Don’t Yuck My Yum: The Environment I Try to Cultivate on My Communities
“Don’t Yuck My Yum” is the title of a recent episode of a show with ze frank. On it, Frank talks about moments in his life where he has liked something that was otherwise harmless, only to have people suggest to him that he should stop liking it.
“The yum getting yucked is when you like something harmless – and harmless is the trick here and leads to my confusion – when you like something harmless and someone tells you to stop liking it,” he explains.
I think we’ve all experienced those moments where we like something – a song, a TV show, a movie – and had someone tell us, either with their words or the expression on their face, that they thought the thing we liked was terrible and/or embarrassing. And, certainly, we’ve probably done it to other people.
“I have the yuck in me, too, don’t get me wrong,” Frank says. “I’ve felt it when a friend belly laughs at something that I think is predictable and first I feel confusion and then all of a sudden, I feel contempt. ‘No, you should think that’s stupid!’ As if my feeling of disgust was more valuable than his experience of sheer joy.”
This episode really spoke to me and I immediately thought of the environment that I try to cultivate on my communities. It’s why I don’t allow people to simply say something “sucks.” You can say you dislike something, you can explain why you don’t enjoy it, but you can’t simply say this sucks, that sucks, it all sucks. You have to allow for some balance of personal taste and understanding. Otherwise, you fall into a pit of nastiness. That may work for some and I’m not saying that everyone should do what I do, but it just doesn’t work for me.
You don’t have to look hard to find that. I want to do something different.
