Let’s come back to post-modern California! If you’ve lived long enough in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in San Francisco itself, chances are you have been ghosted and have at some time ghosted someone else. Have you????? (Note for my international readers - to ghost someone is to simply not respond when a response is the proper civilized thing to do. It is, as you might imagine, rude and disrespectful and being at the receiving end of it is a lousy experience, especially if you have been having the conversation in good faith.) What’s behind this phenomenon? Let’s take a closer look.
Now being rude isn’t a Californian copyright, people can be rude everywhere and ghosting can happen in other parts of the world too. However there is something unique about this California experience that says a lot about the curious pathologies that underly some of the social problems here.
Firstly, it is worth reading this lovely article on Vox that goes into how we make friends and how we lose them in this part of the world. The TL;DR version - we are notorious flakes and the flakiness at some point kills friendship. Why are we so flaky? The author suggests one reason is that we are aspirational. We are always on the lookout for something better and so are quick to drop stuff that we happen to have judged as not cutting the mustard.
What’s wrong with that you ask? Nothing! Hey if you can’t be aspirational in California where can you be? This is the place to pursue your dreams, or so the mythology goes. However like that proverbial second scoop of ice cream that’s going to cause a headache, there is a point when things turn toxic.
For one, we can get stuck in optionality. Why choose something when there could be something better around the corner? If we choose and settle on one thing isn’t it possible we have missed out on this better thing? And so we remain in perpetual search mode, as Zen teacher Norman Fischer noted in his book on coming home.
For that matter, how do we decide if something is sufficiently better enough or even just good enough so we can choose it? For material things it can be easy to know. Your high end Macbook is better than the 200 dollar Chromebook at Best Buy. With regards to people? There it gets complicated.
Throw in a mix and mash of people from different backgrounds raised in different cultural systems that is the demographic composition of California today and it gets even more complicated. Whatever map we may have learned from growing up about relating with people isn’t that useful for this territory.
Add to that the headlong rush our post modern age has made to throw away any remaining cultural guidelines that could be useful and instead place everything up to the individual’s feeling and you have even more complication. Few of us are equipped to navigate such a world with just our feelings. While experience does teach us however we can only have so much experience and even with it we only ever see a small part of the big picture.
Putting it another way, most of us are not very good at choosing when relying our immediate feelings to guide us. Our immediate feelings betray us far more than our popular culture would admit. We end up often just looking for feelings of immediate excitement to be our guide, while a deeper nature of the relations in question might be revealed only after a longer period of knowing.
An interesting conversation comes to my mind. This was during lunch at a meditation center in wine country. The discussion had turned towards marriage and the difference between arranged and love marriages. What’s the rationale behind arranged marriages? Someone suggested that modern arranged marriages(not the old traditional ones) allow the family and the culture to guide the young man and woman to make a good choice, even if the final decision is theirs alone. While here in the West, in California, you are on your own completely.
In a remarkable moment of candor an older woman sitting next to me reflected on her experience and had to admit, she had asked for and had gotten the freedom to make her own choices, unencumbered by any familial and cultural expectations. However she had not been able to choose well. Three marriages and three divorces later, this had become evident. Whatever instinct she had followed to choose her partners, it hadn’t been a good one.
What does all this have to do with ghosting? Get to ghosting please or else this blog will be ghosted! Patience, we are almost there! All of this adds up to say that people relations have this extra degree of ambiguity and grey area that they might not have had before. Then throw in this clincher and you can see why ghosting is so prevalent. Positive psychology dominates here. We have to always be cheerful and optimistic, wildly excited about what we are doing/intending to do. Negative emotions are frowned upon, and being unsure, on the fence, might be even worse.
As you can imagine, this can easily slide into passive-aggressiveness. What do we do if we are unsure about something? Or if we just want to say no? To express any of these emotions is a bit of a social no-no. It is so much easier to ghost, just drop the conversation and pretend it didn’t happen. I realized this myself recently. Sometime last year I had reached out to someone via a message board about something they were offering(details not important). They responded back asking me to tell them something more about myself. I meant to reply, however some things shifted around for me and due to that I wasn’t sure at that moment if I still wanted what they were offering.
How to respond back with a ‘this is me and I’m not sure’? Not easy to do, and I, regretfully, choose the easy way out by just not replying while filing it away in the back of my head that I need to reply ‘at some point’. This mental filing away was my enabling rationale for this social rudeness.
I suspect this is a very common pattern. We ghost a lot here and as they say, as goes California so goes the rest of America and then the rest of the world. In this case however, we certainly hope it isn’t so and this cultural pathology won’t spread. Ghosting isn’t very nice, not only does it feel awful to be ghosted, but also if we are the ones ghosting we are diminished by doing so, our karmic backpack will grow and over time the quality of our relationships will decline.
Let’s then begin the week with a little pay-it-forward to generate good energy. Have you ghosted someone recently? Reach out to them, let them know you are sorry for doing so and ask them to pay this forward to someone they have recently ghosted. Let’s spread some good cheer. Who knows what might happen?