psychology

Madness From The Measure

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m posting this before the 2024 election and everyone is talking about polls. Movements of a tenth of a point garner news stories. Questionable polls flood the zone. Everyone is looking at a few numbers and asking “what does it mean?”

So we know what that means here, I get to talk about the Unaccountability Machine again! If you’re new here, it’s a book on why organizations go stark raving bonkers, which seems pretty relevant now.

One of the many bits of wisdom in the Unaccountability Machine is focus on a limited metric makes an organization go insane. The author is usually talking about shareholder value, which is easily maximized by doing things that don’t actually involve doing useful things. A business can completely undermine itself, especially if it has enough money, and end up propped up by investors while not doing anything. At least until things fall apart.

Going mad from focusing on one number? Sounds a lot like polls doesn’t it?

We’re obsessed with polls, wanting to see the future, to know. Of course these are snapshots in time, and snapshots weighed and changed and tweaked to try to make them accurate. In the end someone asks a few people and then tries to model what their responses mean for the population as a whole. If that sounds vaguely crazy, congratulations, you’re starting to get it.

Trying to get the number right will make you mad, as we’ve seen quite a few times. And you know who I mean.

But also we follow the polls. We want to know what it means, and when you have a margin of error of 2% or more that often becomes meaningless. But boy as we look at those numbers, we all start to go a little crazy one way or another. We’re trying to see the future made by people either lying or trying, but not by those who know.

Watching the number will make you insane as will knowing it may be completely made up.

Finally, yes, there are manipulated polls. It’s been fairly obvious that happens for awhile, but any idiot can call themselves a pollster, and some pollsters are already a few bricks shy of a moral or mental load. So there may also be lots of B.S., making everyone else further crazy.

And then how many of the liars or propagandists are already slamming the kool-aid, believing what they lie about – or knowing they’re lying but not being sure of anything.

I’m really getting all the “nose to the grindstone, get out the vote people” this year. You just ignore the polls unless there are useful extremes and work hard. And boy in 2024, it seems like there’s a lot of weird things where margins of error tell us how much we can do or don’t know so we might as well get to work.

But the magic number tells us nothing, though it will make us and a lot of other people crazy.

What is finally crazy-making is maybe we could actually try to do stuff that works for people in politics. That maybe we need to discuss our poll obsession, or what works. But horseraces make for exciting news and endless amounts of fundraising letters. The news media makes bank on all this, but we keep talking numbers not people.

Which makes it all more crazy.

Steven Savage

Marketing Is An Infection

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Being a creative person who hangs out with creatives, we often discuss marketing – and it’s a popular subject among us as of late. Our reactions have not been, shall we say, civil towards marketing creative work in 2024. Or probably the past decade. Or three. Or our lifetimes.

Something disturbing that has come to mind from these discussions is how marketing isn’t how we sell writing, but how we THINK of writing. If you at all try to market your work, thoughts of marketing will doubtlessly infect your work as you create it. There’s always that voice in your head that takes the books, seminars, and suggestions you’ve experienced and whispers on how to do your writing or art or whatever.

You’re not writing you’re marketing

That voice is actually a constant drumbeat in our culture and we miss how widespread it is. Personal Branding seminars, amazon marketing lessons, endless books on how to write what sells, etc. are everywhere. There’s also blatant how-to-write-for-market books like “Save The Cat” and so on. I’ve even seen it well argued that the Joseph Campbell’s contrived “momonmyth” has so intertwined in culture that it affects our media and in turn our way of promoting it.

As I’ve changed my writing to be more personal columns (like this), art (under a pen name) and small press (under a pen name, look I have many) I’ve been doing more work for myself. To not think about marketing (as much) is not only liberating, but made me see how it infected way too much of my work (and that’s a wide body of work).

It’s a subtle thing, of course. Write an extra career book to help people in the thoughts it’ll help sell my others. Way With Worlds went through many experiments, including one that made me wonder if it was easier as a promotional – when it became my flagship. I vacillated on the plots of my novels to fit various desires, patterns, etc. (honestly, probably why they weren’t quite what I wanted).

How much of my writing has been me and how much has been marketing thoughts? Marketing is an infection that we’re all suffering from.

The ads you’re sick of in your browser are just the blatant, resource-consuming, questionably-targeted, most visible manifestation of marketing Over Everything. Do so many things seem empty? Well part of that is because they’re meant to be sold not experienced. Does your own work feel like checking boxes to it sells?

Now that I’ve stepped into some more for-me creative works it’s fairly obvious how widespread the Marketing Infection is. It also makes me mourn all the things that could have been and may not be but for someone trying to write/paint by the numbers of a marketing guide.

I don’t cast aspersions on people that want to make money at creative work. In fact, trying to “figure out the system” can be its own fun challenge! But we do have to ask if it’s become too much of a driver that shapes our lives and work. We also have to ask how it shapes our choices of what we consume and do.

Because the infection is widespread.

Steven Savage

The Throughlines

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Last week I discussed how I took a long walk where I reflected on my life and choices I realized that, as I drifted back over the years, my choices led to more and more “alien” selves the further back I got in time. At some point the you of the past is unknown territory and you can’t learn anything or relate to them.

Now I’d like to discuss an insight from the same exercise that is not about not who I am, but instead very much who I am.

To recap, at one point in my life I took a walk for over an hour, viewing points of “divergence” in my life, asking where choices may have led down different paths. Sometimes I realized that choices would take me so far away that I’d be a complete different person. However throughout this exercise I saw something else, I saw what I call the “Throughlines,” common, consistent parts of my life.

Throughout the many mes there were consistent patterns in my life, weaving not just the life I had now, but most of the possible ones I could see. There was me now, the mes’ I could have been, and behind that were certain, nearly omnipresent elements. I vaguely call them “Throughlines” because they are consistent over time.

I have always been a writer, and rarely go longer than a year or two without some writing project. I never became the fiction writer I once half-heartedly comprehended as a teen, but I am a writer. My past “maybe selves” included technical writing, grant writing, and science writing. Writing is a Throughline, a deeper me.

I’m always an organizer, always having a plan, always having a project. I ran RPG groups and zines, planned software, and more – it’s no wonder I became a Project Manager. Whatever choices I made in my life, I know I’d have been the guy with a scheme. Planning is a Throughline, a deeper me.

I bring people together, it’s the organizer in me. I’m the guy behind the movie night and the writing club, the gaming group. I love to network people so they can come together, and it’s visible in my past from where I was nearly an administrator for an anthropology department, all the way to team building now. Networking is a Throughline, a deeper me.

There’s other Throughlines of course, from my love of theology to the fact I always return to doing art (even when I’m not good at it). You get the idea, somewhere among all the mes I could have been, probably even the ones so strange I couldn’t imagine them, there were these Throughlines. There’s a me under all the me’s.

In fact, I could see times where I could have ignored my Throughlines, tried to be someone I’m not. I can also see how I would have been miserable. For instance, for those who know me, try to imagine me as a humorous corporate IT ladder-climber – had I gone that direction I’d have hit midlife crises two decades early.

As I noted last time, I invite you to try this exercise. Give yourself at least an hour to walk somewhere pleasant and work backwards through your life, asking who you’d have been with different choices. It’s not just a way to ask about different yous, you might just find out more of who you are, even if you’d have been someone different.

There’s a you behind the yous. Go on, get to know them.

Steven Savage