Knowledge Evaporation Considered Harmful
4 min read, last updated on 2021-02-20
Clubhouse (joinclubhouse.com) entered the Polish 🇵🇱 market on a very high wave. 🌊 Currently, I cannot participate because I don’t have any Apple-based device (as this application is iOS only at the moment), which builds up FOMO-like symptoms. I thought about it, and this seems irrational - so I want to address that.
Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) and 6 Stages of Accepting Change
FOMO - the fear of missing out - makes you feel bad and hinders your ability to focus on important goals. It’s that gloomy feeling you get when learning that somebody else enjoys something different while working on another thing. It’s that nagging anxiety that is behind your back.
I am sure that you have heard about the 6 stages of accepting change. There are denial and anger, bargaining, depression, revising, deserting and acceptance. Being aware of that is very useful when a very strong emotion irrationally attacks us.
It’s no different with FOMO (😱). In the beginning, I was irate: how are those people having time for that? Of course, there was a denial too (it’s a temporary irrelevant thing), bargaining (I will buy an iPad for that, I always wanted - Nah, you don’t), and so on.
In the end, I have accepted that and realized that I still do a lot daily of more important things for me. So it’s a matter of goal-alignment. If joining Clubhouse would allow me to realize some of my goals faster, I would do it. So here is the answer to the question in the title: I think you need to accept this feeling and then name it.
However, that’s not the end - as I have realized one thing, though.
Knowledge Evaporation
I do not want to diminish anybody’s effort here. That’s actually a great and noble activity that clubbers are doing: sharing knowledge for free and building relationships. In the case of the latter Clubhouse replaces the lack of face-to-face conversations and meetups currently, and that’s great!
However, if the latter makes sense, in terms of the first one, I feel that it is a misguided effort to invest in something … that will disappear. It’s like letting knowledge evaporate. ☁
It’s not only about Clubhouse, but about anything Stories-like - so Instastories, Snaps, Fleets, etc. Those tools have very valid use cases - in some cases, it makes a lot of sense for both sides - producer, and audience - like building relationships. It’s not wrong, but this medium’s temporal nature is hard to grasp for me in terms of knowledge sharing. That’s also a reason why I stopped preparing Instastories on my Instagram account.
But there are some cases when it’s a purely marketing tool to … show off, when a producer shares something relevant to you for free, but then it disappears. Next, you want to recall it, it’s no longer available, but by accident, sharer has a paid product that did not disappear (obviously). It’s is a part of marketing activities.
Side-note: I deliberately say that it’s a part of marketing activities because this is the way how many engineers may perceive all marketing. But that’s not true for the definition of marketing.
Learn in Public
Additionally, the thing that really bothers me is the knowledge evaporation. After reading “Deep Work” by Cal Newport I fully agree that meaningful work needs time and effort to prepare - at the same time, we are sharing this on a medium with temporal nature.
That’s why I do and believe in different things. I do my best to learn in public. Here is the definition by Shawn Wang:
It may require a little bit more effort from me, but it builds trust between you and me, plus gives me a much better control how, when, where content is delivered.
Keep in mind that’s because my goals are different. Who knows, maybe in the future they will change, and I will adopt such temporal media. 😉
For now - I passed - and I will stick to learn in public. 🤓
