Life is Pain, Only Potato

On the commensalism of large similarities

Yesterday a screenshot of an old twitter exchange crossed my radar. The original tweet by Taleb is from 2021, but I can’t find this reply, which may have been deleted. I think this is one of the finest replies in Twitter history.

What makes it great is not the sardonic comment about Slavs, which other replies also make, but the phrase, life is pain, only potato.

At the risk of ruining it, I’m going to deconstruct this excellent joke and use it as a lens through which to look at the state of life, the universe, and everything.

Taleb of course, is being his usual obnoxious self, performing Levantine identity in a way that has perhaps single-handedly turned me off ever being a Levantophile, over the decades he’s been doing it. That’s just Taleb being Taleb, and he’s old and beyond reform. Sadly, most people the world over perform their cultural identities this way. Though rarely with such relentless thin-skinnedness, and to such a global audience.

Sosna’s reply also performs identity, Slavic in this case, but in exactly the opposite way — self-deprecating (the stupidity of joyless drinking), emphasizing a universally resonant sentiment (life is pain) via a globally familiar motif (the potato). The vodka-vs-wine subtext is only gestured at, not centered. This is a reply that makes me want to be a Slavophile.

Of course, given that both the Levant and the Slavic world are being torn apart by really ugly wars right now makes being either a Levantophile or a Slavophile something of an armchair aspiration at the moment.

In the grim darkness of the unevenly distributed future, there is only potato.

Good vs. Bad Identity Performance

We are all, of course, consciously and unconsciously performing our identities anytime we’re in public, so identity performance is neither good, nor bad. It’s just a part of our phenotype, like skin color. It’s how we present a discoverable API to the world, so to speak. A simplified, relatable version of ourselves.

But there are bad and good ways to do it, and this exchange illustrates both. Why? Because in at least a tiny way, Taleb makes me care a teeny bit less about the tragic fate of people in the Levant, while Sosna’s reply here makes me care a teeny bit more about the tragedy unfolding in the Slavic world.

This is not a trivial point. The small bits of caring, summed over 8 billion souls now wired together by the global contraption that is the internet, add up, and make a difference. How individuals perform their identities actually shapes how distant strangers relate to them and get invested — or not — in their fates. So there’s more at stake for the world than you might think, in apparently innocuous little interactions like this, which occur billions of times daily, between individuals with hugely varied pairwise cultural distances.

This potato joke lands because it performs identity in a way that anyone in the world, Slavic or not, can relate to. You don’t have to have tasted vodka or eaten piroshkis to get it. Even if you’re not from as potato-centric a region as the Slavic world apparently is, your culture probably has some relationship to the potato that rhymes at least vaguely. Everywhere in the world, the potato is a relatively cheap ingredient that’s more important the lower you go on the socioeconomic scale, but popular with all classes.

Contrast the use of the potato as a motif for identity performance with say, squid-ink pasta, which I pick as an example absolutely at random for no particular reason.

I ate pasta for the first time at age 23. Even if I were not a vegetarian, it is unlikely that I’d ever have had squid ink in India. As far as I know, the ingredient does not show up anywhere in Indian cuisine. All I can do, if someone performs their identity at me using squid ink pasta as a motif, is shrug and say, “Uh, ok. Good for you.”

The key phrase there is perform at. Most identity performances are perform-at behaviors, not meaningful connection overtures.

This does not mean, of course, that you should not talk about narrowly familiar cultural elements to broader groups at all. There are plenty of good reasons to talk about the unique parts of your heritage with people who don’t share it. Identity performance is just not one of them. Because when you use elements in your identity performance that the listener has no experience of, you generally weaken the connection, not strengthen it. To alienate a listener, you don’t have to be actively hostile to them, or mock them. All you have to do is emphasize aspects of your identity they can’t really relate to, except in a spirit of polite, passive spectatorship. Elements that invite no connection.

Potatoes though… now you’re talking my language. You’re talking everybody’s language. Everybody has something to say about potatoes. Everybody has a potato recipe to share. And a potato joke. Any random pair of humans can have a vigorous argument about which potato dish is best. The potato is part of our universal human heritage now. If a comedian making a potato joke called me up on stage, I’d probably be able to hold up my end in some okay banter.

The Sosna joke works so well for me because, while it is anchored in identity, it is the opposite of amirite identity humor.