The Antidote to Shame, Social Friction, Nonchalance Contests, and the Louvre's Trivial Password

1. The word of the week for Seen & Unseen‘s Belle Tindall — who is slated to speak at our 2026 NYC Conference (!!) — is shame. It’s an emotion we all feel. And perhaps one we wish our adversaries would experience more deeply in their souls. At least that’s what Jacob Elordi, who plays the monster in Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein, believes. When an interviewer asks him which lost art he wishes would come back in style, Elordi responds, “The art of shame. I wish people could experience shame a little heavier.” Danggggg.

It’s a sentiment that Tindall can half agree with. She sympathizes with the actor:

I get it. He’s been consumed with what components make up a monster, endeavouring to literally turn himself into one. He’s been ruminating on the recipe of evil, and perhaps he’s found one key ingredient — shamelessness. Maybe Jacob, having dwelt on such, has subsequently looked out at the not-so-fictional “monsters” wreaking havoc and has diagnosed the same thing, a distinct lack of shame.

Shame can reacquaint us with our humanity, our brokenness, and ultimately our need for grace. In that way, I suppose it’s a necessary thing. But even more essential, Tindall writes, is the relief of mercy:

[M]y brain creates a helpful montage for me — whirring through the countless ways in which I have failed — in what I think, what I say, what I do. I’m confronted with the ways that my breaking-things-ness has leaked out of me through my negligence, it’s spilled out of my weakness, the force of it directed at others through my own deliberate fault.

Oh yes, I’m well acquainted with the emotion of shame.

But the only thing productive/appropriate/corrective about falling on my face in shame, is that there is a mercy that can scoop me up. It’s not hopeless, you see? There’s a mend-ability. There’s an antidote to shame; there’s a balm for its burn. There’s a bewildering love that banishes shame from within me – there’s a rescue route from its toxic spiral. […]

I can only ever wish people to experience the heaviness of shame if it means that they are more sensitive to the feeling of it being undeservedly lifted off them. That’s where change happens. That’s the medicine.

2. Where shame spirals us inward, mercy propels us outward. Unfortunately, in the digital world we are found wanting for mercy. Exceedingly so. Our online echo chambers have made us susceptible to mob mentality — according to Alan Noble in his Substack — and allergic to people who think differently than us; the central reason for the mob mentality being our innate “desperation” for belonging:

Part of the power of mob identity is that the individual has a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something meaningful and important and with power and movement in the world. The contemporary world is a violent and chaotic space, with warring factions and high stakes conflicts. To belong somewhere is not to be left to fend for yourself. It also helps you filter information in an epistemological crisis where all information is contested. Your group will help you decide which information is to be trusted and from which sources.

“To belong somewhere is not to be left to fend for yourself.” One wonders if the NYC marathoners felt any sense of belonging this past weekend during the long 26.2-mile trek. My algorithm brought up many videos of loved ones cheering on other loved ones and strangers supporting other runners as they passed by. Could marathons be considered a “third space” of sorts? Maybe not, but I know running clubs can function as one.

Lisa Bubert, for Noema, understands the yearning to belong in her essay “The Healing Power of Social Friction.” A local dive bar by the name of Crossroads used to be Bubert’s sacred “third space” before it closed down during COVID. She described it as “a lovefest of humanity singing at the top of their lungs, a place that made you believe this American melting pot experiment could actually work.” Beyonca Deleon, who ran the karaoke machine, named it affectionately “the-come-as-you-are bar.”

Why don’t more places like the Crossroads exist? Bubert hits the nail on the head:

Today, at a time when we’re increasingly siloed by class, race, politics and algorithms, places like Crossroads perform a sacred service. They invite us to embrace something essential to our collective well-being: social friction.

We humans can have a low tolerance for social friction, tension that may arise when people from different backgrounds, worldviews or values interact.

She goes on, about how algorithms and modern conveniences have affected our relationships:

Now that we can access whatever (and whomever) we want in the palm of our hands — the perfect dinner, the finest products, an ideal lover — it’s easy to avoid anything that doesn’t meet our explicit preferences or that falls outside our comfort zone.

This optimization comes at a cost. When we can pick and choose whom we engage with, click by click, we become further sorted into weak tribes exploited by grievances that drive us apart. We lose the ability to wade through the muddy waters of forgiveness and repair, accountability and justice.

3. Are you cringemaxxing? Are you letting your kids be cringe? Amil Niazi for the Cut commands you to “Let Your Kids Be Cringe,” because focusing on the judgment of other parents is keeping you from the best parts of parenting. Niazi points out that children are “inherently cringe,” they say what’s on their mind without fear of shame or embarrassment. Kids aren’t weighed down by the same self-consciousness that keeps us up at odd hours of the night. What starts out as an instruction turns into a deliverance of sorts (but I’ll let you parents decide for yourselves):

Parenting is essentially a frequent devotion to being taken down a peg that asks us to lay bare our souls in order to shepherd our spawn safely to adulthood. We’re not supposed to be smug or perfect or free from embarrassment while we do it. In fact, it feels so much better and more fun when you stop caring about getting it right and just getting it done. The same way you realize after 40 that no one thinks about you as much as you think they do, the truth is no one is obsessing about what you look like while you’re parenting or whether you have the right toys, furniture, or clothes.

I’m reminded of Bryan Jarrell’s latest piece about letting kids enjoy their inside joke of “Six Seven”:

We adults are not meant to get Six Seven, and that’s OK. In fact, that’s part of the joke’s authentic, organic charm. Our parental confusion is a portent of our growing irrelevance, our aging, and the fact that our children are independent creatures loved by God who won’t be ours forever. I’m delighted for my son in that bittersweet way that parents experience when our children grow beyond their immediate need of them.

Permission for both kids and parents to be cringe? Indeed.

4. The goalposts are always moving, but in the case of this next essay, it’s moving behind you? Apparently it’s not cool to have followers anymore (did you see what Vogue wrote about boyfriends being embarrassing now?). Kyle Chayka at the New Yorker calls the notion a “post-pandemic phenomenon,” in which social media users started preferring personalized algorithms and recommended content over specific creators/accounts. For influencers, or those who want to be influencers, it’s no longer a popularity contest but a scramble for who can remain relevant.

There’s a certain status that comes from ignoring the usual signs of success online, and an envy inspired by those who can grow a career without the pressure of performing on social media. Sundberg told me, “In a time when people are posting everything about their lives online constantly for attention, you almost get a little frustrated that someone can be successful without doing that.” […]

The appeal of online anti-fame reminds me of a rule that a friend who runs an international company’s social accounts espouses: professional social-media managers should have messy, unoptimized personal accounts. “It’s kind of a flex to have bad photography and unpolished content,” she said. You could produce polished content — it’s your job to know how to, after all — but that doesn’t mean you have to do so in your off-hours. In fact, not hustling too much might paradoxically cast you as more professional and trustworthy, since you’re not caught up perfecting your own profile.

It seems like the pressure to perform is still there, just hidden behind a significant attempt at nonchalance. To care or not to care? To care … but also look like you don’t.

5. For kicks and giggles, look no further than a recent development in the Louvre jewel heist that sounds like it came from the Onion but actually came from the London Times:

The password for the Louvre’s video surveillance system was simply “Louvre” when thieves stole jewels worth €88 million from the museum last month…

The password for another security system, operated by the defence contractor Thales, was “Thales”. Some security installations were still running until recently on Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 although both operating systems have long been unsupported by Microsoft.

Experts warned the Louvre as early as 2014 that “trivial passwords” and “obsolete systems” left its alarms, entry controls and CCTV network open to intrusion, but little action appears to have been taken.

If security didn’t have reason to take action before the heist, they now have €88 million worth of motivation. Ha.

Elsewhere, there’s McSweeney’s “Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand, But the Five Thousand Are Gluten Free.” Do you think Jesus can turn water into kombucha? And finally, SNL really has a way with words:

6. To close, Cody Delistraty wrote a fantastic essay for the NY Times about the artist Mark Rothko’s experience of a fifteenth-century fresco that captured “what no other art he’d seen could.” The fresco, painted by friar Fra Angelico, “transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience.”

One of the many facets of art is to stir our hearts and make us feel something. And in this case (as my dear friend Ben Self reflected) art has the ability to break through our inner barriers to belief. Again, we turn to that which is outside of us.

I’ll leave you with more from Delistraty:

And though it would have mattered a great deal to Angelico, it matters not to contemporary eyes whether the viewer believes this scene to have ever occurred. It will capture you regardless.

“You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” the novelist Henry James wrote after visiting the former convent, “you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.”

It is this ability to emotionally spellbind the viewer that most sets Angelico apart — imparting belief through art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher, described Angelico’s key artistic invention as interiority: “that indwelling significance of human features.” Angelico did not just depict; he evoked. Before Angelico, one largely found ideas in art, but not necessarily feeling.

Strays: