Let your ideas mature
It pays to let your draft ideas sit for a while and develop. This is why I prefer the kind of writing that requires a bit of time and thought.
Earlier this week I was working on something when I hit a wall. It suddenly felt impossible to finish. I let go of it and concentrated on something else for a while. When I finally returned to it, I found that I not only had ideas about where to go next with it, but I also felt newly excited about it. I found ways to enrich the narrative and felt able to complete the research it required.
The moral of the story is, let your ideas marinate if you’re finding it difficult to proceed. Sleep on it or leave it for a few days, and let your brain do the magic it knows how to do so well.
Seeing one’s father anew
A middle aged man sees his retired father in a new light:
And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.
- Tom Wolfe The Bonfire of the Vanities (pp. 469-470). Random House.
Second gen ultra-rich and the Peter Pan Syndrome
Carl Jung introduced the archetype of the puer aeternus, which Marie-Louis von Franz later expounded in lectures she gave in 1959 -1960, published as The Problem of the Puer Aeternus.
While von Franz used The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, to explicate her point, Dan Kiley, in 1984, used Peter Pan, the play by J.M Barrie, to describe a syndrome he thought afflicted the upper classes only, but is now recognised in the wider population. The female version is referred to as “puella aeternus”.
Both von Franz and Kiley describe the same phenomenon of adults who, like Peter Pan, never grow up. Their irresponsible behaviours and narcissistic properties, make it difficult for them face up to their adult responsibilities and feelings, as well as maintain social and professional relationships. In 1998, Ann Yeoman connected the two in her book Now or Neverland.
Adults who never grow up
Dan Kiley lists the following as some of the characteristics of adults who never grow up:
- Anxiety stemming from family dysfunction
- Emotional paralysis that shows up as emotional instability
- Failure aversion from growing up overprotected and therefore, failing to learn how to take risks and deal with failure
- Irresponsibility a result of coddling, which inhibits the ability to learn from the consequences of their actions
- Inability to work, as their parents tend to be wealthy and don’t teach them how to earn
- Magical thinking, that is, given to fantasy and preferring this to taking action to achieve goals
- Loneliness as family dynamics lead to low self esteem and inability to make true friends or hold meaningful relationships
- Narcissism from reluctance to accept responsibility
- Chauvinism because it provides a sense of belonging and esteem
- A “piratical lifestyle,” that is, one that selfishly extracts value from whatever or whoever is available, with no concern for the provider
All this was brought to mind when I read Jack Self’s interesting article about the ultra-rich entitled Plutocrat Archipelagos. By ultra-rich, Self is referring to the 2,781 world’s billionaires, of which he has personally met 4. Reading Self, I couldn’t help but think of both von Franz’s and Kiley’s analysis of adults who never grow up.
Self’s experience of the ultra-rich is that phenomenal wealth infantilizes by imprisoning it’s beneficiaries in a perpetual non-adulthood, which severs them from their humanity. They are characterised by “aggressive megalomania” or ““nihilistic hedonism.” Their material and psychological circumstances make it impossible to “grasp anything about material or social reality.”
Here are some excerpts from Self’s essay to illustrate how the characteristics of immaturity that von Franz, Kiley and others identified, converge in the ultra-rich:
Traumatised and overindulged
Self describes the psychological profiles of second gen ultra-rich as “dominated by interminable existential crises.” As Self puts it:
The great emotional contradiction of this class is that they are both traumatized and overindulged. Their parental relationships are rarely healthy, and are marked by childhood rejection, neglect and lack of support. At the same time, anyone employed to care for them was (understandably) financially motivated to lavish praise and be overprotective — often to the extent of smothering personal growth or self-criticality. This contradiction is literally the foundational marker of narcissists.
Emotional instability and purposelessness
The life of the ultra-rich is so over-protected and sanitised that it lacks opportunities to help them build resilience. Self explains:
They spiral pretty easily. Unluckily, a life without real-world feedback quickly becomes directionless (the primary source of the existential crises). Luckily, the absence of consequences masks any and all shortcomings (hence the nihilistic hedonism).
No risk or failure
Self points out the ultra-rich use their money, power and influence to avoid facing the outcomes of their actions:
To inherit a condition of unjustifiable wealth means to never experience cause and effect. All external pressures are alleviated by capital: there are no consequences to missing a deadline, to not finishing a project, to dropping out or giving up. It is terrifically difficult to fail, in any normal sense.
Inability to work or create
Self explains:
Since they [the ultra-rich] understand very little about causality, they do not understand how events happen or things get made. They can be filled with mystical wonderment at the spontaneous generation of material reality. They can also be blind to social realities that sit outside their lived knowledge, which is terrifyingly narrow.
Self adds that they lack the essential skills to create anything meaningful:
Second gens are not detail oriented, unless they become lost in the minutiae of infinite trivial distinctions. They generally lack the frameworks required to establish priorities and hierarchy, because they lack a foundational experience of ‘need’. This muddles everything, rendering all decisions equally important or unimportant, or big or small, or both.
Magical thinking
Marie-Louise von Franz suggested that a puer aeternus will spend a lot of time planning and fantasizing about what will and could be, but never take any action to make this a reality. Self comments:
For such people, a dream is reality. To engage in a discussion about some speculative future is to have already made it tangible. A description of a wondrous project is the outcome. There is rarely any drive to realize or act on these ideas – accelerating the drift into purposelessness. That said, sometimes a dream can be sustained for years, even decades, as a perpetual promise, a permanent coming-into-being. The second gen can plausibly inhabit a totally unrealizable fantasy.
Loneliness
Kiley showed us that the puer aeternus is emotionally cut off as an adult. As a younger person, they are forever seeking somewhere to belong. With emotional turmoil at home, they have no choice but to seek comfort, at any cost, outside home. This makes them prone to peer pressure and addictions. Such is their fear of rejection, that they can never fully settle into the newfound communities, leading to loneliness.
Similarly, it is difficult for the ultra-rich to make true friends. They are paranoid that what everyone wants from them is money, so they wall themselves off literally and psychologically to pre-empt this. Self:
I am describing a metaphorical wall that circumscribes obscene wealth, cutting the rich off from their own humanity. It is load-bearing, integral to their psyches and thus immovable. It is erected upon a foundation of paranoia, distrust and fear. The ultra-rich suspect that everyone wants only one thing from them…
No accountability
Kiley shows how blamelessness is an integral part of the Peter Pan syndrome. It’s nigh on impossible to accept responsibility for anything. So it is with the ultra-rich, which is concerning, as they tend to wield some degree of societal influence. As Self puts it:
It is especially worrying when the ultra-rich are so divorced from reality, so cocooned and entombed in their wealth that they barely perceive the violence they commit against the world as such. From the perspective of the impoverished, this class of people combine the decadence of Versailles with the brutality of war criminals.
Narcissism and chauvinism
According to Dan Kiley, if the foregoing characteristics are left to fester long enough in a younger person, they turn into narcissism which in turn leads to chauvinism.
Kiley explains that narcissism is a self-protective mechanism that helps the puer aeturnus project their faults onto other people. It helps avoid self-criticality which in turn prohibits the personal growth that comes from meaningful relationships with other people.
Chauvinism allows the narcissistic person social acceptance by their peers.
Conclusion
It’s important to recognise that while Self was specifically talking about the ultra-rich, this syndrome is not confined to them. It afflicts all adults who for whatever reason cannot, or will not, take on the responsibility of becoming adults, regardless of wealth. Personally, I know adults, who though not ultra-rich, their failure to launch has wrought nothing short of devastation. Living with the syndrome is punitive for the afflicted, their families and our society.
The Peter Pan syndrome is not recognised in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - DSM-5 (the the American Psychiatric Association’s professional guide to mental health). It is nevertheless, a painful state for those it affects directly or indirectly.
How to be better humans and participate in building societies that are robust enough to tackle the universal challenges of our time, is an endeavour that we should all strive to engage in. It would behove those who are above this enterprise, either because they are physically or mentally walled off, to heed Edgar Allan Poe’s warning in the short story The Masque of the Red Death.
In the story prince Prospero and his friends seclude themselves in his court and revel in lavish parties, while outside, people die en masse from a virulent infection. The party eventually stops when the red death nonetheless, finds its way in. Poe intended it as a reminder of our own mortality. The story should encourage us to muster the unflinching maturity and courage it requires to face up to not only our human frailties, but also, the perilousness of our times.
The merits of a shitty blog
A “shitty blog” in this case means a space you can write without worrying too much about the quality you’re producing. This, I think, is the benefit of daily blogging, where what matters most is that you write daily, to keep the flow going.
I prefer to write long well-researched essays about the many threads that interest me. Publishing daily is therefore not a practice I find comfortable. It feels like I’m shooting from the hip, with my eyes closed. And yet, there are definitely merits to it:
- it can free you from constraints
- you can take bigger risks
- you can express your ideas and quickly find out which land
I am therefore deeply gratified to find a kindred sprit on this subject, in Henrick Karlsson, who like me, prefers to write long form researched content, but has recently decided to experiment with what he refers to as his “shit blog.” Karlsson has been pleasantly surprised to find that keeping it, has been a worthwhile exercise:
What has delighted me about the shit blog is how abundant it has made me feel. I sit down and type as fast as I can, and the results—well, they suck, but they don’t suck that much. They have a certain breeziness and some insights, too—insights of a different kind than I have in the serious essays.
Having a place to stream ideas without overthinking them, has eliminated feelings of scarcity:
Which means I have underestimated my capacity! I can actually just sit down, without energy, without ideas, and if I frame the task in the right way, I can extract something of value from myself. The sense of scarcity I felt previously—feeling that to write the actual essays, I needed hours of high energy, which is scarce since we homeschool (sic) our kids, and I work, and the 2-year-old wakes up at night screaming, and feeling, because of this, that I needed to use my limited energy on good ideas—this feeling of scarcity has, I realize, kept me from doing more and better work.
I can relate to this. For me, the best approach might be a bit of both. Yes to the shit blog and yes to the serious essays. It remains to be seen whether they will both end up in the same place.
Toxic bedfellows
In The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, Julia Cameron describes “poisonous playmates” as people who can “capsize an artist’s growth.”
Cameron highlights people whose creativity is still blocked as being particularly bad for one’s creative recovery. But really, Cameron’s advice applies not only to the creative path, but also to all areas of life where one encounters resistance from those who, either deliberately, or unconsciously, sabotage your progress.
Why they do it
Cameron gives the following suggestions as to why poisonous playmates may be unsupportive:
- Blocked friends may find your recovery disturbing. Your getting unblocked raises the unsettling possibility that they, too, could become unblocked and move into authentic creative risks rather than bench-sitting cynicism.
Perhaps they still get an anorectic high from the martyrdom of being blocked or they still collect sympathy and wallow in self-pity.
Perhaps they still feel smug thinking about how much more creative they could be than those who are out there doing it.
Whatever their reasons, poisonous playmates are not in a position to offer support:
Do not expect your blocked friends to applaud your recovery. That’s like expecting your best friends from the bar to celebrate your sobriety. How can they when their own drinking is something they want to hold on to?
What you can do
These behaviours are detrimental to your progress and well-being and Cameron offers some suggestions on how you might cope:
Deal with doubt
Be alert to subtle sabotage from friends. You cannot afford their well-meaning doubts right now. Their doubts will reactivate your own.
Do not let their fears and second thoughts derail you.
Do not let friends squander your time.
Give yourself the gift of faith. Trust that you are on the right track. You are.
You will be led to new sources of support as you begin to support yourself.
Ruthlessly protect your creative boundaries
Cameron encourages us to be:
very careful to safeguard your newly recovering artist. Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people’s plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn’t. It makes us frustrated people.
Be gentle but firm, and hang tough.
Nurture yourself
The essential element in nurturing our creativity lies in nurturing ourselves. Through self-nurturance we nurture our inner connection to the Great Creator. Through this connection our creativity will unfold. Paths will appear for us. We need to trust the Great Creator and move out in faith.
Beware of guilt and other manipulation
Blocked creatives are easily manipulated by guilt. Our friends, feeling abandoned by our departure from the ranks of the blocked, may unconsciously try to guilt-trip us into giving up our newly healthy habits.
Be particularly alert to any suggestion that you have become selfish or different. (These are red-alert words for us. They are attempts to leverage us back into our old ways for the sake of someone else’s comfort, not our own.)
If all else fails, bail
There’s nothing wrong with disengaging from toxicity that is harmful to your creativity and well-being. If things get really bad, remember that conscious uncoupling is also an option.