Now that I’ve been writing this blog for about eighteen months, it’s a good time to review my progress. One year later would have been better, but like everything else with this project, I’m way behind.
I have grand ambitions for Participastory. In it, I write about negative, unpleasant, and awkward interactions. They fascinate me for a couple reasons. For one I am often surprised by how awkward I can still feel after all these years of living in society. But I am also intrigued by how blind we can be to our own lack of awareness. People can have a bad interaction and half the participants don’t know anything went wrong. Or maybe all the participants are frustrated and dislike each other, yet perceives themselves as always happy and easy to get along with. And situations like this occur among individuals who can do amazing math problems, make medical breakthroughs, or write award winning love poems. Understanding and treating each other better shouldn’t be too complicated, but both continue to elude us. That makes it a tantalizing problem to solve, with bonus emotional features of being both funny and sad. What a great ongoing topic for a blog, right?
Over time, if enough people read and contribute on this subject, we may figure out how to practice better ways of interacting. We already practice how to escape burning buildings without getting hurt, so why not practice much more commonly needed skills like de-escalating angry situations, or being honest without being a dick, or having tough conversations? I envision Participastory to be a double value – high quality, fresh entertainment and a very practical effort to help humankind.
What have I accomplished? I’ve written about thirteen posts that no one has seen except some spammers trolling for fresh website meat. And they probably didn’t read any of it or it would have changed their whole worldview enough to dissuade them from sending me their spammy internet links. So what happened?
Well, like everyone else, I’m busy. I treasure time with my wife, family, and friends. I have a full time job and have been rewriting my latest novel, Forgive and Take (don’t worry, you’ll hear plenty more about it later). And I vastly underestimated how much time it would take to write three stellar blog posts a week, which was my original goal.
So, specific to this project, my first problem is similar to one that afflicts many interactions – I was so consumed with impressing readers that I put too much pressure on myself. Not that I think some posts can suck or just be mediocre. There’s plenty to read out there and I don’t want to write just to be “producing content”. But trying to include a deep insight into human nature and an interest-grabbing improvement for interactions all with a hilarious tone in each essay – that’s more time consuming than I expected. Unfortunately I underestimate how long most projects will take. I thought that I would have solved my problem of underestimating project times by now, but, you guessed it, I underestimated how long that would take.
Rethinking my first vision for the site also caused delays. Originally I thought my posts would focus almost entirely on issues of people giving each other feedback. I would suggest ways that the Ware a Care Index might improve shortfalls in our verbal and nonverbal communication. But around this time I started thinking Participastory might make more sense to people as an advice column. Not that I have a lot of answers, but I do get along well with most people and might be able to reframe old problems in new ways. And I thought an advice column might spark more interaction, which I needed to mobilize practice interactions. And that led me to think – what if Participastory could illuminate ways for readers to change their own mental states? In other words to snap out of anger, anxiety, or agitation, or increase energy or motivation. Isn’t that the ultimate form of participation? I couldn’t decide what to write about next.
So in these eighteen months I’ve gone from thinking about examining how we give each other feedback to suggesting new ways to how to control your own mental state. Actually, those pursuits are related, but trying to make that connection with each post is difficult. And here lies my biggest self-made obstacle – I have attempted to make each post directly and obviously connected to last one and all that preceded it.
Starting now I am going to take some smaller steps. At first I will focus on how people learn about each other. I’ll try to avoid common, boring ways people pick up information, like reading resumes or asking dull questions, and instead focus on body language, snap judgments, gossip, and awkward staring. I hope to explore some ways we might improve upon that. In my last few posts, for example, I’ve focused on how people see what others are looking at on their phones and laptops.
Most importantly, I am not necessarily going to keep these posts in order. I may write about how we learn about each other one day, and the next about efforts to impress each other. But the topic will somehow revolve around how people affect one another, all based around the belief that people are interdependent. If we want to succeed and thrive in an interdependent environment, we need to approach the majority of interactions with others with a mind to find mutually satisfying outcomes.
Here are just a few of the areas I may write about over the next few years:
People that make you wish we weren’t interdependent.
How to tell certain people that if they want to be funny they’ll need special training.
How to forge a unique, individual point of view while agreeing with everyone around you.
How to establish social boundaries without a psychological surveyor.
And so on… Thanks for reading. Hope to see you back sometime.