Proposal anxiety
Not the marriage kind
I struggle with proposing things that don’t resolve in a timely manner. Suggesting a restaurant for the night is easy - the group will decide within minutes. Planning an activity days/weeks in advance? That’s more of a challenge.
Sometimes it’s easy, the event filling up within hours/days. But with most things, there’s a slow exponential-ish ramp-up where the outcome is uncertain until right before the event takes place.
Logically, I know that it’s not about me as a person. People attend events based on their own life situation, how appealing the suggested activity sounds to them, and/or the quirks of social media content algorithms. Furthermore, the reactions of other people clearly fall outside my sphere of control, meant to land in the pile of indifferents.
Sadly, my instincts care a lot about these things.1 I fall prey to the fundamental attribution error2, acting like the popularity of my ideas/events is based on other people’s opinion of me.
[…]
I’m noticing myself using the term “popular”, “opinion” etc when writing about this. There’s most likely a connection between proposal anxiety and the prestige-seeking impulse. Prestige-seeking is a way of being. As such, I want to think a bit more about the different “modes” I go into when proposing things.
I have a healthy way of proposing things, where the impetus behind the proposal comes from a genuine wish for the thing itself. There’s also an unhealthy way, where a secondary goal sneaks in: wanting the rush of social success.
A good litmus test ought to be: “If no one wants to join in, and then someone else starts up an identical (but successful) initiative, would I feel the same delight joining in & cocreating the other’s initiative?
Sadly, I think I’d often be a bit grumpy about it. For no good reason!
Besides the litmus test, I want to find an anti-prestige approach. The prestige-mode way of proposing things is confident and cool, not giving away any uncertainty. Inverting that gives us the anti-prestige approach:3
Openly uncertain
Openly in need of assistance
Open with vulnerability
It’s funny how pretty much all my introspective posts boil down to radical honesty, but there you have it.
I think rejection was a bigger deal in the olden days of small-scale tribalism.
Which is just the near-far distinction when you think about it
This kind of approach is way more fun when you don’t know about countersignaling. Alas.