How we connect

The baseline question, in the conversation that led me to write this, was whether we need our businesses to be present on social media at all. Because the question came from a young woman in England, whose life I imagined to be a certain way, it kept me thinking.

All kinds of questions come from participants in the Floret Online Workshop. I did not feel particularly qualified to be one of the 10 growers answering them in the Learning Community on the back end, but there I was, lending an extra hand, in January and February. Of course there was the question about social media, whether it was something you absolutely must do, and how personal you should get. This young woman from the U.K., who is not on social media at all and is wary of it, tagged me in a few of her questions. After the workshop, she reached out directly, with apologies, but said she felt that, from the answers I’d given inside the workshop, I might understand her deep hesitation. We have exchanged a few emails, and this convinced me to get some thoughts down, figuratively speaking, on paper. This post might serve as my letter to her. I have written it quickly, and I may come back to it.

But the most important piece is this: I know for certain that people want to connect; this is part of what makes us whole. Our lives and our businesses are built on relationships, but social media is just one means of connection, and a relatively new one. (If you want to skip the rest of this post, just know that in the last note I wrote to her, I said I thought that she could skip social media altogether if she wanted to—no posting personal stuff about herself or her kids—and sell at a well-chosen farmers market and build relationships in person there.)

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I am speaking as someone who has worked professionally in writing and in communications for 30 years, but perhaps that matters less than the fact that I have lived more than five decades.

Early in my life I learned that people were hungry for stories and that they didn’t have to be dramatic. People don’t want to be constantly instructed; they want to relax, to have an experience, however short and vicarious. In my 20s, when I didn’t even feel settled in my own skin, when my confidence was nothing like it is now, I wrote dozens of columns for the floral magazine where I was the editor. Each issue opened with the editor’s column, and I had to write it. I didn’t feel as if I knew enough, broadly speaking, about the industry I was covering. I wasn’t an expert, and I didn’t want to write an opinion column anyway. And the idea of providing a summary of the articles in each issue seemed unimaginative and superfluous.

So I told stories that were tangentially connected with the content of each issue. Say there was an article on bedding plants; I wrote about the garden I kept as a child. Once during the winter I wrote a dreamy column about staring out the window at falling snow while I was taking a final exam in college and trying to remember the Latin name of a plant.

Each year the magazine did a readership study, and as part of this, the readers ranked the areas of content. I did a good job with all of it—I really did—but my column was always the winner. This is not because I was such a gifted writer; it was because I had chosen, partly from a lack of confidence, to use the column to write personally. (And really, I wasn’t interested in writing about what other people were doing. Like E.B. White, who truly was gifted, I was longing, and still am, for the first-person singular. You can read White’s essays, which are all about his personal experiences and ideas and feelings, and see that he achieved this in a way that maintained his privacy. No over-sharing. He never even used his wife’s name.)

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Part of the reason Mary Oliver’s poetry is so well-loved is that she wrote in a way that connects. When she gives us a line like “I know what a kiss is worth,” we are invited into an experience. But she doesn’t tell us anything about a particular person, place or time. We can’t know whether the experience was real or imagined or a little of both, or wished-for. We can be in any of those places, though: remembering a real experience of our own, or an imagined one, or a real one we wished had been different. A good poem can be experienced by one person in one way and by another in a different way. We begin from the point of a single line, and we find more than one possible line of connection because the poet has given us just enough to invite imagination.

The connection happens through our emotion. What we consider our most important experiences are based in feeling. If an experience has a deep and lasting influence on us, or if we have dream that seems important, we hold onto it because of the feeling we are left with. And over time many of the details of a memory fall away, but the feeling about it remains.

One idea about poetry is that its ultimate good is in making the reader feel less lonely and strange.

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Both a magazine column and a poem are printed words on page. There might be one image alongside. Or none. And no one physically present. But the connection is achieved.

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I’ve been writing around the subject of social media so far, but I think you see where I’m going. Social media is a firehose of content. The mind-numbing industry around the development and distribution of online content can pull you off-center, away from the core human desire for connection. When we feel a certain kind of hesitation and discomfort about what we might share—because of what others are sharing—we must listen to that. I knew as a young magazine editor that I wasn’t going to bring frenzy (I used that word then) into my column. I wasn’t going to say anything was urgent, or that the reader must hurry and learn as much as possible about any particular thing or their business wouldn’t “keep up.” (I have since come to believe that there are people who do get energy from frenzy, but I’m not one of them.)

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I will offer something more specific about social media now. Here is what I have noticed: I’ve followed growers (often younger, in their 20s or 30s, but not always) who give it their all, who do this full-time and produce amazing flowers, who are great managers, who share what often are long, detailed posts—long enough to be blog posts. They sometimes talk about significant struggles in their lives, or they talk about finances in detail. There may be photos of their children, with specific information. There is a great deal of energy in these posts, and there may be a huge and growing Instagram following.

And then at some point, there comes a post of a completely different tone, in which they express exhaustion—and we were not expecting this (but we’re not surprised). The post may be long and detailed. The word “vulnerable” is used by the one who posts or the ones who comment. The post will go into many of the specifics about what makes flower growing a very, very hard business indeed, with no room for rest or escape.

You could take this pattern and find it in any area of business on social media, I expect.

I think you probably know already that life is quite hard, though, and that you do not need social media to learn about that. We are all vulnerable.

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How do we create connection through social media and still maintain our privacy? The same way people did so at a distance (in books and magazines) before social media existed: We share our particular experiences. But we leave plenty to the imagination.

We don’t have to share any of the facts of our lives—our children’s names and ages or details about our personal troubles. Everyone has those. We can instead share that we saw something in particular and what it reminded us of. We can share that we planted seed in the ground, and something grew, and we watched this process. We can share our method of doing something (maybe it’s not perfect). We can tell about something we tried, and say that we were scared, and why, and what ended up happening, and how that was for us. We show experiences we are having that might be unlike anything a follower has done—or that might be only a little bit different. We can follow one another and compare notes.

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Should we have social media accounts at all for our businesses? I know people who are entirely off social media as a matter of principle, and I respect this and think it probably is the right thing to do. I’m still on it, cautiously. It can be helpful to have an online presence, but if I have one, I want it to feel like a place to rest and connect and see something fresh. I talk to my sister and my closest friends about my troubles. I have made in-person friendships through Instagram, and I continue to wait and see where it leads and how I feel about it. But in the past couple of years I have shifted a lot of my energy for prose into this journal and my newsletter, and that seems right to me.