Loud Shadows

I don't think all of us are hiding something, but I am

Imagine a culture in which having callouses on your hands is considered taboo. Not illegal, not punishable, but socially unacceptable in a way that makes people squeamish and uncomfortable. Consequently, everyone wears gloves at all times.

We also know that some people go climbing — climbing itself isn’t exactly taboo, but it isn’t something you’d bring up at dinner either. The people who do it don’t tend to advertise it. Some people climb a lot. Some people have never climbed. But because of the gloves, you can’t really perfectly tell who’s who.

It ends up being the case that people with heavy callouses tend to assume that everyone has them. They’d had several experiences in which they meet other people, reveal that they have callouses, and bond over it. This generally fills them with a sense of relief, but also confusion and anger about everyone else’s refusal to confess.

They look around at all the gloved hands and think, “obviously everyone’s hands are rough under there.” They believe that the world would just be much better if we all stopped wearing gloves all of the time.

However, while most people have the biological capacity to develop callouses (i.e., their skin would do it if they climbed). They haven’t, and their hands are in fact pretty smooth as a consequence.

When calloused people meet someone who seems like they don’t even know what climbing is, the instinct is not necessarily to just think “huh, this person is different.” The instinct is to think “this person is hiding it, and refuses to confess either to me or to themselves that they are.”

And this is because people do hide it, the gloves are real and everyone is wearing them.

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The reality is, taboos almost always start for a reason. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t ever be challenged or questioned; but rather, that there will actually be meaningful consequences to some people if they are removed.

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This all makes me think about how through the combination of both genetics and adversity in early development, I have what could be called a “loud shadow”. This is to say, when most people meet me, they know that something is up. I most likely didn’t have an idyllic childhood, I’m probably unconventional in some way, and perhaps I have some type of psychological abnormality.

They don’t usually know exactly what it is, but they know there is something.

I think it’s good that people track these things. While they may often be what amounts to guesses and projections, it seems fine to rely on quick paradigms like this sometimes.

I’ve especially found people who have louder shadows themselves to be unusually good at identifying me as one of them. And, this applies in reverse. When I enter a room, quickly identifying the other shadowy people is generally quite easy.

Going back to the earlier analogy, I believe that appearing more blatantly shadowy in a way that is legible to the people around, would be similar to hinting at the fact that you do go climbing.

By the heavily calloused, this ends up getting perceived as honesty. However, I think that is a mistake.

I’ve noticed shadowy people tend to more or less keep to one another, and almost exclusively form close bonds among other people like them.

I think my experience has been unusual, in that I have actually developed some quite close and involved relationships with people who don’t have loud shadows at all. I notice that when I speak to people who are more like myself (similarly to the heavily calloused), they tend to (perhaps) implicitly distrust non-shadowy others.

And again, I think this is in large part because they believe the non-shadowy others are basically lying.

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I think it makes sense for these two groups to want to remain mostly segregated. I do think that each group actually presents a meaningful threat to the other’s frames for assessing reality and virtue.

The person I am closest to without a “loud shadow” basically hates edginess. He doesn’t understand what it’s for, and thinks that it generally creates harmful norms.

I absolutely am edgy. And, having this person’s disapproval made me think more deeply as to why.

I don’t think this is all of it, but I want to say that edginess, vice signaling, and other social moves in that camp are basically ingroup signals. Metaphorically speaking, they are tiny dog whistles among the calloused that allow for easier identification. They bring relief to the calloused, and disgust to the rest.

I have no desire to stop giving out signals that move people closer to accurate models of me, and I don’t think anyone else should either. But, I do think these things come at a cost that most people just aren’t tracking. The others aren’t uncomfortable because they are ashamed of their own callouses, but rather because they do not have them at all.