The Soft Cruelties of Conversation: Travelogues and Emotional Safety Reflections
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/18
When you travel with someone steeped in select grievance, a gentle, loving persuasion eventually gives way to containment: kindness, limits, and exit routes — for a time. This is a short field guide from one fraught trip: how to stay humane, set boundaries, and leave without rancour when conversation turns into performance.
I travelled briefly with a lawyer once, a peculiar composite of many Western traits they’d denounce while one reflecting the Sermon on the Mount’s “speck and plank” warning about hypocrisy: not to learn from it, but to ironically live it out.
They practised a selective morality about the killing of journalists: condemning the killings of journalists by Russian forces while showing indifference to reports of journalists killed by Israeli forces. The United Nations reported at least 242 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza as of 11 August 2025, while the Committee to Protect Journalists’ verified tally was lower — at least 189 by 1 September 2025. Counts vary by source and method.
They were chauvinistic about many things outside what they stereotyped as Western and voiced anti-trans views, apparently resentful over a grant awarded to an LGBTQ organization. Hurt can explain a posture; it does not excuse prejudice.
Their horizon narrowed to a hard, self-justifying individualism. “I do not care about trans people!” they would exclaim whenever perspective-taking or fairness in competitive grants arose. Coming from a privileged background in their homeland only made the moral asynchrony starker. The symphony was off-key.
Most of the trip consisted of eating and walking; coffee, cola, and wine; smoking shisha and the occasional cigarette; ignoring medical advice with a gleeful lack of care; trash-talking employees in absentia; and seeking an audience — one in person or many online. They framed this as work.
I soon realised the monologues would continue regardless of any reply. I learned to be wise and barely engage, for this person wanted mainly to hear their own echo — stereotyping all Westerners or “the West” as bad while being, by their own definitions, Westernised, even as they claimed the East by implicate identity.
It made me pause. I do not see the world in Western versus Global South terms, West versus East, developed versus developing. These demarcations have some conceptual utility; they are placeholders to help us grasp reality. Regardless, I am a humanist. I see humanity as one species in the same boat, whether facing nuclear-weapons proliferation, natural disasters and pandemics, anthropogenic climate change, overpopulation, or otherwise.
I hardly spoke, avoided geopolitics, and focused on art, plenty of compliments, good food, and the possibility of future visits. From their insecurity, they seemed to assume I found them “rude, radical, or evil.” I did not. I found them generally intelligent, well-educated, and, with effort, thoughtful and kind — often lovely to be around when things were going well: an unexpected grace note I would welcome again.
They were simply another ordinary person with distinct legal and linguistic talents, an above-average character, and the habit of stereotyping others. As I later joked, they might have preferred to be born with two mouths and one ear rather than the reverse.
I have never seen what is called “Western” as inherently superior, and still do not. I do not know why anyone assumes otherwise. Had they asked, I would have given an honest, straightforward opinion. We should strive to offer non-judgmental space for improvisatory opinions with travel partners. They took little time to offer empathy or consider another point of view — a pitiable lack of curiosity despite philosophical education.
They were prone to misrepresenting me — later, online, to others. I did not confront them; outbursts or social-media rants often follow. They promised confidentiality, then subtweeted insinuations.
What to do about emotional and reputational abuse? Withdraw gently and completely. I cut contact, professionally and personally, in a systematic manner. I do not have to participate in my own abuse.
I enjoyed one early dinner with them and a friend on the first day, where we discussed metaphysics. Language barriers made deeper conversations impossible, so I left it there. It is not a judgment — simply a cultural and linguistic barrier. How well would I speak metaphysics in their languages as a monoglot?
By the second day I gave up on their repeated monologues. I realised their questions were often intrusive, performative prying — a setup for dramatic exasperation and moralizing. Attention was the currency.
Once, after I bought them fries and myself a burger, they asked what I thought was a genuine question. I barely began to answer when they pretended to choke on potatoes — a theatrical flourish. It was a superficial farce masquerading as a sincere moral inquiry. You never know when these stories will be recycled for a mentally adolescent audience on social media; in this case they were, with encouraged epithets and expletives to boot.
I stayed calm and offered terse, unserious, even sarcastic replies, having already mapped their bigotries and games. They were self-involved and saw conversation as another dais for grand moralizing, as if channelling the very ill-defined “West” they caricatured.
By the third day, I stopped trying to reason altogether. Repetition breeds clarity: when every idea circles the same drain of grievance, silence becomes a form of interpersonal self-preservation.
These outbursts repeated throughout the trip, along with requests for professional contacts. It is dispiriting to meet those who treat others as transactions: ears to listen, networks to exploit, set pieces for later show-and-tell, or verbal and emotional punching bags for prejudices against whole regions of the world. This all unfolded during a birthday week that ended with my father’s funeral. They knew. Why the mendacity? I was celebrating life, mourning death, and turning a page in a new region with someone entirely new. They chose to abandon fundamental charity toward a person sharing space and time with them.
This was not principled anti-Western sentiment so much as dependence. They needed a stereotype of “the West” as a mirror to feel seen. A scholar as cultural paradox: caught between privilege and resentment; mimicking resistance while craving its validation; resenting what one reflects and reflecting what one resents; harbouring indifference to out-group suffering while cloaked in moral relativism, trimmed with the shawl of pseudo-skepticism.
They would cite Baudrillard while acting as if attention were the only real. An embodiment of the modern afflicted contradiction: To want the power of traditional older men, the privileges of contemporary younger women, and the accountability of children no matter the generation. Someone who ‘hates men of this generation’ while seeing her male peers as “children” while wanting a family due to “hormones” but engaged in short-term mating while ‘seduced by ministers’ and flinging with French lovers. It is: To see life a simulation and live in a forever “What if?” — settling to be never settled.
By the end, I gained a vital travel lesson: choose companions carefully, disengage when necessary, maintain a kindly composure, and keep firm boundaries that allow forgiveness without forgetting. The door is open. Listening without illusion is a discipline: to hear a worldview collapse under its own echo and stay kind anyway.
Forgiveness is usually an email away. Love as a principle commands it, and loving sentiments toward this person in particular still incline me to goodwill.
They saw themselves as apart and me as a type; I saw both of us as just people. My refrain, to remind them of my individuality and vulnerability, was simple: “I’m just a person.”
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