As pre-context for my response to the topic here stirred up (once again) by Granny’s indelicate wording and decidedly victim-oriented diatribe, I will readily admit that this site cannot be all things to all people. Nor does it aspire to be.
The good news is that I am immune to the demand that I be all things to all people. That was never my goal, nor my desire in life. I speak to those who can hear and are ready to hear. Those people are my tribe.
Further, our tribe consists of people who readily do whatever work needs to be done, when it needs to be done.
They don’t loudly proclaim that the floor needs sweeping, they don’t angrily demand that the seminar leaders sweep the floor beneath their lifted feet, they quietly grab a broom and start sweeping the whole room. They do this because they noticed the floor was not to their standard of cleanliness. They do it because it needs doing, not with the hope that someone will notice and lavish praise upon them.
This is a character trait in some people and, in my experience of life, these are quite often the most conventionally successful people. They build businesses, relationships and communities.
Lately I have found Granny’s signal-to-noise ratio to have slipped well below the level that adds to this community. At best her outbursts provide a platform for having a teachable community moment, but otherwise I find them divisive, and distracting.
On balance I find this thread is poorer for this conversation, even though, as with every grenade-tossing event, there are some harvestable fragments.
westcoastjan said:
I read A LOT of websites. It is rare to find the kind of civilized discourse that is found here. It is also rare to find a community like this that has the kind of long term connection among members that we have here. We can't let TPTB win by the divide and conquer they use successfully just about everywhere.I agree Jan, this is a rare online community. It's a treasure and worth preserving. But I don't believe it's TPTB at work here creating division. In this particular instance this is just Granny's style. It's who she is, it's who she's been, and therefore it's who she is going to be in the future. I have detected exactly zero moments of self-reflection on Granny's part where she came back after an outburst having thought things through and owned any part of it. It's always someone or something on the outside that she finds abrasive. Every push-back to her style is met with a wall of JADE-ing (Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain) and/or wildly inappropriate deflection ("Oh, this is just men beating up on women again!") I can state this with certainty; if Granny is the same in person as she is online she wouldn't last long as a member of my physical community. We're all doers here, all hard workers, and we accomplish incredible amounts each day without complaint. We own our failures and we don't demand more free labor from others to meet our personal needs. As Gottman's work pointed out, a good relationship has a minimum of 5 positive encounters for every negative encounter or 'corrective' bit of feedback. I am acutely aware of Granny's displeasure at my choice of free content. I am very aware that she skipped right over the part where I explained I came from very humble beginnings, that I lived on $5/week at one point in my life, and that I worked very hard to get where I am. All of which I understand as her prior wounds and so I don't take that personally. Still I am in a position of leadership here and I care deeply that the conversations are on track, welcoming, and open-minded. So when I read Granny's latest set of angry posts I cringed, knowing that they would be more repellent than attractive to a newcomer. Creating a safe container for online conversations is no easy feat, and attacking, abrasive tones are the opposite of safe. I'm all for diversity and love being challenged, but I'm also keenly alert to the idea that some people are additive to a group's level of energy and functioning and some are subtractive. Some are nourishing, others depleting. To be honest, once again I came away from Granny's latest outbursts feeling quite deflated and annoyed; not so much properly challenged as inappropriately flogged. Certainly no gratitude was on display, no positives to be found at all in any recent comments. Just a solid wall of complaining. I see Sparky defending that as "just Granny's style" but style matters in life. As surely as Granny has every right to be the way she is, I have a right to decide it's not my cup of tea. This part bears repeating; the offer has been made, quite nicely, and very civilly many times to Granny; if you find content missing from this site, then please create it. Without exception, she has declined every offer preferring instead to pick up the cat o' nine tails and flail away from time to time. I presume the desired effect is to shame/goad Adam and I into creating the sort of content that she wishes to see here. Besides the fact that such an approach is rarely effective in life, were Adam and I to try and satisfy every complainant, it would not reveal a dedication to diversity, it would be a decision to adapt ourselves to someone else's wounding. That never works out over the long-term in personal relationships and it's an especially poor practice for any community that seeks to grow and thrive. Eventually you succumb to the tyranny of tiny wounds, nobody able to say or do anything for fear of setting off one of the many roving land mines. DTrammel said:
I also know from experience the time and effort it takes to write content, find or create photos, or graphs, diagrams or all the other things that go into making posts on complicated subjects. I can't imagine the effort to create videos. I've made posts that took me hours to create and probably took minutes to read. The depth of information that you need to teach all of the skills to live in a world that is economically and environmentally collapsing is huge. Its not just write a few articles and take a few pictures. Its also not something that gets done if people don't step up and contribute. Its awful easy to complain "Why don't you cover this subject more". I've had that complaint a lot of times. My response is always, take the time and effort to research those things that interest you, AND then write it up and share it. But I've had people flat out tell me, "I don't have the time to do that." Too often, people expect others to do the hard work for them.I confess, after being tolerant of "granny's style" for a while, this last one pushed me past an inner line and I am now resenting Granny's failure to appreciate the obvious hard work Adam and I put in here. I work right at the edge of what's humanly possible and give away nearly all of that for free. It's still not enough for her type. It's never enough, which now strikes me as both grating and ungracious. Adam Taggart said:
In the just past week, Chris and I have recorded/published interviews with Sergey Young (technology's promise & risks), Neil Howe (the 4th turning), Grant Williams/Mike Maloney & Charles Hugh Smith (the Fed), five daily coronavirus update videos, and the video above with New Harbor (markets).As a reminder, that content Adam referred to was offered to the world free, free, free, freefreefreefreefree and free. Without properly adding it up that's around 7 hours of video content produced. And that was just in one week. Some people struggle to put out 5 minutes of content a week. To put a humorous spin on it all, whenever people come around to complain that Adam and I aren't doing enough for them, it reminds me of this scene: [embed]https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ[/embed] So here's the deal, my bottom line, I get to choose my relationships in life, both in my physical and my online community. There's no requirement that I put up with depleting sorts especially at the expense of spending quality time with nourishing relationships. This community is best served by those, like DTrammel, who quietly pick up the broom and sweep because that's what needs doing. Everybody should feel free to make any sorts of suggestions about new content. But refusing to do any actual work yourself while telling Adam and I we are not doing enough for you won't get you much besides an invitation to let yourself out. This is a precious community and it deserves our very best selves to show up and contribute. I am grateful for the majority of members who show up, bring their best, and weave the ropes that hold us together. Thanks for listening. And remember, it's possible the Romans weren't all bad.
