Notions of Everything and Nothing

I previously mentioned significance and influence and their roles in personal identity (and that of things in general). A common problem, however, is that we are confused about what the relationships actually are that define a thing, or what their relative significance actually is. We see the thing as a whole, but have difficulty seeing what it is that makes it what it is.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a solution to this problem beyond mindfulness and variety of experience. If anything, I am about to bring to the surface another confounding factor: attention.

On the one hand, that which is significant demands attention, which makes sense. If a significant relationship that defines me is threatened, I should attend to it–assuming I’m interested in self-preservation, that is. However, it also works the other way around; that which is attended to demands significance.

I’ll say it again a different way: attention increases significance. Well, is this good or bad? As usual, it depends, but given “bad” events (those that threaten me) tend to demand more significance than “good” events, I can honestly say I therefore only tend to attend to those cases in which artificially raising a relationship’s significance is ultimately harmful. Nonetheless, we can imagine both scenarios with a single example from my professional life.

I am having a productive day, being mindful of the significance of each of my tasks and performing them in the corresponding priority with regards to the goals of the company, when the operations officer barges into my office to make a special request on behalf of a client. To the client, this request really is the number one priority of the moment, but to my company, it’s nothing, and actually compromises our goals (evidence that it must be done to keep the client is not forthcoming, even assuming we want to). Regardless, here is the person in charge of operations–the person whose job it is to be mindful of all the internal relationships of the company to ensure everyone is working toward a common goal–sabotaging his own process at behest of a client.

So what just happened? The client got him on the phone and got his attention, and that relationship got a temporary boost in significance. So significant that even reminding him of the network of relationships that constitute the identity of the company, this relationship–this task in particular–glows brighter than the rest, as if the company will fail without it.

Good or bad? Well, bad for us, good for the client. It’s easy to see how you can use this simple observation. If you have goals you wish to pursue, but haven’t because they don’t seem important enough compared to everything else going on in your life, attend to them anyway! See how you feel if you trivialize what you’ve come to think of as significant, and emphasize something else. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” is how William James put it. (Correction mine.)

For better or worse, there is no objective method to measure the significance of the relationships that make you you. Any method of doing so must attend to those relationships and thus alter their significance during the process. The best we can do is use our malleable memory of me-ness to subjectively ask, “Did I like me more or worse before?” But be careful, the you you attend to will seem more you!

Tags: Add new tag, attention, experience, influence, memory, mindfulness, personal identity, philosophy, relationships, significance

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 8:29 pm and is filed under General Notions, Informed Actions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.