I'm not a gamer, but a segment in last week's On The Media, Personal Video Games, inspired me on several levels, offering insights into the ways that game designers are utilizing their craft to enable others to more effectively relate to their personal trials and tribulations. I've long been fascinated with the stories we make up about ourselves, and even though I rarely play online games, having played the games mentioned in the segment, I can appreciate how adding an interactive dimension can make the heroes' journeys embodied in those stories more accessible.
Co-host Brooke Gladstone interviewed three game designers about their games, and the personal challenges those games were designed to recreate. Anna Anthropy designed the game Dys4ia to capture the dysphoria she experienced as a trans-woman throughout a 6-month odyssey of seeking out and undergoing hormone replacement therapy. "I made the game to communicate all the frustration of the experience of dealing with the medical industry, dealing with society, my own gender dysphoria, and also the hope that comes out of it after struggling up what is basically a mountain". The game has 4 levels:
Gender bullshit (making the decision to start hormone replacement therapy)
Medical bullshit (dealing with the medical industry, finding a clinic, getting tested, ...)
Hormonal bullshit (being on hormones, dealing with wild mood swings)
It gets better? (the hope and eventual realization of achieving a new place of comfort)
While I can't personally relate to being or becoming transgender, I can relate to several challenges that arise in accompanying a loved one on an interminable health odyssey such as the one embodied in the game: struggling with difficult decisions about medical procedures, dealing with the labyrinthian medical industry, interacting with friends and family who want to help but don't fully understand, coping with [someone else's] mood swings and experiencing varying levels of hope and despair about whether things will get better.
Michael Molinari designed the game, That was Yesterday ("A personal journey about learning to move forward in life"), to embody a different type of transition, his move from a small town in New Jersey to San Francisco to take a new job (designing games). I have to admit that I was skeptical when I first heard his description of the game, which depicts "a wall you need to face away from, and in order to get through the wall, instead of bumping your head against it, you need to look to the past and find all the things that help you drive forward ... When you face away from this wall, which kind of represents problems and fears and whatever, you think it might be this dense wall, and it kind of recedes and moves back. The key there is to exercise patience and wait for the wall to disappear, and once it's off the screen, then you're able to turn around, face forward and start moving through life a little bit further."
Even playing the game, I found it disconcerting that the only way to "win" - i.e., avoid being blocked by the wall - was to turn away from the wall, which I initially interpreted as a form of denial. However, upon further reflection, I could see how the game might represent the wisdom of the serenity prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. One of the new dimensions of awareness that my wife and I have learned about functional gastrointestinal disorders is the tight loop between stress and disease, and how sometimes the best solution to dealing with the angst of not knowing the source of or solution to recurring bouts of pain and discomfort is to just let go ... to figuratively face away from the impenetrable and implacable wall.
When we tell stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problem was impossible. Instead, we skip straight to the breakthrough. We tell the happy ending first.
The danger of this scenario is that the act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive.
Sebastian Janisz designed another game about beating your head against a wall, Lackadaisium, which embodies his struggles with depression and loneliness. "I started making it just to kind of relieve myself, because I was feeling all this emotion, or more like a lack of emotion. I thought maybe making this game would make me feel better. Essentially, what I wanted to try and do was make it so that when you play it, because of the way the game play is designed, you'll start to feel how I felt." Unfortunately, the game only runs on Windows platform, and I'm a Mac user, so I have not yet played this game, but I can certainly relate to struggling with depression and loneliness.
Several insights and connections emerged throughout the interview. Anna's observation that games are about rules reminded me of the pervasiveness and permeability of finite and infinite games that I first discovered via James Carse. Sebastian's observation that he made the game for himself, and Michael's surprise that when others play his hybrid semi-autobiographical game, "some people had more personal experiences than I even had when I was making it", both reflect Carl Rogers' wisdom that what is most personal is most general. The raw vulnerability embodied in these games provide compelling examples of authentic player journeys - vs. trendy and shallow gamification - that Amy Jo Kim has articulated and championed so effectively.
I have been practicing structured procrastination while allowing a few blog posts to, uh, ferment a bit longer (not to mention other things I want to get done). As evidence, after reading Jonah Lehrer's recent post about unstructured procrastination - Are Distractable People More Creative? - I feel inclined to write about that, rather than finish the other partially composed posts ... not to mention other important items on my todo list. But I'll postpone writing about unstructured procrastination until I write a bit about structured procrastination.
Several years ago, I encountered Stanford Philosophy Professor John Perry's inspiring account of structured procrastination, which offers a more elaborate and erudite rationalization of a practice that I'd previously justified by way of British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell's famous quote:
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Perry defines structured procrastination as a practice in which one chooses to postpone working on the most important thing(s) one needs to do by working on other, less important, things. He finds that he can be tremendously productive by this dynamic prioritization, getting all kinds of things done while avoiding the thing(s) he thinks he should really be doing.
I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
Although Perry doesn't describe it this way, having read and written about Dan Pink's book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (in the same post - ironically in this context - that I also wrote about David Allen's book, Getting Things Done ... which I still haven't read), I believe that Perry's practice of structured procrastination may be an unconscious prioritization of intrinsically motivating tasks over extrinsically motivated tasks: choosing to do things he wants to do, such as writing the essay, while postponing other tasks that others want him to do, such as grading papers or ordering textbooks. And as Pink points out, through his review of several studies, intrinsic motivations typically win out over extrinsic motivations. [Note that I do not mean to imply that Pink promotes or even condones structured procrastination; I'm quite sure Allen would not.]
Returning to Lehrer's rumination on the costs and benefits of distraction, he defines latent inhibition - the capacity to ignore stimuli that seem irrelevant - and cites a 2003 study showing that decreased latent inhibition is associated with increased creative achievement in high-functioning individuals, i.e., people who are more distractable may also be more creative. However, he points out that the study includes the important caveat that "low latent inhibition only leads to increased creativity when it’s paired with a willingness to analyze our excess of thoughts, to constantly search for the signal amid the noise" [and I'll note that one of my fermenting posts is all about signal vs noise]. Having recently been inspired by Lehrer's Metacognitive Guide to College, I'm glad he is not promoting distractability ... or, at least, not promoting unrestricted or unstructured distracability.
I would define distractability as a form of unstructured procrastination. Whereas structured procrastination is working on - or attending to - things that are important, but not the most important things, unstructured procrastination may involve attending to things that are not important at all (i.e., completely irrevelevant). Indeed, this blog post itself may be more of an example of unstructured rather than structured procrastination ... but I'm going to postpone further consideration of that train of thought ... and having indulged my impulse to fire off a quick blog post, I will turn my attention back to other, potentially more important, tasks.
As I noted in my notes from UbiComp 2009, I missed a few sessions during the last day of the conference so I could explore more of Disney World, taking advantage of my free birthday pass to look for examples of how interactive displays were used to enhance guest experiences at Epcot Center. It felt a bit odd to be spending [part of] my birthday alone at Disney World, but as I noted in my earlier post on pins, positivity and practices at Disney, I was sporting my "Happy Birthday!" button during part of the day, so although I was alone, I didn't feel [as] lonely.
I'd heard reports of an interactive game on big screens for those waiting in line for Soarin', so that's where I went first. The line was the perfect length when I arrived - I was able to walk right up to a point at which the first few of the five giant screens was visible, and the line had just started moving, so I was able to advance to the edge of that first screen before the line stopped.
The displays appear to operate in two modes: ambient and interactive. In ambient mode, each display shows a different sequence of intriguing landscape sketches, accompanied by music that I might characterize as reflective and complex.
One of the interesting effects of this mode is that as the crowd enters this area, they shift from being rather boisterous and chatty into a somewhat more subdued state; the attention of many of the people in the queue seems to shift from their family and friends to the images and music. After about five minutes of ambient mode, the displays shift to interactive mode, wherein the people in line are explicitly invited to play a game, in this case, "Experience the Land".
In each game, the projected images are influenced by the actions of the people in line. According to a report on Soarin' in AllEars, the interaction involves a combination of motion detection and heat sensing (another report alludes to infrared as the underlying technology). Silhouettes of [parts of] people in line are projected onto the screen, and as they move around and/or wave their arms, they affect the story unfolding on the screen.
In the first game, "Form the Land" (shown on the left below), people's movements help to "push up" regions of virtual landscape into virtual mountains; I kept using my hand in a pushing up motion, but seemed to reach plateaus in some of the formations. In the second game, "Grow the Seeds" (on the right), waving physical hands over virtual seeds helped sprout the seeds into virtual plants; I suspect that additional waving helps grow the plants, and I was biding my time between sprouting new plants - requiring jumping to get the ones high up (perhaps these are within standing reach of people in line that are farthest from the screen, and so I may have been hogging the ball, so to speak) - and tending to existing plants, but at one point I inadvertently hit the person next to me, so I curbed my enthusiasm a bit after that.
The entire two-game sequence lasted about 5 minutes - about the time it takes for the Soarin' ride itself - and then I was in line for another 5 minutes of ambient mode before reaching the final destination, so I suspect that the queue is designed to toggle between ambient and interactive modes every 5 minutes, and if you have to wait 10 minutes or more, you get to try the game at least once.
I have since read an Orlando Sentinel blog post - Soarin' queue games a hit - which references "a bird game" so I suspect that there are a set of different games that are - or have been - provided for those waiting in line for Soarin' (and a more recent report in the Orlando Sentinel - Wait may be more fun at Disney's Space Mountain - suggests that an "interactive queue" and "audio-visual upgrades" may be included in the rehabilitation of that ride).
Passengers will be able to immerse themselves in unique game play as
they prepare for blast off, becoming part of the space station
adventure. During a recent walkthrough, we deflected asteroids to keep
runways clear as part of the story.
The interactive experiences are based on duties you’d find on board
a long-traveling space craft, according to Walt Disney Imagineering
Senior Show Designer Alex Wright. Each game lasts about 90 seconds with
a 90-second interval and the games can accommodate 86 players at one
time.
Had I known about the possibility of multiple games at the time of my visit, I would have looped back through, just to see whether I could try another game. The post describes some group dynamics - "many people were yelling, in unison, 'lean left!' and 'lean right!' while trying to lead the bird through the forest" - that I did not observe in the Experience the Land games, so if I were to go through the queue again, I would also explore more of the collective dimensions of play in this context. There is a debate in the comments on that post about whether the game ultimately makes the queue move slower - i.e., whether people are so absorbed in the game that they don't move forward as the line opens up. While I was there, the timing was such that movement seemed to take place only when the game was not in play; I'm not sure whether this was a game feature added after the initial roll-out or was part of the original design.
One of the most challenging dimensions of designing large display applications for public and semi-public places is achieving the contextually appropriate level of engagement. If the displays are too engaging, they virtually (or attentionally) take people out of the physical space, reducing "task performance" among the people in that space. If they are not sufficiently engaging, then it is not worth the time or money to deploy them. We encountered this Goldilocks dilemma - not too hot, not too cold - in the design of our CoCollage proactive display application, where our ambient visualization of photos and quotes uploaded by people in a cafe was designed to promote awareness and conversations among those people while they were in line (and/or elsewhere in the cafe) without unduly interfering with the "task" of placing their orders when they got to the end of the line. In some cases we got it right, but in others - due to a complex combination of factors including place, placement and community in places - the display appeared to be either too engaging or not engaging enough [and before moving on, in this context, I can't help but mention that there is a 1939 Disney short film on Goldilocks and The Three Bears.]
After searching around for some other uses of displays, I decided to take a break from my field exploration in order to attend the closing keynote and post-conference UbiComp steering committee meeting back at the Disney Conference Center. Fortunately, this was within easy walking distance.
When I resumed my journey at Epcot later that afternoon, the next stop was Spaceship Earth, where in this case I was more interested in the use of displays after the ride rather than before the ride. Shortly after embarking on the ride, the riders are invited to "Look up", whereupon a photo is taken of each rider in a two-person car. The ride then progresses through a series of animatronic exhibits highlighting the relentless march of technological progress. During the ride, and at the end - while the car is backed down into the catchment area - each rider is asked a series of questions; I'll include the questions below, with my responses highlighted in italic, and links to photos I snapped of the kiosk when the questions were shown:
I was then shown my freshly semi-customized video from the future, which given the constraints imposed by the questions and multiple-choice responses, represents an example of user-influenced content vs. user-generated content. A further constraint I encountered is that the Disney site does not permit embedding, so I downloaded the video, uploaded it to YouTube and embedded it below. I'll also include a transcript of the narration.
I don't know how the video might have been affected had there been another real passenger in the car providing input to the questions above, but my assigned virtual co-star in the movie appears to bear the brunt of the health problems we encounter during the episode.
Welcome to the future ... or should I say _your_ future?
Here in your future, it'll be more fun than ever to enjoy nature in the great outdoors. But even in a perfect world, accidents do happen. [video shows skiers on an icepacked ledge that breaks up falling down a mountain]
Don't worry, with your take charge attitude, you are prepared. A portable medical scanner analyzes the situation. Fortunately, your entire history is with you at all times on a smart card.
Your first day might include nanotechnology, a microscopic robotic team that fixes the injury from the inside.
And while you relax at home with a cup of soup, technology speeds recovery time. In no time at all, you're back on your feet. Uh-oh [video shows another icepack breaking up under skis]. Fortunately, in the future, help is never far away.
The end ... or should I say the beginning ... of your future.
After disembarking from the ride, I entered an area dominated by a large spherical display of the earth, with photos of the people emerging from the ride momentarily superimposed on the display, after which the photos are whisked away to the points on the earth representing their hometowns. Surrounding the globe are a collection of large rectangular displays showing the keyframes for the semi-customized videos that had been produced by recent riders, and a set of kiosks at which riders can find their videos from the future and send them to themselves - and one other person - via email. I found myself wishing I could have simply swiped my magnetically-striped Disney card rather than having to manually enter my email address on the touch-screen (and waiting in line in order to even get to a free kiosk). I'll include a Flickr slideshow of the sequence of events - and displays - encountered at Spaceship Earth below.
One of the interactive games I heard about, but did not experience first-hand, was the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure, in which players use their "super-secret Kimmunicators—interactive, handheld, cell-phone-like devices that help maneuver agents through their mission". This was a game that encompasses several screens - the screens on the hand-held devices, as well as larger screens at different pavilions around Epcot.
One reason I didn't try it is because I heard several reports about the game being boring (for adults) and crassly commercial - many of the adventures are designed to lure the agents into specific areas of the shopping areas of the various pavilions. The other reason was that, it being my birthday, I wanted to take some time off from my field study to simply enjoy other dimensions of the guest experience, such as the warm weather, a beautiful sunset - a more naturalistic, but less interactive, public display of sorts - and the tasty margaritas I discovered around the Mexican pavilion.
Digital artist Camille Utterback makes installations that combine
cameras, projectors and custom software to create interactive, playful
paintings.
Stand in front of her work, and you’ll soon be waving your arms,
walking around, spinning or hopping to figure out how your movements
get translated into the abstract, colorful strokes on the screen.
I blogged a bit about Living Without A Goal recently and went down a path I didn't originally anticipate, focusing on utility and value and appreciation in life. I'd intended to say more about James Ogilvy's views on work, but once I was plumbing the depths of what makes life meaningful, valuable and worthwhile, I wasn't in the mood to write [more] about work.
I suppose this may be an example of what poet David Whyte calls investigative vulnerability, a term he attributes the term to Dante. An example he shares (on Disc 2 of his Clear Mind, Wild Heart audiobook) is when he was composing the poem Sweet Darkness, he wrote the line "You must learn one thing..." and felt tremendous excitement and anticipation to discover what he would actually write next ... which turned out to be "the world was made to be free in" ... although I think the more poignant revelation comes a few lines later: "anyone and anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you" ... a sentiment very closely aligned to ideas expressed more prosaically by James Ogilvy.
And coming back to Ogilvy, in his book on Living Without a Goal, he notes that
[T]he worthiest works of all often reflect an artful creativity that looks more like play than work.
Unlike my resistance to his rejection of being useful to others as a worthy Goal, this notion of work as play is something I embrace wholeheartedly (and even practice occasionally). Work that is intrinsically motivating is indistinguishable from play, and work that is solely or primarily motivated by extrinsic incentives (money, titles, prestige, manager approval) can never be as ultimately satisfying and fulfilling.
Writing this now, I'm drawn back to the issue of [work] being useful to others. When I am playing, do I care whether or how my play affects others, or do I play with reckless abandon? Am I goal-oriented in my play, or do I play just for the fun of it? It seems indulgent, even extravagant, and downright risky, in applying this attitude [explicitly and openly] to work ... but I know from past experience that there also risks in not following my heart, working on things that have been assigned to me that I do not see as intrinsically worthwhile, and feeling the energy draining out of my body day in and day out.
Ogilvy notes these (and other) risks:
Creativity relies less on goal-directed labor than on a subtle mix of discipline and play. The artist suffers under an imperative to delight, an obligation to bask in pleasure. Someone must scout those frontiers of bliss and discover the pitfalls. There are risks. It is not an accident that artists suffer accidents. It is the nature of the case that they take risks. But if one must take risks, what better place than in pleasure's paradise?
A little further on, he presages Web 2.0:
people who explore the outer reaches of human delight, then learn how to bottle and sell some of their ecstasy, end up being far more successful than the drudges who are convinced of their duty to defer gratification forever
He then contrasts this approach to the typical process by which research is "managed" (!), especially within large organizations:
Just look at the administration of big science -- planned creativity -- and then look at its track record for innovation. On a dollar-per-dollar basis, big science doesn't do as well as the less bureaucratized passion of garage inventors.
At budget time each year I would be asked what I planned to do the following year and what it would cost. It always seemed to me that I was being asked what I planned to discover ... It was as if the only time genuine discovery would be allowed would be during the month or so of the budget cycle.
Having been working at Nokia Research Center for three months now, I'm struck by a curious tension: the organization is the most process-oriented I've ever encountered, and [yet] it also emphasizes the importance of taking risks more than any organization I've been a part of. NRC Palo Alto, the newest facility (and the one where I work), is experimenting on a number of dimensions, organizationally and with respect to research trajectories. Thus far, I've experienced a great deal of liberty and happiness in my time there, and have enjoyed both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
Popping up a level (or two), I'm reminded of some ruminations that occurred to me while listening to another audiobook, The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide by Rick Jarow. What would life be like if everyone only worked on things that were intrinsically meaningful to them? What kinds of work would we see more of, or less of? What kinds (and sizes) of organizations would we see? What would the world be like if everyone followed Rumi's prescription:
Let yourself be drawn by the silent pull of what you really love.
God and Marx are both dead. Relativism has dethroned absolutism. In our postmodern world, how do we create meaning in our lives now in the absence of externally defined Grand Goals? In Living Without a Goal: Finding the Freedom to Live a Creative and Innovative Life, author James Ogilvy encourages us to adopt a more playful attitude toward life and work, letting go of our attachments to outcomes, and giving ourselves permission to explore the frontiers of our bliss. Drawing upon a wide-ranging set of disciplines, including religion, politics, philosophy, psychology, science, art, architecture, economics, linguistics and semiotics (among others), Ogilvy questions our compulsion to fill the void created by the disappearance of religiously and/or ideologically inspired Goals with “personal pretensions to destinies”.
I’ve owned this book since it was first published, in 1995, and although I bought it with the goal of reading it, never quite got around to it. I resurrected that goal after attending (and blogging about) a presentation on Goal-Free Living” by Stephen Shapiro last year, but to no avail (and I admit I have not read Shapiro's book, either). Two weeks ago, in a series of discussions about what our research team mission statement ought to look like, the question arose whether it ought to represent a unifying Goal or a more pragmatic assemblage of individual goals. I was championing the former, but aspects of the discussions were bringing to mind a vague memory of Ogilvy's book, and his stipulation that "Living without a Grand Goal while orchestrating many goals offers opportunities for free choice, design, intelligence, play" ... the kinds of opportunities we want to cultivate in our project.
I initially intended to blog more about "working without a Goal", but as this time of year is often a rather dark and deeply reflective one for me, I've decided to focus on the ways I'm interpreting and applying Ogilvy's precepts outside of the work context. One of the most jarring passages in the book was the claim that
when you try to identify the use of your entire life, you are asking to be used.
When I read this passage, I was immediately reminded of the very different (and personally more inspiring) sentiment expressed by George Bernard Shaw:
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Ogilvy distinguishes between Goals and goals, the former having "the nobility and mysteriousness of God" and the latter helping to organize activities and getting things done. He rejects the single-minded life-long pursuit of an overarching Goal, through which we sacrifice our freedom, while embracing the opportunistic adoption of smaller-scale goals that we may adopt as we artfully create ourselves in real-time.
Many aspects of the book resonate with my deeply held beliefs, e.g., his preference for appreciation over manipulation, and affective sensitivity over instrumental rationality, focusing more on "sublime", "spontaneity", "creativity" and "marginal intensity" and less on "material", "efficiency", "productivity" and "marginal utility". Ogilvy's emphasis on an artistic and entrepreneurial approach to life (and work) are closely aligned with ideas championed in some of my other favorite books, e.g., The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide by Rick Jarow and The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. His invitation for "goofing on the precious self" reminded me of Bill Buxton's warning at CSCW 2006 about the danger of precious ideas ... and I can see that one of my precious ideas is the idea of my "self" ... and that I often take my self [too] seriously.
Getting back to me (and it's all about me), and my difficulty with the rejection of Goals, I acknowledge my attachment to my own personal sense of mission (“helping people relate”), which feels more like a Goal than a goal. I believe my awareness of this mission arose more as a process of self-discovery – simply noticing where my natural passions and joys are most keenly felt – rather than a top-down imposition of what I ought to be doing. Ogilvy praises Jean-Paul Sartre's observation that "Man is a useless passion", and I recognize that part of my joy in being an irrepressible connector is that my passion is useful (to others).
So perhaps the core of my resistance here is this desire to be useful to others. Recently, in a post [explicitly] devoted to self-disclosure, I noted that I am an irrepressible people-pleaser, and I have known for a long time that many of my challenges stem from an inner conviction of worthlessness, that I am only valuable insofar as I am valued by others. Lately, I have not been feeling very useful (or valued), which is why I am willing to plunge a bit further into the depths of this issue. While focusing on "helping people relate" has enabled me to transcend the darkness of my own self-image, it has, up until now, not enabled me to transcend the pitfalls of [my perception of] others' perception of me. In articulating his concept of narcissism degree zero, Ogilvy himself notes that "self-love must finally spread itself across the social pattern of reflections that constitute the self".
I can't honestly say I'm entirely willing to release my attachment to others' [expressions of] appreciation at this moment -- despite the opportunities for practicing such detachment currently being offered me -- but I'm at least willing to re-open the question of whether and how I matter ... and if it is possible to matter without being [acknowledged as] useful to others.
