IdeaTree

“Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite “thinking”, not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available…We just float along in the general noise.”
- Thomas Merton in Modern Spiritual Masters, edited by Robert Ellsberg.

There’s something fundamentally irritating about Twitter. Have you noticed? Yet we flock to it. Why is it so maddening and so addicting at the same time? And what will life be like after Twitter?

Have you ever by some happy accident reached a state of no-thought? Maybe on a particularly long vacation, or some convergence of situations that left you with absolutely nothing to do, so you just sat…and discovered you were happy for no reason whatsoever. The fun of it is in finding out what happens when you disengage in this way. If you pay close attention, you may see life living itself, autonomously. Kind of like how your gut knows how to break down food into the right molecules without you knowing anything about it, the theory is that life can run itself in a similar way without much thought or involvement from us.

That means we meet the right person, the right contact, at the right time, if we stay out of the way and don’t try to manipulate. This is the opposite of stepping up to the plate, putting your game face on, or similar heroic platitudes. This sounds like heresy in American business though I’m beginning to hear faint echoes of it in the field of “inbound marketing” and in advice from business gurus to “never give out your business card until asked”. Old-school push-and-interrupt advertising is supposedly on the way out and relationship-building is in. Some are beginning to figure out that there’s a lot of wasted effort going on out there, and that less is more. With the advent of opt-in social media as a force in marketing, the customer is in control. Ah, liberation! A huge step forward from methods that had long since gotten heavy-handed and, well, old.

Twitter might seem to be a welcome step in the same direction. I mean, it’s opt-in, and how much blatant self-promotion can you do in 140 characters, anyway? Well, it turns out you can do a lot. And the result is that you’ve always got a subtle level of vigilance going on because you don’t know who is relating to you and who is gaming you. The whole marketing scheme is to relate at whatever level of sincerity you can muster, but the truth is we’re all tweeting for a piece of the worm: “notice me”, “notice me”. Those wanting to sell something must act like they don’t want to. Paraphrasing Keats, “If I seem not to care, perhaps I may catch a trout”.

It’s like we want to believe that life can manage itself, that the right opportunity or contact (or trout) will come along, that destiny will win out…but doesn’t it need a little help?

Bottom line: I already have enough tweets going by in my brain, and adding more is, well, adding more. Yes, you need to let people know what you have to offer; yes, communication is good; but at the same time, ego can get in through the smallest crevice and distort things.

Life can bring the right opportunity along via Twitter as well as any other means, but if I try to make that happen…it doesn’t.