September 18, 2021

Democratizing discomfort, Why are you successful?

This week, I have a couple of short essays. Nothing fancy.

Democratizing Discomfort

The conversation has never been wider. There has never been a larger allowable space of things you could say. Thanks to social media. Yet, people are pretty pissed about how it feels to participate in it. There is a distinct intensity to online conversations these days. The two, I think, are related. The wideness of conversation and the number of people you can hear from are also the things that make us nervous and feel unsafe. The good of it is also the bad of it.

Social media has undoubtedly broadened access to large swathes of society. But, it has broadened access on the terms of the people who once benefited from access. Is that really what we’re trying to do? Is that really what pluralism and inclusion are about? It feels to me like pluralism starts with access but is really about an equality in experience. Plurality is what we get when everyone in society experiences similar levels of discomfort. Yes, this is a counter-intuitive way of thinking about equality, fairness and pluralism. It isn’t that everyone now gets to come into the room and join the conversation and have the exact same comforts once extended to a smaller group of people. It’s that now we have everyone at the table and nobody quite knows the exact right thing to say about the others. Everyone is equally uncomfortable. This is plurality.

Discomfort is good. It is how discourse expands. It means that we have to be thoughtful. We have to reconsider the norms. If it means that if I’m no longer sure I should let it rip on an offensive joke, that’s probably a pretty good thing. It’s the democratization of discomfort. This calls for a whole new set of virtues to accompany truth telling. Today, if you are or aspire to be an influential, talented person, you’re gonna have to develop a new set of virtues, skills and competencies to help you conduct conversations, build relationships, and other such things. For sure, it’s going to be hard to do this. But, it’ll all be worth it.

Nearly all change is generational. There is more change from one generation to the next than within a generation. As things change, I guess it’s natural we feel a tad left behind. You’ve got young people today who say, “You said gender is a spectrum, right? Imma live it as a spectrum.” And we go, “Did I say that? Hold on. I didn’t mean it that way.” Changes surprises us even when we’ve always been the ones clamoring for it.

I’m inspired by people who within a generation have resisted becoming that old person. To succeeding generations, they say, “I hear you. I’ll get with it.” We’ve got to constantly relitigate ideas we take for granted. We were just talking about social media and the intensity of online conversations. On social media, there seems to be a lot of moral panics. It’s one moral panic after moral panic after moral panic and it’s becoming hard to even separate them out. Maybe it’s all one giant moral panic around “There’s a lot going on and I don’t feel equipped.”

We are, undoubtedly, at a historic moment in time. We are being asked and pushed to rethink almost every meaningful social category, things we’d always kind of taken for granted. There is a historic opportunity to redefine some of the rules. That’s amazing.

What makes us successful?

It’s a pretty simple question. What makes me successful? To pose it a tad differently, why did I become more successful than my grandparents or parents? As far as I know, they were as hard working, as intelligent, as committed, and deserved as much economic success as I did. My dad was a gold medalist in high school. My mother aced mathematics through school. My paternal grandfather was deeply respected in the community. My maternal one spoke and wrote English fluently. These are all typical and strong indicators of success. They did a lot of things right. Yet, it became somehow my turn to experience a higher level of success even though I am not, in any real sense, better than any of them.

Here’s a recent example from my own generation. My wife. By all objective standards, she is more intelligent than I am. I have 28 years of incontrovertible evidence. She can solve New York Times crosswords faster than I can. She can answer more questions on Jeopardy than I can, on any given day. She has a better vocabulary than I do. Believe me, I am not being falsely modest here. I’m no slouch at crosswords, general knowledge, and other things. To beat me at these things is no mean feat. Not just all that, she seems better at applying her acquired intelligence and wisdom to life, love and relationships than I am. Why is she not a Vice President at a Fortune 100 company but I am? What is going on?

Here’s the thing about success - It is always limited by how well others can imagine the possibility of your success. A lot of success is about others seeing the vision you have for your success and agreeing with it. Society imagined my grandparents, parents and wife a certain way. By the time I came along, conditions became ripe for it to imagine me differently. I just happened to be the right kind of smart in the right kind of time frame on the right end of globalization.

You can do everything right but if society imagines you differently than you imagine yourself, the road then is no longer a straight one. It’s useful to ask, I think - why am I more successful than others, what caused it to happen to me and not them. These questions create discomfort. They help us grow spiritually. They help disabuse our notions that there is something special about us. They keep us grounded.

Stay safe. Have a great week ahead.