Following up on a great session of The Stoa with Peter Limberg and Katherine Dee, I’d like to talk a bit about how my triangular conception of my relation to the environment and to others helped me “migrate” my too-online persona into the real social world. This was a strong theme in today’s discussion. Ideas about how to “manifest” or realize one’s “true” self, or whether such a true self existed at all, recurred throughout the talk.
As I spelled out in another piece, the internet makes it all too easy to find one’s people in a locality and to meet up with them. To go to places one already knows or suspects one will like. To use the internet to find things one is (already) interested in.
To me, keeping a slim ego means rolling the dice just-as-often as attending places or events which is pre-selected for you. It’s an encounter with the unknown that really challenges and brings out one’s “true self,” which is, I think, more intuitive and improvisational.
Audiences which placate a novice stand-up comedian with false laughs do the comedian no favours. Experiencing the discomfort of a joke not landing is how one learns. “Cringe is how we sweat out the narcissism,” my friend Felix once said.
Comfort seeking behavior, then, may have its occasional benefits—but when one needs to be shaken up or to find something new or discover one’s identity, it is a hindrance.
But how to, then, defer the gratification of comfort-on-tap? The discussion veered toward the idea of “internet addiction.” If you can get temporary comfort and feelings of belonging or being seen just from reaching into your coat pocket, what will get you to stop? In other words, there is no reason to stop if there isn’t a promise of a greater reward for doing so. Saying, “I need to stop checking my phone, it’s bad for me,” is pointless. You need to say, “If I stop checking my phone, and experience being offline, and use that offline time to good use, future me will thank me for what that earns me in the long-term.”
Peter identified this as having a telos. My own telos was the fruits of indirectly finding myself by discovering the other two sides to my triangle: my environment and other people.
Other People
I didn’t focus on myself too much. I didn’t reach for labels or diagnostic tools or tests to determine my “type” in any abstract schematized system. I don’t care what “archetype” I embody. I got to know a wide variety of people, and as I grew to know them, parts of them mimetically rubbed off on me. I’d do something in a situation and say, “Wow, that was something Ryan would do,” or “that was a face Lydia would make” or “I just reminded myself of my dad.”
Forget celebrity rolemodels or fictional inspirations. Go make enough acquiantances—good and bad—that you can recognize them in yourself. That’s the way out of life on the screen.
Our Shared Environment
And attending to control and understanding of the environment was important too. I know the parts of the city, I can take people places, give them directions or recommend what to do on a night out. I can say “let’s go for a walk” and discover something new with a friend in a late-night stroll. Likewise, I know technology well and can point out and help people with those aspects of their life and illuminate the role technology plays in it.
And I listen to other people’s take on the environment. I have friends in construction who will critique buildings, and fashionable friends who can point out things about interior design or clothes or other aesthetic qualities which go over my head. People with better social acuity than I have helped me understand others betters—and people who pretend to have better social acuity than I have demonstrated to me, often painfully, what posers and self-denial looks like.
There are temporal dimensions too—Siegfried Giedion’s anonymous history is about the entire world of people who have made our world. He studied architecture and mechanisms during World War II. I do the same with computers. There, the two other corners—other people and the environment—converge to tell the story of our world. Not in celebrities, but in the humble fashioners and daily workers who keep it going. All of us are the real heros of civilization.
Whitespace
Katherine’s presentation involved the important aspect of what she called “whitespace” online. It’s the absence of stage-props, or contextual clues in being online. It’s the blank space which the imagination can project into—the frictionlessness of the online world. This is also what lets people be whatever they want—there is nothing to belie their put-on.
The embodied, offline world denies you a great deal of that whitespace. You only have one body, and you live in a certain place on this planet, and you’re surrounded by a finate amount of individual people—I told myself that I had better get used to that and make the most of it. Because it’s all I had to work with. I’m very glad I did.
Existing within one’s environment as an embodied and social person entails growing to feeling comfortable in the room you are in, and the people you are with. That comfort comes from understanding and demonstration of this understanding in practice, day in and day out. The more you get to know more and more places, and more and more other people—and the more aspects of places and people you know, the more at home you will grow.
Attend to others, and to the places you inhabit. Your own identity and habits will, then, attend to itself.
That’s my telos. Deal with the not-you, and the you will follow. It’s vague—but it’s not waffling. It requires faith. Trust the process—even if you don’t trust yourself to not get hurt. You will. That’s life.
Forget the labels, and have fun screwing with people who try to pidgeon-hole you into one. It’s not your problem that they need you to fit their categories! And everyone has haters—you’ll have to deal with them eventually, so may as well do it on your own terms. Choosing the time and place of an experience, even a negative one, provides a great deal more for accepting and learning from it than letting chance or fate force-your-hand.
The opening reads real mushy. Like Play-Doh in water. Ya feel me?
Wminakamen