Matthew De George

People tend to judge how much they are supporting others higher than the support they receive from others. I try not to but I might be failing.  

People who know me often tell me I think differently to other people. Usually, this is framed as somehow being “innovative” or “creative”. The truth is I do believe I think differently to other people. I even have an old note that I wrote to myself about 15 years ago entitled “Way’s In Which I’m Different”. 

I don’t really value “innovation” and “creativity” the way other people seem to think I do. I guess this is another way I’m different. But I suspect people are just trying to be kind. So I enjoy their kind words.

One of the ways I actually believe I’m different is that I have a hard time claiming to know how somebody else feels. I genuinely don’t like to pre-suppose I know how somebody feels. This means if I try to be supportive or helpful I typically don’t assume that I’ve succeeded unless they tell me. 

Interestingly, sometimes I’m told I’m not “empathetic”. This is rarely said in a nasty way – my wife says it the most often, so I know it’s not something that makes me unbearable, or unloveable.  

But I believe this idea that I might lack “empathy” is related to my unwillingness to presume to know what somebody is feeling.  

It’s possible that when I communicate I’m so committed to not presuming that I know what goes on inside another person’s mind, or to presume I know how they feel, that I’m coming across as not empathetic. When I try to take the next step it often feels fake – not because I’m faking emotions, but because I know I can’t feel what they feel. But I do care, and I do try to help.  

Like an introvert who finds communication with others draining, genuinely caring for others takes energy, and time, and must never be faked.  

There is a trend I’ve noticed where people refer to themselves as “empaths”. I believe they think this means they have a special intuition about how others are feeling and take these emotions on themselves. I can’t relate to that concept. One interpretation of me not being able to understand a so-called “empath” might be that I myself lack empathy. But I have other theories. 

I believe those that call themselves “empaths” are doing one of two things. Either, they are so self-centred that they cannot think about the feelings of others without making it all about themselves. Alternatively, they are so lacking and out-of-touch with their own genuine feelings that they have to reach out and adopt the feelings of others in order to feel emotionally connected to the world.  

It feels too personal to write about this, and again I feel it’s presumptuous to claim any knowledge of how others feel – even how empaths feel. But because I am thinking about it now does that make me finally more empathetic, or does it mean I’m an empath? Or just pathetic.  

It’s hard not to feel like an adventurer looking out at these guys

This is an interesting idea:

In my book You Are Not a Gadget, I did an experiment. Whenever I was around people and there was music playing, I asked them if they could tell me in which decade the music they were listening to was made. I was quite taken aback by how people can’t tell this decade from the previous one, whereas all the other decades seemed very distinct to them, including very young people. It is as if some kind of cultural stasis has happened, but it’s hard to say whether that is down to the Internet.

From here.

As we reduce the discovery cost of finding people, services, and even our personal preferences, surely, the benefits of the discovery process start to disappear.  

It used to be that you had to be deep into conspiracy theories to read things like this:

the Obama administration has formally re-defined the term “militant” to mean: “all military-age males in a strike zone” unless “there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” In other words, the U.S. government presumptively regards all adult males it kills as “militants” unless evidence emerges that they were not.

or this:

In sum: We need U.S. troops in Africa to launch drone strikes at groups that are trying to attack U.S. troops in Africa. It’s the ultimate self-perpetuating circle of imperialism: We need to deploy troops to other countries in order to attack those who are trying to kill U.S. troops who are deployed there.

or this:

So yesterday the president killed roughly 150 people in a country where the U.S. is not at war. The Pentagon issued a five-sentence boilerplate statement declaring them all “terrorists.” And that’s pretty much the end of that. Within literally hours, virtually everyone was ready to forget about the whole thing and move on, content in the knowledge — even without a shred of evidence or information about the people killed — that their government and president did the right thing. Now that is a pacified public and malleable media.

The above quotes are from the very interesting article here: https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/nobody-knows-the-identity-of-the-150-people-killed-by-u-s-in-somalia-but-most-are-certain-they-deserved-it/

It occurred to me this morning that we seem to have been talking about “millennials” for a long time now.

If you think about it, we started talking about millennials, and how we thought they’d turn out, when some of them were still at school.

That would be okay if we updated our ideas as they got older.  But have we really said anything different over all these years?  Haven’t we just decided – as old people from a different generation – what the younger generation is like, and then not bothered to update our views as they got older?

I’ve been blogging since mid-1999.  This is quite early in the history of blogging so I’m quite proud of it.  In fact, according to A Brief History of Blogging:

In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the internet.

I’m pretty sure I’m not in that list of 23 blogs.  In fact, I’m quite sure that number depends on particular definitions that seperate blog from “regularly updated personal homepage”.  Also, how would anybody know the number of blogs when this description wasn’t uniformly utilised and discovery of sites had only recently shifted to Google’s indexing, ranking, and search-based approach?

What I do know is that I had to write my own blogging system for my website. This was probably the last bit of software development I ever did – and it was pretty ugly behind the scenes – but I was quite proud of it too.  It had two seperate types of “posts”, one was a traditional article, and the other was an “idea”.

The “idea” content was supposed to be  the blog-like content.  Except I didn’t want it to be just a reverse chronological list like typical blog sites.  Myself and good friend Graham Rix had an idea that the posts would be interconnected in a multidimensional way that would create a structured body of content over time.  Rather than focus on only the newest posts we wanted to use the platform help us understand how our ideas related to one another.

What’s this got to do with Karl Ove?  Well, as I was reading Book 2 of Karl Ove’s increasingly incredible My Struggle saga, I realised that I’d really like to learn to enjoy writing itself again.  My Manage Without Them Blog works better if it’s actually about my MWT Model – rather than this present form of rambling.  But there is also another more subtle constraint I’ve placed on the MWT blog.

One of my explicit intensions when I started the Manage Without Them site and associated blog was to develop my thinking into a grand unified theory of organisations.  Though I haven’t managed to do that, the attempts have been crucial to my personal  and particularly professional development.

The attempts to make everything connect together have exercised parts of my brain that I can then use in my professional career.  The feedback I get reflects that I have developed myself in the way that I intended – and yet again I am proud.

But finding connections, explicitly trying to tie things together, and seeking interconnection is a maddening impulse.  When it comes to writing it’s a constraint.  While constraints, as always, can help with creative endeavorers, this is only one of many types of constraints I might utilise.

If I want to enjoy writing, write more, and extend my ideas more freely, I think I’ll benefit from removing that constraint.  While reading My Struggle I often go back and re-read to find the exact moment we went from, say, a visit to the coffee shop, to the moment when Karl Ove is considering how nihilism shifts from being art and existentialism in Dostoyevsky to being largely the scientific name for teenage angst in the modern world.  Often when I look back in the text to find the transition it simply isn’t there.

The transition makes sense.  The ideas and particularly the emotional context often connects the passages.  But the need to explicitly connect them in the text is absent.  This, and of course the skilled application of many other techniques I can’t even detect, creates an engaging form of writing that I’d like to explore.

I’ve finally shifted off my old personal theme with my little sketches in the header.  I’ll miss it.

Saved copy of old site:

Personal web site of Matthew De George.