7 Symptoms of an Aggrieved STEM Major

Are you or someone you know aggrieved?

What distinguishes us from the animals… is freedom, which means the right to collaborate in defining ourselves.

- Charles Taylor, Cosmetic Connections

Last week, I talked about French poet Paul Valéry and his mission to fight Romanticism by making poetry that was precise and, more importantly, scientific. He wanted his sublime to be neatly packaged and easily measured. He was frustrated when it didn’t happen. That’s why Valéry is a good example of the behaviors that show up in the aggrieved STEM majors among us. By demanding a system that makes sense to their system of values, the aggrieved STEM major packages emotions into equations and pretends they’re logic. The result is often a coldness and occasional cruelty to the processes, products, and people that don’t fit into their system.

Whether coding, making military-grade robotics hardware, or cutting tens of thousands of jobs in the name of efficiency, the aggrieved STEM major crunches numbers to express feelings. We’ve all got some of these tendencies. Valéry’s writings, especially in Monsieur Teste (1898), his novella about a man who only felt things like a machine, shows us a clear list of signs that someone might be an aggrieved STEM major. Here are the seven major symptoms:

1. You Think Art is About Input and Output.

Valéry believed art was science, not sensibility. Creating and appreciating art was, in his view, more or less a bodily function. As he writes, art is “a machine intended to excite and combine individual formations [in a] category of minds.” The magical thinking of Romantics, the spirituality and woo-woo of it all, was pure ignorance.

Valéry strove make his poetry as clear as day - no legends, history, or mythology needed. He was endlessly frustrated by obscurity, because his idea of the sublime was a chemical reaction caused by “the mysterious bodies which physics studies and which chemistry studies.” Nothing spiritual about it.

Chemical reactions are the essence of art, according to Valéry. “I always think of them when I reflect upon works of art,” he writes. Any aggrieved STEM major may agree that the mechanical and tactile are far more real and holy sources of joy than the spiritual. But this might mean that other things have to be chemical reactions, too.

2. You Think Decisions are Chemical Reactions.

I greatly fear, my old friend, that we are made of many things that don’t know us.

-Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste

In Monsieur Teste, we see an aggrieved STEM major put inner conflict under the microscope. In a letter to Monsieur Teste, a friend writes:

I imagine there is in each of us one atom more important than others, made up of two particles of energy which would very much like to break away from each other…nature joins them together forever, though they are furious enemies.

The aggrieved STEM major doesn’t think the spirit drives us to do the things: it’s chemicals all the way down. Destiny is electricity. This electricity is caused by the perpetual motion of what’s inside us. As Valéry puts it, there is some positive electron in all of us, telling us, “There is nothing but me. There is nothing but me. There is nothing but me, me, me…” And there is a negative electron: “Yes, but there is somebody else. Somebody, somebody somebody else.”

The aggrieved STEM major believes human hypocrisy is a matter of physics. Our battles between impulse and instinct are equal and opposite reactions.

Did you make a mistake? Hurt somebody? Hurt yourself?

Blame the electron.

3. You Think Meaning Can Be Measured.

If everything and everyone is just chemicals, everything can (and should) be measured. Valéry thinks it would be helpful to have a “living indicator, quivering over the hidden dial” of every man where the numbers range “between the zero of being an animal and the maximum of being a god.”

Our protagonist fantasizes about a hidden dial that measures whether a man “admires himself, adores himself, hates himself, puts himself out of existence.”

The aggrieved STEM major asks:

If we can’t measure something, how do we know how important it is?

Wouldn’t it be easier to see the worth of everything on a numerical scale?

Wouldn’t that make the world a better place?

4. You Feel Alone in a Crowd.

What is more tiring than to conceive of the chaos of a multitude of minds?

-Paul Valéry

The aggrieved STEM major finds safety and certainty in their own mind. Any wanton exposure to other minds is oppressive. In Monsieur Teste, Valéry’s protagonist feels an overpowering anxiety not to become part of the “immense other” that presses against him from all sides when he’s in a crowd. Every sensation is an invasion:

We listen, with a delicate ear, to the mingling of the ample street noises, our heads full of clattering hoofbeats and the constant flower of people, vaguely animating the undercurrents, making them swell as in a dream, a kind of confused vastness whose magnitude wavers and gathers together all the footsteps, the opulent molting of the world, the transformations of the indifferent each into the other, the general press of the crowd.

The brain is overstimulated and overwhelmed with the abuse of the crowd, Valéry writes. But, without realizing it, the chaos “engenders a whole modern literature” in response.

This is an interesting look at the stereotypical introversion of a STEM major, that sensibility as delicate as a dandelion. Even in experiencing the fearful pressure of the Other that is the crowd, Valéry acknowledges that it’s this tension between the Self and the All where we might find poetry.

4. You’re Afraid of Cities.

The French have amassed all their ideas in one enclosure. Here we live in our own fire.

-Paul Valéry

Monsieur Teste and his companions are overwhelmed by cities. The lack of control becomes a prison. In a city:

You are captive to its ideal, plaything of its monotonous fury. You are subjected to millions of clangs truck at top volume and these rhythms and breaks in rhythms…

You are drunk on spinning phantoms, on visions poured into the void, on vanishing lights. The metal forged by the march through the darkness makes you dream that a personal and brutal form of time is attacking and breaking up the hard, profound distance.

This description is likely familiar to anyone who’s been to any kind of urban center at rush hour. The difference for the aggrieved STEM major is that everything outside their own system is the Other and therefore a threat to the purity of their own calculations. If we are nothing but our reactions, then the city is a lightning storm, an endless experiment that causes people to come and go and “scatter in the sunlight.”

The city is a cruel and constant reminder that the aggrieved STEM major has no control, no certainty and therefore no truth beyond the self. No matter how the numbers add up. The city is a place and a promise with “a perpetual capacity to begin and end that consumes people, fragments of people, doubts, walking phrases, prostitutes, an endless pale horse that carries away everything in sight, even moments, disappearing into a singular void.”

You have to be a Romantic to love the city. You have to fall in love with that singular void where moments can’t be measured because moments are disappearing too fast. Permanently and irretrievably. In the frail and finite, the Romantic finds beauty. Meanwhile, the aggrieved STEM major is battered and bruised until going numb:

At times, sensation comes to a halt. All that juddering leads to nothing. The total movement is made up of an infinite number of repetitions, each moment convinces the next you’ll never arrive.

In the city, the numbers never add up. The math never seems to have any meaning. So doesn’t that mean all the moments before, after, and during have no meaning? The aggrieved STEM major would heartily agree.

5. You Live in a Web of Ideas.

His head is a sealed treasury and I do not know if he has a heart. Do I ever know if he notices me, whether he is loving me or studying me?

-Madame Teste, on Monsieur Teste

The most interesting perspective in Monsieur Teste is in the letter from Madame Teste to a friend about her relationship with the one and only Monsieur Teste. She talks about him with awe and fear. It is quite clearly an aggrieved STEM major (Valéry) wishfully chronicling a woman’s love for an aggrieved STEM major.

Bound to a partner with “variable gazes” who can “break your spirit with a word,” Madame Teste gets the feeling that her husband sees her “as a flawed vase the potter throws into the trash.” That’s part of the thrill, she explains.

“We live quite at ease, each in his own obscurity, like fish in water,” she writes. She observes how the STEM-first mind works against itself, reflecting, “We never think that what we think hides from us what we are. That’s an important line. If we treasure our thoughts above all else, but our thoughts are constantly hiding us from ourselves, who are we? The entire system of the aggrieved STEM major collapses .

As Madame Teste writes about her inscrutable husband:

He has too many ideas one after the other. He leads you astray at every moment into a web that he alone knows how to weave, break, take up again… he spins within himself such fragile threads that they hold out against their fragility only with the help ofa ll his vital powers. He stretches them over unfathomable personal chasms and he ventures no doubt far beyond ordinary time, into some abyss of problems. I wonder what he becomes there?

This is the power and peril of the aggrieved STEM major: you can become overwhelmed with yourself, start too many things without finishing them, and weave a web inside your mind that becomes a cage.

6. Your Focus is Fragile, Finite, and Merciless.

I am either quick or nothing - anxious, frantic experience… the result is an individual regulated by his patterns of thought.

- Monsieur Teste

Do you like to “lock in” on the regular?

Does anything outside your focus seem like an invasion?

You might be an aggrieved STEM major like Monsieur Teste.

As his wife writes, when he’s after an idea, Teste:

[uses] all the energy of his whole body to sustain in the mind the diamond instant that is at once idea and thing, entry and end.

Monsieur Teste has his own advice for staying locked in: just ignore the stuff that’s in your way.

Burn brilliantly but only at your own discretion - and, scorning every particular thing, draw power from every thing. However, thousands of things remain nonexistent, if you choose. Their nonexistence is at your disposal.

Keeping your focus and finding your flow state isn’t exclusive to the aggrieved STEM major. There’s something about the “diamond instant” of an idea as you work on it that can resonate with everyone else. The difference may be just how aggravated we feel when that diamond instant is shattered - and how much we value the diamond over everything else around us in the first place.

As Monsieur Teste describes it, his focus makes him “a monster of isolation and singular knowledge.”

7. Your Pride is Glass.

His heart is a desert island. Perhaps, someday, he will find some footprint in the sand.
- Monsieur Teste

The great conundrum of the aggrieved STEM major is that they may seem aloof and removed, assured of their genius above all, but their sensitivity is second-to-none. Hit them in the right spot and they’re quick to anger and slow to forgive. In the sanctuary of his mind, the aggrieved STEM major can find no relation and no sympathy with anyone beyond his own system. But self-hate keeps the aggrieved STEM major from thinking himself into delusions too often. As Teste explains:

[This pride] would be completely abominable and almost satanic, if, in its over-exercised soul, this pride were not so bitterly turned against itself, and if it did not know itself so precisely that the evil somehow weakened at its source.

Insults are hard to get over. Especially for the aggrieved STEM major, when something outside your expected system challenges the existence of your system entirely. In a vague letter at the end of Monsieur Teste, we see the protagonist reflecting on a recent insult that hurt his pride, likely by challenging his system.

I am thankful for this injustice, this insult that galvanized me, the keen sensation of which cast me far from its ridiculous cause, giving me also the strength and appetite for my own thought so much that finally my work benefited from my anger; the search for my own lows profited from the incident.

Monsieur Teste tells a friend that he has a way for finding motivation during these challenges:

Submit yourself wholly to your best moment, your greatest memory. That is what you must recognize as king of time, the greatest memory, the condition to which every discipline must lead you back… That is what gives you permission to despise yourself, as well as justly think well of yourself.”

Reminding yourself of something that makes you proud can show you a “center of motivation, disdain, purity.”

Rather than vengeance, the enlightened aggrieved STEM major seeks to remember his own greatness when someone insults him. That’s how he, as Taylor Swift would say, shakes it off.

Of Struggles and Systems

People think differently, which means they feel differently. In a digital world, we’re less exposed to human behavior and faces than we are to symbols of interactions and personalities. When we’re all behind the screen, we see everyone else through our own eyes and hear everyone else through our own ears without ever experiencing something outside our own system.

In this way, we are all becoming, as Teste puts it, monsters of “isolation and singular knowledge.” We risk becoming too sure of a system that works for us but only because we’ve never experienced something different. But when that system breaks, it’s as if the world is ending.

For Teste - and Valéry - achieving singular knowledge through a singular system is the only way to achieve the sublime. As Teste puts it: “I sacrifice myself inwardly to what I would like to be.”

But aggrieved STEM majors should take note: if you are sacrificing inwardly for a vision of yourself created by your own system, you’ll never actually be what you would like to be. You’re only feeding yourself to the system. When we sacrifice outwardly to other people - looking to understand other systems - we can expand on our own system and reach a different kind of sublime that comes the outside, not the inside. Look outside your system more than inside of it. That’s how you can really reach what, where, and who you would like to be. And maybe stop being quite so aggrieved.

Read Part 1 of this series here.