Kindred spirits
o o o o o
There was that one time I was stopped behind a pick-up truck at a red light. Nothing about it seemed particularly notable, just an ordinary pick-up truck. Only when the light turned green and it pulled away did I notice that it had a bumper sticker with the words LINGUA LATINA SEMPER SERVABITUR (meaning roughly "The Latin language will live forever"). Hey, "my kind of people", at least to that extent. And driving a pick-up truck.
o o o o o
Many years ago -- it may have been my first office job -- one of the decorations I had up in my cubicle was something I had put together myself, a photograph of a gorilla with the first eight lines of this poem. One morning when I arrived at work, I found a note on my desk which turned out to be from the janitor. He said he liked the decoration and asked if I could make another copy for him. So that evening I ran off another copy, put it in an envelope, and left it on the desk the next day marked "janitor". It didn't occur to me to put in a note encouraging further communication, though the guy must have had a pretty strong interest to have made such an advance in the first place.
(A few days later I mentioned to the boss that the janitor had asked me for a copy of the picture, just because I thought it was interesting. Her immediate response was to ask if I wanted to make a complaint. This shocked me, since it had not even occurred to me that it was anything to complain about. Maybe she thought it was presumptuous for a lowly janitor to address a lordly clerical accountant.)
o o o o o
In one back window of my car I have a small strip of paper taped to be visible from the outside, which has a kind of "pun" in Japanese on it. One day, as I was returning to my car in the post office parking lot, a Japanese guy stopped me and pointed to this and said, "That's pretty funny." We talked about the language for a couple of minutes and he gave me his business card and asked me to get in touch. I never did, though -- the card showed he worked for some Christian evangelical group, and that put me off a bit. Maybe I should have. I could easily have just dropped out of touch if he started pushing religion on me.
o o o o o
At the one-week temp job I had last November, a regular employee asked me about a book I was reading during lunch break. It turned out he was from Iran, a member of the Baha'i religious minority (which is viciously persecuted by the regime there), and he had most of the same kinds of interests as I do. Every time he ran into me in the office he engaged me in long discussions about history or religion or whatever, to the extent that I'm surprised the manager didn't complain about loss of work time. On my last day he asked me for contact info so he could keep in touch, so I gave him my e-mail address. A couple of days later I got a message from him asking if he could meet up with me, so I replied with some suggestions about times and places.
But I never heard back from him. I even sent a copy of the message to his work e-mail, in case the original had gone to spam or something, but he didn't reply. Given his original enthusiasm, this seemed very surprising. I wonder if some family member or clergyman told him not to stay in contact with me because I would undermine his faith -- my atheism would have been very evident from our conversations in the office. But who knows.
o o o o o
Ah, well, there's always the blog.
posted by Infidel753 at 2:03 AM
10 Comments:
The more I’m around people the less I like them. I do have a couple of liked minded good friends, but that’s it. I have many blogger people who think, for the most part, like me and have some similar interests, but while, these people are great, I’ll likely never meet any of them.
I find it hard to find people in my age group (70-80) that have some of the interests I do, like cosmology, art and culture etc. but there are others that like some liberal politics and secularism, that I do find.
Mary
I sometimes feel similarly—that people I encounter (or even know well) spend time on activities that I would never consider. Case in point, a relative who spends many of her evenings watching video recordings of 1970s sitcoms.
Your anecdotes, however, show that there are many areas of common ground that we never bother to discover. Everyone is busy these days and face-to-face interactions are taking a backseat to online conversations.
So many of those are very superficial but I've found that interactions I have with you are great. You have so much to offer! I value our friendship, even though it resides nearly exclusively in the comment sections of our blogs.
That said, I highly recommend finding ways to make friends offline. Even though none of my friends see the world exactly the way I do, across the board, we share more of the same core values than not.
CAS,
I think many F2F interactions are mind-bendingly superficial and that is nothing new. Oh, and I hate phonecalls.
Mary: I have the same issue. Most people I encounter in meatspace, I have little or nothing in common with. I've met some very interesting people on the internet, but most of them are much too far away to get to know in reality. It's the downside of this country being so huge. In a smaller country like the UK or France, with most of the population within a few hundred miles, it would be easier to meet online people in person if they felt comfortable with it.
CAS: I know the feeling. Almost all the co-workers I've had would have been with the sitcom lady -- or, in the case of the men, obsessed with professional sports. (It's not that I look down on such interests or consider them inferior -- my favored music is from roughly the same period -- I just don't share them.) I doubt any of them have ever read a word of HG Wells or Jules Verne, never mind Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins.
I'd much prefer face-to-face interactions with people I have things in common with, but y'all live too far away.
Likewise, I greatly value your meticulously-crafted posts, even if I can't always come up with a worthwhile response to them, and I always value your comments on mine. I hope you'll continue to find it worth your while to write.
I doubt there's anybody out there who sees the world exactly the way I do, but even a few commonalities can keep things interesting.
NickM: Most people seem to dislike phone conversations these days. In my case, moderate hearing damage is part of it. But I think it's more that spoken language evolved to be used in person -- facial expressions and other non-verbal cues are part of how it works. Writing has had thousands of years to develop work-arounds for the absence of in-person signals, which is why the style of written language is so different from spoken. Speech just hasn't had time to do that, with even the most primitive telephones being less than a century and a half ago.
It's very difficult to find people I have much in common with. Like others, I've accumulated a lot of like-minded blogmates, but they're so far away (mostly in the US) I'm never likely to meet them in person. In everyday life like-minded people are well-hidden. There might be someone in the next street I would get on famously with, but how would we ever meet each other?
Infidel,
I think you nailed that about phones. For myself. Having had a few long-distance relationships so in the past the phone was a necessary evil for actual connection with people (as oppossed to ordering a pizza or similar). I much prefer typing stuff. I can type pretty well. To be honest I can't really write with a pen beyond a shopping list.
nick & others,
Could something like a dating site be an idea but not for dating - just for shared interests and views? I could see that, in principle, working. It would have to be very carefully done because I can see a million ways it could go wrong. And those are just the, "known unkowns".
Nick: That's also true, unfortunately. I don't know anything about the people who live in the other apartments in this building. Of course, they also don't know anything about me, which may be a good thing.
NickM: Could something like a dating site be an idea but not for dating - just for shared interests and views
We may end up developing things like that eventually. I hope they'd work better than dating apps do.
This post is evidence of your unique value—as a human and a blogger, Infidel. You’ve touched something deep in all of us who responded—and, I suspect—in many you won’t hear from as well.
When I reread your post about blogging, my response mentioned your poetry, which I find wonderful. I won’t presume to tell you what to write, but as this is a time when you’re stuck in a soul-sapping job, perhaps…
Infidel,
Well, the problem is that, currently, websites that might allow folks to get to know each other IRL are either tightly policed (StackExchange) or don't allow 1-2-1 stuff easily (Quora*) or descend into dating, hook-ups, whatever... There is a serious gap in the market. It needs fulfilling. Alas, I can only do front end web-design. The back-office stuff is not my gig. Perhaps this is what social media ought to have been but that didn't come to pass did it?
But, ultimately there is a need for "real life-ing" things beyond sex via the net?
I do believe that web will right itself and become much more generally social. Well, I hope so but way to many people are simply using it for the most base urges in ways they wouldn't IRL.
PS. On a related note (about the mission-creep) as seen with Australia's big court case: "Tickle vs. Giggle" I found this interesting.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13484121/Lesbian-dating-app-use-facial-recognition-exclude-trans-women-matching-biological-females.html
*Example on Quora... I'm active on the Tolkien bit (and others) but I just couldn't get in touch directly with another Tolkienista who had a brilliant fan-fic idea... I haven't pursued it because, whilst I'd write it, it was her idea. I have never written fan-fic so that's how good it was...
Annie: I appreciate your saying that. Living pretty much isolated except for situations like the job, one doesn't get much sense of being valued.
For poetry, unfortunately, even if I could overcome the bad moods and lack of energy fostered by my current situation, the lack of inspiration is harder to overcome. There are only so many ideas and visions of the kind that provoked the earlier ones.
NickM: Social media might well have had the capacity to develop that way, with different incentives. Unfortunately the model they ended up with was making money by maximizing the number of ads it gets people to look at, which meant trying to get people addicted to the sites themselves, at the expense of using them to promote real interaction. They seem to have ended up as a morass of doomscrolling, influencers, and compulsive behavior that no longer brings any pleasure, just like a real addiction. I really think social media should be banned for minors, the way alcohol is. I hope you're right that they'll eventually shift to promote more real social interaction, but I don't see how that happens with the current models and incentives.
I have heard about Jenny Watson's efforts, and linked to stories about her a couple of times. The fact that lesbian dating apps are mostly following policies which will inevitably drive away actual lesbians is a good example of how perverse the incentive structure has become.
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