The Beautiful Mess Effect
featuring Seinfeld, supermodels and adolescent angst
My friend’s son Luke is 13. Recently, he won an award at one of those inter-school young scientist events. He coded a VR learning app—a mind-boggling feat when I reflect on what I was doing at his age.
The next day, Luke was anxious going to school. He believed the jig was up, he’d been outed; now everyone was going to know he was a dirty nerd, and the teasing would begin.
My Lord, but that took me back.
Looking at Luke, I feel hope for our future generations. It’s not just that he already has a craftsman’s skillset at his age, but that he has already been exposed in this tall poppy fashion. What a gift (says he from a suitable emotional and temporal distance)!
For one, I think back to my time in school with his father to the days when we were both lost (and apparently only occasionally friends). We suffered through all the mire of teenage anxiety and depression—the Purgatory through which our lost souls wandered blind in search of some shred of self-esteem. At Luke’s age, I’d discovered that raw intelligence was no foundation for said self-esteem, and it took me many years to find more solid ground on which to build my ego.
Luke has a craft. I could be wrong but I think that were he to experience the turbulence that myself and David did he would have an anchor for his self-esteem in that. If nothing else he could pour more of himself into it. He has a connection with soul and it’s something I would eagerly wish on any nascent teenager out there.
But it’s not just the skill, there’s also a gift in that feeling of dread he experienced the next day. There’s a line in one of Henry Jamison’s songs (one of my favourite lyricists; if you haven’t heard it already you really have to listen to Real Peach) where he’s talking about meeting a girl; he stumbles over to her and said something ridiculous “Like a man who’d refuse to shine”. That line stomps on my gut, and I love it.
I read somewhere recently that many of the great supermodels like Kate Moss and Claudia Schiffer were picked on when they were younger because they had strange features. They didn’t fit the ordinary mould exactly; they were different. This factoid went into the same pocket of my neurons as the test audience’s reaction to Seinfeld. It is our natural Darwinian reaction to treat any unevenness in the texture of reality with suspicion. The distinctness of Seinfeld and the great supermodels—their “shine”—is why they were disliked, but it’s also why they became iconic. These idiosyncrasies are Leonard Cohen’s “cracks that let the light in”.
We all-too-accustomed to the primal fear of Tall Poppy Syndrome, but we don’t talk enough about the “Beautiful Mess Effect”1. We think what makes us different will always cause alienation. Where we are different, we are raw; these are the places in the landscape of our soul where we look over our shoulder to see if we are alone. There is safety in numbers, but nothing is more universally human—and universally cherished—than difference. It is these raw places that connect us; they are our unsuspecting sinkholes into spirit.
The day of reckoning came for Luke, as I hope it has come or is coming for us all—the moment of vulnerable revelation. And…nothing happened.
Much ado about nothing.
The insight of Seneca holds true long after the collapse of Rome’s antique grandeur: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”. One teacher congratulated Luke; for the rest, it was another school day. In the end, the clarions heralding doom proved to be false prophets; the social persona and the personal ego came into greater alignment, and no great cost was paid. It won’t always be so.
I spent my adolescence as a boy “who’d refuse to shine”. I remember a teacher talking about Nietzsche in my final year in school and being too shy to speak up even when my soul had entered the room and invited me to dance. Aside from my closest friends, nobody in school caught a glimpse of the uneven textures of my being. I was invisible because I didn’t know how to shine. Because I was afraid. I hid from the world; some days I feel like I’m still hiding. It fills me with joy to think future generations might be spared some of this isolating loneliness and be able to claim their acre of this world. It won’t always be won so cheaply as this occasion, but every inch is a little slice of Elysium.
David and Luke make games together. David writes about it over at Creating for Godot (check out my favourite article he’s written so far Games with Meaning). Before they worked together, Luke made his own game called Grapploteer. I love me a puzzle (I’ll have you know that last year I finally solved the 5x5 Rubik’s cube) and I ADORE this game. It scratched my puzzle itch in just the right way, and I can’t recommend it enough (if you do play it, try and wrap your head around the fact that a 12-year-old made it!)
From a Forbes article on it: “The “beautiful mess effect” refers to a psychological phenomenon where individuals tend to judge their own displays of vulnerability more negatively than others do. This discrepancy creates a dynamic where individuals feel uncomfortable or self-conscious about showing vulnerability, even though their [others] may view it positively.”
I love the style of your writing!
Great little article. 🙂