Tall poppy syndrome

Reading material

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

Are deep thinkers more lonely

Are the people that are self-reflective, that rely on cerebral horsepower, that pay attention, that think in a detailed way, the more nuance that their thinking is, are there fewer people that are going to be like them? Does it make them feel more alone? If yes, how do you think people can overcome this?

That wouldn’t necessarily be the case. Because, as you start to make your thoughts more public, if you do it right, they might appeal to more and more people.

Not sure if that’s a threshold phenomena. Maybe, as you start to become specialized, as a scientist in some sense, your vision narrows and narrows. It gets more high resolution at the level that you’re operating in that field. But you kind of pass through a needle and come out the other side - where the thing you’re studying starts to become everything again. So that maybe the developmental progression. Specialization, and then generalization.

Is the depth of your consciousness causes me to suffer? You take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. This is something you see here as well. When you start to think differently, when you start to consider the way that you are living your life in a more detailed, higher resolution, more unique, more nuanced way, you will probably receive pushback.

In normal working class towns, people born, live, die in these places. It’s insular. Especially in the UK, tall poppy syndrome is a huge problem. In UK, deviating from the norm is very very very quickly mocked. There’s a lot of that in Canada too. Tall puppy syndrome is a big deal. The Japanese have that saying too, except, it’s the nail that sticks up above all the rest is the first one to be struck down by the hammer. There’s some truth in that. But some and all are very different words.

The biggest difference between American people and English people is that, American children are told that they can be anything that they want to be. They’re told that they have blue sky vision, they can achieve whatever they want. And that gives them a lot of confidence. When Brits, stuffy stiffer Brits, see Americans on TV, it seems like everyone’s had media training. Because everybody is just so enthused about whatever it is, even if it’s a 18-car pileup.

When you roll the clock forward, what you end up with is, American children that become adults who look around at the world and say, well hang on, this wasn’t what I was promised. I was told that I could be anything that I wanted to be. I was told that I could have anything that I wanted to.

But the message that you can do whatever you want can become misinterpreted in a narcissistic manner. That happens to some degree, especially as people have had fewer and fewer children. There’s a difference between, you can earn everything that is earnable and you deserve everything there is.

Jonathan Height and Luke Enough talk about it in The Coddling of the American Mind. They think about that in large part as a consequence of an ideological transformation. It is useful to look at more fundamental phenomena. People have children when they’re a lot older. They have way fewer children. They have way more resources when they have children, on average.

Only child syndrome

If you’re one kid of eight, you’re pretty much battling it out for attention, for a very finite amount of parental attention, with a lot of intense competition. The probability that you’re going to come out of that entitled and narcissistic is pretty damn low. Because your siblings will definitely punish you for that. But if you’re the only child, especially of older parents, who are also more conservative because of their age and also less willing to take chances with you, because there’s only one of you, then, you have a lot of resources at your disposal. That’s a whole different developmental milieu. We have no idea what the consequences of that are. But the idea is that children in that circumstance are more likely to be overprotected and dependent and structured. Well, yeah, undoubtedly. That would even be an overabundance of parental virtue in some sense. Right? “Well, we just did nothing but pay attention to our child.” Okay, but too much? What did you expect?

A lot of the commonly held presumptions around only children. And i don’t know whether it’s where we’re from, that the northeast of the UK is very spit and sawdust, it’s salt of the earth people, it’s, grab your boots straps on your boots and start pulling. I just haven’t seen that.

This might not be a working class phenomena. The coddled mind phenomena might not be a primarily working class phenomena. That could easily be a middle class and upper phenomena.

How much should your children be left on their own? The answer is, as much as they can tolerate. How much is that? Well, you find out with each child. But it’s certainly possible to not deprive your child enough.

Tall poppy syndrome