Gauging

They did it again, this week. Twice. They notified a room full of people, "I am intimidating."

Generally, it's a pretty dicey undertaking to make bold, public declarations about other people's perceptions of oneself. The risk of being made absurd is unnecessarily high. And I think a lot of the students I teach are treading close to that line. I've noticed it over the past year or two: more and more college students drop into conversation, or an assigned speech, their assertion that "I intimidate the people around me." And I have no idea where it comes from. We're not talking huge, hulking bruisers, or decorated sharpshooters; not a Nobel prize winner among them. They're just ordinary eighteen, nineteen year old college kids, who are convinced that they make other people's knees shake and stomachs turn to ice water.

My first diagnosis was plain old narcissism. These are kids whose parents, all four or five of them, and grandparents, all twenty-three of them, repeated hundreds of times a day how special they were, how talented, how beautiful, how much better than other children. Now, if they find the people around them unresponsive, it can only be because they are so formidable, so wonderful, that they shock everyone into silence. That must be it.

But it's also been showing up on my course evaluations, too: they tell me that I'm intimidating, that they feel afraid to approach me. And if they're intimidated by a pasty, middle-aged academic dressed in Wal-Mart clearance, they're bound to find the world outside pretty daunting. Somewhere along the way, the benchmark has moved: a fairly large segment of the generation currently coming of age is primed to find people intimidating on the weakest of cues.

The students who claim the label for themselves do have in common a tendency to be assertive. They don't apologize, they don't talk around things, they simply say what they mean. As far as I'm concerned, that's a positive and healthy thing, and I've been known to frame my remarks that way as well. But is it really the case that if we aren't radiating uncertainty, if we aren't indirect in all our remarks, that we project an uninviting hardness that repels people? Are we drifting in the direction of our neighbors across the Pacific, sliding culturally into the high-context obliqueness that makes conversation a mix of ceremony and detective work? I don't suppose it's a catastrophe: cultures do change, and if that's what we have in store, then I suppose it'll be interesting to watch it happen. But it does make me curious what forces are driving us that way.

And I think it has a good deal to do with the particular brand of alienation that's taken over this country's culture. It's the same phenomenon that makes the typical American so conflict-averse, so certain that having an argument must mean ending a relationship. My sense is that we've built on top of being over-medicated, and now our everyday conversations are over-choreographed. Probably some of the blame for that falls at the feet of my field, but as with any helpful advances that pare down the messiness and danger in life, it's tricky getting the balance right.