An Ode to Ordinary and A Disdain for Cancel Culture

Cultural messages don’t typically announce themselves for what they are; they envelop us and hold us tightly, so we feel they are simply part of us. As a child, I didn’t think about the messages; I just absorbed them. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the culture gave me a distinct push to seek opportunity. There was Punky Brewster, independent in her mismatched socks. Then there was Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show: a mother and a career woman; Romana in Beverly Cleary’s books.

In music, there were Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, Joan Jett, and Gloria Estefan. Powerful, unique women filled the cultural realm around me. These women were individuals, yes, but they were also shaping and being shaped by a cultural moment that became the backdrop to my adolescent identity.

When I was living in Germany in my twenties, I asked a friend who had grown up in East Berlin what it was like. He said, “Well, you know, Traci, it was all I knew.” That response has stayed with me. It reminds me how deeply culture lives inside us, and how invisible it often is, until we step outside it or it shifts.

I find myself reflecting on this now because I’m trying to understand what it would mean to step away from the striving those early years ingrained in me like muscle memory: move forward, move up, you can do it! I’m trying to understand what it might mean to accept myself as ordinary. How might I step out of the cultural narrative of always becoming something grand? I don’t mean becoming small or insignificant. I just mean no longer pushing up and out. Is that even possible?

What happens when I no longer push to become more successful, more accomplished, more recognized? Because I am no longer interested in this fuel. I still believe deeply that each of us deserves the opportunity to reach our fullest potential, and I want that especially for children, for people who have been systematically denied opportunity. But how do we define that fullest potential, by whose standards? I want to dismantle barriers, and (at the same time) I want to question the assumption that a life must always be improving in ways that are visible, performative, and consumable. How do I reconcile this to the work towards justice?

As my own children approach college age, I’m acutely aware that “the best” can be defined in many ways, and I am hesitant to push them toward the path that promises grandeur, unless, of course, that is the path they choose. The pressure to be better has become tangled with capitalism, productivity, the need to prove worth, and to earn value. I think it's causing harm. I know it has harmed me.

Perhaps this is an inevitable tension of being human: we want to become something, but what is motivating us is sometimes hard to see. Sometimes we are wrapped in a cultural moment that feels like truth and that impacts our choices in ways we can overlook. What if the pursuit could shift and become more rooted, more spiritual, more honest? What if it were less about personal perfection and more about collective presence? About easing into a way of being that allows room for others, for ourselves, for imperfection?

Maybe I’m writing about the idea of presence—the practice of being with what is. Bernie Glassman’s idea of bearing witness says sit with suffering, with injustice, with what is real, without rushing to fix or flee (Glassman, 1998). It is a radically quiet act that takes an unnerving amount of strength. In my experience, bearing witness to something I’m at odds with is painful. But I believe it’s an essential first step in understanding how reconciliation might occur. Can we really reconcile injustice and simultaneously strive for our own greatness?

Constant striving creates the conditions for judgment. It has made us collectively suspicious, expecting perfection from one another. In my lifetime, I’ve watched society go from whispering the word gay, to celebrating Pride openly, to legalizing gay marriage, to making transgender identity part of mainstream conversations. And yet, a simultaneous backlash is happening. In that backlash, we’ve started to cancel one another.

Should I even dare to talk about cancel culture? It makes me uneasy. We collectively withdraw support from an individual or group because of a wrong they’ve done—or are perceived to have done. This began as a way to hold power accountable. But it has become more complex. Research from Pew (2021) shows that some Americans see cancel culture as necessary accountability, while others view it as censorship or punishment. Maybe it can be either, depending on the nuance. A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology (Franken et al., 2023) suggests that social shaming often leads not to transformation but exclusion. And that is the part that concerns me. We cannot cancel people out of existence. We can exclude them from our communities, but they will still be somewhere.

So how do we engage? How do we live in community with people whose beliefs are at odds with us? What actually changes minds?

The “backfire effect” refers to the psychological phenomenon where presenting facts that contradict someone’s belief can make them hold more tightly to it (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). Perhaps we all know this intuitively from those holiday dinners with relatives we disagree with. Social scientists now suggest that change happens more through relationships, empathy, and storytelling than through evidence alone. It’s not information or argument that shifts us, it’s connection.

I’m not saying we must all remain in close proximity to those who have harmed us. But if we want a different world, someone must be in relationship with those on the other side.

Creating conditions for dialogue, for being heard, and for bearing witness is more powerful than debate (LSE Impact Blog, 2023) In intimate relationships, presence is the moment I hear my partner say, “This hurt me,” and instead of defending myself, I sit and listen. I try to allow his experience to exist beside my intention. I stay and listen. I try not to run away. Could presence be a first step toward reconciliation and accountability in other areas of our lives? What if we embrace the hard work as a sign that we are falling toward the center of what matters most, at least sometimes?

I think of these lines by David Whyte:

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back with firm eyes,
Saying this is where I stand.
I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
Falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day,
With the consequence of love
And the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

References

Douglas, S. J. (2010). Enlightened sexism: The seductive message that feminism's work is done. Times Books.

Franken, A., Poppe, E., & Roose, H. (2023). Cancel culture and digital exile: A socio-psychological perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1042782

Glassman, B. (1998). Bearing Witness: A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace. Bell Tower.

Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303–330.
LSE Impact Blog. (2023). Facts don’t change minds. Social networks, group dialogue and stories do. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/01/24/facts-dont-change-minds-social-networks-group-dialogue-and-stories-do/

Pew Research Center. (2021). Americans and “Cancel Culture”: Where some see calls for accountability, others see censorship, punishment. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/05/19/americans-and-cancel-culture

Whyte, D. (1996). Where Many Rivers Meet. Many Rivers Press.