(2025-05-07) Hall Crossing The Cringe Minefield

Cate Hall: Crossing the cringe minefield. Say you want to improve your life - to become happier, more helpful to others, more desirable, whatever you want. Given that this is a big world, with many possibilities, there are lots of strategies for self-improvement available to you. Which strategies will you pick first?

Because motivation is tightly linked to emotion, you will first choose the strategies that are emotionally comfortable for you in particular

Then, once you've exhausted the strategies that feel emotionally satisfying, you will choose the strategies that feel emotionally okay - strategies that don't exactly delight you

Now what? Maybe you're in your late twenties or early thirties. you've been around the block, and you've tried all of the self-improvement strategies that seem viable. But there is still some difficulty in your life that's really obvious, that you feel you ought to be able to solve. Despite being unusually talented, your career isn't taking off the way it should.

you're frustrated, and you've tried everything to fix it!
But of course, you haven't actually tried everything. There are other strategies you could try. The only problem is that they will require you to feel the forbidden feeling.

That one horrible feeling that your whole adult personality has been devised to avoid.

I.

Each of us has a sensitive spot, a core fear or discomfort that we see as more hurtful than everything else.

And we're probably already feeling it: by avoiding it all the time, paradoxically, we keep it ever-present in our consciousness, in a watered-down form

Nevertheless, we try not to confront the feeling directly. Even considering the feeling creates an existential cringe reaction, an instinctive repulsion. (disgust)

This influences, to an astonishing degree, what we do with our lives.

Perhaps you fear loneliness and monotony. Cool - you take a highly social job with lots of choice and few long-term restrictions, like being a fine dining waiter or a wedding planner, so you rarely have to be alone, and you can always walk away from a particular workplace.

And that's all fine. In a sense, this is just working with the gifts you were given, playing the cards you were dealt

But relying too much on your natural gifts, in order to avoid the existential cringe, is hugely limiting. Cringe fields are where our biggest self-improvement gains are likely to come from, because they point to parts of the self we haven't allowed to develop.

This means that existential cringe is actually a signal pointing you to where you can make the most progress quickly.

What does being limited by existential cringe look like?
The chaotic and adventurous artist, who fears being mundane, would be best-served in their artistic pursuits by some completely standard productivity strategies, and perhaps even a normal day job that would give their life some structure.

But it seems people in situations like these rarely think - ah, I'm out of the good ideas that will be easy, perhaps I should consider the ideas that are more difficult for me to stomach. They simply reject the difficult ideas out of hand.

And this can be tragically limiting. The chaotic artist reflexively insists that structure would kill their creativity, and so instead chooses to remain adrift, at the cost of rarely producing the art they believe is their purpose.

you will never be fully free unless you know what your core fear is, and consciously make an effort to see the options on the other side of it.

II.

Do you know where your cringe minefield lies?

For me, it's extremely clear. As I've written about before, I'm perpetually in flight from fear of being evil, corrupt, or imperfect. In the Enneagram system, this type is the One - called the Perfectionist, or the Moralist.

it's also true that I'd be dramatically worse off if I never disobeyed the feeling.

Here are some examples of how this has played out for me:

Giving my husband compliments: I like to believe that I'm scrupulously honest, that I don't use flattery or deception to achieve my ends. But this can become a little pathological. For a long time in my marriage, I was afraid to give my husband compliments or call him by pet names, because on some level I thought it was manipulative

Negotiating for higher pay:

Burning out of EA

The challenge with EA, and why many people drop out of it, is that there's no principled stopping point once you've decided you're morally obligated to do 'the most good you can do. I ended up feeling guilty about everything

III.

I'm a big believer in the power of human intuition, but also a believer that there are important limits on when and where it can be trusted. It's a mistake to treat your existential cringes like any other intuition.

is more like being drunk than feeling another emotion

It dilates time and distorts your sense of proportion

to cross the cringe minefield, you need to have humility about the fact that your perception is distorted, right now. You simply cannot see the landscape of options in your life objectively

If you don't take this into account, you're doomed to low-grade, long-term self-sabotage that will feel like simply leaning into your strengths. The default is to choose the misery you're comfortable with over the agonizing thrill of real change.