Nick's Journal
I am definitely digging the storytelling angle to life recently, as it seems to align quite well with how I have found life to unfold over the years. This week I thought I'd touch on people in your life whose Lights you keep on.
As you get older, it becomes more and more clear to you how fleeting a lot of things in life really are. If you take snapshots every couple of years it would shock you as to who and what was important to you in any given snapshot, when you look at your current life. And yet, at one time, they would have seemed like one of the most important people or things in your life, irreplaceable and you could not have imagined life without them.
This is what I mean when I speak of which Lights you keep on. I've found that it’s incredibly difficult to hold on to most people or connections. Modern life will tug you in a hundred different directions and it’s doing the same thing to all the important people in your life as well. People have less and less ties to any given place and gone are the days of growing up in a town and never leaving etc. In the face of such constant flux, it’s actually not that shocking how few people you will find that stand the test of time, either due to circumstances, apathy or any number of other possible reasons.
One of the reasons I write this weekly newsletter is that very factor. There are people on this newsletter that I've known for more than 20 (hell some are close to 30) years, and I only still know them BECAUSE of this newsletter in many ways. It's what has led to the reach outs and the grabbing of drinks, the dinners and the late night deep dives every couple of months. And without those connections (as there are any number of folks who did not make the effort or ever reach out or accept invites, so I know what happens) these folks would have disappeared out of my life.
And many of them were people whose company and personalities I very much appreciated, some very important pieces of my life at points in time. And it's really much harder to find good folks than we sometimes pretend. Like, really good folks, the kind who you entrust with things, who you rely on, who lift you up. These folks are a lot more rare than I used to think.
And so as part of the 'storytelling view of life', one of the parts of the story of your life that you are choosing is the Lights you keep on. The connections that mean so much to you that you are willing to overcome all and any of the obstacles that life will place in front of you to maintain them. The characters who add happiness, joy or other positive feelings - that you don't want to let slip away.
You should give this some careful thought and pay attention to it. Before you know it, what seemed like a cornerstone of your life, something you relied on and took comfort from, will dim to nothingness. Turn your attention elsewhere and it will be like their Light turns off and what was once so bright will not even be a flicker.
I can imagine this will only get more crazy in the years ahead, as Tech tries to replace your human connections with computer generated ones and the lines become increasingly blurred between what is real and what is artificial in your day to day life. I worry greatly that the opportunities and willingness to connect is going to be under assault - there will likely be pushback from the diehards like myself, who grew up with a different world and see its value, but when I look at my children and their insane love of technology I can't help but feel that it’s a losing battle, and maybe one that won't even be fought at all. How long until people look for encouragement from an AI bot in place of a human one? We'll find out very soon it seems.
Take the time to begin to more fully appreciate those people in your life that matter and to start to really flesh them out fully. Have those long conversations about what makes them tick, their fears, ambitions and struggles, about what drives them and why. People are so unique when you take the time to let them really build out who they are and don't just scratch the surface as we are so prone to do. Friendships have been under assault for a number of years now and the average number per person has never been lower than it is today and all signs point to that getting worse. And yet relationships remain the most important factor on happiness, on mental health and on general well-being later in life. If you are not on this earth to connect with the other spirits, than I fear you have lost sight of the very purpose.
As technology trends towards Dystopia, make sure you don't just follow along blindly. Your life is your story to tell and it’s up to you to fill it with all the richness that it deserves. And that richness ultimately comes from relationships - your interactions with other folks will always be what defines you and will be what matters most. Reach out to someone you haven't spoken to for a while and give them the most positive interaction you can - you'll never regret it.
Much love as always,
Nick
Quotes:
I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. - David Maraniss
Even a brief interaction can change the way people think about themselves, their leaders, and the future. Each of those many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or a low point in someone's day. - Douglas Conant