Let’s have a chat
As a Community Manager at Inspire9, one of my daily tasks is to give people tours of our coworking space. This morning I provided a tour to a writer, who asked me about our opening hours, and the possibility of accessing it outside the 9–5 window.
“Not a problem, do you work on weekends?” I asked, upon which he answered: “I don’t work. Not to sound sassy, but work sounds like something I have to finish. You will ‘work’ for a very long period of your life, and then right at the end you’ll maybe get the chance to do something different when you’re retired. For those of us who have the privilege of doing something that we’re interested in, we should see ‘work’ as an ongoing project of living, rather than something where we clock off at the end of the day.”
Our conversation made me think a lot about the work I do as Community Manager at Inspire9. In a world where almost everything is measured, reported, targeted, and quantified, finding a middle ground for a role that requires a lot of spontaneity could be challenging.
Newcomers often ask me: “So what do you actually do here?” I tend to jokingly tell them that I do a million different things, which is partly true. I am privileged to enjoy these “tasks”: be it chatting to someone who is having a bad day, organising the cutlery tray, pretending to be in an internet troubleshoot queen, making popcorn, or introducing office dogs to each other.
All of these interactions have a common thread to them in that they are spontaneous, unscripted and unplugged. Although these interactions don’t go unnoticed, they are often unreported or unmeasured.
But that doesn’t make them any less important. These spontaneous, real time interactions remove the distance between people, the distance we’ve gotten so used to with our digital lives. Texting, emailing, and posting on social media provide us with the opportunity to present ourselves in a way that we’re comfortable with, because it allows us to edit our presence — a presence we can switch off when we go home from “work”.
In a world where our corporate culture values communication that is scripted (how many emails or tweets did you conquer today?), do we ever stop and think about how distant we have become to each other and to ourselves? In my previous email-heavy role, I remember feeling really stressed out when I actually had to call someone (how ridiculous!). However, I also remember how lonely I sometimes felt. This has completely changed since I started working/living at Inspire9, where it’s my job to talk and listen to people. For an introvert like me, having a conversation is a skill that took some practice, and a skill that I can — and always should — strive to improve.
It might be a bit crazy to say, but in a future where AI will be writing all our emails for us and where we’ll employ robots to manage our digital profiles, maybe the real valuable skill we can pass on to generations to come would be how to have a conversation. IRL.
