Stay Home Journal 3: Un-Differentiation and Torschlusspanik
But first, Something Relaxing
All right. Before we discuss anything serious, here’s a hedgehog attempting an American Ninja Warrior style obstacle course.
Look at the grace, the persistence, the tenacity. And this from an animal that has really poor eyesight!
I hope this makes you feel a little better.
Un-Differentiation
The essence of a capitalist society is differentiation, specialisation, and prioritisation — and part of that is compartmentalising our different roles at different times of our lives.
In doing UX, we see the amusing side effects of this quite frequently — and this cuts to the very heart of what ‘user empathy’ really means. A startup founder and developer, in his role as the owner of a company, is adamant that his target consumers and users will do things as he has envisioned them to do.
But as a user of other apps and products, he is quick to criticise them for ‘doing things weird’ — in other words, he is pissed that others envision him doing something he didn’t want to.
This happens all the time — it’s not even a matter of ‘designing for them, not for ourselves’, but completely forgetting that what separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ is an imaginary veil we cross multiple times every day. In the office, we are workers. In the restaurant after hours, though, the waiter is now the worker — we are the customers.
But now — with every aspect of life packed into the same space — a sort of enforced un-differentiation has happened. Work is no longer something you separate from the other things through a commute and a uniform or business wear; it’s here, along with ordering on Foodpanda and fretting about having enough wet wipes. On the news, and among friends, there has been a newfound respect for teachers, now that the profession has become the parents’ responsibility too.
Now that we’re having to live everything in one space at the same time, it might not be as difficult to convince ourselves that what we want for ourselves, we should want for other workers or users. Or that, as creators, we cannot divorce our work from the users they’re built for (since we are those users, just maybe not of those products).
Will this allow us to have a wider circle of empathy when we eventually come out of the lockdown? Or will it simply be forgotten as something unpleasant we’d much rather have behind us, when we hurry back into our nicely divided life roles? I’m cautiously optimistic, but only time will tell.
Closing Gates
Speaking of time…
Torschlusspanik is a German word that literally means ‘gate-close-panic’, and it sometimes gets put on those ‘untranslatable foreign words’ lists. But the meaning is pretty clear. It’s the sense that some gate or window is closing, that some opportunity is passing and needs to be grabbed at somehow.
And as the ‘Circuit Breaker’ measures grind on, somehow it is this that I’m feeling intensely. That — whether in terms of the business, or in branding and ‘upskilling’ myself — I’m not using all this free time that’s been given to me. It’s a bit like those viral posts about how we apparently never lacked time, but instead lacked discipline.
And I do get where this is coming from — this need to see everything as a positive, which interprets a circuit breaker or lockdown as a great abundance of time. And what is time for, this idea continues, if not productivity?
And, well, they’re right! It’s just that a lockdown is not just about time. It has also been about limitations; it’s been about lost opportunities and reduced options, and all the stress and grieving that comes with it. That is the real reason why there’s so much time, after all — there’s a lot of things we couldn’t spend time doing even if we wanted to.
This is not to say that good habits have no place while being stuck at home. Exercising, setting up some sort of routine, trying to regularise work as much as possible — that’s all helpful and essential to maintaining sanity. But to inflict Torschlusspanik on yourself and others — and to treat this merely as extra time for extra hustle, rather than enforced limitations that come at emotional cost — is not what we should be doing.
I see the effects of this a lot in interacting with acquaintances these days. There is a lot of talk about what they will be doing, and how there’s just a few more weeks, and how this is a great opportunity to be really busy and GET EVERYTHING DONE. And then, silence.
And you know what? Silence is fine. When you get a whole bunch of hours and days dumped on you by severe restrictions necessitated by a deadly and still mysterious disease, and you don’t fill them all by learning 4 languages and founding the second Amazon, that’s fine. It really is.
Perhaps a better way to think of this time is as a time to help — not just others, but also ourselves. Is the best way to help ourselves now really to be rushing into all sorts of endeavours? It may well be. But if not, then where else can we help? Reaching out to others, perhaps. Reflecting on what in our lives might need tweaking, now and in the future. Or just, you know, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other.
After all, as Laozi said, a journey of a thousand miles…
Wilson is co-founder and content guy at Reassemble, and in these dark days, he would love to talk to you about user-centred design. Sign up here.
