来源：https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/first-we-shape-our-social-graph-then
本文是系列文章的第一篇。
一旦你看到了环境的边界，它们就不再是你的环境边界了。——马歇尔·麦克卢汉（Marshall McLuhan）
子宫内部的样子与7万年前无异，但外面的世界已经改变了。2021年7月，我们的女儿出生时，夜空不再闪烁着星光，而是被钠灯路灯温暖的余辉照亮。身穿绿色衣服的护士把婴儿抱走，往她嘴里输送氧气。这一幕仿佛出自科幻小说：她在一个陌生世界中醒来，没有记忆。浑身涂满黄白色的胎脂，她不知道自己是谁，也不知道自己在这里做什么。唯一基因告诉她的是，她必须迅速弄清楚这一切，否则就会死亡。
我们究竟是如何做到的？
在基因所期待的栖息地中出生的黑猩猩，主要依靠本能生存。而我们却不能。我们必须依赖人类学家所说的“文化学习”。我们必须观察周围的人，找出谁最能熟练驾驭我们所在的文化，并从中提取出他们使用的思维模式。这是一个极其复杂的问题。但我们却能本能地解决它。这正是我们与黑猩猩的主要区别。
正如我在《学徒在线》中所写：
如果你将两岁半的孩子与黑猩猩和猩猩进行比较，他们在使用工具和独立解决问题的能力上大致相当。只有在观察他人并重复其动作时，才能看到明显的差异。
两岁半的孩子只需观察人们在房间中的活动，就能从中提取知识。他们开始渴望周围人所渴望的东西。他们吸收隐性知识，调整自己的方言以匹配同龄群体。经过几年与比自己更熟练的人相处，我们的孩子——这些小小、头骨柔软的生物——除了近身搏斗外，在各方面都能胜过黑猩猩。
这种能力不是你可以随意开关的。你始终在内化你周围的文化，即使你希望自己不会这样。因此，你最好让自己置身于你希望融入的事物之中——精心打造一种文化。
你的文化塑造了你将成为怎样的人
如何召集一群有趣的朋友来交流你的想法？你该从哪里寻找好的影响？如果你想让人们把有用的想法传递给你，你应该产出什么样的内容？
这篇文章是关于“文化策展”系列的第一篇。在后续部分（我将在秋季发送给订阅者），我将详细探讨如何做到这一点。但在这里，我想从宏观角度解释为什么以这种方式看待世界是有意义的——将其视为一个你可以重新构建的网络，从而改变自己。为什么你应该努力塑造自己的文化，而不是其他东西？
这里有一个原因。在过去的几个月里，我阅读了大约30本关于历史上天才人物成长经历的传记（为了一篇即将发布的内容）。最让我震撼的，莫过于他们所内化的文化质量。他们的监护人采用的教学方法千差万别；他们的性格各异；他们精通的学科也各不相同，但他们都有一个共同点：他们每天都与高度有能力的人为伍。
大多数在1900年之前成长为天才的人，通常被隔离于同龄人之外，并在家由导师或父母抚养长大。米歇尔·蒙田的父亲只雇佣会流利拉丁语的仆人，营造出一种古典文化氛围，以便蒙田能用母语阅读经典著作。J.S. 密尔的童年是在父亲的书桌旁度过的，他帮助父亲撰写经济学论文，还经常跑到杰里米·边沁家借书并讨论思想。
布莱兹·帕斯卡也是由他的父亲在家教育。他的父亲选择不教他数学。（父亲艾蒂安对数学有着近乎不健康的热情，他担心数学会让帕斯卡分心，远离那些内在回报较少的追求，比如文学，就像现代父母担心TikTok一样。）帕斯卡不得不自学。当人们发现十几岁的帕斯卡重新推导出了欧几里得的几个证明时，全家搬到了巴黎，以便父子俩可以参与梅森的数学沙龙。这种行为的核心是策展一种文化，而不是单纯地教学，至少不是首要目的。
通过用一个卓越的群体（如梅森的数学沙龙）取代技能较低的同龄群体（如学校里的同龄人），我们可以利用人类内化文化的能力，培养出非凡的才能。
不，塑造你的是你的环境（milieu）
到目前为止，我一直在使用“文化”这个词，但这并不是我真正想表达的准确词汇。我们内化的并不是广义的文化，而是围绕在我们身边的特定影响因素，蒂姆·厄本（Tim Urban）称之为“我们独特的文化交汇点”。有没有一个词能更贴切地描述这个概念？我不知道。但与大型语言模型GPT-3讨论术语时，它建议我使用“milieu”（环境）这个词，听起来很有法式高雅的感觉。我觉得这可以接受。
GPT-3解释说，“milieu”是指包含在你独特联系中的文化。（《韦氏词典》定义为“某事物发生或发展的物理或社会环境”。）与人类学家在谈论“法国文化”或“巴厘岛文化”时使用的“文化”一词不同，“milieu”并不是一个单一的整体。你的“milieu”和你姐姐的并不相同。它是一个不断变化、高度个体化的信息流配置。你精心策划的推特时间线是一个“milieu”，你的朋友圈（这与这个群体中其他人的朋友圈并不相同！）也是一个“milieu”。
通过改变你的“milieu”，你才能改变自己。
如今，策展我们的“milieu”是我们所有人都在做的事情，尽管并非总是有意识地进行。我们的“milieu”不再由我们的出生地决定，而是由我们对朋友和职业的选择决定，并且越来越多地由我们如何训练那些向我们推送内容的算法来决定。我们大多数人尚未完全掌握如何充分利用这一点。
那么，我们该如何做到呢？
环境是一个有向图
在回答这个问题之前，我们需要一个模型，以便能够形象化我们所讨论的内容。
围绕在你周围的环境——它塑造了你，而你也反过来塑造了它——我们可以将其建模为一个有向图。节点是人、物体和思想，它们彼此相连。这个图是有向的，因为你有一些节点向你输入信息，而另一些节点接收你的输出。
你阅读的书籍正在向你输入信息。你的朋友为你示范行为。报纸、工具、你在推特上关注的人，甚至哥特式教堂的建筑结构向你传递宁静感——这些也都是输入。
同时，你也在向其他节点输出信息。此刻，我正在将这些想法记录到我的袖珍笔记本中，这本笔记本会将它们传递给未来的我，而未来的我会将它们传递给你——就在现在。我五岁的孩子看着我一边洗碗一边记笔记，泡沫沾满了双手，她也是我输出的观众，尽管她从中汲取的教训可能与我的原意不同。
正是这种整体的信息流动——流入你和从你流出——决定了你会成为什么样的人。你越是思考这一点，世界似乎就越发奇异。这就有点像在茶壶里撒了一把迷幻蘑菇：你不再是一个独立的个体，而是成为了更大流动的一部分。这就是互联网的逻辑。
正如纳迪亚·阿斯帕鲁霍娃（Nadia Asparouhova）所写：
如果说“毅力”——心理学家安吉拉·达克沃斯（Angela Duckworth）推广的面对挑战时坚持不放弃的品质——是过去十五年中最受关注的人类特质，我怀疑“能动性”——相信自己有能力影响自身处境的信念——可能成为下一代人的决定性特质。
“毅力”是从节点内部的视角来看的。你在与整个网络抗争。而“能动性”则是从网络的角度来看的。你就是这个网络本身。通过改变它，你也在改变自己。
精心选择你的输入
“小心你所阅读的内容，因为那将决定你会成为什么样的人。” ——安妮·迪拉德，《写作生活》
昨晚，当我快要入睡时，音乐制作人里克·鲁宾（Rick Rubin）的声音如同输入信号般涌入我半清醒的脑海。他正在采访约翰·弗鲁西昂特（John Frusciante）。在20世纪80年代，弗鲁西昂特是一位天赋异禀的少年吉他手，在乐队失去第一任吉他手希尔勒·斯洛伐克（Hillel Slovak）于海洛因过量后，他被招募加入红辣椒乐队（Red Hot Chili Peppers）。乐队主唱安东尼·基迪斯（Anthony Kiedis）在采访中提到，让弗鲁西昂特与众不同的地方在于，他有着非凡的专注力（“他能够真正集中注意力，并全身心投入到他的技艺中，使得外界的噪音对他的影响更小”）。
用本文的话来说，这可以重新表述为：弗鲁西昂特对他感官接收的内容有着非凡的自律；他在策展自己的环境方面表现得异常审慎。他的歌曲创作方式是选择一组吉他手，然后跟着他们的录音一起演奏（“我在和那些我希望受到影响的音乐一起演奏”），直到新的灵感开始涌现。他构建了一组节点的星群，并将这些节点传递给他的输入转化为全新的音乐。
里克·鲁宾：你能不能说说对你影响最大的吉他手是谁？这个问题你能回答吗？还是范围太广了？
约翰·弗鲁西昂特：嗯，现在看来，在制作这张专辑的过程中，对我影响最深的主要是弗雷迪·金（Freddie King）、吉米·沃森（Johnny Guitar Watson）、克拉伦斯·加普（Clarence Gape）和莫思·布朗（Moth Brown）。他们都是50年代到60年代初的电声布鲁斯演奏家。此外，杰夫·贝克（Jeff Beck）和吉米·亨德里克斯（Jimi Hendrix）一直对我影响很大，但在制作这张专辑时，他们的影响尤为突出，尤其是杰夫·贝克。[…] 我逐渐意识到，我的演奏风格正在试图弥合一种差距——一边是像杰夫·贝克这样拥有许多非常有趣、富有旋律性和表现力技巧的人，他的演奏让吉他听起来几乎像是在唱歌；另一边则是像科特·柯本（Kurt Cobain）那样的人，尤其是在即兴演奏中，他并不专注于技术本身，而是将大量能量注入乐器中，以一种近乎不顾一切的方式演奏。
与我的那些音乐人朋友不同，他们只是随意即兴演奏和听任何吸引他们的东西，而弗鲁西昂特似乎对自己应该受到哪些影响以及为什么有非常详细的了解。他清楚这些吉他手的演奏风格如何相互关联，并且知道自己希望在这样的演奏版图中占据什么位置。他有一张“吉他手地图”。这张地图不仅按照技巧来组织，还根据他们对他产生的影响、他们为他打开了怎样的创作空间来排列。他调整这个影响网络，从而改变自己的演奏风格。
这项技能——尽管不像他卓越的技术能力那么显而易见——却帮助弗鲁西昂特作为一名吉他手和词曲作者脱颖而出。在许多领域中的顶尖人物身上，你都能看到同样的模式——研究人员、程序员、画家等等。他们通常会花费大量时间思考如何构建自己的环境：与谁互动，学习和研究哪些作品。你也可以用这种方法培养软性价值观，例如通过让自己置身于慷慨的人群中来训练自己的慷慨品质，或者通过与临终者相处来获得更广阔的视角。
你的环境输入到你头脑中的内容，就是你将要处理的内容。它会在你的大脑中雕刻出思维路径。这一点从理论上来说或许很容易理解，但在实践中却未必总能做到。
但同样重要的是，要考虑你正在向谁或什么输出。
“观众”的引力场
在我二十岁出头的几年里，我曾自诩为一名诗人。我能凭记忆完整背诵托马斯·特朗斯特罗默（Tomas Tranströmer）的诗集《波罗的海》（Baltics），并且当皇家戏剧院的一位导演将我纳入麾下，教我如何打动观众时，我开始收到源源不断的邀请去朗诵我的诗作。
这一百多场朗诵会对我的影响深远。我有一种倾向，那就是模仿我的“观众”的偏好，我认为这种现象非常普遍，无论是在日常互动中还是在舞台上。一旦了解了这些偏好，就很难不调整自己去迎合它们。
努尔·阿尔萨迪（Nuar Alsadi）写道：
“在开口说话前的那一瞬间，我们会将自己投射到听者的位置上，想象他们将如何接受我们即将说出的话，然后调整我们的表达以符合这些预期。这个在毫秒间完成的机制，使我们说出的并非原本想说的话，而是一个经过编辑的版本，这个版本考虑到了——或者说保护了自己免受——听者心理表征中的思维和情感方式的影响。”
由于我受制于自己的诗节，我无法进行这种毫秒级的调整来迎合观众的期望。相反，我不得不深入到这种调整通常保护我们远离的领域。我会袒露内心深处的想法，同时直视某个打哈欠的女性。人们会悄然起身，在我念到一半时离开——而我还必须把句子念完。
随着时间的推移，我变得擅长提前预测这些反应。这改变了我的写作方式，也改变了我自己。我变得精明而世故，写作不再是一行行写在纸上的文字，而变成了一种操控观众的工具。这种塑造本身并没有错。问题在于：这个特定观众的“引力场”与我的伦理和美学并不一致——他们的期望把我拉离了思想需要去的地方。为了迎合他们的笑声和泪水，诗歌变得空洞了。
为了写出我应该写的东西，我必须找到另一个观众。然而，由于当时我还不懂得如何策展自己的环境，这意味着我不得不在很大程度上度过近十年的孤立时光。那是一段黯淡但必要的时期。即使现在，已经找到了你们，我也需要时不时地回归那种孤独。否则，我会迷失自己。
分布式的学徒制
让我以稍微不同的方式来表述我在本文中所说的内容。你想要创造的是一种分布式学徒制——学习如何成为你自己这门艺术的学徒制。你需要组建一套可以观察和模仿的影响源，以及能够为你提供反馈的同伴和导师，以帮助你更好地与自我模型相契合。
我们适应环境的本能是复杂的。它常常会误导我们。如果不加以深思熟虑，我们最终会内化那些对我们无益的行为和价值观。然而，这种本能也可以成为一种优势：通过主动策展你的“观众”，以及你允许进入感官的信息，你可以利用这种顺应本能为自己服务。你可以创造一个将你拉向理想方向的环境。
这一过程的第一步是找到正确的影响源——那些你希望融入自身的人和思想。如何以非随机的方式做到这一点，将是本系列下一篇章的主题。
此致亲切问候，
亨里克（Henrik）
全文总结：策展你的环境，塑造自我
总述
本文探讨了环境（milieu）如何深刻影响个人的成长与自我塑造。作者提出，我们并非被动接受外界文化的影响，而是可以通过主动选择和调整自己的环境，来引导自身的发展方向。这种能力被称为“策展文化”或“策展环境”，它是一种分布式学徒制，帮助我们内化有益的行为、价值观和技能，从而成为理想的自己。
分述
环境对人的塑造作用：
我们的环境（milieu）由人、思想和信息流构成，是一个动态的有向图。输入的信息（如书籍、朋友、文化等）会影响我们的思维方式，而输出的内容则反映我们的行为和思想。
通过观察和模仿周围的人，我们可以内化他们的知识和行为模式，这是人类区别于其他动物的重要特质。
主动策展环境的重要性：
如果不加选择地接受环境的影响，我们可能会被拉离自己的目标，内化不符合自身伦理和美学的价值观。因此，必须主动筛选输入源（如阅读内容、朋友圈）和输出对象（如观众、反馈者）。
例如，音乐家约翰·弗鲁西昂特通过精心挑选吉他手作为影响源，构建了自己的音乐风格；而作者在年轻时因迎合特定观众的期望，导致创作变得空洞，最终通过孤立自己重新找回方向。
如何策展环境：
找到适合自己的影响源（如导师、同伴、思想），并通过观察和模仿学习他们的优点。
主动调整输出对象，确保他们能够提供有价值的反馈，帮助你更好地契合自我模型。
总结
策展环境是一项需要深思熟虑的技能，它不仅关乎如何选择输入和输出，还涉及如何利用顺应环境的本能为自己服务。通过找到正确的影响力并构建一个支持性环境，我们可以将自己引向理想的方向，实现自我成长和价值的实现。这不仅是个人发展的核心，也是区分人类与动物的关键所在。
原文
First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us
This essay is the first of a series. Here is part 2, part 3, and part 4.
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
Marshall McLuhan
The inside of a womb looks as it did 70,000 years ago, but the world outside has changed. In July 2021, when our daughter was born, the night sky didn’t light up with stars; it was lit up by the warm afterglow of sodium street lamps. Green-clad women carried the baby away, pumping oxygen into her mouth. It was like something out of a sci-fi: she had woken up, without a memory, in an alien world. Smeared in white-yellow fat, she didn’t know who she was nor what she was doing here. The only thing she knew, genetically, was that she needed to figure this out fast or die.
How do we ever do this?
Chimpanzees, who are born into the habitat their genes expect, get by largely on instinct. We cannot. We have to rely on what anthropologists call cultural learning. We have to observe the people that surround us; we have to figure out who among them navigates our local culture best and then extract the mental models that allow them to do so. This is a wicked problem. But we solve it instinctively. It is the main thing that sets us apart from chimpanzees.
As I wrote in Apprenticeship Online:
If you measure two-and-a-half-year-old children against chimpanzees and orangutans, they are about even in their capacity to handle tools and solve problems on their own. Only when it comes to observing others and repeating their actions is there a noticeable difference.
Two-and-a-half-year-olds can extract knowledge from people just by watching them move about a room. They start to desire what those around them desire. They pick up tacit knowledge. They change their dialect to match their peer group. And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat.
This ability is not something you can turn on and off. You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.
Your culture shapes who you become
How do you summon an interesting set of friends to bounce your ideas off? Where do you look to find good influences? Which types of output should you produce if you want people to route useful ideas your way?
This essay is the first in a series about culture curation. In later parts (which I will send out to subscribers during the fall), I will go into detail about how to do this. But here I want to give a high-level view of why it makes sense to think about the world in this manner—as a graph you can restructure to change yourself. Why should you put effort into shaping your culture, rather than something else?
Here is a reason. Over the last few months, I’ve been reading about 30 biographies on the upbringings of historical geniuses (for an upcoming post). What has struck me, more than anything else, is the quality of the cultures they internalized. The pedagogies their guardians employed differed radically; they had differing temperaments; they mastered different disciplines, but they all had this in common: they spent their days around highly competent people.
Most who grew up to become geniuses, pre-1900, were kept apart from same age peers and raised at home, by tutors or parents. Michel Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, curating a classical culture, so Montaigne would read the classics in his mother tongue. J.S. Mill spent his childhood at his father’s desk, helping his father write a treatise on economics, running over to Jeremy Bentham’s house to borrow books and discuss ideas.
Blaise Pascal, too, was homeschooled by his father. His father choose not to teach him math. (The father, Etienne, had a passion for mathematics that he felt was slightly unhealthy. He feared mathematics would distract Pascal from less intrinsically rewarding pursuits, such as literature, much like modern parents fear TikTok.) Pascal had to teach himself. When it was discovered that Pascal, then a young teenager, had rederived several of Euclid’s proofs, the family relocated to Paris so father and son could participate in the mathematical salons of Mersenne. The instinct was to curate a culture, not to teach, not primarily.
By replacing a peer group that is low-skilled (such as a peer group in a school) with one that is exceptional (such as Mersenne’s mathematical salon), we can leverage our human capacity to internalize our culture to foster exceptional talent.
No, it is your milieu that shapes you
I’ve been using the word culture so far, but that is not the exact word for what I am gesturing at. It is not the wider culture we internalize; it is the particular set of influences that surround us, what Tim Urban has called “our unique cultural intersection”. Is there a word for this? I don’t know. But discussing the terminology with GPT-3, a large language model, it suggests I use the word milieu, which sounds sophisticated in a distinctly French way. This I can live with.
A milieu, says GPT-3, is the culture contained in your unique set of connections. (Merriam Webster’s dictionary says “the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops”.) Unlike the word culture, as anthropologists invoke it when they talk about “French culture” or “Balinese culture”, a milieu is not a monolithic thing. Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
Curating our milieu is something we all do these days, if not always consciously. Our milieus are no longer determined by where we were born, but by our choices of friends and careers, and, increasingly, by how we train the algorithms that feed us content. Most of us have not yet developed the know-how to fully leverage this.
How can we do that?
A milieu is a directed graph
Before we can answer that question we need a model so we can visualize what we are talking about.
The milieu around you—which shapes you, and which you shape in turn—we can model as a directed graph. The nodes are people and objects and ideas connected to each other. And the graph is directed because you have nodes that send you input and nodes you send output to.
Books you read are sending you input. Your friends modeling behaviors for you. Newspapers. Tools. People you follow on Twitter. The architecture of a Gothic church beaming serenity into you—that is input too.
At the same time, you are also sending output to other nodes. Now, I am sending these ideas into my pocket notebook, which will send them to my future self, who will send them to you—now. My five-year-old, watching me jot down the notes, my hands foamy from the dishes, is also an audience for my output, albeit the lesson she draws is another.
It is this overall flow, into you and out from you, that determines what you become. The more you think about this, the stranger the world seems. It is a bit like dropping a handful of magic mushroom in your teakettle: you cease to be a separate self, and become a part of the larger flow of things. This is the logic of the internet.
As Nadia Asparouhova writes:
If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation.
Grit is the node’s eye’s view. You are struggling against the graph. Agency, on the other hand, is the view from the graph. You are the graph. By changing it, you are changing yourself.
Curating your input
Be careful what you read for it is what you will become.
—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Last night, as I was falling asleep, the music producer Rick Rubin was beaming input into my lucid, semi-awake mind. He was interviewing John Frusciante. In the 1980s, Frusciante was a prodigal teenage guitarist who was drafted to Red Hot Chili Peppers when the band lost its first guitarist Hillel Slovak to a heroin overdose. Anthony Keidis, the lead singer of the band, remarks in the interview that what sets Frusciante apart as a guitarist is that he is uncommonly undistractable (“he can really focus and concentrate and apply himself to his craft in a way where the noise of the world has less of an impact”).
In the words of this essay, this can be rephrased as: Frusciante has an uncommon discipline about what he lets into his senses; he is uncommonly deliberate about curating his milieu. His mode of writing songs is to select a set of guitarists and play along to their recordings (“I'm playing along with music that I'd like to be influenced by”) until new ideas start to emerge. He arranges a constellation of nodes and channels the input they send him into new music.
Rick Rubin: What would you say your biggest guitar influences are? Can you answer that question? Is it too wide?
John Frusciante: Well, right now it seems like throughout making this record, the main people for me were Freddie King, Johnny Guitar Watson, Clarence Gape, Moth Brown. These are all electric blues players from the fifties and early sixties. And then Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix have always been big for me, but they were particularly big, especially Jeff Beck, while we were making this record. […]
I got to a point where I was realizing that what was happening in my playing was that I was trying to bridge a kind of a gap between someone like Jeff Beck, who has a lot of very interesting techniques that are very lyrical and expressive—making the guitar sound almost like it's a singer or something—it seemed like I was bridging a gap between that and someone like Kurt Cobain, who, especially in his improvisational playing, is not so much about techniques per se; it's about putting a lot of energy into the instrument and playing in a way that has reckless abandon.
Unlike my musician friends, who are just jamming and listening to whatever catches their fancy, Frusciante seems to have a detailed understanding of who his influences should be and why. He knows how their playing styles interrelate and where he wants to position himself in that landscape of playing. He has a map of guitarists. The map is organized by technique but also by the effect they have on him, the kind of songwriting they open up. He tweaks this web of influences to change his playing.
This skill , though less obvous than his considerable technical skills, help set Frusciante apart as a guitarist and songwriter. You see the same pattern with top performers in many domains—researchers, programmers, painters. Often they spend a great deal of thought on how to structure their milieu: whom to interact with, and what work to study and learn from. You can do this for soft values too, training yourself to be generous by surrounding yourself with generosity, for example, or getting perspective by spending time with the dying.
What you allow your milieu to feed into your mind is what you will be processing. It is what will carve the pathways of your brain. This is perhaps well-understood, in theory if not in practice.
But it is equally important to consider who and what you are sending output to.
The gravity field of your “audience”
For a few years in my early twenties, I passed myself off as a poet. I could recite Tomas Tranströmer’s collection Baltics in its entirety from memory, and when one of the directors at the Royal Dramatic Theater took me under his wings, teaching me how to move an audience, I started getting a steady stream of invitations to read my verse.
These one hundred or so recitals had a powerful effect on me. I had a tendency to model the preferences of my “audience”, which I think is quite common, whether in everyday interactions or on stage, and knowing those preferences, it was hard not to shape myself to fit them.
In the split second before speaking, we project ourselves into the position of our addressee, imagine how they will take what we’re about to say, then adjust our communication to fit those expectations. This mechanism, performed in milliseconds, leads us to utter not what we’d intended, but an edited version that accounts for—protects against—the ways that the psychic representation of our addressee thinks and feels.
Since I was constrained by my stanzas, I could not do this millisecond correction to fit my words to my audience’s expectations. Instead, I had to wander far out into the space this correction is normally protecting us from. I would reveal my innermost thoughts and stare into the mouth of a woman yawning. People would quietly get up and leave mid-sentence—and I would have to finish it.
Over time, I got good at modeling these reactions ahead of time. This changed my writing, and it changed me. I became shrewd-cute and the writing became not a line of words on paper but an instrument to manipluate my audience. This shaping is not bad in itself. The problem was rather this: the gravity field of this particular audience did not align with my ethics and aesthetics: their expectations pulled me away from the places my thoughts needed to go. The poems, in conforming to their laughs and tears, hollowed out.
To write what I was meant to write, I had to find another audience, which —because I didn’t know how to curate a milieu yet—meant I had to spend the better part of a decade isolated. It was bleak but necessary. Even now, having found you, I need to return to that solitude from time to time. Or else I lose myself.
A distributed apprenticeship
Let me phrase what I’ve been saying in this essay in a slightly different way. What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. You want to assemble a set of influences you can observe and imitate, and peers and mentors that can give you feedback on how well you converge with that model of yourself.
The instinct to fit ourselves to our milieu is tricky. It often leads us astray. If not deliberate, we end up internalizing behaviors and values that do not serve us. But it can also, in this way, be a strength: by actively curating your “audience”, as well as what you let into your senses, you can leverage the instinct to conform in your favor. You can create an environment that pulls you in the direction you want to go.
The first step in this process is to locate the right influences—the people and ideas that you want inside of yourself. How to do this in a non-haphazard way is the subject of the next part of this series.
Warmly, Henrik