It's Always More Complicated

A thought generated by Oliver Burkeman's column in today's Guardian Weekend, which has interesting resonances with this post I made some while ago about people undervaluing their own skills.

Burkeman is considering Rothbard's Law: "People tend to specialise in what they're worst at" and suggests that what it's getting at is this:

[I]f a talent has always come naturally – or if it's been decades since you last found it difficult – you conclude that it's nothing special. And so, in your efforts to achieve something impressive, or to gain a feeling of accomplishment, you gravitate toward whatever it is you can't do. You stride out into exactly those fresh pastures in which you shouldn't be setting foot.

I also wonder if in the mix there is the Protestant Work Ethicy notion that dammit, things ought to be difficult because life is real and life is earnest and we are not here to enjoy ourselves but to STRIVE (to seek, to find and not to yield). (While looking for the Stern quote below, I came across this perhaps pertinent line from Doris Lessing: 'This set of mind, this predisposition towards suffering, the unconscious belief that to understand life - or to know the score - means immersion in painful experience, shows itself in other areas.')

I'm thinking now about people who make a big deal about how hard what they do is and how they alone have the special talent/knowledge - I've vented before about archivists who want to be the sole conduit between reader and record - but this can be performative and about keeping oneself in a job (paper I heard at the conference about psychologists in WWII who produced just such great protocols for selection procedures in the military that they essentially did themselves out of a job by the time the war had ended).

I wonder also if, hovering about this, is my darling GB Stern's apercu that 'There is no delight like the illegitimate pleasure of suddenly marketing what is not quite one's own job'; I can see that in areas where one's achievements are of a hit and miss nature, having one's random hits valued may well be very cheering.

And on a further paw, I'm thinking about that sensation which sometimes comes over me that, yes, I could do that, it falls within my sphere of competencies, but I have no desire whatsoever to do that thing (and sometimes, dr rdrz, I end up somehow having to do it anyway). Which is the reverse of Thing that is challenging even if within that sphere.

Possibly also relevant here: column in the Review section by a first time novelist on the demands to self-publicise (though it goes off into other areas). Some writers can presumably do this, and others can't, and others do it badly. Though I'm not sure that there are writers out there who think more of their ability to promote themselves than to write whatever it is they write: not that I'd bet that this doesn't ever happen at all.

Level playing field unfair to boyzzzz: reprise of a perennial 'terribly poor stuff' favourite that signally fails to take into account the various factors that militated against female academic success within recent living memory - up to and including severer marking of their 11+ papers because, o dear, there were fewer selective schools for gurlz than for boyz, quotas in e.g. medical school entrance. etc etc etc. Of course rectifying that parlous state of affairs will look like a sudden rise in underachievement, whereas, arguably, it was always already there and cunningly concealed.

And it's still, apparently, a (white) man's life in the modern Army, or, the promotional campaign that shot itself in the foot.

Do we perhaps feel that this former director of the Royal Geographical Society is making rather too much of a case for its role as 'Extreme Holidays with a touch of scientific cred'?

One man was bitten by piranhas but made it back to the camp before an artery burst; a herpetologist was bitten by one of his deadly snakes, but our nurse saved him; I slipped off some rapids and was swept down river and, much more seriously, the camp occasionally ran out of beer.

I tend to find Kathy Lette a bit annoying, but she's pretty much spot-on in her review of that book about the couple that had sex every day for 365 days:

It's like reading a meat lover's guide written by a vegetarian. After a decade of marriage, if you're having daily sex with your husband, the reader needs the libidinous details. Did they employ an erotic portfolio? Were the lights on or off? (To which most married couples would sensibly answer on, so they can read during the boring bits.) Did they try S&M?'....
But from Charla's descriptions of sex - "Quickies count... In fact, quickies often are preferred if you're doing this daily" - we're left to deduce that sexual experimentation is not on the carnal cards.
....
[N]ot once does Charla suggests that if husbands were better in bed, wives would want to spend more time there. Perhaps the trouble is not women faking orgasms, but men faking foreplay.

At the end of the year, Charla is "downright ebullient with the notion that I didn't have to have sex today!" Because boys, do you know what the exhausted, overworked, working mum really wants in bed? Breakfast... but she'll be so grateful that she just may want you for lunch.

Another review of Voodoo Histories

What sounds like a fairly positive book on that much maligned decade, the 1970s.