Whether to Participate or Observe?

A story about connection

I stood at the edge of the balcony, NYE at the Fillmore Auditorium, the band on stage behind those iconic crystal chandeliers, music blasting, huge crowd dancing below.

“I love watching it happen,” I told my friend.

“You’re a part of it, too, you know?” she said.

Easy to forget with that perfect view. Indeed, I wasn’t just watching, but there in the scene with everyone else. How often this happens, when we think of ourselves as mere observers, though we’re actually participating.

There’s a spectrum between participation and observation, always has been, but the line has now been wildly contorted by this house of mirrors we call the internet. Our phones encourage us to live vicariously through the lens of others’ videos and photos, stewing in a mix of inspiration and envy. I’d like to believe it pushes us toward engagement, toward participation, but I’m pretty sure the opposite is true—a move toward ever more remote observation.

And I have a feeling this slant toward observation is making us all miserable.

The main culprit, of course, is social media. No wonder there are plenty of posts (like this and this) about quitting it altogether. What’s the alternative, you might ask? More participation.

This makes me think of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, inventor of the method of fieldwork aptly called participant-observation. The man embedded himself with the villagers of the Trobriand Islands for years in the early twentieth century to understand their scene. Then he turned around and hollered back to the sedentary armchair theorists of his field, holed up at their universities:

COME DOWN OFF THE VERANDA, COME OUT OF YOUR STUDIES AND JOIN THE PEOPLE!

Still resonates, yeah? But we’re not talking about travelling to some remote island here. We’re talking about connecting like we used to, having more conversations face-to-face. And yet, it still feels daunting sometimes: to connect, let alone live the life you really want to live. Or to quit your miserable job. To make the art that’s burning within. To travel (maybe to some remote island).

But we must. Otherwise, you might end up sounding like John-Paul Sartre:

I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.

Oof, don’t do that.

We owe it to ourselves to stop observing and participate, whatever that means to you. But how? We’ve got to trust our instincts. We’re born to connect with each other, to participate in life together and figure it out. We’re not on our own.

We need to help each other cross over from observer to participant. You might even say guide one another. This is why we hire business coaches, to guide us through our careers. Why we hire therapists, to guide us through our heads. But we can all be guides.

That friend of mine at the Fillmore was a guide that night, pulling me into the show. And so are you when you call that friend who’s having a hard time, or anytime you show up for someone. We ought to give ourselves more credit.

We can do this for each other. We should.

Participation is greater than observation. So come off the veranda. Do your thing.

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Maybe this is all a lengthy preamble to something I’ve been thinking about doing, something to make a little more participation possible . . . hosting a Zoom call.

I love writing this newsletter, yet it feels like a one-way street, a monologue. So to make it more of a conversation, a dialogue, let’s get together. I’m not saying I’m a guide here, I just think it’d be nice to bring people together

If you want to take a chance, see what might come of this experiment, join us:

Tomorrow afternoon (Friday 1/3), 3pm MT. Link below.

This one already went down. It was super fun. Keep an eye out for the next one!

Hope to see you then.

-Martin

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