Story-Colored Glasses

As I promised in part zero of this series, because I plan to alternate between moments of cringe (misgivings) and joy (satisfaction) in my work, this post will be about a moment of joy. Hooray!

(These cringe-and-joy posts are not in any useful order, by the way. They are in the order the clusters fell into as I grouped my ungrouped lists, which means: nothing at all.)

The joy of opening eyes and ears

The first joy in my list is the joy of helping people feel heard. I have felt this joy so many times now that I expect to experience it in every PNI project. Somebody, in some interview or group session or web form, will mention how pleasantly surprised they are that the project is (or its creators are) actually listening to them as real people with real lives and real experiences, and not just sticking needles and pins into them.

The experience I’ve seen a lot of participants have in PNI projects has been something like this:

1. What is this? What am I being asked to do?
2. This is … different. I’ve never been asked to do anything like this before.
3. I can’t believe they actually want to know what has happened to me and how I feel about it.
4. That was fascinating. It’s good to feel heard, and I learned some useful things too.
5. I wish we could share stories like this more often. Maybe we could.
6. I wonder what everybody else said. I wonder what it all means. Maybe I should go to that workshop they mentioned.
7. Okay, so that workshop was confusing and overwhelming, but … it could actually change how things work around here. And I’ve learned so much more than I thought I would.
8. I wish we could work with stories like this more often. Maybe we could. I wonder where all of this comes from. Is there something I can read about it?

Now obviously, not every participant says or thinks every one of these things. Getting all the way through this list is pretty rare. Even in the best of projects, at least 5% of participants will stop after stage two (“this is different”) and never actually tell any relevant or meaningful stories. As I explored in my previous post (on anecdotal evidence), that percentage can be higher, even as high as 30%, when projects are not planned well, especially when “this is different” is more like “this is weird” or “this is useless” (or even “this is scary”).

The transition between mild interest in sensemaking (step 6) and a plan to attend a sensemaking workshop (step 7) is a huge hurdle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the percentage of sensemaking participants get higher than 20% of the total, and it’s usually more like 10%. This is sometimes due to lukewarm interest, but I think it happens more often because people don’t feel qualified to participate in sensemaking (especially if it’s described using “ten dollar words” like “sensemaking” that sound elite or intellectual) and because people have other claims on their time and attention.

The two groups of people who say “I wish things like this could keep happening,” whether “this” is story sharing or sensemaking, is usually higher, about 20-30% of the people who participated in either activity. Few of those people will actually put any effort into making “this” keep happening, but if somebody else starts to make “this” keep happening, they will probably jump on board.

Where the need to be heard comes from

The universality of these let’s-do-more-of-this responses, and the joy I feel because of them, has always surprised me. They appear in every socioeconomic group, in people in and out of power, in people who seem self-assured and self-doubting, in people who are angry and peaceful, in people who are happy and sad. The pattern seems to say to me that we all want to be heard more than we are.

We are a social species, so the instinct to feel heard, seen, and acknowledged by some sort of social group must be prehistoric as well as universal. Other social species have similar needs.

But in terms of recent societal changes, I wonder: do we feel less heard than we did, say, 200 years ago? And do we feel that we should be heard more than people back then felt they should be heard?

I like to read old novels, old folk tales, and books about daily life in various time periods. Based on that reading, and combined with my experiences helping people feel heard in my work, I do feel like people today are experiencing a greater gap between how heard they feel and how heard they would like to feel than people did in the past. I can’t prove that. It’s just a feeling, and I could be wrong. But I do feel it.

Because I keep having this feeling, I’ve come up with some explanations for it. I haven’t done any real research on any of this, mind you, but these are my speculations:

1. We feel unheard because there are so many of us. We felt more heard hundreds of years ago because there were literally fewer of us on the planet. When I was born, there were 3.2 billion of us. Now there are 8.1 billion. This place is getting crowded. (More on this speculation later.)
2. We feel unheard because the internet has given us a new awareness of how many people there are on the planet. When we used to be only vaguely aware that other people existed beyond our villages, towns, and city streets, we had an easier time feeling heard. The unspoken question behind the question “Do you feel heard?” is “By whom?” And when the answer to that second question was a smaller number of people, it was easier to answer the first question in the positive. Now we all want to be heard by everyone on the planet. That makes for a bigger gap.
3. We feel unheard because our collective choices have brought us closer and closer to the carrying capacity of our planet. The dramatic increases in the global population have not come to us without costs or consequences. The earth’s climate is becoming increasingly unstable, we have lost half of our topsoil, our fresh water is dwindling, and we have set in motion a mass extinction. Those who are alarmed by these signs feel a rising sense of fear that no one will “look up” until it is too late. At the same time, those of us who are convinced that none of these things are happening (or matter) feel a rising sense of fear that (I’m struggling here) the new world order will bring the end of times in a different way (dogs and cats living together, and so on). No matter what we all think is happening to the world, we all feel that we have to stop it and can’t. That makes us feel unheard.
4. We feel unheard because we miss the access we used to have to the time and attention of the people around us. The opportunity-seeking capitalist enterprise/plague never seems to stop finding things we do for each other in our families and communities, pumping them up into supernormal stimuli, and selling them back to us at a profit, leaving us bereft of the real social ties that once supported us. Talking to random strangers on the internet is like eating pictures of food, and we are hungry for real connections. Even when we go to the third places that still exist, the not-home and not-work-or-school places in which we still (sometimes) come together, our churches and bowling lanes and barber shops and breakfast spots, we stare into our phones at the latest larger-than-life spectacles in front of us instead of getting to know the now-apparently-smaller-than-life people who still exist all around us.
5. We feel unheard not because of broadcast media (that’s so over) but because of the new media landscape in which everyone and anyone can be a mass-media mogul if they have a funny or clever or soul-bearing gimmick that captures the fleeting attention of the public (and makes money for the still-at-the-bottom-of-it-all opportunity-seeking capitalist enterprise/plague). So we aren’t actually less heard than we were before. We just think we deserve to be more heard than we are, because we’ve been told that by the people who want to sell us back the thing they are still taking from us (access to the time and attention of the people around us).
6. We feel unheard because of rising asset and income inequality. We felt more heard in the days when half of the world’s assets were not owned and controlled by eight or ten people. There have been inequalities in other times, but because of the internet, we all know about it this time, and we don’t like it. Today a lot of us feel like we’re recurring characters without backstories. Or maybe most of us are redshirts now, characters whose sole reason to live is to die in support of the lie that the main characters were ever in any danger. Redshirts never feel heard, except for that one magic moment just before they die when they suddenly get to have feelings and friends. It was so sad that – what was his name again?
7. We feel unheard because of rising geographic mobility. We move around so much more today than we did in the past that we feel increasingly placeless, unsituated, floating, unmoored, rootless, with fewer opportunities to form coherent and longstanding identities of membership.
8. We feel unheard because of rising political and social divisions (stoked by the opportunity-seeking capitalist enterprise/plague). We’ve always had our disagreements with our families, friends, and neighbors, but it wasn’t always so easy to get away from each other. Now, instead of having to find common ground and work out compromises, we can hunker down in our beliefs and line up at feeds that serve up only the cherry-picked facts we like best. We are turning into Homer’s Cyclopes, who made no assemblies, lived in caves on the tops of high hills, and gave no heed to each other. I’ll bet the Cyclopes didn’t feel heard either.
9. We feel unheard because we’ve all been conditioned to respond dully and dutifully to lazy keys-under-the-light social research fueled by scientific-measurement envy and the deceptive ease of asking useless and meaningless surface-level questions over the internet and pretending it means something. (What replication crisis?)
10. We don’t all feel unheard. Only some of us do. I have spent close to half of my life listening to people who feel unheard, so I think the feeling is more prevalent than it is. It’s a selection bias, and I’ve been making a hasty generalization.
11. Nobody feels unheard. I’m just in my sixties, and everyone thinks the world is going to hell in their sixties. It is a universal weakness of people in their older years to ignore the influence of nostalgia on the way they think things are going “nowadays.” Yes, I’ve come into contact with a lot of people who have been grateful to be heard, but so has everyone forever. It’s not a trend. I’m a trend.
12. Nobody feels unheard. This whole list is a fantasy I created because I need to justify the ten person-years I have given away in doing this work. (Which, to be clear, is not your fault, dear reader.) As I get older and begin to understand why people retire, I wish I had that money back, so I need a story I can tell myself about how I have been saving the world. If everybody already felt heard, I didn’t need to spend (waste) all of that time and money, and I can’t stand that idea, so there have to be people who don’t feel heard. I’m like an addiction counselor who has become addicted to addiction.

My overall suspicion is that that there is no point trying to figure out which of these things are “really” happening, because they all are. The important thing is not to pin down the reasons people are surprised to be heard, but to keep working to help people feel heard. That works for any of these explanations, even the ones that are all in my own head.

How to find more of this joy in your own work

When I started this blog-post series, I said that for each moment of joy in my list I would write “what you can do to experience moments like it yourself.”

I don’t need to write out a long list of possible answers to that question. There is only one answer, and I can give it to you with perfect confidence. Plan your projects well.

PNI projects are like giant trees that grow from tiny seeds. The more time and care to you put into the formation, location, planting, and nurturing of the tiny seed that will grow into your full project, the higher and stronger your tree will grow, and the greater joy you will bring to yourself and to others.

Appendix: how many people there are in the world

I didn’t want to confuse you in the midst of my speculative list-making, but I thought you might like to see the results of a little exploration I did of how many people there are in the world. I’ve been thinking about this issue, off and on, for the past few years. I keep wondering how many generations have experienced a rise in population as high as my generation has.

This is a graph of how much population increase each generation of people experienced over a 75-year lifetime, starting with people who were born in 1600 and stopping (based on estimates) with people who were born in 2025.

Surprised? I was. I had to go over the numbers a few times before I believed it. (I got most of the numbers from this page and this page.)

As you can see, the generation that experienced the greatest proportional increase in global population in recent human history (putting aside prehistoric bottlenecks) was born around 1925.

That’s my parents’ generation, the Silent Generation. They experienced a tripling of the population. The increase I have experienced, though still more than a doubling, has not been as great an increase as they experienced.

So if anyone has ever had a right to feel unheard because there are more of us than there were, it was the Silent Generation. That’s ironic, isn’t it? Why do they call it the Silent Generation? According to a tiny random sample of articles on the internet (which could not be wrong), it’s because the people who grew up in the Great Depression and lived through World War II valued stability over everything else. This led them to place a high value on loyalty, quiet determination, and thrift.

As a description of my parents and their generation, this makes perfect sense to me. My mother was a small person, and she always told us that she was so small because her mother didn’t get enough to eat during the Great Depression. And I certainly remember hearing the phrase “don’t rock the boat” many times as I was growing up.

I also recall that my parents had a more narrow sense of the world, at least back in the day, than most of the people I know do today. They belonged to local social groups, went to local stores, volunteered in local projects, read the local paper, and watched local news. They did also watch national news, but there was usually only a relatively small section on “overseas” news.

(Do people even use the word “overseas” anymore?

Fascinating. See the peaks for the world wars? And then the slow decline?)

So maybe the Silent Generation felt more heard than later generations because their world was a smaller world. I don’t mean that pejoratively. In fact, I think it may have been a good thing. Our later belief that “there will be no more wars because we all wear jeans now” may have led us to a complacent lack of cross-cultural effort that has led, paradoxically, to more wars. Maybe the local and global scales both matter, and we need to attend to them both, but differently.

Still, it does strike me as strange that I can’t recall my parents ever talking about there being a lot of people in the world, even after pundits started talking about it in the 80s. I talk about it (and think about it) all of the time. To me, the jump from 3.2 billion to 8.1 billion feels overwhelming.

My husband and I are on the older side of the parenting spectrum, so our son is part of Gen Z. He grew up near the end of the downward curve in the graph above. I showed him the graph, and I told him how I felt like people don’t feel heard today because there are a lot more people in the world than there used to be. His response was, “But if there are more people who need to be heard, there are also more people who can listen to them.”

That’s an excellent point. I wonder why I didn’t think of it.

Maybe I did think of it, only I didn’t know I was thinking of it. Maybe it is the reason I have poured so much time and effort into my work on PNI. I have always known that being a tiny part of a solution (any solution) to the twin problems of so-many-of-us and so-many-of-us-poor has been a motivating force in my career. But I could never figure out where that motivating force came from. Maybe it came from from my perceptions of increase and inequality, married to the fact that I did not grow up in a depression or live through a war (as my parents did). Those factors may have put me into a place in which I felt both motivated to be, and capable of being, part of a solution to the problems I saw in the world.

That’s a comforting thought. I’m neither an idiot nor a saint. I am a person of my place and time. I am a tiny piece of a giant negative feedback loop, a homeostatic correction that may eventually bring our species back to a more stable state. I like that idea very much. Let’s all work together on that. And let’s start – as we must – by listening to each other and being heard.