Risk Being Cringeworthy
Note: Bonnitta Roy’s Psychotechnology Playgrounds have come to an end. The last session can be found here. Bonnitta is going to take some time off this summer but she will be back. :)
Some events to check out this week:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tuesday @ 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.*
Social Design Club w/ Freyja and Joe Edelman. Every Wednesday @ 1:30 PM ET. RSVP here. Join the club here. 90 mins.
Raw Sexuality: Sacred Sex w/ Chester Brown. July 22nd @ 4:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Bio-Emotive Framework: Live Emotional Processing w/ Doug Tataryn. Every Other Thursday @ 1:15 PM ET. RSVP here. 30 mins.
*Watch a presentation on the practice here. You can come and leave as you leave throughout the 5 hours.
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July 20, 2020
A few weeks back I was corresponding with a friend via text who was involved heavily in the Game B community for some time. She mentioned she was reading my journals: "I’m a few weeks behind with it at the moment but I’ve read quite a bit of your letters. Both cringey and inspiring!"
The cringey part stung so I asked her what was cringe about them:
Cringey: the grandiosity, sense-of-certainty around some notions, and personal disclosures (fyi I only feel comfortable using the word “cringey” as you bring it up yourself a few times in entries). Inspiring: also the grandiosity! Your writing gives me some belief in the idea that you can really become/be/live/change *through* writing—the knife’s edge stuff.
I am pretty sure she was referring to the time period where I was having my spiritual crisis, which was intense around April 17th to May 3rd. Some of those entries felt like they were being channeled and that afforded me to write boldly, poetically, and comic bookly. I was viewing them as philosophical art at the time but maybe it is better to view them as philosophical cringe in retrospect.
My understanding of something being “cringey,” or cringeworthy, is when you wince when someone does something that is, or should be, extremely embarrassing for that person. Was I being cringe with those entries? Maybe. They were fun to write though, they felt right while writing them, and I liked reading them myself. I’ll own up to whatever propositional mistakes I’ve made in them, or whatever naive and narcissistic qualities they may have contained.
The pick-up artists have a motto: risk being creepy. The idea is that when a man learns how to pursue women, they’ll surely make some mistakes and creep some women out. Coming off as creepy is one of the worst feelings for guys and this is what prevents them from pursuing women they are attracted to. No guy wants to be placed in the creepy guy category.
I think the same thing can be said about being cringeworthy. Nobody wants to be thought of as cringeworthy, unless you are consciously engaged in cringe comedy. When you are attempting to be earnest but try too hard to be so, you will risk the cringe.
I do not want to be cringeworthy, but if I am going to keep writing here I sense I am going to have to risk it. I want to be earnest here, because taking myself seriously is fun. I will attempt to soften all of my earnest Stoic emo shit with some meta ironic distancing though, because taking myself unseriously is fun as well.