Crossing the cringe minefield

Don’t get too comfortable

Illustration by Alexander Naughton

Say you want to improve your life — to become happier, more helpful to others, more desirable, whatever you want. Given that this is a big world, with many possibilities, there are lots of strategies for self-improvement available to you. Which strategies will you pick first?

Because motivation is tightly linked to emotion, you will first choose the strategies that are emotionally comfortable for you in particular. Perhaps you are an energetic, rugged person, who enjoys autonomy and competence, so you will choose a difficult exercise routine that others would shrink from. It’s effortful, but it’s emotionally satisfying, and that satisfaction will propel you through the difficulties. Or perhaps you are a person who values novelty and adventure, so you choose an abrupt move to a different city, where you can find new work and a new friend group — the thrill of newness will give you fuel to deal with all of the anxiety and uncertainty involved.

Then, once you’ve exhausted the strategies that feel emotionally satisfying, you will choose the strategies that feel emotionally okay — strategies that don’t exactly delight you, but that come recommended by people you’d like to emulate. Perhaps you don’t love filling out a gratitude journal every day, or having a weekly debrief about your relationship with your spouse, but these tactics are like a well-chosen supplement. They’re flavorless, they require nothing of you but a minor expenditure of energy, and they obviously help. So you keep them up, to some degree.

Now what? Maybe you’re in your late twenties or early thirties. You’ve been around the block, and you’ve tried all of the self-improvement strategies that seem viable. But there is still some difficulty in your life that’s really obvious, that you feel you ought to be able to solve. Despite being unusually talented, your career isn’t taking off the way it should. You spend your nights binging on junk food or tv or Twitter. You endlessly put off working on the passion project you keep telling people about. You’re frustrated, and you’ve tried everything to fix it!

But of course, you haven’t actually tried everything. There are other strategies you could try. The only problem is that they will require you to feel the forbidden feeling.

You know, the forbidden feeling. That feeling. That one horrible feeling that your whole adult personality has been devised to avoid.

I.

Each of us has a sensitive spot, a core fear or discomfort that we see as more hurtful than everything else. We relate to it as an existential peril and do everything we can to shove it far away from us. Perhaps on a rational level, we know that it’s not an existential threat — it’s just another feeling. And we’re probably already feeling it: by avoiding it all the time, paradoxically, we keep it ever-present in our consciousness, in a watered-down form. Somehow, ingesting this feeling at low concentration for our entire lives does not kill us.

Nevertheless, we try not to confront the feeling directly. Even considering the feeling creates an existential cringe reaction, an instinctive repulsion. As Bruce Tift says: “Almost all of us have a sense of annihilatory panic associated with our core vulnerabilities. This is an intense sense of threat, impossible to really put into words — ‘If I have to feel this feeling, I will cease to exist.’” Any path in life that involves such a confrontation lies on the other side of a cringe minefield, a barrier created by the promise of that feeling.

This influences, to an astonishing degree, what we do with our lives. Perhaps you fear loneliness and monotony. Cool — you take a highly social job with lots of choice and few long-term restrictions, like being a fine dining waiter or a wedding planner, so you rarely have to be alone, and you can always walk away from a particular workplace. Perhaps you fear being seen as worthless — so you chase prestige, and find yourself coincidentally interested in occupations valued by your society, with friends who also have high-status jobs, and you try to be just a little more impressive than they are.

And that’s all fine. In a sense, this is just working with the gifts you were given, playing the cards you were dealt. But relying too much on your natural gifts, in order to avoid the existential cringe, is hugely limiting. Cringe fields are where our biggest self-improvement gains are likely to come from, because they point to parts of the self we haven't allowed to develop — there's only so much you can continue to squeeze out of your core strengths, but you can get noob gains from focusing on your core fears. This means that existential cringe is actually a signal pointing you to where you can make the most progress quickly.

What does being limited by existential cringe look like?

• The chaotic and adventurous artist, who fears being mundane, would be best-served in their artistic pursuits by some completely standard productivity strategies, and perhaps even a normal day job that would give their life some structure.

• The empathetic therapist who fears letting other people down might be better off firing a difficult client who’s not being served by the therapeutic relationship.

• The prestige-seeking overachiever could do something much more rewarding with their time if they abandoned the glitzy but soulless occupation that brought them approval from parents and peers.

But it seems people in situations like these rarely think “ah, I’m out of the good ideas that will be easy, perhaps I should consider the ideas that are more difficult for me to stomach.” They simply reject the difficult ideas out of hand, slapping them away with pat dismissals. Or they don’t even really see the options that are ruled out by their core fear.

And this can be tragically limiting. The chaotic artist reflexively insists that structure would kill their creativity, and so instead chooses to remain adrift, at the cost of rarely producing the art they believe is their purpose. The empathetic therapist believes the client would suffer irreparable harm via their rejection, and so winces through appointment after pointless appointment, guiltily collecting money for a useless service. The prestige-seeking overachiever believes falsely that everyone would abandon them if they ditched the fancy job, so they continue, feeling more and more trapped in an inauthentic life.

I can’t say that confronting your core fear will ever be comfortable or easy. But I know that you will never be fully free unless you know what your core fear is, and consciously make an effort to see the options on the other side of it. In this way, the deepest levels of agency require accepting the possibility of counter-instinctual behavior.

II.

Do you know where your cringe minefield lies?

For me, it’s extremely clear. As I’ve written about before, I’m perpetually in flight from fear of being evil, corrupt, or imperfect. In the Enneagram system, this type is the One — called the Perfectionist, or the Moralist.

I don’t think this fear is all bad. It’s structurally important in my life — it fuels behaviors I’m proud of, like trying really hard to be helpful when friends are in trouble, and working on things I think will make our collective future better. However, it’s also true that I’d be dramatically worse off if I never disobeyed the feeling.

Here are some examples of how this has played out for me:

1. Giving my husband compliments: I like to believe that I’m scrupulously honest, that I don’t use flattery or deception to achieve my ends. But this can become a little pathological. For a long time in my marriage, I was afraid to give my husband compliments or call him by pet names, because on some level I thought it was manipulative to do things he liked too much. (I’m cringing just writing this — on a conscious level I do know it’s lunacy.) When I realized what was happening and told him, he told me “what I want is to be manipulated.” It took a year of forcing myself to say cute things over an inner reaction that kept insisting “this is wrong” for the cringe to go away.

2. Negotiating for higher pay: Nothing mortifies me quite like the thought of being recognized for the selfish creature I am. Historically, this has made it tremendously difficult to force myself to negotiate for higher pay, even though I know it’s normal to do. I end up bargaining against myself, generating all sorts of counterarguments that would probably never even occur to the other person: “You should be grateful just to have this job, how can you think you’re entitled to more?” “If you were doing this for the right reasons, you wouldn’t be so fixated on what’s in it for you.” Etc. I’ve spent weeks deliberating whether I could justly be fired for making an ask that was then quickly granted.

3. Burning out of EA: For a couple of years, I got pulled into the world of effective altruism, which exerts a gravitational force on people with my particular set of neuroses. In my personal experience, the vibe of EA is essentially: yes, we are all bad, corrupt, and imperfect — but here’s an approach to life that is minimally defective, a kind of decentralized, secular Catholicism. The challenge with EA, and why many people drop out of it, is that there’s no principled stopping point once you’ve decided you’re morally obligated to do “the most good you can do.” I ended up feeling guilty about everything — what I did with my money, what I ate, what I did with my leisure time (if I allowed myself any). Predictably, I burned out, but even after I did I had to overcome a deep fear that it was moral dereliction in order to extract myself from the movement. If I hadn’t confronted that fear, I’m confident I’d be doing something a lot less useful than I am now.

III.

I’m a big believer in the power of human intuition, but also a believer that there are important limits on when and where it can be trusted. It’s a mistake to treat your existential cringes like any other intuition. Being triggered by a core fear or vulnerability is more like being drunk than feeling another emotion. It dilates time and distorts your sense of proportion, leading to thoughts like, “if I do this, everyone will see me as unserious,” or “if I mess this up, no one will ever want me again.” It triggers self-protective instincts, creating a temporary view of the world where people are out to get you, where there’s a thin, perilous walkway between you and emotional safety, with hazards on either side.

Most people who drink successfully avoid drunk driving. They achieve this via metacognition — understanding, in advance, that being tipsy will cause you to overestimate how capable you are behind the wheel. Having a little humility about the fact that their perceptions can be distorted.

Similarly, to cross the cringe minefield, you need to have humility about the fact that your perception is distorted, right now. You simply cannot see the landscape of options in your life objectively. By default, you will ignore a path to your dreams if a personally perilous emotion—worthlessness, loneliness, imperfection—is along the way. If you don’t take this into account, you’re doomed to low-grade, long-term self-sabotage that will feel like simply leaning into your strengths. The default is to choose the misery you’re comfortable with over the agonizing thrill of real change.