I had a conversation a couple months ago with a new person, and their first question for me was "what's your niche?" I almost flinched. Academia is certainly a game of niches, and most professional environments want to slot people into specific roles, too. I love having many interests and the cross-pollinating potential that follows and there's plenty of media out there that celebrates being a generalist, but from where I sit, it is still an uphill battle to wear the badge in everyday life.
The rub is the weight in entertaining so many futures and keeping up so many threads. One approach to lighten the load is to reduce an interest into a passing fancy: this is the path of the dilettante, practically a dirty word (I once used it for myself in a professional context, yikes). I'm keen on finding other ways to dissolve the weight, to be able to sit at the intersection of many things and have the tension be a source of energy rather than strain. I appreciated some of the language in Ava's recapping of a recent book on the subject, which draws a line from my "extremely logged-on" youth—in which the internet gives a sense of "infinite browsing" and infinite potentials—to an inclination towards a lack of commitment to a certain body of knowledge. (tl;dr: it's all out of fear.)
Increasingly, I've been trying to log off: I know that my happiest days are those in which I forget to go online because work is urgent or interesting and my friends want to go surfing or drink some wine. Less noise cultivates focus. But I grew up online and have too many connections with lovely people through the internet for me to fully remove my online presence: instead, I need to find a strategy that helps me maintain sanity. Instagram and its ilk are FOMO machines, and they exacerbate the struggle I have to maintain a strong sense of self. I think that if you know what you are prioritizing in life, it makes it easier to absorb or deflect or respond or ignore the online deluge. But answers to questions such as "what do I like?" or "what am I here to do?" have generally been slippery to me: I have days where I feel like a half-baked character, ready to absorb whatever next ingredient I consume.
With this in mind, when I read an essay on Main Character Energy, which starts by rephrasing a TikTok: "You have to start romanticizing your life", my ears perked up. The piece identifies the directive as a way to capitalize on the central-tendency form of celebrity on social media, to battle the unsatisfying returns of being "shapeless online." There is so much value in non-performative celebration of self by construction of some kind of narratives (perhaps episodic rather than grand, thanks again, Ava). I *think* this is pretty basic self-care kind of stuff, but it feels more important than ever to have a few tools against the atomized incentives of the media landscape. Narratives of self also cannot come at the expense of group solidarity: this kind of balancing act was called out as "squads" by the folks at Other Internet: narrative-building and identity with others at a human, rather than corporate, scale.
(From the peak of my Styleforum days, I remember a guy who would post short sci-fi stories with himself as the main protagonist. Each short story was coupled with an outfit. I found it ridiculous at the time—despite the cool outfits—but now I see it as a useful tool, an opportunity for those who disapproved show themselves the door and for the author to help himself inform and support his choices. A very distilled example of "main character energy".)
The PhD experience is tough: it is incredibly atomizing, provides little information on pathways for the future (unless you're totally committed to academic work), and, in my experience at least, demands pushing at the edge of your skills. I have to learn new skills every day to do my job—which is awesome but also exhausting. There's failure every day, and this also wears at the sense of self.
Thinking about "main character energy" returned me to my childhood, filled to the brim with video games. Some of my favorite video games were Tales of Symphonia and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, both of which include organizing teams of characters to complete grand quests. My favorite characters in both were those who could both fight using the physical weapons as well as use magic. (In Tales of Symphonia, all but two characters only could do one or the other, essentially; in FFTA, you had to really carefully develop characters to do both). One of the most interesting characters in the Final Fantasy universe, to me, is the Blue Mage, a class who learns skills not so much by practicing them (as most classes do), but by being hit with them from enemies' attacks. Blue Mages end up with a wide repertory of unique skills, but only because they suffered through being on the receiving end. I don't see myself as a victim of any attacks—but a narrative built on learning through failure and celebration of a wide array of skills does sit right with me.
With age and practice, my "niche" is clearer than ever, and I'm getting better by the day at putting up boundaries to help me actually prioritize what I want to, but the "Blue Mage" mentality also really helps me think that there's still a lot of space and value to my wide-open approach to the world.
Getting hit,
Lukas
p.s. This post morphed a lot; I originally wrote it about my "depressed boys chat," which wasn't actually a single chat group but rather the handful of 4-8 independent long-form texting conversations I had over the past winter with some men in my life of a similar age. The common thread is that all of us were depressed, lowercase d at least. Common threads are loneliness, aimlessness, lack of agency. I've written here about how I'm responding to some of that (and I'm lucky to feel anything but lonely: frankly, overwhelmed by the social demands of my vaccinated social circles). But I am looking to learn more about how people characterize the various flavors of loneliness (i.e. in youth vs old age or a "lonely around people" vs truly-remote loneliness) and its intersection with masculinity. Let me know if you have any recommendations.
The rub is the weight in entertaining so many futures and keeping up so many threads. One approach to lighten the load is to reduce an interest into a passing fancy: this is the path of the dilettante, practically a dirty word (I once used it for myself in a professional context, yikes). I'm keen on finding other ways to dissolve the weight, to be able to sit at the intersection of many things and have the tension be a source of energy rather than strain. I appreciated some of the language in Ava's recapping of a recent book on the subject, which draws a line from my "extremely logged-on" youth—in which the internet gives a sense of "infinite browsing" and infinite potentials—to an inclination towards a lack of commitment to a certain body of knowledge. (tl;dr: it's all out of fear.)
Increasingly, I've been trying to log off: I know that my happiest days are those in which I forget to go online because work is urgent or interesting and my friends want to go surfing or drink some wine. Less noise cultivates focus. But I grew up online and have too many connections with lovely people through the internet for me to fully remove my online presence: instead, I need to find a strategy that helps me maintain sanity. Instagram and its ilk are FOMO machines, and they exacerbate the struggle I have to maintain a strong sense of self. I think that if you know what you are prioritizing in life, it makes it easier to absorb or deflect or respond or ignore the online deluge. But answers to questions such as "what do I like?" or "what am I here to do?" have generally been slippery to me: I have days where I feel like a half-baked character, ready to absorb whatever next ingredient I consume.
With this in mind, when I read an essay on Main Character Energy, which starts by rephrasing a TikTok: "You have to start romanticizing your life", my ears perked up. The piece identifies the directive as a way to capitalize on the central-tendency form of celebrity on social media, to battle the unsatisfying returns of being "shapeless online." There is so much value in non-performative celebration of self by construction of some kind of narratives (perhaps episodic rather than grand, thanks again, Ava). I *think* this is pretty basic self-care kind of stuff, but it feels more important than ever to have a few tools against the atomized incentives of the media landscape. Narratives of self also cannot come at the expense of group solidarity: this kind of balancing act was called out as "squads" by the folks at Other Internet: narrative-building and identity with others at a human, rather than corporate, scale.
(From the peak of my Styleforum days, I remember a guy who would post short sci-fi stories with himself as the main protagonist. Each short story was coupled with an outfit. I found it ridiculous at the time—despite the cool outfits—but now I see it as a useful tool, an opportunity for those who disapproved show themselves the door and for the author to help himself inform and support his choices. A very distilled example of "main character energy".)
The PhD experience is tough: it is incredibly atomizing, provides little information on pathways for the future (unless you're totally committed to academic work), and, in my experience at least, demands pushing at the edge of your skills. I have to learn new skills every day to do my job—which is awesome but also exhausting. There's failure every day, and this also wears at the sense of self.
Thinking about "main character energy" returned me to my childhood, filled to the brim with video games. Some of my favorite video games were Tales of Symphonia and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, both of which include organizing teams of characters to complete grand quests. My favorite characters in both were those who could both fight using the physical weapons as well as use magic. (In Tales of Symphonia, all but two characters only could do one or the other, essentially; in FFTA, you had to really carefully develop characters to do both). One of the most interesting characters in the Final Fantasy universe, to me, is the Blue Mage, a class who learns skills not so much by practicing them (as most classes do), but by being hit with them from enemies' attacks. Blue Mages end up with a wide repertory of unique skills, but only because they suffered through being on the receiving end. I don't see myself as a victim of any attacks—but a narrative built on learning through failure and celebration of a wide array of skills does sit right with me.
With age and practice, my "niche" is clearer than ever, and I'm getting better by the day at putting up boundaries to help me actually prioritize what I want to, but the "Blue Mage" mentality also really helps me think that there's still a lot of space and value to my wide-open approach to the world.
Getting hit,
Lukas
p.s. This post morphed a lot; I originally wrote it about my "depressed boys chat," which wasn't actually a single chat group but rather the handful of 4-8 independent long-form texting conversations I had over the past winter with some men in my life of a similar age. The common thread is that all of us were depressed, lowercase d at least. Common threads are loneliness, aimlessness, lack of agency. I've written here about how I'm responding to some of that (and I'm lucky to feel anything but lonely: frankly, overwhelmed by the social demands of my vaccinated social circles). But I am looking to learn more about how people characterize the various flavors of loneliness (i.e. in youth vs old age or a "lonely around people" vs truly-remote loneliness) and its intersection with masculinity. Let me know if you have any recommendations.