Transcript
Hello and welcome to another DailyJim—it is May 4th 2022, or as it is becoming customary to say on the internet, May the fourth be with you— which is a pun from Star Wars. If you're not familiar with the Star Wars series, I strongly suggest you check it out, at least the original three, which are actually episodes, Uh 4, 5 and six I believe anyways enough about Star Wars, I'm recording this again at about 11:40 PM, but it's okay today, I feel a little more excited to talk about a topic that is not just about what time of day I'm recording the episode.
Today, I want to talk a little bit about how I, y ou know, how much I keep telling my friends that have a lot of fear of putting myself—I don't know if putting myself out there on the internet is the word—but really to be more open, more public on the internet and, I was thinking about it in the car quite a lot today and thinking about it and reading some papers and stuff, you know. When I reflect on it, I think, you know, I think that I go back to when I started working on an app called, iFeelio, whic would have been 2012. Wow, 10 years ago. And I think one of the main purposes of working on that app for me, at least the story that I continue to tell myself is, that I wanted to get better at being honest with myself, and being more open and honest with what was going on with me about how I was feeling, so maybe in the future so that I could be more open and honest with others. But the main purpose was to be more open and honest with myself. And then I found out after working on that for a couple of years that I started teaching a class called emotional self defense. And I think one of the ideas with emotional self defense was how do I protect myself in interactions with others? How do I defend my own intentions and how do I almost become more open and honest with them and maintain that openness and that honesty in my interactions with other people, But typically more one on 1. It came a lot from kind of romantic situations I was in, but it was still more kind of in person, one on one Um two way relationships.
And I've been thinking about why I've been somewhat stuck over the last couple of years, I'd say, I mean I'm trying to take the words of advice from my friend and remember that it was a pandemic. It is a pandemic and to have a little more grace for myself for this time, but at the same time I'm just wondering what, what, why else have I been stuck? And I think that fear of being open with the public is, About going to the next step and the next step is not about having the relationship with myself, not about having the relationship with one other person 1-1 but having a relationship with many people at the same time or a one to many relationship.
Or another way to put it is um, there's a concept, I'm not sure if you've, you're familiar with it, but it's called para social relationships and so it's gaining a lot of attention these days. Um, as there are more people who are on Youtube or Tiktok, um different social media influencers, twitch streamers and stuff who para social relationship is kind of like a one way relationship. It's the person who is the fan who is sitting at home and feeling very close to the person who is on Youtube or Tiktok and feels, believes that they have a relationship with that person almost like that's my friend, you know, I watch them every day. Um, I watch them from the comfort of my own home. I know so much about them, they know so much about me, but the problem is the influencer doesn't know too much about the person on the other end. And so it's a very one way relationship and just been exploring this concept a little more and trying to. I think that maybe this is the next frontier for the work that I've been doing is not only how to get more honest with myself, more open with myself, but not about how to get more open with other people, one on one and honest with them, but how to do so on a much larger scale when it's not a two way relationship, but a one way relationship, where I'm opening up and broadcasting it away to other people and not knowing how they're going to receive it and not ever being able to maintain relationships with all those people. And so I think this is really the new frontier that I've been pressing on and probably why it's causing me so much fear because there's so, so much bigger, there's so many more unknowns in a way. But I guess this is part of the experiment, is to record these episodes and put them out into the, into the ether, the ether of the internet and just see how it goes. And well, we'll see. So this is part of the experiment and I'm grateful for you to be joining me on this journey.
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