The Privacy of Memory

We lose a little of ourselves when we outsource our memory to Google.

But not in the obvious way that we think of.

What we lose in the privacy (some would say inaccuracy) of memory is the ability to forget.

The privacy of memory and the palaces that we build in our minds of truths, facts, lies and stories is more valuable than we know to preserving the best parts of our fragile humanity.

In the rush to electronically preserve the truth in non-debatable, and factual ways, we are losing the pleasure (and the privilege) of the privacy of choosing what we want to remember—and what we have the grace, forgiveness and ability to forget.

When we can call out each other using facts we like that work for us (and avoid or dismiss the facts that don’t), our social media communications and interactions become about expressing the rawest of emotions with immediacy, in the face of overwhelming facts that are preserved as eminent, and indisputable truth.

Google can’t help us here. Neither can artificial intelligence. Neither can another social communication platform.

Only human beings can preserve the privacy of memory in relationship with other human beings.

Utopia and Dystopia in the Present

A friend once pointed out that he doesn’t watch films that portray either a dystopic future (i.e. Children of Men or Blade Runner) or a utopian ideal (i.e. Avatar or Gattaca) because they tend to be less than realistic.

There is a lot of talk (and writing) going around about the importance of either 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as a literary or cultural guideposts in a time of rampant civic uncertainty and fear.

There are several problems with articulating–and living out–a worldview based off works by English authors of the early to mid-20^th century, but the biggest problem of all is the mindset behind thinking that authors of a dystopian (or utopian) future can possibly provide any actionable wisdom in the present day.

The specific problems are best articulated by others, but the general issues that face believers searching for truth in any conception of utopia (or dystopia) are three-fold:

Utopia (or dystopia) look different based upon your frame of reference. This is the main problem in applying the logic of utopia (or dystopia) to fleeting present-day political disputes and disagreements, rather than seeking longer term wisdom. The fact is, for every person who views a position as a dystopic one, there is a person who at the least views the position as not a problem. And for some, they view the position through the frame of utopian thinking.

The dystopia (or utopia) that a person is looking for (typically one represented in film or literature) is rarely exactly the one that manifests in the real world. The specific tent poles of culture, politics, and societal considerations are fluid and dynamic, not static and solid. There are elements of utopia (or dystopia) that manifest, but not all of them. Not exactly. And the fact is, when there isn’t exactitude in the manifestation of a prediction, the credibility of the predictor (and by extension the reputation of the prediction itself) seems to fail miserably.

How people think about what’s happening now influences how they mentally construct utopias (or dystopias), and then emotionally “buy-in” to them. This mental and emotional construction is more of an analysis about the nature of a present condition of conflict, rather than about genuinely deep conflict analysis. This is why films and literature aren’t good predictors of what will happen, what can happen, or even what should happen.

The fundamentals that underlie films and literature about dystopias or utopias are snapshots in time, representing a particular conflict mindset, and a particular set of perspectives on the world and events in it.

We would do well to be skeptical of attempts to glean too much understanding of current events from them, and would do better at managing and engaging with the conflicts we are currently in, by dealing bravely with the utopia (or dystopia) we’re creating right now.

Where the Hammer Will Fall the Hardest

The courage to make the decision to act in the first place is the thing that is lacking the most.

The courage to raise our hands, take responsibility, and to engage with accountability (rather than assigning blame or taking credit) is the work that your children will eventually be paid for.

But not handsomely.

It’s also the work that you’re not getting paid for now, but that your boss, team leader, supervisor, or coach really wants you to lean into.

The people who understand these two principles, that are now coming online as fundamentals of development, engagement, and interaction between people, will “win” the future.

In case you’re thinking “Well what if I don’t want to be responsible beyond my own desire to be? What’s the future look like for me and my children?”

The top three areas of growth, innovation, and development (which will translate to wealth making and value creation in the future) will be in the following areas if the current trajectory of education, work, organizations, and society, doesn’t change significantly:

Making something so “new,” no one has ever thought of it.

Working for the person who made the “new” thing.

Selling the “new” thing.

But since “new” things only come along once in a great while (i.e. the car, the I-phone, the Internet, etc.) the chances of being able to survive as a visionary as the first one are slim.

Which means that in the next two areas, working for someone who’s innovating, or selling the innovation, education, work, organizations, and society need more individual people to behave courageously, engage where it’s uncomfortable, and do the things that are hard now in the present-day, which will resemble a game of patty cake later.

Courage (the lack of it, the abundance of it, or just enough of it) is where the hammer of the unknown in the future will fall the hardest.

Are your children ready?

Are you?

What We Can Have

There can be truth and justice and civility in a civil society.

For if we sacrifice any of the three—in service of achieving any one of the others—the pillars of civil society fall apart.

And then, we become the very monsters of oppression we are fighting to destroy.

Grace from Here to the Moon

The steps toward forgiveness and reconciliation include the giving of—and getting of—grace.

We don’t often think about grace (other than maybe as a person’s name, in light of physical attributes, or as a ritual that some families perform before a meal) but the fact is, there used to be public, shared discourse around grace, regardless of politics, emotions, educational attainment, or material situation.

This was grace in the Christian conception of such a term, meaning “God’s unmerited favor.”

Webster’s New World College Dictionary provides this theological definition of grace: “The unmerited love and favor of God toward human beings; divine influence acting in a person to make the person pure, morally strong; the condition of a person brought to God’s favor through this influence; a special virtue, gift, or help given to a person by God.” This definition is based in virtue harkening toward a strong moral core.

Another way of framing grace is that it is getting what we least deserve, when we least expect it, through no effort of our own.

Getting grace implies faith and surrender.

Giving grace implies forgiveness and reconciliation.

Understanding and appreciating the depth of the need for grace and the skillset to give grace is implanted in people through developing a strong moral center.

This is deep and dark waters though, because moral centers (and the ballast that undergirds them) are so very rarely considered by individuals at depth, much less by societies at scale, in countries where the Church is no longer as powerful a moral force as it once was.

We outsource parts of our emotional life to politics that we used to outsource to the Church. The Church used to be a bulwark of morality—even in the face of conflicts so detrimental and consequential that they used to escalate to World Wars.

But the skills that undergird giving grace—such as humility, obedience, and discipline—are harder to acquire now than ever before both individually and corporately. And when the skills that undergird giving grace are lacking, getting grace seems as unattainable as going to the moon on the back of a cardboard rocket.

Grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation; these are what the world—and our civil discourse—need now.

Pushing Your Chips Forward

“There’s a real lack of moral fiber,” he said, before launching into a story about local criminality, theft, drug smuggling, and a situation that—while murder may not have happened yet—was certainly in the offering.

“It’s almost like No Country For Old Men,” another party in the conversation quipped. Trying to recall the lines from the film, I misquoted, so I’ll quote accurately here from Ed Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones [emphasis mine]:

“…You can’t help but compare yourself against the old timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would have operated these times.

There was this boy I sent to the ‘lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it.

Told me that he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember.

Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again.

Said he knew he was going to hell. “Be there in about fifteen minutes”.

I don’t know what to make of that. I sure don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, “O.K., I’ll be part of this world.”

A person observes it happening and the temptation is to believe that it has always been this way. The sky has always been falling, and it’s always been the end of the world.

But the reality is, things really have changed and our conflict culture (which used to be focused around, first going along to get along) is now increasingly focused on winning at the expense of everything else.

When the clarity of fiction sheds light on the murkiness of facts, the problem revealed is deep at the core of our culture and society.

The further away culture drifts from a moral core, the harder civility and grace become, both as states to attain and as skills to practice.

We see this fact in our conflict communication, in the tools that ramp up and give power to the tendencies we already had, and in the interactions, we allow to happen to us on a daily basis.

How many of us are willing to push our chips forward and meet something, without moral fiber, that we don’t understand?

H/T to the Anonymous Storyteller who mentioned this to me.

HIT Piece 2.7.2017

On any curve of distribution, at the beginning of the curve and at the end of the curve are outliers.

At the beginning, these outliers are known as “pioneers.”

At the end, these outliers are known as “laggards.”

And in the middle of the curve (where the bulge is) this space is a cluster known as “the masses,” or the “average” or the “median.”

This truth of distribution stands for anything that can be mathematically measured, from the number of tall people in a room all the way to the number of CDs that people own who you may stop on the street.

This truth of distribution applies to my words (and the words of any other blog writer) as well.

On one end (at the beginning of the distribution curve) I’ve written blog posts with 50 to 100 words.

On the other end (at the end of the distribution curve), I’ve written blog posts with 1000 to 2500 words.

And in the middle, on average, I’ve written posts with 300 to 500 words.

Some math before I make my larger point: In the last four years, I’ve published 848 blog posts. If on average I’ve written 500 words per post, which comes to 424,000 words I’ve published in total since starting in 2013. And it might even be a little higher than that, due to posts not published.

424,000 words.

In all that time, I haven’t collected as many email subscribers as I would like.

I also haven’t collected as many engaged readers as I would like.

And this is the trouble with the Internet in general and blog writing in particular.

It begs the questions:

Why write on a blog you own, everyday if no one (or very few) are reading and engaging with you on your own platform and instead are continuing to read and respond on other platforms (i.e. Facebook or Medium)?
Why continue to build on land that you own when you’re the only one in the house?

I’ve been thinking about these two corollary questions a lot lately, because people often get excited when I talk about the blog, but then, when I point out that it requires you to be engaged with me, in order for it to work at the emotional and psychological level, I get…

…well, I get the responses that you would think I would get.

I’ve been thinking about these questions as I’ve been watching shared, walled, social media gardens devolve into spaces of short-form thinking, and long-form hubris.

I’ve been thinking about these questions as I build a platform that may not be for everyone–but that just might be for YOU.

424,000 words.

Responses, engagement, critical thinking, emotional intelligence: These are the things that matter, and whether writing, teaching, video making, or podcast recording, I hope that you will stay in the meaty part of the distributions curve of listening, engaging and responding.

The Hook

You’re not off the hook.

You’re not off the hook for finding a metaphorical hook to hang onto.

You’re not off the hook in resolving a conflict.

You’re not off the hook for managing other people in conflict.

You’re not off the hook for connecting with people and for hearing their stories.

But there are some places where you are off the hook.

You’re off the hook in blaming other people for the situation rather than seeking to resolve it.

You’re off the hook in putting yourself in physical danger, because interpersonal violence is not a fact of life.

You’re off the hook in taking on responsibility for outcomes that the other party is responsible for.

You’re off the hook for making sure that people stay at the negotiation table.

You’re off the hook for seeking consensus rather than doing the hard work of launching a product.

Don’t worry, there are plenty of hooks around that no one wants to hang onto.

You won’t run out of hooks to hang your reputation onto in your lifetime.

HIT Piece 1.31.2017

The thing about anxiety in conflict is that it’s part biological and part psychological.

And one part washes the other part.

Which is where people have choices: We can either narcotize the anxiety (through the use of distractions) or we can medicate our biology (through the use of drugs).

This is where anxiety in conflict should probably focus on managing behaviors, rather than seeking to escape the outcomes of those behaviors. Or seeking to short-circuit the behavioral responses.

But there’s a lot of narcotizing and medicating going on out there.

Sharpening Our Axes

Searching for the right tree to cut down (where to put our focus in a forest of worldly options) may not be as important as taking considerable time to sharpen our axes beforehand.

Unfortunately, too many of us are focused on the complexity of the forest of trees we find ourselves surrounded by (i.e. media noise, internal dialogues, external conflicts, etc.) and are not focused enough on sharpening the axes we’re carrying around.

Some of our axes include:

Our money.

Our time.

Our intentions.

Our relationships with people that matter in our lives.

Our “no’s.”

Our “yeses.”

Our strategy for managing our egos.

Our strategy for managing other people’s egos.

Our emotional energy.

Approaching a tree in the forest and chopping it down is twice as hard with an ax that’s dull.

And not all trees respond well to being cut on by all axes.