I don’t know how successfully I will make this point, but damn if I won’t try, ya know?
I’ve thought a lot about social media since maybe early 2019. I broadly view it as a joke. I think Facebook has become the domain of old white men in Barca-Loungers opining on “The Wuhan Flu” and sharing misleading bullshit, then a few woke liberals clapping back at them. As is common, the far 3% of each side — right and left — dominate the entire discussion, making things seem very fraught. (They’re better than you realize.) LinkedIn? A joke, too. I’ve been on it consistently since 2012. I’ve had a few years where they email me in December and say I’m one of the most engaging users in my geographic area. I’ve gotten work from the platform maybe once. I like Twitter, have made some friends there, but it’s also the one that “can’t monetize” and “gets hacked.” I hated IG when I was on there. It’s all low-context life stuff that somehow we call “Stories.” I never did Snapchat, even though I have a friend who works there.
Well, I started thinking about social more because I was broke for a lot of 2019 — doing better now — and I was using it here and there to try and get work, but I’d always get shamed by people telling me I was “too transparent” or “too open” or “too real.” It was always funny to me because … we always say we want more conversations, more realness, more transparency. But then, when you do those things, people recoil. Maybe it works if a celebrity talks about mental health or an eating disorder, at which point it’s “brave.” A common person? It seems to draw more shame and ire than love and appreciation.
Seems like a disconnect.
So then I started thinking about how many different things in life are very “square peg, round hole” in nature. Not all of them are bad, but there’s a lot of different examples. To wit:
Hiring
I’ve written about this for years and years now, but hiring is largely a broken process rooted in various and non-sundry assumptions about people, competence, desperation, compensation models that are asymmetrical in terms of information, etc. It’s very square peg and round hole at most places. A candidate wants a chance at income, some cool co-workers, and opportunities for growth. An employer wants cheap, young talent that can be developed elsewhere. It’s hard to find big wins in this category.
Confirmation bias
You ever fight with someone online recently? Maybe about masks? It’s a giant exercise in confirmation bias, with sides of availability bias and proof by example fallacy. You can feel like you’re banging your head into a wall trying to convince Big Billy from Oklahoma that masks aren’t a “fascist hoax.” Square peg (logic) meets round hole (belief structures).
Becoming an adult
I’m in a semi-unique position because I went past (“past”) the “acceptable” age for having kids, so I’ve seen a lot of different people have kids, struggle to have kids, and see their friends have kids first. People always shit on me for this online, but I’ll say it loud and proud one more time: Through no fault of their own necessarily, your friends with kids leave you behind. It is just true. It is reality. They don’t have time for you, and when they do (if the geo is local), all they discuss is their kids and how tired they are. It gets a little better as kids get older. Now, I do not fault these new parents and if I ever have kids, I’d expect to be similar. But it creates a very “square peg, round hole” social context for your late 20s and 30s, where x-percentage of people are chasing being young parents, y-percentage are chasing relationships that maybe lead to being young parents, and z-percentage are at the bar. The square peg is often where you fall, and the round hole is trying to make it work with people falling in other buckets.
Management
It’s not intuitive for many people, who are in turn not trained on how to do it and just focus on task mastering instead of people development. Management is the No. 1 reason people leave jobs (far and away, above even compensation by a wide margin) and the main reason management sucks is because it’s just a series of square peg/round hole moments. For example: square peg (I want to know my people better) meets round hole (I cannot be friends with these people because I need to maintain discipline and accountability). Another example: I want to focus on tasks and projects being completed (square peg) but I think I am also supposed to help these people develop as professionals and leaders in their own right (round hole). Remember above all: most managers think they are insanely busy as is — the common answer you get back from any manager to “How’s your day?” is “SLAMMED!” — and they often think they can only do, or prioritize, one thing. Not multiple things. A lot of square pegs win out over round holes in that equation.
Those are but a few examples
Maybe some made sense. Maybe some did not. What I’m overall trying to say is that while life is beautiful and interesting, a lot of it feels like trying to jam together two things that just won’t fit.
Takes?
Ted: So this says it as your lead in: Life is beautiful and interesting, but a lot of times, it can feel like trying to jam together two things that just don’t fit (work and personal). Hasn’t it always been that way from the birth of man, you have work you must do and you have personal you need to do. What I’ve found in my 63 years on this earth is its more about how you approach things than actually what you do. It’s really about “attitude” and how you engage attitude and in a base sense how you get up each morning; with a negative attitude or a positive attitude. As to being in your late 30s and childless many couples/singles others start families in their late 30s even 40s. My wife and I (she is also 63) became parents at 37 and 38 respectively both times through adoption from China. As 63 year olds we now have a 27 year old daughter and a 25 year old son and our 27 year old daughter gave us our first grandchild last summer. So its not too late if you are so inclined.