Washing the Bowl

I read with some amusement the latest drive-by the WaPo did on millennials. It starts in the title: “The baffling reason many millennials don’t eat cereal.” And proceeds to dismiss the plunging sales of cold cereal (down 30% since 2000) as a referendum on the character of those crazy, lazy, hazy kids:

Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.

So: cereal is out, because you have to wash the bowl after you eat it. Yuck. And thus dies a venerable American industry.

The jump from data on changing tastes to judgment of a generation’s values is distressingly typical. One of the parlor games of my generation is piling on the one two gens behind us. You know the rules, even if you haven’t tried to learn them:

• The folks now entering the workforce are lazy, self-centered, and require a lamentable quantity of hand-holding and praise to accomplish the slightest task (blame their helicopter parents);
• They are too obsessed with digitally-mediated relationships to start real ones, which makes their values hopelessly skewed;
• The combination of the two means that we are doomed. If those we must bequeath our empires and fortunes to can’t stand up on their own two feet, orient according to core values of diligence and grit, and get their priorities straight in the real world rather than fleeing to digital fantasy, what could the future possibly hold?

The piece at hand makes an interesting argument about what has led to a generation that will do just about anything to avoid washing a dish. It notes that parents don’t hold the line on chores, even though they pay lip service to their value; it notes that convenience’s ascendance has also decimated other industries (i.e., the rise of the coffee pod); it notes in passing that 2/3 of households are supported by two working parents, with predictable sequelae:

The less time families have to prepare food or sit down at restaurants, the more convenience hovers over decisions about food, especially when there is an option that is easier. Dinner, which isn’t being cooked at home as often as it used to, is among the trend’s many casualties. Less than 60 percent of suppers served at home were actually cooked at home last year. Only 30 years ago, the percentage was closer to 75 percent.

Both the substance and incredible snark of the piece have me thinking about three things:

1. What’s the over / under on convenience? What does its pursuit give us, and take from us, if anything?
2.  How unique are the millennials, really, when it comes to desiring convenience?
3. What, if anything, do these characterizations of millennials tell those of us who wish to communicate with them: to share ideas and tools with them that will bring them happiness?

To the first: if convenience is possible, we will choose it. This observation doesn’t have to overlay a value trip on those who desire it. Convenience genuinely does enable us to do more; sometimes, convenience makes possible incredible new levels of self-actualization. Think of how fully the introduction of labor-saving household devices in the 1950s was baked in to the rise of the career woman a decade later. Think of how innovation in manufacturing (“convenience” writ large, automation’s capacity to do more with less in less time) transformed manufacturing in the last forty years. Convenience is at the intersection of need, ease, and speed: the bones of innovation everywhere it materializes.

What has convenience brought the millennials? We can huff and puff about the demise of the “family dinner” as much as we wish, but let’s remember where the kids in the backseat eating cheeseburgers were on the way to. Practices, lessons, rehearsals – the pool, the dojo, the gym, the studio – the game, the match, the recital, the exhibition, the college-prep seminar. These people have SEEN so much and know how to DO so much! As a result of their parents overprogramming, perhaps; in ways that rewarded compliance rather than innovation, perhaps (Google “participation trophy” to see some really spectacular cultural hand-wringing). But nonetheless: convenience in the form of dinners handed through windows of SUVs has prepared a generation with deeper and wider skills than any that have gone before.

But convenience also takes something away. There’s a knife edge that can be crossed beyond which convenience cultivates a certain kind of stasis, even indolence. An unwillingness to do anything to change anything, because it is easier to just accommodate yourself to what is already happening. In our household, losing the TV remote is akin to the TV being broken. Even though the actual, physical controls ON the television work as well as the ones on the remote, it’s become inconceivable to have to get up and go physically change the channel or the input or the volume. We’d rather not watch. Or instead of watching, fiddle around on our phones (together but alone; grown up parallel play – Wall-E’s vision is almost ten years old now, and become realer than we could have imagine).

So much comes back to that little device, which created its need so completely that we’ve reformed the world around its capacities and limits. If it can’t be done on a smartphone or a tablet, it increasingly doesn’t happen. “Frictionless” engagement with the digital world – shopping, sociality, music, research – is paramount. We measure out our lives not in coffee spoons, but in 3×5 screens; we are simultaneously enlarged and diminished by that ever-present black mirror. (I confess to a respectful love / hate relationship with these devices. I am a walking low-power EMP, apparently shorting out gizmos as soon as I come within a few feet of them, which might be coloring my view. But not by much.)

Are millennials so different than we were? Only in the exponentially greater impact that convenience has on their lives as a result of technological shifts; not in their desire for it. My generation wanted and acquired tools of leisure our parents didn’t understand: portable turntables and 45 records; cars with better suspensions and broader seats; the color TV I brought back home from Japan; microwave ovens (which worried my mother-in-law until they day she died, always concerned about the unseen effects of the “rays”); the WalkMan portable cassette player we listened to compulsively on our cross-country ski machines.

We are the same, them and us: we both want more, better, faster, and easier. And we both use the additional time and energy freed up by all this innovation only sporadically for improvement; mostly, we take it easy and watch more TV.

It’s from THIS perspective that I regard millennials: recognition of similarities, not horror at difference. As I wonder how best to communicate with these people about personal change, I recall that mine is a field of human endeavor that’s has always been anti-convenience, when it’s sold honestly. A book could be filled with examples of scoundrels made rich by claiming to know the shortcut (Fen Phen and Bernie Madoff leap to mind as chapter titles), but the reality of personal change is stubbornly inconvenient. Here’s the man who “innovated in this space” most effectively,  Dale Carnegie:

If you wish to get the most out of this book, there is one indispensable requirement, one essential infinitely more important than any rule or technique. Unless you have this one fundamental requisite, a thousand rules on how to study will avail little, And if you do have this cardinal endowment, then you can achieve wonders without reading any suggestions for getting the most out of a book. What is this magic requirement? Just this: a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to increase your ability to deal with
people.

The “vigorous determination.” Change can only start with a powerful drive, and a willingness to apply oneself. We all know we can change any habit in three weeks (maybe); all you have to do is want the change enough to do the new thing, every time, in every waking second, during those weeks. No pain, no gain.

This is not a sexy thing to sell. How could this approach to life ever be positioned as desirable to folks who would rather skip breakfast than rinse out a cereal bowl?

Maybe change has a marketing problem. Two quick thoughts on marketing: first, I read with interest that millennials aren’t responding to branding the way other generations have; they’re not susceptible to brands’ efforts to “make their myths relevant to the cultural conversations of the day.”

Or more to the point, they are very wise to marketing’s ploys. They’ll respond if and only if associating with the brand clearly affirms their OWN identity – what Doug Holt describes as the brand’s “iconicity.”

The crux of iconicity is that the person or the thing is widely regarded as the most compelling symbol of a set of ideas or values that a society deems important. Icons come to represent a particular kind of story — an identity myth — that their consumers use to address identity desires and anxieties.

So: the product that affirms one’s own identity – that I am this and not that, and DEFINITELY not that – is the product that inspires loyalty. We love things that ARE us; that tell us the story of who we wish to be, and who we wish not to be.

Second, I read that millennials seem to respond to a powerful combination of nostalgia and iconoclasm. Those cereal magnates who see the upside-down hockey stick? They are re-packaging cereal as a nostalgic trip, a way to recapture the satisfaction and indulgence of being a little kid (they’re not the only one). Cereal isn’t a sensible breakfast idea any more; it’s a treat, a gift to yourself of a portal back to being younger, happier, and more at ease.

I wonder if there isn’t insight at the place where these observations meet. Remember:

• Millennials DID more after school and on weekends than anyone previous; they have tons of skills that have been well-developed in thousands of hours of practice and rehearsal and competition. (Those resume builders already got them into good colleges; now what were they for?)
• Millennials (like all of us) crave iconic brands that reflect back to us the people we most wish to be.
• Millennials (like all of us) respond to nostalgia.

Could we reposition personal change in a way that reaffirms millennials’ perceptions of themselves as self-improvers, achievers, excellers?

Could we describe it as a way to continue to become the person you always have been: someone willing to work hard after school and on weekends toward your goal?

Could we tap into the same powerful nostalgia for youth by helping millennials recall the achievements of their focused, productive youths?

“Washing the bowl.” The yucky parts of life as an adult: accountability, diligence, discipline. The bottom line, it seems to me, is that millennials will “wash the bowl” if washing the bowl helps them affirm their identity as people who always have. And they always have, truly. They have studied harder, practiced harder, worked harder than any American generation ever raised. Their passion for convenience and avoiding work only points out how we have failed in helping them see that they are already people who work hard and do the hard stuff.

• If we could help them access personal change work as their rightful inheritance – the natural next step of people who have already done so much;
• If we could connect personal change work with the triumphs and satisfactions they experienced as children as a result of their unprecedented labors;
• If we could make change work a way to reflect back to them all they desire to be, rather than a mirror that tells them all the ways they are wrong and not good enough;

Well, then we’d really be on to something, wouldn’t we?

Desire for convenience isn’t a moral failing: it’s just a generation voting with their feet and looking for something else that better affirms who they wish to be. Let’s flip the script. Change might be drudgery and pain for us; it doesn’t have to be for them.

Stock photo of bowl and spoon. 
(On another note: is change’s issue a design problem? Apple has become an iconic brand by selling itself as NOT slow, technical, and unresponsive, but rather as human, easy, and elegant. Apple has moved TOWARD brick-and-mortar presence in the age when all other retail is moving online – because people want to be around the objects that make their lives so convenient and rich and beautiful, to have them reflect their power back on them. What does an Apple-inspired change device look like, feel like?)

books and laps

I get to watch my son a lot with his toddler, and am blown away by how kids really learn to read.

When a toddler brings her parent a book, she is not really interested in the book: she is interested in being close to someone who she knows loves her, safe and held. That feeling of safety and closeness enables her to read the book. The baby sits in the lap so she can see the book, so she can see and be open to what the book has for her. But she’s got to be in the lap for the reading to happen. No lap, no book.

Later, we learn to be read to in other ways. Still later, we learn to read out loud to ourselves, hearing only our own voice in the guiding, parent role. Then, finally, we don’t even need the voice: we have become independent actors in the world, reading and learning, released on our own recognizance.

But before any of that can happen, we need to be held, in a moment of learning that doesn’t really differentiate between the feeling of being safe and the thing we are reading together. The whole thing happens at once. It is all the same thing. There is no part of it without the other part. Learning, initially, is almost a byproduct of relationship. Before a book is anything else, it is a pretense for being held.

This observation might seem too simple to merit further consideration: babies sit on laps, and reading’s a thing you do. But it came to mind even more clearly when I read this terrific Slate piece on the contested future of NPR. And from mashing the two ideas together, I ended up thinking about – well, about millennials. (I know – again.) Please, read on – it’s really interesting, I promise.

First of all, it turns out NPR is a mess. Not least because they are in a battle with their distributors / franchisees: the local stations, some very powerful, who sit on their board and frequently stymie efforts to provide the public access to NPR offerings without going through them. There’s a bloody war raging over the core premises of NPR’s business – a war being waged “spiritedly, in multiple forums, [over] whether the antiquated economic arrangements that govern NPR’s relationships with its member stations are holding it back from innovation.” (Drama! Intrigue! Power struggle among the tote bags!)

But that’s not even the interesting part. The struggle that underpins the financial and organizational discord is really a fight over what constitutes news at all: whether NPR’s offerings are becoming stodgy and undesirable.

A little history: when NPR began, it was considered an upstart voice…

…hatched by “misfits, castoffs, and dreamers” out of a desire to experiment with audio, and was widely viewed as the province of left-wingers and hippies. The first broadcast, emblematically, was a chaotic, 25-minute portrait in three acts of the massive anti-war rally that shook Washington, D.C., on May 3, 1971…the unusual piece rang out with a vibration from a realm where youthful earnestness commingled with merry-prankster lunacy, land-grant university idealism, New England pragmatism, and a native instinct for storytelling.

So NPR made their bones on the insertion of chaos, polyphony, and above all first-person voice in their reporting. They were the New Journalism brought to drive-time FM: bumpy where the evening news was smooth, and not afraid of wandering from 5W reporting in the name of creating an immersive, complex experience for their listeners.

Cut to forty-five years later, though, and we find NPR being eaten by the offspring of the market it arguably created for textured, “you are there” reporting. There are MORE textured, MORE “you are there” offerings to be had now. And to make matters worse, the podcast revolution has made it even harder to differentiate the value of NPR’s offering.  Just like iTunes destroyed the album (and the existing music industry) with the 99 cent song download, podcasts have atomized the listening landscape. Podcasts offer the capacity for the audience to pick and choose what constitutes “news” for them, and therefore have created the attendant expectation that the experience of listening feel custom, personalized: not like “news.”

And like so many challenges, this one is generational.

The conventional wisdom among podcasters like Blumberg is that, in 2016, listeners want audio programming that makes them feel as though they’re getting to know a person or a topic intimately, whether through the familiar banter of beloved panelists or through lovingly produced works of storytelling. Whereas [baby boomers] turned to NPR because they wanted someone trustworthy to tell them the news, younger generations seem to find satisfaction in the velvety bedroom voice of 99% Invisible host Roman Mars as he murmurs about furniture and the self-consciousness of Serial’s Sarah Koenig, who makes the method of her reporting part of her story.

NPR News reporters usually can’t get that personal, in part because, as Gimlet’s Adam Davidson puts it, they are in the impossible position of having to simultaneously “appeal to 80-year-olds in Alabama and 20-year-olds in Brooklyn.”

“All evidence suggests that with on-demand audio, people don’t want the three-to-four-minute radio stories,” Davidson told me. “They don’t want the anecdotal lede, followed by an expert saying something. They want something longer. More engaged. Something that isn’t designed for 30 million people in mind, but 1 million people who are more like them. They want something looser, more fun.”

So demand for the experience of news had morphed. It is no longer enough to be accurate, comprehensive, and timely in reporting: you now must also enable the listener to “get to know a person or topic intimately” while feeling like a customized, boutique, niche offering.

The facts have to be embedded in an experience of connection.

You can’t just read the book – you have to provide the lap too.

Between the lines of this awesome piece, I hear a common refrain about “kids today”: they ways that millennials want it all spoon-fed to them, even the news. Everything for them has to be just so.

Back in OUR day, the grown-ups say, we showed up to work and did what we were told. We didn’t pay attention to our quality of life when making career decisions. We didn’t expect supervision and real-time feedback all the time to tell us if we were meeting expectations (though it must be said we didn’t come of age in an education system that reduced all educational to a high-stakes test score that told us whether or not we had learned anything).

And we sure didn’t expect the job to adapt to us: our schedules, our wardrobe, our needs for validation and affirmation and social connection. When these kids, with their hoodies and merit-based pay schemes and mutual funds, come into our world, it feels so weird. A blasphemy, leading with what they need to work well, or concurrently seeking their personal satisfaction while also working for the company’s bottom line.

It is threatening, to be sure – all the ways the young folks are different from us. But my son’s toddler shows me that maybe we are the ones who got it wrong.

• Maybe our insistence on separating ourselves from the emotional consequences and implications of our work has set us up to be divided people, unfulfilled, at odds with the world.
• Maybe if we had attended to our own needs when we were their age, we wouldn’t be a generation overwhelmed with regret, overwork, addiction – all the consequences of pretending things are OK when they are not.
• Maybe they are on to something.

To be sure, there is a fine line between wanting your news reporting to feel personal, immersive, and customized, and not being able to attend to something that doesn’t explicitly try to draw you in. As we mature, we need to learn to focus on things that resist our focus. After all, much of the most important stuff in the world is boring; many of life’s most power truths hide in plain sight, in the small print, and we have to learn to be able to read, understand, and use it – even if it seems off-putting at first. Sometimes especially then.

But maybe we learn to do that kind of work best when we begin the process of learning how to in a relationship of safety, accommodation, and personalization. Maybe the kids today aren’t selfish and soft. Maybe they just insist on learning the way that people learn best, and always have: on their own terms, with a keen eye to their own safety and support before they venture into something new, or pick up a new book.

So four insights from this musing:

1. Why are we so hung up on what is wrong with the younger generation? What lack in us do their peculiarities call out? I think one might be that their insistence on having the world their way, on-demand and customized, scares us because it reminds us of the ways we didn’t, and don’t.
2. If we can overcome our first resistance to their approach (e.g., that they are selfish, soft, self-absorbed), then we might be able to actually learn something from them.
3. This is HARD! This intergenerational strife. It would be much easier if everyone were like us, in this and every other domain.
4. But we can’t afford to ignore them. We must listen to them, and learn from them. Because you can only step in the same river twice, and that river only flows one way.

I plan to join the next generation downstream. I am working as hard as I can to confront what is new and uncomfortable – to let myself feel what’s weird and keep going anyway. I suggest you do the same.

Maybe acknowledging your own discomfort is the first step to addressing it. And maybe, once you feel safe and comfortable – well, maybe then you’ll be ready to learn something new too.

Image borrowed from lincnyc, with thanks.

Boom-Bip

Here’s a guest blog from a younger friend of mine, who’ll stay anonymous. He’s not talking about my world, but I sure get his message about the simplicity of change and how accepting that simplicity gives us back our lives! And I am always open to the way younger folks experience the timeless principles behind my work. So, onward: change and rap music, why not?

Hip Hop is about two things: the flow of the lyrics, and the big “boom-bip.”

Most casual listeners to rap music and its many derivations focus on the words: the ways that different rappers meld rhythm and meaning in the half-rhymes and end rhymes they both compose and improvise live. To be sure, there’s endless craft in lyrics; endless possibility to express one’s unique perspective in one’s singular voice. It’s our era’s poetry – the place where we find beauty and meaning in wordcraft that’s as surely relevant to our world as Donne’s Holy Sonnets were to his.

But the “boom-bip” – the repeated, usually sampled, bass-and-snare pattern over which the lyrics happen – is the spine of the whole hiphop enterprise. Without the beat, however rhythmically you rhyme, it’s still just you and your words. The beat lifts your words into real space and time where we can all share them. The beat crafts empty time into something purposeful, a deliberate moment of proposing and signifying. The beat liberates the creative impulse from the no-time that goes on in all our heads; draws it silhouetted against the inexorable tick-tock of all our lives; makes the creative impulse more than a mere idea by rooting it in reality. The beat makes it real.

There are countless ways a voice can sound. But there are also countless ways a drum can sound, and infinite ways the boom-bip can be varied both rhythmically and sonically. I think an alien visitor to the planet would have a hard time classifying Clyde Stubblefield’s tight, hammered-down “Funky Drummer” loop and A Tribe Called Quest’s massive, obliterating “Excursions” sample as the same genus, let alone species. Or maybe he/she/it wouldn’t: maybe to someone who hasn’t listened hard to beats their whole life, they’re both just drum sounds.

But I have found that paying close attention to the boom-bip actually teaches you you how to hear it. The more you listen – in all different moods and moments, at all different ages and stages of your life – the more the sameness of the rhythms only accentuates their differences, until to you, DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt” and Chemical Brothers’ “Orange Wedge” and Beck’s “E Pro” are as different as a Raphael and Renoir and a Rothko. In a way, this sort of aesthetic sensitivity spoils you for the regular world. We are in a musically saturated culture, and no rhythm you encounter, however casually, is ever just “background music” again. A television commercial, the XM station playing at your lunch spot, the block-rocking subwoofers in the next car at a stop light: you involuntarily become students of all of them, attending to their rhythms and sonic qualities, comparing them to everything you have heard before and filing them away, differentiating and grouping them…suddenly everything has rhythm to it. Every moment of incidental music is a chance to tune in to the big beat, to become its student again, hello old friend.

It’s the sameness that makes the awareness of difference possible. Hiphop came into being as the music of the dispossessed, up from the streets as the found art regenerated from what others primary expressions (records, big speakers, and scavenged power, in the classic block party setting). Its elemental sound, stripped down and repeated, offended sensibilities that had been trained to value other definitions of music. “It’s all the same,” my friends and I said when we first heard Run DMC. “they’re just TALKING, that’s not singing…” And of course the sniff-down-the-nose that elites have always directed at the next thing: “that’s not even new. You’re just stealing what someone else did and saying its yours.” (I remember a friend rewriting MC Hammer’s lyric that he made over an unprecedentedly broad lift from Rick James’ “Superfreak”: “I didn’t write this. I stole this.”)

But all this sameness, remade into something new through repatriation and decontextualization, gave us back the beat and let us listen to it through new ears that were rudely awakened by the same discomfort. What feels strange and offensive makes us pay attention. The new is uncomfortable, but it teaches us its new rules, usually with the pain that always accompanies stretching. And thank heaven for it: it hurts, but we come away able to hear more, with an essentially new world stretched out before us to experience anew.

Am I making too much of the boom-bip? I don’t think so. And I am writing about it here because of how much my lifelong experience of listening to rhythm helps me understand the way that personal change really happens. Consider:

• The most difficult personal changes I have made in my life were previously unimaginable to me. As in, literally: I could not cognize the real issues that were turning over and over, restlessly, in my mind. I had inchoate glimmers of what was underpinning my constant restlessness, my unhappiness with the gap between my intentions and efforts and their results. But I could not name what was really causing them – only turn my pain at that disconnect into more and more anger, going out, and shame, going in.
• I needed a structure, a backbone: some way of lifting my experience out of the no-time and no-space of my churning mind and holding it up to the light where I could see it, measure it, weigh it. Just like the big beat provides a sonic space for creativity to be expressed and recorded and shared, a structure for capturing my churning experience let me actually hear what was really going on and begin to express it, react to it, do something about it.
• The basic ways in which rhythm get expressed are similar in some ways: bass-and-snare patterns, looped. Similarly, my basic modes of engaging the project of personal change are pretty limited. I have a tool kit with only a few tools in it, which I am learning to deploy consistently, resolutely, and accountably.
• But my willingness to do these few things consistently has opened my eyes to the infinite variety of opportunities I have to engage with my life on these new terms. There are so many moments in which I have become accustomed to making a habitual, self-defeating choice; these all become contexts in which I get the chance to hear something different and take the music in a new direction.
• The results are clear. Before I saw the patterns beneath my behavior, I detected no order to it, and therefore all the different moments of my life felt the same, chaotic and unsatisfying. Now that I see the common beat that pulses beneath all of them, they have come into view in all the rich variety they really represent. As my way of seeing my world became more constrained, it paradoxically opened up and became more complexly, impossibly, beautiful.
• The tools I use now, every day, are the ones I used to think weren’t valuable because they were so simple. But they’ve become priceless, because they have re-invented the world to me. They were originally uncomfortable: they asked me to hear the world differently, and I didn’t want to. (Their “music didn’t sound like music”.) But I let myself be open to them, and they re-ordered my ability to hear. My “ears got bigger.” And now I can hear everything. I have become a student of my life, and every new input – even the uncomfortable ones – is something new to pay attention to, a new opportunity to engage my life differently.

Well, this all might sound crazy to you. Your mileage may vary. (Or, as Madonna said, “beauty’s where you find it,” over her own big beats.) I know my own experience, though, and am glad I found a way to simplify what had previously been too complex to even hear, and that I kept paying attention even though it sounded weird and made me uncomfortable. Because the simplifying gave me back the world, and it’s rhythms still carry me forward, every day.

Image of someone on the Wheels of Steel from pickmyturntable.com, with thanks.

You 3.0

I feel that online life is characterized by estrangement and longing.

That’s one of many thoughtful things author Rick Moody has said. It’s mostly on my mind because I am trying to think through – even think ahead – of what online life offers to support those who wish to make lasting, holistic changes in their lives.

When I say think ahead, I mean I want to consider what is coming next, after the internet. I am not technologically savvy enough to begin to imagine Web 3.0 – let’s leave that to the folks at Wired (who, when they consider it, usually seem to discuss the future in terms of integration of the market with the growing trove of personalized data that lie in the Big Four’s server farms). What I do know is that the version of personalization that Web 2.0 has offered is becoming increasingly dehumanized, even as it accumulates granularity in the data it uses to define us.

For example, I am noting the change month-to-month, even week-to-week, in my social media experience. That’s how fast it is happening. The shift to flash video in the Facebook feed was surprising – suddenly one day, the pictures began to move, like an animated Disney forest – but even more so has been the recently aggressive prompts to remember my friends’ birthdays, and to send them greetings on their big day. And FB has begun coughing up images and posts that I shared two, even three years ago, in the interest (I think) of building some narrative arc into my online experience, some gentle sense of a story unfolding with peaks and valleys, learnings and enduring mysteries.

All of this has the tacit effect of reminding me, over and over, how much FB knows about me; how much of myself I have confided to them in the interest of them, in turn, confiding it to my friends. The net effect is disquieting, especially when FB tips even farther into the uncanny valley and tells me how glad it is I am using Facebook tonight. Comparisons to Hal telling Dave “I can’t let you do that” are not far off: suddenly the machine is addressing me, reinforcing some behaviors and discouraging others. And all the while, the space itself becomes more cluttered with both the elements of the world that FB’s algorithms tell it I want to see and the elements that let it monetize my eyeballs: the in-feed ads, the growing box in the upper right telling me what news is “trending” in my geographic area and therefore should be attended to, even the little strobe effect that has been built into some images that flashes unexpectedly, forcing my autonomic system to attend more to that image. I comply – I am only an animal, after all, drawn to light and movement – but always at the cost of a little panic, a little unanticipated arousal that makes the whole mise en scene that much more agitated, fragmented, atomized.

What an odd word for this reflection to cough up: “atomized.” It’s the word of another generation, of course: my childhood, the period in which the split atom represented all our greatest hopes and fears for what we might do upon or against our planet. Here I use it to describe the various splittings and increased resolution that the data-saturated environment has made real. My preferences in politics, drink, film, have all been recorded – even, infamously, whether I respond more desireably to happy or sad news. The 1s and 0s of the simple binary that underlies everything digital are, in turn, constituting me as a pointillist portrait, with the points themselves subdividing again and again as they reach toward absolute constitution of me, homo digitalis, Digital Man.

Whew. That was intense. But I only hope I communicate something of the experience of being online these days. To return to Moody’s observation: all these simulacra have the two net effects:

• they render me further estranged from who I really am, and who my friends really are;
• they engender greater longing in all of us to find each other, and ourselves, once again.

First, the estrangement. Online, both my friends and I become avatars, more and less than our actual selves, when distilled to our online presences. The word is first used in 1985, borrowed from the Hindu word for a deity manifesting in the world in physical form (but inverting it, as the designer wished the in-game representation of the player to be the human player’s instantiation of himself in the not-real world of the game). Our avatars are thus less and more than human: only what we tell them we are, but with the gaps filled in and smoothed over by big-data analytics that a user base of more than one billion makes possible at FB.

Avatars are able to communicate in seconds around the globe, share the slightest inkling of a thought with thousands at once and gather their replies a moment later. We give up something slow and dense and muddy in our transmutation from flesh to pixel, but we are happy to make the switch because of how time and space collapse for such a low price of admission. (Remember: if it’s free on the internet, you’re the product.) Our estrangement from our flesh is transcendence, initially, but becomes anomie (what happens when “unruly scenarios result in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values”). We are unable to get back to the type of connection we took for granted before; we are unmade from our usual capacity to connect, and cannot be remade into regular people for blood or money.

Which feeds us into the longing: the itch we can’t scratch for human connection. It seems all the more doable by the day, because of how high fidelity the reproductions of humanness online are. With pixels this dense – 1080p, even more for us top-shelf Apple-biters – everything looks as good as being there. But what we see there is not really there, and our somatic beings know it, and tell our brains and our hearts that we are connecting even as our senses wish to tell us we are. I understand artifical sweeteners causes a similar effect: even though, metabolically, we are not consuming sugar, our emotional desire to consume (i.e., our appetite) is engaged as if we were, and we consume more than we would if we were consuming actual sugar (i.e., our auto-off that kills our appetite once we are sated is hijacked, so we can’t know when we’re sated). Addressing our longing for sweetness through artificial means only intensifies our longing; addressing our desire for connection through avatar interface only intensifies our desire.

I know how cranky all this might sound. There has always been societal concern when a new technology of representation shows up to render our fictions more realistic, from the cheap pulp novels of the eighteenth century to the lurid true crime mags and comic books of the 1950s, even the video games which supposedly began warping our connection to reality the instant they appeared in our shopping malls (which echo the same concerns about pinball machines fifty years earlier). Each scared the elders by the simulation of reality offered and the way it was feared to affect the users’ engagement with the real thing. I observe that none of the past technologies actually beheld a rendering of the real thing within its grasp (3d printers). There’s a real way to avoid my concern by just chalking it up to the last generation being scared of the kids, with their jalopies and their rock and roll…and their VR helmets.

But there is a difference this time – perhaps for the first time. The past technologies all sophisticated the users’ palette for imaginative substance, true, and perhaps dulled the imagination by offering more and more to be seen, not pictured. But nothing was hyperreal, realer than real (except, frequently, in the SF stories that some of this technologies serialized). Now – here, in the same laptop I compose these lines upon, a browser window away – I have access to Who My Friends Actually Are: what they look like, what their kids look like when thy open their birthday presents, what they think is funny and sad and horrifying.

They are Really There. And, ineluctably, they Are Not.

* * *

So what does my despotic fever dream here have to say about Web 3.0? Or more to the point, its potential role in supporting humans seeking to make lasting, healthy behavioral and relations changes to themselves?

First off, it should be noted that, were our avatars in fact our selves, this line of thinking would end (and I would be out of business). Because as we become more saturated with data, and more constituted by data, we begin to believe the modernist fantasy that we should respond as data: to logic, to preponderance of evidence, to statistical models that can predict what we will do and the margin of error that accounts for the few times we don’t do what we should.

But we don’t. Homo digitalis remains more homo than digital. And while the work that needs to be done can adapt to be communicated, reinforced, or personalized through multiple platforms and modes of engagement, the work itself remains stubbornly analog:

1. It almost always begins with an experience of acute pain, or a shift in chronic pain that has been suffered for a long time that suddenly makes it no longer bearable. That pain may be internally generated, but it is more frequently thrust upon the person by outside circumstances.(The only force other than pain that I have seen start the cycle is the intervention of some higher or greater power, accountable to no one but itself – Paul’s change on the road to Damascus is an example.)
2. It always requires that the pain compel a person to come to a greater understanding of who he is and how he acts, through application of a structure for understanding that both accounts for his complexity and demonstrates how utterly like everyone else he is.
3. It always requires him to replace a discrete number of undesirable behaviors with desirable behaviors in short-cycle, describable ways;
4. It always requires her to practice the changed behaviors unceasingly, with complete personal accountability, which is immeasurably helped by the constant support of at least one other person who helps him stay accountable.

Following from these four principles, it becomes apparent that the very context of Web 2.0 is inimical to the first event taking place, and seriously obstructs the others.

The algorithms that encourage estrangement and longing do so by disrupting organic relations to ourselves and to each other, and replacing them with less nutritive but still appetizing simulacra of those relations which in turn (like artificial sweeteners) create greater desire for their ersatz relations. This dance of estrangement and longing is a shadow play that distracts us from the Really Real: our actual experience of the world, and others’ experience of us as we move through it (i.e.. our sensory engagement with it, which in turn points to its lasting aspects).

The only way social media technology can support lasting, permanent human change is by becoming something utterly other than what it is: by becoming a means to engage reality rather than create surrogates of it; by becoming a tool to amplify and deepen our engagement with reality rather than filter and mediate and edit and Awesomeize it.

What might that look like?

I’ll sound like a spokesperson for a product for the next moment, but I am not.

I am forming these lines using a program called iA Writer. It is a radically simplified text creation environment, which appears more like typing letters on a page in a typewriter than any word processing program that I have ever used. Looking at my screen, all I see are the words I type, and a pale blue line which pulses at the point where the next character I type will appear.

However, it is not a typewriter: beneath the seamless surface is the most powerful word recognition and autocomplete functions I have ever encountered. I fee like I could type with my elbows, and this program would know what I am trying to inscribe and do the work for me. Everything I type is instantly backed up, on the machine and to a remote server, and exporting my writing to other formats or the web to share is easily done with simple menus that appear only when I mouse up to them, and disappear otherwise.

In short: the technology here has been developed to the point where it disappears, and functions only in the service of my own self-expression, reflection, and sharing of who I am with others. I am more myself on the page than I would be without this technology; the alacrity with which I can express myself is enhanced, but the thoughts themselves are not. If there is anything in the autocomplete that gives me some plausible words more than others, thereby shaping my text for me, it is deeply unconscious – I can’t see it.

It perhaps makes me more articulate in my writing than I would otherwise be; someone reading me might think me a shade more well-spoken than I actually am. But what I am enabled to express by being saved form the hunt-and-peck typing I never unlearned is more than enough compensation for that slight enhancement of who I am when I write. I feel the program facilitates me slightly in becoming more of myself; in offering more of myself up for reflection or sharing, or declaration.

What if this genre of technological development were brought to the social media environment? What if there were a way to be in connection with others – with those we already love in meatspace – that enabled and enhanced expression and perception rather than re-presenting it? What would that look like? Here are some possibilities:

• It would minimize estrangement of ourselves from ourselves and each other by making available only exactly who we say we are, how we look, how we sound, and would do so through an interface that offered only ourselves to each other.
• Nothing of us would be captured, no algorithms would be created or improved based upon our responses to them (though how that autocomplete gets so good would have to be figured out, then). Our iterations and interactions would live beyond the moment in which we have them only if and when we choose to inscribe them through writing, or sound, or video, or some other mode of presenting reality as yet undeveloped.
• We would have access to under-the-hood tools that encouraged the set of interactions with self and other that fosters healthy self and other-creation: focused listening and speaking. Truth telling. Empathetic understanding of the consequences of our actions. Accurate depictions of what might be if we were to make different choices next time. Nothing would be entertaining, other than ourselves. Nothing would compete for our eyeballs, other than ourselves.

You can see how these features would map onto the characteristics of real, lasting change:

1. Such an enhancing technology should probably enable us to feel the pain of the consequences of our actions more quickly and deeply than we otherwise would, and therefore bring us more readily to the place we need to be for change to happen.
2. It should probably give us access to a model of understanding human experience that both lets us see what is unique and ineffable about each of us while at the same time allowing us to see the ways in which all humans are the same.
3. It should probably offer specific, articulable behaviors that can be changed in short-cycle, describable ways.
4. It should probably support one-on-one accountability for practicing those behaviors and learning from the experience of trying to live into a different way of being, in direct and supportive ways.

None of these innovations would change the fact that technology is always, to date, only expressed in images, words, and sounds. This technology, at its most perfectly realized would only ever be an augmentation of lived reality, not its surrogate, as surely as the written word is not the same as the spoken word, or the inchoate languaging that churns inside all of our heads, all the time.

But our writing is itself a precious technology that lets us arrest the flight of our thought, inscribe it and reread it and perfect it, in order to read it back to ourselves and share it with others. We can reflect without writing, but we reflect differently with it. So might we connect to ourselves and each others without this technology I am proposing – but perhaps we could discover a new level of possibility through connecting with it.

Maybe there’s a way to build this new way of being in connection through existing channels, but I do not see it. I can see ways to use existing social media platforms to educate people about another way to connect, and to invite them to come and try it – but it cannot be monetized through information gathered about people. Perhaps it cannot be monetized at all, except by an initial buy-in and a monthly fee that grants access to the service (like my writing app – or, for that matter, like joining almost any supportive group). It would need to charge enough to sustain itself; no one can get rich off it, any more than the ministry should be a way to get rich. Words like “open source” and “crowdsource” have new meaning in this context: it would needs be a true commonwealth (“a political community founded for the common good”), accessible to all. Perhaps it can be built upon existing platforms that share these values.

But that’s what it would look like. Can we do it? Can it be done?  I do foresee a time when those who seek a more authentic, reality-affirming engagement with themselves and others through technology forsake the versions of themselves they originally established online for more powerful, more responsive ones, like folks of a certain age abandoning their Hotmail accounts (or, indeed, the kids leaving Facebook in droves for hipper, more anonymous platforms as FB was overrun by their parents).

I believe that homo digitalis is not as fully formed by the social media powers as those powers would wish to believe. I wonder at the moment when all the pictures of my grandson that his parents have so lovingly archived are presented to him, at eighteen, as the backbone of his new Facebook profile – and anticipate a revolt, from him and his peers, that any entity would presume to tell him who he was, and therefore is and shall be.

We are still people, beneath the pulp novels, pinball machines, comic books, video games, social media chatter, and immersive 3D environments. We’ll find a way to continue being so. How will it look? What will it mean for those of us who wish to change and be better? What do you think?

Image a shameless lift from the promotional materials of the 2015 film Ex Machina, which I have not seen but has very arresting art, with thanks.

the maelstrom

A whirling phantasmagoria can be grasped only when arrested for contemplation. And this very arrest is also a release from the usual participation.

That’s Marshall McLuhan’s commentary on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” It’s in the introduction to his 1951 book The Mechanical Bride, which was a smartypants analysis of the overwhelming saturation of shared culture by advertising messages which kept everyone, by design, dazed and confused. (“To generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.”)

McLuhan takes Poe’s description of being caught in a terrifying whirlpool much stronger than himself as an analogue to modern experience of media. Of course, we wonder what McLuhan would make of the exponentially greater saturation of our present life by images and sounds, screens and projections, that work to teach us what to want. His response is a forerunner of the “culture-jamming” work of collectives like Adbusters, whose critique in turn gets echoed by comic sources from The Onion to Saturday Night Live’s ubiquitous fake ads. We know we are being pitched to, these responses say; we assert that we are made immune to their powers by turning them back on themselves.

But in fact our parodies of advertising only seat advertising’s impact that much closer to our hearts by wedging it that much deeper into our lives. We escape to escape real ads by taking refuge in…fake ads. There is no way not “to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career,” as Lloyd Dobler memorably hoped. “I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” Good luck with that, kid.

But enough with the handwringing. I am bringing it up because the response that McLuhan offers to the power of the maelstrom has descriptive power in my work too. He notes that fighting against the far greater power of nature, of accelerated mass and its inevitable momentum, is fruitless – that to do so only hastens your being sucked under. The only way out is through, and the only way through is to cultivate a detached, regarding disposition toward the chaos swirling around you. It’s an observance that may seem crazy from the outside looking in: detachment seems like madness before something that demands that you fight it. But in fact, for McLuhan, it’s only “the rational detachment of the spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread that led him out of the Labyrinth.” And we need to take in his next observation whole cloth:

Many who are accustomed to the note of moral indignation will mistake this amusement for mere indifference. But the time for anger and protest is in the early stage of a new process. The present stage is extremely advanced. Moreover, it is full, not only of destructiveness but also of promises of rich new developments to which moral indignation is a very poor guide.

Here’s how I see the relevance of McLuhan’s perspective to personal change:

First, the world is saturated with distractions, many of them of our own doing, that seem ultimately determined to undo our capacity for actually coming to know ourselves, as we are, in our purest form. McLuhan describes the advertising industry as “the best-trained individual minds who have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.” And to be sure, we are distracted by the stories that are always being told to us about what being successful looks like, what being happy looks like, what being human looks like.

But second, most of those external distractions are magnified in our own lives only when we give them power: when we plug them into our own internal, whirling maelstrom of doubt and fear. Those are the deep powers inside us that, for the most part, were set in motion by forces beyond us before we had any control over them – our families, schools, our first formative experiences. No intimation of inadequacy from a swimsuit ad can have power on its own. It is only when it hooks into our inside story about our own inadequacies that it really does the whammy on us. And when the combination of outside and inside powers drive us to repetitive self-defeating behaviors that make us feel better even while they don’t impact anything – well, then we are really cooked. Then we are dissipating the power we do have on behaviors that guarantee we can’t focus them on actually making change.

Third: we have a choice about what to do in the maelstrom, both outside and in. As we meet the swirl of messages from the outside, we can choose whether to react defensively to its assault or whether to cultivate habits of detachment; bemused perceiving; regarding a provocation, and savoring the moment we have to choose what to do. We always have that moment. Even if our responses feel ancient, and set is stone; even if they have been cemented in by physical or mental dependency; even if we cannot imagine another way of responding; there is always another way of responding. Finding it starts by finding the moment you may not have noticed for decades: the moment when you get to choose what to do next. Anger and pain are appropriate “at the beginning of a new process;” since we are here describing a new way of engaging a very old process, they really don’t need to be part of our choice.

And finally, once we have made the choice to regard what is happening, rather than fight against it, we are in a whole new reality. We are through the veil – on the edge of habitual response, the edge of chaos, but not there yet. Just balancing in the possibility and looking at what is unfolding before us. There are so many film representations of moments like this: remember the last few moments of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the end of Nolan’s weird and wonderful Interstellar. (A representation of the actual maelstrom moment is here on YouTube, even.)

In an new place, we are disoriented, but also at peace. We can begin to see that things are not as they seem. And we can then find solutions that didn’t seem to exist before. In the Poe story, the narrator comes to understand that his boat is pulling him down; that he needs to abandon the one thing that seems strong, and instead cling to a small chest for buoyancy and give himself up to the waters. It’s a moment of seeing something that couldn’t be seen before, which leads to a solution that not only works, but works way easier than he had feared. He just floats up.

The solution surprises us, and frequently offers us a way through that is way less painful than we feared. But we can’t see it unless we interrupt our usual response and learn to hang out in the moment of choice. Until we decide what to do. If we can do that, what’s next may astound us. It may truly reconfigure our understanding of the world and our place in it.

One more McLuhan quote:

Concepts are provisional affairs for apprehending reality; their value is in the grip they provide.

How well have the concepts about change that you have been clinging to been working for you?

Is your grip slipping?

Is it time to pause, look around, and grab something new?

Are you ready to start, today?

Image of “Battle of Calypso’s Maelstrom” borrowed from enchantedpaintings.com, with thanks.

toward our growing tip

So, here’s your vocab word for the day: “meristem.”

As I understand it (still not a biologist, me), the meristem are the cells of a plant that are undifferentiated:. They could become anything. They are, therefore, “capable of continued cellular division” – or, as we regular people call it, growth.

M.C. Richards taught me the word by using it in her wild book Centering in Pottery, Poetry,, and the Person. “Wild” is a relative term, here – Richards herself was pretty wild. She was a co-founder of famous Black Mountain College, a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of avant-garde art and music (and education). And she was really on fire with understanding the roots of renewal in all areas of existence – especially creativity. Here’s the sort of thing she says:

We age toward youth, toward our growing tip, which lives as the meristem in even the oldest oak.

This statement gets my attention, for two reasons. First, the hope it communicates to people like me and you – and second, the fear that comes right behind it.

So, hope first, of course. To me, she is saying that how long we have been around is not a factor in whether or not we can keep growing and changing. This will come as good news to most of the folks I work with, who have a vague (or not so vague) sense that they are stuck forever with the parts of themselves that have caused them so much trouble so far in their lives.

In my experience, successful people are often data-driven. They believe the evidence they are presented. and act accordingly. Most people I work with have tried to make changes in the way they interact with other people, and have failed. They reasonably conclude that, whatever else might change, their core makeup of strengths and weaknesses is relatively fixed.

So they move along deciding to build on their strengths and accommodate those weaknesses, even if doing so makes their work inefficient or painful. “That’s just how I am,” is their message – “love it or leave it.” They persist in doing what they have done before, and if it doesn’t work this time, they just do it harder and faster. And even as the body count rises of people who don’t “love it” and decide to “leave it,” they persist in believing that’s just the cost of doing business.

Richards says, in essence, that when it comes to change, the data don’t matter – or at least they don’t mean what they seem to mean.

Imagine an ancient, gnarled oak tree. Imagine how tough the bark is, how strong the branches, how tall and wide and grand it is. This is not a malleable object. This is a rock-solid stable thing – the kind of thing you hang your kids’s swings on, and give directions by for generations. It’s an emblem of stability, not change.

Richards makes us realize that even this apparently unchanging entity does change: that it grows, every spring. That over time, it inevitably will transform itself by moving resources from this branch to that one, or pushing roots into a different, deeper source. If it didn’t continue to change, all of its accumulated solidity would eventually die. It must grow to live.

But here’s where the fear comes in. Richards isn’t so interested in how the parts that are already established will change. She focuses on the “growing tip”: the tiny green parts of the tree that are always pushing into new space and new air, even it is already plenty big.

Its hard to imagine what it feels like to be a tree, but I find it a useful exercise, especially in the spring. The new buds of the tree stretch out into a world that is not hospitable to it, at first. It is too cold to be growing, when it starts, too dark. But I have to believe that the cold and dark somehow indicate to the tree that, actually, early spring is exactly when it should be doing this painful work. If it doesn’t begin doing that work way before it feels good to, it won’t be ready for the longer days and gentler temps that are just around the corner. For trees, when it feels wrong is exactly when it’s right to stretch in the most vulnerable ways.

OK, end of biology lesson – where’s the connection? Three places, I venture:

1. Change to the most unchangeable parts of you can happen, and will – if you can get in sync with the deepest truths about the way life keeps moving.
2. If you don’t connect with the necessity of change, the only other option is to die. (Note that you can be dead for a long time before anyone notices, too. An ancient dead tree still looks massive, until someone leans on a branch and it sloughs off at the slightest touch.)
3. Choosing to live means choosing discomfort: choosing to do something different at the exact moments where and when doing something different feels very, very wrong. Because that’s where the actual first moments of growth happen, and without them you won’t have the groundwork you need for the explosion of new life that will come later.

There are so many personal places where this insight has meaning that I think it best to leave you to find them yourself. Or, you can go my Web site to read more about how to choose change in the moment it feels like the wrong thing to do.

But I have to mention that I have noticed it over and over again in the way that folks of my generation react to people who are two generations behind us: the fabled “millennials” that are causing so many of us to lose sleep over questions of integrity, succession, and legacy.

I get uncomfortable when people of my vintage start complaining about millennials – mainly because of how easily we globalize our own experience. The younger folks have our number: we really do groan and complain a lot about that one millennial we know who doesn’t understand the importance of showing face in the office or kissing the ring of his betters. Forget their productivity or their creativity: they don’t understand the way we do things around here, and we can’t imagine their ilk taking over after we are gone. (We sound like our parents, but louder and more self-righteous.)

I think that the discomfort we feel when we are around them indicates that we need them, desperately, to grow into new life ourselves. Sometimes, they are the cold and the dark that spur our own changes. We must stretch out into their uncomfortable spaces to lay the groundwork we will need to scale up later.

I come back to the weirdest phrase of that M.C. Richards quote – that we “age toward youth.” It sounds like Alice in Wonderland or Gulliver’s Travels stuff, improbable and fantastic. But when millennials FaceTime into important meetings, or fail to show appropriate enthusiasm for quarterly sales goals, or choose to work from home on yet another Friday, we must see our discomfort as an opportunity to push through our hardened ways of being into what is next for our business, and for ourselves.

The only option to change is ending up dead wood. I don’t want to, and neither do you, I venture.

So: how can you grow today? Is it uncomfortable? I wager that means you’re right where you need to be.

Thanks to Cross Timbers Gazette for image of english oak buds.

The Shame of Social Media

I am about as far from a digital native as one can be. I actually believe that I emit some kind of electromagnetic field that scrambles computers’ brains whenever I come close to them. Still, I am fascinated by social media, and not just for marketing purposes (honestly, I don’t need to market: all my business has been word-of-mouth referral for the last twenty years.)

I am more interested in the kind of change social media makes possible. As I understand it more and more, I am impressed by how singular a space it is to try new things in both private and public ways.

As in:

• Social media interactions are comparatively anonymous: you choose who witnesses what you do, and how, and of course, on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.
• But at the same time, what you do on social media is also public: when you do something, you more or less have to let your curated bunch of connections know you are doing it. That’s the point.

In other words, it seems to me that you have control over HOW you are connecting, but not THAT you are connecting. Which makes it a unique space in which to take risks, or seek support, or get accountability help, from those you choose to connect with. And since my work is all about taking risks, making connections, and staying accountable in the supremely challenging area of personal change, it has my attention.

But I am beginning to perceive a pitfall built into all social media platforms I have experienced which threatens to scuttle my desire to use it to help people make change. It’s that all social media, by design, runs on fear. The compulsion to participate may feel like its driven by desire to connect, and perhaps initially it is. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that connection is underpinned with anxiety.

See what I mean:

EXHIBIT A: Among my demographic, Facebook posts are almost always positive: celebrations of how your life is awesome – your beautiful vacations, your exquisite meals, your attractive and clever children. So really, Facebook is set up to be a rampant, insatiable sharing of everyone’s performance of the best they ever hope to be.

But everyone’s best efforts to appear awesome all the time are in turn consumed by real people who, though they are not saying it, are having decidedly less awesome daily lives, because daily life is just not consistently awesome. So FB really becomes what some sane people call comparing your insides to somebody else’s outsides. Occasionally there will be someone who tries to be more real – who actually shares when things are going poorly, “no filter.” But in a world full of Listicles, there are so many ways to Facebook wrong. So really, Facebook exerts a subtle message about how important it is for your life to be awesome – and if it is not, it lets you know that you are the problem, because everyone else is doing great. But you better keep trying, because everyone is watching.

EXHIBIT B: On Twitter, there’s a one-character difference between sharing a Tweet with just one, intended person, and sharing it with thousands (citation needed). Twitter isn’t a place I live yet (I am starting my social media world with FB, LinkedIn, and this blog), but we’re always hearing about someone who has shared something compromising or embarrassing. Part of the “overshare” error is the ease with which Twitter lets you mouth off about whatever is on your mind, which lends itself to sharing ill thought-out sentiments and poor word choices. And of course, it is up to everyone to share thoughtfully, because on the Internet nothing is ever truly deleted.

But I am beginning to believe this one character difference between a secret and a disaster is something the Twitter designers actually built in – that the high risk of sharing something meant for one with many is a design feature, not a design flaw. It is as if they set out to create a way of connecting that had a high probability of drama, both intentional and not. As if they knew that when the chances of looking are foolish are heightened, so is everyone’s awareness of someone looking foolish, and commensurately, their self-justification in swarming when someone’s error puts blood in the water. Which swarming, in turn, gives people a lot more to Tweet about.

FINALLY: I don’t use Snapchat; it’s an undiscovered country to me, but I am beginning to understand that its (in)famous anonymity (scourge of parents everywhere) is actually a built-in way of disclosing just enough to create social anxiety in its (mostly young, excruciatingly self-aware) users. While a user cannot see the content of Snaps that her friends share with each other, she can see how many Snaps are being shared among them. And there is a system of emojis that indicate what those Snap counts might mean that show up next to your friend’s names, with a focus on intimating who is your best friend, who says they are but maybe isn’t, who cares more about whom than they are in turn cared about, etc etc.

So the inability to see the WHAT leads to a lot of conjecture about the HOW MANY, which is worse. Bottom line: Even this most anonymous of platforms always gives you data that it asserts are valuable as you try to figure out how your social life is doing – and, by their count, it usually is something to worry about.

I fully confess that these three observations might be because of my ancient geezer, “get-off-my-lawn” status – but I don’t think so, not fully. After all, advertisers have known for more than a century that the key to creating desire is not really the effective assertion that your product is superior to another’s, but rather the creation of an urgent need in the consumer that can only be met by your product. The most urgently compelling force in humankind is not physical hunger, or the esteem of others, or even sex: it is shame, and the desperate desire not to feel it.

And therefore, any experience which can tap into shame, and manipulate the user into feeling it in ways that compel use of the product, is profitable. For mouthwash, the desire was that you become ashamed of your morning breath, and buy the product to remedy it and therefore get morning kisses without embarrassment. For social media, the desired outcome is that you use it a lot – that its experience becomes contiguous with your real life (more uses = more eyeballs on advertisers’ ads). And if you need to be on social media to ensure that you are not feeling shame, or to manage the shame it made you feel, or to fret about whether or not you are about to feel shame – well, then you are exactly where they want you to be.

Here’s the thing: I know that in order to make permanent, lasting change in one’s life, a person has to feel a bunch of stuff he has been working very hard NOT to feel.

• He has to become aware that there might be a mismatch between what he wants to be good and what he is actually good at;
• That there might be a disconnect between what he thinks are his primary Motivators and what they ACTUALLY are, especially when he is under stress;
• That there are probably a welter of strong emotions and fears that he brings in from his childhood and upbringing that he has unconsciously managed NOT to think about, but that are still bashing around in his life like a bowling ball in the trunk.

And the first reaction to realizing any of these things is usually shame. Shame as the deep conviction not that you have DONE something wrong (that’s “guilt”), but rather that you ARE wrong: that you are irretrievably messed up. Shame is certain, and managing shame becomes job one because it is so predictable, and so destructive to the capacity to make change (because we’ll do anything to avoid feeling it).

The ways to manage shame include:

• getting honest about feeling it,
• sharing the feeling with someone you trust (frequently me),
• developing a plan about what to do when you feel it (not letting it convert into anger, which it does easily – anger that then gets dumped on people who do NOT have it coming),
• and becoming accountable about following the plan every time the shame comes back around.

I had hoped that social media would offer an opportunity for people to encounter some of these tools in low-stakes moments that are anonymous enough to let them take a risk and try something new. But I am starting to doubt that it can, because there is already so much shame built into the theory of action that drives social media that it might be impossible to have an experience that doesn’t involve it. I just don’t know yet.

But there’s a bright spot, too. What social media DOES offer, incessantly, is the promise of distraction. Distraction from whatever work you are trying to avoid right now because it is hard – and, frequently, distraction from the exact feelings of shame that social media also exploits to get you to keep coming back. But that also means that people show up on social media looking for something to make them feel better, and they usually find it. Although it is usually a short-term fix of cat videos (which might have gotten a bad rap, actually).

What if people who are looking for something to make them feel better could find solutions that REALLY help them feel better – that give them tools that will get to the root of their driving shame for the first time?

That’s what I am working on doing as I develop my social media presence. The images and questions I am posting on my feeds are designed to interrupt the daily stress and anxiety and ask provocative questions about what is driving folks’ presence on social media at all, looking for something to escape into. I am deeply impressed by Dan Roam’s work on how images hold attention more effectively than words, and am beginning to pilot a series images designed to cut through the noise and offer a signpost toward a real solution to people’s pain.

I would love your feedback on which of these images get your attention and “boost the signal” of the promise of real change in the areas of your life you probably thought never could. And if you’d like to know more, please come to my Web site and learn about the tools I offer.

I hope I can find a way to let people use the anxiety, fear, and shame that social media cultivates to open a new door of possibility that they didn’t even know existed. Small ambition, I know – but really, the only one that matters to me. Ad Astra.

Thanks to www.socialmediatoday.com for image.