Transcript

Bringing community back offline | Ankit Shah | TEDxTeen

[Music] people will forget what you liked people will forget what you commented people will forget what you messaged and people will forget when you called and they will forget what you said and they'll forget what you did but they'll always remember how they made you feel Maya Angelo well kind of I've taken a few creative Liberties to update the quote for 2014 and uh maybe digitally remaster it I figure if Disney can make an episode seven of Star Wars and it's not the worst crime in the world today I want to talk to you about how we can build better Relationships by getting offline inspired by that quote or the remastered version of the quote now we all know some of the some of the common pitfalls of being constantly connected we take our phones out at the dinner table we text instead of calling each other we fact check in the middle of conversations and still we all know that we should stop doing it We complain about how relationships today are deteriorating and we talk and we talk and we talk but we still do it and I'm no exception but the funny thing is I happen to be somebody that talks about this in my day-to-day with a lot of people but I'm still the main perpetrator I take my phone at the dinner table and I'm always sending my last email right before I have to meet somebody today I want to explain a little bit of my hypocrisy why I'm so attached to technology and it's because getting offline is really really hard it's because staying connected to the internet allows me to satisfy three really big addictions that I have and I think a lot of us share the first is to stimulation second is to validation and the third is to control now perhaps I it would be helpful if I shared a little bit about how I spend my days I spend a lot of time in cafes I do all my work on a computer and even though I'm surrounded with people I'm quite alone and sometimes that loneliness does get to me and when it gets to me I'll go on Facebook and the first thing I'll do is I'll be thinking about how I have no notifications there's no red badge in the top right so the first thing I'll do is I'll go to my profile pictures and I'll select an old one and make it new again and I select the make profile picture button and Facebook says Hey an this used to be your profile picture are you sure you want to make it your profile picture again and I say yes Facebook that's exactly what I'd like to do because I want to make sure that people know I still exist and I need them to let me know that they know and they do that by clicking the like button but occasionally occasionally I share a moment that's not out of loneliness but rather because I'm actually trying to share a Part of Me Maybe it's past weekend when I was in New York with my family and maybe it's a picture of us in the living room but the picture pict is not perfectly edited it's not retouched the lighting's a little off and it wasn't taken with an SLR camera it was taken with an iPhone it's not the best picture but the issue is that that picture won't get the same number of likes as that profile picture because the profile picture is so meticulously crafted and what happens is when it gets zero likes you kind of feel like a guy sticking your hand up for a high five and then nobody's actually there to reciprocate it so you'll just kind of put your hand in your hair like it never even happens but that's basically what happens on social media you pretend like these pictures don't actually exist these moments never actually happen they don't matter because nobody said they mattered and maybe they did to you but then they stopped mattering to you because that's the way feedback works when people tell you that what you're doing is awesome you'll do more of that because you feel good about it and when people don't like anything that you have to post then you'll stop doing those things that they're not liking because well why are you posting it in the first place but it's not just posting it's why are you doing doing it in the first place why are you even living do to do the things that aren't going to get validation and it's problematic because slowly but surely for me at least I become the person the internet wants me to be so instead of going to parties because I'm actually enjoying them I'll go to the ones where I feel alienated because that's where the best pictures are taken and instead of being honest when I don't know something I'll actually have to read the article and pretend like I actually know what I'm talking so I can post a Facebook status about this thing that's happening in the world today and I'll post an ALS Ice Bucket Challenge just because well everyone else is doing it and I don't want to be left out it's a struggle because you forget who you actually are you know we all want to be this this individual but it doesn't actually happen but going back to my day today I go to the cafe and I get a little board I've gotten bored of the validation I've gotten my 15 20 likes and I'll go to another Cafe and I'll get on my bike and I live in s s Francisco so I'll ride my bike across San Francisco to a new Cafe I'll have my earbuds on and I'll hit a red light and the light the walking thing will tell me that I have 16 seconds before the light turns green so the first thing I do is I take my phone out and I go on Facebook and I scroll and the first post is a is a cat photo and I scroll a little more and there's another cat photo and then the light turns green and I put my phone back in my pocket and I couldn't send a moment idle I couldn't possibly Embrace San Francisco because it's totally not an interesting City at all the cat photos are so much better and the worst thing about it though is that Facebook gives me those cat photos because it knows what I like because in the past I liked a cat photo and maybe I posted a cat photo on my on my best friend's wall but there's more to me than just cat photos but why is it that Facebook keeps giving me that because it thinks that that's what I want it thinks that that's the person I want to be and there's a problem here because the information that's being given to us on the internet and the people that we're engaging with it's all operating on two really core assumptions that are arguably kind of wrong the first is that we know who we are and the second is that we know what we want and now being that we're all at Ted I'm pretty sure we can all agree with this that anyone who's had an existential crisis knows that they have no idea who they are we're all trying to figure it out we're all trying to become our best versions of ourselves but the thing is we're doing it in infertile soil we're consuming much of the same content over and over and we're being surrounded by people who are all validating themselves with each other but if we were to actually try to discover ourselves we would explore more it's like following a map and you think you know where the x is but you also are pretty sure that you're wrong and you're following this route following this route and the fact that you know you're probably wrong means that any other route is just as right as the one that you're on but you're so focused on that one route that you refuse to actually accept anything else put in more practical terms what that means that we forget to embrace Wonder we forget to be curious and we forget to talk to people that we might not otherwise cross paths with we don't actually explore beyond our own territory even though the point is to figure ourselves out and for me that becomes the guy that pretends like he actually blows his nose every single time instead of actually picking it and that's not actually true because I do take my nose here and there and that becomes me saying that I'm enjoying what I'm doing just because I posted on Facebook and it got a lot of likes but maybe that's not actually what I like to be doing maybe I'm just posting it because well there's a large number right under the photo and when I was a senior in undergrad I was placed in really really fortunate Serv circumstances my last semester of college I only had two classes left of my requirements and when I'm normally taking five classes having two classes means I have a lot of time to do nothing and it is awesome and then on top of that being a last that last second semester senior you have well no attachment to what's about to happen afterwards you're about to leave this school that you're not going to see 99% of the people afterwards anyway so you become a lot less attached to this contrived version of yourself that you've been creating for the last 3 and a half years and you start thinking about how well you don't really care so for me in a moment of in a moment of Reckless inspiration I made a website in my senior year and I called it let's get tea and the premise was very simple it just said if I don't know you yet let's change that I figured I would solve my boredom by using what was actually available to me and wouldn't be within the next two months the people around me and this website was kind of ridiculous I'm I'm half embarrassed and half utterly amused looking back at it because there was a section of the website where I wrote all the things we could possibly talk about and it read like a giant paragraph of everything I would never post on social media because I was way too embarrassed to actually post it but things that were very true to me these were the things that that got filtered out in the controlled contrived version of myself online and the thing is it resonated with people and if boredom and the Curiosity that stems from it and a lack of regard for the contrived donet is what it actually took for this to happen that existed plentifully when I graduated and moved out to menow park and if you've ever been to menow park you know that unless you're pitching to venture capitalist there's really nothing to do there at all and I didn't know anybody there so I had these same exact circumstances right after I graduated so I built another version of the site and it worked and a lot lot of people signed up and over the course of the last year I've brought together over a thousand people to sit together in small group conversations and I learned a few things but before sharing what I learned it might be helpful if I shared what actually took place when I got to you at strangers I would bring people together in small groups of five and we would agree to sit together for two hours and often times it would go well over there was never any predetermined topic of conversation and there was no curation of who actually showed up you just talk about whatever came up and whoever showed up was whoever signed up for that particular time the goal wasn't to make friends the goal was just to have good conversations and sometimes friendships come out of that and sometimes not and as the host my responsibility was just to organize Logistics and set the tone of the conversation and I did that by giving people a hug when they walked in and I did that by asking people questions when I didn't know what was going on and I did that by unhi expressing my own thoughts and letting people know that they could do the same and what happened was amazing people of all breeds came as young as 16 as old as 72 dancers Nomads techies and billionaires people who had risen up from insurmountable challenges and people that didn't even know what challenge even meant some people who had been pursuing their lives with passion and some people that were still trying to figure it out and you would think that eventually these conversations got stale eventually after five people 50 people 100 people 500 people you would get a little bit bored but that's only true if the common denominator amongst all these conversations was a topic but that wasn't the case the thing that brought everyone together was authenticity and that's not a topic that doesn't get stale because being authentic is what makes makes us relatable when we're able to actually share our stories and ask people questions and listen to one another what we realize is that none of us are actually all that different we all have fears and we all have motivations we all have things that we're very proud of and we all things that we're awfully scar awfully scared of moments of absolute ecstasy and moments of utter despair cultural upbringings and family relationships things that bring us all together but you'll never find that out unless you actually create an environment where you can actually talk about them because hell I don't even relate to the contrived version of anet and I know that I don't relate to the contrived version of you or the contrived version of you or the contrived version of you but the thing is we put those up because it's the easiest we put those up because it gives us the most red badges on the top right corner of our web browser but what would happen if you could actually create an environment that allowed itself to allowed people in the environment to become authentic environments where it was a common assumption that we were going to try to ask questions a common assumption that we were going to try and be honest with each other try and be curious and explain the fact that we don't understand what we're actually talking about and we would also maybe even be honest about the fact that well when we're about to judge somebody that maybe it's unfair like hey this might be projecting something on you and maybe I'm assuming something but you let me know what you think and just see how people react in that space and what you find is that well that common denominator of authenticity kind of Rises and it becomes so apparent that we're not actually that different and that was actually what started happening when I brought people together for two with strangers and interestingly enough it also satisfied all those addictions I was talking about earlier my addictions to stimulation my addiction to validation and my addiction to control except stimulation instead of coming as an espresso shot of a buzzfeed article would come as a slow drip coffee of a story from someone else and that story would also serve as a form of validation because when I tell you a story and when you tell me a story we're not just exchanging that we're exchanging a listening ear which is the highest form of validation because you're giving what you're getting and the sense of control that we all seek becomes kind of a moot point because we're all strangers and we know that we're no place to make preconceived notions about one another and none of us actually know what's going on so when nobody has control well everybody has control but the thing is about this is that social media if you compareed it to a slice of pizza would make real life authentic interactions the runners High a slice of Pizza is so much easier and it's so much more satisfying and it's well delicious but you always feel a little bit guilty after and you're always thinking maybe I should go on a run now but running sucks because you have to sweat and you have to breathe really hard you just put your running shoes on everything about running is miserable until the end when you're like wow I just did that and I'm feeling really good about myself but just the same way that it's easier to choose a slice of pizza over choosing a run it's really a lot easier to just change your profile picture than it is to call somebody up and say hey I don't know anything about you maybe we should change that if you were looking throughout this whole talk for me to eventually deliver like some silver bullet that would be how to actually build offline connections it doesn't exist because the reality of the fact is that just the same way we all know that we should be running and we're not it's not that much easier to build offline relationships you actually have to do something you have to be deliberate about it and part of being deliberate about it means you have to open yourself up and that's a really hard thing to do you have to acknowledge the fact that you don't know certain things that you think you know and you need to actually share who you are with the people around you but maybe before even opening ourselves up to other people we really need to open ourselves up to ourselves but I think we can all agree that that's something that's really really hard to do when our faces are so buried in screens thank [Applause] you