On shit and should: Friday philosophy
Hi guys
In this week’s podcast I spoke to Lucy Blakiston, the founder of tearaway youth publishing success Shit You Should Care About, and we briefly touched on a word in her masthead that I don’t like.
“Shit” is not the word. “Shit” is good, because it’s not very offensive, it’s unusual enough to make you sit up and notice and it’s tailored to Lucy’s audience.
My problem is with the “should”. There’s too much “should” in the world already. Lucy agreed.
“Maybe a better name with way less oomph is ‘Shit You Could Care About’ … but ‘should’ rolls off the tongue.”
Lucy is smart and driven, and has built a massive (3.6 million actual people) audience on the back of hard and consistent work. I recommend you to listen to our conversation. If you subscribe to this newsletter and don’t listen to the podcast - sign up! You can find Crawford Media on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other places.
Talking about Lucy and her great masthead is not the point of this particular newsletter, however. I want to talk about “should”.
Third-person first
The version of the word “should” I am now trying to avoid is the first one listed in most dictionaries. It is the version that indicates a duty or requirement with the implication that duty or requirement is not being met or is not likely to be met. It’s a criticism or an admonition, often masquerading as advice. It’s the “should” that appears in this loathsome phrase:
“They should just … “
This is something you hear a lot in many organisations. It is advice generously given in the absence of the supposed beneficiary. The person who first drew my attention to the lameness of “they should just” was Mark Britt, my boss at ninemsn, and he did this because I had just used it. I was talking about Nine, our 50% owners and 100% tormentors. I can’t remember exactly what I had said to him. No doubt I was complaining about “their” inability to understand digital, or “their” duplicitous actions regarding something or other. The phrase seemed like a recommendation for a course of action, but actually it was just a whinge.
“That is not a useful sentence,” Mark said. He was right. Later I came to see a lot of what I had been complaining about as simple symptoms of conflicting interests. That and the fact that TV companies are culturally miles apart from technology companies.
Second-person: For the ones you love
When you “should” someone directly, you’re telling them what to do. Most of the time, this is too confronting with people we don’t know well, and we reserve second-person shoulds for good friends, relatives and partners. I’m not a relationships expert but I can’t imagine these kinds of sentences are helping anyone:
“You should get out more.”
“You should drink less.”
“You should be more careful with money.”
“You should lose some weight.”
First is worst
Gore Vidal said “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
Why does his phrase ring so true, when from an objective point of view it makes no sense at all?
My guess is because the success of a friend can feel like a poor reflection on you. It conjures up the most powerful should of all, and the one I have the most trouble with.
I have learned over years not to use third-person and second-person shoulds. I don’t say “they should just” (thanks to Mark Britt) and I no longer try to change other people, including those closest to me. It’s a relief.
The first-person shoulds are the real buggers. The voice in your head that tells you what you what you should be doing, what you should have achieved by now.
Not long ago, my friend Brigid Delaney sent me the manuscript of a book she had written about Stoicism. Brigid, who I worked with at ninemsn, has written several books. With each one she has become more established, more successful, she’s venturing further into the wilds of truthful experience and bringing back the gold. Contrary to Vidal’s witticism, I am not suffering from Brigid’s growing success. And I really like that she asked me for my advice.
Brig had been having a torrid time of it with the Stoics, and the manuscript was born hard. She thought it might be shit. As I sat in my reading chair overlooking the valley, I experienced a wonderful sense of discovery. That book brought together several threads I had been following for years, and turned me on to a powerful philosophy. It was not shit.
“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
That quote is from Marcus Aurelius. Lying under it is an encouragement to not only look the world in the face, but accept it and yourself as they are, rather than what they should be.
Brigid’s book is called Reasons Not To Worry, published by Allen and Unwin, and it will be available from September 20.
Have a great weekend,
Hal