This is one of a series of reflections on the content of my favorite podcast of 2021: episode 110 of The Knowledge Project with Jim Collins.
People break into 2 buckets. There are those that come at life as a series of transactions and there are people that come at life as building relationships … the only way to have a great life – you can have a successful life doing transactions – the only way to have a really great life is on the relationship side … In the end it is [all about] really deep relationships and doing things that you love with people you love (and those connections).
I don’t know that this is true, but it feels like it is.
I have written before of my ethical/philosophical struggles with social media/surveillance capitalism and my unsuccessful means of maintaining meaningful connections with people outside of it. The above reflections of Jim Collin’s mentor, Bill Lazier, seem to lean into that experience heavily.
My own life feels like it is missing something that it didn’t miss 20 years ago. At the age of 24, I had a robust and deeply intertwined interpersonal life that still included dear friends from college and peers in 2 different small companies (both of which were family-run). It was as if I had 4 families. There was my CNY family, my college family, my Rickard family, and my Sica family. And while the latter two signed my paychecks, the relationships that grew from those circumstances were never based on monetary exploits. We genuinely enjoyed each other’s company We loved each other. We were devoted to one another. I took it for granted.
After moving from New Jersey back to New York, those family ties began to slowly disintegrate over time, as all relationships do when they are starved of attention and time. I remained involved with fantasy sports, which maintained some ties for a while (even if superficially). Meanwhile, I was pursuing professional and intellectual interests and developing a new and exciting international peer network with some of the brightest minds that I had ever met or engaged with. It was exciting and stimulating, but short lived.
Over a few years, conversations that were once multi-layered and at great depth on a small message board moved to social media. People who once engaged in discourse to learn in a private forum began to engage to proselytize to anyone that was watching. Little by little, conversation devolved as more and more conversations prioritized “Likes” over respectful disagreement and victory over courtesy. Over time, the participants were the same, but the conversations had changed.
I will assert that the driving force behind the detrimental changes in depth, tone, and courtesy in conversation was people’s desire for more Likes and Followers, to feed their ego, or to monetize their thinking and ideas (which were not themselves unique). Relationships that had once been rooted in empathy in the shared pursuit of discovery had become transactional.
Meanwhile, even before I disconnected from FB and Twitter, I was trying to maintain old friendships from college and New Jersey on the same platforms that were actively eroding my social-professional life with no better success. In each instance, the updates were still viewed, the Likes were still seen, but nothing remained beneath the facade … most relationships became transactional and died.
And while I grant you that most relationships have a shelf life, I can’t help but think that each relationship would have been better served by an occasional phone call a few times per year than any number of hundreds of Likes.