Tag: conversation

086b – the kiki bouba effect in conversation

kiki: sharp, precise, particular

bouba: loose, round, soft

I’ve always been a little Kiki when it comes to.. most things, really. I was reminded of this while talking to a close friend of mine. We’ve been pretty close for almost a decade now— suffice to say we know each other pretty well and have talked about various things under the sun. We were reflecting on our friendship and relationship a bit, how it has evolved etc and something that came up was a difference of ours. This is one of the few differences that has persisted over the decade— he’s a little bit Bouba and I’m a little bit Kiki. 

In conversation, I tend to be quite Kiki. I’ll always be the one thinking-frowning at words that I don’t think fit very well and at generalisations and at vague descriptions of problems and (although this is unrelated) unsolicited advice. 

With some people, this results in great things, we collaborate to find words that fit better, we learn a little more about each other every time we strike off a generalisation and discuss how the generalisation may not apply even to us as data points, and we get closer to the sub-problems that we’re interested in talking or thinking about. (Even if that problem is a very simple and mundane one, like where should we hang out the next time we meet. Side note on calling this “open question” a problem is pretty Bouba of me but ah, well.)

So anyway, I suppose these people are equally or more Kiki than I am and so they’re okay with deep-diving into precision ABOUT the things I want to get more precise about. 

What happens when you talk to someone who’s not as Kiki about the same topics as you are, then? I am often met with resistance. They give me reactions like “ah, well you know what I mean don’t you” or “why are so fixated on x y z when that was clearly not the point of me talking about a b c” etc. And I’m okay to take that feedback, I think I’ve gotten a little bit better at being a little more Bouba with different people in different situations. Like yes, maybe sometimes being pedantic is really just coming in the way of transference of feelings. In a way, when I’m pedantic when the other person doesn’t want me to be, there’s of course a disconnect that they might feel. They might feel misunderstood, or like they’ve said— they might just feel like in the moment I (the listener) might be focusing on the wrong thing.

This makes sense. For people like me then, it becomes important to discern when there is a “discussion” or a “debate” happening, and perhaps when it’s just feelings being shared. 

But what about when Kikiness is actually really useful? How do I communicate that to people? Like there are some people who are so Bouba that they get defensive about any examination of the things they’re expressing. 

Maybe it does just come down to discernment. One of my friends does this pretty well, he might say: “I disagree with the use of the word XYZ here, but I know what you mean”. And then if I want to open a thread there, we can do that. If I don’t, we carry on with the original conversation. 

I don’t know, I thought I was going to go somewhere with this, I really wanted to make a case of “when can being Kiki be useful”, but I’m gong to test out my discernment theory a little more in conversation from now on and then see where that takes me. 

085 – a break from doomscrolling

Happy with deactivating Instagram to be very honest. I’m realising it’s actually quite a waste to have your thought-process interrupted by social media. Of course, not all thoughts are interesting or useful, and I’ll be mindful of that, but from the chatter often come very interesting things, and that’s part of the skill-building I imagine, to find interesting things from a bunch of the noise. But for that I need to learn to tame and sort through the noise, not just quieten it down every time it starts to build. 

I’m also happy with a little bit of the abundance mindset dating I’ve been doing (or trying to do lately). Simply put, dating more than a single person at a time. It’s really the only way I can emulate secure attachment at the moment. 

Really want to get better at structured writing, or long-form writing, ie tying multiple related thoughts into a singular thing. I’m pretty meh at that right now. I used to think I have a lot of thoughts running through my brain ALL the time, but lately I feel like half of them are literally useless. I guess this is okay to realise, maybe that’s what growing up feels like. Or maybe that’s what a lot of word-vomiting allows me to get to. That I’m not as interesting as I thought. (And I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating way). Or maybe, that I need to put in more effort or work or focus-time to mould my thoughts into something “interesting”. Of course, that also opens up the question of what interesting is, really? I think I know this in my heart, though putting it out in words feels tedious, so I won’t attempt to do that right now. 

Something that I’d been mulling over is the amount of time I want to be giving to maintenance of relationships etc, since I sometimes feel like there’s too many relationships to maintain lately and I don’t know if I can maintain them all. Of course, this doesn’t mean I want to “end” relationships or whatever, but just that sometimes it’s hard to make time for too many people in a single week, or a single month or whatever. There’s also that constant quality/quantity debate. Generally, over the last few years, what has worked okay for me is thinking of friendships and relationships in tier-forms. (I know a lot of people think this way and I think that works for me too). That I have some tier-1 friends (inner circle, etc) and a lot of tier-2 friends and then some tier-3 friends, etc. I’d also seen post by Casey Tanner about types of friendships and that was pretty cool as well because then you don’t have to “rank” friends in a way but you can still (for your self) define how important different people are to you. I can’t find the post right now but it was something along the lines of: close friends, lifelong friends, daily friends, dinner friends, party friends, affinity friends, family friends, etc etc”. I do have a lot of “affinity” friends for example. Queer friends, music friends, writing friends, self-growth friends. And these are important connections, but I wouldn’t necessarily hang out with them every week. 

Anyway, I’d been mulling over how much time I can take out for social needs and whether I might just be over-indulging (ie continuing social interactions even after my social needs have been filled) and something I’m realising is that conversation is definitely something that I care about a lot. Conversation, when it goes well, has the power to move me in really unique ways. Conversation also allows me to test thoughts (and ideas) a lot better than anything else does. Sometimes I may have written a very simple word-vomit and even that allows me to be more articulate about my thoughts and feelings in conversation. Even about the simplest things. Basically coming to the conclusion that conversation is a great tool that runs parallel to writing. To that end, I don’t want to cut down my social time too much. I do think it contributes a LOT to creative work and growth, so I think it’s worth putting in the effort into it. And then again of course there’s the whole “you learn a lot of unexpected things from people”. Obviously, time is not infinite, so maybe I can’t just spend all my time with people (and obviously, my introversion will not allow for that either), but three good hangs in a week is something I can definitely strive for. At least for the next few months. I can always reevaluate once (when) I start working. 

I’m up at 9:30 am today and feeling great, even though today’s a pretty chilly day as well. Good sleep, good food, good people around me, I suppose it’s all quite nice. Feeling pretty grateful, too. 

I have a feeling reducing social media will also help me make more time for all the admin tasks I generally detest so much. Man, I’m feeling quite excited about this break! I might be romanticising it a little bit (lol) but I think that’s okay. If the benefits actually turn out to be that good, it’ll be very worth it. The main thing I’m doubting I think is whether it was even an addiction if it feels so easy to “quit”? I’m not sure, I guess we’ll find out. Will have to go back to the open question of understanding the addiction a lot better. 

Alright, that’s it from me right now! Cheers xx