Random Walks in the Low Countries
Reflections and observations on the expatriate experience from an American scientist living and working in the Netherlands.
Another whirl of a week, ‘looking forward to a bit of a break at the weekend. With spring in full bloom now in Cambridge (as it was in Charleston and Savannah), I’m looking forward to getting out to see the Fellows Garden’s and the riverbanks, daffodils blooming and trees in flower.
I did a spring cleaning of my office last night. Over the past few months project folders had become disorganized, papers hadn’t been filed, receipts and vouchers were unlabeled. As a result, it was getting harder to find things, work was being duplicated or lost, and there was entirely too much time spent searching rather than doing.
So I laid into the task in late afternoon, wrapped up about midnight. The result feels great: more space, better organization, lots shipped to the recycle bin.
My office is my computer, supplemented by a date book, a receipt boo, and a notes-book. So, to outward appearances, I was simply, obsessively, ‘on the computer’ from mid-afternoon until well past a reasonable bedtime. This prompts comments about how I was isolated and immersed in unreality for far too long, both an unhealthy and asocial practice.
Yet if someone saw me doing identical tasks, filing, binning, and annotating the clutter of a messy physical office, the result would be laudable. What’s different about the computer? I have three theories:
My activity is private when I’m on the computer, so it’s not apparent what’s I’m doing. Skype or Facebook tell people that I’m logged in, but nothing
about why.
There is a ‘”Theory X” bias in people’s thinking (McGregor), seeing people as inherently lazy and tending to avoid work if they can.
Computer time equates to time spent on games and social networks, frivolous pursuits akin to watching television or chatting on the phone.
But the computer is a wonderful tool for learning new topics, for exploring ideas, and for creating original work. It connects to knowledge, experts, and resources. I spend 15 minutes updating Facebook status each day: I spend an hour listening to a lecture on consciousness or learning the Ruby language. I don’t see the time as wasted or asocial: it’s working or enriching for the most part.
I’m not sure how (or whether) to justify time spent on the computer as real or productive. I used to have the same problem with reading: my mother forever accused me of “going through life with my nose in a book”. Maybe this is just the updated version? Harmless.
Still, I am a bit haunted by The Social Network: Mark intense, unsmiling, hammering keys late into the night. ‘Not a good archetype for me to reflect on, either.
In psychology, “personality” is the set of behavioral traits that distinguish us from one another. These can have many dimensions, behavioral, emotional, temperamental, mental, but they tend to be pretty consistent for a given person over time.
Personality is a complex thing to try to describe: the most common classification is Myers-Briggs Indicator. If you’ve never tried it, you can have a go here. The result describes you as one of sixteen types based on a combination of four attributes, Introvert / Extrovert, Sensing / Intuitive, Thinking / Feeling, and Judgmental / Perceptive.
I first encountered it in a group dynamics session where our research group interactions were being analyzed to improve our performance. I typed as INTP (Introvert / iNtuitive / Thinking / Perceptive). In fact, everyone in our group did, which turned out to be the main reason why nobody could get along. Leavening the group with a few other types (less controlling, more feeling) improved life considerably.
As I move from job to job, I’ve found that I need to overcome some innate traits in order to succeed. Schmoosing with investors, for example, requires more extroversion than is typical for me, but I’ve learned to adapt (or so I believe).
An interesting question is to what extent our personality is expressed through our daily writings. A blog analyzer called the Typealyzer purports to do just that. Enter your blog URL, and it analyzes a selection of postings to return a Myers-Briggs classification. Mine was…INTP: The Thinker
The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
A bit of a horoscope, but at least I’m consistent…
