schmoozer

“One who chats”, from the Hebrew “to report gossip”. Informal, friendly relationships; exemplified by two activities: eating dinner together and playing cards.

macher

“Big shot”, from the German “to make”. Relationships based on membership in formal groups, from churches to bowling leagues.

Both activities are correlated with education and income but Putnam says that schmoozers and machers tend to be different people. The rate of both schmoozing and maching has been declining in our society, but maching has possibly been declining faster: bowling is less popular than it used to be, but bowling in leagues especially so. This analysis of folksy politicians gets the definitions a bit wrong, but I think it’s worth considering whether there’s a cultural divide between schmoozers and machers.

The standard advice for getting more friends is to do maching: volunteer, take a class. I’ve been doing some of those things to build my social capital. But if you’re looking for friends to schmooze with, macher activities are probably the wrong way to go.

How do you foster “less organized and purposeful, more spontaneous and flexible” social activities? I’m pretty good at random dinners and drinks, although I probably don’t incite them as much as I could. Do I need to get better at entertaining at home? And what’s the contemporary equivalent of bridge – a Wii?

I grew up in Victoria and I’m not completely happy with my social life. I suspect other natives aren’t either. So it doesn’t really matter if it’s relative: Victoria’s social scene is not living up to its potential.

Some of the most literal urban tribes I’ve seen in Victoria are sports leagues: team mates and rivals party together, travel together, take care of each other when they’re sick, etc. So in the past I’ve looked at sports as being the city’s only stable social groups. But I should have thought more carefully about my running metaphor: running is easy to do by yourself and most of the runners you see are by themselves.

My friend Nina moved here recently. We were discussing my difficulty organizing Community Circles in my social group and she offered this theory: Victorians are not in exclusive cliques (tribes) that can’t be broken into, instead they’re all off doing their own thing. Victoria is a city full of people bowling alone. Who knows if it’s happening here more than in other cities (bowling leagues are a Middle American thing, right?), but we should try to figure out how to fix it regardless.

I take objects with me when I leave the house. Some are to get to work. Bicycling is more fun in tights. Some are to use at work. It can be hard to keep an ironed shirt crisp. Some are to use during my breaks. Run! Some are to use after work before I get home.

All of these objects need to be transported. How do I handle all these “moving parts”, as David Allen calls them?

• Leave objects where they are used. My toothbrush is by the sink; my climbing gear is in a locker at the climbing gym.
• Use external cognition: remember things by manipulating the environment instead of storing them in my neurons. It’s hard to miss something blocking the door.
• Use rituals: do things in the same way every day so I don’t need to think about them.
• Have backups and contingencies. I love the stack of pressed shirts in Don Draper‘s desk drawer.

One thing I don’t do is check my next actions list. Maybe I need another list for small recurring tasks, organized by phase? But it’s hard to imagine technology that would be seamless enough to not get in the way.

I miss some opportunities to complete next actions. I won’t be dropping my pants off at the dry cleaners today – they’re still in my closet. I forget a few nice-to-have objects per month but so far nothing catastrophic. I don’t worry that much that I’ve forgot something. But I do feel it is a stressful burden to keep my life on track.

Would driving to work help? Is this another sacrifice I’m making for the environment? Can my life be simplified? Can I use more external cognition? Can I do the same actions but interpret them differently to manage my stress?

That assumes that figuring how what to do separately from doign it with a reasonable amount of effort in a reasonable amount of time. But the things we tend to care about are not like that (if it were that easy, it’d already be fixed). Another way to change things is adaptive management, an environmental science technique that takes place entirely in the real world:

You cannot run tests in a laboratory, because labs are hard to do properly and you don’t have time. At worst, you’re trying to change your life: you’ve only got one and you can’t spend it all theorizing.

For example, everyone trying to be more fit is doing adaptive management: you implement a diet and exercise regime, then measure weight, clothing size, appearance naked, energy levels, hunger feelings, etc.

The hardest thing about adaptive management is measurement (“what you can’t measure, you can’t manage”). A lot of things in the world are not directly measurable, so you have to find proxy measures. But proxy measures only obliquely get at your goal, for example: nobody is ever actually trying to “lose weight”, it’s a proxy measure for fitness. But using weight as a measure leads to perverse management plans like ketosis, which sheds muscle as well as fat.

Peter Drucker popularized management by goals (sometimes called “objectives”). Previously, managers said “do your best”: employee intervention emphasized behaviour like tardiness and team engagement; they believed the right behaviour leads to success.

Under management by goals, managers and workers collaborate to establish goals, then managers monitor performance and remove barriers, giving the workers flexibility to achieve the goals. Obviously the level of collaboration, style of performance monitoring and flexibility given to workers will differ according to project and organizational culture. But the general idea of guiding with goals is well supported.

The key challenge in management by goals is setting the goals. A very popular set of criteria for goals uses the mnemonic “SMART”:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

These are redundant because specificity and time-boundedness are necessary but not sufficient conditions for measurability (“did you or did you not achieve something specific by some time?”). Relevancy means that the goal is in alignment with personal and organizational objectives (which should just be bigger goals, eh?), and values. Research suggests achievability is the criteria most linked to goal success: people work hardest when their goals are challenging but not impossible.

• “Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.”
• “Many brilliant people [believe] that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”
• “One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
• “Very few of the people who believed that doing one’s own thing would lead to contribution, self-fulfilment, and success achieved any of the three.”
• “There is another reason to develop a second major interest, and to develop it early. No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in his or her life or work… In a society in which success has become so terribly important, having options will become increasingly vital… For a great many people, there is at best an absence of failure. Wherever there is success, there has to be failure. And then it is vitally important for the individual, and equally for the individual’s family, to have an area in which he or she can contribute, make a difference, and be somebody.”

This blog represents – but, in itself, isn’t – my second major interest: reading, thinking and writing about ideas that are too multidisciplinary, abstract and esoteric to make a job out of. I don’t have measurable success in this interest, but I think I have an absence of failure.

I have a general sense that adults in Victoria have very scheduled lives (as if still being driven around by their soccer-moms). I don’t think it’s that they are more scheduled than adults in Winnipeg or Toronto. The reason Victoria is different is that schedules are never disrupted by winter.

In the east, the kinds of things you can do in the summer are different from what you can do in the winter. The transition between seasons creates opportunities for spontaneity. Having to throw your life out every six months keeps people from getting too habitual.

In Victoria the archetypal activity is running, but all sorts of sporty things can easily be done in the winter rain. And it creates a vicious cycle: the more people that “run”, the fewer people there are to do cultural and social events. Bored on a Friday night? Go for a run. Want to give back to the community? Run for the Cure. Want to meet more people? Join a running group.

The reason I love living in Victoria is that I feel you can balance outdoorsy and cultural events better than any other city. Lately I’ve been neglecting outdoorsy pursuits to try to improve my social life. But I can see that if I poured myself into physical activity that would at least distract me from that void.

It has been argued that contemporary marriages are consumption partnerships. But I say marriages are still about producing something: relationship products. These are all the activities you like, from long walks on the beach to footrubs to sex that your friends don’t produce.

The two relationship products that men particularly benefit from consuming are:

• emotionally-intimate talking: for most men their only really good friendship with a woman is their partner
• social network building: in most marriages the woman manages social relationships from dinner parties to family gatherings

Single women are not missing such vital relationship products, which explains why married men are statistically happier than single men but single women are happier than married women. Men get married instead of serially date to ensure a reliable supply of relationship products. Women can get relationship products without marriage, so advertisers create the need for marriage-as-romance. Marriages centred around relationship product production are “companionate marriages”.

Growing up I definitely considered myself an introvert, but in the last few years I’ve suppressed that part of my personality to build social skills. I’ve worked on “being Alpha” and getting attention.

I’ve recently become friends with a few people recently who are very in touch with their introversion: they are socially adept and enjoy doing stuff, but quite deliberate to schedule “Me Time”. They’ve inspired me to accept my introvert tendencies.

My all-time favorite Cary Tennis article is this one where he, as an extrovert, extols the virtue of introversion:

Have physical presence. I’ve heard this behaviour described as “being Alpha”. It can be more socially effective to have quiet physical presence than verbal presence (to misquote: “sound and fury signifying nothing”).
…
“Oh, to be an introvert, full of impenetrable depths!” Playing with your cards close to your chest is an asset. If you open your mouth less, people should treat your words as more important when you do (provided you retain the ability to make yourself heard). It’s okay if people get the impression that you’re judging them if you seem to be doing so without an agenda.
…
Are you jealous of the interaction extroverts get, or the attention? Introverts can get interaction. Introverts probably don’t actually have a use for attention.

His advice to a stepmother who needs time away from her stepkids is also excellent.

In my 20s and confused:

If I were you, I might be a little angry that my culture neglected to tell me the truth about these things, that my education did not prepare me for adversity. I might be upset that I had not gained an understanding of economic forces, of class forces, of the way power is wielded in hidden ways in the workplace, how we are led to believe that things will be easy when they are actually hard.

My boyfriend is bad with money:

What cultural bias it is that makes his sort of financial immaturity less shameful than, say, sexual immaturity, or not being able to tie your shoes or comb your hair, or having a learning disability…Maybe it has something to do, too, with the knowledge a white male has that, any time he wants to, he can clean up his act and go out and earn more than you do. Maybe a certain privilege, built into the system, rewards him for, and insulates him from, his own irresponsibility.

I’m tired of graphic design. What next?:

You cannot change your life without encountering things you didn’t know about yourself. You cannot change your life while still believing that everything you think you know about yourself is true. Change involves shedding beliefs.

My boyfriend’s afraid he will cheat:

Because the consequences of marrying and divorcing are grave and complex, I suggest you talk about what would happen if he were to have sex with someone else. Would the marriage have to end right there and then? Or could you commit, now, to some sort of reconciliation process if that were to occur?

I’m an enabler at the end of my rope:

I know about metaphors. I know that symbolic behavior does not alter the world. But it does allow us to experience our own feelings. It allows us to graphically, viscerally experience what we are doing and how we feel.

Mom, lawyer, musician?:

As men we sometimes do not appreciate the burden of being constantly seen. To constantly be the object of others’ gaze. As if you were under surveillance! As the constant object, you must always prepare yourself for men’s eyes.

I studied print journalism: Now what?:

Paper itself is a kind of message; it tells us that information is permanent, whereas the Net tells us that information is in motion…If information is in motion, does that make it more or less true?…Obviously the world is in motion. So information must be in motion as well.

Should I leave L.A. after one year?:

You will suffer and hate everyone and then one day you will find yourself sitting at an immense console with knobs, and when you turn the knobs some people are thrown into the fire pit and others are elevated to the banquet hall, and you say, How did I get to be in this knob-turning situation? as if you didn’t, secretly, know.

He e-mailed us to say, “I’m dating both of you”:

He made you a nice dinner. He says nice things to you. Those things…are not the relationship. They are relationship-oriented products…As a man, I can tell you that sometimes when we want a woman to do something, we produce our best relationship-oriented products and present them to her as if they represented our current feelings toward her. But what they actually represent is how we think we might feel once we get what we want from her.

Let’s get Michael Jackson to tour the U.S.!:

I imagine that one’s particular attachment to Michael Jackson reflects, among other things, one’s troubled and contradictory relationship to Pan, who, incidentally, was also the god of theater. One thinks of Jackson and his animals and his purported interest in boys and children, and his genius for performance, and one thinks of Pan.