Caveat Bungalow

The ostracizing of normal

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

When I was a kid, I lived in a bungalow for a while. You know, one of those houses that’s compact and square and has a half-upper floor that’s basically just a loft with sloped ceilings. Kind of like an attic with carpeting. If it even has carpeting.

That loft was the throne. It was the meat of the house. The coolest place to be. Without that loft and those cozy sloped ceilings, it was just a tiny, boring little house.

Or at least that’s how I felt when I was a kid. I don’t agree with that anymore.

Now if someone told me to live in a loft with sloped ceilings I’d ask if there was any regular house available, please. Because, although the loft is quaint and cozy, it’s extremely impractical. You can’t hang stuff on the walls (ceilings), you can’t fit much in the way of shelving or tables or desks… it barely even qualifies as livable space. It’s just there to make the house not look like a boring cube. It’s one of those tricks you can pull on somebody to say “actually, this home is 1,600 square feet, not 1,100.”

People dress up bungalows with high square footages and pretty upper windows to make them look like more than they are: simple, minimal living spaces. So the bungalow, with its barely-livable half-upstairs, is sort of an illusion. Taken as a whole package, it’s cozy, but it’s not very practical.

Something else I’ve noticed that’s shaped like a bungalow is the way we talk to each other. Human speech. We dress it up with all kinds of accoutrements when all we really want to say is a simple thing. We sell a whole bunch of shit we don’t mean along with what we actually want to say. Cozy, but not practical.

We waste an unbelievable amount of time — in our daily lives, on podcasts, in interviews, in blogs and articles, even in Tweets and Notes for God’s sakes — qualifying everything we say with caveats. We say “now I know not all x are y, and I know that historically abc, and I’m not trying to say that lmnop so please don’t take this wrong…” And, to be honest, it seems kind of pathetic. It’s like serious, thinking adults have been reduced to spineless puddles of goo. Myself included. Saying anything even remotely controversial on the internet is terrifying.

The caveats are there to make our argument palatable to an over-sensitive public. The upstairs is kind of just an accessory to make you buy the downstairs. It’s a decoration to make your argument seem cozier.

We spend so much time pre-empting the edge case that we lose the momentum of the thing we’re saying. The truth ought to hit like a Louisville Slugger; but in a muted culture afraid to speak the truth, it hits like an oven mitt. It just sucks as a way to communicate.

No matter what argument you make on the internet, you will get people who reject it wholesale because you forgot an asterisk. Because you forgot to mention their particular edge case. Since you were so crude and nuanceless to forget about them and their special circumstances, you are labeled an Inadequate Thinker and rejected.

We all know that not all heterosexual dating advice or sex advice applies to transgender people. It doesn’t even apply to all straight people. We are all intelligent enough to know that. But people want to argue anyway. They want to do the “not all x” thing. Which just isn’t useful. It bogs down the truth in qualifiers.

If you post a home-improvement video on Instagram for regular people, someone will leave you a comment saying “yea well not all people live in regular homes, this doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people are millionaires and live in bigger, nicer homes, and therefore we need better tips than this.” As if you did them a personal disservice by creating content that doesn’t apply to them.

People have managed to make it insensitive to speak about things that the majority of people deal with. People have managed to make it insensitive to be normal. And then the tyrannical minority ostracizes you for it, and in turn makes it okay for everyone else to ostracize you. (And in some cases, the tyrannical minority demands that everyone ostracize you, lest they be punished themselves.)

For saying a normal thing. For saying a thing that is practical.

And it’s like… okay, great. You’re different than us, you live in a bigger house, you’re the edge case. But the rest of us, we live in normal houses. So we’re going to continue to discuss normal houses, if you don’t mind. You fucking idiot.

Another thing people often do with bungalows is build on a big front porch. Which is nice, and makes the whole thing look bigger and prettier. Very nice touch. But it also isn’t really “livable space.” The house is still inside the house.

In the age of everyone's opinions everywhere all of the time, it’s so easy to get caught in the trap of decorating your arguments to look as homely as possible. Not even so that more people will agree with you, but so that people will listen to what you have to say in the first place. That alone is hard to accomplish.

If you drove down a street consisting entirely of overly-decorated bungalows, with nice upper windows and big, furnished porches, you’d call bullshit on the entire street. Everything looks so cozy and big, but you know that you’re really just on a street of very tiny, compact living spaces. That’s how it feels to try to communicate seriously in 2024. Everywhere I look, I see people decorating their speech with nuance when all they really want to say is some simple, normal thing. It feels like bullshit.

Besides — something I've learned from writing on the internet is, your target audience is not listening. If you're talking about some big problem that a few people have caused, or calling out stupid behavior of people you morally disagree with, one of two things is going to happen:

• Your target audience is not reading your piece at all, because idiots are not in the business of reading for self-improvement.

• And even if they do read your thing, they’re going to find a reason to reject it wholesale anyway.

People don't change their minds on the internet. They usually do that in books, battlefields, or not at all.

I have even had people try to add nuance back to my piece that I had already added. Well it’s not all women who behave this way, and you as a self-proclaimed smart person should know that. Yes, that’s why I wrote it already. What you just said is already part of the piece I wrote.

So even if you build your caveat bungalow to make the truth cozy, the bad communicators still aren’t going to be happy with it. So I guess I’m wondering, why build the bungalow at all? Why build the elaborate front porch and the decorative carpeted attic, when they aren’t helping to sell the house anyway?

Some people are just actively searchlighting for reasons to get outraged. They aren’t worth listening to. People who need that much nuance weren’t going to learn from your argument anyway. People who are willing to reject entire arguments based on pedantics and technicalities are not serious thinkers. They’re not adults, and they need to be dismissed from the conversation entirely.

This is a theme I have been writing about more and more lately: adults. And I have wondered why I keep leaning on that word.

And the reason is because, we live in a culture where you cannot trust that your neighbor has the courage to tell the truth. You cannot trust your neighbor to have done enough growing up, and to be serious enough about all of this, to speak like an adult.

As I've said before — we as a culture have become profoundly unserious. And building caveat bungalows is a symptom of that.

But it’s also a cause of it. It's a feedback loop. The more we let pedants dispute good, solid thinking, and basic truths of life, the more powerless we become over them. The more afraid we become of their power to shut us down.

Maybe if we just start saying what we mean and placing the impetus on the reader to read nuance into the topic, we’ll all grow up a little. And that would be a good thing.

It’s like Bryan Cranston said about acting... if you cry, the audience doesn’t have to. Maybe being intelligent works the same way. Maybe we rob each other of the chance to think carefully when all of our communication is laden with all possible edge cases.

People are tired of having to decorate their speech to make it marketable. People are tired of pre-empting the edge case. People want to just be able to say what they mean, and sell the house for what it is.

I think we’re past peak Woke, and I think part of what that means is that we’re past peak not-being-able-to-speak-like-adults. And that’s a good thing, because we have a lot of things to work on. We have a lot of things that need us to be serious about them.

Drink some water and be serious about something.

JR

“Without truth I feel ashamed to be alive.” - Andrei Platonov