Patchy performance
It began, as a lot of things seem to these days, with TV so bad it’s great. We were watching Bravo’s Summer House—a reality show where a bunch of people who seem attractive until you get to know them share a house and shenanigans ensue—when it struck me: every single woman’s face was sporting pimple patches.
These didn’t exist when I was a teenager, clinging to my parents’ insistence acne would disappear when I was 18 and never return (ha!). But they’re ubiquitous now: small hydrocolloid patches that get rid of blemishes fast. Using them is absolutely fine—who doesn’t want clear skin? But what’s weird is people now have no hesitation wearing them in public.
“Since I wear pimple patches as part of my nightly skincare routine, I never really thought much about wearing them during the day—and certainly not outside my house,” Tiffany Dodson Davis wrote last year in a Harper’s Bazaar article titled “Does everyone just wear their pimple patches in the wild now?”. “But nowadays, it feels like pimple patches are stalking me. Whenever I turn around, I see strangers wearing them while carefully selecting their groceries, picking up a new shirt at the mall, or just walking down the street.”
It’s true. You see them everywhere, as though Norman Gunston is suddenly cool. Dodson actually concludes this isn’t a bad thing—that “there’s actually something quite affirming about the outward-facing pimple patch trend: Wearing one in public makes acne-prone folks like me feel seen and a little less isolated about their skin issues.”
That’s one way of looking at it.
The other way is as yet another example of how social mores have dramatically shifted, and not for the better. I don’t want to see pimple patches. I also don’t want you to have a video call via speaker phone at a coffee shop. Or be forced to endure whatever Netflix show you’re watching, because you insist on sitting next to me with the volume up. I don’t need you bailing on plans with a last-minute text. Or putting in your work calendar, “Vasectomy at 4pm.”
“Workers are ready to let the casual office die,” Carrie Battan writes in New York magazine, examining the struggle many younger workers have in adjusting to working in an office environment. “Bringing respect back to the office means acknowledging that it’s not a stage for self-expression or—everyone hold on to something—an outlet for fulfillment. It’s a site of transaction.”
All of this could be dismissed as weird or socially inept. But I’m thinking the core motivator is selfishness or, to be more precise, the notion that lots of people now think of themselves as the stars of their own movie—and mistakenly believe the rest of us care about watching it.
I mean, we’re long beyond the point when LinkedIn morphed from being a marginally useful platform to connect with former and current colleagues to a bizarrely performative, not-so-humble-bragging professional equivalent of Instagram. But it’s literally today an avalanche of self-serving pap in between photos of fun runs or corporate events and—my personal favorite—someone declaring they’re now certified in something totally random, usually from some two-bit free online training course.
I understand the notion of having a personal brand. I also get that we have one regardless of what we do, so you’re probably better off proactively shaping it. What I don’t get is why so many people spend so much time on performative fluff. What happened to simply taking pleasure and pride at being good at something and doing it without fanfare?
I’ve previously written about the culture shock of landing in the United States and being exposed to relentless self-promotion. In Australia, anyone big-noting themselves is cut down to size in a flash. We call it the “tall-poppy syndrome” and, while there’s no doubt it can veer into being destructive and stifling ambition, it’s useful for reminding people that being “successful”—however that’s measured—doesn’t make you superior or important. And you’re likely still a dickhead.
Almost a quarter of a century later, we’re all Americans. “We live in an age of loud egos,” Arthur C. Brooks writes in The Atlantic. “Scholars have documented a large increase since the late 1970s in the percentage of people with a narcissistic personality, a trend that is especially clear among young adults.”
Social media has, of course, thrown kerosene on this bonfire: according to one survey, Brooks notes, more than half of young people today say they want to be an influencer. But surely all these people trumpeting their success and working hard, playing hard are crushing life, right? Er, no. “The increase in loud egos has coincided with declines in well-being,” Brooks writes. “The rate of depression in the United States has risen to its highest level on record.”
We all know the deleterious effect of social media generally—I mean, catch five minutes of any of the 400 varieties of 90 Day Fiancé and see for yourself. But the loud ego effect Brooks describes has bled deeply into the professional world. More than a decade ago, I recall working with an alleged expert in the emerging field of social media and constantly feeling they were just totally bullshitting, taking advantage of general cluelessness about this newfangled tech. That was absolutely true but—spoiler alert—they failed up.
Back then, it felt like genuine imposters were a rarity. Today? The incentive and reward structure for careers seems geared toward being all hat and no cattle. It feels like professional success flows to those who pitch themselves as thought leaders, who opine the loudest and longest, and who are utterly relentless in their self promotion. Some of that probably stems from the fact so many corporate jobs are both unnecessary and irrelevant—it truly is a triumph of style over substance.
But it’s also reflective of the so-called role models we see at the very highest levels of American society. That’s led, of course, by a president viewed by his supporters as a business tycoon despite mountains of evidence suggesting otherwise, and closely followed by a cabinet filled with the most incompetent cast of incompetents in the country’s history. But, man, do they look good on camera or what?
Cock-eyed optimist that I am, I’d like to think actually being good at what you do will ultimately triumph. I mean, I have to believe that—because the alternative is relentless self-promotion, and who on Earth wants to do that? And, more to the point, in between applying pimple patches and inhaling bad TV, who has the time?
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.