On an audience of one, the thickness of a page, and adding a little fat around the bones
May 23, 2019
Dear Eva,
Thanks to a discussion you and I had early this week about my MBA program, I have been thinking about how many of our online and offline conversations over the past year relate to how much care, thought, and resources need to go into nearly anything — a creative project, a relationship with another human, anything — to make it worthwhile. Yet everything around tells us to work toward efficiency, speed, doing more and reaching more people with less. Will it scale? This is now the first thing we ask before starting a new project. We owe a lot of this mentality to technology.
I have been “working in tech” since 2009, not in the sense that I build technology but in that I think and talk about its effects as part of my work. I like to think I wasn’t too utopian about the internet in those early days because that’s not really my style, but I do remember using words like “democratization” and feeling pretty darn optimistic about the prospect of global interconnectedness.
It is no fun to be wrong. Actually, though, it is not that we were wrong about the good things digital technology would bring to our lives. It’s just that not enough of us were as imaginative about the inevitable bad things it would bring at the same time. (H/T to Jaron Lanier for predicting the dystopia before most.) These days, I read and hear a lot about all of the hate, trolling, and manipulation technology has wrought. I hear less about the more subtle ways in which opening up the ability to communicate to everyone has made it more difficult for people to remember the power of communicating to a few. This letter-writing project we are doing is such a good example of how writing to a single human being can transform what might otherwise be an empty “talking to everyone/no one” blog post into a rich, meaningful exchange between friends. To be clear, our correspondence may only be meaningful to us! But if it is and has been meaningful to you, my audience, then I have achieved success.
I am currently reading a brilliant book called The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. She talks a lot about the importance of deciding who to include — and who to exclude — in order to make gatherings meaningful. At first blush, this notion seems to run counter to things we hold dear: inclusivity, openness, equal access. But Parker makes the very astute point that bigger groups often water-down conversation and make connections more shallow, ultimately leading to less real diversity and human connection. Our letter exchange is not a gathering, and in some ways we have opened the doors by putting our private exchange online. But I feel like there is a real parallel here in that knowing and defining my audience of one (you!) gives me a purpose I simply would not otherwise have with my writing. It also opens me up, makes me more honest, because I know you are reading and pondering my words, just as I am with yours.
I don’t think it is just that talking to THE WORLD that can make our digital lives more superficial. It is that technology leads us toward efficiency in every way. We start using our rational brains to consider what we really need vs. what provides value. An online course provides the talking head, the ability to have questions answered and homework graded. Education? Check. Facebook gives us the ability to alert our “friends” that we are seeing cool things on vacation. Friendship? Check. It feels like we start skimming things down to the bones… because we can. I think we could use a little plumping back up sometimes, adding a little fat around the bones to make things more hearty. More human.
At the end of the day, I guess we are all just technology babies. This sweeping change in how we communicate, how we work, how we connect is all still very new, so it makes sense that we would flounder a bit as we figure out how to live with it. I dare say this RogShinch writing project has been a successful experiment in using the internet. So, cheers, to an audience of one on a medium built for billions!
Yours,
Sarah
Thursday May 23 2019
Dear Sarah,
It is a grey-light day, cloudy but not wet, bright but not sunny. I was thinking about my letter to you and I made a few notes that I was excited about, on the topics that I wanted to pose to you in this week’s letter, and then I did a thing that I sometimes (often) do: I set aside the thing I was excited about and turned to something less invigorating, less exciting. It was like starting your car filled with the enthusiasm of an impending vacation, and then driving to the office instead. (Sometimes when I am using goog maps to find some location, it will offer suggestions, one of which is “Try ‘Work’” to which I always say No! I work from home, and if I am going anywhere it isn’t to work, and wouldn’t I know my route to work by now if I was going there? This nudge is particularly rude when I am actually on vacation. Why mention work right now, maps?! You can see I am somewhere else!)
I’ve described this to you before as it relates to books: sometimes I will pick up a good book, and will start to sense its goodness — feel my mind tingle with the flow of the language, start to follow new idea-paths — and then I will close the book, set it aside to return to. I’ve judged it to be good, and with that “task” complete, I move on to something else. Sometimes I don’t even return to the book! What the heck am I doing? I’ve written elsewhere about the particular pleasure I take in anticipation — it would seem to be some sort of odd muscle I’ve formed in order to play the long game of life, to work toward eventual outcomes — but I think it’s possible to take it too far! Too much pleasure in the anticipation can mean a “thing” never gets done! I had a professor in my graduate design program who, when I would talk with him about my work and thesis research, would say, But what is the thing? And I would push back — we live in a world full of things and this is about ideas and process and how we do things — and then at the end I did generate some “thing” and talk about it in front of a room full of people. I still agree with that part of myself, and now, a handful of years later, I also understand the need for the “thing,” the thing being some clear sense of a what, a why. This is all by way of describing why I’m now actually writing my letter to you instead of thinking about all the things I could put in my letter. It’s Thursday and the time is now!
The thing I was making excited notes about is that I have two calendars, new to me this year, that embody a very physical sense of time. They are each the kind of calendar where you tear away a sheet for a day when it has passed. Thus the thickness of the calendar is a measure of how much year you’ve got left, and how much you’ve been through. Of course, no time is guaranteed, and in theory a new year starts every day, depending on your point of view, but still, we have this January through December year we work with much of the time, and seasons alongside which that year runs, so it’s an acceptable marker of time in general. I have two tear-away calendars: a larger one that hangs from the side of my desk, and a smaller one, tiny really, that sits on my desk in front of me, a block whose dimensions diminish by a page’s-breadth each day, a block becoming something more like a dimensional rectangle, on its way to the thickness of just a page. The calendars lately have been telling me that we’re nearly halfway through this year — as pages have pulled away, somehow we’ve shaved our way to mid-May with June right around the corner.
The larger calendar
The smaller calendar
This pairs nicely with the unveiling of my first midwestern spring in many years — it’s been ages since the air and sky and plants around me have so clearly communicated that what was once cold, wintry January is now a cool, green, fragrant May, verging on a hot and sunny June and July. It’s important to me to see that time is passing, to anticipate and look to the future, but also to see that what lies ahead is only ever what happens today. It is in this way that letters to lovely friends (hello!) are written instead of daydreamt, that books cohere from idea to page to collected block of pages, that plans become not future ideas but instead the activities of today. And look, that’s my letter! Your letter last week was warm and flowy, I could sense myself riding alongside your thoughtful generative bike rides. What a treat to read your letter each week, and to tap what’s on my mind and get it down to share with you. You talked about what it means to have an ordinary life — and here I agree that what is small is also big, solid — the pages of the days that add together to become something more, some “thing.” Here’s to another week and a fresh layer of shared ideas!
Your friend,
Eva