Who We Are Without Applause

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve shared a single word on social media. A friend asked last week what I have noticed in that time. It was a good question and I allowed myself a minute to mull before answering. There are many things, I told her, but the one that feels the sweetest is the lack of affirmation. I have always (Well, maybe not always, but at least for as long as I’ve been noticing how corrosive it is to the human soul to be commented on constantly or graded on for validity by a number of followers or ‘likes.’) been a bit uncomfortable with the metrics side of my work.

Every vocation has metrics, though. Reviews on a plumber’s service or ratings for a restaurant or numbers of data points entered or websites designed. Metrics help us to know whether we’re doing a good job or not. What they don’t always tell us, though, is whether we’re doing good work. Most work is good work in that God has put us here to be fruitful and multiply, to care and cultivate. But there is a nuance to work that gets a little bit sticky at times.

Most of what I know about goodness and work, I’ve learned at the feet of Wendell Berry (his Art of the Commonplace has schooled me more than any other). For instance, while it may be that the work a burger flipper does is good because they work hard at it and provide for their family, it is also not without complication because of the messiness of factory farming, animal cruelty, land abuse, and more. At some point the good work we do here finds its roots in some bad work along the way.

But it’s also true that all bad work has its roots in good work gone awry. This is sin, after all, right? And sin’s effect on all of creation. Our work as Christians is try and redeem each bit of that (literal) food chain until the good works meet one another in the middle. In other words, until there is no room for bad work sandwiched between the goodness of Eden and the goodness of God’s kingdom established on earth.

All that to say, for me, the metrics of being a writer fall in the bad but still redeemable work for me. I don’t like that they exist, I don’t like what they do to the human soul, and I hope we’re moving toward a world where those numbers and hearts and likes no longer say much about the work within. But I also recognize that we can’t redeem what’s not great without stepping into the space a bit.

In answer to my friend’s question, it has been the sweet absence of affirmation that has been so good about the past month. It has reminded me that I write more and better when I don’t have the applause from last time ringing in my ears and running into the applause from this time. Applause is nice, but after a while it becomes just noise.

But it’s also been the lack of affirmation that comes from constant commenting on or with others. I am all for good conversation and great dialogue on all manner of subjects, but pressing back against the inclination in myself to comment on everyone else’s comment or to engage every little iota of disagreement among reasonable and thinking people, has been great for me. I don’t miss Twitter a single bit and miss Facebook even less. There’s a sick sort of savior mentality that creeps around a lot of us in those spaces that manifests as “Just wanted to share a thought…,” but is really masking “If I don’t say it, who will!?”

I guess I don’t have the answer to that question. If all the thinkers and writers and sayers leave the spaces where they think and write and say publicly, I don’t know that that’s a good alternative either. (I haven’t quite figured all of this out yet, in case you couldn’t tell.) What I do know, though, is that regular breaks are better for us than we probably can imagine and we all probably need better disciplines around the ole social media.

I know that I don’t miss the chatter. I don’t miss the sense of always being slightly ahead or slightly behind whatever Big Deal is proliferating the timelines. I don’t miss feeling graded on my thoughts or photos or writings or ramblings. I don’t miss wanting to share an article but wondering if I’m going to get bullied or shamed or applauded for it.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it still live a good and noble life worthy of the joy of the hiker or the home of its inhabitants or the nourishment its roots gave to other roots? That is, can a thing still be well and truly good, without being shared by the masses? Without the whole world weighing in on its goodness and merits?

Am I still a good writer and thinker, even if no one reads? Concretely: is what I’m writing right now any good, even if not a single one of you reads it all the way through? I have always known the answer to that is yes because what the work is doing in me is good, and that makes it good whether anyone reads it or not. It is me inhabiting my humanness and the image of God and that is always good.

The better question I’m asking these days is, “Am I loved by the God of the universe, even if no one notices my existence?” The answer to that is yes, but convincing me of it is a bit more complex. That is part of why we take sabbaticals. Not to vacate from our lives but to shrink back to a human size, to pinch our skin and ask if we are still us after the bloat goes down.

Turns out, friends, of course I am. And I am better for it. And this, more than anything is what makes work good: that when we live as we are and not as our metrics tells we are or ought to be, we’re all a little more healthy, a little more whole, a little more human.

Carroll Clore, Wild Okra