainly true that my skin has thickened over the years - with regard to most things, I wonder if there might not be a compensatory thinning somewher though that I'm not fully aware of.

 

[entertainment]

Rich you seem like the least neurotic guy on Dissensus. You would never understand this thought. Your portuguese bohemia lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from this point of view.

 

[entertainment]

Essentially it's about being a self conscious man in the internet age whose idealizations keep him from doing anything because in their light anything that is practically within reach is embarrassing.

 

[Murphy]

The answer, then, is to be practically engaged in the world, with yourself and other people and to always speak your mind, no matter with whom you’re conversing

A straight talking direct approach, fuck embarrassment, where does that get you?

 

[Leo]

everyone is self conscious, to varying degrees. the challenge is to not let it become so predominant that you become paralyzed. easier said than done, obviously. wise advice as usual from WYH: engage with it, as a way to break its hold. maybe it's like standing up to a playground bully: seems impossible and avoided at all costs, but their hold and imagined power often vanishes when confronted.

 

[woops]

you should start making music and making a twat out of yourself on stage @entertainment can work wonders

 

[entertainment]

I think I have obscured this thread with multiple different thoughts that were floating through my head last night

 

[entertainment]

I'm actually not really self conscious, at least not more than the next person. What I was originally was trying to describe was this sense of a dissonance in the ecosystem of culture, ideals, identity and reality that registers as this vast unacknowledged embarassment.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm actually not really self conscious, at least not more than the next person. What I was originally was trying to describe was this sense of a dissonance in the ecosystem of culture, ideals, identity and reality that registers as this vast unacknowledged embarassment.

One of the great reasons to practice detachment, you can become less subject to feelings like this. In my case, there is some degree of exercise required, IE its not only uphill.

 

[Leo]

I get the dissonance, but it doesn't have to result in embarrassment. uneasiness, uncertainly, sure.