We had an icebreaker at work a while back and the question was "what are you passionate about?"
Coming from a long history of workplaces with a "Bring Your Whole Self to Work" philosophy, and realizing how spotty/borderline toxic those can be if you don't think a certain way, I answered the passion question: "I'm passionate about my privacy."
More relevant to this comment than the initial post:
My company just started a "tell everyone about yourself to get to know each other and connect with people of similar interests" program and keep bugging those of us who haven't contributed.
If I were single or had lots of free time or was super social, sure. But I'm none of the above (one reason I like this job and do well at it is I'm on my own most of the time) so ignoring it.
Also I don't want to weird people out, and IF i was going to for real do this the only way to make it work would be to either get way more out there or go into way more detail than I suspect they want, freaking everyone the hell out thru the sheer inappropriateness of listing too many interests in too much depth.
A bit late to the party, but catching up on old posts and wanted to comment on this one especially for 2 reasons (also it's well written and thoughtful but that is the norm for you):
I think it really encapsulates what makes your writing and thought processes particularly appealing to me
&
It has me applying some of what you laid out here to a recent email exchange with an old friend, wherein I gave her massive amounts of detail about my life long ago (and mostly pre social media) but find myself strangely reticent to go into much detail about the present (other than a creative project i decided not to follow up on) and basically stopped most of the beyond superficial relationship info once I got to where my wife and I started dating. Then again, OF COURSE that gets a different level of privacy & importance & OF COURSE it's less problematic to share stories about people from 30 years ago (sorry I'm old, 50's, you can mute me now) than about someone you're involved with now, + emails tween old friends are not the same as social media so maybe this part isn't applicable at all but I spent enough time writing it that I'm not gonna delete it so you're stuck skimming it, sorry not sorry.
There’s a part of us that longs for real connection, and so we instinctively seek out opportunities to open ourselves up to others. But of course modernity, which seeks to commodify everything, wants to sell rather than offer real intimacy, and thus we end up with something that feels contrived and transactional. The real depths of a person are only reached through effort, looking past the superficial, past all the barriers created by wounds and cynicism. It takes real work, but when you find it, it’s worth it.
We had an icebreaker at work a while back and the question was "what are you passionate about?"
Coming from a long history of workplaces with a "Bring Your Whole Self to Work" philosophy, and realizing how spotty/borderline toxic those can be if you don't think a certain way, I answered the passion question: "I'm passionate about my privacy."
oof, that's GOOD
More relevant to this comment than the initial post:
My company just started a "tell everyone about yourself to get to know each other and connect with people of similar interests" program and keep bugging those of us who haven't contributed.
If I were single or had lots of free time or was super social, sure. But I'm none of the above (one reason I like this job and do well at it is I'm on my own most of the time) so ignoring it.
Also I don't want to weird people out, and IF i was going to for real do this the only way to make it work would be to either get way more out there or go into way more detail than I suspect they want, freaking everyone the hell out thru the sheer inappropriateness of listing too many interests in too much depth.
Very thoughtful and well written! Thank you!
A bit late to the party, but catching up on old posts and wanted to comment on this one especially for 2 reasons (also it's well written and thoughtful but that is the norm for you):
I think it really encapsulates what makes your writing and thought processes particularly appealing to me
&
It has me applying some of what you laid out here to a recent email exchange with an old friend, wherein I gave her massive amounts of detail about my life long ago (and mostly pre social media) but find myself strangely reticent to go into much detail about the present (other than a creative project i decided not to follow up on) and basically stopped most of the beyond superficial relationship info once I got to where my wife and I started dating. Then again, OF COURSE that gets a different level of privacy & importance & OF COURSE it's less problematic to share stories about people from 30 years ago (sorry I'm old, 50's, you can mute me now) than about someone you're involved with now, + emails tween old friends are not the same as social media so maybe this part isn't applicable at all but I spent enough time writing it that I'm not gonna delete it so you're stuck skimming it, sorry not sorry.
There’s a part of us that longs for real connection, and so we instinctively seek out opportunities to open ourselves up to others. But of course modernity, which seeks to commodify everything, wants to sell rather than offer real intimacy, and thus we end up with something that feels contrived and transactional. The real depths of a person are only reached through effort, looking past the superficial, past all the barriers created by wounds and cynicism. It takes real work, but when you find it, it’s worth it.