horsepigcow

Gawd, this is an amazing city. I remember that feeling I had when I first moved here…it was pure excitement. Between the colourfulness of the city, the geekiness and freakiness of it’s residents and the complete essence of hope that pulsates through San Francisco, there is no other place in the world like it. It’s a fantastic city. A real city. A small yet large city. People learn how to fly here every single day. And, unlike other fantastic launchpad cities like New York, you can fall from the sky and survive it here. San Francisco will always have my heart.

So, why am I leaving? Why am I taking a karaoke road trip across America to settle in my new home in Montreal? Because it is time. And it’s been time for just over a year now.

Like any good catalyst, San Francisco isn’t meant to be where someone settles. It would be the antithesis of what the pull of San Francisco is for to be a settling ground. It’s more of an unsettling ground. The place where I questioned everything that I had come to take for granted as the way the world works and is supposed to work. It unsettled the notion of everything I am and what I could do. And once I had that answer and found my new reality, I felt I was unnecessarily holding onto the key that needs to be passed along to someone else who awaits the experience. It would be futile for me to learn so much and then not bring it somewhere else with me. It would be like staying in school forever…getting smarter, but not being able to bring that knowledge to real-world issues. It’s necessary that I move onto my next adventure.

Of course, there are the practical things that most people understand like the cost of living (really high in SF), the lack of public health care, the awful public schools (for my 16 year old son), and the fact that I’m a Canadian citizen and cannot live here without a job to sponsor me and, well, I don’t want a job…I want to write my next book and do all sorts of great entrepreneurial things and keep spreading the message of whuffie and changing the world and stuff. But those are practical bits that I’ve dealt with since day one of living here. If it weren’t for the ethereal stuff, I’d continue working around the impracticalities of living in this city.

If I were to compare San Francisco to a geeky reference, I’d say that SF is like Dagobah, where I got to be Luke Skywalker, learning from the many Yodas here. But even though I want to stay, I know I have to leave and face the Empire. And even more importantly, I have been trained in the Jedi ways, so I can transfer my skills to others. I know…too much geek.

So that’s why I’m leaving San Francisco. Of course I’m going to miss it. And there are tons of great things people get in America that I’m going to miss, too. Like Pandora and Virgin America and Trader Joe’s. I’m going to miss the sheer choice I have. The lack of limitations on delivery. But I’m going to an amazing city. A different city. Montreal is charming, even though there is 5x the population of SF. The architecture is similar, with rows of Victorians to choose from. There is a vibrant technology scene there with venture capital, cool companies and people who really get it. There is also a brilliant coworking space. And an opportunity for me to learn new experiences and share my current ones with others.

Oh. And I can write my next book (proposal is still in progress). That’s what I’m most excited about.

So, on my birthday, July 15, I’m leaving San Francisco and will arrive in Montreal at the end of July to move into my new home for August 1. I hope everyone comes to visit.

So…I showed this wee slideshow to open up our panel at 140 | The Twitter Conference today (great conference, btw) to demonstrate the essence of what I think is the reason that Twitter has captured our imaginations.

It’s not the links or the deep wisdom or the celebrities or the customer service stuff supplied by the companies on Twitter that makes it amazing. It’s the connection I feel to the people I follow when they make me smile, or feel sad or feel passionate about something. It’s the constant display of humanity sliding by on my screen daily. I know when someone thousands of miles away is feeling frustrated at work. I feel the elation a virtual stranger is feeling when he finishes that race he’s been training for forever. I share that funny moment that person I miss hanging out with has…and can feel closer to her for it.

The other stuff is gravy. If it weren’t for the interesting tidbits and connections I feel emotionally to the people on Twitter, I wouldn’t tune in so religiously and catch the great New York Times article or the fact that one of my favorite artists is coming to town. If all I got was customer service on Twitter, I’d only tune in when I had an issue. But because of the ambient intimacy of the connections…the real human experiences being shared daily, I may also tune into the ‘commercial breaks’: this company doing good stuff and this person launching that cool bit. It’s a bonus, but not the core of what draws me in.

Twitter is, if nothing else, a series of sheep throwing awesomeness allowing for mondo exchanges of whuffie, with commercial bits and bobs stuck in here and there to also make it lucrative enough in the marketplace so we can afford to keep on about our daily adventures. And some may say, “Sounds ridiculous!” but I say, “No…ridiculous is the notion that everything has to be boiled down to a transaction and thank GOD something came along to demonstrate the importance of interaction for the sake of connection without a value judgement or a pricetag on it!”

If we go and suck the humanity out of Twitter, it WILL go away. It will cease to be interesting and you will have no goshdarned place to put your productive/lucrative bits anymore. It’s not that I’m all googly eyed about the touchy-feely, it’s that I recognize that the touchy-feely – the throwing sheep – is the BASIS of what makes us bloody happy. The other stuff we stick in there to be able to pay our rent and buy fancy things that make us appear to be happy. And if we want to continue to reap the benefits here, we need to stop sucking the social out of our social media spaces.

It’s not just the nice thing to do…it’s necessary.

I’ve been told from various sources almost all of my life that people are merely searching for happiness. That is why, when I read a quote from a 72 year old study on happiness in The Atlantic this month, I was taken aback:

Last October, I watched (Valliant) give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Even though conventional wisdom* says the opposite, I felt his research findings to be poignantly true to my own experience. How difficult is it for any of us to take a compliment? Accept love from someone else? Feel like an act of kindness or generosity is warranted? Trust a positive experience to continue on being positive? Accepting any of the above would mean taking a huge risk. A huge risk of disappointment and the loss of innocence.

Someone I know recently partook in a personal study where he bought a bunch of flowers and handed them out to strangers. The findings of his ‘study’ were that most people would reject the gift outright. I wasn’t surprised and explained to him that I would have probably rejected a flower from a stranger myself. There are a few reasons for this reaction. Number one, in North American culture we have experienced that there is no such thing as a pure gift (except from those we know, but even then, there is an iota of reciprocity attached to it). The gift is given with an expectation that we give something in return: our attention, our money or the like. Number two, there is the phenomenon that Valliant describes above: we don’t feel as if we deserve a random kind act from a stranger. It is embarrassing to be given a gift. We don’t understand how to receive it.

These thoughts are tangled up to result in a personal protectiveness, which may seem negative, but are mainly about lowering our expectations. And lowered expectations, as discussed in the article, are conducive to higher overall happiness (Danes, who have the lowest expectations, top the ‘happiness’ surveys).

So what does this mean for those of us trying to make the world a better place to live in? Well, maybe we shouldn’t be shooting for increasing the baseline on happiness, but instead, shooting to increase the baseline on trust. It turns out that the happiest of those studied had strong relationships with people they trust around them. Turns out we really do require more of those high ‘soup metric‘ relationships.

Personally, the more I study, the more that I return to community and a focus on social capital to find my answers. But human beings are not rational creatures. And because the desire to be self-protective outweighs the desire to achieve an optimal living experience, we deeply embed protectionism and distance into our day to day interactions as well as our societal structure. Alas, there is much work to do. But if there is anything I’ve learnt to embrace…is my own vulnerability.

{photo from Flickr}

I know that I don’t usually give dating advice on my blog, but I thought I’d put this out there since it’s been ultimately helpful for me.

Being broken up with – especially when you are still really into the person – is super painful. It hurts all over. Your heart aches because of the dashed hope for a potential future with this person. Your brain aches and you beat yourself up over not seeing the signs or doing something different leading up to this. Your ego aches, making it really difficult to imagine someone ever loving you again. Etc. I get it. I’ve been the dumpee as much, if not more, than I’ve ever been the dumper and for anyone who says, “Being the dumper is more painful…” well, they are totally full of it and have probably never experienced being dumped.

About a year and a half ago, I read Helen Fishers, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, which really saved my life. I swear. Having been dumped in a big way a couple months previous to reading it, I was still in the throes of pain. I was showing the world ‘brave face’ but inside I was a total mess. I’d go home every night after smiling and pretending I was okay and go into total mope mode. But after reading Helen’s book, I realized that I wasn’t moping because my ex was the best thing that ever happened to me and I’ll never find anyone to take his place, it was because I continued to feed the brain chemicals that caused romantic love.

Yes. Seriously. Why we fall in love has very little to do with fate or stars or some other mystic and romantic notion. We fall in love because chemicals in our brains are triggered at the right time. I won’t go into the chemicals in this post (you should read the book…very fascinating), but lemme just illustrate it with this one fact: falling in love is tightly related with the same brain chemical reaction to becoming addicted to drugs like cocaine or crack.

So after reading the book, I realized that I would need to de-toxify my body from my ex the same way as I would de-toxify my body from a drug. Here are some of the things I found worked well to ‘break the habit’:

1. Zero contact. And I mean ZERO. None. Nada. Everytime you have contact: be it email, phone, in person, whaever…you are revving up those chemicals again. Just like if you were to say you quite cocaine, but do a ‘bump’ a day later. If there has to be logistical contact, keep it professional. No ‘I miss you’s’ or ‘I’m thinking of you’s’. Even better, if you bring in a mutual friend to help you make handoffs (keys, etc.).
2. No stalking either. I know that you desperately want to see if he/she is still thinking of you. But even if looking at his Twitter stream is tempting and will only take a second glance, don’t do it. Even if he or she mentions they are feeling blue, too, can be misconstrued as something to hope for…which will strike up those chemicals once again. Bad. Unfollow him/her on Flickr, Twitter and everywhere else he or she regularly updates.
3. Refrain from reliving moments. If you had a special song or there was a special place you went together or anything else that will trigger happier moments memories, avoid it. Eventually, you will learn to reclaim it. For yourself or with someone else who deserves your love.
4. Keep yourself moving forward. Don’t avoid your feelings. They are real. But wallowing only serves to feed the chemicals and keep you miserable. Find ways to positively move through the pain like working out, going to a conference to put your brain on a workout, read a good book, go out with your brilliant friends, dance, etc. Anything that will stimulate the other chemicals in your brain that will eradicate the love ones.
5. Get over someone by getting under someone else. Okay. So this one is a bit dicey and to tell you the truth, I’m not very good at it. But according to the brain chemical theory, being ravished by a new suitor will jump start other chemicals that could be very good for you. Things to be careful with here: a. the person you are doing this with won’t get hurt by a fling thing, b. this won’t turn into a rebound relationship, c. you, yourself, are aware of what you are doing and you make the choice to feel good again and treat yourself, not to get back at whats-his-pickle.
6. Be aware at every moment of the really awesome things in your life. Not in relation to him/her, but in relation to you. Just you. You have great friends. A good job. A great vocabulary. A fantastic wardrobe. Supportive parents. A good palette for wine. Whatever. You have talents and blessings and, well, it’s not too corny to repeat them over and over to yourself at this moment…cause you need a happy distraction.

Love is like an addiction, so getting ‘clean’ when it isn’t available to you anymore (through that desired person anyway), is not easy. But you make it even tougher on yourself if you prolong the addiction. Of course, you can do all of the above and it will still take time to get that person out of your system. I mean…you DID really love him/her, right? And you still DO. But at the risk of sounding crass…He/she has moved on. It’s time for you to as well.

xo