#30: Escaping the Inter-generational Dick Measuring Contest
A particular kind of mimetic trap.
My writing seems to want to continue in a personal vein. This essay is about how to tell if you’re living someone else’s life, my experience with IFS therapy, and, mainly, about my grandfather.
It’s cringe to post personal things. A part of me would rather not do it. But another part of me wants to record these stories and vivid memories while they’re fresh. So in 2, 5, or 15 years, I can link to these pieces, as a proof-of-work for how my past self felt.
2023 Reflections, 2024 Intentions, and more ideas-related writing are coming soon.
Let me know what you think!
I: Our Grandfather Who Art In Heaven
Most of my life, I’ve been an unknowing participant in an Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest.
I had no choice. The competition started before I was born.
It takes a short story to explain. The story of my grandfather, and his untimely death.
To my family, Granddad Bill was a hero. He lifted the Hollandses out of abject poverty.
For generations, my family worked on the docks in South Shields, earning barely enough money to buy a packet of cigarettes and a few pints of lager. That working class lifestyle would’ve continued if Granddad Bill hadn’t done something about it.
Bill left school at 10 or 11, like many of his friends. But instead of hitting the docks, Bill went to work in construction. He worked his way up at a large conglomerate, that, thanks to neocolonialism, had been chosen to build large infrastructure projects in the Middle East.
Most employees weren’t interested in leaving England. But, sensing an opportunity, Bill put his name forward, and was selected.
Bill thrived in the Middle East, leading projects to build highways and airports for sheikhs in Oman and Jordan. A real colossus of roads.
He visited Petra. He was gifted gold watches. He acted as an envoy of his company in the court of Arab princes, who offered their daughters’ hands in marriage as a token of their goodwill.
He bought an enormous house, and a full-sized snooker table undergirded by a piece of slate so heavy that it required eight men to lift. He sent his sons to boarding schools back in England. He took his boys to Sunderland matches at Roker Park, returning to South Shields a king.
Born from poverty, Bill lived a life of riches.
Granddad Bill got out of the Northeast, but he couldn’t escape the consumption habits he learned there. He drank and smoke profligately. The smoking killed him in the end.
Complaining of severe foot pain that whiskey couldn’t soothe, he was diagnosed with “Buerger’s Disease” also known as thromboangitis obliterans. I don’t know much about medicine, but I do know that I don’t ever want the word obliterans to apply to me.
Bill’s body began to decay. His once vigorous bloodflow softened to a trickle. His feet became gangrenous. Then his legs. He required several amputations. Still alive, his body rotted away. He died piece by piece.
After years of excruciating pain, he died aged 54, surrounded by his wife—my grandmother—and his sons.
They spread his ashes in my grandmother’s garden, where, a month later, my parents would have their wedding reception.
II: Meeting Your Heroes
I recently met my dead Granddad Bill.
He was hiding in an ominous suit of armour, made of my family’s false beliefs.
He was a figment of my imagination, of course. My imagination during IFS therapy.
IFS, or Internal Family Systems, is a type of therapy which believes there are different “parts” of you, little characters in your head that together comprise your personality. Each part has a core need and a core fear, shaped by memories that left a lasting impression. Most people have a child part, a teenage part, an infant part, and so on.
The idea of IFS is to deeply relax, make contact with these parts, then talk to them—ask them how they feel, what they want to express. (I won’t explain IFS in detail here, other than to say that it seems to be helping me, and I recommend my therapist, Anita, who wrote about her own journey here).
It was in my second IFS session that I met my grandfather.
I was lying in bed in a state of relaxation, my attention focused fully inward, with Anita prompting me through Google Meets.
I made contact with the child part of me, the part that wants to love and be loved. I made contact with the teenage part of me, the part that wants to be free to explore, to be powerful, to spread his wings. Both parts were unable to fully express themselves. They seemed afraid.
When I asked why, an armoured figure appeared. It was terrible, looming over the two child-like parts of me, who huddled together for protection. Dark purple light radiated from its eyes like some kind of evil creature from Tolkien’s legendarium.
It spoke.
“You cannot do what you want. You need to get a job. Earn money. Climb the ladder. Buy a house. Have a family. Become successful.”
I asked the figure what it was afraid of, and the suit of armour erupted.
It erupted into a kaleidoscope of indistinct faces. Thousands of faces spiraled in and out of view, untold thousands of generations of men, their deeds, their expectations encircled and enveloped me, becoming my entire universe. It was like I was witnessing my entire paternal lineage all at once. An unbroken eternal flame of nameless faces. Like when Krishna reveals his cosmic form in the Bhagavad Gita.
It was overwhelming. And then these revolving formless faces materialised into the shape of my grandfather.
He sat there in his hospital bed. Infirm, but regal.
“Hello Thomas. I’m so proud of you.”
Tears trickle down my face.
“You’re worried about being a man. You already are one. You only need to realise.”
I begin to sob.
“My sons? They’re good boys. But they’re trying to be me. They don’t realise you can only be exactly who you are.”
“This suit of armour? They made it out of their false beliefs. Their way of keeping me alive. But they worship a false idol.”
“I’m not a god. I’m just a man. And I’m not perfect. In fact, I only have one leg!”
Granddad Bill winked, and I realised, for the first time, that I’d been an unknowing participant in this Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest.
III: The Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest
My Granddad Bill gave his boys everything. Everything, that is, except his approval.
In my family, this absence of patriarchal approval is a black hole that the rest of us orbit.
It is the base object of our desire, we act in service of it, and we measure ourselves against it. What would Bill think? What would Bill have thought?
It’s this approval that competitors in an Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest seek.
An Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest is when siblings compete for their patriarch’s approval not only through their own actions, but through the improvement, refinement, and perfection of their own family units.
Children of competing brothers are thus unknowingly born into a contest which they have no choice but to participate in. More than caught in the crossfire, they become child soldiers in the war. It’s hard for them to see any other way. It’s the fabric of their reality, the very water they swim in.
A fancy job is not enough. You must also have a charming wife and precocious kids. If the warring brothers run companies, then even their employees can be pressed into service of this contest.
It’s about brothers competing to be a Man, as measured by what they imagine their patriarch’s idea of a man is.
I haven’t seen Succession, but I reckon the archetypal Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest looks a bit like this:
I think many people are competing in an Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest. Maybe you are right now. Are you?
I think, unless you have a psychoactive experience like I did, it’s hard to tell.
Are you competitive? Do you want to “win”? Why? What causes children to develop a competitive spirit? I think one answer is a persistent lack of approval. If you consistently feel loved, you don’t need to win anything.
My grandfather’s two eldest sons were swallowed up by this black hole of approval for a long time: Working for multinational corporations abroad. Travelling from afar to watch Sunderland football matches. Investing in “bricks and mortar”. Expensive watches. They unthinkingly execute someone else’s life script. Granddad Bill’s life script. And I’ve been executing it, too.
At Christmas my cousins and I would compete to have the wittiest banter, to be the most gregarious, the most charismatic, the most successful. What we were really doing was competing to be like Bill.
It’s not like Granddad Bill was in my head telling me what to do. But my idea of what I thought he might want was always in there, a boundary condition constraining my actions.
The Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest is a pernicious kind of mimetic trap. In a mimetic trap, you take on the desires of others. You want what other people want. The Intergenerational Dick Measuring Contest is a mimetic trap where you take on the desires of a father figure.
There is nothing more noble than honouring your family. But you have to do so in your own way, in your own time. Each generation must figure it out for themselves.
How do you do what Thiel exhorts, and escape competition?
The only way is through authenticity.
I don’t want to execute someone else’s life script. But I do want to be like Granddad Bill.
Granddad Bill was the last Live Player in my family.
And I want to be one, too.
Damn this was good.
Really good - resonates deeply. It's especially interesting because presumably you didn't even know your Grandad Bill?
For me, this person is my dad, who got brain cancer when I was in middle school and passed 9 years ago. I wonder how the person "applying the pressure" being unable to still communicate (vs someone who's alive) impacts the real or perceived pressure. Is it actually worse because they're not alive to query what they think.