Becoming More Human
I am trying to become more human.
It’s a funny-sounding sentence. Humanity is usually an absolute quality: I am human; my intellect, morality, and mortality distinguish me from animal, machine, and deity. But it’s the other kind of humanity, the lower-case, relative kind, that I’m hoping to improve.
Over the last few years, I’ve changed. Not abruptly, but gradually - and almost insensibly to those who see me often. The most visible change has been my self-prescribed social isolation, a natural tendency in myself that I have encouraged and fostered, especially after making the decision to bootstrap Brokly as a solo founder.
As I retreated into my work, I knew I was sacrificing a part of my humanity by not meeting new people or making new friends, but I was able to rationalize it as being in my own ultimate self-interest: I was giving my all to create something from nothing. And at first, the isolation was tempered by the safety net of my online social networks: Twitter and Facebook filled in when I found myself needing to see a familiar face.
To be honest, it didn’t feel like I was giving much up when I stopped going out. After a year in New York’s tech scene, it was always the same faces anyway: most of them buried in their phones, “alone together”, and busily telegraphing their thoughts, feelings, and activities over the social networks I could access so much faster at home.
Media addicts. That crowd was as self-absorbed as I was and am, more interested in the next party and the next conversation than the one they were having, in the next big thing than anything else, except maybe the thing after that. I envied them (I should have pitied them) and followed them gladly, without being followed back.
These were people that - though personable enough - were more at home online than in person. I set up camp on their digital doorsteps: Foursquare and Quora; Turntable and - hah! - Color. I endeavored to drink the river, to be as interesting as the sum of my follows; I remade myself into a mother bird, digesting and regurgitating.
It felt real. It felt important. At least as real as talking to them in person - and the pace was so much better. Bored? Move on! Refresh! Check Hacker News!
At one point, overwhelmed, I turned off push notifications for everything but email. I felt giddy, and guilty, and under-stimulated: with my extra mental bandwidth, I started subscribing to email alerts for the Google Groups of the software projects and platforms I was building Brokly on. Coming in at odd times of the day and night, they punctuated my solitude with inane, pressing questions about oAuth and Python libraries.
A second, more insidious form of dehumanization had quietly taken root in my life. I was no longer a participant: I was a voyeur.
Related reading:
Rick Webb, “On Conversation”
Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together”
