When to Stop Asking “Why?”
A reflection on self-care for the common ethnographer
In a recent office hour with a startup team, I found myself initiating a rather emotional discussion about rejection. You see, the team’s pitch to the executives for funding was just rejected and they had to revisit their prototype and business model. For context, the team is part of an internal corporate innovation unit and is working on the challenge of healthy eating. Ever the empathetic ethnographer-turned-consultant I’m trained to be, of course I asked: how do you feel?
We spent almost half the meeting sharing surprisingly optimistic vibes. The team understood they had an uphill climb. The PM was clearly aware of where to go next. More importantly, everyone made space to simply acknowledge how they feel and collectively turned the rejection into fuel. They all felt the pressure of succeeding but they were also confident that they will prevail.
And I pat myself on the back for asking such a simple yet meaningful question.
The meeting was one of my last that Friday, and I crawled straight into a weekend of hyper-analysing my own work stress and failed relationships, over drinks with trusted friends. I had so many theories of why things felt so difficult in my life right now (even if, objectively, I am fine). At some point between G&Ts and tears, I realized the irony that I never really checked-in with myself in that way. I never just let my feelings hang in the air. I was feeling the pressure of succeeding at work and in life but I have yet to feel that confidence in myself.
I never really asked: how do I feel?
As an ethnographer, my job is to understand the hows and whys of people’s behaviour in a certain context. A big part of this job is to question every significant detail, so that we can explain why people make decisions, how they feel towards certain ideas or products. We then apply our understanding — a.k.a insights — towards making the world that much of a better place, by creating new products, services, and other innovations that addresses some existing or future needs. Simply put, we create value by asking why, why, and why?
The trouble is, sometimes it’s hard to turn off this Modus Operandi. I would unknowingly apply this hyper-curious mindset to non-target users that I meet: un-collaborative colleagues, demanding clients, toxic dates. These interactions, these conversations would more often than not lead to some kind of consequence — a snarky comment, a shortened deadline, cancelled plans — that left me feeling… well, exhausted. But when I have my ethnographer’s hat on, I would wind up excusing their actions.
I know where you’re coming from, I would think, I know why you did what you did, or said what you said to me. It’s fine, I’ll adjust.
Silly, I know, this (almost) involuntary rationalization. I would disregard the fact that these “bad behaviours” and energy-draining actions of others have an emotional impact on me, too. And so, lately, I’ve begun to admit hat I have been ignoring or suppressing my own feelings because I have been giving others the space to be human beings with emotions.
In the past few weeks, I’ve poured myself a metaphorical cocktail of toxic pre-honeymoon phase romance and workplace adjustments. One might call it growing pains, as people generally do, to minimize how much it hurts. And it hurts. I remember days when I just looked at my dinner and felt a knot in my stomach, or when I would lay awake until 4 am grasping at some career goals in the dark. I can recall entire weekends during lockdown that passed by in a blur of naps, books, laundry, TV shows. Actually, it’s rather rejuvenating to watch TV, to put myself into the magical worlds of WandaVision or The Good Place, and not think about me and my own pains.
A common practice in our line of work is to hold debrief sessions — at the end of exercises, post workshops, with our teams after interviews, after presentations. I do this with my teams to improve the ways we host workshops, to debate the merit of meaningful insights, to incorporate feedback from clients/colleagues. It’s a ritual that helps us get better in our roles.
Knowing what I know now, the big mistake I made was taking this lesson a bit too far into my personal life. I reflected and replayed my (biased) memories of the meetings that went awry, the date that felt like a turning point, the presentation that didn’t seem to land, that one text that was met with silence. What could I have done better?
But the more I think about the question, the more it felt like drinking poison: what did I do wrong? Because changing for the better can mean constantly navigating a slippery line between taking charge of our growth and feeling at fault, at all times.
The other irony in my story is that this supposedly new-found understanding has in fact been right under my nose for over a year. Please allow me to take you on this temporal detour.
You see, it was early 2020 (pre-pandemic period) when my good friend and long-time collaborator Yuri Zaitsev visited Thailand to run participatory design workshops in preparation for our speaking engagement at Bangkok Design Week (but also like to hang out and sightsee, I suppose). We wanted to explore mental health in relations to the urban design of Bangkok or, in plainer terms, what exactly about living in the capital that is stressing people out. One working concept we developed was the idea of “crowded” places — bus stops and traffic jams, for instance — wherein any kind of activities tend to yield negative emotions. And there are a lot of these places in Bangkok, as it turns out, hence the poor state of mental health.
Naturally, the ethnographers in us wanted to dig deeper. Common sense tells us that living in a densely populated city is stressful, but that can’t be it —after all, negative emotions are natural, so perhaps it’s something to do with how we deal with them in Thai culture?
Apologies for the leading question, but that is exactly what we explored in the next phase of our work. We created Smile Space to convert our learnings into a physical exhibition-like space and help people deal with urban living but alas the very first wave COVID-19 postponed our plans for in-person gatherings for a bit. So we conducted a few more rounds of interviews for inspiration. And we started to notice our (Thai) stigma of expressing negative feelings comes from our tendency to quickly smile against the bad situations and immediately label them with a particular language, thereby creating “crowded” mental spaces without actually talking about them. We call this language wordisms.
For us, wordisms refer to words or phrases that people use without considering the consequences to our feelings and thoughts; this is particularly obvious in our words of consolation. Phrases like “you’ll find someone new” or “you’ll get over him/her/them soon” for someone who just got out of a relationship. Like “oh, wait til you do [insert future work activity]” for someone stressing out about their career. Like “this, again?” for someone who is trying their best to get over that one thing (it’s hard!). Even when delivered with the best of intentions, these (sometimes inconspicuous) wordisms carry a negative impact for the listener.
So first, Smile Space became a beacon to highlight these wordisms through Instagram to acknowledge the linguistic triggers of our negative emotions and that, yes, the weird way you felt about these phrases are normal. Then, we hosted online and offline workshops (when it was ok to) to help people share the wordisms in their lives and to describe how they felt through storytelling, dance, and Legos (yes, the toy!). We heard stories about parental expectations on a girl’s hair, messages sent and unsent on social media, the unacknowledged efforts of a young dancer, offers to help others to appear polite, and many more emotional stories.
In other words, we made room for people to simply talk about how they feel. That’s it. There was no pressure to question why they felt that way. No rationalizing what others meant to say. No speculation about how you could’ve responded. It’s a long detour but we finally made it: I needed my very own Smile Space.
Fast forward a year or so from Smile Space and here I am: feeling moody and blue and shying away from social interactions (to be fair my MBTI says I’ve turned introverted in recent times). Since the start of 2021, I downloaded an app called Mooda which helps me track my daily mood and gives me the option to write a little journal. Here’s what my June look like.
After many, many, many conversations with friends about my work/dating troubles and some throwback reflection on Smile Space, I can confidently say that I am now ok letting myself feel the feels without asking the whys. This will be just once in a blue June.
So, where do I go from here? When do I let go of trying to understand the other person? When do I actually want to take the actions of others as genuine feedback to change my actions, thoughts? When do I stop asking why?
It sounds like I can only really answer these questions if I am clearly in touch with my emotions. I have to recognize how I feel before I react to or read into that unanswered text message or that ghost of a date or that dreaded scope creep.
If I’m in a good place, then by all means question away and frame the actions of others as opportunity for self-betterment. But if I’m in a “crowded” mental space, then it’s best to let go of the need to always understand and to expend my energy more productively, with friends or TV or elsewhere. This doesn’t mean that I am excusing myself of all faults and walking away from all my life’s problems — it’s just that I need to first feel ok to judge what I should do.
These days I start out meetings after big presentations with a check-in, even one-word share-outs can do wonders. I try to do the same with my team. And I’m making it a habit to reflect on my own, after significant events, whether personal or professional. It’ll take time to get used to this new habit.
As ethnographers, we have to be aware of our feelings too and we have to constantly check in with ourselves because we might not even know when we’ve overloaded our empathy beyond its limits.
I hope you take care of yourself as much as you do others. Find your good place. Be well :-)
A note on Smile Space: You can read an amazingly comprehensive summary of the project on Yuri’s portfolio and you can also view our a video of our gallery exhibition where we showcased our wordisms and workshops outcomes.
