Virtual validation

Also: "Fool's guilt" - Shame over nothing, really

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New here? This is Odelia with Percolations. Today’s edition was posted late, but we’ve been sending stuff like this out every Friday for the past 66 weeks.
Hang around if you’d like. I’d appreciate it. Hope you enjoy your visit. :)

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What you do sometimes seems less real if it’s not online.

A disturbing thought, no?

It’s like you must connect your work to an online presence — a social media account, a YouTube Channel, a website, a thingy on your LinkTree — for your work to be real and relevant.

Considering how the Internet connects to and saturates almost every aspect of our lives, which of course includes self-introductions and personal life portfolios, this thought kind of makes sense.

And perhaps exactly because of its ubiquitous nature, the virtual world collides with that part of ourselves that yearns to scratch “I was here” notes on every surface we come into contact with. That urge to have someone else know about the piece I’ve crafted — “hey I did this, I made that, look at this!” — is quite strong, sometimes stronger than the urge to create in the first place.

It’s like what the Charlatan said here:

At its core, that emotion is illogical — would I really want someone to read what I’ve written only for them to go away believing that it’s utter garbage?

Yes. I would. Because the obsession with analytics, for me, comes not from desire for validation of what was created. It comes from a desire for validation of the sheer fact of its creation.

This desire can be a beautiful thing. The understanding between people over something good and beautiful shared between them is one of the great treasures of our human experience.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

But this sort of sharing, of having someone else simply know you have created it, is blown way out of proportion by the proliferation of information and linking and comments on the comments.

It’s as if the experience and journey of doing the thing, of going to that place, just isn’t real enough on its own — you have to post it somewhere, make sure eyes other than yours see it and think about it — to the point where you create something, go some place, say something just so you could post it on social media and get those likes.

It’s to the point where two architects would describe a building or other as “instagrammable” — a cute adjective, but one that just ever-so-slightly disturbs me.

When did our understanding, perception, and description of the connections our internal worlds make with the external become so closely linked with something unhuman and inanimate?

Like what we’ve said, the instinct to share and feel validate is instinctive — largely fed by one’s need for society, I suppose — but when taken too far, it cripples the creator by becoming a stand-in for the raw experience.

A few days ago I made a comment to my mom about how I tend to look up a restaurant’’s website, menu, or Google reviews before I even visit it. Even worse, my mom responded, is how she’d literally drive past a place and make a mental note to look it up, instead of making a stop then and there, wander through, and get a tactile feel for what it is.

It’s like we’re going online for proof that the place actually exists, to know when it’s open, to know what it feels like and look like inside — while we could have done that in person.

For art, it’s even worse. Craig Mod addresses this phenomenon here:

Social media, for me, has always been a broadcast platform for things made elsewhere. It isn’t the place where the art is created. It’s never been about arguing or fighting or scandalizing. Sometimes, rarely, it’s engendered friendships, but how many pounds of flesh have we traded for that (and I feel like I would have connected with these friends in other ways given time)? At its best, social media was a lightweight, efficient, reliable and consistent, one-to-many broadcast system. And now, in most places, it’s no longer that; as such, I find its utility to be dramatically reduced, and the negatives of engaging with it as high as ever.

It sometimes frustrates me that I’m finding my place as a writer and artist just as some of the most powerful broadcasting and connection-building tools have outgrown themselves and become less-than-good. It raises lots of questions — where to post, and how many, and how you get good at it, etc. And to be sure, some people thrive on and love this sort of communicating — Visa talks about this here:

Tweeting wasn’t the first time I’d been consumed by a particular form of posting– I’d previously had phases of posting on Reddit, on Tumblr, on Quora when it was good, on local Facebook, blogging about local politics and news before that, and hanging out on all sorts of random forums in the early y2k years. Sometimes I encounter people who ask about whether they should post on twitter, or how to have a good time on Twitter, and I’m not sure how to appropriately contextualize my suggestions, because I’m unusually well suited to thriving in such an environment, being someone who’s been so immersed in posting for so many years. So my truest advice is something like “spend 20 years getting good at posting”, which when said starkly like that can come across as dismissive or unserious. But I mean it quite seriously.

Whether you’re the sort who’d rather use a fliphone and ditch all social media platforms, or you’re someone who lives for those interactions and backlinks, we’re all trying to win at this game with the new rules of media.

But you could take the rules and the game itself too seriously, sometimes. Anything overdone is nauseating — for me, it becomes unbearably disgusting when that healthy tension between creating and posting is skipped over altogether and all you’ve got is the sort of “content creation” that’s just content for content’s sake.

On the internet citizen’s side, this kind of catered-to environment may gets to the point of ambivalence and even apathy. A subtle, deep-rooted apathy that’s also aggravated by the increasing number of AI-produced content — how much could you actually care about something that’s written by a machine, no matter how perfect it is?

Judson Vereen expresses this sentiment quite well in the lines below:

Tell me something worth ridiculing
Tell me something I don't already know
I've tried speaking out
But mostly it’s for show

Show me the graveyard texture
Percolating in your mind
Show me how things just seem true
Humor me one more time

Planet earth is ringing out,
you recognize the sound?
I hear a D minor chord,
Such a lonely soulful sound

But what about creating for real, staying true to self and having integrity as an artist? When you're “so happy you don’t even think about happiness,” as Ines Lee puts it? Putting stuff out because you want to explore, those who like the grooves of your mind.

I was asked a question by a reader some time ago - I liked my answer a lot ¹so I’ve included it here:

To answer your question on how analytics affect my own judgement on written pieces and potentially affect future work: I used to care a little about the "reach" and "engagement" of my work. I'd look at the numbers and try to figure out what made one piece more popular than the other, and feel a little disappointed if my personal favourites didn't seem to get read as much as the others. At some point, though, I stopped caring altogether. I didn't start out writing for views and likes - I wrote because I wanted to and/or had to. So why not continue doing that?

Encouragement from readers also play a huge part in negating the tug to please an audience to the point of inauthenticity or such. Having an author I respect, read, and recommend - Derek Sivers himself - reach out to me saying he read through some of my work and found them interesting carried me through the last bit of insecurities and self-doubt during a certain low point last year. I also have a good friend who reads and appreciates my words quite regularly - once he sent me a quick note on a blog post I'd published less than an hour ago, telling me how it impacted him.

Things like that has led me to my current approach - which can be distilled into one statement. I write always, only, for an audience of one. Sometimes it's a friend who'd asked me a probing question a week ago, one to which I want to clarify my response to; sometimes it's reaching back to a younger me and offering some lessons and conclusions I was dimly reaching after in the past; sometimes I write for the future me I'd like to be. Or someone else altogether. It can be "to" them, "for" them, or "about" them. But it's always focused on someone singular, specific, special to me in some way.

This approach has been powerful for me in two major ways: my writing is never diffused for a varied and vague audience (it is always addressed to an individual, which has the unintended but wonderful result of sometimes having readers feel even more connected to the piece and to me (since we like to be addressed as individuals more than just one of a group)), and I'm never disappointed about the number of people who read it, since I'm pretty sure that at least one person would read it. (That one person is myself sometimes...)

Do I think this is the only correct approach? No. Would I recommend it? Not necessarily. Your goals differ from mine, and realizations you make along the way also shape and shift your approach to this issue. To me, this whole question is an area where, if you find something that works for you, it's a good idea to just stick with that until you're nudged into a new understanding and approach that's even better. No need to stress or overthink it. :)

Writing for an audience of one.

It’s kinda like the way care doesn’t scale. Or even efficiency…past a certain point. Both points applicable to audience or the people you are writing for, creating for.

So what happens when you step away from reaching for more subscribers, more revenue, more likes and views?

You start creating instead of catering. You make things that stand by their own merit and not because the show’s sold out, there’s a huge waitlist, or because people give thrilling comments to your work. It’s because what you’re making means enough to you for you to care about it on its own.

I think that’s where the magic happens. And I have a handful of thoughts that might help define what this sort of creating means:

• It’s when you create stuff that resonates with others to the level of the poetry below (written by an anonymous american highschooler):

You ask me if I remember the stories you used to tell
yes, because I want you to know I cherish them
no, because I want you to tell them again

• It’s trying to attain the proper balance between engaging with your audience and seeking to be understood, and not lose yourself in the process:

“Society is in this respect like a fire—the wise man warming himself at a proper distance from it; not coming too close, like the fool, who, on getting scorched, runs away and shivers in solitude, loud in his complaint that the fire burns.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

• It’s when you’re not afraid to speak your mind. This costs something — a reality that Jordan Peterson echoes in this line with which I’ve fallen in love: “I have bought/earned the space within which to speak my mind” and the pricelessness of this freedom. Bertrand Russell’s “Ten Commandments For Living” has this to say on boldness and honesty in dialogue:

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

And to drive this virtual validation point home, consider this: We talk of the Stone Age, the Copper and Bronze and Iron Ages. We’ve been through the Paper Age. Do you see a trend here, and where this is leading us?

Ted Goia summarizes our current position thus:

By implication, we live today in a digital age—or the Age of Less-Than-Paper.

“Less than paper.”

That sent a thrill down my back the first time I read it. I’m still trying to figure out the implications of that; but while it’s not all bleak and apocalyptic, it apparently unsettles me enough to have written this much about it.

Oh well. That’s it for this week — I’m hoping to bring you something pretty and a little more joyful next time, but we’d see! :)

Until then.

Odelia

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Quote for the week

“I keep trying to improve my control over language, so that I won’t have to tell lies. … I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.”

— Stanley Kunitz

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This week’s word: “Fool’s Guilt”

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.

fool’s guilt

n. a pulse of shame you feel even though you’ve done nothing wrong— passing a police car while under the speed limit, being carded after legally ordering a drink, or exiting a store without buying anything.

(From fool’s gold + guilt. Also known as a reverse Alford plea, whereby you plead innocent to all charges but want the judge to know that you feel kinda guilty anyway.)

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I cannot be happy even when
I've won and conquered the day;
For even as when I crawl into bed
I remember all I'd wanted to say. 

No one knows the things I lose
When I do my duties aright:
They only see that I've used
All that's left of my might. 

But the inner voice roars on still
Even when I've done no wrong
Mocking at my feeble will
And snatching at my song.

*** 

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Snapshot of life

A pretty ocarina I invited into my life two days ago.

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Give this a peek

I’m enjoying the way @SimonSinek forms his sentences and questions. He interviews such interesting people too! Here’s one episode I particularly enjoyed this week:

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EXTRAS!

My little brothers recently started making stop-animation LEGO videos. Check out their channel @ACBricksBrothers sometime. ;)

Here are a couple:

1. Wow, Odelia, what kind of a statement is that…