About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
email me if you have any questions or comments.
Using WordPress
3.1.3
Golly. Three months without posting. But things have calmed down at work, I took a few days off for Burning Man two weekends ago, and I slept most of this past weekend, and, hey, look, I have things to say again. Well, actually, I’ve had things to say for months, but not the energy to write them up after work. And it didn’t help that I felt like I had to write something _really_ insightful or amazing to justify posting after such a long drought. But that’s silly, so this week I’m going to try to post multiple times to try to start the habit back up again.
I had a small-world moment with a friend I was meeting at Burning Man, where we discovered multiple separate paths through social space by which we could have known each other (otherwise known as small world syndrome, where it seems like new people we meet always know people that we know). I’ve talked about small world syndrome before as an example of reality coefficients, where our social worlds are so small because we only interact with people who share our view of reality.
I also had a large-world moment a few weeks ago, when I attended a housewarming party where I really only knew the host, putting me in a large room of people where I didn’t know anybody. And I chatted with several folks and realized that their social world didn’t overlap with mine at all except through this one friend we had in common. It was an interesting experience, as what little social time I have had outside of work over the past year has been spent with my close friends, so I’d been enveloped in my small world. It was good for me to step outside it and remember there are all these people I don’t know, whose worlds might be interesting and worth checking out.
I think there’s value in both experiences. Being in a small world is comforting – it provides a place where our values are reinforced and where basic worldview assumptions don’t have to be defended. But it is also limiting in preventing us from having new experiences, from challenging our beliefs – it makes it more difficult to grow. Part of the reason I moved to New York was that I felt like I was in a rut in the Bay Area, where my world had gotten too small, so it was time for me to step out into the larger world.
However, being in a large world has a separate set of issues. It does provide challenges and new experiences, but it also requires one to be always “on”, which can become exhausting. Some people thrive on the constant shiny newness, but I am not one of them. That was one of the reasons I moved back to California, with the goal of taking what I’d learned about large-world living in New York and balancing it with my small worlds in the Bay Area.
We choose the mix of small worlds and large worlds we live in. Some people choose to live within a small world their entire life (e.g. somebody living in a small town, or somebody who spends all their time on one interest like sports or video games), prioritizing comfort over growth. Others choose the large-world life of novelty, traveling the world, constantly throwing themselves into new situations for the sheer thrill of it. And every possibility in between is available, with small worlds and large worlds overlapping in interesting and unexpected ways, such as becoming the common element between multiple small worlds.
I also think it’s interesting that we call out “small world moments” when we find a surprising social connection that makes the world smaller, but don’t similarly call out “large world moments” when we step into a new and different world. I suppose that’s because “large world moments” are the default, as we don’t expect to know strangers, and our brains are wired to remember exceptions. But it might be good to observe the “large world moments” as well, to remind ourselves that the default expectation is the default for a reason.
I don’t really have a point here, but thought it was interesting to contemplate both why the world is occasionally small, and, more regularly, large, and how we can choose the mix of small and large worlds that we live in. And it is a choice – it’s up to us to change our worlds when they are not currently suiting our desired identity (if we change our environment, we change who we are). We design ourselves by choosing our context, and we must choose to be active designers.
Previous: Thinking about easy | Next: Planning for surprise
Be wary of equating travel or New York with “large world” living. As Michael likes to say, New York displays a cosmopolitan provincialism. That tends to suggest the world has come to New York, so one doesn’t need to look much outside the city–or often, outside Manhattan. Possibly Manhattan and certain Brooklyn neighborhoods. There is much in Manhattan, but plenty is not.
Similarly–at least to judge by Michael’s experience, and a lesser extent mine–it’s possible to travel the world and yet remain in the company of a class of cosmopolites, many of whom know each other as you describe. Put another way, in some respects it’s harder than it used to be to get somewhere else–or, when you travel, you may encounter a larger version of your existing world, but that’s not the same as living in or encountering the larger world more generally.
***
Do we choose the mix of worlds we live in? This question is complex in that it gets into broader questions of agency, independent thought (or lack thereof), the influence of one’s surroundings, and the question of whether/the degree to which we can act as individuals.
A small piece of that is where we live. I’d suggest much of the “mix” choice is made for us in the form of land use and transportation planning–facts on the ground–and largely in the form of excluding or limiting possibility on the one hand, or pushing us in a more constrained direction on the other. Perhaps a degree of choice is possible within that.
I think I’ve mentioned this quote in the past, but I thought I’d post it with some relevance–from an Atlantic Monthly column by David Brooks back in 2003:
Americans tend more and more often to marry people with education levels similar to their own, and to befriend people with backgrounds similar to their own.
My favorite illustration of this latter pattern comes from the first, noncontroversial chapter of The Bell Curve. Think of your twelve closest friends, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray write. If you had chosen them randomly from the American population, the odds that half of your twelve closest friends would be college graduates would be six in a thousand. The odds that half of the twelve would have advanced degrees would be less than one in a million. Have any of your twelve closest friends graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, or Brown? If you chose your friends randomly from the American population, the odds against your having four or more friends from those schools would be more than a billion to one.
Many of us live in absurdly unlikely groupings, because we have organized our lives that way.
I thought that the calculations of odds was pretty interesting.
Spackle, great points all. Even though I met new people in New York, fundamentally I was still living in the same “cosmopolite” culture – not like living in Africa or another culture entirely.
While I agree that some of our choices are restricted by outside influences like planning, I think it’s possible to shake things up a little bit. I wasn’t thinking at as macro a level as you are, I think – I was thinking of the quotidian choices we make about whether to hang out with the friends we already know or to check out the new party or experience that we’ve been invited to. But I’d love to have a conversation about the broader perspective you suggest here.
Bats, thanks for that quote – another friend of mine mentioned that Bell Curve statistic recently, and I’d been mangling it. Richard Florida calls this phenomenon “The Big Sort”, as we self-select ourselves into communities where we are all alike. We are choosing to avoid conflict and live in our small worlds. I’m not really one to talk, mind you, living in a wealthy suburb and surrounding myself with people much like myself.
Another interesting point is that physical location is becoming both less and more important. It’s becoming less important in that I can have closer relationships with people across the country than I do with my next door neighbor. But it’s becoming more important in that I can choose my location to surround myself with “my people”. Both of these tendencies are weakening the potential of serendipity, of me experiencing something new or new people because I happen to run into somebody or walk by something that I didn’t plan to.
Thanks again for the comments – interesting stuff.