Ghosted
I mostly love being self-employed. I get to choose where I live, charge what I want (within reason), and the best part is the flexibility – I can travel, make time to pursue other interests, and carve out time for exercise, nature, self-care routines, and family. I can take the morning off on a powder day in the winter, and take an impromptu day trip to the river in the summer. All of this is wonderful, and until recently I would say that there is no way I’d give all that up.
However, there is a downside to self-employment, and it involves some trade-offs that are starting to wear. Primarily, all income is self-driven and therefore inconsistent; even when the business gets big enough to feel self-sustained, it’s not really because the grind never stops. I never feel like I can totally relax because if I’m not generating contracts, I’m losing money. This reality leaves me with a slightly elevated baseline level of stress and worry about where the next check is coming from.
More specific to the type of service-based practice that I have, the only product is me until such time as I can produce something that doesn’t depend on my in-person interaction with clients. Yes, I could write a book or create recorded sessions or a class, and these are all things that are on my back burner. And yet, these still require direct input and output from me, and I only have so much to give before the grind tilts over the edge into unsustainability.
However, the most challenging part of the work that I have chosen, and the thing that I am now up against in trying to grow my business, actually involves an ironic cultural and professional paradigm that has developed with the advent of copious technology that should make connection easier: People’s communication is astonishingly poor.
The bar for professional communication has gotten very low.
One of the hallmarks of this Technological Age is that we have the ability to communicate with each other whenever we want and from almost wherever on Earth; the ubiquity of handheld tech makes connecting simple, and all you have to do is walk outside (or just look in the mirror) to know that people are on their phones all the time. And yet: My experience has been that there is a wild lack of follow-through and follow-up from people who would claim to be professionals and whose jobs involve, primarily, communication.
The way it works for me is thusly: I make a connection with a coach, either through circumstance (like at an athletic event or camp) or facilitated by a mutual acquaintance. Often, these connections lead to some shared interest in working together, for example bringing me in to run a series of preseason workshops with their team. Ideally, the back-and-forth is regular and produces a contract, and everyone is satisfied; I have work, the athletes learn and grow, the environment improves, performance increases, and the coach is happy with the investment.
What has been happening more and more often, however, is that after the initial interest, my follow-up calls/texts/emails go unanswered. Mind you, the people I’m contacting are professional coaches, athletic directors, and club directors. People who had to interview for their jobs, who work as part of a team or department that can, I assume, only function if communication is clear. And, I know y’all are on your phones because I see you posting on Instagram…which means that I KNOW you have seen my missed call, text, and email (and the 2-3 others I sent to follow up).
When did ghosting become acceptable communication behavior for people who claim to be professionals?
Just not getting back to someone – “leaving them on read” as the kids say – is rude and obnoxious when it’s a casual interaction; it’s inconsiderate, mean, and degrading in more intimate connections. In a professional setting, however, it reflects so poorly on not only the person but also the organization for which they work or that they lead. I often find myself wondering how someone who can’t even text me back can be a college head coach, athletic director, run a sports club, or even just successfully function at a job or in daily relationships.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
People are struggling. The world is tough for a lot of people in a lot of different ways right now, and there is a strong impulse to just hide out from the compounding stress. So many people are so immersed in their triggered fight/flight/freeze/fawn response that anything that might remotely poke their already fragile system is too much of a threat to deal with. We don’t live in a society that values sensitivity, humility, asking for help, slowing down, or self-care that isn’t Instagram-beautiful, so many of us just keep our heads down and only do what’s easiest to handle; anything else gets ignored.
People are checked out. This comes from the overwhelming amount of digital and political slop that we have to wade through, leaving us to throw our hands up and ignore the world; it comes from human beings’ fading ability to critically think, which morphs into an aversion to paying attention at all. For example, it’s just wild to me that so many people walk around with an earbud in all the time. I thought this was firmly a Gen Z and younger thing until I saw a grandma pushing a baby in a stroller with an AirPod in one ear. Who are you talking to? I work with a tennis team and one of the coaches always had an earbud in during practice; are you coaching, or waiting for a call, or listening to your life’s soundtrack, or what?
I decided to try it on a walk with my dog the other day because I was waiting for a call, and I immediately felt a barrier go up between me and the world around me. It was partly the anticipation of the next input – in my case, a phone call – and it was partly the wall that our technology creates by constantly drawing and then fragmenting our attention. The result was that I was not aware of the world around me; my dog could even tell that I was less present.
People are insecure and pathologically conflict-averse. This is ironic because a lot of what we do from behind our semi- or fully-anonymous X handles and Instagram accounts is yell at each other, proclaim superior ideology, degrade and gaslight each other, and stoke conflict…and swimming in all of that toxicity makes us insecure. Doing this from behind a technological barrier keeps us safe from actually having to look someone in the eye, listen, work out our differences, understand another point of view, learn to negotiate, take a nuanced position, or risk disappointing someone else in a specific way (rather than from behind the safety of a screen). It leaves us without the essential communication skills to navigate anything in the real world, and so we run away or kick the can down the road, leaving it “for tomorrow” but knowing on some level that we will just kick the can again.
People are selfish. I’ve found that when someone wants something from me, their communication is ROBUST. This exists on the micro scale (like my little business), and on the macro scale. For example, how many of you receive multiple texts a day from your state representative’s re-election campaign, asking you for money, but then when you try to get ahold of that same representative, your call or email goes unanswered? They want your money and your vote; good luck getting their representation. My experience is that whether macro or micro, people are very communicative when they want something but generally much less so in the reverse, which leads me to my last thought.
(Some) people are assholes. I find myself thinking this more often than I would like to admit. It’s not everyone, and I think it’s often not intentional - although as we’re seeing daily, it definitely sometimes is. Some people are traumatized and living out the effects of that trauma; others aren’t intentionally shitty, but the impact they have ends up that way. Almost all of us have been the asshole at one point or another.
This stems from the fact that, in general, human beings are naturally ego-driven, and our modern culture is built on the ego’s validation. You needn’t look far; social media’s whole raison d’etre is to manipulate and prey on the needs of the ego, to get us into the dopamine stream of fragmented attention and extreme viewpoints; at some point, we all get got. Especially in today’s technological and social environment, where callously “looking out for #1” is celebrated, having sharp edges is encouraged and, for some, is necessary, but the result is that many people are losing perspective and forgetting how to live in harmony with other human beings.
Some kind of conclusion
Aggression, bullying, cynicism, validation, vapidity, ignorance, status-judging, exceptionalism, and self-aggrandizement are social and ideological norms in this country, and whether by choice, inception, or just good old-fashioned conditioning, we all participate to some degree. Additionally, the effects of our collective addiction to technology on brains and nervous systems makes us simultaneously more emotionally and psychologically brittle, and less skilled at both self-reflection and constructive social discourse. In the case of how we communicate with each other – professionally, and generally – this means that rather than risking disappointing someone (which often involves a tiny bit of effort and vulnerability), we just put an earbud in and ignore any attempted contact that feels sticky or complicated while congratulating ourselves on taking care of our immediate business.
All of this analysis is well and good, and yet there is still a part of it that I can’t conceptualize when it comes to professionals who have decided that ghosting is an acceptable form of interaction in relation to their work: How do you have this job? It’s led me to question my choice of self-employment, and to begin applying for “real” jobs, which means sacrificing some of what I love about working for myself but also some very real benefits (like benefits).
Hopefully someone gets back to me.