DEAR WORLD ❖ Discovery through others

the anthropological approach to every day & what I'm reading

Francis Picabia, Aello (1930)

When I was single and dating a lot, I really enjoyed having the opportunity to peer into random peoples’ lives. For all the downsides and brainrot of dating apps nowadays, a pretty great thing they do is introduce you to people in totally orthogonal social circles.

While I was picky about who I became involved with, I was not particularly picky about who I met, and dating gave an amazing license to sort of just walk around someone else’s life for a little bit.

Obviously, you’re not really supposed to do this on dates, but it’s just what I’m like: Bowerbird told me she can physically feel me trying to map the inside territory of her brain. I have to regularly check myself for my tendency to interrogate.

Someone told me the other day about ‘peach’ vs ‘coconut’ people. It goes like this: peach people are soft on the outside, easy to get along with and eager to treat strangers as friends, but their core is harder to get to and their inner circle is small and hard to penetrate. Coconut people are the opposite: they rarely smile at or dance with strangers, but once you get to know them a little bit they’re loyal, warm friends.

Supposedly entire cultures can lean one way or the other: Americans and Latinos are more peachy while Russians and French are more coconutty. A lot of cultural clashing can come from the misunderstandings between the two, because coconut people can interpret peach people as fake and disingenuous when they don’t follow up on hanging out, or the relationship isn’t as reciprocal as they thought. And in turn peach people might find coconuts standoffish and unfriendly; they would normally expect people to just ‘go along’ with their play.

It’s funny, because I prize authenticity and depth a lot, but I do relate more to being a ‘peach’. I make a lot of effort to be cheery and easy for others and feel free to invite others out, but I also know on some level who I am in private is really not for everyone, and nor do I want it to be.

There’s nothing fake about it to me. I cherish short-lived connections a lot: I still think about that guy I met in Osaka who I got drunk with over Japanese barbecue told me about how he’s been stranded in Japan for the last three years cause he followed a girl he loved there and then they broke up. Or the girl in Bangkok who wistfully told me she misses her ex-girlfriend, who she reckons is going to be the first female Secretary-General of the UN. Or the guy who matched with me on Hinge to buy my fridge and was very kind to me during a bad time, he even rented a van to help me move without asking for anything in return.

There’s something about that snapshot view of someone else’s life that is so compelling, so rich with implication and possibility. Did he stay in Japan or did he go back? What happened to that girl and her brilliant ex? And so on. I’m always rooting for them.

There was another time in Bali a much older couple invited me to eat with them, and they gave me love advice that changed my life - not because it was new advice, but because it was authentic, you could feel that what they said was true, because they had experience.

When I came away from that dinner, I really thought to myself, “I’m never having anything less than what they have ever again”. I could have read a million books on love, or gotten reasonable advice from a hundred twenty-five-year-olds on love, but nothing beats that. I hope they’re rooting for me too, and I like to think that my curiosity about their relationship was good fun for them too: I love that momentary regression you see in older couples when you let them teleport back to the early days of their romance. Even with my mum now many years after my dad has passed, you can still see her wrinkles melt as she briefly relives her twenties when they were dating.

We come into so many connections without really knowing what we’re hoping for, consciously or otherwise. And disappointment comes from one person wanting one thing and the other wanting a different one, but a lot of the time you can only tell what you wanted after it’s over.

I would say the default mode I bring to meeting strangers is, “So what is it like to be you?” It’s a really great way to get to know a bunch of people without being too attached to what happens next.

To me, life is one big experiment in anthropological data gathering, so I don’t feel particularly picky about where or who I am with, or even how much fun I’m having. People are doing and thinking insane things everywhere you go. And the less that others claim to see value in something or someone the more I’m interested. I want to see what people enjoy about being in the dirt and what people hate about living in luxury. My worldview is so entrenched in the idea of inherent depth that I’m drawn to what is seen as shallow to see where I can dig around.

Coming back to being a ‘peach’ person, I think they are also people that have a clear preference to look outward towards others versus being looked at. The thing that seems fake about being a peach is that you can hide a lot by constantly diverting attention towards others, especially in a way that still makes them feel close to you. And even when you do share on a personal level, its a very deliberate sample: its been pre-screened for appropriate exposure and curated to invite others outside of themselves rather than to actually let them in. It is the same as writing in public, where you can maintain a performance of rawness and vulnerability through paradoxically exercising an immense amount of control over your narrative.

It isn’t about manipulation (to me) so much as it is trying to maintain a very specific balance of privacy and connection. It’s a simple law of being human: the more you want to be friends with a lot of people, especially in a way that makes room for all of their differentiation, you really do have to smooth over many of your own spikes, at least in public. I’ve noticed the same of my friends who are very communally-oriented, ‘get along with anyone’ chummy guys. As a bartender B is the most extreme example: his private and public self are energetic opposites, though his character and fundamental care for people remains intact.

The silliest complaint from someone who is constantly other-oriented is when they feel slighted at not being known by others, like feeling they constantly care for everyone else without receiving care in return. Didn’t you notice, you’re doing it to yourself!

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🦜Post-scripts

As always, I read all and respond to most replies I get, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on connection / privacy / whatever’s on your mind.

I’ve also been in Singapore for the last month and should be for a while - if you’re in the area, hit me up!

📖 Book club

If you’re reading or have read any of the below, let me know what you think! I love most hearing peoples’ interpretations of different texts, so I might start doing regular posts where I focus on some specific books too (when I’ve had time to finish them). If you’d like that let me know by pressing the like 💚 button.

• Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro
  Alongside Cold Enough For Snow | Jessica Au, this is one of the most stylistically and thematically interesting novels I’ve read in the last few years. The only thing you should know plot-wise about this book before going in is that it is narrated by a woman, Ruth, who is currently a carer reflecting on her bizarre high school experience. It is a quiet and haunting book that builds slowly and steadily: allegorically rich (without spoiling much, I was thinking a lot about animal agriculture) and centred around endearing characters. Their lives appear at first small and full of petty detail, which is sort of the point, and is the most accurate close-up portrayal of high school up I’ve seen. I came out of this book with a greater love for innocence than I did before. Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨ 4.5 stars

• Not Waving, Drowning: Mental Illness and Vulnerability in Australia | Sarah Krasnostein

  This essay paints a grim but necessary portrait of the direction of mental health care in Australia, and the direction of social and community care in general (note: it is not good). She argues that though the current state of care is more comparable to the Nordics (good) than to the US (bad), we are trending economically and politically towards the US. This essay in particular matters because it goes in depth into mental healthcare beyond what you might call ‘garden variety’ middle class mental illness and into the experiences of the most marginalised and stigmatised (BPD, bipolar, schizophrenia, Indigenous overrepresentation so on) who signify a sort of ‘canary in the coalmine’ of the rest of the system. It sheds light on the political and economic mechanisms that enable the most vulnerable to fall through the cracks in horrific ways, and the average Australian to accept isolation as a norm. Rating: ⭐⭐⭐✨ 3.5 stars

• Funny Weather | Olivia Laing (Currently reading)
  Really enjoying the ‘Lives of Artists’ essays in this one, and Olivia Laing is skilled at weaving a culturally relevant and personally complete mini-history of an artist’s life. I’m appreciating just how much good art criticism can provide an entirely new lens through which to view someone’s body of work. Much like the table talk before you experience a dish or a drink, so much of sensory experience is heightened by the mental provocation and anticipation beforehand. It really is a shame to me that art galleries can be so decontextualised and sterile, hence why they feel so inaccessible to those other than the cultural intelligentsia: I think if everyone had the chance to encounter them in their original context, they would make sense a lot faster. But that’s reality of curation: if you want something to be accessible, you sometimes have to rip it out from its roots and plant it somewhere everywhere can see it.