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 themselves denounced, while also reflecting the Sermon on the Mount’s “speck and plank” warning about hypocrisy: not to learn from it, but to live it out ironically.
They practised a selective moral and evidentiary posture. They would criticize my writing for what they saw as its reliance on popular opinion, demanding a deeper analysis while insisting that key phrases had been taken out of context, and simply attacking me personally and stereotyping me. When gently identified as an issue, the response was doubling down.
They were often sweeping and categorical about many things outside what they stereotyped as Western and could speak in sweeping categories about places, peoples, and perspectives. Hurt can explain a posture. It does not excuse prejudice. The posturing was often theatrical as I wrote a life memoir, having just passed the age of 30. One marvels at the self-inflation.
When I first arrived in Tel Aviv, I was urged to stay in Jewish territory rather than Arab areas of Israel. “Why?” Because I was told it was not safe. I asked, “Have you been there much?” Not much or at all, apparently, what was the basis for the opinion, then? None. They had not stayed there and knew little about it. However, the opinion was delivered with the kind of confidence one usually reserves for the Sun rising tomorrow. One marvels.
Their horizon narrowed to a hard, self-justifying individualism. Gentle questions of fairness or perspective-taking often yielded exasperation rather than curiosity. Coming from a philosophically educated 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; long stretches of monologue, bursts of complaint, and seeking an audience. One in person or many online. They framed these recreational activities, bragged about not reading their report and just wrote the preface or foreword, then portrayed all this self-sinecure activity as work.
I soon realized 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, Westernized, even as they claimed the East by implicit identity – living out Western values in the East while denouncing it.
It made me pause. I do not see the world in Western versus Global South, West versus East, or developed versus developing terms. 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 the remarks they made, 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, they were 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 a tendency to stereotype others. As I later joked, they might have preferred to be born with two mouths and one ear rather than the other way around.
I have never seen “Western” culture 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, in the worst terms possible. I did not confront them; outbursts or social-media rants often follow. They promised confidentiality and a safe space. This was betrayed, later making private communication public when promising a safe space and vagueposting cynical slander against me.
What to do about emotional and reputational abuse? Withdraw gently and completely. I cut off contact, professionally and personally, systematically. I do not have to participate in my own abuse.
I enjoyed an 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 be able to speak metaphysics in their languages as a monoglot?
By the second day, I gave up on their repeated monologues. I realized 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 seemed at first to be a genuine question. I barely began to answer when the moment turned theatrical. It was a superficial farce masquerading as a sincere moral inquiry. You never know when these stories will be recycled for a social-media audience, stripped of context and served up with insinuation; 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 patterns 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 patterns 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 always principled anti-Western sentiment, but rather something closer to dependence on a stereotype. They needed a stereotype of “the West” 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. It was an embodiment of a modern contradiction: to want moral authority without reciprocal scrutiny, a radical posture without intellectual humility, adulthood’s privileges without adulthood’s full accountabilities. It is to see life as a simulation and live inside a perpetual “What if?”, settling for never being 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. Later, I apologized for my part in the rupture. They behaved as if doing nothing wrong in stereotyping, in public emotional abuse, or in making private communication public. Then later, after the apology and when I asked directly about it, they joked they had published private communications on social media and tagged me – completely tone deaf.
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 am just a person.” That was the point I kept returning to, against every reduction into stereotype.
I wish them happiness and wellness, despite this circumstantially poor outcome for us, maybe another time: Safe Space.
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