Matthew here with the second installment of Five Big Questions Posed to an Extremely Thoughtful Person.
Does Natalie Wynn need an introduction? Or do we simply know that every frame of every Contrapoints essay is a gorgeous still life, a love letter to the unknown viewer thirsty for smarts and queerness and justice?
Often, top-tier artfulness will wind up concealing the artist. But despite the rigors of curation and the introversion Wynn ‘fesses up to in this interview, she also communicates welcome and generosity, and it was an honor to hear her speak personally about these Big Things..
BTW: here are the five questions. You can think about them too.
What terrifies you most in these times?
What is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story you return to for reliable wisdom and relief?
What is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships, and how do you work to overcome it?
If you were responsible for comforting and guiding a child terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do it? What would you say?
If your wisest ancestor came in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would it be?
Show Notes
ContraPoints - YouTube
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Conspiratuality Relief Project.
This is your regular timeline cleanser, featuring interviews with folks who reflect on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in hard times.
You know, all the things that conspirituality itself can't do.
So these are short, personal visits in which I ask my guests the same five questions about their life wisdom, at least as it is in this moment.
My name is Matthew.
My guest today is Natalie Wynn, known for her extraordinary YouTube channel, ContraPoints.
Now, as per usual, I'm going to say something brief about why I admire the guest of the day, and I'm going to do that this time in lieu of introducing Natalie too much, because I think most of you will know her.
I can't recall which ContraPoints production I saw first, but within about 30 seconds of pressing play, I was transfixed.
And that was before I had any real grasp of her politics or analysis.
And I was transfixed because every frame that Natalie shoots, edits, and produces is a gorgeous still life.
A kind of love letter to millions of unknown viewers.
At first impression, I thought I was listening to Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Judith Butler all chatting away at some wacky seance.
But then I really listened to these meticulous, incisive, hyper-original, but also generous and empathetic and fair essays.
Now, usually I find that top-tier artfulness like this will often wind up concealing the artist.
But after having listened to Natalie for several years, I've gathered the impression of someone who, while they may be in a process of constant curation, or because they might be introverted, as she admits in our interview, I can feel someone approachable and neighborly there.
Someone who communicates welcome.
And so I was really glad to get to ask that neighbor some questions.
Here's our discussion.
Natalie Nguyen, creator of ContraPoints, welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm very happy to be here.
You know, I sent you five questions.
You've had some time with them.
I'm just gonna ask them.
I'm gonna try to stay out of your way, but I think this is hard because I'd love to ask you about a thousand questions.
But today, my discipline will be minimalism and foregoing my own needs.
And the first question is a little bit bleak.
Love that.
It will set the stage for the relief part.
Okay, so number one.
What terrifies you most in these times?
Not to get overly specific, but I do think the most terrifying thing to me at this moment as a transgender American is the idea that in the next year, by one means or another, Donald Trump is somehow going to rise again to power and use presidential immunity and other Essentially undemocratic means of establishing some kind of like dark, theocratic regime that I will feel the need to like flee from if I can.
I feel like that's a kind of, I mean, obviously some people will call it paranoid.
I don't think it's paranoid.
I think it's a very real possibility, but it's definitely a kind of nightmare that haunts me in a day-to-day way that I feel like I'm constantly sort of engaging with, constantly returning to.
Seeking out information about, obsessing over, and it kind of casts a shadow over everything that I find myself doing.
So that returns over and over again.
Yeah.
And that, I guess, leads to the next question, which is, in the face of that, what is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story that you return to for reliable relief?
Well, I think that in general, when I'm finding myself spiraling too much to the point where it's, I realize this is not productive fear.
It's like not motivating action.
It's not motivating anything that's helpful.
I think I actually find a lot of relief in kind of, I know this is, this is kind of weird sounding, but like I'll just like watch documentaries about really bleak parts of history.
Um, you know, like, Ooh, let's hear about the Black Plague or like, you know, I'll watch like, you know, because the thing is like history is just like a series of like horrible things happening.
But for some reason that doesn't make me spiral.
Like it makes me like.
Calm down in some ways.
It's like, OK, it's I'm not living in some uniquely horrible situation that that's like there was this cliche in the 20 like the Trump administration from like liberal media of unprecedented times.
But like, no, they're not.
There's like nothing unprecedented about anything.
Right.
And I think that I realize this is not necessarily a specific story, but I guess I'd reflect on The fact that people have survived so much worse, I think that that idea comforts me and that it makes me feel that there's not, you know, I feel, I feel like it's easy to have like a millenarian feeling.
I think, I mean, everyone seems to have this I mean, I hear that kind of rhetoric from people all over the political map, right?
Is that like, like, I mean, I mean, they may as well be saying it's the end times.
Like they're saying like, you know, some, some unspeakable doom is imminent.
There seems to be a common feeling that just people are sort of susceptible to.
And I feel that just thinking about, I don't know, the time even your grandparents were alive, it's like, Oh no, no.
I mean, think about how it must have seemed then.
How must it have seemed in the Cuban Missile Crisis or in 1942 or in, you know, 1442.
You know, I think that you can go back to a lot of different points in history where if you were there and you didn't know how it turned out, it would seem apocalyptic.
I mean, you don't even need to do history.
I'll think back to 2020.
Those last two months of 2020 were so dark.
And in retrospect, I'm very interested in this period of recent history.
I watched all these documentaries about the January 6th uprising and the coronavirus pandemic at its worst.
For some reason, I'm able to, in a sort of emotionally detached way, find all this, like, interesting in retrospect.
But at the time, I was, like, on the edge of despair all the time, because you don't know how it's going to end.
So I think that part of what's always scary about the present moment, and part of the reason for those apocalyptic feelings, is that you don't know how it's going to end, and you put nightmares into that uncertainty.
And there's something about the documentary that tells you a little bit about how at least that part of that thing ended.
Yes, right.
And like things do end, right?
Like, like things, nothing lasts forever.
And even if things get worse, well, they'll probably also get better eventually.
And, um, you know, taking that like kind of zoomed out view of things, I feel is helpful to understanding that no, like you're not like some unique sufferer in some like uniquely terrible, no, like it's, you know, it's, Everything flows, right?
Like, like it's, uh, you know, obviously things won't be okay for some people and sometimes horrible things do happen, but, um, you know, there, there's a, there's a difference between productive fear and unproductive fear and, and I guess I'm trying to train myself to perceive that difference.
And it sounds like gaining observational distance is part of that.
Yeah, completely.
I mean, it's helpful to sort of see your current political situation as belonging to like a long lineage of such situations.
And when you do that, it's sort of like, well, okay, this will have an end and problems have a solution.
And, you know, that doesn't mean you don't need to do anything, but it means that, you know, what we call doom spiraling is probably unwarranted, right?
There's always like late at the end of whatever darkness you happen to be in.
And there are people with you.
Yeah, yeah, completely.
Which is my next question, which is, you know, what is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships and how do you work to overcome it?
So for sure one of the greatest obstacles for me is the kind of inherent difficulty of forming a community with other people who are all kind of traumatized in their unique ways.
And I think that this is I'm sure this applies to like a lot of communities, maybe all communities even, but I think it's especially an issue for LGBT people where certain types of social trauma are commonplace if not near universal.
So things like family rejection and betrayal, you know, that's a type of trauma that's so common in this community that I think it has reverberations that make it more difficult to, you know, form stable relationships with other people when you sort of are expecting betrayal.
Like it sort of creates this lower trust environment and people will sometimes take like very uncharitable views of It's difficult to be in conflict with people or to have disagreements without the conflict sort of escalating into like this extreme, you know, throwing of accusations back and forth.
And specifically, I guess, talking about like, people sort of used to call this cancel culture.
We sort of stopped calling it that because that term has been abused to the point of You know, sort of being not very helpful, I think, but I think that from even small queer communities, like by small, I mean like group chats to like large communities that you would see on social media.
And, you know, obviously this also all applies to like, you know, in person spaces too.
You know, There's this tendency to see the worst in people that I think has, for me, made it difficult to form stable communities.
And then traumas as a result of that sort of compound whatever original traumas led to it in the first place.
And so it can make you sort of paranoid and isolationist, which is still a tendency that I a little bit have is to kind of like shut myself up.
I mean, I'm an introverted person in the first place, so I'm sort of okay with that, but you know, no one is an island.
You do have to reach out to other people.
You have to have people in your life.
So for me, it's about trying to overcome that fear of trauma-driven conflict.
And, you know, try once again to make friendships happen.
It sounds like it would be a really sweet relief to have some kind of clean slate.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's really hard because this found family finds each other in part because they share certain wounds.
Exactly.
And so the clean slate, like, where is it?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think for me, it's been helpful to get less online.
I think that, you know, bashing social media again is a little cliche, but I think that There's this kind of illusion of community I think that sometimes occurs on social media that I definitely spent a lot of time succumbing to maybe five six years ago when you know I was getting you know this I had this YouTube channel that basically I kind of
My entire ego was basically invested in this thing.
And I think that's a kind of fragile and precarious situation to put yourself in as a creator, where you're basically identified with your creation so much that an attack on that feels like an attack on you.
And you then feel like your audience is your community.
That's bad.
That's so bad.
If you're a creator of any kind and you find yourself in that situation, Don't get out of that situation.
It's so helpful to have people in your life who like, if you were to describe what your current Twitter drama is, they would just look at you like you're insane.
That's so helpful, right?
Because it reminds you that you kind of are insane, right?
Like, why do you care so much about this?
Well, because at some point we started using the word community as kind of like a suffix.
We would say discord community, my creator community, my Patreon community.
And it's a little bit deceptive.
Yeah, it is.
No, it absolutely is deceptive.
And I think that there's kind of Mutual accountability that is in place often in, um, you know, relationships that you form with people offline that often isn't there online.
I mean, it's the reason why, like, it's, it's the reason why a lot of people prefer to date people that are, you know, a friend of a friend or something.
It's like, it's like a kind of protection against some of the most like flagrant types of abuse or neglect is that there's like social consequences now.
For both people involved, because you have sort of mutual friends who, you know, you would have to be held to account by if things were to go really horribly wrong.
Right.
Whereas online often, you know, that's not the case.
Like, there's, you know, there's there's there's sort of less you can do in situations of conflict and things can get spiraled out of hand like unbelievably quickly.
Well, they're designed to.
Well, because it's exciting.
Yeah.
Right.
Because a lot of people, again, and part of why the word community is a little bit misleading with certain online spaces, is that a lot of the people in these communities are basically spectators, right?
Right.
The gaze is not returned to them, right?
They see, but they're not seen in these spaces.
And so that can create a little bit of a circus kind of dynamic where, you know, I don't know, I think it creates the circumstances for all kinds of ugliness to take hold.
Speaking of the responsibilities in real life, the next question is kind of in that direction, and it's this.
If you were responsible for comforting and guiding, let's say, an eight-year-old child who is terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do that?
What would you say?
Well, I mean, I'm talking to an eight year old who is in terror.
I think that one thing I would say is something that I find comforting myself, which is to reflect on the fact that in past dystopian fiction, often the way the dystopian future is imagined is as if all current trends never stop trending.
Right.
So I think that A lot of dystopian fiction from the 1970s kind of imagined this future where crime is so out of control.
I'm thinking of things like A Clockwork Orange or Escape from New York, where like And escape from New York, like Manhattan is turned into a giant prison because crime is so out of control that the entire island is a huge penitentiary, basically.
Because in the 70s, crime was a massive problem and crime was going up.
And, you know, violent crime in cities in particular.
And so there was this sense that, oh, this will never end.
It's always just going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.
And so 50 years from now, like the entire world will be dominated by horrific, violent crime all the time.
But that turned out not to be the case.
Now, I think with climate change, you know, it's not enough to be like, well, the trend will probably not continue forever.
It's going to be fine.
You know, you don't necessarily want to say that to an adult because we actually do in fact need to do things to change the trend, right?
But changing the trend is possible.
So I think the sense of Inevitable doom that comes with panic is something that I feel like I try to combat by reminding myself how often people have felt that about other problems that seem to be spiraling out of control and how often those problems don't continue to snowball forever.
You know, you could also, the most stereotypical dystopia is like something like 1984 which is
like like what if Stalin but even more even more Stalinism right and like and and again I don't
think that really has happened despite you know what a lot of people say that xyz is Orwell's
nightmare like no it's not like it's it's just not um right and there's there's all kinds of
things that are terrible about society today but I don't really think that most of it resembles
like Stalinism but more so.
I don't know if this is reassuring.
I don't think I would say this to an eight year old, but things will get bad in all kinds of different ways that you can't even imagine.
You can't anticipate the ways that things will be bad in 20 years, right?
So I don't know if that's comforting, but it does, I think, mean that whatever particular horrible scenario you're imagining, you're probably wrong.
To adjust for the reading level between Orwell and, let's say, George Lucas, you know, I suppose the eight-year-old, many eight-year-olds, would understand that we didn't know exactly how far the Empire was going to get.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we didn't know.
We didn't know until the story unfolded who was going to rise up and who was going to become heroic.
Yes, yeah.
So I think that, you know, we're always in act two, we can maybe say, right?
It's always too soon to announce, like, how exactly things are going to go down.
And I think the fact that so many young people are panicked about this, I mean, some of those young people are going to do something about it, right?
So that's something to keep in mind.
And maybe that could be you, eight-year-old, you know?
I mean, I think that... Who's asking Natalie Wynn to comfort them?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, if they're in that position, they might have a gift.
Yeah, completely.
Um, so, you know, it's, I think that the fear is understandable and it's, it's, it's not that I would say, Oh, you shouldn't be afraid.
Like that, that's not reasonable because like it's, it's kind of reasonable, but you know, lots of people have been in such a similar situations.
Again, if you think about history where it seems like, Oh, things are just going to get worse and worse and worse.
Um, but it doesn't, things change just because people make a change.
Okay, here's the last question.
If your wisest ancestor came to you in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would that be?
Well, I think, again, the ancestor brings the historical perspective of, you know, every time is difficult in one way or another, right?
People have survived a lot, so I think the advice is to kind of not be so Narcissistically obsessed with your own moment.
Um, you know, I think that seeing how, again, the perspective of the past also gives you the perspective of the future in a way, you know, we were all someone else's future.
Um, and we're also someone else's past.
So by envisioning yourself in the middle of a timeline, I think you, again, do the best you can.
And then you also sort of accept that.
It's not your responsibility to do everything.
Like, you know, no one can do everything.
And so part of it also is accepting, like, it's finding that right balance between allowing the flow of history to take you and knowing when to kind of attempt to intervene.
I think that we all have like a little domain of control, right?
So I guess, you know, for me, it's okay.
I have a million people who listen to things that I say on YouTube.
Maybe that's not huge, but it's something.
It's something enough that I think it's worth taking seriously.
So I do think about, you know, Can I influence the people who have decided they want to listen to me in a way that's going to improve situations?
I think in a certain way, yes.
Am I going to completely influence the outcome of elections and things?
No.
But I hear enough from people who say that my videos have affected them in XYZ way that I know that it's worth doing.
So I think I tend to kind of try to focus my energy into that and then understand that there's a lot of horrible things happening in the world that aren't really my fault and nor can I change them.
So for the same reason that I don't necessarily blame...
You know, I don't blame Sigmund Freud for Hitler, right?
Even though those two guys are alive at the same time, right?
Like what was he supposed to do, right?
Like, you know, I think like there's a lot of things that there's like the guilt I think is not helpful, right?
When it comes to sort of like putting on your own shoulders every horrible moment.
So I think from the, not that I'm saying that Sigmund Freud is my ancestor, but like, you know, I don't really know who my ancestors are, frankly.
So you sort of imagine various historical people and think like, well, what would they have thought?
Sometimes you can know what they have thought because you can read their letters or you can read, you know, what they did think about the horrible shit that was going down in their life.
And that can be helpful too, is sort of like really direct confrontations with like what people How people felt in past historical moments.
And that sort of tells you that, you know, you're not alone at the least.
I realize that this last question is maybe over-personalized for some, and if one naturally goes to, oh, so this is the historical figure that would come to me in my dreams, or this is the literary figure who would come to me in my dreams, this is what they would tell me.
So for you, Freud pops up.
Well, I don't know why, what it says about me that Freud is popping into my dreams, but it probably says something.
It's a little bit of snake eating tail there.
Yeah, a little bit.
I've got one wrap question, I think, which is, so this isn't part of the five questions that everybody's going to get, but it does engage with the last tangent that you put out on spirituality.
And what I'm hearing you say about your stress management and about your capacity to offer care is that it seems that there's a relationship between having a historical observational perspective and perhaps what you are learning about The process of meditation, which is actually the observance of your own internal, you know, movement, your own mind.
Is that fair?
Absolutely.
It's fair.
Yeah.
And I mean, I'm such, I'm so, I'm like such an amateur dabbler in meditation.
Like I started doing like basically this year, but no, I do, I do think that it's, it's, it is kind of part of the same thing is that meditating.
Well, I find that, You know, simply paying attention for long enough changes the object of attention, right?
In this case, your own thoughts.
And I think that it's a little bit similar to sort of, maybe it would be the wrong word to use to say to be mindful of history.
Yeah, but that's, I think you're saying that in a number of different ways.
Yeah, but I do think that there's a little bit of a similar kind of, where again, there's a kind of awareness or an often kind of a calm that sets in specifically from paying attention to the flow, I guess as I'm calling it, whether it's the flow of your own thoughts or the flow of historical events.
I think that the practice of concentrating on that helps you not be so overtaken by the present moment, right?
Or it makes it seem like less like unbearably imminent because you sort of have come to understand The nature of change, I guess, so that you don't feel that the experience of a particular moment is the overwhelming truth.
I just have to say, as somebody who's been involved with meditation for a lot of years, the first year dabbling actually is kind of the best.
It's kind of the best.
So I know you're being self-deprecating about it and you're staying in your lane and you've got a scope of practice and all of that, but the freshness with which you talk about it I think is something that's really valuable for your listeners and I think a lot of the insights that you describe coming out of initial experiences, those are the ones that last actually.
Well, that's good to hear.
I mean, I do hope that I will like, I don't know, if I end up listening to the things I'm saying this year about it in five years, I will not be like cringing horribly.
Well, maybe I will, but I mean, sometimes that's not bad either, because sometimes, you know, cringing horribly at things you said five years ago means that you've grown.
Yeah.
You know, sometimes I think you have to get, I mean, with a lot of things, you have to get through a cringe stage before you can get to any other kind of stage.
I mean, you know, I play the piano decently now, but I wasn't good when I started.
