I can hear the neighbors above me. Well, one neighbor and someone who I assume is her guest. They’re talking, but I can’t make out what they’re saying – just muffled voices. I was trying to read when they walked in to her apartment. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the neighbor below me. How much noise do I make for her/them? And now I’m wondering about the directionality of sound… stereo speakers put out more bass when they’re on the ground. Waves vibrate through floorboards and joists. I found myself straining to hear. Straining to make out their conversation – though I just want to know the gist. The details don’t interest me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this silly blog of mine. How I spend more time on it than I spend on what I consider to be my “real” writing. How I continue to get caught up in that old paranoid loop about audience and purpose and privacy. I’m interviewing for jobs. I’m meeting people on dating sites. Everybody googles everybody. Lately, I’m feeling less comfortable with being found. Lately, I’m feeling less comfortable with having a digital footprint.
Yesterday I saw a tweet from some dufus promising to use AI to prove that everyone in higher ed is a plagiarist (either through incorrect citations, missing citations, or similar phrasing, etc.). That’s right, instead of using AI for promising things like how to better manage traffic signals, he’s inspired by the recent fall of Harvard’s president and would like to use it to see how many ivory tower types AI can take down. Full of grievance, some people only wish to tear down.
Web statistics tell me I had almost 200 page views last Monday and another 100 on Friday. Those are unusually high numbers for this site – I typically get between 15 and 40 views on any given day. I assume most of my page views are bot traffic indexing my site and I assume the spikes are some AI program crawling the site. Why, I’m not sure – and that’s the part that makes me uncomfortable. Personally, I don’t think I’m interesting enough to warrant interest. But of greater concern is the possibility that there are algorithms building profiles to help people make decisions about me without ever consulting me. If one of my stated goals in writing in this space has been to have a say in my own story, another goal has been about getting more comfortable with ceding control: over what’s read, how much is read, and how what I’ve written is being interpreted.
A few years ago, I made what I thought was a deliberate decision to try to live an authentic and transparent life. At the time, it seemed like fighting the privacy battle was a losing proposition and that a reasonable counter would be to live in such a way that almost everything could be out in the open. Live a life in which my screw ups weren’t so shameful that I couldn’t put them out in to world for everyone to see (and maybe learn from). In some respects, it was an attempt at a type of personal accountability. Quite often, this has meant being willing to share those times when my less-flattering human side taps me on the mental shoulder with a reprimanding “ahem.” Those are moments of pettiness, jealousy, spitefulness, depression, etc. I write about that type of stuff a lot. My thinking in being so open has been twofold (at least). For one, working towards a life of relentless honesty leads to a greater self-awareness, and greater self-awareness, I believe, leads to a better understanding of others. Additionally, working towards a life of relentless honesty feels like a small and radical act, and I’d like to see a world in which more people try to live radically honest lives.
I began this blog in the rubble of a failed relationship. The cognitive dissonance of being told two seemingly opposite things (love and hate) made me want to understand the psychology of relationships better. Time and time again, I was brought back to the notion that in order to understand others, in order to love others, in order to have compassion for others, we must first understand, love, and have compassion for the self. In many instances, this blog has been my attempt at deeply understanding the self. In my experience, It seems that most relationships (personal, romantic, familial, and professional) struggle because people are not honest with themselves, and are therefore unintentionally dishonest with others. We’re frequently clumsy when it comes to expressing our true selves and even worse when it comes to listening to, understanding, and seeing someone else’s true self.
There’s a lot of noise (some call it baggage) that keeps us from seeing and hearing others. There’s a lot of noise in which we project our fears, experiences, and internal crap on to others. Living a relentlessly and radically honest life, seemed like a reasonable antidote to the poison of the unexamined life. This attempt at reflection and honesty comes with a healthy dose of discomfort. I have a lot of days when I’m tempted to go back to what feels like a more normal life – one in which I don’t have this detailed memoir out in the public. One in which my voice is muffled to the nosy neighbors around me.