Isn't being snotty about boozy women book clubs sort of playing into the whole phenomenon that Freddie is describing? Like, god forbid I should be a woman who has wine and talks about drippy books at book clubs; now that I know that superior people mock that, I'll have to mock it too.
I say hooray to more boozy book clubs *and* more pretentious independent bookstore readings that give buzz to edgy books *and* more weirdos with actual books in their hands on airplanes and subways.
I just flew across the the country on a flight where there were no overhead lights and all the window shades were down so people could watch movies. (I watched one, too!) But when I wanted to read my book, I had to use the flashlight on my phone––and a person on the next aisle asked me to angle it away from them: I was the anomalous person on the flight who needed light to read.
At the risk of making wild generalizations, I wonder if the male market for books is sci fi and fantasy. (Obviously women read those genres too.) Every time I go to the bookstore I see a million "genre" series that I've never heard of and I feel like someone has to be reading them.
I feel that men in particular are going for "franchise" sci-fi and fantasy. I don't really see many men talking about new sci-fi books but I do hear them talk about reading Warhammer or Star Wars novels. Genre fiction awards seem to be aimed more at genre fiction written by and targeted to women but whether thats a reaction to men losing interest or a reason for men losing interest is up in the air.
"Because I gotta tell you, I find this all fucking exhausting."
I find the whole choosing one's canon based on how many Wokemon points one scores to be a particularly dreary status game, one that has jack-all to do with music or literature or anything other than status and Wokemon.
Is this the Straussian reading of this essay's final three paragraphs, in particular? I love this essay, but at the end it engages in some heavy-duty Person-Guying of a wide swathe of contemporary writers. (As when Plato devotes a large portion of the Phaedrus (a written work of philosophy) to defending the claim that writing is an inadequate means of doing philosophy: the self-referential contradiction seems too obvious to have been unnoticed by its author.)
Here's my theory: the successful class that you are describing have jobs and social lives that allow for/require never ending comparisons with peers via smartphone engagement. That makes people neurotic/unhappy (these folks mirror the trends in teen mental health caused by the same problem). Combine that with that class not having kids, delaying having kids, and/or creating the idea of "parenting" that filters the entire experience back through themselves (and their phones), thereby negating the normal maturity that comes from child-rearing. Namely: to learn to love someone else more than yourself, thereby softening the pains of aging and the fear of death.
There was always a certain amount of "keeping up with the Joneses" but I'd agree social media tends to push this from relatively mild competitive insecurity into full-blown neurosis.
I think it's the single most mean-spirited thing I've ever read on that site. The description of who Tech Bros are and why they suck must be at least three times the length of the average trope description on the site. I come away with the distinct impression that the people involved in composing the description loathe tech bros more fervently than they do paedophiles or purse-snatchers, and also that none of them have ever met such a person.
Regarding techbros, there's something I've noticed working in, well, tech. There was a joke back in the 2000s/early 2010s, that went something like this:
Two hipsters walk into a club. Five minutes later, they walk out. Then one hipster says to the other, "this used to be a great club... but now it's full of fucking hipsters."
The techbro is, I think, a similar phenomenon. A projection onto people a little too close for comfort.
Bear in mind that the TV Tropes wiki is about describing tropes that appear in *fiction*. Furthermore, since techbros in fiction are often either villains or targets of contempt (or both), it's unsurprising that the description of them is unflattering. That doesn't mean that whoever wrote the description has a particular dislike of them, anymore than the one who described the Smug Snake trope has any particular hate of them.
And? Real life is often the *starting point* for tropes in fiction. Of course, in fiction, many of those aspects of real life get amplified or downplayed, leading to the fictional version being an exaggerated or simplified version of what happens in real life. The Real Life section illustrates that.
Obviously there's no way I can "prove" this to you, but the trope description of "smug snake" to me reads like a disinterested analysis of a narrative device that appears in fiction, whereas the trope description for "tech bro" reads like an angry rant about a kind of person who exists in real life that the author has a bone to pick with, depictions of which can incidentally be found in fictional works. I don't get the same feeling of venom or contempt when reading the description of a contemporary trope like "bad influencer" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadInfluencer), which unlike "tech bro" doesn't allow real life examples: real life tech bros are fair game for criticism, real life morally dubious social media influencers are not.
I will never get over the fact that SomethingAwful enriched a domestic abuser for many years and then, when faced with that reality, chose to enrich his lackey and enabler just so they could keep their safe space operational.
Lowtax started SomethingAwful in 1999, and it succeeded due to a combination of humor, decent moderation, and a $10 paywall. It became popular enough that Lowtax made a shitload of money. Unfunny "weird twitter" accounts (like dril) got their start on SA as well.
Over the years, multiple posters made claims that Lowtax was a domestic abuser. At the same time, the quality of the forums degenerated due to his complete lack of investment combined with the rise of competitors like Reddit and KiwiFarms. The posters trying to bring his abuse to light were always banned, and each incident was covered up by Lowtax and his moderators. In the first half of 2020, the evidence became too great to cover up, and the forums turned on him with much rage and despair. By this point most SA posters had become extremely insufferable social justice types, and they were torn between their addiction to the forums and their sense of injustice.
Jeffrey of Yospos, the technical administrator of the site for something like 15 years, decided to buy the site from Lowtax for half a million dollars. Instead of balking at this enrichment of a predator, the now-pathetic user base decided that this was enough of a fig leaf for them to keep using the site. SA has continued its spiral into hypocrisy and irrelevance to this day.
As a lit prof, at this point I'm excited at signs that people read literature at all.
Yeah, assuming that anyone's tastes will remain static is dumb. It's not true for either readers or for writers themselves. Henry James and Edith Wharton both thought the hated Walt Whitman's poetry. They both later "confessed" to each other that they just hadn't previously grasped what he was doing.
One of the great realizations of my life was that I will always be someone's LOLcow, someone's Person-Guy. And I can either live my life trying not to be that, desperately performing to stay one step ahead of the new Person-Guy archetype (because, as Freddie noted, it's ever-shifting as people run away from one Person-Guy form to the next), or say "fuck 'em" and be the absolute goddamn weirdo the Creator put me on this Earth to be.
First, in a society where much fewer mate and fuck (according to statistics) "I've found a partner" is a status signal. A lowly one, but still one.
Second, if it concerns a trophy wife, it's a thing as old as time. Not different than bragging about one's money or car collection.
Third, in the loweliest form of posting sexy pics of their wife, it's either cuckholdry or a light prostitution (for likes, and sometimes for actual money), still things as old as time.
Your comment comes across condascending and agressive. Or maybe I am irritated and stressed, haven't had a good sleep in weeks. I think you completely miss the point: 'wife guy' never had a meaning. Back then I read multiple articles about the subject and it was all confusing because it was never meant to mean anything, it's just a way to shit on others. As with any dunking-terms, it started with a losely defined meaning that got diluted to the point where 'wife guy' means a married man. Just look at the ratio of actual Nazis and people being called Nazis on social media and you will see my point.
One of the (very few) social benefits of being a mathematics major was the early realization that your tastes and interests were wildly different from the vast majority of humans, and making peace with that fact. There was zero random social interest in your opinion about the continuum hypothesis, or anything else for that matter, and a lot of my early adulthood was spent getting comfortable with being culturally oddball. It certainly was isolating and kinda miserable at the time, but at 53… wow, it’s not nice to give a fuck and to just enjoy what I enjoy regardless of how judged.
MLB is probably trying to lock down support for the sport in East Asia (Japan, Korea, and Taiwan). It's a bit like NFL doing those exhibition games in Europe.
That's what I thought, too. I don't know much abt Korean BB but know it's big in Japan and (getting back to FdB's post) Haruki Murakami claims he decided to be a writer while at a BB game.
"If you actually have imposter syndrome you think that your problem is that you are an imposter, not that you have a confidence issue."
Maybe? I worked as staff and adjunct faculty in an 'elite' design graduate institution for most of a decade. I did really have a confidence problem at times, feeling overwhelmed by what felt like the fluent intellectual clout of people there--who worked way faster than me, had a better design sense than me, thought on their feet better than I did, and generally just moved more effortlessly through the New York aristocracy than I did. I really felt like the "public school kid" who was too busy recovering from a 16 year old infatuation with the Beats and Beastie Boys, and that it was a matter of time before someone cornered me, and I said something truly dumb that collapsed the illusion.
The external signals, by almost every student I had (I had almost 100% participation on those evaluations!), by my peers I admired, and by the power brokers at the school including the Dean... were all that I was awesome. It didn't line up with how I felt. I genuinely felt like a fuckup who had been rescued from life and career purgatory by a lucky shot at an awesome job. I did, from the beginning, share that feeling with people I trusted.
To your point though, it was only as I became more confident, had some laurels to rest on, and was comfortable talking about more publicly it that I actually CALLED it imposter syndrome. So maybe I'm agreeing with you that it's a self-limiting self-diagnosis. My own experience with the term does feel fuzzy.
The fluency question is crucial. After 30 years in academia (20 spent getting up to speed with peers when it came to on-the-fly fluency), I'm convinced that rhetorical fluency is a real thing but *not* the same as competence or capacity. People who grow up having certain kinds of conversations around the dinner table are going to absorb cognitive "moves" and linguistic short-cuts that other people just won't have. But that doesn't mean that they will be the most innovative or complex thinkers, or the most adept teachers.
Oh, no doubt. Design/architecture is particularly jargony and susceptible to esoteric bullshittery passing itself off as innovation; I knew that from the beginning; I tried not to let my contempt for that get in the way of my making a real point or missing truly good ideas and people, of which there were many. I think it's particularly bad in design because there are a few core people driving the discourse that are purely theoretical/academic (and often truly interesting), but the rest of us have to mobilize what's useful in their rhetoric and sell it as buildings and other programs for mostly rich people and civic bodies. It's an ugly stew of critical abstract machinery and entrepreneurial pandering.
I actually found the non-native-English speakers had a fluency dynamic all of their own on top of it, where they could shortcut some of the linguistic short-cuts even... I was once sitting next to a brilliant Spanish prof at a lecture by another design institution's chair, a towering Dutch woman of some fame, and during her bloviating talk the prof whispered to me "you know, there are those who understand English better than they speak it, and those who speak it better than they understand it"
Not sure why it's hard to understand that someone can consciously understand or suspect that how they feel is not a reflection of reality, but remain unable to change how they feel.
Maybe various groups of us simply inhabit wholly different realities, and it's extremely difficult to understand each other. When you constantly feel like you're not good enough, when you have low self-worth, you're constantly looking for 1) signs that your inadequacy is showing to others, because you sure as fuck don't want everyone else thinking about you the way you think about yourself, and 2) signs of things that might be wrong with you so you can correct them.
If you can't understand this, then you will never understand how someone can self-diagnose it and be right, and have it honestly not be a humble-brag. Of course...the people who have these problems are not typically terribly eager to share that feeling...because it makes them look pathetic.
There's no paradox in feeling inadequate, and internally wrestling with whether these feelings may be a reflection of actual inadequacies or of irrational self-doubt. I've been there, and often only in retrospect is it clear whether I was being too hard on myself or was truly out of my depth.
But "professing to have imposter syndrome", as Freddie writes, is absolutely a humble-brag. The statement declares, "I am in this impressive role because of my ability and performance ..." (the brag), "...but I don't see myself as impressively as I actually am" (the humble.)
I think my issue here is a pedantic one, likely inimical to me, and probably not worth discussing. I dislike the idea that self-diagnosing imposter syndrome is somehow illegitimate. I also dislike the idea that, say, publicly announcing that I have imposter syndrome is the same as telling my close friend or spouse I have it, that both are merely humble-bragging. But I suspect you were really only referring to the sort of public, shouting-from-the-Twitter-tops version of this.
Spent graduate school commiserating with other grad students about our shared impostor syndrome while simultaneously believing I was in fact the real imposter?–Yep, that's me. Guilty as charged. People are weird.
Sweet Jesus, I hate the imposter syndrome discourse in academia! I have tried to talk graduate students down when they go on about it at length. Sometimes a little anxiety is productive, because giving a presentation is stressful, not doing well on an important exam sucks, and you don't know everything when you walk in the door. That is the fundamental state of someone seeking knowledge - if you knew everything already then why would you need to be in graduate SCHOOL, and why would you be bothering with researching things we already understand? But as others have pointed out, claiming "imposter syndrome" is often a way of seeking validation and even connection with others. The negative side effect is that someone who doesn't express their concerns about it gets cast as the prototypical clueless white male (or other progressive boogeyman) going through life on "easy mode".
This really resonates with me, especially that last point. In convos with other academics I often try to present the ‘actually it’s not all that bad’ viewpoint just to try and make things less relentlessly miserable (and boring). But as a white male I’m conscious that those around me will view it through a privilege lens. And staff definitely transfer it onto students, too.
Write about Pete Rose!
Isn't being snotty about boozy women book clubs sort of playing into the whole phenomenon that Freddie is describing? Like, god forbid I should be a woman who has wine and talks about drippy books at book clubs; now that I know that superior people mock that, I'll have to mock it too.
There is an audience for past male authors...look at this list of 2000 self-reporting favorite books on X.
https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/books-that-made-a-difference-to-2000
But you are right about contemporary male authors..
Literary prizes which create some demand aren't there for men much anymore
Library circulation doesn't show a healthy demand for adult lit.. by men
Popular culture used to write about male authors
Authors used to be on the covers of magazines and talked about....
Look at Time Magazine covers....
The last male author was Jonathan Franzen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_covers_of_Time_magazine
I say hooray to more boozy book clubs *and* more pretentious independent bookstore readings that give buzz to edgy books *and* more weirdos with actual books in their hands on airplanes and subways.
I just flew across the the country on a flight where there were no overhead lights and all the window shades were down so people could watch movies. (I watched one, too!) But when I wanted to read my book, I had to use the flashlight on my phone––and a person on the next aisle asked me to angle it away from them: I was the anomalous person on the flight who needed light to read.
I remember a trip to DC before movies on planes and everyone was reading (mostly Tom Clancy)..I checked.
I got a Kindle because one can change the print size, but it works better on planes than a print book.
Jonathan Franzen...
You have hit the nail on the head. It's exactly that.
At the risk of making wild generalizations, I wonder if the male market for books is sci fi and fantasy. (Obviously women read those genres too.) Every time I go to the bookstore I see a million "genre" series that I've never heard of and I feel like someone has to be reading them.
I feel that men in particular are going for "franchise" sci-fi and fantasy. I don't really see many men talking about new sci-fi books but I do hear them talk about reading Warhammer or Star Wars novels. Genre fiction awards seem to be aimed more at genre fiction written by and targeted to women but whether thats a reaction to men losing interest or a reason for men losing interest is up in the air.
The Expanse!
Why don’t you start a book club?
"Because I gotta tell you, I find this all fucking exhausting."
I find the whole choosing one's canon based on how many Wokemon points one scores to be a particularly dreary status game, one that has jack-all to do with music or literature or anything other than status and Wokemon.
Evan Longoria in game 162. Doesn't get better than Evan.
Hear hear
The beautiful irony here being that the Person-Guy take writer has by now become its own category of Person-Guy
Thinking about Roger Clemens.
I don't understand the bit here. Are you making a kind of obtuse satire with these comments?
Baseball= solution to being one of these. Or at least thinking abt BB..it's almost Opening Day.
Is this the Straussian reading of this essay's final three paragraphs, in particular? I love this essay, but at the end it engages in some heavy-duty Person-Guying of a wide swathe of contemporary writers. (As when Plato devotes a large portion of the Phaedrus (a written work of philosophy) to defending the claim that writing is an inadequate means of doing philosophy: the self-referential contradiction seems too obvious to have been unnoticed by its author.)
There is a simple, yet unfathomable answer:
Modern American society is deeply narcissistic, and the core of narcissism is insecurity.
How about a book about Philip Humber?
Here's my theory: the successful class that you are describing have jobs and social lives that allow for/require never ending comparisons with peers via smartphone engagement. That makes people neurotic/unhappy (these folks mirror the trends in teen mental health caused by the same problem). Combine that with that class not having kids, delaying having kids, and/or creating the idea of "parenting" that filters the entire experience back through themselves (and their phones), thereby negating the normal maturity that comes from child-rearing. Namely: to learn to love someone else more than yourself, thereby softening the pains of aging and the fear of death.
I still dream about Nolan Ryan.
There was always a certain amount of "keeping up with the Joneses" but I'd agree social media tends to push this from relatively mild competitive insecurity into full-blown neurosis.
Because now you're comparing yourself to carefully curated personal brands/images from around the world. How could it not drive someone crazy?
You don't have to breed to be capable of loving others. Just a note.
Very true. And in my experience, totally different kinds of love. And many people adopt, not breed. Just a note.
I don’t ‘breed’, I make love
so do I, but without side effects.
TV Tropes has an article about "tech bros". https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TechBro
I think it's the single most mean-spirited thing I've ever read on that site. The description of who Tech Bros are and why they suck must be at least three times the length of the average trope description on the site. I come away with the distinct impression that the people involved in composing the description loathe tech bros more fervently than they do paedophiles or purse-snatchers, and also that none of them have ever met such a person.
Regarding techbros, there's something I've noticed working in, well, tech. There was a joke back in the 2000s/early 2010s, that went something like this:
Two hipsters walk into a club. Five minutes later, they walk out. Then one hipster says to the other, "this used to be a great club... but now it's full of fucking hipsters."
The techbro is, I think, a similar phenomenon. A projection onto people a little too close for comfort.
Bear in mind that the TV Tropes wiki is about describing tropes that appear in *fiction*. Furthermore, since techbros in fiction are often either villains or targets of contempt (or both), it's unsurprising that the description of them is unflattering. That doesn't mean that whoever wrote the description has a particular dislike of them, anymore than the one who described the Smug Snake trope has any particular hate of them.
There's a "real life" section at the end of the article.
And? Real life is often the *starting point* for tropes in fiction. Of course, in fiction, many of those aspects of real life get amplified or downplayed, leading to the fictional version being an exaggerated or simplified version of what happens in real life. The Real Life section illustrates that.
Obviously there's no way I can "prove" this to you, but the trope description of "smug snake" to me reads like a disinterested analysis of a narrative device that appears in fiction, whereas the trope description for "tech bro" reads like an angry rant about a kind of person who exists in real life that the author has a bone to pick with, depictions of which can incidentally be found in fictional works. I don't get the same feeling of venom or contempt when reading the description of a contemporary trope like "bad influencer" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadInfluencer), which unlike "tech bro" doesn't allow real life examples: real life tech bros are fair game for criticism, real life morally dubious social media influencers are not.
The biggest reason for their insecurity is likely that they have heavy privilege-guilt.
I will never get over the fact that SomethingAwful enriched a domestic abuser for many years and then, when faced with that reality, chose to enrich his lackey and enabler just so they could keep their safe space operational.
Story?
Lowtax started SomethingAwful in 1999, and it succeeded due to a combination of humor, decent moderation, and a $10 paywall. It became popular enough that Lowtax made a shitload of money. Unfunny "weird twitter" accounts (like dril) got their start on SA as well.
Over the years, multiple posters made claims that Lowtax was a domestic abuser. At the same time, the quality of the forums degenerated due to his complete lack of investment combined with the rise of competitors like Reddit and KiwiFarms. The posters trying to bring his abuse to light were always banned, and each incident was covered up by Lowtax and his moderators. In the first half of 2020, the evidence became too great to cover up, and the forums turned on him with much rage and despair. By this point most SA posters had become extremely insufferable social justice types, and they were torn between their addiction to the forums and their sense of injustice.
Jeffrey of Yospos, the technical administrator of the site for something like 15 years, decided to buy the site from Lowtax for half a million dollars. Instead of balking at this enrichment of a predator, the now-pathetic user base decided that this was enough of a fig leaf for them to keep using the site. SA has continued its spiral into hypocrisy and irrelevance to this day.
As a lit prof, at this point I'm excited at signs that people read literature at all.
Yeah, assuming that anyone's tastes will remain static is dumb. It's not true for either readers or for writers themselves. Henry James and Edith Wharton both thought the hated Walt Whitman's poetry. They both later "confessed" to each other that they just hadn't previously grasped what he was doing.
One of the great realizations of my life was that I will always be someone's LOLcow, someone's Person-Guy. And I can either live my life trying not to be that, desperately performing to stay one step ahead of the new Person-Guy archetype (because, as Freddie noted, it's ever-shifting as people run away from one Person-Guy form to the next), or say "fuck 'em" and be the absolute goddamn weirdo the Creator put me on this Earth to be.
The second one is way more fun.
Rockism forever, fuck the haters
Keeping Box scores is weird, but attractive.
Well, we gotta get our two minutes hate from somewhere.
I still don't get Wife Guy.
What's not to get?
First, in a society where much fewer mate and fuck (according to statistics) "I've found a partner" is a status signal. A lowly one, but still one.
Second, if it concerns a trophy wife, it's a thing as old as time. Not different than bragging about one's money or car collection.
Third, in the loweliest form of posting sexy pics of their wife, it's either cuckholdry or a light prostitution (for likes, and sometimes for actual money), still things as old as time.
Your comment comes across condascending and agressive. Or maybe I am irritated and stressed, haven't had a good sleep in weeks. I think you completely miss the point: 'wife guy' never had a meaning. Back then I read multiple articles about the subject and it was all confusing because it was never meant to mean anything, it's just a way to shit on others. As with any dunking-terms, it started with a losely defined meaning that got diluted to the point where 'wife guy' means a married man. Just look at the ratio of actual Nazis and people being called Nazis on social media and you will see my point.
I dunno, I like guys who like baseball.
One of the (very few) social benefits of being a mathematics major was the early realization that your tastes and interests were wildly different from the vast majority of humans, and making peace with that fact. There was zero random social interest in your opinion about the continuum hypothesis, or anything else for that matter, and a lot of my early adulthood was spent getting comfortable with being culturally oddball. It certainly was isolating and kinda miserable at the time, but at 53… wow, it’s not nice to give a fuck and to just enjoy what I enjoy regardless of how judged.
Opening Day is in Korea this year.
Is that true?
Yes it is--so odd. Doesn't start in U.S. until March 28.
https://www.mlb.com/news/2024-mlb-schedule
MLB is probably trying to lock down support for the sport in East Asia (Japan, Korea, and Taiwan). It's a bit like NFL doing those exhibition games in Europe.
That's what I thought, too. I don't know much abt Korean BB but know it's big in Japan and (getting back to FdB's post) Haruki Murakami claims he decided to be a writer while at a BB game.
Self-diagnosed Imposter Syndrome always strikes me as a kind of paradox. If you think you have imposter syndrome you almost, by definition, don't.
If you actually have imposter syndrome you think that your problem is that you are an imposter, not that you have a confidence issue.
And there are a lot of imposters out there! When I'm pretty sure I'm one in a particular setting I keep my mouth shut about it.
People have very strange and wildly incorrect intuitions about how confident and self-assured other people are.
Is it not just one of the most textbook examples of countersignaling?
"Oh little old me? Yeah I feel like a fake because of how easy it was for me to achieve this very enviable, high-status thing!"
"If you actually have imposter syndrome you think that your problem is that you are an imposter, not that you have a confidence issue."
Maybe? I worked as staff and adjunct faculty in an 'elite' design graduate institution for most of a decade. I did really have a confidence problem at times, feeling overwhelmed by what felt like the fluent intellectual clout of people there--who worked way faster than me, had a better design sense than me, thought on their feet better than I did, and generally just moved more effortlessly through the New York aristocracy than I did. I really felt like the "public school kid" who was too busy recovering from a 16 year old infatuation with the Beats and Beastie Boys, and that it was a matter of time before someone cornered me, and I said something truly dumb that collapsed the illusion.
The external signals, by almost every student I had (I had almost 100% participation on those evaluations!), by my peers I admired, and by the power brokers at the school including the Dean... were all that I was awesome. It didn't line up with how I felt. I genuinely felt like a fuckup who had been rescued from life and career purgatory by a lucky shot at an awesome job. I did, from the beginning, share that feeling with people I trusted.
To your point though, it was only as I became more confident, had some laurels to rest on, and was comfortable talking about more publicly it that I actually CALLED it imposter syndrome. So maybe I'm agreeing with you that it's a self-limiting self-diagnosis. My own experience with the term does feel fuzzy.
The fluency question is crucial. After 30 years in academia (20 spent getting up to speed with peers when it came to on-the-fly fluency), I'm convinced that rhetorical fluency is a real thing but *not* the same as competence or capacity. People who grow up having certain kinds of conversations around the dinner table are going to absorb cognitive "moves" and linguistic short-cuts that other people just won't have. But that doesn't mean that they will be the most innovative or complex thinkers, or the most adept teachers.
Oh, no doubt. Design/architecture is particularly jargony and susceptible to esoteric bullshittery passing itself off as innovation; I knew that from the beginning; I tried not to let my contempt for that get in the way of my making a real point or missing truly good ideas and people, of which there were many. I think it's particularly bad in design because there are a few core people driving the discourse that are purely theoretical/academic (and often truly interesting), but the rest of us have to mobilize what's useful in their rhetoric and sell it as buildings and other programs for mostly rich people and civic bodies. It's an ugly stew of critical abstract machinery and entrepreneurial pandering.
I actually found the non-native-English speakers had a fluency dynamic all of their own on top of it, where they could shortcut some of the linguistic short-cuts even... I was once sitting next to a brilliant Spanish prof at a lecture by another design institution's chair, a towering Dutch woman of some fame, and during her bloviating talk the prof whispered to me "you know, there are those who understand English better than they speak it, and those who speak it better than they understand it"
Not sure why it's hard to understand that someone can consciously understand or suspect that how they feel is not a reflection of reality, but remain unable to change how they feel.
Maybe various groups of us simply inhabit wholly different realities, and it's extremely difficult to understand each other. When you constantly feel like you're not good enough, when you have low self-worth, you're constantly looking for 1) signs that your inadequacy is showing to others, because you sure as fuck don't want everyone else thinking about you the way you think about yourself, and 2) signs of things that might be wrong with you so you can correct them.
If you can't understand this, then you will never understand how someone can self-diagnose it and be right, and have it honestly not be a humble-brag. Of course...the people who have these problems are not typically terribly eager to share that feeling...because it makes them look pathetic.
There's no paradox in feeling inadequate, and internally wrestling with whether these feelings may be a reflection of actual inadequacies or of irrational self-doubt. I've been there, and often only in retrospect is it clear whether I was being too hard on myself or was truly out of my depth.
But "professing to have imposter syndrome", as Freddie writes, is absolutely a humble-brag. The statement declares, "I am in this impressive role because of my ability and performance ..." (the brag), "...but I don't see myself as impressively as I actually am" (the humble.)
I think my issue here is a pedantic one, likely inimical to me, and probably not worth discussing. I dislike the idea that self-diagnosing imposter syndrome is somehow illegitimate. I also dislike the idea that, say, publicly announcing that I have imposter syndrome is the same as telling my close friend or spouse I have it, that both are merely humble-bragging. But I suspect you were really only referring to the sort of public, shouting-from-the-Twitter-tops version of this.
Spent graduate school commiserating with other grad students about our shared impostor syndrome while simultaneously believing I was in fact the real imposter?–Yep, that's me. Guilty as charged. People are weird.
Sweet Jesus, I hate the imposter syndrome discourse in academia! I have tried to talk graduate students down when they go on about it at length. Sometimes a little anxiety is productive, because giving a presentation is stressful, not doing well on an important exam sucks, and you don't know everything when you walk in the door. That is the fundamental state of someone seeking knowledge - if you knew everything already then why would you need to be in graduate SCHOOL, and why would you be bothering with researching things we already understand? But as others have pointed out, claiming "imposter syndrome" is often a way of seeking validation and even connection with others. The negative side effect is that someone who doesn't express their concerns about it gets cast as the prototypical clueless white male (or other progressive boogeyman) going through life on "easy mode".
This really resonates with me, especially that last point. In convos with other academics I often try to present the ‘actually it’s not all that bad’ viewpoint just to try and make things less relentlessly miserable (and boring). But as a white male I’m conscious that those around me will view it through a privilege lens. And staff definitely transfer it onto students, too.